Andy Kissane lives in Sydney with his partner and daughter and writes poetry, fiction and drama. He won the Red Earth Poetry Award and the FAW John Shaw Neilson Award, was runner-up in the Gwen Harwood Memorial Poetry Prize and equal third in the Newcastle Poetry Prize. Facing the Moon won the Harri Jones Memorial Prize. He was a member of the Poets Union inaugural POW! Poets on Wheels tour of northern New South Wales. Kissane has worked as a writer-in-residence at MLC Burwood, a producer of audio books for Royal Blind Society, an editor for the Australian Council of Social Service and a lecturer in creative writing at the University of Western Sydney, Macarthur. His interests include supporting the Brisbane Lions (formerly Fitzroy), drama, reading and cycling.
Publications
Facing the Moon Five
Islands Press 1993
Every Night They Dance Five
Islands Press 2000
Under the Same Sun (a novel) Sceptre
2000
Poetics
Any
statement about poetics is necessarily provisional and out-of-date. I dont
want to keep writing the same poem and so my statement is more about
what I have done in the past, than what I want to do in the future.
My
primary concern has always been to move people, to let the emotion drive the
poem. I have also tried to explore political issues, particularly those
concerned with human justice. Personal experiences are also important, which
might be why so many of my poems are full of domestic details. Finally, I like
humour, which often seems to just happen in some poems, rather than being
deliberately willed.
I
am also interested in narrative and dramatic poetry. I see the dramatic
monologue, or voice poem, as an exciting form. It seems closely connected to
both the oral origins of poetry and to the multiplicity of voices within any
individual. It is liberating and enriching to take on the voice of another person,
either real or imagined, historical or contemporary. Sometimes the inspiration
for a voice is a painting or a photograph, sometimes an event, such as the
hostage drama in Kanaky in the late 1980s.
I believe writers are influenced by other writers (rather than being
uniquely original) and reading is important to my work. I am attracted to poets
that explore emotion, such as Robert Hass, Larry Levis, Philip Levine, Sharon
Olds, Galway Kinnell, Carolyn Forhι, Paul Durcan, Ciaran Carson and James
Wright to name a few. It also puzzles me why so many Australian poets seem to
avoid emotion in their writing. Australian poets whose work has influenced me
include Judith Beveridge, Martin Langford and Dorothy Porter.
Poems
The Silk Road
I can't sleep. It's the voices
calling,
muttering, one after the other like
mustard seeds
as they swell and burst. Then they
stop.
It's nothing an oasis of the ear,
a dream.
I'm almost asleep when they start
again,
growing louder, marching towards me.
And music,
music that only the Emperor can
command
drums, pipes, incandescent voices.
I gather my cloak around me and step
outside.
A black night, not a lantern to be
seen,
anywhere. Chang says they're demons
tormenting the bodies of foolish travellers
who lost their way in this endless
sand.
Don't wear red he warns, don't heed
the voices.
Pah! I rejoiced when I left the
Mouth
of the Great Wall no more wasted
days
tending my grandfather's silk worms,
drinking jasmine tea. Soon I will
see
the sun strike the Flaming
Mountains,
soon I will sleep in Turfan. I'll
hear
women's voices, lounging in a
courtyard
under the shade of a poplar. They
say
the wine lingers on your tongue
and the
women every night they dance.
Breaking the Mould
It doesn't take a poet to describe
this.
A boy brings a pug of clay from the
pit
to the stool. If he's good he also
rolls
the walk so the clay has the rough
shape
of a brick before it reaches my
table.
I sprinkle the clot with sand, dip
the mould
in the water box and dash in the
clay.
Excess I cut off with the strike,
then turn
the green brick out onto the plank.
Thirty seconds a brick, ten minutes
a page
of bricks, my skin coated with grit,
my hands,
my deft fingers slicing the moist
air,
the whole job as automatic as
breathing.
But a man's more than the reputation
of his tailor,
or the number of his servants, or
the grandeur
of his
ceilings flannel flowers, poppies, bunches
of grapes the abundance, the
craftsmanship.
And a man's more than his trade,
more than
the fatigue spreading from my wrists
to my elbows,
more even than the smile that breaks
from my lips
as another barrow heads for the
drying sheds.
And what is work, but a mind
dreaming. Yesterday
I saw her again, the magistrate's
daughter.
Yes, you're thinking already, what
hope have I
with a lady who wears pearls and a
black silk
band round her neck? An astronomer,
a phrenologist,
a gifted surgeon might woo her, but
I'm a
brickmaker returning from the
Builder's Exchange
in Pitt Street with a saddlebag full
of cash.
Who can buy love? And even if by
some miracle,
some comet splashing its sparkle
through the heavens,
she happens to like me, what then?
There'll be
another lump of clay to feed into
the mould.
There'll be a wicket of bricks to
build
in the kiln and six days of firing
to see to.
There'll be dawn and dusk and
another dawn.
And when the next drop of sweat
falls to darken
the earth will another desire rise
to greet me?
3am
Along High Street, the window in the
white Cortina
right down, the air rushing in, my
foot on the accelerator
beating time to the electric fizz of
Johnny B. Goode,
all evening my hand inside your
jumper what bliss!
Street lights flashing past like
beacons of joy.
Everything went so well until you
found Jesus.
It never works after that. When you
said,
if you ask Jesus into your life
you'll never miss
another green light, or wait for a
parking space,
I couldn't help myself. I said, 2000
years and all
it amounts to is traffic flow. And
you gave me
that look
and I knew: Eli, Eli, it is finished.
Miscarriages
I've just let the onions slide off
the chopping board onto the spices
darkening
in the cast iron pot when the phone
rings.
Can you get it? I say, taking the
knife
and peeling back the hoary skin from
a knuckle
of ginger. After the sort of casual,
jokey
greeting that I admire, your face
changes
and I realise that on the other end
of the line
something is wrong. Sorry, I'm so sorry,
scattered through your listening
and I want to ask who it is, but
restrain myself,
slicing the ginger with a precision
copied from cooking demonstrations
on TV.
Eventually I catch her name and I
know.
Words are inadequate. I stir the
onion and add
a tin of tomatoes. Solidarity is
most powerful
when silent an arm around a
shoulder,
a meeting of eyes. It's quite common
actually,
they write magazine articles about
how no-one
talks about miscarriages, one of the
last taboos.
Ours started with the ultrasound
length of body
consistent with nine weeks, not
twelve. No sign
of a heartbeat. It wasn't a mistake,
he said,
our baby was dead. We should come
back the next
day for a D&C. But we didn't
need to. It happened
the same long, long night. Your
tears,
my helplessness. And a chill-out
culture
which advises getting over it,
getting on with life,
as if you can block the experience
in bold
and hit a little button called
'delete'.
In O Cruzeiro, Brazil, even today,
they don't
name infants until their first
birthday.
Our pregnant friends are friends no
longer.
Now I see, how inevitable, how
necessary it was
to exist on your own terms: to be
selfish.
When your uterus is a grave, guilt
flings
its shadow forward so the next
pregnancy
and the next seem to mirror the past
a nagging half-thought floating in
its own sea:
that you are pregnant with the baby
you lost,
that history repeats itself. How can
we love
and honour what is gone, how can we
make precious
what we barely knew? As steam from
this dish
of beans vanishes into the air. Yet
remains.
No Ending
When the phone call brought the news
we made love. If it is true, if the
dead
do walk the earth for a day or two
before they leave this world, then
perhaps
you were with us, your legs dangling
over the edge of the wardrobe, your
arms
sweeping back the curtain to let
in the evening an accelerating
car,
the birds squawking in the camphor
laurel,
the street five floors below. This
poem
was written after words looped
through the air above parched
fields,
over grazing sheep, beside the road
from city to city. This poem
followed sex,
two bodies trying to forget the
sound
of three pips and a familiar voice.
Later, cycling by the river, I
watched
the golden beam of light spill out
in front of me the way the cancer
spread
through your body breast, bones,
lungs, liver the calcium levels
rising
in your blood. Arched over the
handlebars
I pushed down and pushed down on the
pedals,
the light constant always before
me