A DARK SAMADHI - Melbourne Launch October 2003

A DARK SAMADHI
Melbourne Launch October 2003
Speech/Review by Brett Dionysius
© Copyright Brett Dionysius 2003

Early on in A Dark Samadhi, we get an indication of the type of poetry manifesto that Brentley Frazer has been writing for well over a decade now, his sublime, neo-symbolic, maladapted, but forward thinking imagined world. In the poem “Abstract Building (hands)” Frazer suggests that, “We all have the technology, access to the symbols, the perfume to/make it pretty, the gloss to make it sell. Only a few in the herd hear the word, a particular sleight of syllable.” Frazer is like the first beast of a bewildered pack to sense a new danger, to flare its nostrils, lift its head, and hunt for the source of this unarticulated malice.

A universal “I” rages throughout this text; a disturbed, triumphant, paranoid, self-proclaimed inheritor of our neural system meltdowns, that unleashes multi-tonal diseases to ravage the ‘lyric’ carcass. This is anti-lyric (anti-high aesthetic, capital “P”) poetry at its very best; the signification of human experience is rarely epiphanous, reality is almost always discordant, a come down of intellectual and emotive grief, “East of certainty that’s for sure” As the poet relates in the poem “Juggling with Nothing”, “we crossed the void in yellow linen safari/suits, carrying mobile phones and a giant stash of miracle/thirst quenchers. Truth, beside you, carries two things, and neither seem useful.” The history of Western philosophy and religion is inverted by the slick techno-gods, cast down into metaphysic ruin, and out of these ontological ashes society grows a new dream skin; mottled, alien the Petri dish filthy.

In A Dark Samadhi the human soul puts up brave resistance against the forces of ‘Narrowspeak’ as Les Murray has called them or ‘Newspeak’ as George Orwell did. These forces that even now put a knee in the small of the worlds’ back & apply excessive political, social, economic and cultural pressure. In the poem “Memorandum for the Birds” Frazer describes our apparent powerlessness against the technocrats, oilmen and industrial-military complex; “You could have just taken me apart with/the ease of a machine.” Sounds just like when US soldiers opened up with MI Bradley Fighting vehicles & 30 calibre machine guns on a van during the Iraq War, containing an extended family, that quickly became brutally “unextended”. But Frazer rallies us against this defeat of our common and resistant psyche as in, “Watering an Uneasy Beast”, when he warns us against becoming “digital insects” and suggests that we, “don’t just give them something to read, infect them with a memory.”

Frazer is post-romantic in his investigation of the 21st century human condition; as this line from “Plastic Daffodil” suggests; “Her mouth is where I hung my soul, an ode in a round window.” This sentiment undercuts both our 19th century romantic and 20th century colloquial assertions of the ‘self’. Or even musing on the mystery of universal suffering as in the poem, “Tempting Sleep”, Frazer looks for the abnormal, even the para-normal to explain these, “Exit wounds without an entry point”, but discovers instead, a banality of human metaphysics overridden by hyper-natural despair, or “a dance of movement on the back of a wardrobe, an intricate waltz bled there by wood.”

For Frazer, we inhabit a ‘shapeless’ body that is yielding to the ministrations of conventional dogma, becoming dumber, obese, brain dead and impotent as in “A Dog Theology” where “the blunt edge of shadows hit us through phonebooks”, or not surprisingly, we inhabit all three states simultaneously, a “kingdom of joined together heads. A tinny symphony of cheap die-cast clockwork, a little lonely if it happens to be evening.”

A Dark Samadhi is Philip K Dick melded with Andre Breton; a Rimbaud modified to produce the diaspora of Ballard. This is a post-surreal, techno-lingual savvy text that uses the oppressor’s corporatist and jingle-laden language against them. Like the smart arse kid who always sat at the back of the class and pushed the Maths teacher that little bit further, until the imploded in hollow anger, Frazer tempts the reader to counter-experience the world as we know it, to reorganize and reprocess our consumer enhanced daze. Or as the poet says in ‘Blood Psalm’, “…What do you do, there is no menu bar on the screen.”

A powerful, brooding voice in contemporary Australian and International poetry, a voice that has (secretly) simmered away for ten years, has now shifted to the front hot plate of human debate, the heat turned up. I declare A Dark Samadhi: poems and microtexts duly launched.

Brett Dionysius
© Copyright Brett Dionysius 2003

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