Mining meaning from the mundane
"Quotidian" is a word often found on the back covers of poetry books. It means having to do with everyday life. In the thesaurus, quotidian rubs up against "mundane", "ordinary" and "nothing to write home about". But the quotidian can be where the action is, where thoughts ravel and unravel, language shimmers, emotions roil.
Ouyang Yu's Fainting with Freedom (5 Islands Press, 90pp, $25) includes a poem called Banality. It begins with irritation and lethargy: "I don't think anything is going to change / anything else â€¦ I went to the market / everyone does and what's the beauty of that". As the poet continues, his descriptions of banalities begin to sound tangy and exciting, "then the salty fish hits the tastebuds". 
In this collection Yu uses language to make tedious or painful things interesting, something to be chewed over, not despaired at. His writing is sometimes angry, and he frequently describes himself as bitter, but he's not pious or superior, he does not lecture the reader. He complains, he commiserates, he jokes. He's bitter like black coffee or, as he has said, bitter melon, not bitter like poison.
Fainting with Freedom includes prose poems, easy-to-read lyric poems, strange disjointed poems, thin poems, wide poems, long and short poems, poems that speak plainly and poems that cut up words. What's consistent is the sense of control, maintained and relinquished. Yu's precise lines, steady, speech-like rhythms, logical sequences of related ideas give way to absurd associations, unexpected images, wildness. These two modes of writing are kept in balance, each used to upset the other.
Yu migrated to Australia from China as an adult, when he was 35. We are lucky that he has worked so hard to make himself a place in Australian literature. He is a good, interesting and prolific writer: earthy, impolite, direct and idiosyncratic, endlessly interested in language differences and, through language, culture. He can write flawless standard English, but he can also make English strange.
He writes often of translation. In the poem Round he describes a class discussion to illustrate a translation problem - "One student stood up and said,/ 'the subtle factor that makes live endurable' is not right/ as the word 'endurable' is not a correct / translation of the Chinese characters yuanhua" - and how to solve it:
On his way home, the teacher was defeated again when he thought of the impossibility of match making the two languages in this single expression that describes a person's unctuousness, like oil or an eel or that denotes life's smoothness
The figure of the teacher who ends his workday with thoughts of impossibility and defeat, rather than happy expectation of evening leisure, provides such a contrast to the idea of what Yu inexactly translates as "life's smoothness" that it helps the reader understand what is meant by yuanhua. The unfortunate teacher, on this occasion, illustrates the word by showing us its opposite.
Though he consistently describes Chinese as more sophisticated and developed than English, Yu's poetry in English shows how much stimulation and enjoyment both the experience of translation and the English language have afforded him. Individual words, idiom, and the way language is put together is the insistent theme of his poems of ordinary life, fleeting emotional states and passing thoughts.
Jill Jones's Breaking the Days (Whitmore Press, 57pp, $22.95) has an atmosphere of slow crisis. The cause, if one exists, is not important to the reading of the poems. This poetry is about the grind that sometimes goes with daily life. The poems are perversely reassuring. There's oddness and what seems on the surface to be nonsense. Well-worn phrases are brought into unexpected contexts. A gentle surrealism is recognisable as the disjointed thinking of daily life. Some of the poems are working hard to feel better, others are frankly miserable, such as Metaphors:
I need a name to fill in this form a metaphor for the way I lived my real life years ago.
Jones has a particular ability to create books that work well as coherent collections of poetry, having a unity and wholeness without needing an obvious theme. Perhaps it is her experience as a publisher that preserves her from the temptation to cram as much as possible into every book. It is indicative of her thorough, considered approach to writing. Her poems make me think of stonemasonry. There is cutting, carving, skilful placement that can produce effects of airiness and flight as much as solidity and weightiness.
If the doubt and quiet struggle gets to be too much, turn to the poem Recuperation. Hope glimmers in an image of the seed pods of resilient weeds.
Gina Mercer's weaving nests with smoke and stone (Walleah Press, 65pp, $20) doesn't tangle much with uncertainty. Mercer revels in descriptions of landscape, plants, birds and animals, makes pen portraits of recognisable characters, protests at contemporary absurdities, follies and cruelties. Her familiarity with her subject matter, and the obvious depth of feeling, result in flashes of enjoyable, musical descriptions, as in Vivid: The arriving chatter of musk lorikeets interrupts our toast communion.
Abandoning coffee cups hands fossick for binoculars.
Three birds are feeding on blossom in that young gum we planted.
Here is unreserved pleasure in small things, in toast, lorikeets, gum blossom, the busyness of arrival, the optimism of tree-planting. Mercer could afford to risk focusing on this vividness and seeing where it takes her, cutting away the explanatory phrases she too often provides like handrails for a tentative reader, but many readers will enjoy this accessible collection.
The best poems in AG Pettet's Improvised Dirges: New and Selected Poems (Bareknuckle Poets, 93pp, $15.95) are grim descriptions of material struggle. Less interesting is his sometimes violent writing about women and sexuality, images of tearing and breaking. If this is intentional, it is hard to justify. A deeper interrogation of his own work and seeking out challenging opinions from other writers would at least ensure Pettet is saying what he means, not just repeating outdated versions of beauty and desirability.By contrast, in the poem For what other reasons could I exist, he describes what it's like to have "only four dollars to last â€¦ a week and a half". This poem does more with straightforward description than his more colourful, glamorised versions of urban desperation. When he works toward original, vivid descriptions of the quotidian, Pettet comes up with the goods.