Jan Dean

Tuesday 29 May 2007 0 responses



As a resident of Cardiff, Lake Macquarie, Jan Dean has published widely in journals, anthologies and the literary pages of newspapers. She has won prizes in local and national competitions, and her poems have been selected for inclusion in the Best Australian Poetry (UQP) and The Best Australian Poems (Black Inc). With One Brush includes a selection of her previously published and awarded poems.

Jan gives some credit for her return to poetry in 1996 to six-months spent as an exchange teacher in Tanagura, Japan. She taught visual arts for thirty-five years after training as an Art/English teacher at the National Art School, East Sydney and Sydney Teachers’ College. Jan has served on the committees of regional writing groups, including six-years as the first female President of Poetry at the Pub (Newcastle) Inc. She is currently Vice President of the Hunter Region Fellowship of Australian Writers.


With One Brush was winner of the 2007 IP Picks Best First Book Award.

I could hardly believe when reading this manuscript that the author could sustain the luminous power of the poetry, and yet she did: each poem built on those before, with seemingly effortless grace, turning visual art, and especially that of the impressionists, into poetry.

In between evocative poems which explore artists, their work, and different mediums, such as “The Body and Brushes with Blood”, “Signed Auguste Rodin”, and “The White Curtain”, Dean’s poems are occasionally about fruit: the opening “Six Persimmons”, which on first reading immerses you in the sensuousness of the overripe fruit so you cannot see beyond it, but on further reading yields fruit you can actually pluck, it’s so real. “Skin a Fig” makes erotic connections between the fruit’s texture and human skin, more erotic still when the fruit are hidden away at the end. Dean also writes about the occult and archaic, from “Banquet” which take us to a hell or purgatory too intoxicating to be terrible, to “The Woman in White’, in which we encounter a female spectre whose connection to the preceding poem intrigues: could she explain why women were so inextricably absent from Dean’s hell? The connections Dean weaves between her poems, and in individual poems, hold rich secrets worth unravelling; the fact that she gives little away about their meaning makes them more appealing.

The collection’s great strength is the uniqueness of the changing perspectives Dean imagines for her poems: each time we leave the world of painting behind we are momentarily disappointed, but the new subject or device soon makes us forget. Particularly interesting were “The Dream Paster Muses”, which shows us the world from the vertiginous point of view of a man who plasters advertisements on huge billboards. Dean herself is a visual artist in a number of poems best described as word paintings: “The Door in the Wall” asks us to imagine what is hidden behind a mysterious door: we can see a love garden, a refuge, and also much more: all that the protagonist desires. “Acrobat” is a still life interior, but animated, and a panoramic view from the room where the artist stands, walls hung with art, trees bending outside, the children in their playhouse, until a great tsunami comes. Most vivid is the scene in “The Reading”, where we are brought right into the room as the poet witnesses a historic reading of Les Murray’s.

If Dean has a message through With One Brush, it is gently given: perhaps it is about the cycle of things, how, in “Script of Sorrows”, we might return to a world less mad, and more at peace. By the end, in “Creeping” and “Sensations”, we learn what we had suspected, that Dean’s view of things is hopeful, that the world can regenerate, and even that we can return and be given a second chance:

Waiting in amoebic form we’ll stay
floating along in boundless time, until
our shore leave comes…
and revitalised, we begin again

Amidst the conflicting visions of our times, a voice like Dean’s is needed, because she is able to see things with compassion and hope, even in the poem “Banded Rail”, in which a dead bird is brought to the poet. This prompts her to imagine the bird’s point of view in a truly ethical moment where we experience that spine-chilling sensation of seeing with another’s eyes, when she acknowledges: ‘for us to meet, you had to die.’ Existing in Dean’s world, even if only for the duration of a book, is experiencing a world in which many more things are alive than most of us had imagined, even a painting.


IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd.)


Aftermath by Jan Dean

Read full post >>

Contributors' Poems

30 responses

The works on this site are owned by the individual authors/artists.

The artwork on this site is © Copyright

Kim Barker 2002-2009,

All Rights Reserved


Disclaimer
This blog is a personal blog written and edited by me. Images and contents taken from other sites are credited here.

Read full post >>

Jan Dean

0 responses

Aftermath



One day blurs boundaries of fact
and fiction, causes poets
to favour numbers, discard words.
When numbers are paramount
will books ever balance? Seekers
of escape are rewarded with ironies
of further disturbance. While some
flounder for expression, desire solutions
consider fate, dwell on humanity
leaders make rhetoric. Words
become ominous, try to divide
into them and us, promote fears
of an unseen enemy. We fumble
through Nostradamus and Revelations
invest prayers into origami cranes.
Dust and debris from a site
of catastrophe, gather momentum
roll down our street, leave us ashen
become our nightmare
submerge us in shadow.



Aftermath was published in Reunion (2003): this collection was from members of the XX1 World Congress of Poets, which met in Sydney in 2001. They passed a Resolution: ‘Write poetry in the cause of Justice and to heal the world’s wounds.’

Read full post >>

I nEEd a tITle

Saturday 26 May 2007 7 responses












pOEm # 1

Girl in a leotard
will you dance Swan Lake
tonight or when you're thirty two?
Will you sign autographs for girls
who wear pink satin shoes
and dance
long-legged
in their Sleeping Beauty dreams?
On this stage
you do not see those who
prance and parade infinitely
on their champagne carpet feet
towards reflections of themselves.
You do not hear them
gabbling, groping toward
your flower-infested dressing room
You sign their two dollar programs
and brush their soft, plump, rosy cheeks
as they claw
cackling in their society-stiff dresses.
Who will they adore
next week?
Will you be on their
top forty list next year or
will your shoes be kept
like blankets in plastic bags?
Will they recognize
this girl
in a leotard
who glances
at a mirage of life?

please write your title(s) in the comments box....

Read full post >>