Tag: Rico Craig

Give me better ghosts: Nekhau by Rico Craig

When we are one hundred and thirty
pages old and it is still night, you place your hand
on my shoulder and still the shovel I’ve been swinging

into darkness. This is place of many walls,
many arms, endless caverns where we are
always at work turning what was into what will be.

(from “Caverns”)

Nekhau is my second encounter with the work of Australian poet Rico Craig. It’s his third collection. I read and wrote about his debut collection, Bone Ink, back in 2017 when I was still building my confidence as an amateur reviewer of poetry. In the meantime I have published a few of my own poems and written about a variety of poetic collections, but I still see myself as someone who lacks the language to critically analyze poetry and am quite comfortable with simply allowing myself to respond or, as I suggested when I set out to review Bone Ink, write through the experience of reading a collection.

With this new work, the focus is love, that most essential and ancient poetic theme. Craig is, as he says, asking the reader to “sit with love, to share hopes and fears.” Swimming through the collection, offering a shimmering thread of connection, are fish—real and talismanic alike. The “nekhau” of the title are small metal fish-shaped amulets created by Ancient Egyptian craftsmen to be attached to a loved one’s hair as protection against drowning. These charms are echoed explicitly and implicitly throughout:

These nekhau-poems aim to preserve and shield: they are reminders of dangers near, distant, even imagined, that bear upon our experience of love. Their existence becomes a rehearsal of loss and an expression of hope.

The lyric “I,” then, carries the capacity to speak for any of us, our loved ones, friends and families, as the poet mines the intricate and intimate dynamics of our interrelationships with one another, in a world born of flesh and dreams.

Nekhau is divided into three sections—End, Nekhau, Future—and to move from one to another there is a sense of a change of environmental awareness. The first and longest section, “End,” seems to speak to an abstracted space in which corporeal and chimerical worlds meet; a dream-like quality infuses the poems. The central section which opens with the title poem, “Nekhau”, a piece that also appears in fragments sprinkled throughout the book, holds to a more immediate domesticity and familial themes, again with an otherworldly tint, while many of the poems in the final part, “Future,” are set in locations abroad or otherwise marked by an a away-from-homeness. Across the collection, in addition to the small fish glimmering through the verses, distinct motifs link poems directly and indirectly, erupting in a visceral language that transcends experience. I could quote endlessly from this delicious collection but this, a length of the closing passage of “Black Swans” speaks volumes, distilling the power of Craig’s poetic imagination:

The river is a misshapen question and we answer, waking,
white air, the love beneath an eyelid. Our molecules crush
against pale ether; our songs float on water, fill culverts,
push against the scarp. All night we protect the rocks,
hide them in our sleeves; and when sunrise wakes us,
we lift from earth. I’m floating above the bed,
beside you, in a half-dream light shines into. My ears are filled
with sounds—lungs expanding, the river expelling life.
There are shapes hidden below our skin and each morning
I remember you as clearly as blood remembers a vein.
Love is cellular, in the sky, and you are still beside me. We will rise
and move into the day, encased in the people we are; we will drift
from this place, there will be buses to catch, clouds to be;
and for a moment it is impossible to know what has become of me,
become of you, if there is an I. It’s possible the scientists
have been truthful and we are clouds of swirling

matter, and only our pact with vision keeps us solid.

With his debut collection, Bone Ink, Craig was engaged a form of storytelling, slipping into characters, taking a frustrated attempt at prose writing and turning it into fragments of stories of suburban youth and riffing on artistic and historical themes. Now, two collections later his canvas is broader, more ethereal, but not divorced from quotidian routines or harsh contemporary realities. As he carries his reader (listener?) along a current sparked by the magic and the mundane, summoning fear and hope, one sense that the nekhau he invokes as a theme are also guiding his own passage, and growth, as a poet.

We are home you say, and I recognise nothing

of this darkness, only artefacts we have collected,
on we have rubbed across our skin,
treasures you have polished from dust.

(from “Caverns”)

Nekhau by Rico Craig is published by Recent Work Press.

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.