First a rant. Where do we place a poet such as Liam Ferney within the Australian poetry canon? To use a cricketing allusion of which Liam is fond of in Boom, he is the Steve Waugh of the younger generation of Australian poets. He is a patient scrapper, a fighter who has proved himself in Shield cricket for years, before the national call up. He is the type of poet who gets on with the job without fuss, who takes balls on his body rather than let himself be caught out. He is the epitome of poetic resilience, who has impressed the poetry community through his now 20 years of writing and publishing.
Recently, critics and commentators such as Martin Duwell and Corey Wakling have started to question in reviews the selections of some poetry editors, particularly editors of recent Australian poetry anthologies, who are establishing a new generation of Australian poets born after 1968 within the canon, who are mainly Sydney and Melbourne based, while excluding many younger notable poets from outside these poetry metropolises.
Their editorial decision seems to be based more on stylistic convention than publication record or contribution to the form. Many of these newly canonised younger poets write a particular type of lyrical poetry, and when anthologised together, their subject matter, tone, emotive language choices, epiphanous endings and register all tend to bleed into each other, to create a homogenous, emotional, urbane, intellectual and middle-class type of poetry, where arguably any of these poets could have written the same poem. Their voices tend not to stand out from each other; instead they’ve formed a new homogenous lyrical collective, where safety in numbers guarantees publishing survival, good reviews and canonisation. This is the type of boom according to Liam Ferney, ‘where we all go bust.’ Where there is a danger in favouring a few select aesthetes over the inventive ranks of other, regional post-modern poetries that subvert the lyrical project. Thank the gods for rogue lion poets and lone wolf publishers.
Liam Ferney is definitely a younger poet whose poignant and imaginative voice has been overlooked by editors of recent poetry anthologies; but who can stake a serious claim to be included in the canon. Enter Alan Wearne. Wearne’s new press, Grand Parade Poets has a mission to publish poets who he feels have not received the proper recognition they deserve from the Australian poetry community, but have the publishing record to back it up. Liam certainly has the runs on the board.
On the Austlit database Liam has published 99 poems, short stories, reviews and columns since 1999. However, unlike Shane Warne who fell short of his debut ton by one run, Liam has reached his century of publications with the publication of Boom and will go on to score even more runs for Australian literature throughout his career.
Boom follows on from Liam’s 2004 collection, Popular Mechanics and his 2011 chapbook Career. Boom is the collection that consolidates Liam’s innings as a significant new voice in Australian poetry. In fact the 11 published poems from Career form the first suite of poems in Boom, and deal with the effects of the dissonance of cultural identity through immersion in ‘otherness’. The speaker in these poems gets his ‘Australianness’ bat behind his pads and defends himself vigorously from Korea’s cultural spin.
The observer in these first poems rebukes spiritual engagement with Eastern culture, and instead prefers to rely on their own grounded experiences of loss, love, poverty, hardship and sporting inspiration; ‘We prick at the voodoo doll of our routine/& there is an absence of transcendentals, of candles;’ says the speaker in ‘Saturday’s Typhoon’.
Or this from ‘Seoul Survivor’; ‘& if I have faith I feel like/ Mark Waugh always coming through/when the pressure seems insurmountable.’ Here the narrator relates more to a sporting hero’s ability to bat his country out of trouble, than to any profundity of mystical experience to guide them as ‘grace & poise become symbols of another age’s finery’, perhaps even an idealised hey-day in the 1990s, where the narrator seems to often retreat to in Boom in order to revitalise their spirit.
Boom is a mash-up of social critique, political commentary, popular cultural references, historical misdeeds, right-wing agendas, sporting allusions and the tyrannies of distance, ambition, alienation and identity in a pluralistic world driven largely by the hollowness of rampant globalisation, the self-interest of social media, vast cultural difference, corporate corruption and moral weakness. Wearne states in his mission ‘that Poetry for Grand Parade Poets is the imaginative use of language under pressure’. Liam is this kind of grand poet, one who puts not only language and the Australian vernacular under immense pressure, like setting five bat-pad catchers for Warnie, but every moment of existence too.
Boom casts a sardonic and critical eye over the human condition in the 21st century. Irony is a prevalent technique employed in the poems. At the end of ‘Millenium Lite Redux’ the speaker admits, ‘I float off/into the universe/a sceptical astronaut/only ever in it for the uniform’. Whether it’s uploading ‘cyberpunk memories’ in Korea or an American soldier in Iraq receiving bad news via e-card, ’ain’t no use going’ home/Jodie’s got your girl and gone.’ Boom tracts the unsustainable human continuum that repeatedly tries to build an ordered structure that makes sense, yet Ferney’s major discourse suggests that this is rarely possible, that chaos and disorder always win out in the end of our ‘September Projects’; characters in the poems try to get ahead, get along, get even, but ultimately fail in their attempts to develop a rational world.
‘After I had failed in l. a./ I sent postcards to all the familiar characters’ suggests the narrator in ‘Nourished on magazines’. There is a thematic parallel to J.G. Ballard’s visions of social dystopia in Boom. One senses if Ballard wrote poetry, he might have written poetry like this. Social entropy, the most powerful entity in the universe, affects all of our human endeavours: it poisons politics, erodes economics, destroys dreams, frays friendships, collapses culture and tarnishes travel.
The tone of the collection is one of self-deprecation – ‘gastronomically inferior, I avoid bosintang’,(‘Crumpled Elegance’) ‘I do life Dubya diplomacy style’(‘Expecting Turbulence’), ‘I’ve tackled this world like a hapless defender’ (‘AM)’, yet the speaker still manages to cast their sarcastic sling at the Goliaths of self-aggrandizement, our new world order, American geo-political interference and mainstream ideals of success and fame in the world’s attention economy.
Liam is mostly interested in the interstices between order and disorder. Where it all begins to break down. His poems seek to articulate the moment when the pull of social entropy overpowers human ambition, and ambiguity, fear, anxiety, self-doubt, depression and immorality blossom in the vacancy of the human spirit. The natural world which embraces entropy ignores us, ‘like an errant seagull/lifting on an updraught’ as we strive to create a meaningful existence or find an absolute truth. It is this tension that Liam’s poems capture and exploit like a weakness in a batsman’s defence. Boom is most interested in those balls that just miss off stump and worry the batsman, not on those over-pitched deliveries that are easily driven to the fence for four.
Liam is a poet of his age. He licks his fingers when he turns the page. He has Wearne’s Aussie cynicism and cultural critique, Johnston’s and Duggan’s historical and mythological allusions, Forbes’s self-deprecating surrealism and use of larrikin figurative language, Ryan’s astute politicism, Minter’s eco-intellectualism, Farrell’s play with post-modern language and Brown’s feisty avant –garde deliciousness.
Finally Boom is a collection that is more interested in the cycle of how we bust, which uses a splintered language of experience to wander over, ‘the forgotten tundra/of our century, breath grasped like fate/as loose and inconsistent as smoke.’
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