The Transparent Lung, Jayne Fenton Keane.  Post Pressed. ISBN 1 876682 51 5. Price: AU$22.50.

Reviewed by Patricia Prime

On the train of Ophelia’s Codpiece, a verse novel, comes Jayne Fenton Keane’s impressive The Transparent Lung.  This is a contemporary verse drama of a family changed by the life-threatening illness of one of its members.  Jayne Fenton Keane is one of Australia’s best contemporary poets by virtue of her skills, her concern with language and her intellectual capabilities.

Opehlia’s Codpiece enhanced the poet’s reputation as she developed the mixture of formal clarity and hermetic content that expanded the pattern of a series of short poems and coalesced into a balanced verse novel.

In The Transparent Lung the tightening effect of this “echoing “ and “imaging” is more intellectually satisfying than before.  The series of poems is a fine achievement, with precise connections between family members expressed in narrative, reflection, soliloquy, graphics and puzzles.  These dynamics shock the reader out of complacency, shaking us up by giving us space to think.

Precise connections between father, mother, son and daughter are always clearly defined.  There is a reading guide provided at the start of the book where each voice is provided with a number, allowing easy access to their thoughts and feelings.  To take one example, the x-raying of the father in “Verdict Scene 1: 009 in the name of the father  (ii)”:

The important hand points

a latex finger at the centre

of a bright white box.  He shuffles

his vocal chords into deadly shapes

and though I can’t hear them

I know they are well rehearsed.

Is taken up in the wife’s soliloquy in “ Scene 2: 007 montage for a bewildered wife”, “It started at her feet / stalked / its way through / cartilage and bonelets”, where the numbers indicate the voices in the narrative.

Although few of the poems might recommend themselves to the anthologist at first reading (“Going To Battle” , “Doing Time” and “Daughter contemplating neitzsche” are exceptions), the volume is wholly integrated.  The poems are grim comic exercises constructed around a family coming to terms with an illness which impacts on everyone else.  It oscillates sharply between cold, restrained pathos and hilarious scenes, as in ‘Scene 7: 003 close up of a lost son”:

I pick off the cheese, scrape

off clots of tomato sauce

and throw the dough-frisbee

over the fence.  My dog fetches it

doesn’t come back.

What doesn’t vary is the book’s capacity to disconcert.  It picks up ideas and words from the family and brings them together.  Many of the obsessive images that gather momentum throughout the book: the father’s hospital visits, the mother’s bewilderment and her coming to terms with the trauma of her husband’s illness, the son being pushed into the background and relating his experiences to life in the ocean, the daughter’s relationship with her father and the way in which her garden becomes her mainstay and helps her cope with the situation.  The linkage these images provide sometimes has great moment: the bonding of the father and son, the acceptance of the mother, the daughter’s self-discovery and growth.  At other times the poems illustrate the comic ties that Fenton Keane’s imagination delights in.  The father’s discovery that his “lungs are full of embryos” contrasted with the mother’s  “Is that an invisible methane halo / around my husband’s head?”  The surprises are as much in the language and syntax as in the events described.

But in The Transparent Lung the cross-referring and associations work in a controlled fashion, far beyond mental quirkiness.  To take one instance: in a haunting line in “The Bet” the father says, “whatever you call / the chips are down / the odds against you.” And the mother retaliates with “That’s what happens / when you’re on a roll / and everything seems / to be going right.”  Then the daughter, “that risk is relative” and in the next poem, the son says, “When I was 15 I began to gamble.”  The circuit of images is welded together as we see the father, mother, daughter and son caught up in a web of gambling, although now it is not for money but for a life.  It is a technique of symbolism, familiar in Yeats.  The comparison with Yeats bears labouring because many of the fragmentary associative techniques in The Transparent Lung are reminiscent of the symbolist tradition.  Image object and idea work together into an uncertain whole, in the way in which they do in reality.

This suggests at least in part the answer to what Fenton Keynes’ poetry is about and the way in which it works.  In The Transparent Lung, the concern is with the way personal memory, sensual experiences and language compete for the attention of the conscious mind.  The process is symbolic and visionary.  There are visions of many kinds in the book: the kind of trances induced in the family by their poignant memories, or the state brought on in the father by the “confessions / I dare not make”.  These confessions are insistently recurrent in the book because they provide the link between vision as heightened awareness and the love the characters have for each other although they are not able to express themselves adequately.   Memory aids the characters to come to terms with the trauma,  to acknowledge their separation from each other, and to help them accomplish their final bonding.  The visions are symbolic representations of the way words and experiences come to inform the mind.

The poem that most intriguingly incorporates Fenton Keynes’ visionary method is the father’s last poem “eel”.  It begins with the narrator, as he is dying, feeling “something slippery in my veins”.  The poem unmistakeably suggests the continuity and discontinuity of experience at the same time: what is known or not, and what is believed or not.  The temporal point of vantage is used in this shifting way throughout the book.

For all its difficulties (and there are some), The Transparent Lung is unfailingly suggestive and worthwhile.  And it is hard not to sound too condescending in evaluating the poetry, as the poet taunts you into praising the formal brilliance, the intellectual crafting, and the crucial substance of the poems.  The oblique methods used in The Transparent Lung suggest understanding better than a more direct statement might.