Samuel Wagan Watson. Smoke Encrypted Whispers.

Flanagan, Kathleen

Samuel Wagan Watson. Smoke Encrypted Whispers. St. Lucia, Australia. University of Queensland Press 0SBS, distr.). 2004. ix + 171 pages. $22.95. ISBN 0-7022-3471-0

SMOKE-ENCRYPTED WHISPERS, awarded the 2004 New South Wales Premier's Literary Award for book of the year and best fiction, selects poetry from Samuel Wagan Watson's 2000-2002 volumes and concludes with the 2004 poems that bear the title of the collection. Watson, born in Brisbane, Australia, of German, Irish, and Aboriginal descent, explores links between the natural, spiritual, and human worlds, much as these tracks are connected in Aboriginal Dreamtime (the era of creation). Watson's poems often refer to "bitumen" (paving asphalt, in American English), and these "road" poems trace the relationship between these worlds. The "bitumen" poems refer to human relationships, familial and romantic, but more often they lead to physical sites of racial coherence or division, particularly those in and around his hometown, Brisbane. The "bitumen labyrinth" of self-abnegation in the poem "night racing" presents Aboriginal teenagers, who are too scared to look in the rearview mirror and see the "perpetual black grin," who speed "through the suburbs / of white stucco dreaming / ... of settlers' sacred sites."

Although smoke easily permeates borders, the poem "smoke signals" differentiates toxic black smoke in the blue-collar section of town populated by Aboriginal peoples from the pleasant, benign white smoke in the affluent white neighborhoods of the "Lucky Country," an ironic title taken from David Horne's 1964 book describing Australia's success despite mistaken racial and economic policies. Boundary Street, a nineteenth-century street in the city of Brisbane that Aboriginals were forbidden to cross after curfew, forms a site of connection solely during "the siesta of new year's day ... the only moment on the Australian social calendar when every citizen is almost equal; hungover we are united!" The tracks become international when the poet links Brisbane's Boundary Street (and its history of excluding Indigenous peoples) with the site of the fallen Berlin Wall, both of whose "blemishes of history" are (wrongly, the poem suggests) covered with "band-aids to place over the wounds of our ancestors." "When I crossed the ditch" notes a site off the bitumen path that nevertheless forms a connection, a Maori marae, where Indigenous peoples of New Zealand greet the speaker: "We knew your spirits were out there ... we've known that you've always been out there. Welcome home." In Watson's poetry, "bitumen" suggests a surface that coats the present with ancient remains of once-living organisms in the same way that the ancestors of Dreamtime affect contemporary human society. "Gas tank sonnets" connects dreams and creativity as the speaker leaves behind the site of a muse, Byron Bay, "tongue dragging along the bitumen."

Sites in nature inspire Dreamtime and positive creativity in Watson's poems, but modern Western civilization frequently does the opposite, as in "the dingo lounge," where videos and drugs supplant "the faded memories of the storytelling damned." As the strong, clear statements in Samuel Wagan Watson's Smoke Encrypted Whispers attest, however, human creativity can provide pathways between the past and the present to keep a culture alive.

Kathleen Flanagan

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill