Suburban elegies: Bone Ink by Rico Craig

I have been drawn to poetry more than ever this year. A sign of the times. Poetry offers an antidote, a distillation of imagery and emotion, in a world that assaults our senses through the 24-hour news cycle and social media. But, it is also a reflection of my own evolution as a reader and a writer. I want to immerse myself in language, structure, and form. Poetry opens knots in my prose.

But writing about poetry tends to intimidate the non-poet, or the person who has not been trained to read it. But I write about prose without any special training. My intention is typically to attempt to write through the experience of reading a work, a process that, in itself, feeds a deeper reading. So why can’t I apply the same logic to writing about poetry? No reason at all.

Which brings me to Bone Ink, the debut collection, from Australian poet Rico Craig. I bought this book when I was in Sydney earlier this year, and had the good fortune to connect with Rico a few days later. I have often read the work of writers I have come to know online, but this is a rare instance in which I am writing about the work of someone I have actually met in person. So I allowed myself a little space before giving this collection a proper read. And my response is simply: Wow!

This book is divided into two sections: “Bone Ink” and “The Upper Room.” The first part opens with “Angelo,” a gut-level elegy for a dead friend, fueled with adolescent spite and spinning tires:

On the day he died we drove stolen cars
through the suburbs, spray cans knocking like eggs
in a swaying nest. I melted the dash and flicked

matches through the window.
From Parra Rd to Blacktown, our sweat mixed,
desperate, with the stink of scorched plastic;

& we sprayed mourning consonants on every
archway we found. Cops killed Tsakos
& dash lights were our campfire, & in the fretful

lustre we might’ve been mistaken for men.

The poems that follow continue in this vein, marked by visceral imagery, faded nostalgia, and gritty settings peopled with reckless youth and hardscrabble characters. Intimate dramas are played out in bedrooms, on oil rigs, along hospital corridors—childhoods lost, friends misplaced, loves not quite forgotten. These are stories boiled down to their most essential elements, the bare bones and sinew, nerves and raw energy. No word is wasted, every image evoked tells a larger tale. “Hamburg,” for example, begins:

If anyone asks I will say, you are oceans away,
afloat in the ventricles of a great city’s heart,
your fractious brain pecking the afternoon press,

your relentless devices compelling you toward
a smoky eyelet. I will say there is nothing left
to summon. The Rathaus must be dripping

ice, rock salt strewn on our streets of Sternschnaze.

To end, a handfull of stanzas later:

. . . If we meet again
it will be unexpected, as will-less shoppers,
caught lingering in front of a cheese cabinet,

shocked, seeking salvation in a slab of brie.
We’ll both be empty handed, shoeless,
one sock lost in the tide and the breaths we share

will be stained with the silt of industrial cities,
the taste of places bright enough to burn sand into glass.

Upon finishing this book, I returned to an interview conducted by my friend and fellow blogger, Tony Messenger, at the time of the release of Bone Ink. It was no surprise to see Craig explain that he “started as a prose writer trying to write ridiculously long and complex stories, it didn’t go well, but I kept trying, maybe for too long. I finally clicked with poetry as a form when I understood that it gave me a way to tell a fragment from a longer story, but tell it in a way that was satisfyingly rich.” I had forgotten this comment, but it resonated with and reinforced my own reading.

The second part, “The Upper Room,” is more abstract, featuring primal, vivid imagery drawn from art and nature, and woven into stories and urbanized folktales. There is a more mature allegorical quality to these pieces. This section opens with “With Chris Ofili in The Upper Room,” a magical visit to an exhibit of the British painter’s artwork that turns surreal when monkeys slide off their canvases and lead the narrator on an escapade across the city. It closes with the wonderful six-part “Lampedo,” a sequence of taut poems that forge a febrile romance between a contemporary urban dweller and his mythical Amazonian queen.

Here, as in the first section, several of the poems employ shape and form to work in concert with the content to affect a heightened sense of melancholy as in the couple’s bus ride through London re-imagined in “Hand in Glove”:

flex a fist          blow your mist of winter words
into a leather glove                we’ve set course

for the sun-scribed cloud        our bus ride mapped in fine
nibbed biro             a pattern of ley-lines inked

on the surface of your gloves         you trace capillary
streets across threadbare fingers

check off monuments marked on the pleated palm
out the window gulls          unveil    euphoric from ledges

and totter against wind          plunging in great Trafalgic arcs
across the span of our window

This collection, in the span of less than sixty pages, offers a finely tuned series of condensed narratives—indelible portrayals of passion, heartache, and loss that linger in the imagination. Rico Craig’s Bone Ink is a poetic testament to the instinctual urgency of being alive.

The publisher of  Bone Ink has gone out of business. For more information about Rico and this book, see his website.