Bone Ink by Rico Craig | Anne Elder Award Winner 2017
Originally published by Guillotine Press, Bone Ink by Rico Craig won the Anne Elder Award in 2017 and was also shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize in 2018. After Guillotine Press closed at the end of 2017, Bone Ink was reprinted by University of Western Australia Press in an extended edition with additional poems. As it exists now, the collection is divided into two sections, “Bone Ink” and “The Upper Room”, which can assumedly be read largely as the original collection and the additional poems. In-keeping with the spirit of the project, I’ll focus my attention on the first section, though there are things to be said about the second, too.
The judge’s reports from both the Kenneth Slessor and the Anne Elder (judged by Libby Hart and Eileen Chong) used similar language to describe the collection including “cinematic”, “intimate”, “assured”, “vibrant”, and “energetic”, as well as highlighting Craig’s evocation of place, childhood, masculinity, and violence. Craig’s poetic voice is simple and accessible, using brief vignette-style scenes, reminiscent of Michael Mohammed Ahmed’s The Tribe or Yumna Kassab’s The House of Youssef, to construct largely narrative-focused poems. Craig balances the close, personal relationships between many of the poems’ personas alongside flashes of visual descriptions which has the effect of placing the reader as a silent witness, viewing the poems’ actions while remaining outside of the memories and in-group language.
Much of the collection is set in the suburbs of western Sydney amongst groups of boys and young men. They roam through the streets in stolen cars, buses, and on foot, sneaking out late at night, picking up girls, vandalising property, and selling drugs. While the relationships aren’t always smooth, muddled by addiction, violence, and paranoia, Craig’s language is intimate and nostalgic with frequent use of “we” in recounting mischief, “We were the kids who hung shoes from power lines” (12), or poems directed to a specific “you” like the missing friend in “Reunion — Our Suburban Lingua”, “Where are you?” (60).
Occasionally, the nostalgia and its tendency towards romanticism colours the poetry too much with a juvenile grandiosity like in “Emperor of 32 Bella Vista Drive” where a suburban dad is recast as an ancient emperor in charge of an army.
“Terracotta Warriors guard their Emperor. Fifteen
archers in the al fresco dining area, a four-car garage
full of foot soldiers. The Emperor is damp
with middle age and dawn dew, askew
on a banana lounge, his dressing gown unhitched.” (18)
His prize possession, placed protectively behind his terracotta warriors is his daughter who has “outgrown the suburban vista, outlived artless childhood devotion” now that “[t]here have been boys aiming rocks / at her window” (18). The grand metaphor of this father’s possessiveness is overwrought and clunkily predictable. When read in immediate succession to “Through the Witch Window”, where a young hero rescues a girl through her bedroom window for a late night rendezvous, these poems slip from nostalgia into young adult saccharinity. It’s not helped by the image from “Through the Witch Window” that recalls a famous driving scene from the teen classic The Perks of Being a Wallflower, the book and the movie: “My head out the window, howling your name / into celestial alignment; we’re satellite streaks, orbital promise” (16).
Where Craig’s poems are most successful are when the depictions of mundane western Sydney suburbia and memories of people and places are tinged with a grittiness that comes with age and understanding and regret. Both “Train to Quakers” and “Behind Orana Takeaway” set a story of violence, injury, and trauma in the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant, making these memories pedestrian, generic to this particular environment of urban sprawl. In “Train to Quakers”, a friend has an epileptic seizure and has to go to the hospital.
“the sound of a siren
in front of Red Rooster, slow changing traffic lights
where I cupped your head as you fell
into an electric field; your epileptic body
in desperate shapes on the pavement.” (54)
The speaker is haunted by this friendship as a witness to suffering.
“My memory is pale witness to the sight of you
twisting on a bed, a cigarette burn by your right breast,
this young mind an ember in your hands.” (54)
Craig uses the motif of fire to evoke notions of uncontrollable possibility and its extinguishment. In this environment, even memorials of deceased loved ones fade into another memorial; “The dove / on your wrist has turned to ash” (54).
In “Behind Orana Takeaway”, the speaker and friends sit “hunched around / a feast / five dollars worth of chips” (62) before Taliyah enquires about the scars and injuries of the poem’s “you”. The speaker recounts the memory of a childhood afternoon turned into tragic accident.
“White Holden / You don’t see / the car come around our corner, your turn / tail trot steps onto the street. White Holden / always seeing / always seeing / White Holden” (63)
The structure of the words on the page which Craig breaks and shifts from gentle waterfalls to staggered, jagged lines, indicate the impact of trauma on the speaker’s memory as well as the inevitable unfolding of the accident and this instance of remembering. Strikingly, the following poem “White Holden” speaks of the driver’s perspective after hitting the boy and driving away.
“There are three bags in the back seat
and a video recorder he stole
from his parents. There must be blood
on the bumper. He keeps staring
through the windscreen. We should stop
and look. That doesn’t seem possible.
The wheels keep spinning. There’s a whirring
phonetics I’m trying to comprehend.” (67)
By flipping the perspective of the accident to the also traumatised experience of the driver, Craig gives the impression of the violence in this encounter emanating from the environment surrounding these boys and men as a perpetual cycle of violence that none of them can escape from. The man driving the white Holden with the stolen electronics could have been Tsakos from “Angelo”, a friend killed by police while joyriding in a stolen car, or the brother in “Thane part 1: Jasper Road”, whose only friend amongst addiction and paranoia “had no limbs — all wheels, torque and escape’s punctured muffler” (29). Trauma becomes in-built to their world, something that comes for all of them in the end.
Many of the poems of “Bone Ink” read as elegies in memory of men and boys who died by police, suicide, or accidents in a world steeped in violence. In “Monsoonal Light of Our Childhood”, the speaker mournfully charts a childhood alongside a brother who slipped under, through the cracks of drugs and suburban drudgery. By the time they reach adulthood, the only brotherhood available to him is amongst men who harness his anger and use him:
“You
let me lock you away
in a room with men who tend and bridle
the anger between your teeth,
the fire in your spine” (24)
This depiction of a deteriorating brother is a particularly potent characterisation returned to throughout the collection in a way that quite powerfully illustrates the permeation of death in this world.
“My car twists down the dirt track;
you speak of buried money, angry spittle
on your lips, a scalp
cropped in rage, your muscles
taut as bones, unloaded gun
in your hand.” (24)
In this state, the brother is already dead, ghostly, skeletal, and clinging to the symbol of demise. The men of Bone Ink haunt the world before they’ve left it: “Today I’m glad / I didn’t know / you’d die in this place” (41), “He’ll die before we do — misadventure” (49), “Our twenties were carved from dust” (58), “Nothing is solid, we are as transparent as the terraces, our boots empty” (39). The grim reality of these young men’s lives where even joyful memories are tainted by early deaths is what gives this collection its unique voice. What Craig lacks in poetic flair or sophisticated innovation in this collection is made up for in the way these men’s presences linger in your mind well after reading.