Woven Frays
Publisher: Centre for Stories and Red River Press
Published: February 2024
Genre: Poetry
Is Perth poet Baran Rostamian the love child – metaphorically speaking, of course – of John Ashbery and Melissa Lozada-Oliva? Quite possibly.
For in her debut collection Woven Frays, Rostamian’s exuberant playful seriousness and serious playfulness is partly the result of, as she says in this interview, a process where snippets and ideas are collected in a notes app before the ‘compiling, collaging and rearranging’ begins, always bearing in mind the importance of layout and typography, of how the poem looks on the page.
In the same interview, Rostamian also mentions being inspired by the likes of Aurora Milroy, Laura Jean McKay and Rashida Murphy. But listening and looking specifically at the poems in this veritable maelstrom of cage-busting thought and feeling, you’ll find all sorts of resonances and echoes with the poets of the past. The intimacy and intensity of Sylvia Plath comes to mind – as does the typographical experimentation of e.e. cummings.
The first of the book’s three sections, Paper, opens with the poem She Doesn’t Have a Great Imagination, She Just Has a Lot of Problems, setting the tone with its raw introspection by beginning with a striking confession: ‘I want to tell you about my favourite maladaptive coping strategies’. This line, much like the confessional style of Anne Sexton, invites the reader into the poet’s psyche, exposing vulnerabilities which live somewhere in the penumbra between illuminating frankness and an obfuscating archness.
Picture-poems such as Pinpoint showcase Rostamian’s meticulous concern for the poem’s appearance on the page. The words ‘finer and finer and finer’ form a step-like structure, gradually diminishing in size – a technique that recalls the visual impact of Apollinaire’s calligrams.
The second section, Scissors, continues this exploration of form and content, with Muzak featuring words with reversed backgrounds, creating a visual dissonance that complements the poem’s thematic tension. And in Wholly Profit, Rostamian’s play on words and sacred imagery evokes the irreverent wit of Allen Ginsberg: ‘Make sure I tense that shit so hard a new planet will pop out somewhere/in space/sounds pretty sacred to me’.
The final section, Rock, and indeed the collection as a whole, culminates in the poem Passage and the lovely, simple image of a rowboat journeying towards the horizon: ‘They’d then begun rowing/towards the point/where the sea/meets the sun/and the sky’.
After so much controlled chaos, one receives this open-yet-closed ending as both gift and curse.