Ghost Poetry. Robbie Coburn. Upswell Publishing.
Reviewed by Michael Byrne
Robbie Coburn, the Australian poet, was born in 1994. Coburn grew up on his family’s farm in Woodstock, Victoria. Coburn’s books include And I Could Not Have Hurt You (2023), The Other Flesh (2019) and Rain Season (2013). He has also published several chapbooks. Coburn began writing poetry at the age of fourteen, inspired by the American poet Edgar Allan Poe. The Australian poet Robert Adamson whose work Coburn discovered as a teenager, was his idol and mentor, and one of his greatest influences. Another Australian poet Steve Kelen described Coburn’s poetry as an intense, at times disturbing, emotional journey employing a surreal fetishist use of the human body. Another Australian poet Sarah Holland-Batt wrote that Coburn’s raw and intimate poems are marked by a strong presence of voice: confessional, consolatory, despairing and defiant. She also points out that his poems speak of impulses that are often repressed or left unsaid. Coburn is a poet of preoccupations. His preoccupations are various, of blood, wombs, dreams, birth, death, bodies, trees, earth, rain, paddocks, fences, horses and crops.
Horses are one preoccupation of Coburn’s. Coburn shows an interest in a certain type of horse in ‘Carousel Horses’:
I can hear them speak together here
in response,
each word an anguished shriek;
they tell me the carousel
will never stop spinning,
and they have always been here
moving in this torturous circle.
they say the carousel is one body
powered by their blood
Here, Coburn shows imagination in the tercet of this extract. Also, the hearsay in the quatrain and the couplet of this extract makes it more emphatic. Another preoccupation, apart from horses, in Ghost Poetry is blood. There is a poem in Ghost Poetry about cutting. The poet makes incisions in the skin (‘Cutter’):
The last face I see
will be that of a child
learning of its own death,
a scavenger
tracing a bullet hole
in a cow’s skull.
we do not know who we are.
In the first stanza of this poem, Coburn dalliances with death. In the last line, Coburn aptly goes off on a tangent. There are some nice poetic devices – repetition, assonance and alliteration in the last line. In an extract from ‘Dream of Suicide’, Coburn proffers another good last line:
there is only the figure lying
against the bathroom tiles,
tracing the slowing pulse
of an opened wrist
in a dream
where my body ends
at the moment
I recognise it as a stranger’s.
In the first quatrain of this extract, again there is the issue of cutting. Also, in the second quatrain, there is a lovely surrealism about his dream. There are poems about dreams in Ghost Poetry which are equally good. In Ghost Poetry, in an extract from ‘Asylum’, Coburn sees a doctor:
You still don’t know
I was taken to hospital after we last spoke.
when the doctor left, satisfied I was at no risk,
I approached the bed
as if the mattress was on fire,
my hands pulling the sheet from its fixed place
and tying it around my neck.
Having a doctor feature in Ghost Poetry is unusual. Coburn lives in a perfectly claustrophobic world in Ghost Poetry. It features Coburn and his ‘you’ – a female accomplice. His relationship conveniently becomes his subject matter. Normally, Coburn’s subject matter is incorporated in stanzas of varying sizes. This is not so with ‘Torture’:
I want to hold you until
your body becomes my own.
I want to touch your tortured bones
as if my hands were gauze.
in the night the walls are silent
and become a wound.
the mirror returns and shows me
the blood you cannot see,
a scarred figure stolen
from your hands.
again you are hidden.
again you ache.
the silence appears and pain
encases your skin like glass.
‘Torture’ is a poem that is stanzaic. This makes the poem neat. The title is apt – Coburn is a tortured poet. He is a pastoral poet. He follows a tradition. A tradition of brilliant poets that live on, like Australian poets Phillip Hodgins and Les Murray as well as the Irish poet Seamus Heaney. Coburn has preoccupations that are quintessentially pastoral in Ghost Poetry like entering a silo (‘The Wheat Search’) and observing a rodeo (‘Rodeo Haiku’). It is these preoccupations and others in Ghost Poetry which give city people the impression of what it is like to live on the land. Preoccupations are one thing, issues are another. In Ghost Poetry, Coburn is a cutter. He successfully keeps his partner. It is Coburn and his partner versus the world in Ghost Poetry. A minimalist world. But a beautiful one, nevertheless.
Michael Byrne 