Maria Takolander

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Biographical note:  Maria Takolander was born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1973. Her poetry has been widely published, appearing in The Best Australian Poems 2005 (Black Inc., ed. Les Murray), The Best Australian Poetry 2006 (UQP, ed. Judith Beveridge) and The Best Australian Poems 2007 (Black Inc, ed. Peter Rose). She is also the author of a chapbook of poems, Narcissism (Whitmore Press), and a book of literary criticism, Catching Butterflies: Bringing Magical Realism to Ground (Peter Lang, 2007). Maria is a Lecturer at Deakin University in Geelong, Victoria.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844713400
ISBN:  9781844713400
Author:  Maria Takolander
Title:  Ghostly Subjects
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  15-Jun-09
Extent:  80pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  6 mm
Weight:  120 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 12.99
Price:  USD 23.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  In Ghostly Subjects, Maria Takolander applies her unique and unflinching gaze to the earth, relationships, the body and art, revealing the exquisite strangeness that marks the world as fair game for poetry. Her topics range from the Madrid train bombings to sex dolls, from domestic violence to poetry readings, and from love games to cosmetics. The collection also features two significant sequences: ‘Alien Signals,’ inspired by the films of Stanley Kubrick; and ‘Lessons Learned from Literature,’ inspired by the literature and lives of Mary Shelley, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges and Sylvia Plath.

The poems in Ghostly Subjects can be violently intimate, but they are also often, as these two sequences show, ironically aware of the narcissistic play of representation. Indeed, narcissism is explicitly acknowledged in the title of another sequence reflecting on the hidden history and banal peculiarities of the human form. The world portrayed in this striking collection is intensely uncanny, and it is rendered with a distinctive precision of language and vision.

In Ghostly Subjects, its poems so often haunted by mirrors, Maria Takolander has reached through the surface of the glass, clawing up through the dripping silver the otherness of the self, its situations and its illusions.

Table of contents:
GEOGRAPHY
Geography Lessons
Driving by the You Yangs
Euphoria
Tableaux
Finland?:?Fables
Peace be with you (and also with you)
Tides
Ghost Story
Storm
Seasonal
CHEMISTRY
Canasta for Lovers
Minimalism and the Abstract
Epithalamium
Satellites
Reality Check
BIOLOGY
Misogyny
Seed
Whale Watching
Nose Bleed
Understanding Dionysus
Prosthetic
Drunk
Grief
Bedtime Story
Pillow Talk
Sleep
Insomnia
Paranoia
Narcissism
CULTURE
Cosmetics Department
The Good and the Ugly
Alien Signals?:?Poems after Stanley Kubrick
Poetry Reading
Claude Monet
Lessons Learned from Literature
Writer

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Excerpt from book:  

Ghost Story

Under a night sky as immense as sleep.

On a land mass shifting over the earth’s blood, dream-slow.

Near the muddy coast, mangrove-dark, of a body of water rocked by the moon.

(How oceans heave with things unseen.)

In a small town, destination luminous, quilled lawns shadow-filled with trees.

By a highway, cutting the town like a vein, tarmac nightmare-black, power lines feeding the muscular road-trains.

Under a terracotta roof, hulking like a grave, encrusted with ash and moss.

Beneath a yellow globe, flickering blind and fast.

At a kitchen table, laminate bottle-marked, off-red.

A man and woman fight.

Curses settle like asbestos in their word-full souls, then fists, suddenly fleshy as infants, thud-slap.

Reducing everything — all of it — to nothing.

(And so the universe feints, becomes domestic.)

Unpublished endorsement:  Maria Takolander writes a poetry that strips affect and language back to what is necessary. There is no excess. She displays a remarkable ability to isolate what is essential in language, situation, mood, event and idea. Deeply insightful, intelligent, and receptive to the world in its many guises, she is also sceptical and resolute in her poetic engagements. Her poems deploy an almost scientifically precise observation with an aphoristic and understated wit that compels the reader to question their own perceptions of what is presented. The mundane might induce paranoia, the exotic betray its own limitations. Nothing is to be taken for granted. Takolander is a new kind of shaper of poems: a postmodern lyricist, she searches for the essence of what makes the poem and finds, in the end, that the poem matters. She won't be categorised, because she is constantly exploring the nature of categories. A brilliant first book by a poet who will show us where to look next.

John Kinsella

Unpublished endorsement:  At times either disarming yet penetrating, or mysterious yet blunt, in Maria Takolander’s Ghostly Subjects poems move from the You Yangs to Finland, contrasting or embedding the human with nature in rich imagery and stark thoughtful reflection: starlings have “tiny hearts like ticking bombs”, “Jellyfish drift in the murky water like ghosts”, air “shines like tiles.” One section charts the course of love: “the afterglow / of solitude and spite”, “Now clocks are tombstones… I kill daily to get to you.” Biology explores sex and the body and is adamant and questing: “eyes are like that: corridors of myths”. The last powerful section Culture uses art as palimpsest. as Takolander circles out from each subject. From Kubrick – “Your guns only sound like typewriters” – to Monet to Mary Shelley – “haunted / Not by death but by life”- to Plath, these poems invoke the theme of artist as “messiah” who paints the world, makes real, in her/his own image. In ‘Claude Monet’ “You pursue your wife, as you hound / The grain stacks and pond lilies”. In these jagged vivid portraits, each artist blindly pursues her/his own elusive ghostly subjects, and Takolander, haunted in turn, reinterprets them in a unique new voice.

Gig Ryan

Previous review quote:  These poems, as fine as bone china, have an acuity of image, tone and phrase that can cut to the bone, laying bare how the perception of ‘the unfathomable suddenly everywhere’ becomes a mode of being. In Maria Takolander, poetry has found a fresh articulation and a new voice.

Paul Kane

Previous review quote:  In Maria Takolander’s first [chapbook] collection we find all the qualities we look for in a new poet: accomplishment, verve, technical flair, memorable phrases, unexpected intellections – above all, originality and boldness, a gamey contribution to the long unfolding polyphonic song that is poetry. This is zesty writing, individual and unintimidated by the sharp nature of much of the material. ‘Beauty doing its job,’ to quote the poet.

Peter Rose

Previous review quote:  Always polished, always surprising … Narcissism is a book of great accomplishment and its vision is one that it would be interesting to explore at greater length.

Martin Duwell
Australian Book Review

Previous review quote:  …her phrasing is poised … The impact of a poem like ‘Tides’, for example, is unmistakable … the work is memorable for its precise articulation of violence.

Oliver Dennis
Island