Jennifer Maiden has published sixteen collections of poetry; her most recent book, Pirate Rain (2010) won the Age Poetry Book of the Year Award and the NSW Premier’s Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry. She is a recipient of the Christopher Brennan Award for lifetime achievement.
Judges’ Citation
Jennifer Maiden’s Liquid Nitrogen may very well be the most contemporary collection of poetry you’ll ever read.
Jennifer Maiden’s Liquid Nitrogen may very well be the most contemporary collection of poetry you’ll ever read. Over the course of these dense, obsessive, and allegorical long poems, Maiden has created an absurdist theatre of global politics in which the spirits of public figures from across the last century share the stage with politicians, terrorists, dissidents and fictional creations from our continuous present. Combining a free-wheeling, meditative style with crisp, lucidly elegant lines, Maiden’s philosophical verse investigates the poetics of narrativity itself, not only as mediated by the news on TV, but by the no-less ethically charged realm of art as well. An extended meditation on the uses and abuses of power, the moral gravity of Liquid Nitrogen is buoyed throughout by Maiden’s self-effacing sense of humor and her tenderness towards her grown daughter, Katherine, who stands at the heart of this collection. Epic in its scope and utterly eccentric in its approach, Liquid Nitrogen is a work of rare passion and unprecedented poetic achievement from one of Australia’s most prominent living writers, ‘alert to the point of twitching,’ like the ox to whom she likens herself on page one, who nevertheless ‘still tramples through the difficult.
Selected poems
by Jennifer Maiden
Eleanor Roosevelt woke up in Paris. Hillary
Clinton wore an autumn jacket, bright
beads, and addressed the Press about
the new Libyan No Fly Zone. Hillary’s
campaign faux pearls – as big and
innocent as Jackie Kennedy’s – were gone:
replaced by those semi-precious beads
in elegant earth colours, just
as Eleanor would have worn
herself. Hillary, however, did not
mention that this day in Bahrain
fifty demonstrators were shot, the Saudi
Army had moved in to savagely protect
the Government, with the glowing
Pearl Roundabout monument destroyed
because the protestors had employed
it as a gathering symbol. Eleanor
remembered the thirty-year-old statue
as being indeed quite as lovely
as a star turn at the jewellers,
the giant luna pearl enclasped
high up in petal-claws. Maybe
because she was old, she thought,
she increasingly loved the pretty.
Hillary was actually
even prettier each day, but
the best she could attempt on Bahrain
was to recommend social order, the sacred
schoolday, workday. Eleanor had been
to school in France two centuries ago, the
headmistress a very nice American
Lesbian whose name she forgot, but
she did recall reading the Medieval
poem ‘Pearl’ on the pearl maiden lost
by her father as a child, reappearing as
an angelic young woman reproaching him
for not being a ‘gentle jeweller’, since
he mourned her inconsolably. We also,
Eleanor reflected, continue to grow
after death. Hillary at one point scratched
her head and visibly thought this would not
look so good and stopped. She often
scratched it absently, luxuriantly, as
women do, when she discussed her plans
with Eleanor. She could do anything in front
of her, she smiled with sugar, pretended it
was to the Press (some of whom suddenly
looked puzzled at her delicious fondness),
told all who were staying to enjoy
their night in Paris teasingly, then left.
Her cute march out of the room, smile
were as self-consciously naughty as a moppet
in the movies, so relaxed
because Eleanor was there. As soon
as they were in the hotel room, she knew
as useful as the Seine, she’d hear
‘But, now, about Bahrain, my dear …’
and thankfully it would not let her be.
Copyright © Jennifer Maiden 2012
Hillary and Eleanor 9: The Pearl Roundabout
In the International Pavilion,
for carven cats there are three positions
mainly: the sleeping round, the sphinx
and the sitting upright Bast,
protector of women. These cats
are painted in African sunset
colours, from bird pink to black,
with russets, grapes, and tangerines.
They look edgy, like the live
exhibits. The Show is always
edgy, its moon often a high
cold full Easter moon. Some of the
animals will die and be tasted
and fear it. Some schoolchildren
who bred them will vomit with pride.
Katharine and I avoid
the live exhibits these days, even
the pretty petting zoo. We buy a small pride
of soapstone for her cat collection, two
hippos for my soapstone hippos,
too. These hippos are different:
curled asleep like cats, not upright
on four legs with flaring noses.
When Katharine was a baby, I wrote
a poem that cats have small dry
noses and dogs large wet ones. Mysteriously,
it was requested for an erotic
international anthology and I agreed
diplomatically. Katharine still
finds that hilarious, but I suppose
the anthologists could have been northern
from some area of ice where noses
chill easily and need a pridelike welcome.
I try to photograph her with the new
digital camera but it has too
funhouse a dimension, distorts
the nose too far before the face, which
should suit the Show, but I abandon
it for the mobile phone, which shows
that moon of equinox behind her better, and
her small fine straight nose with its
slight nostril flare in proportion.
We buy a round white cloth cat:
mouthless, Japanese and strong,
the lack of mouth suggesting not
docility but a placid and wide
powerful telepathy. It has
a nose, which looks sensitive and neat.
Such cats were strewn around
the Japanese tidal wave wreckage, wet
and no doubt radioactive. Urbane men
with grim in their name and tone spoke
on Western TV saying that
the Japanese crisis would prove
the safety of nuclear power. Stray
toy cats without mouths did not
lower their pride to reply. The grim moon
of April is a pale pear blossom, not
pink like cherry, peach, or plum. Somewhere
here a cow lows, uncertain. We
hope it is a dairy cow, move on
in the milk-warm moon of caution.
Copyright © Jennifer Maiden 2012
In the International Pavilion
My heart has an Embassy
for Ecuador where I will seek
asylum. Earthquakes
and aftershocks undermine
my hope and my means to work
and the Americans
have wormed into my psyche
with their black knack at fear.
My heart has an Embassy
for Ecuador as rare in air
and sumptuous as the Andes,
as clear as the Equator. There
will be in it waterfalls
and jungles like salvation.
There will be friends
whom I owe nothing, no
famed bail, no knotty
knowing sexualities. My heart
has an Embassy for Ecuador
where there will be no secrets
and the truth falls down like water
from giant granites of despair.
Copyright © Jennifer Maiden 2012