Ambulances and Dreamers – Bel Schenk
Wakefield Press, 2008
82 pages
RRP: AU$19.95
ISBN: 978-1-86254-818-3

Reviewed by Lynne Keenan

Bel Schenk’s collection of poems Ambulances & Dreamers captures some truly insightful moments in life which explores to some extent, the angst of the human condition.  She is obviously well-travelled and draws on her experiences in far-off places to fuel her creativity. Her settings are urban and her often fragmentary style suits the themes she explores.

The poems are arranged in four parts and these represent her journey from the domestic settings of the train to or from the city, the kitchen, birthday dinners or the laundry, to the wide world of travel in North America and Europe. She ends the anthology appropriately with some apt and amusing fortunes available to us all. I like the one: “He may be ugly but remember how desperate you are”.

Quite a few of Schenk’s poems involve a self-conscious commentary on the fact that she is writing a poem. It is not quite metapoetry in the sense that the subject matter of the poem is not the poem itself, but rather an attempt to state the obvious – this is a poem!

“Val Kilmer is in Your Fortune Cookie” is a lengthy poem which uses the second person narrative more effectively than some of the others. It starts:
“In your gloved hands is a styroform cup from which you are drinking designer coffee.
You are in the markets…”Quite arbitrarily further on in the poem, she writes: “Write this poem. Read it aloud.”

In “Words. Place. A Memory.” She begins:
‘The poem I will write
To make you fall in love with me
Will begin with a reference to your skin” (77).

Many of the poems employ the you and I without actually exploring the notion of the essence of the you or the I: some are almost a list of events – you did this and I felt that  – and this distracted from the otherwise thought-provoking content of the poetry collection.

One of the poems which I enjoyed was “Thoughts about Laundry and You” (although there was too much of the interplay between you/me/I in this one also).

There are places lonelier than a Sunday night laundromat.
Like a bus station in Middle America.

“those lines you write,
I try to read between them” (P. 16).
“You make the perfect flat white
by shooting me a double dose to get me going.” (36)

Having recently revisited the big guns of poetry – TS Eliot, Blake and Judith Wright – I found Schenk’s self-absorbed style quite distracting. However, it is one with which many Australian poets, in particular, begin their poetry writing lives. If her poems had been included in an anthology, these small irritations would not have been as apparent but when reading the whole book of poems, one is more conscious of the recurring style.  Apart from these minor frustrations (which are quite personal), Schenk’s collection Ambulances & Dreamers (a very evocative title), is worth reading and I look forward to seeing how she develops her writing style.