Magdalena Ball launches 'Tarp Green Light' by Carl Walsh

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April 20

Photograph of Carl Walsh reading from Tarp Green Light by Rochford Street Review

Tarp Green Light by Carl Walsh, Flying Island Books, 2023, was launched by Magdalena Ball at the Watts Space Gallery on 5 March 2024 as part of the Newcastle Writers Festival

If I had to sum up Carl Walsh's Tarp Green Light in one word it would be mindful. The work focuses inward, quietly observant, converting memory into the present moment through deep and sustained observation. In many ways the book takes the form of a journey, moving through places and spaces but also time, moving back towards childhood, the discovery of a personal ancestry, and even beyond that into the human relationship and shared DNA with animal life and the natural world: creature, rock and lichen. This is an exploration of deep connections and deep time, the way spaces connect, and the way in which humans inhabit and change those spaces. The book is structured into four sections, each similar in the ways they utilise language, simultaneously condensed and expansive, beginning with the self as innocent youth, rooted in sensuality, and moving through language towards a non-linguistic awareness that is both knowing and yet still rooted in the innocent self.

The work contains arresting and sensate imagery, beginning with the first poem, with its breathless, unpunctuated roots in perception:

journey began wide-eyed in innocence sun
splaying golden light across drunken wheatfield
heads intoxicating under red harvester blade
as real as fireworks displacing far-off cosmos of
darkness and light in shatter of colour wheeling
overhead a caravanserai caught in passing of days
that trip endlessly forward rain spilling down
round Neolithic mound to drain in chalk fields
and run on in rivulets forming underground
echoes of self as real as summer scented grass
crushed underfoot
..................................................- first

There is a Japanese feeling – both subtle and overt – running like a thread through the work, from the introduction in the second poem to Basho's frog, the most well-known poem about a frog that jumps into the water of an old pond – "a frog jumps into, the sound of water" as the answer to an unanswerable koan - or as Walsh puts it in "bug pond": "in absentia, Basho's frog ripples/entranced by the damselfly nymph" – reminding us, that even when the form is free verse, the sensibility of Haiku or Senru is present and we must, above all, attend, and pay attention. Walsh makes good use of form in this collection, allowing space and breath through his poems with spaces, pauses, italics, concrete representations in words, minimal punctuation and capitalisation, but liberal use of the slash, dash, parentheses, and words that mirror or form puzzle type structures, all of which creates a delicacy or lightness that permeates the work.

However rooted in the natural world this work is, and it is indeed rooted, there is also a strong metapoetics, a direct link to place as a construct made of words, as in the poem 'supermarket of words', which moves forward in couplets that use the word "words" like an incantation:

words that flow within my veins
or swim around my head

the lost words / words to come
words that fill my cup

luxuriant or fallow words
I will pick you up

There also parentheses, runes, Japanese characters and words that are written and then crossed-out – visible but cancelled, their traces providing a nicely unsettling duality between presence and absence that reminds us of places that no longer exist, except in dreams or memories, in the case of 'at kinglake, two of three burned', destroyed by bushfire:

3. ~~Beale Avenue, Kinglake Central~~ (home 1986-
...................................................................1989,
....most weekends until 1999)
In dreams, I still find myself here / 'Home'
............even when I lived elsewhere

The book is a kind of travelogue, moving around Australia and the world, charged with nostalgia for places and people who no longer exist in the same way. In Australia, the different settings are often connected with a sense of youth and shaping influences such as a father working on a paddock ('on water divining', coming-of-age on a camping trip with old friends (Gaffneys Creek camping trip (early 90s), walking through sand on Kangaroo Island, watching grandparents on Glenrowan farm ('Glenrowan farm, mid-70s'), walking through a paddock in Kinglake, Victoria, Sunsets in Wimmera, lost crushes, the willy-willies of Walhalla (with a poem that twists just like a willy-willie), or imagining a father as a boy in Delatite, Victoria:

perhaps I should have asked more
– demanded stories of childhood
absorbed them so this land and I are one
so mullock heap and scrub and Delatite
flow through my veins

The father figure appears several times through this book, along with a grandmother, tracing a line of migration from somewhere else The Australian poems seem like a scaffold to the book, shot through with a sense of loss but also as something that is fundamental, like this sense of a self and a base – the creative source which is rooted in lost artefacts like VCRs, billycarts and BMX bike but also soil, land and farm life, the Yarra river, thistles that "bend their pink heads", eucalyptus, magpies, rainbow lorikeets and tessellated earth. These rich Australian images form a beautiful contrast to the many non-Australian places visited, Papua New Guinea, Cantabria, Spain, England, exploring Norse mythology and runes in the Orkneys and Aran Isles (Sligo in Ireland too), Italy, and of course Japan. Kyoto features prominently throughout the book, its quiet dignity playing off the earthiness of the Australian poems:

On Okura-ike pond dragonflies dart, and so do
I, to Jōjakkō-ji gate. My feet in silence sink in
carpeted moss hillsides. Then are loud again, as
tarmac leads me away. A poet lived here once, a
'house of fallen persimmons.' As if this is real life.
.................................................. - Arashiyama

Walsh covers so much ground in Tarp Green Light, literally, moving deftly back and forth out of sync through time and space in a way that seems to be as random and chance-like as the willy-willie he describes but which feels entirely natural – in line with the randomness of memory and the way people and places accompany us from the past into the present. Similarly the natural world is aligned with the human – it feels like these binaries are no longer relevant, sea rise mirroring the rise and fall of a human chest, silver gulls in "fringe-myrtle and dryland tea-tree" aligning with a coastal walk. Tarp Green Light is a beautiful collection that takes you everywhere and lands you here, in the present moment always:

an image inked
on paper

on eyelids that flicker
between temple
..............gates

a world falling
into quiet nothing
..................................................- Setsugoan

- Magdalena Ball

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Magdalena Ball. photograph by Morgan Hardy Bell.

Magdalena Ball is a novelist, poet, reviewer, interviewer, and managing editor of Compulsive Reader. Her stories, editorials, poetry, reviews and interviews have appeared in a wide number of journals and anthologies, and have won local and international awards. She is the author of several novels and poetry books, most recently, Bobish, a verse-memoir published by Puncher & Wattmann in 2023. Find out more at her website: http://www.magdalenaball.com