Book Club - Maxine Beneba Clarke's How Decent Folk Behave

Final Draft - Great Conversations

Maxine Beneba Clarke is an author of short fiction, non fiction and poetry. She won the Victorian Premier’s literary award for poetry in 2017 for her collection Carrying the World,

Her short story collection Foreign Soil, masterfully captures voices from marginalised communities, winning the ABIA for Literary Fiction Book of the Year 2015 and the 2015 Indie Book Award for Debut Fiction.

Maxine Beneba Clarke’s new collection of poetry, How Decent Folk Behave, once again highlights Clarke’s ear for voices and ability to tell stories with empathy and insight.

The collection opens with When the Decade Broke; a sprawling poem that takes in those moments of seemingly endless possibility as we sit collectively holding our breath each new year's eve. The poem examines the fears and realities we all faced as we stared down the millennium. As Y2K gave way to the war on terror we all seemingly had a ‘new normal’ thrust upon us. Again in 2019 as bushfires ringed us in both cities and towns we had little insight of even greater captivity and restraint that would challenge our sense of self. When the Decade Broke reminds us that it’s ok to not be ok and flips these harsh reminiscences with the line ‘but that all slowly started to change’. Clarke is able to tell us of a place where these things are our past.

And so the scene is set. The poems in this collection will be brief or they will be epic. They will capture voices of the city and the regions and they will unflinchingly speak to the violence and privation, the microaggressions and the outright calamity of blatant abuse of power and privelege.

The poem Something Sure gives the collection its name. A mother addresses her son in the wake of the murder of Hannah Clarke. The mother talks to her son about How Decent Folk Behave and his responsibilities as a man...

your mama needs to know

that a good man,

exactly the man you’ll be,

will lead a bad man home

This poem left me devastated. There is simply no answer to such a call to action other than to look inward and ask whether you are equal to the task.

How Decent Folk behave sees our excuses and our weasel words and speaks to us in plain language. It knows

You don’t wanna

Think too much

About the year that was

But also sees that “there is hope, in little things”

How Decent Folk Behave launches this week and I couldn’t wait to bring this in for you all. The poems are a tonic to feelings of malaise and that stupefaction we’re all kinda feeling when we realise we have to relearn how to be social and in a crowd.

I’d love to invite you all to tune in this Saturday. Maxine will be my guest on Final Draft and she’ll be doing a reading from How Decent Folk Behave. Trust me it’s a must hear!

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