Birdmen and Astronauts
by Dharmavadana, Poetry Salzburg, £9 + £3 p&p
35 pp, paperback, http://www.poetrysalzburg.com
With this audacious title Buddhist poet Dharmavadana has brought out his first published poetry pamphlet, from the well known Poetry Salzburg Press, who although they are based in Mozart’s birth place have for many years produced excellent english language collections from the Department of English and American Studies at the University of Salzburg.
Dharmavadana presents a collection of fascinating characters and incidents. Some, like the opening ‘Birdmen of London’, with a visionary somewhat Blakean tinge. Others are more down to earth with incidents from family life perhaps, but still rich and colourful.
In the poignant ‘My Braver Younger Cousin’ for example, we find a vivid picture of an idolised childhood figure with many telling details such as:
your foot-high model Harley –
proud forks, dragon flame tank.
Your brother had his plastic dinosaurs
and reading lamp.
Later we get the tragic reprise:
Your father’s gaze
is on your brother’s now,
good in his suit, my father’s on me.
I fold my hands in front of my lap
as we maunder through the hymns.
The sodden leaves you saw too late,
spitting engine, smoke searing your eyes…
Other poems are more mythic and mysterious, none more so than ‘The Spaceman and Cybele’ where the astronaut appears to follow the goddess’s ancient devotees and castrate himself in her honour! Is this ritual or psychological abasement? What has become of this grounded spaceman who is now reduced to sucking his thumb as Cybele watches a talent contest on her ‘sleek black TV’?
Even the most mundane of encounters, as in a fish and chip with the chip man’s blunt advice on marriage in ‘Friday Night’, or a ‘peeping tom’ childhood encounter in the local dump (“our savannah strewn with wrecked TV’s”) – in Through the Fence to the Dump’ – have a strangeness to them in this collection which lingers in the mind.
Urthona – Buddhism & art 