Launch Speeches
The Bearded Chameleon
The Bearded Chameleon was launched by John Hawke, lecturer and poet, on 19 November 2011 at Red Wheelbarrow Books in East Brunswick, 19 November 2011
"Chris Mooney-Singh belongs to an intermediate generation of poets who emerged in Sydney in the 1980s – Steven and Chris Kelen, Adam Aitken, Dipti Sara and others - whose work seems to have been underrepresented in anthologies. This may be attributable to the fact that they are an inter-generation - but it also might be because their work doesn’t conform to hegemonic nationalist expectations of Australian poetry. Certainly there is a shared openness of engagement, particularly evident in Adam’s work, with broader international themes; and each of these poets is widely travelled. This is perhaps exacerbated in Chris’ case by the fact that he has spent extended periods living in Asia - he has made a significant contribution to the poetry scene in Singapore, and has participated in a wide range of poetry festivals across South-East Asia in recent years. It is also worth noting that while it may be relatively easy to ‘emerge’ as an Australian poet, many experienced practitioners in mid-career tend to be overlooked - often in spite of the fact that this is when they are producing their most important work.
This is Chris’ second full-length collection - I’ve read his first, The Laughing Buddha Cab-Company, and I’m also lucky enough to have read some of the excellent recent work that’s been completed since this current volume - and it seems clear that he is now delivering the fully developed poetry that he’s been working towards for many years. One thing that is immediately noticeable about Chris’ work is his mastery of prosodic technique: his poetry has its basis in a flawless metrical sense, especially in his control of the blank verse line, which allows him to write extended narrative and dramatic poems. There is a remarkable variation in formal models, as well as a range in tone, throughout this book: there are rhymed stanzas, monologues, evocations of the natural world, even a highly amusing found-text. Each of Chris’ poems is consistently based in solid technique, which means that they not only stand up to close inspection, but improve on rereading (the real ‘test of poetry’).
The Bearded Chameleon was launched by John Hawke, lecturer and poet, on 19 November 2011 at Red Wheelbarrow Books in East Brunswick, 19 November 2011
"Chris Mooney-Singh belongs to an intermediate generation of poets who emerged in Sydney in the 1980s – Steven and Chris Kelen, Adam Aitken, Dipti Sara and others - whose work seems to have been underrepresented in anthologies. This may be attributable to the fact that they are an inter-generation - but it also might be because their work doesn’t conform to hegemonic nationalist expectations of Australian poetry. Certainly there is a shared openness of engagement, particularly evident in Adam’s work, with broader international themes; and each of these poets is widely travelled. This is perhaps exacerbated in Chris’ case by the fact that he has spent extended periods living in Asia - he has made a significant contribution to the poetry scene in Singapore, and has participated in a wide range of poetry festivals across South-East Asia in recent years. It is also worth noting that while it may be relatively easy to ‘emerge’ as an Australian poet, many experienced practitioners in mid-career tend to be overlooked - often in spite of the fact that this is when they are producing their most important work.
This is Chris’ second full-length collection - I’ve read his first, The Laughing Buddha Cab-Company, and I’m also lucky enough to have read some of the excellent recent work that’s been completed since this current volume - and it seems clear that he is now delivering the fully developed poetry that he’s been working towards for many years. One thing that is immediately noticeable about Chris’ work is his mastery of prosodic technique: his poetry has its basis in a flawless metrical sense, especially in his control of the blank verse line, which allows him to write extended narrative and dramatic poems. There is a remarkable variation in formal models, as well as a range in tone, throughout this book: there are rhymed stanzas, monologues, evocations of the natural world, even a highly amusing found-text. Each of Chris’ poems is consistently based in solid technique, which means that they not only stand up to close inspection, but improve on rereading (the real ‘test of poetry’).
"One thing that is immediately noticeable about Chris’ work is his mastery of prosodic technique: his poetry has its basis in a flawless metrical sense, especially in his control of the blank verse line, which allows him to write extended narrative and dramatic poems."
I’ve never been to India, but feel I have an entirely trustworthy guide through the paradoxes and contradictions of what it must be like to experience that country through reading the central section of Chris’ book. The adeptness of understanding demonstrated by the speaker of these poems is most apparent in the portraits, like the wonderful ‘Apartment of a Bombay Millionaire’; and also in monologues – recalling those of Clough or Browning - such as the major poem ‘Mrs Primita Devi’. Obviously there have been previous Australian poets who have engaged with India - some of the poems in Judith Beveridge’s Accidental Grace, for example; a long travel-poem by Robert Gray; Vicki Viidikas’ India Ink, to name a few; and there have been a growing number of recent books of Australian poetry focusing on Asia, which Chris has been pointing out for me. But I don’t recall a comparable sense of immersion, of a genuinely long-term lived understanding of the country, as one encounters in these poems. I did sit down to watch the whole of Louis Malle’s six-hour film Phantom India shortly after I met Chris, but I needn’t have tried: it’s all in the poems.
But this book isn’t just about creating exotic panoramas and character studies, though it certainly does that. In fact the personality of the speaker, which is self-evidently suggested in the book’s title, is acutely important to the reception of what is being described here - and not only as an observer or cross-cultural filter. The book opens with a series of confronting poems that are pitched at extreme level of grief - very carefully handled and shaped, I should say. That’s quite a risky way to start, but I think it is deliberately intended to provide a shaping theme for the structure of this book. We’re immediately made to confront the fact that this is a very sad world to live in: there is intense grief, there is suffering, and - as we’ll see in the Indian portraits later - there are also extremes of acute injustice. So the book from this point on describes the speaker’s attempt to ‘orient’ himself: it’s quite literally a search for meaning, as journeys to the east often are. So in this context, the descriptive poems about India, the chaos and contradictions they’re identifying, are quite loaded with the speaker’s own divided perceptions - it’s a kind of purgatory he’s experiencing after the sudden descent of the opening sequence. There’s a very fine, and very carefully placed, poem at the conclusion of the first section that I’d like to read; it’s called ‘A Meditation at Sukhna Lake’, and it’s about just that: the attempt to, at least fleetingly, clear the mind of a world of suffering. (Go here to read and hear an audio rendering of the poem)
That’s obviously a religious poem - one which has more in common with Kabir, or the poets of the sufist tradition, than with anything we’d recognise in Australian poetry of the natural world. That’s not entirely true, of course, because we find similar quests in the work of Harold Stewart, and indeed throughout the imagery of Judith Wright’s work - the ‘white water-lily’ that appears as the culmination of her book The Gateway, for example; and I know that’s a tradition which Chris himself is interested to identify and to position himself within.
As I suggested, The Bearded Chameleon is carefully structured as a volume, and the journey it describes does lead to some consolation in the beautifully shaped extended poem that concludes the final section. It’s not a ‘paradiso’ by any means: the relationship it describes is still affected by absence and separation, of cultures as much as distance, and that’s what Chris identifies and chronicles so clearly throughout this book. In doing so he provides a wonderful foundation for the major work he’s now engaged on - and I think we should enjoy this volume in anticipation of the poetry to come. Chris provides quite a unique voice and perspective for our engagement with and experience of Asia; and that’s mainly because he’s a highly accomplished and profoundly serious poet.”
But this book isn’t just about creating exotic panoramas and character studies, though it certainly does that. In fact the personality of the speaker, which is self-evidently suggested in the book’s title, is acutely important to the reception of what is being described here - and not only as an observer or cross-cultural filter. The book opens with a series of confronting poems that are pitched at extreme level of grief - very carefully handled and shaped, I should say. That’s quite a risky way to start, but I think it is deliberately intended to provide a shaping theme for the structure of this book. We’re immediately made to confront the fact that this is a very sad world to live in: there is intense grief, there is suffering, and - as we’ll see in the Indian portraits later - there are also extremes of acute injustice. So the book from this point on describes the speaker’s attempt to ‘orient’ himself: it’s quite literally a search for meaning, as journeys to the east often are. So in this context, the descriptive poems about India, the chaos and contradictions they’re identifying, are quite loaded with the speaker’s own divided perceptions - it’s a kind of purgatory he’s experiencing after the sudden descent of the opening sequence. There’s a very fine, and very carefully placed, poem at the conclusion of the first section that I’d like to read; it’s called ‘A Meditation at Sukhna Lake’, and it’s about just that: the attempt to, at least fleetingly, clear the mind of a world of suffering. (Go here to read and hear an audio rendering of the poem)
That’s obviously a religious poem - one which has more in common with Kabir, or the poets of the sufist tradition, than with anything we’d recognise in Australian poetry of the natural world. That’s not entirely true, of course, because we find similar quests in the work of Harold Stewart, and indeed throughout the imagery of Judith Wright’s work - the ‘white water-lily’ that appears as the culmination of her book The Gateway, for example; and I know that’s a tradition which Chris himself is interested to identify and to position himself within.
As I suggested, The Bearded Chameleon is carefully structured as a volume, and the journey it describes does lead to some consolation in the beautifully shaped extended poem that concludes the final section. It’s not a ‘paradiso’ by any means: the relationship it describes is still affected by absence and separation, of cultures as much as distance, and that’s what Chris identifies and chronicles so clearly throughout this book. In doing so he provides a wonderful foundation for the major work he’s now engaged on - and I think we should enjoy this volume in anticipation of the poetry to come. Chris provides quite a unique voice and perspective for our engagement with and experience of Asia; and that’s mainly because he’s a highly accomplished and profoundly serious poet.”