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Rodney Hall reviews The Mad Vibe, by Rae Desmond Jones

The Saturday Centre Poets, Series No. 1X, 1975

This review was first published in The Australian, Saturday 16 August 1975, page 24. It is 800 words or about 2 printed pages long.

Poems Uncoiling Like Whips

It is rare for a reviewer to have the chance of welcoming the arrival of an important new talent. But Rae Desmond Jones’s second booklet of poems gives me the opportunity to do it.

The strength of his social parables is at the heart of his success — also the ruthless way his anger reveals a sense of loss, and his aggression, a measure of underlying shyness.

Everything is drawn in thick black outlines, so to speak, yet the perceptions remain delicate and vulnerable.

In these poems about flowers, frustrations and cannibalistic love, Jones comes through as a man striving to impose singularity (that is control) on the diversity of his personality. The result is tense and complex in such poems as The Mudra of the Rose and The Generator.

The main thing is that he never takes short cuts, however painfully the problem may make him twist and struggle.

Sometimes he seeks the key to order in the objective social aspects of personality:

... identity is always found in decoration
You are the objective symbols of yourselves ...

But more often he turns to the felt mystery of self, the subjective intuition of being:

... so you
won’t ever no never need to
Stop & know that

slow painful sweetness deep
in the belly which is you &
Has nothing to say

or offer to anything or
anyone else except itself &
the dumb fact of its being ...

Naturally enough he has his failures, but the true poems in this collection are those in which he allows these two forces, the social and the intuitive, to collide head- on. Among these are the Poems To My Father (“Then late one night / you came into my bedroom/ stood at the end of the bed/ I sat up frightened / in the appalling caverns of your need ...”. a father from whom he had asked “The first yes of life” and been met with “an instinctive no.”

It is difficult to find representative quotes because most of the poems work by means of plot, the accumulation of circumstances. Jones is not notable for his fine images or epigrammatic perceptions. The poems uncoil like whips. He compels the reader to his purpose by aptness of situation and action. He controls development by passionate commitment to making us accept what he seems certain we’ll hate.

One of his most extraordinary poems, ‘The New Tenant’, is particularly difficult to discuss for this reason: the plot is essential — the landlord and landlady begin by prying in a tenants room, disappointed even disgusted at finding nothing irregular. They are caught in the act by the young man himself, but they don’t stop hunting, even when he has taken off all his clothes for them to rip into shreds. He drops to the floor. They begin tearing his body apart:

... & she fondled the split half moons
of his kidneys & he probed his fingers
Inside the broken wallet of his heart.

The book is full of violence. It may also seem to be full of hatred. But I’d prefer to describe it as being full of protective legends — protecting, one must assume, considerable reserves of tenderness and love.

Beyond question many people will find the work offensive and vulgar. Jones flings language about abusively, seeming to challenge us to give up and put the book down.

But despite the irritation of witnessing the author making a parade of loutishness, even the unsuccessful poems are almost wholly free of triviality, and he has escaped that blight of contemporary poetry whimsicality.

His technique is gritty and inefficient, yet the poetry lives. There is no clearer indication of this than The Flower Show, the merciless portrait of an ageing spinster whose fantasy is that her dead father comes at last to seduce her. After which she walks out into the garden among her prize roses and falls bleeding among the thorns:

...the next day she
Was pulled feet first
Out of the garden &

The earth clung
To her grey hair &
The neighbours were

Silent & a little
Embarrassed at her skinny
Legs & exposed condition.

The 90 lines of this poem cry out for release from the jerky, chopped-up form he entraps them in. There is a natural flow to it, demanding that the words be rearranged in longer lines, so the unit of each idea more nearly corresponds with the breathing of the form.

It may be that Mr. Jones has a long way to go, but he has already come farther than most. There is sufficient evidence here that whatever it is a poet must have to be a poet, he has got it.

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