Stepping Over Seasons

I decided to get serious about poetry last year (and by serious I mean skill up, write, rewrite, resub. and read). Part of that plan was seeking out current Australian poets and reading their work. Something you’d think easily done in the era of the internet.
It’s been and continues to be an interesting journey. But it’s not been a particularly smooth one. Australian poetry still seems somewhat fragmented to me as something of an outsider, islands of culture rather than one big continent(and perhaps this has advantages). The Best Australian poems series by Black Ink certainly helps but I have been steadily making my way around these various communities, and know that what’s to be found in these is not the full story.

Ashley Capes was featured in one of these tomes, but I don’t believe that’s where I first came across him. Perhaps it was Twitter or his blog. In any case I feel as If I have come to his writing without the imprimatur of some college professor or a salon like group of poets meeting in a bohemian cafe(please, poets still do this don’t they). I think these kinds of discoveries, the ones we make ourselves without the influence of others are important, they allow a genuine connection.

Stepping Over Seasons is Capes’ second collection and I am late to the party( it was released in 2010) and if I were to pick one defining feature of this collection, it is his striking ability to present clear imagery succinctly, to let just the right amount of words carry the feeling and point of the poem.

That and he can take the most mundane of objects and imbue them with meaning. Maybe he’s just deploying focussed attention, developed through his work with Japanese forms of poetry like Haiku and Senryu, which I know he’s a dab hand at.
A case or poem, in point is the first in the collection:

other objects

my wedding ring is a plain silver
barrel band. same as dad’s, very modest
and very hard to keep smooth,
with scratches I can’t keep track of and
don’t want to hide. it’s no good pretending
the marriage is perfect, no use
hanging all our memories and every
step of the future on just one symbol. other
objects speak of love, too. the weeping
maple we’ve shifted to every house, the
cup we fill with knives and forks
or the handwritten address you gave me
the night we met, walking the city
and flinging orange peel into hedges, things
that endure, things that have lines
and marks to prove them.

I am suspicious of ebullient expressions of emotion, they can easily ring false (it depends on the Poet and what you know of their life an experience) but Capes is often understated in his expression of sentiment. “All this Ink” speaks of the struggle of writing, of hoping and believing that this writing is going to lead somewhere:

…
if I sit up tonight and all this ink
becomes poetry, I could point the wheel
to a place we’ve never been,
watch Venice sink a little more
or show you stability in three bedrooms,
and looking back, you wouldn’t see
smoke stacks or the front door.

and “August Rain” sketches out beautifully the reality of being in that position where sometimes the only thing you can do for some one is be present. This is not not to say that the collection is all reserved, contemplative poetry. There’s some cynicism and criticism that comes through in Overlook, a piece that criticises the great poets who romanticise their cities, a piece that challenges them to find in Capes’ home town “… a moment worthy of haiku, where sewerage and the paper mill meet.”

I laughed out loud at “Sunrise Today” which dryly eviscerates morning television variety shows. Four years on this poem is still right on the money, proof of every claim that Capes lays at their feet.

But I return again to his ability to focus, to deliver succinct, and inspired observations. A stanza from Small Town could be the epitaph of half the regional towns of South Australia with

marks on the footpath
don’t fade and the cemetery
never shrinks, only the town around it.

These three lines speak more truth about my experience of rural towns than anything you’ll find by Banjo.

In one of those serendipitous moments I happened also to be reading a Ted Chiang short story about a society in which we have the ability to record and recall everything and anything we experience (imagine being able to prove that you had indeed put the toilet seat down). Chiang is seductive in that piece, in that I almost feel that such a thing(as he outlines it) wouldn’t be so bad. Then I read Capes’ “Late Night”, and suddenly the seductive reasoning was a little more shaky. It ends with…

I guess the great lie of our time is capture –
it’s comforting to believe
everything can be caught, recorded
and remembered,
so we don’t have to appreciate
anything in the moment.

Stepping Over Seasons continues to resonate with me. Just in writing this review I experience that aha! moment again as I pluck out quotes for you. This collection had a very high hit rate for me. Capes I find to be a keen observer and communicator with his poetry, it’s some of the most enjoyable free verse I have read.

– Sean Wright, Adventures of a Bookonaut

In his latest collection of poetry Ashley Capes mines the quotidian. The seasons play an important part in the life of the poet as he moves from “no whispers to quicken fruit” (“dawn”) through the “sagging tent ropes” of “slow moon” to “these / people and their autumn-house hold together” in “autumn-house.” Detailing the typical emotional routines of life today – marriage, home, a bus ride, a farm, the small town, the intersections and intrusions of the issues of the day, and the occasional time for thoughts about nature, death and God, Capes explores the links between nature and human nature. He typically writes simple one- or two-page poems with little or no punctuation. His introspective moments are triggered by rain, the moon, mushrooms, night, sunrise, butterflies, an echidna, autumn, grass seeds, and particularly small town life.

His style, not surprisingly, is lean, employing one-paragraph poems, or poems with short stanzas. Within these parameters Capes is good at what he does, while a few poems step outside his normal range: the surreal longer poem “leaking,” for example, or the clever poem “on the road,” contrasting the narrative of driving with the thoughts of what would happen “if they found your body.” And Capes’ issue poems, few in number but well-constructed, include the poem about the act of writing “take five,” and “black comedy” where the focus is on death:

or will I, in fact, be able
to laugh at my body as it’s lowered into a hole,
for some reason
in a suit in a box with
a pillow and my teeth probably
very clean and maybe
whitened too,
in case wherever I’m going
I’d need a great smile?

Much more representative is “overlook,” regarding great poets, who “romanticize their towns” contrasted with Capes’ home,

with street corners and marigolds
painted in vomit

industrial strength
cigars, puffing second-hand
smoke into the sky

three inland surf shops
dozens of bars, six fast-food chains
and one theatre

Capes lives in the world: “from the river / the echo of our fishing trips / and dark lines / polishing the shore.” (“tar and white paint”).

Capes’ language with all its sensuousness is the language of spontaneous overflow. Factuality goes along with the feelings and the emotions and there is an evident sobriety present in the poems. He builds his verses, several with headlong continuity and fitting compactly phrase to phrase and line to line, so that his poems present an overall visual impression of clarity. This solidarity is an aspect of sensibility. Capes is perfectly aware of the fleeting nature of experience, yet equally aware of its reality. So he takes things as they come: savours them, ponders them, feels them and fixes them in durable verse, as we see in “bitches brew”:

once, at the gate,
bragging about loneliness
he made a bow out of blue ribbon
and hung it above her headstone
murmuring to the wind.

In this particular passage the final effect is aesthetic prompted by stylization of the persona and the image of the headstone in the final line. Characteristically Capes exemplifies an acceptance of the whole of life, of his own humility – toughly, zestfully, serenely. In the first part of the two-part poem “botanic,” he writes about the park “full of photographers” and also full of readers, ibis, people and a “Chinese couple / posing for wedding photos.” But beyond this tranquil scene lies the city with its sirens, streets humming with threats and the casino. His equity is in simply being alive to the sights and sounds that surround him.

Capes’ poetry is, in fact, as eminently social as it is personal. It registers with a touch of irony the people at a hotel pool: “a man opens a window / grunt riding / beads of sweat down his chin” (“royal on the park”). The poem “by the curve” records with humour the man waiting for a loved one to return:

a teacup sits on the sink
shoe-brown
inside, imagined marks
where you held it,
not by the handle
but by the curve, to fit a palm
aching from winter

The final poem “the jacket” offers an arresting image of “a filthy spring jacket” left lying on a chair which the reader feels must be of importance to the poet for

in the jacket
you linger in traces
and I rake them with my hands
collect every scent.

Here is a poet who writes with immense clarity and real verbal music on the main themes of life – love, loss and death – with humour and sensitivity.

– Patricia Prime, Another Lost Shark