from the editor's desk
Review of ‘Under the Tattered Roof’ by Jerome Masamaka
Masamaka, Jerome. Under the Tattered Roof. Centre for Stories: Green Leaves / Red River, 2023. RRP: $14.95, 112pp, ISBN: 9788197810602.
Lisa Collyer
Fire and Brimstone
When you first flick through the pages of Jerome Masamaka’s poetry collection Under the Tattered Roof, published by Green Leaves / Red River (a partnership between Centre for Stories and Red River Press), the poem titles, in-part, prepare you for a bleak account of Earth amid climate emergency, with examples such as ‘Crash-Landing’, ‘Carbon Fart’, and ‘Death in a Dolphin Pool’.
The collection is divided into three sections, with the first being ‘Pacific Panorama’, featuring an anthropomorphised, enraged Earth. The opening poem, ‘Sun-Fall’, alludes to Greek mythology and Phaeton’s reckless journey in his father’s chariot; Phaeton’s ‘puny hands’ explain human folly and ineptitude at the expense of the scorched Earth:
Phoebus’ fireball
in free fall
through the O zone
Casting shades over wilting trees
Grasslands frown, branches bow
Sticky silhouettes on burning backcloth (13)
This poem is also the introduction of the leitmotif of the ozone, which features heavily in section one, and develops cleverly calculated connotations, including what Masamaka terms the ‘gaping O hole’ (15). Is this a reference to the hole in the ozone, setting up the thesis of the collection as an account of climate emergency? Is this the human ‘Oh’ of distress to express climate anxiety? Or, is this a pun on the profane, A(rse) hole, perhaps a reference to just one of the noxious gases, methane, that is responsible for said hole? It is these multiple potential readings that help Masamaka produce confronting eco-poetry. His engagement with the hopeless and forlorn is thus almost satisfying, as if in response to questions like, how can we write nature poetry that acts as witness to the climate emergency?
The titular poem, ‘Down Under the Tattered Roof’, conjures biblical images of people fleeing Earth’s, or is it God’s?, wrath, as punishment: ‘Fierce Sun / fire- inspiring / spitting pikes / blow by blow on the forehead / strike upon strike on bald heads’, until, Masamaka writes, ‘We fled to the beach to sue for peace’ (16). This inclusive ‘We’ becomes Australian television viewers, when ‘We’ watched in horror during the 2019 bushfires and saw the 4,000 people stranded and seeking asylum on a beach in Mallacoota. The coast does twin work here: it is a transition zone between land and sea, and serves as an allegory for our adjustment to the volatile weather and rising sea water that are some of the results of climate emergency.
At first glance, the poem ‘Death in a Dolphin Pool’ seems gratuitously violent: it pits innocents (children and dolphins) against each other in what appears to be a horror film set in a natural paddling pool, and points the blame for a still-born Bluenose at plastic consumption among children playing with toys. But wait. The poem becomes a kind of eco-bildungsroman, where innocence is lost at the sight of a dead dolphin, juxtaposing harmless fun with bloody manslaughter, disrupting childhood and its connotations of innocence:
Beneath the bloated stomach
of our fin friend
A stack of polythene gushed
flooding in blood …
A stillborn followed amniotic fluid
glistering
with the blood
on the play pool. (32)
The focus on children (and a dire future) continues in the second section of the book, ‘Earth Watch’. Here, numerous references to climate emergency activist Greta Thunberg accompany an arresting photograph (56), from The Guardian, of Greta with an oil-slicked head and eye. In the poem following the photograph, ‘Greta’s Nightmare’, there is no hope: her dream is a nightmare and despite her being ‘among crowded street children on strike’, eventually she ‘Woke up afloat a midnight ocean / dark all around, alone, / No one can hear her now / It’s been too late, a while ago’ (57). The message is clear: we—another collective ‘we’ for the collection—have let our children down and they will pay. Note the cunning conversation between this poem and ‘Death in a Dolphin Pool’.
Hope does make a brief appearance in the collection, in the science fiction poem ‘Timeless Sphinx (An Eco-Apocalypse Time Machine)’. This poem alludes to H. G. Wells’ classic The Time Machine (1895), and acts as an attempt to find answers to the climate crisis in literature and archaeology, rather than through religion and myth, as in section one. It is a human desire to revisit and rewrite the wrongs of the past. But, ‘When story tellers outlast the story / It is time to look for new shores / to recover the old tales’ (61). Is Masamaka’s reference to the ‘Green-eyed unfolded / UFO’ (60) a hint at looking for other planets like the prospective human mission to Mars—another colony, another trashed planet?
The final section, ‘African Harmattan’, takes us to West Africa and the season of Harmattan, known for its dry, dusty northeasterly wind. Footnotes provide context under the first poem, ‘Mud Soup for the Kids’, which is ‘A reaction to the climate change induced famine in Madagascar which was widely covered by the international news media in 2021’ (90). Once again children, animals and the Earth are positioned as victims of climate-induced chaos, this time through drought:
We heard it in Space
we came for a mission
to serve it hot or cold
with the flies gasping for a last sip of dirt
before they tumble, to earth
the children, to death. (90)
Masamaka removes the sanitised lens of the nightly news that the West is privileged to look through, to take us to the site of despair on the ‘lump lumpy mound of mud / on bony fingers // soup of dirt, seasoned earth / watery soil left unfarmed / when drought encroached’ (89), and the inescapable reality of malnutrition and death that inevitably follows for those most affected. In all, his message is clear and eloquently communicated: the climate emergency is the apocalypse. Now.
Image Cited
Ohlsson, Marcus. The Transformation of Greta Thunberg, 2021. The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2021/sep/25/greta-thunberg-i-really-see-the-value-of-friendship-apart-from-the-climate-almost-nothing-else-matters
Lisa Collyer is a writer in Boorloo. She is the author of the poetry collection, How to Order Eggs Sunny Side Up, (2023) which was short-listed for The Dorothy Hewett Award and is published with Gazebo Books/Life Before Man. Her personal essay, ‘Prolonged Exposure’ is published in the anthology, Women of a Certain Courage (2025) with Fremantle Press. Her poem, ‘The Grape Pickers’ is short-listed for the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize (2025). She recently won an artist residence at Bundanon Art Museum for 2025 where she will create new work on climate grief.
