The Blizzard Voices

Everyone I love who has died has been cremated. The coffin disappeared with a mechanical whoosh, or a discreet curtain covered it up, and that's the last we saw of it. It's cold, clinical, institutional, fake, and it's not enough for me. I want to watch dirt cover the coffin and know that it's done. I want a place to visit, a place to sit and chat and cry and think.

So my husband and I will be buried. We will sink into the soil and turn into good earth. We will be in a place where our children can hold a picnic, and listen to the trees, and breathe goodbye over and again. In my fantasy world, I will be buried at a friend's block, quiet, unremarked, ignored for the most part, but a good place for a picnic; a place where the wind sings and a rainbow is often to be seen spanning the valley. In reality, we're visiting country cemeteries and seeing what's available.

Which brings me in a roundabout way to The Blizzard Voices. I find most poetry to be unutterably omphaloskeptical (I have always wanted to use that word in a sentence) and excruciatingly tedious.

And then there's Ted Kooser. Kooser is a poet who uses the cool spare language of the Great Plains. He is the poet for people who like stories, and other people. His language is clear, strong and wiry; and he tells the most wonderful tales.

The Blizzard Voices is a collection of poems about the terrible storm which struck the Plains in the late nineteenth century. Teachers and students were trapped in schoolhouses with limited fuel and food. Farmhands perished in the fields, unable to find their way home. Fathers sheltered under upturned wagons with their livestock, and lost hands and feet to the cold. Mothers sat anxiously at home waiting for their husbands and children to return: from school, from the neighbour's house, even from the barn just yards away.

Kooser collected the stories from those who remembered, and from old diaries and other reports. He shaped the material into a series of short poems, each speaking in a different voice to relate an image, a snippet, or an experience. Together, the poems form a chorus, and provide a sense of the many faces of the blizzard: finding a loved one dead in a snowdrift, and the methodical calm of a plainsman in dealing with it; the surprising experience of discovering turkeys days later, buried by the snow but alive and well; the quiet devastation of a young teacher who lost her way and held three young charges close as they died in the night; the sight of a man who lost arms and legs to frostbite being loaded onto a train; the line of sunflowers which led a teacher and her children to safety.

Reading the book, I felt I was sitting at the feet of a grandmother or a great-uncle, listening as they told stories by the fire. It is a deeply nourishing set of poems, tied to a particular time and place, but drawing the reader into a collective history, and giving the reader a sense that the history is part of our shared story.

As in his book Local Wonders, Kooser finishes the collection with a deeply moving piece which is a benediction of sorts; here, a blessing on those who died. He writes that the names of those buried unremarked and unremembered in the corners of fields are still carried on the wind. And I'm back to where I began. Two lifetimes and half a world away, I think of those lines whenever the wind blows, and hope that I too can one day be buried in a field somewhere, remembered for a few years, then left to the song of swaying grasses, and the ever changing crooning of the wind.

(You can read more about Kooser's book Local Wonders: Seasons in the Bohemian Alps here.)

The contradictions of colonialism

Finally, finally I have read The Secret River – one of those 'must read' books on the bookshelf. It's the tale of one William Thornhill, a waterman on the Thames, who is caught stealing and sent to New South Wales for the term of his natural life. After gaining his pardon, Thornhill moves out of Sydney and appropriates a stretch of land along the Hawksburn River, where turns his hand to farming.

What makes the story so interesting is its focus on the encounters between Thornhill and traditional owners of the land, a story not often told in Australian literature. From the outset, it is clear that violence is in the offing, and reading the book is like watching a train wreck in slow motion.

The Secret River is beautifully written, dreamy even, especially in the passages about the river and the landscape. And yet, recalling the recent spat between Peter Carey and Bryce Courtenay on the nature of a good book, the characters are not immediate, even the story is not immediate in the way a good story, a Dickens perhaps, would be. For all its beauty, I felt as if I were reading through a veil and the book, once finished, made little impression on me. The characters have already departed.

Overall, I found it a somewhat frustrating book. The book focuses on Thornhill's thoughts and feelings; we are told constantly what is going on in his head. I wanted to shout the elementary writer's mandate: Show, don't tell! – don't tell me what he thinks, show me the actions that result from his thinking. Yet for all this thought, Thornhill's actions are largely unaffected, even contradicted, by his thoughts.

In the most striking example, Thornhill's household is woken one night by the sounds of a corroborree. Thornhill sneaks over to the indigenous camp to see what is happening. As he watches, he believes he is seeing a war dance, but as the night wears on he realises it is liturgy, and an old man dancing is a 'book'. Thornhill realises too that everyone, except himself, can read the story being told. Yet despite these revelations, which one would expect to assuage his overwhelming fears of imminent attack, he leaves to protect his household.

I would find the scene more plausible had he perceived only a war-dance (and so his defensive preparations would have made sense); or, if he indeed had the insight that he was observing liturgy, that his fears dissipated. I find it hard to swallow that a character has such profound insight, yet is not affected by it.

In another example, Thornhill observes that in the way the indigenous live, all are 'gentry'. All have time to spare every day for socializing, playing, and meaning-making activities. Despite this realisation, this word 'gentry' coming to his mind, he continues to refer to them as savages and treats them accordingly.

I have not read enough history to know whether Thornhill's observations truly reflect those found in old diaries and other records; but I experienced a strong sense of anachronism. An uneducated Thames waterman, living in a strange and hostile terrain, suffocating on fear and feeling threatened every time he heard a branch break saw a corroborree and thought of the Anglican Christmas service? Oh please. In other places, despite his deliberate choice to remain apart from the local tribe, he has insights into the way they claim and farm the land, and have a spiritual connection with it. These insights seem extraordinary, if not completely implausible, for the average Englishman of the time.

Oddly enough, despite the suspension of belief required to read this book, I would still recommend it. My family is Cornish, and left Cornwall in the hungry forties, as they called it. They came to mine, stretch out and breathe, and I can't pretend that the land they worked was empty. I am sure there is blood on our hands, just as there is on so many hands, and it is through books like this that we gain insights into our ancestors and begin to accept responsibility for our history.

As the great-great-great-grandchild of colonists, I can absolutely understand Thornhill's desperate desire for land at any cost – this is his one chance out of grim poverty, his one chance to have children grow straight and tall. It doesn't make his violent actions acceptable, and I don't condone them; but I can't infinitely condemn him either. Like my ancestors, he was born into hunger and a precarious existence; he was sent to Australia; and the philosophers of the time disputed and largely denied the full humanity of indigenous people. Not only that, but the English government ordered the settlers to take all necessary steps to subdue the native population and appropriate the land.

For Thornhill or my ancestors to question the philosophers and the clergymen, for them to perceive indigenous people as fully human and having powerful claims on the land, would be radically farsighted; for them to disobey the King and relinquish appropriated land back to the original inhabitants, unthinkable. Even two hundred years later, many Australians still deny that indigenous Australians have a special claim on the land and bitterly resent any suggestions that sacred sites, at the least, might be returned to the traditional owners.

Perhaps the contradictions between Thornhill's observations and actions are deliberate on the part of the writer. However, they seem to say more about the contradictions we might feel now as the descendents of colonists. From our position of power, we have the emotional space to acknowledge that a corroboree may be a form of liturgy, or that an indigenous person may have a different way of belonging to land – after all, these acknowledgements cost us nothing. But the violence has been done; we have the land; and, at least in Victoria, there is no one much left to take it back. Even more, we are so removed from the violence that we can almost pretend it never happened. Thus, like Thornhill, we can simultaneously make our interesting anthropological observations even as we reap the rich rewards of colonialism.

> Kate Grenville The Secret River (Melbourne: Text, 2005).

The Baroque Cycle

Ah, holidays. Time to claim a little space of one's own, and sink into a good book. We're about to go on a long trip, which takes me back to the last long trip we made. Five years ago, we spent a couple of months pottering around Italy. I was still so shocked at the constant presence of my first baby, then eight months old, and so desperate for time alone, that I would wake automatically most nights at midnight, walk on the cold tiles through to the small loungeroom, and lie on the couch reading until 3 or 4 am in the morning, lost in the story and revelling in the blessed peace. Then I'd take myself back to bed, sleep for a few more hours, and get up to face the day.

Question: What books could impel me to dispense with infinitely precious sleep and keep me awake until the wee small hours? Answer: Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle.

The Baroque Cycle consists of three enormous novels (Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World), or eight sub-books immersed within the whole, or almost 3,000 pages; in other words, a whole lot of reading. And the reading is thrilling.

The books chart the evolution of modern science through the antics of the Royal Society and the development of the calculus; the evolution of the modern money markets through German mines, London moneylenders, the development of futures markets, and the endemic tampering with coins; and the evolution of modern government through the power plays of the the rich and powerful. Incidentally, we read about the Plague, the Great Fire of London, and Christopher Wren's vision for a modern London; the Spanish Inquisition and slavery in the New World; Puritans and Barbary slave galleys; the many uses of the Tower of London; and the customs of mudlarks at Tyburn Cross.

It's an immense series, sprawling, endlessly fascinating, and hilariously funny. Stephenson is a natural storyteller with a terrific eye for character. The books are peopled with an enormous cast, real and imagined, yet each person is fully realised and developed. The linch pins are Half-cock Jack, the Vagabond hero, who creates mayhem and havoc wherever he goes; Daniel Waterhouse, Isaac Newton's College roommate, who provides regular insights into the Royal Society and the vicious dispute between Newton and Leibniz over the development of the calculus, as well as engaging in political intrigue; and Eliza, rescued by Jack from the Ottoman harem during the siege of Vienna, but slowly ascending to grace the French Court at Versailles. Meanwhile, dozens of major European figures in science, politics and architecture make their appearances in all their glorious eccentricity.

Stephenson writes about everyday aspects of Baroque life well - the collection of human urine to make phosphorus; people dropping of the Plague in crowded markets; the elaborate negotiations required for every monetary exchange, as the coinage changed so often and was compromised so regularly that currency was always negotiable; the terrible impact of kidney stones; the rampaging Press Gang; the dogs, rats and feces that filled the London streets; the use of feathers and whalebones to induce vomiting and balance out one's humours; the power of the elite over all aspects of human life; the society of coffee houses; the effects of smallpox and French pox - that the reader gains a rich, almost visceral, sense of daily life so many years ago.

The books are an education. Ideas which I had previously had no understanding of or interest in, such as the buying and selling of futures, were clearly explained; even some of the machinations of politicians and royals became intelligible. Yet interwoven into this crash course in history, science and politics are characters so vile, events so dramatic and conversations so hysterically funny that the reader is completely engaged from beginning to end. It is worth setting aside a year, or some very long holidays, to read them. They are absorbing, nourishing, and enormously entertaining.

While we were in Tuscany, we had the first two books with us. The third was released in London during our holiday; a friend purchased it there and brought it with him. I had a week in Venice to read it before he took off home again. It was the perfect location, as the city evoked so much of the story. I remember days and nights in 'our' apartment, curled in an old armchair overlooking a canal, completely immersed and interrupted only by excursions to the Venetian islands, glances at the medieval buildings opposite, and meandering walks through narrow alleys to the fish market, cheese shop and Doge's Palace. Happy days.