Beyond 'A Cultural Look and See': Chris Mooney-Singh's The Bearded Chameleon
by Sam Byfield, from Asiancha.com, September 2012 (Issue 18
Chris Mooney-Singh, The Bearded Chameleon, Black Pepper Books (Australia); Red Wheelbarrow Books,(Singapore) 86 pgs.
It's not very often that the first poem in a collection involves defecation, and rarer still, I suspect, that it does so with grace and artistry. The first poem in Chris Mooney-Singh's collection, The Bearded Chameleon, does just that and sets the scene perfectly for the works that follow. In "Punjab Pastoral" we find Mooney-Singh, an Australian poet who in 1989 adopted Sikhism, squatting in a field, cotton shawl pulled up around his ears, "bobbing like a sunflower." Having moved to India in search of meaning and "deeper experiences," he questions his motivations and the wisdom of his choices, suggesting that "they all want to leave and yet I've come/to squat and shit and chew on grass and spit/for 'a cultural look and see'."
Perhaps in response to his own preconceptions, this poem starts and finishes with the observation that he can hear no mermaid singing; indeed, he notes, "I am the fool round here." This search for identity, for wisdom and for a "legitimately" lived life is a common theme in this collection, though it is interspersed with poems of both great loss and great hope, as well as some of the most effectively wrought depictions of Asia and its people that have been published in Australia.
As an Australian writing from India, Mooney-Singh can be viewed in the context of a broader pattern among the country's poets engaging with the region—think Aitken, Cahill, Caddy, Kelen, among others. Australian poetry is clearly benefiting from the country's growing engagement with Asia. Yet this collection is notable in that it's not simply a tourist's weeks or months spent in-country, but years—a whole life that's been packed up and relocated.
One of the most notable elements of The Bearded Chameleon is its ghazals. They possess a more playful tone than some of the collection's serious offerings, and highlight both the poet's preoccupation with the culture he is writing within and with the possibilities of language more broadly.
The series "Bonehead Ghazals" consists of five poems. In "Puzzle" the poet writes—"The system sucks: can't click, can't knit with it./Round peg, square slot. I'm quit unfit for it"—demonstrating a sense of lyricisms and rhythm, and also emphasising the questions around identity and purpose which pervade the collection. "Roses" shifts to an exploration of the many types and connotations of "roses" and again displays a sense of playfulness: "The redhead rose has that playboy look./the bee is hooked on the soft porn rose" and "Make money, not art, says the plastic rose./I have no nose for that stillborn rose."
"Belonging" turns to the themes of entrapment and the desire to be free, and draws them together with a lovely image—"Absurd, this cage, so where do we belong?/In peach-faced lovebird-heaven we belong"—while in the Bearded Chameleon, the ghazal series from which the collection derives its title, the poet writes: 'Suburbia was a dumb cartoon:/here, typhoid sweats through each monsoon."
Several poems in this collection deal with grief and loss. "Casualty" is an unsettling description of the death of the narrator's first wife, who passed away en-route to hospital in a taxi. This is a poem of acute loss played out in an alien environment, full of effective details. Where it would have been easy to alienate the reader through overt bathos and an absence of detail, this poem and several that follow avoid such traps. "Casualty" opens with
At 8 in the morning,
at exactly 8 in the morning,
they wheel her through swing doors
banging like a poltergeist.
and continues with an effective mix of image and simile: "a woman who gasped like a dove," "ripping off her wedding ring," "dehydration on wheels," "this absurdity of roses outside the window." The only questionable note comes right at the end, with Mooney repeating the opening but adding a play on words which is perhaps out of place: "at 8 in the morning,/at 8 in the period of your mourning."
Some of the most effective poems in this collection are portraits. "Mrs Pritima Devi" takes the form of a monologue by a school teacher who has escaped a troubled marriage and left her son behind, and who appreciates a sympathetic ear to speak to. The language and grammar of the poem bring it to life and demonstrate the Mooey-Singh's attention to the rhythms of the language around him. In "Advice from an Uncle," a business-owner explains the realities of business to his "MBA-fresh, Harvard-hyped nephew," noting that "Bribes are bad, dear boy,/but we must get the job done" and
…you must become
a practical chap: serve all
Superintendents of Police
their God-allotted cup.
Ever-practical, the Uncle even
prongs
incense in a brass holder
before the Guru's photo, so
he, too, will turn a blind eye.
The only sticking point in this poem is the short line lengths, which disrupt the flow and give a sense that the line breaks weren't thought through, whereas many of the collection's other works employ a longer, more natural line length.
In "Families," Mooney-Singh broadens out this portrait approach to capture the diversity and complexity of families in India:
This family left the village, that family found the city,
this family emigrated on false passports,
this family placed an ad in The Times of India,
this dutiful daughter got a green-card husband.
Several other poems share this focus on observation and "naming." These poems are particularly effective and benefit from the narrator taking a step back. "Indian City," for instance, is comprised of a list of often contradictory images:
Satellite dishes on a temple sky-line
low-flying jets vultures in a flock
a bicycle loaded with electrical fans
In "Laws," Mooney-Singh provides a series of contrasts between the human and animal worlds, in essence noting that despite our foibles and occasional destructive urges, the natural world continues. In this same observational spirit, "PEEP PEEP DON'T SLEEP" is an amusing list of signs seen while driving on Indian highways:
I AM CURVECEOUS
BE SLOW
DRIVE ON HORSE POWER
NOT ON RUM POWER
The second half of The Bearded Chameleon contains several traditional love poems, dedicated to "Savinder," Mooney-Singh's second wife. These contain strong moments, though at times lose focus and momentum. In "Long Distance," the poet has returned to Delhi from Singapore and is struggling through a rickshaw ride.
Shaken
and queasy, I missed home
badly— the flicker of your hair,
breezy as the East Coast palms
The details of this ride are, as with much of the collection, strong and believable. The final two tercets, however, are somewhat unclear in their language and syntax, and detract from an otherwise strong work.
By contrast, "Yatra, 1999" is a more complete poem. Starting with "You had come to lure me/from my white-robed life/in a marble sanctuary" it describes how his lover has come to visit him after a period of long-distance communication. In the taxi, "We counted the mile markers;/time was rushing to harvest/as you agreed to marry me."
The final poem in the collection, "I come in Winter to a City Without You," continues with this theme of long distance love, of finding a way to bridge the separation of continents. The poem is a worthy finale to the collection, marking a clear and definitive finish to the themes leading up to it. There are a few moments, however, when the strong images and tone are somewhat undermined—the following lines, for instance, veer too close to clumsiness: "I know peach-pink lips still unlock/the zone of your aromas: this is the future/and I will always kiss your rose."
I also question the need for this poem to constitute the whole of the collection's third section, when the previous two amounted to over 70 pages. At the very least, the other works dedicated to Savinder seem to work well with the final poem and could have constituted a section of their own. More broadly, the allocation of poems to specific sections, as well as their ordering throughout the collection, is at times confusing, with different themes and forms being broken up and interspersed. The overall cohesion and flow might have been aided by more judicial editorial intervention.
These criticisms aside, this is an impressive collection by an interesting poet. Future anthologies of Australian poets who have "written Asia" should certainly contain one or more of Mooney-Singh's offerings, especially those that engage strongly with locations and people and those which utilise the ghazal form. In a literary climate where poets sometimes end up sounding rather alike, Mooney-Singh stands out.
It's not very often that the first poem in a collection involves defecation, and rarer still, I suspect, that it does so with grace and artistry. The first poem in Chris Mooney-Singh's collection, The Bearded Chameleon, does just that and sets the scene perfectly for the works that follow. In "Punjab Pastoral" we find Mooney-Singh, an Australian poet who in 1989 adopted Sikhism, squatting in a field, cotton shawl pulled up around his ears, "bobbing like a sunflower." Having moved to India in search of meaning and "deeper experiences," he questions his motivations and the wisdom of his choices, suggesting that "they all want to leave and yet I've come/to squat and shit and chew on grass and spit/for 'a cultural look and see'."
Perhaps in response to his own preconceptions, this poem starts and finishes with the observation that he can hear no mermaid singing; indeed, he notes, "I am the fool round here." This search for identity, for wisdom and for a "legitimately" lived life is a common theme in this collection, though it is interspersed with poems of both great loss and great hope, as well as some of the most effectively wrought depictions of Asia and its people that have been published in Australia.
As an Australian writing from India, Mooney-Singh can be viewed in the context of a broader pattern among the country's poets engaging with the region—think Aitken, Cahill, Caddy, Kelen, among others. Australian poetry is clearly benefiting from the country's growing engagement with Asia. Yet this collection is notable in that it's not simply a tourist's weeks or months spent in-country, but years—a whole life that's been packed up and relocated.
One of the most notable elements of The Bearded Chameleon is its ghazals. They possess a more playful tone than some of the collection's serious offerings, and highlight both the poet's preoccupation with the culture he is writing within and with the possibilities of language more broadly.
The series "Bonehead Ghazals" consists of five poems. In "Puzzle" the poet writes—"The system sucks: can't click, can't knit with it./Round peg, square slot. I'm quit unfit for it"—demonstrating a sense of lyricisms and rhythm, and also emphasising the questions around identity and purpose which pervade the collection. "Roses" shifts to an exploration of the many types and connotations of "roses" and again displays a sense of playfulness: "The redhead rose has that playboy look./the bee is hooked on the soft porn rose" and "Make money, not art, says the plastic rose./I have no nose for that stillborn rose."
"Belonging" turns to the themes of entrapment and the desire to be free, and draws them together with a lovely image—"Absurd, this cage, so where do we belong?/In peach-faced lovebird-heaven we belong"—while in the Bearded Chameleon, the ghazal series from which the collection derives its title, the poet writes: 'Suburbia was a dumb cartoon:/here, typhoid sweats through each monsoon."
Several poems in this collection deal with grief and loss. "Casualty" is an unsettling description of the death of the narrator's first wife, who passed away en-route to hospital in a taxi. This is a poem of acute loss played out in an alien environment, full of effective details. Where it would have been easy to alienate the reader through overt bathos and an absence of detail, this poem and several that follow avoid such traps. "Casualty" opens with
At 8 in the morning,
at exactly 8 in the morning,
they wheel her through swing doors
banging like a poltergeist.
and continues with an effective mix of image and simile: "a woman who gasped like a dove," "ripping off her wedding ring," "dehydration on wheels," "this absurdity of roses outside the window." The only questionable note comes right at the end, with Mooney repeating the opening but adding a play on words which is perhaps out of place: "at 8 in the morning,/at 8 in the period of your mourning."
Some of the most effective poems in this collection are portraits. "Mrs Pritima Devi" takes the form of a monologue by a school teacher who has escaped a troubled marriage and left her son behind, and who appreciates a sympathetic ear to speak to. The language and grammar of the poem bring it to life and demonstrate the Mooey-Singh's attention to the rhythms of the language around him. In "Advice from an Uncle," a business-owner explains the realities of business to his "MBA-fresh, Harvard-hyped nephew," noting that "Bribes are bad, dear boy,/but we must get the job done" and
…you must become
a practical chap: serve all
Superintendents of Police
their God-allotted cup.
Ever-practical, the Uncle even
prongs
incense in a brass holder
before the Guru's photo, so
he, too, will turn a blind eye.
The only sticking point in this poem is the short line lengths, which disrupt the flow and give a sense that the line breaks weren't thought through, whereas many of the collection's other works employ a longer, more natural line length.
In "Families," Mooney-Singh broadens out this portrait approach to capture the diversity and complexity of families in India:
This family left the village, that family found the city,
this family emigrated on false passports,
this family placed an ad in The Times of India,
this dutiful daughter got a green-card husband.
Several other poems share this focus on observation and "naming." These poems are particularly effective and benefit from the narrator taking a step back. "Indian City," for instance, is comprised of a list of often contradictory images:
Satellite dishes on a temple sky-line
low-flying jets vultures in a flock
a bicycle loaded with electrical fans
In "Laws," Mooney-Singh provides a series of contrasts between the human and animal worlds, in essence noting that despite our foibles and occasional destructive urges, the natural world continues. In this same observational spirit, "PEEP PEEP DON'T SLEEP" is an amusing list of signs seen while driving on Indian highways:
I AM CURVECEOUS
BE SLOW
DRIVE ON HORSE POWER
NOT ON RUM POWER
The second half of The Bearded Chameleon contains several traditional love poems, dedicated to "Savinder," Mooney-Singh's second wife. These contain strong moments, though at times lose focus and momentum. In "Long Distance," the poet has returned to Delhi from Singapore and is struggling through a rickshaw ride.
Shaken
and queasy, I missed home
badly— the flicker of your hair,
breezy as the East Coast palms
The details of this ride are, as with much of the collection, strong and believable. The final two tercets, however, are somewhat unclear in their language and syntax, and detract from an otherwise strong work.
By contrast, "Yatra, 1999" is a more complete poem. Starting with "You had come to lure me/from my white-robed life/in a marble sanctuary" it describes how his lover has come to visit him after a period of long-distance communication. In the taxi, "We counted the mile markers;/time was rushing to harvest/as you agreed to marry me."
The final poem in the collection, "I come in Winter to a City Without You," continues with this theme of long distance love, of finding a way to bridge the separation of continents. The poem is a worthy finale to the collection, marking a clear and definitive finish to the themes leading up to it. There are a few moments, however, when the strong images and tone are somewhat undermined—the following lines, for instance, veer too close to clumsiness: "I know peach-pink lips still unlock/the zone of your aromas: this is the future/and I will always kiss your rose."
I also question the need for this poem to constitute the whole of the collection's third section, when the previous two amounted to over 70 pages. At the very least, the other works dedicated to Savinder seem to work well with the final poem and could have constituted a section of their own. More broadly, the allocation of poems to specific sections, as well as their ordering throughout the collection, is at times confusing, with different themes and forms being broken up and interspersed. The overall cohesion and flow might have been aided by more judicial editorial intervention.
These criticisms aside, this is an impressive collection by an interesting poet. Future anthologies of Australian poets who have "written Asia" should certainly contain one or more of Mooney-Singh's offerings, especially those that engage strongly with locations and people and those which utilise the ghazal form. In a literary climate where poets sometimes end up sounding rather alike, Mooney-Singh stands out.
Review from the Canberra Times
The Bearded Chameleon
Geoff Page, 21 January 2012
Chris Mooney-Singh has also had an interesting life story (though re-telling it is rarely the intention of his poems). Raised in Canberra in the late 1950s and 1960s, Mooney-Singh adopted Sikhism in 1989. He has travelled and lived for extended periods in Singapore, India and other countries in the region. He has also become an expert in Sikh music.
The Bearded Chameleon, the first of his books to be properly circulated in Australia, focusses on India. Unlike most of the work written by Australian poets travelling in that country (or living there for short periods), Mooney-Singh’s poems are written from the “inside”, as it were. Even so, the poet has no illusions about how well he knows his subject — or how well he is accepted by his new correligionists or compatriots. India is a vast topic after all.
The key to this book is probably the title poem, a sequence where the poet sees himself as a chameleon, adept at fitting in no matter how difficult. He is also quick to see the irony of his self-chosen predicament: “My sun-cracked soles have drawn some sap / from green Punjab. An Aussie chap // I chew on sugarcane each week / and sport this beard — a convert Sikh. // Now turbaned like a maharajah, / I’d pass for Ranjit Singh, the Padshah — // a bit like you, chameleon — / a colour-shifting charlatan.”
There’s nothing of the charlatan, however, in Mooney-Singh’s nicely balanced views of the pluses and minuses of the country which has called him. He is quite unsparing of the corruption in Indian life, the savage oppression of a great many of its citizens and yet he also leaves the reader in no doubt as to the country’s and the culture’s attractions. There are poignant monologues such as that by the unjustly treated “Mrs Pritima Devi” but also the cleverly balanced binaries in the poem “Laws” where every negative is offset by a corresponding positive. e.g. “despite the hunting season on dissidents / another mongoose crosses the road” or “despite the rise of fanatics to government / clans of macaques will rule the ruins”.
As the excerpts quoted may illustrate, Mooney-Singh is a poet who is both accessible and skilled in his art. What he has to say about his adopted country should be essential reading for the naive tourist — indeed, even for the sophisticated one (who will enjoy even more its slyly observant references).
Chris Mooney-Singh’s new collection of poetry The Bearded Chameleon is the work of a new voice engaging with the ‘diaspora discourse’. As a Caucasian Australian who embrace truth in the global world. Such are the rich layers of thought and experience to be found within the pages of The Bearded Chameleon.
The Bearded Chameleon, the first of his books to be properly circulated in Australia, focusses on India. Unlike most of the work written by Australian poets travelling in that country (or living there for short periods), Mooney-Singh’s poems are written from the “inside”, as it were. Even so, the poet has no illusions about how well he knows his subject — or how well he is accepted by his new correligionists or compatriots. India is a vast topic after all.
The key to this book is probably the title poem, a sequence where the poet sees himself as a chameleon, adept at fitting in no matter how difficult. He is also quick to see the irony of his self-chosen predicament: “My sun-cracked soles have drawn some sap / from green Punjab. An Aussie chap // I chew on sugarcane each week / and sport this beard — a convert Sikh. // Now turbaned like a maharajah, / I’d pass for Ranjit Singh, the Padshah — // a bit like you, chameleon — / a colour-shifting charlatan.”
There’s nothing of the charlatan, however, in Mooney-Singh’s nicely balanced views of the pluses and minuses of the country which has called him. He is quite unsparing of the corruption in Indian life, the savage oppression of a great many of its citizens and yet he also leaves the reader in no doubt as to the country’s and the culture’s attractions. There are poignant monologues such as that by the unjustly treated “Mrs Pritima Devi” but also the cleverly balanced binaries in the poem “Laws” where every negative is offset by a corresponding positive. e.g. “despite the hunting season on dissidents / another mongoose crosses the road” or “despite the rise of fanatics to government / clans of macaques will rule the ruins”.
As the excerpts quoted may illustrate, Mooney-Singh is a poet who is both accessible and skilled in his art. What he has to say about his adopted country should be essential reading for the naive tourist — indeed, even for the sophisticated one (who will enjoy even more its slyly observant references).
Chris Mooney-Singh’s new collection of poetry The Bearded Chameleon is the work of a new voice engaging with the ‘diaspora discourse’. As a Caucasian Australian who embrace truth in the global world. Such are the rich layers of thought and experience to be found within the pages of The Bearded Chameleon.
Philton reviews The Bearded Chameleon
Mascara Review
There are poems for the page and poems for the stage. Chris Mooney-Singh is an established live performer. His second poetry collection, The Bearded Chameleon, transposes his performative skills into poetically good reading. Mooney-Singh is a chameleon because his ‘makeup’ stems from two cultures: his native Australia and India where he has mostly lived in recent decades. He is never quite at home in either, his ‘colours’ change according to which country he’s in. His adoption of the Sikh faith, which forbids cutting hair, has him bearded. This theme is encapsulated in 40 end-rhyme couplets tightly presented with perceptive cultural observations (‘village life is one food chain’). India, exuberant and traumatic, contrasts with Mooney-Singh’s other life:
Suburbia was a dumb cartoon:
here, typhoid sweats through each monsoon;
There’s exquisite images of interaction between the newcomer and villagers:
I wet my tongue, pretend what’s best
and they are kind, pretend the rest.
An ‘internal ode’ to the poet’s fauna namesake weaves engaging snippets; the chameleon is ‘prehistoric, spiky, punk’ for whom ‘sun-bathing is the reptile’s art’. ‘Abstract Studies with Monsoon Green’ distils the adopted environment’s fecundity’:
The days of humid blindness are upon us,
the rain has left a steamy haze of green.
The mulberry limb drips into the milk pail,
green are the tears upon the chilli plants.
There’s an innovative reprint of humanity’s footstep:
I follow footprint puddles to the pump.
Mooney-Singh aims to
…learn the way of planting rice:
green thumb, invite the fingers to make friends.
Among captivating images of India there’s a night-driving view of a truck’s decorated rear: ‘Krishna and the milkmaids/ were dancing in our headlights’. ‘Indian Standard Time’ includes ‘eating pakoras and deep-fried gossip’ and ‘yesterday or tomorrow, neither too late, nor too early’ whether that be ‘in this birth or the next’. There’s arresting street-graphics:
the lifters of dead-cows,
cremation-ground caretakers,
collectors of the shit-bins,
bottom-feeders, vultures.
And vivid imagery that could be from anywhere such as this forest-after-rain metaphor:
sunlight opens up its peacock tail
Personal aspects of Mooney-Singh’s journey embrace the evocative pain of witnessing his (first) wife’s death.
I was helpless, a passenger
during the final act of her breathing
that slipped beyond even its coma
as the taxi halted at the traffic light.
Aftermath is poignant:
…I lift your old cup from a suitcase
of last things you touched on earth.
I see the lipstick: two firm petal prints.
I will never clean away the kiss.
‘My Fallen’, images of deaths in Mooney-Singh’s family, innovatively commences ‘These last photos I don’t have’. Significant memories are often associated with background detail and these are captured with powerful brevity:
The strident starlings of 2001
still halo your head on soft grass.
Mooney-Singh produces striking aphorisms including ‘The Kingdom of Heaven is a clear conscience’. ‘To the Dalits’ demonstrates well-crafted rhyme is effective for invocation of traditional Indian folklore. Tradition is also invoked with the ‘ghazal’, a love song comprising couplets with an end-rhyme refrain that usually repeats the same word; Mooney-Singh diffuses the refrain’s monotony by introducing ‘unattached’ prefixes which form cross-rhyme patterns — neither end-rhyme nor internal (within-a-line) rhyme, but constructed on rhyming words appearing within different lines:
Make money, not art, says the plastic rose.
I have no nose for that stillborn rose.
Poetry got divorced from the rose,
yet the New Thing’s still a fresh-worn rose
Seventy million years of the rose:
fossils lime the time-sworn rose.
The cross-rhyme is ‘stillborn/fresh-worn’ etc. Creating effective cross-rhyme is difficult. Kipling, Hopkins and Swinburne were the only poets of whom I was aware to have crafted it well until I encountered Mooney-Singh’s ghazals; in this challenging form he rubs shoulders with the best. Innovation doesn’t always work. Coining neologisms (new words) has potential pitfalls – they can seem forced, too-clever or obscure. A neologism in ‘I Come in Winter to a City Without You’ doesn’t suffer these flaws; the now Australian-based poet and his (second) wife (temporarily in Singapore) communicate by mobile and internet, chatting in ‘glocal tongues’. ‘Glocal’ is an engaging creation: these technologies may be global but they allow for an intimacy which is effectively local. Attractive eclecticism is quirkily reflected in ‘found poems’ of Indian highway-side graffiti including ‘riotous’ examples like ‘HORN IS TO HONK/ PLEASE DO IT ON MY CURVES’.
Mooney-Singh’s India is not all traditional. A woman who dares to reject her violent husband by deserting his family’s home evocatively observes:
To move in public is no easy choice
if you wear divorce’s question-mark
upon your forehead.
With riveting figurative language she urges:
…more women
also swept beneath the family carpet.
Fight! I say…
Never shall we let them make us feel
like wedding ornaments, like nose-rings
returned dishonoured to the jeweller’s shop.
The Bearded Chameleon has a piece de resistance, ‘Another Bhagwanpur’, which opens:
A country village stuck in the buffalo mud
piles up its cow-pats, balancing clay pots
of mosquito water on the heads of women
who wear pregnancy under flimsy shawls.
The metaphorically stuck-in-mud village is personified by its ‘orchestration’ of cow-pats and women’s actions. The stereotypical heads balancing pots become thought-provoking with ‘mosquito’ water — potential drama not associated with the image. Women ‘wear’ prominent pregnancies. We learn much from skilfully packed lines:
The village council of five cannot fight
the school’s wrong sums and cane-learning;
cement walls, white-washed by government,
the young men employed by opium.
There’s doctors who ‘deal in snake-bite mantras’ and this arresting portrait:
…the last Gandhian freedom-fighter
props up old glory on a walking stick.
More transfixing language concludes this village vignette: ‘the night-long typhoid prayers to Ram.’ Sixteen lines have the reader experience a tour de force.
There are flawed moments. If information becomes a poet’s ‘driver’ the poetry usually suffers; this happens with Mooney-Singh’s portraits and some traditional-story retelling. ‘Mr Chopra’ is mostly prosaic description. ‘Apartment of a Bombay Millionaire’ and ‘Mrs Pritima Devi’ are generally similar and include unnecessary didacticism. In ‘Yogesh Meets Ganesh’ and ‘Advice From An Uncle’ storytelling dissolves the poetry. There are moments when things don’t work. ‘A Punjabi Leda and the Swan’ presents an ostensibly good metaphor between the Western myth and a man raping a woman in contemporary India, but there’s awkward passages; the mental wrestling needed to wrap one’s head around these reduces effectiveness — a forced sensibility suggesting the legend doesn’t fit the poem’s context. Sometimes poetically good ‘moments’ are undermined by additional figurations:
Saffron priests say Out!
like big sticks hunting rats
along the temple drains.
The images of saffron priests and big sticks hunting rats in drains are vivid; but the linking simile is not – verbal commands and running with sticks are dissimilar actions. The ‘common ground’ is intensity, a minimal likeness. Since the commands are projected by priests, effectiveness is further reduced; whatever the faith, clerics don’t undermine their authority with doing-the-shitwork frenetics. The collection has instances of overwriting.
I look out into the darkness for you.
Rest is the wraith
that will not let me sleep.
This image’s potential is under-realised with the superfluous ‘out’ and the prosey ‘let me’. Direct ‘ownership’ of the wraith and tighter presentation like (for example) ‘Rest is my wraith that will not sleep’ increases metaphorical impact. ‘I Come in Winter to a City Without You’ is curiously headed by this Mallarmé quotation: ‘Oh so dear from afar and nearby’. What is this quote’s purpose? True, it fits the theme – but Mooney-Singh’s poem says it much better than this (unusually) ordinary Mallarmé line; a redundant epigraph, it may imply credibility is sought through an artificial hitch to the famous. High-profile quotations can be epigraphically effective. But there’s risk that contrast with iconic lines may diminish one’s own and inclusion may appear to ‘name-drop’. If the same poem’s ‘the god of small transactions’ is an allusion to Arundhati Roy’s Booker-winning Indian novel The God of Small Things, should this be acknowledged? Or is it a subliminal reference to the novel? Could it be pure coincidence? Of course the reader is never ‘party’ to writers’ thoughts. It’s suffice to say that if Mooney-Singh was aware of his line’s similarity to Roy’s title, it was advisable to not use it and rely on his own words.
There are minor irritants; an alcoholic’s problems are lessened with a cliché (‘all have raised a storm’) and curiously excessive use of colons and semi-colons. These ‘punctuations’ enhance pauses but frequent use impairs poetic flow and produces a ‘boy who cried wolf’ effect – reduced impact of their effective moments. The poem ‘Families’, mostly a prosaic list, has poetry in its rhythm, which leads to the other key feature of Mooney-Singh the poet: performance. It was informative to attend the collection’s launch. Prosey patches were enlivened, reflecting that a not insignificant proportion is ‘poems for the stage’. His performance embraced skilful light/shade vocals and effective nylon-string guitar accompaniment. The Bearded Chameleon progresses strong poetic qualities Mooney-Singh crafted in his first collection The Laughing Buddha Cab Company (2007). To gain full appreciation one should experience the performance.
PHILTON’s poetry and short fiction have appeared in Overland, Island, Quadrant, Envoi (UK) and translated into Chinese for Chung Wai Literary Monthly.
Suburbia was a dumb cartoon:
here, typhoid sweats through each monsoon;
There’s exquisite images of interaction between the newcomer and villagers:
I wet my tongue, pretend what’s best
and they are kind, pretend the rest.
An ‘internal ode’ to the poet’s fauna namesake weaves engaging snippets; the chameleon is ‘prehistoric, spiky, punk’ for whom ‘sun-bathing is the reptile’s art’. ‘Abstract Studies with Monsoon Green’ distils the adopted environment’s fecundity’:
The days of humid blindness are upon us,
the rain has left a steamy haze of green.
The mulberry limb drips into the milk pail,
green are the tears upon the chilli plants.
There’s an innovative reprint of humanity’s footstep:
I follow footprint puddles to the pump.
Mooney-Singh aims to
…learn the way of planting rice:
green thumb, invite the fingers to make friends.
Among captivating images of India there’s a night-driving view of a truck’s decorated rear: ‘Krishna and the milkmaids/ were dancing in our headlights’. ‘Indian Standard Time’ includes ‘eating pakoras and deep-fried gossip’ and ‘yesterday or tomorrow, neither too late, nor too early’ whether that be ‘in this birth or the next’. There’s arresting street-graphics:
the lifters of dead-cows,
cremation-ground caretakers,
collectors of the shit-bins,
bottom-feeders, vultures.
And vivid imagery that could be from anywhere such as this forest-after-rain metaphor:
sunlight opens up its peacock tail
Personal aspects of Mooney-Singh’s journey embrace the evocative pain of witnessing his (first) wife’s death.
I was helpless, a passenger
during the final act of her breathing
that slipped beyond even its coma
as the taxi halted at the traffic light.
Aftermath is poignant:
…I lift your old cup from a suitcase
of last things you touched on earth.
I see the lipstick: two firm petal prints.
I will never clean away the kiss.
‘My Fallen’, images of deaths in Mooney-Singh’s family, innovatively commences ‘These last photos I don’t have’. Significant memories are often associated with background detail and these are captured with powerful brevity:
The strident starlings of 2001
still halo your head on soft grass.
Mooney-Singh produces striking aphorisms including ‘The Kingdom of Heaven is a clear conscience’. ‘To the Dalits’ demonstrates well-crafted rhyme is effective for invocation of traditional Indian folklore. Tradition is also invoked with the ‘ghazal’, a love song comprising couplets with an end-rhyme refrain that usually repeats the same word; Mooney-Singh diffuses the refrain’s monotony by introducing ‘unattached’ prefixes which form cross-rhyme patterns — neither end-rhyme nor internal (within-a-line) rhyme, but constructed on rhyming words appearing within different lines:
Make money, not art, says the plastic rose.
I have no nose for that stillborn rose.
Poetry got divorced from the rose,
yet the New Thing’s still a fresh-worn rose
Seventy million years of the rose:
fossils lime the time-sworn rose.
The cross-rhyme is ‘stillborn/fresh-worn’ etc. Creating effective cross-rhyme is difficult. Kipling, Hopkins and Swinburne were the only poets of whom I was aware to have crafted it well until I encountered Mooney-Singh’s ghazals; in this challenging form he rubs shoulders with the best. Innovation doesn’t always work. Coining neologisms (new words) has potential pitfalls – they can seem forced, too-clever or obscure. A neologism in ‘I Come in Winter to a City Without You’ doesn’t suffer these flaws; the now Australian-based poet and his (second) wife (temporarily in Singapore) communicate by mobile and internet, chatting in ‘glocal tongues’. ‘Glocal’ is an engaging creation: these technologies may be global but they allow for an intimacy which is effectively local. Attractive eclecticism is quirkily reflected in ‘found poems’ of Indian highway-side graffiti including ‘riotous’ examples like ‘HORN IS TO HONK/ PLEASE DO IT ON MY CURVES’.
Mooney-Singh’s India is not all traditional. A woman who dares to reject her violent husband by deserting his family’s home evocatively observes:
To move in public is no easy choice
if you wear divorce’s question-mark
upon your forehead.
With riveting figurative language she urges:
…more women
also swept beneath the family carpet.
Fight! I say…
Never shall we let them make us feel
like wedding ornaments, like nose-rings
returned dishonoured to the jeweller’s shop.
The Bearded Chameleon has a piece de resistance, ‘Another Bhagwanpur’, which opens:
A country village stuck in the buffalo mud
piles up its cow-pats, balancing clay pots
of mosquito water on the heads of women
who wear pregnancy under flimsy shawls.
The metaphorically stuck-in-mud village is personified by its ‘orchestration’ of cow-pats and women’s actions. The stereotypical heads balancing pots become thought-provoking with ‘mosquito’ water — potential drama not associated with the image. Women ‘wear’ prominent pregnancies. We learn much from skilfully packed lines:
The village council of five cannot fight
the school’s wrong sums and cane-learning;
cement walls, white-washed by government,
the young men employed by opium.
There’s doctors who ‘deal in snake-bite mantras’ and this arresting portrait:
…the last Gandhian freedom-fighter
props up old glory on a walking stick.
More transfixing language concludes this village vignette: ‘the night-long typhoid prayers to Ram.’ Sixteen lines have the reader experience a tour de force.
There are flawed moments. If information becomes a poet’s ‘driver’ the poetry usually suffers; this happens with Mooney-Singh’s portraits and some traditional-story retelling. ‘Mr Chopra’ is mostly prosaic description. ‘Apartment of a Bombay Millionaire’ and ‘Mrs Pritima Devi’ are generally similar and include unnecessary didacticism. In ‘Yogesh Meets Ganesh’ and ‘Advice From An Uncle’ storytelling dissolves the poetry. There are moments when things don’t work. ‘A Punjabi Leda and the Swan’ presents an ostensibly good metaphor between the Western myth and a man raping a woman in contemporary India, but there’s awkward passages; the mental wrestling needed to wrap one’s head around these reduces effectiveness — a forced sensibility suggesting the legend doesn’t fit the poem’s context. Sometimes poetically good ‘moments’ are undermined by additional figurations:
Saffron priests say Out!
like big sticks hunting rats
along the temple drains.
The images of saffron priests and big sticks hunting rats in drains are vivid; but the linking simile is not – verbal commands and running with sticks are dissimilar actions. The ‘common ground’ is intensity, a minimal likeness. Since the commands are projected by priests, effectiveness is further reduced; whatever the faith, clerics don’t undermine their authority with doing-the-shitwork frenetics. The collection has instances of overwriting.
I look out into the darkness for you.
Rest is the wraith
that will not let me sleep.
This image’s potential is under-realised with the superfluous ‘out’ and the prosey ‘let me’. Direct ‘ownership’ of the wraith and tighter presentation like (for example) ‘Rest is my wraith that will not sleep’ increases metaphorical impact. ‘I Come in Winter to a City Without You’ is curiously headed by this Mallarmé quotation: ‘Oh so dear from afar and nearby’. What is this quote’s purpose? True, it fits the theme – but Mooney-Singh’s poem says it much better than this (unusually) ordinary Mallarmé line; a redundant epigraph, it may imply credibility is sought through an artificial hitch to the famous. High-profile quotations can be epigraphically effective. But there’s risk that contrast with iconic lines may diminish one’s own and inclusion may appear to ‘name-drop’. If the same poem’s ‘the god of small transactions’ is an allusion to Arundhati Roy’s Booker-winning Indian novel The God of Small Things, should this be acknowledged? Or is it a subliminal reference to the novel? Could it be pure coincidence? Of course the reader is never ‘party’ to writers’ thoughts. It’s suffice to say that if Mooney-Singh was aware of his line’s similarity to Roy’s title, it was advisable to not use it and rely on his own words.
There are minor irritants; an alcoholic’s problems are lessened with a cliché (‘all have raised a storm’) and curiously excessive use of colons and semi-colons. These ‘punctuations’ enhance pauses but frequent use impairs poetic flow and produces a ‘boy who cried wolf’ effect – reduced impact of their effective moments. The poem ‘Families’, mostly a prosaic list, has poetry in its rhythm, which leads to the other key feature of Mooney-Singh the poet: performance. It was informative to attend the collection’s launch. Prosey patches were enlivened, reflecting that a not insignificant proportion is ‘poems for the stage’. His performance embraced skilful light/shade vocals and effective nylon-string guitar accompaniment. The Bearded Chameleon progresses strong poetic qualities Mooney-Singh crafted in his first collection The Laughing Buddha Cab Company (2007). To gain full appreciation one should experience the performance.
PHILTON’s poetry and short fiction have appeared in Overland, Island, Quadrant, Envoi (UK) and translated into Chinese for Chung Wai Literary Monthly.
Blending into the Buddha Tree
Mark Roberts
Rochford Street Review (rochfordstreetreview.com), 13 December 2011
There is little wonder that there is a sense of ‘otherness’ running through Chris Mooney-Singh’s second major collection The Bearded Chameleon. As in his first collection, The Laughing Buddha Cab Company, Mooney-Singh is very aware that it is impossible not to stand out in either India or Australia when you are a turbaned, bearded westerner. Having converted to Sikhism in 1989 his poems reflect an inspiration which is perhaps unique to Australian poetry.
But If Mooney-Singh is unique among Australian poets, his position in India is also slightly complicated. A number of times in this collection he comments on how he is perceived in his adopted land. In the first poem in the collection, ‘Punjab Pastoral’, for example, he begins by describing how much he blends into the Indian landscape:
This cotton shawl is pulled up round my ears
keeping out the fog as I defecate
on fallow field like any other farmer.
I wear a turban, bobbing like a sunflower
But there is a fundamental difference here:
Yes, they all want to leave and yet I’ve come
to squat and shit and chew on grass and spit
like village elders by the panchayat tree.
‘Punjab Pastoral’
The fundamental difference, of course, is that Mooney-Singh has a choice. He can stay, leave and come back:
For what? A cultural look and see and then
to fly back when the travel cash runs dry?
This is a theme he returns to in a later poem, ‘Apartment of a Bombay Millionaire’. This poem begins in a mock deferential tone “Sir, you have wide windows, facing West/to the Arabian Sea”. But the trappings of wealth can’t hide the reality of every live for the vast majority:
yet I find it hard to talk of ‘higher things’
seeing the tin shacks of the servant slums
directly below these apartment blocks.
At the same time as the poet feels disgust at the hypocrisy of the millionaire donating to the temple while ignoring the slums, he also releases that there are points where both them are more similar than he would like to admit:
It’s all too easy
to invent tidy aphorisms. It is high time
I was gone. Mine are also the words of privilege
Speaking
But there is hope in the ending as the poet understands that he must ‘escape’ back into reality. As he is washing his hands he realises:
I must take myself far away from
Your sparkling unblemished rose standing in this vase,
And make them into useful hands.
‘Apartment of a Bombay Millionaire’
The strength of this poem lies in its almost spiritual sense of temptation. From a western tradition one thinks immediately of Satan’s role in tempting ‘virtuous men’. In the same way in this poem Mooney-Singh is escaping the temptation to cut himself off from the reality of his adopted land by retreating into an Indian version of the West.
While he can sense this ‘difference’ Mooney-Singh can also see a way out. In the title poem of the collection he sees himself like the chameleon adapting and fitting in so that, over time, the ‘differenceness’ fades away:
My sun-cracked soles have drawn some sap
from green Punjab. An Aussie chap,
I chew on sugarcane each week
and sport this beard – a converted Sikh
but in the end his skill at disguising his difference is not as good as the chameleon:
Perhaps, I will, one day, be free
to blend in with the Buddha tree.
‘The Bearded Chameleon’
One of the surprising strengths of this poem, at least for me, was the poet’s use of rhyming couplets. While initially a little wary of the use of the form through a fairly long poem, Mooney-Singh manages to pull it off with remarkable skill - for the most part the poem maintains a strong internal rhythm mostly avoiding any forced rhymes that could disrupt the flow of the poem.
The other strength of this collection is the way that Mooney-Singh can turn the everyday into poetry. From the stark contrast of the imagery in a poem like ‘Indian City’ – “satellite dishes on a temple sky-line” and “fresh cow pats on the new overpass” - to the wonderful juxtaposition of the astrologer in ‘The Thirteenth House’ with the Stock Broker in ‘Mr Chopra’, we begin to sense that the poet has, perhaps almost a unique insight into the day to day functioning of Indian life.
In the final instance the contradiction of a Australian trying to blend, like a chameleon, into the everyday of Indian life provides the major strength of this collection. Mooney-Singh has become very close to India, but he still brings the cultural baggage of the West with him. Like the Chameleon, no matter how still he stands, no matter how much he tries to blend in, we can still see the outline of a previous life if we look closely. There is much to enjoy in this book and I look forward to Mooney-Singh’s next collection.
But If Mooney-Singh is unique among Australian poets, his position in India is also slightly complicated. A number of times in this collection he comments on how he is perceived in his adopted land. In the first poem in the collection, ‘Punjab Pastoral’, for example, he begins by describing how much he blends into the Indian landscape:
This cotton shawl is pulled up round my ears
keeping out the fog as I defecate
on fallow field like any other farmer.
I wear a turban, bobbing like a sunflower
But there is a fundamental difference here:
Yes, they all want to leave and yet I’ve come
to squat and shit and chew on grass and spit
like village elders by the panchayat tree.
‘Punjab Pastoral’
The fundamental difference, of course, is that Mooney-Singh has a choice. He can stay, leave and come back:
For what? A cultural look and see and then
to fly back when the travel cash runs dry?
This is a theme he returns to in a later poem, ‘Apartment of a Bombay Millionaire’. This poem begins in a mock deferential tone “Sir, you have wide windows, facing West/to the Arabian Sea”. But the trappings of wealth can’t hide the reality of every live for the vast majority:
yet I find it hard to talk of ‘higher things’
seeing the tin shacks of the servant slums
directly below these apartment blocks.
At the same time as the poet feels disgust at the hypocrisy of the millionaire donating to the temple while ignoring the slums, he also releases that there are points where both them are more similar than he would like to admit:
It’s all too easy
to invent tidy aphorisms. It is high time
I was gone. Mine are also the words of privilege
Speaking
But there is hope in the ending as the poet understands that he must ‘escape’ back into reality. As he is washing his hands he realises:
I must take myself far away from
Your sparkling unblemished rose standing in this vase,
And make them into useful hands.
‘Apartment of a Bombay Millionaire’
The strength of this poem lies in its almost spiritual sense of temptation. From a western tradition one thinks immediately of Satan’s role in tempting ‘virtuous men’. In the same way in this poem Mooney-Singh is escaping the temptation to cut himself off from the reality of his adopted land by retreating into an Indian version of the West.
While he can sense this ‘difference’ Mooney-Singh can also see a way out. In the title poem of the collection he sees himself like the chameleon adapting and fitting in so that, over time, the ‘differenceness’ fades away:
My sun-cracked soles have drawn some sap
from green Punjab. An Aussie chap,
I chew on sugarcane each week
and sport this beard – a converted Sikh
but in the end his skill at disguising his difference is not as good as the chameleon:
Perhaps, I will, one day, be free
to blend in with the Buddha tree.
‘The Bearded Chameleon’
One of the surprising strengths of this poem, at least for me, was the poet’s use of rhyming couplets. While initially a little wary of the use of the form through a fairly long poem, Mooney-Singh manages to pull it off with remarkable skill - for the most part the poem maintains a strong internal rhythm mostly avoiding any forced rhymes that could disrupt the flow of the poem.
The other strength of this collection is the way that Mooney-Singh can turn the everyday into poetry. From the stark contrast of the imagery in a poem like ‘Indian City’ – “satellite dishes on a temple sky-line” and “fresh cow pats on the new overpass” - to the wonderful juxtaposition of the astrologer in ‘The Thirteenth House’ with the Stock Broker in ‘Mr Chopra’, we begin to sense that the poet has, perhaps almost a unique insight into the day to day functioning of Indian life.
In the final instance the contradiction of a Australian trying to blend, like a chameleon, into the everyday of Indian life provides the major strength of this collection. Mooney-Singh has become very close to India, but he still brings the cultural baggage of the West with him. Like the Chameleon, no matter how still he stands, no matter how much he tries to blend in, we can still see the outline of a previous life if we look closely. There is much to enjoy in this book and I look forward to Mooney-Singh’s next collection.
