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Mal Morgan

Beautiful Veins by Mal Morgan & Fighting in the Shade by Peter Kocan

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April 2000, no. 219
Martin Harrison reviews 'Beautiful Veins' by Mal Morgan and 'Fighting in the Shade' by Peter Kocan

In a note to the reader, Mal Morgan tells us that this last, posthumous collection Beautiful Veins – it comes with a CD selected from this and other work – was written during the five months after his being diagnosed with lung cancer. They’re note-taking, note-jotting poems. A sense of someone hurriedly trying to account for and describe his response both to the diagnosis and to the radiotherapy and chemotherapy treatments which ensue is uppermost. Strong, disturbing, they’re often ‘I do this, I do that’ (Frank O’Hara’s phrase) confessional poems.

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Welcome diversity

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February–March 1986, no. 78

No Collars No Cuffs, plenty of fisticuffs, and you’ll probably get K.O.’d by all this, after a round or two of three or four poems each. You may need someone in your corner to bolster you, for as Geoff Good­fellow writes in ‘Skin Deep’, a women’s prison poem:

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From La Mama On: A Personal Perspective by Mal Morgan

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May 1985, no. 70

Sometimes I feel like quitting the whole scene. There’s so much hype and petty politicking. But that goes on in your own backyard. So there I am again – up there on stage, with Mike, wearing my Greek sailor’s cap, and my heart having stopped thumping now, because I’m reading what I really (may I be anachronistic?) dig, and am serious about – POETRY! I mean Gene Wilder really works hard at being a comedian, and me at my funny poems. ‘Well’ I might say ‘this is an angry poem, because I’m one of those angry middle-aged men’, or ‘this is called “Poem-Ugly” because a lot of what I write is ugly. I try to strip the veneer from my everyday matter mundane existence, the extraneous matter in my grey brain; to rarefy to an essence the human condition, and all I’ve got left is my bare existential soul, and my poem – but maybe that’s not too bad!’

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