Ruined Man, Graham Nunn.  Small Change Press, Queensland, Australia.  2007.  31 pp.  ISBN 978-0-9803418-0-5.  $AUD15.00

Reviewed by Patricia Prime

Ruined Man is a slim volume containing twenty-five poems.  This is a brightly-coloured poetry that uses language like a palette. The lines are lean, the poems compact, the words have clearly been fought over.

The opening poem “On One Hand” is divided into five haiku-like poems characteristic of Graham Nunn’s style of simplicity, clarity and virtuosity.  Here is number five:

I want to write this:
things look clearest to people
beyond their edge

Visually, the poem meanders down the page.  It delivers in its own startling language the message that we need to look beyond the everyday mundanities, such as unpacking groceries to find the edge to life.

Nunn manages to cover a vast array of subjects in Ruined Man.  Read these wonderful lines from  “Prophet”:

I stand at the brink of seriousness

/laughter weaving its deadly fingers
in and out of my heart/

and remember the perfection of the city

the idea of a glittering machine
built with the logic of butterflies
profitless from the beginning

The poem sees him writing about the city of Brisbane and a sense of popular culture pervades his work.  Much of the imagery is modern with references to drinking, parties, the streets and the nightlife.  The poems may be inspired by observations and osmosis, while the thoughts in “In the Car Park” come from the netherworld of the inexplicable:

skinny kids talk like old men
in a textual excess
of lust and violence

the newspaper stand
tells the tragic tale
of a pop stars phone-sex nightmare

The predominant feeling in this book is of a realistic and unsentimental poetry.  The poems have one central figure, the subjects are usually about urban life, parties, listening to music, desire, loneliness.  Even when the persona is alone in the street at 1 am, he is objectified.  This becomes the frame for a virtuoso display of language. Nunn’s word play is often whimsical but also tough, reflective and personal.  Unusual words are used, with some metaphors, and stress on the visual/aesthetic nature of the subject emphasises the difference between what is happening to the persona and the way this determines his character, as revealed in “Clearly Alone”:

I breathe it in
clearly alone
each element magnified
fingers the back of my skull
as I devour
their anonymous soundtrack
and retreat into the dark heart
of my tow
tomorrow’s news
already on the street corners

Nunn’s deliberately urban poetry often shows the underbelly of the city.  For instance, in “The Party’s Over” we have come to the end of the party, where nothing is left but the debris and the silence:

morality is covered in dust
and I sit
and stare
at the walls
empty of sound
for the moment

Nunn is clearly comfortable writing about the urban environment, and the language doesn’t betray him.  Any close observer of a crowded street may well have the same experiences as Nunn: it is purposeful, systematic, composed of separate people, each one with an individuality that is anything but harmonious.  But usually it is only the persona that the poem concentrates on, as we see in “All the Way Home” where he is driving home “taking in the fumes / of Brisbane” and having “flashbacks of Saturday night / and the last bus home to central.”  Anecdotal, personal, and yes, poetic.

Some of the poems have a peculiar effectiveness, hard to describe without quoting the poem as a whole.  “Childhood Poem” is a wonderful take on its subject, describing a girl and boy in the playground “trading Kiss cards” and concluding with the lines

a school-yard fantasy
when all I really wanted

was another Gene Simmons

Nunn’s poetry is, in fact, as eminently social as it is personal.  In “Brisbane Love Poems” he registers with a touch of affectionate irony the quintessence of an Australian city, but also remembers with pitying truthfulness its hidden distress (“pastel-painted sunsets”, “Prostitutes sweating on street corners”, “The skull of a cat”).

The poems pay tribute to popular song, record with a humour sometimes grim the decline of taste and the cheapness of a consumerist society.  The suggestively titled poem “Ruined Man” offers an arresting image of the persona in a borrowed suit, which he has stained with his own blood

and back at home
when I shucked it off
and dressed in rags
you watched me roll it up
in a silent bundle
ordered me to take it straight to the cleaners

The unexcited continuance of desire “beneath the cold face of the moon” (“Seasons of Desire”), the “pieces of you / I remember”  (“Bruises”) and “the regularity of habit” (Good Intentions”) indicate an attitude which is pervasive throughout the book.  Nunn acknowledges the evils of the human condition and goes on living nonetheless.  He does not ask for a miraculous transformation of the world or look for compensation.  More toughly, he views the imperfections as a condition in which the acceptance of what life offers is incumbent:

me, I don’t go out much anymore
but now and then on a Friday night
when the Cohen albums drag me down
then throw me up gasping for a drink
I pull on a coat and rush out
into the babble

 (“In Devotion to Life’s Sordid Affairs”)

Characteristically for someone who observes the variety of the human condition, the poet often presents the human predicament in violent terms:

I swallow myself, imploding
fearing the 3am phone call
that comes like a brick
to the back of the head

 (“Hard to Disappear”)

The justice of the night consists in the oblivion of time engulfing public and private ills.  Generally speaking, it is the human capacity for forgetfulness that makes living at all possible.  It is characteristic of Nunn and his poetry as a whole that he offers no easy comfort, no easy assurance, and the verse, taut and vivid, is the appropriate vehicle of a vision that is strenuous, unflinching and comprehensive.  Perhaps the penultimate poem  “Start Over” holds a hint of the material of Nunn’s poetry:

I saw myself in the sky last night
pulled apart
  scattered
a dot to dot of a man
with no substance
a black hole
screaming
deep into the night

Nunn is a brave writer often casting arrows into the reader’s consciousness.  These are wily, wiry, exciting poems, with a genuine sense of urban life, which question, experiment but remain open.