Simon West: Prickly Moses

Princeton & Oxford: Princeton Uni Press, 2023, 60pp.

I think of Simon West as one of a number of Australian poets who could be described as trying to make a possible contemporary lyric poetry. And this, his fifth book, continues the slow and intriguing evolution of his poetry in this direction. It builds on themes, obsessions and motifs familiar from early books but takes them in rather new directions. The homeland of the country around the Murray at Echuca has always been present both as a distinctively Australian environment – redgums and their filtered light, overflow channels, leaf litter and winding tracks – and an emotional home: what they call “a ground”. To balance this, there has always been West’s experience as an Italianist, inhabiting a very different physical and poetic environment. There has always, too, been an interest in the status of words – seen sometimes almost as though they were objects in themselves – and especially in the way they interact with the natural objects that they try to describe, a sense that the reality of a leaf or small piece of bark is almost infinitely complex and that language, even at a poetic pitch deploying all the techniques of tactility and available metaphor, can only really gesture in the direction of full description. This would result in a lyric poetry which, though falling short of the hypothetical goal of complete description, can also offer (or hope for) expansion, a fuller interaction with the world resulting in a fuller inner life for poet and reader. It’s a direction that the poems of Prickly Moses clearly want to explore.

And the exploring is done, not in the cryptic, compressed mode that often appears in earlier books, but rather in more extended pieces. This was a development that I noticed in reviewing Carol and Ahoy and here it’s taken farther. There is, to be brief, a lot of movement in these poems: one of the central propositions might be that the reality of one’s environment is best examined by moving through it. An obvious example from Prickly Moses is “Paddlesteaming” a three and a half page description of a trip on the PS Alexander Arbuthnot along the Murray from Echuca (there’s a Youtube video of exactly this sort of trip for readers who want to get even closer to the poem). It’s a deliberately unpretentious piece – about as far from an intense lyric mode as it is possible to be – and is replete with humble half-rhyme couplets and deliberate “Aussieisms” that almost create a sense of benevolent gormlessness, the poetic equivalent of a labrador dog, perhaps. In contrast to the elliptical lyrics of, say, First Names, The Yellow Gum’s Conversion and The Ladder, this seems to want to take a journey through the magical home country and extend it in exactly the opposite direction of these earlier poems: towards the demotic, even towards chat and casual asides. This even includes self-referential comments on the poet’s own themes – “Red gums still? You’d think I’d done that trope to death! / But why be coy about obsessions?”.

Yet, despite this tone, it’s still very much a poetry of the sacred, or at least, what is sacred to a particular individual. Since, a short distance beyond the gums that line the river, there is nothing but “sand / and plains of saltbush scrub” as far as the horizon, the boat is moving along a kind of stream of meaning, a magical bright ribbon:

. . . . .
                                    So we cling to the cortege
of reflected light, this baptist whose largesse
speaks for an ampler religion than the human heart,
harder too, and not one from which you can part,
though acolytes of speed and noise still try.
Like the nave of a church that has doffed its roof to the sky
when it empties, quiet follows the speedboat’s water-quake . . .

It’s also interesting that in this utterly Australian (well, northern Victorian) environment, the classical Italian world still has its place. When West recalls his father – “who brought us here as kids” – he does so “by way of Aeneas in Dis”, referring to “The Twofold Tree” in Carol and Ahoy which is a translation of a passage in The Aeneid dedicated to his father’s memory. And we are told that the largest of the red gums along the river can be dated as being older than Dante whose “selva oscura” always seems to be an allegory lurking behind earlier West poems involving trees.

Before I look more closely at the emerging, overt autobiographical element in these poems, I want to continue for a while, to think about this idea of a poetry of movement. The poem preceding “Paddlesteaming”, “Elemental Song – Yarra Bend Park”, seems, at first, to be a “rendering” or “catching” poem, trying to convey the immense complexity of the way water moves on the surface and below, the way it shapes land. It’s the sort of task that brings out the best of a certain kind of imaginatively intense language-use that poetry has always held the rights to:

I wonder at the windways water carves,
has always carved in loam,
river’s running vein, glossed glass

that gives back bush cross-sectioned from those mud-packed joints
down to her threadbare baldachin. Water taut in a flute,
the top brushed silk whose shine

is bent around each fold or, under wind,
will ripple through riddles forged
faster than starlings on the wing.

Current works a slower change. Surface plots
of shadow pulse for it,
and pulse for what

rides roughshod down below . . .

It’s lightyears in tone from “Paddlesteaming” and seems to be a meditation frozen in time as though the observer were sitting on the side of the creek. But we learn at the deliberately bathetic end – “though I’m pulled up short now by Heidelberg Road” – that it’s actually observations made while moving. There are a lot of possible ways of engaging with this that may or may not have been intended. Does understanding require a kind of physical alignment of observer and observed? Does he movement of the poet alongside the movement of the stream suggests the movement of a human life in a kind of parallel to the movement of the water?

“Heading North through the Goulburn Valley” and “Variations on the Walk Back from Bushrangers Bay” declare, in their titles, that they are poems of movement. But, taken together with the sequence that follows them, “Exeat”, they might be better seen as openly autobiographical poems. (Interestingly the Latin title is a subjunctive which means “Let him leave”, a chit given to students to permit them to leave school or, in the olden days, university. Thus, in a sense, it refers to movement as well. It’s certainly more apposite than, say, “Memories of My old School”!). “Heading North through the Goulburn Valley” is about the train journey north at the beginning of a school holiday – “It’s summer’s end and you’re led back home / down tracks as plumb as higher laws”. The railway tracks contrast with the “meander routes” of tracks in the bush and, interestingly, it’s a poem celebrating the moment when the line of gums along the river appears. In other words, you could see it as a poem about the moment when you intersect the kind of environment that the PS Alexander Arbuthnot is going to be traversing. Like “Heading North . . .”, “Variations on the Walk Back from Bushranger’s Bay” lures readers into thinking that the movement described – “From headland rock / we’d watched up close how water can charm its own weight . . .” – takes place in the immediate past whereas it is, in fact, set in the distant past of childhood. “Variations . . .” concludes with the moment when, as a thirteen year old boy, West commits himself to poetry:

To reach the car
in fifty steps
will mean I’m meant
by fate to be a poet.

That was the lot
you dealt yourself . . .

There’s a sense in which all poetry that can be called “lyric” – even the stoniest imagist productions – involve the self and the autobiography of its development. “Exeat” is a set of interesting perspectives on school experience, for example, but there is something especially intimate about a poet’s first commitment to poetry: it’s something usually glossed over in the most I-based of poets.

“The Campanile” is another poem of movement but one that takes place far away from the northern plains of Victoria. It is a reminder of the second component of West’s poetic self – the Italian. The poem describes not linear but vertical movement, ascending the stairs of an old bell-tower:

Old stairs pitched steeply round an open heart, 
rigged to walls by worm-holed traves,
girders and joists as thin as stilts, and landings
like the platform an acrobat might use. Trusting
to each hung step as though we trod on unlit
yards of air, we climbed alone, with hunched
and blinkered gaze set on the rung
below our feet . . .

This is not only vertical movement, it is also a spiral. Many of West’s earlier poems, even those set in Australia, have, underlying them, a Dantean allegory: gum trees can also make up a “dark wood”. So I’m inclined to read this ascent in allegorical terms as parallelling the climb up the Mount of Purgatory and it’s intriguing now to think of the journey through the dark wood as being horizontal and the descents and two ascents of the rest of the Commedia as stressing vertical movement. At any rate, there’s no Beatrice at the top of this spiral, only the bell, the symbol of poetry itself “from where / song breaks and expands / evening and morning and at noon”. The Italianist component of West’s self isn’t simply a matter of different landscapes and cultures. It isn’t even to be limited to the sharper perspective on language and the quality of individual words that being bilingual makes possible. It can be a matter of poetic technique itself, especially the drive towards Dantean allegory.

“Notes on Clouds” – the book’s first poem – is, at one level, a poem challenging words to “capture” what is said (along with moving water) to be the most uncapturable of phenomena, but it also establishes this “culturally-double” self. The first two stanzas fix us firmly in the North of Victoria:

. . . . . 
I used to watch that mirrored ocean foam
          float in slow motion over plains vast and rambling
as a pelagic vista, the crickets’ metronome
          set largo fortissimo, the Goulburn untangling
north to the Murray – the valley’s one clear border.
          The clouds moved east and drew your eye in their flanged
wake like a lure in whose shine you saw Dookie, Benalla,
          and a sweep of land to the Dividing Range . . .

But the next stanza moves to Italy:

Later I loved the high-rise fleece in old
          Venetian oils: your gaze drawn up tiers
of rough-hewn fog that angels scale
          like go-betweens. They bridge the stratosphere,
freeing the bounded eye to rise like Dante
          when he glimpsed the whorls of the empyrean . . .

It’s interesting that a poem which seems resolutely to be about a single topic can convey so much that harmonises with other poems. The contrast is strong between the prosaic (though, admittedly, exotic) names of the towns east of Echuca and the rich imaginative possibilities of the clouds in Italy. There is also an oblique touch of unexpected autobiography in the poem in that it might signify childhood years being followed by student years in Italy, and perhaps it isn’t an accident that, as in “Heading North . . .” and “Variations . . .” the exact time is left, at least initially, vague: we have to work out when the individual stanzas are “set”.

Finally, on this subject of a culturally doubled personality, there are the first two stanzas of “The Sun in the Door”:

As gum trees seen through morning fog
dispute for us the fate of Job

so Roman ruins stay the sky
and animate our inner eye . . .

In mode it has a touch of Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence” to it and seems to hope that “riddles and linked rhymes set free / reason’s hounds to chase a key” but that initial pair of couplets nicely combines the Australian and Romance environments.

As I’ve said, one of the underlying issues in this kind of lyricism is of words and the way they cannot adequately convey even the smallest fragment of reality. This is best seen perhaps in “Writing Sounds” where a terrific poem is made out of the doomed attempt to “capture” not a piece of bark or a leaf but the sound a pencil makes when it’s drawn over paper in the act of writing:

First the sound graphite makes drawn across paper:
a rustle like a dog circling in to nestle, or a tight-lipped
whisper as trance-like a child traces her name. The pencil labours
onwards but keeps manically crossing itself, as it plots its pitching

tracks in snow, or shuffles insect antennae into drift lines.
Then the bristles-sweeping sound, the rub-of-rosin sound, as the side
of the hand jumps like a wren in dead foliage, frightened
by the apparition of each new word. And finally
the swish of fingers tugging or run through hair. . .

It’s a different kind of poetry to the poems of movement that I have focussed on but that is part of the richness of Prickly Moses. It is a handsome book in a distinguished series but it certainly deserves its place.

Stephen Edgar: Ghosts of Paradise

World Square, NSW: Pitt Street Poetry, 2023, 87pp.

Stephen Edgar’s new book relates to the new poems in his Selected – significantly called The Strangest Place – by a process of extension. If those slightly earlier poems seemed obsessed by the weirdness of the world of appearances, the poems of Ghosts of Paradise could be said to be preoccupied by the nature of the organism that perceives that strangeness. Perhaps it’s true that our minds are weirder than the world they spend their limited life interacting with but at any rate it is the mind, consciousness itself, that comes to the surface as the overriding theme of these poems. And it is the idea of ghosts – chimera produced by the mind – that is the main vehicle for this theme.

The first poem of the book (which provides its title) is marked by a fascinatingly oblique approach to the issue of mind and consciousness. It begins by meditating on what happens as the past fades increasingly into memory then story and then fable (this process can be seen in reverse in the work of ancient historians like Herodotus where what is fable suddenly clicks into a sharp and reasonable historical narrative a few generations before the author so that the miraculous birth and improbable early life of Cyrus, for example, get replaced by genuine exploratory history by the time of his death.) At this point you realise that the standpoint of the poem is not the present but the far future and that we, in our present, are the far and fabulous past that our evolved organism is thinking about. And this evolved version of ourselves probably has replaced a lot of flesh with digital and mechanical developments that would make flesh and bone creatures such as ourselves us seem faintly silly or at least embarrassing:

. . . . . 
Such ancestors. Who would acknowledge them?
A rattlebag of bones that staggered upright,
Wrapped in a flimsy envelope of skin,

Seething with unknown reasons, wanting more,
Looking through the world they were looking at -
Those swimmers rising through the wave, the dash

Of parrots frisking in a rain-washed tree,
The bedside vigil shocked in the window light -
And seeing things, until the picture ceased.

Who would acknowledge forebears that would die,
Tainting the future like a damaged gene? . . .

In conception, this rather recalls John Boorman’s 1974 film, Zardoz. It’s also, in a sense, a corrective to the error that evolutionary scientists complain about: that we are inclined to see ourselves as the pinnacle of creation because we only ever look backwards. But in a subtler away it is an introduction to the book’s main obsession: the nature of consciousness. And this comes through the title. Our descendants will have ghosts of us – their humble rattlebags of bones – appearing at times in their conscious minds. They may even call them “ghosts of paradise” since the world of immersion, perception of nature, grieving, etc, could be seen as a kind of golden age – a primitive paradise. But the phrase recalls Ryle’s “Ghost in the Machine” that he used in his critique of the approach to consciousness which sees a non-physical mind inhabiting a corporeal body: a ghost inside a machine. And so, even in this first marvellous poem, we can see the introduction of the issue of an individual’s meditations about what mind is: we finish up as ghosts in a machine version of ourselves.

The subject of consciousness is made overt in the second poem, “Identity Parade”, which begins by outlining the “old enigma” – “is my body me, / Or simply where I live”. In a sense this is the obverse of “The Ghosts of Paradise” since it is sensitive to the intuition that, just as the body develops by shedding and replacing cells regularly so the thinking self may be equally susceptible to change. Of course the idea of an unstable ego is a truism of post-war literary, psychological and sociological theory but the subject is approached differently here through the idea, established in the first poem, of older versions of the self, leaving behind ghosts which can flicker on the edges of consciousness:

. . . . . 
Sometimes, performing in this film of light,
Midway through some mundane
And daily purpose, pausing as I write
A shopping list, or tie
A shoe, I’ll sense and fleetingly detain,
Out of the corner of my eye,

Like a faint watermark, or warp of air,
Some presence sliding free
From the mind still tethered to this frame we share - 
A neural glitch, I’d dare
To guess – hinting that who I am may be
Beyond me, and not my affair.

The evolutionary approach to consciousness is explored in poems like the sequence, “Ape or Angel” which is prefaced by Disraeli’s question, “Is man an ape or an angel?”. The three poems explore magical interactions between apes and humans: in the first a group of female orangutans watch, with evident empathy, a woman breastfeeding,; in the second a gorilla gives birth and in the third a chimpanzee is released into the wild. Done badly, these might be nothing more than examples of a new poetic genre, “Terrific Things I Saw on YouTube”, but Edgar’s approach is both more rigorously forensic and more alert than that. He is interested in the moments of connection which are, after all, a kind of ghost-sighting:

. . . . . 
Females they must all be, through a glass sheet
So many aeons thick, their eyes intent,
Anxious to meet
Her eyes, and offer their acknowledgement,

The light of recognition in their faces
For such a blood-deep bond and the tiny shape
That she embraces,
A wonder unforeseen from the Naked Ape. . .

That last line has an intriguing turn of phrase since The Naked Ape is the title of a book by Desmond Morris that was very popular in the seventies. There humans are looked at from a zoologist’s point of view: we are the naked apes for the purposes of the book whereas in Edgar’s poem the naked apes are the orangutans. To connect it with the book’s first poem, it is as if some few humans – the “rattlebags of bones that staggered upright” – had survived somewhere and were now on display in a museum/zoo being stared at by semi-automatons who are perhaps barely recognisable as “human” but with whom there might be a flicker of “the light of recognition”.

Two poems of Ghosts of Paradise announce the connection of ghosts and machines in their titles. “The Ghost and the Machine”, the third-last poem of the book’s first section, deals with experimentation on human cadavers, designed, presumably, to assist forensic examinations of violent deaths. But as a poem, it is about an aging poet’s relationship with his own body – Yeats’s “tattered coat upon a stick”:

. . . . . 
                  Lying in darkness, though,
I stray, a sort of mental parasite,
Impatient to let go
The sightless body that has been my host,

All ghost and no machine, or dreaming so.

And then there is “The Ghost in the Machine”, the title slightly different but still appearing in third-last position, here at the end of the book’s third and final, section. Here the ghost is a perceived self, built of our memories of ourself, which seems to co-inhabit our bodies as a “constant companion boasting to be you”.

The science of the nature of consciousness was developed when dealing with people whose consciousnesses were deeply flawed, an example of the way in which sciences like anatomy, psychology and linguistics made strides by studying the non-perfect rather than the perfect. In “Mind out of Matter”, inmates of what one assumes is an asylum, spend a “rationed hour” in a garden built on the roof of the building in which they spend their lives. The poem worries about the way an “accident // Of tissue in / The skull”, a purely physical phenomenon, can damage an entire self. The inmates themselves, however, don’t worry about this: their response is to the strange and beautiful p[lace they have suddenly found themselves in:

. . . . . 
While all of this
Unfolds behind their eyes, emergent from
These rooftop elements,
Light, shadow, leaf, the fluent idiom
Of water, and their metamorphosis,
Alive to sense.

It’s hard not to think at this point about the relationship between analysis of issues like the mind and body on the one hand, and on the other a response to and description of, the magical mysteries of the natural world which are available to most of us almost continuously. It’s no accident that the first half of “Mind out of Matter” which might have described the way the inmates are led to the roof, actually describes the splendours of the garden itself – “clouds wandering beyond / The edge, and trailing foliage, a stream / Of unfolding matter”. It’s something Edgar is especially sensitive to and there are plenty of examples of it in the book. Sometimes the natural world is serene – as it is in “World Within” or “The Creek Flows Out”. The latter enacts a kind of transaction with the stream where it moves from being an external phenomenon to one that actually generates us:

. . . . . 
This flickering of shade and gleam
Takes in the mind the day is flowing through,
As though you’re lying in the stream
As it flows over you,

Till you become the gleam and shade,
And all but the flux of nothing is undone,
This current out of which you’re made,
Painless in the sun.

But the natural world isn’t always serene. In “Second Circle”, poet and partner tramp through a howling gale on Diamond Beach. The wind is allegorised as the blown scraps of memories and events but the ghost in this poem is Francesca from the fifth canto of the Inferno, blown on the allegorical winds of lust.
To return, for a moment, to the idea of pyschic damage as a site in which to learn about mind and matter, “Haunted Dwelling” is a poem about dementia – another contemporary poetic genre. It has a particularly potent structure, moving from what seems like a rhapsodic description of light-filled space, sustained by a “ghostly presence” to a cold and bathetic ending:

. . . . . 
Filling my study where, on the windowsill,
Is propped the sun-drained face of one now dead,
Who long before she died
Was stricken from her living will,
To linger and subside,
Ghost of herself, self-disinherited.

This poem is, I suppose, a comparison between two kinds of ghosts but I’m most taken by that shape that spirals downwards in tone to its bleak conclusion. I’m reminded of Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan” – Yeats, a great believer in ghosts, figures often and in various ways in this book and many of his poems are famous for their high-powered rhetorical conclusions rather than the down-beat one of “Leda and the Swan”. But there are also poems in the Western corpus like Catullus’s farewell to Lesbia in the wonderful poem XI, and even Dransfield’s “Epiderm” which, like the Catullus, moves from ecstatic expansiveness to a bleak conclusion.

Finally, in this catalogue of kinds of ghosts, there is “Spectre at the Feast” a relaxed piece describing attending an open-air party. The analytical part of the poet’s mind is fascinated by the complexity of human interactions – “this incessant chatter and good cheer, / So effortlessly practiced with an art / that seems so artless and sincere” – and this fascination makes him an outsider/observer rather like, as he says, “a spectre at a feast”:

. . . . . 
Some element
Of mind looks back on the unfolding show
As though it’s past, or like that pageant called
From the thin air by Prospero.
But that is me, it’s evident,
The spectre at the feast, slightly appalled
To undergo

This weird abstraction . . .

The final poem of Ghosts of Paradise returns to the world of “the strangest place”. It describes that strange experience of driving between Hay and Balranald where you feel that you are moving over a huge upturned saucer. In this poem, the entire natural world looks like a full-scale museum representation of the place. It’s not so much a description of a strange place as a place where a certain weirdness is apparent and which might lead one to suspect that this weirdness lies behind (or alongside) other places, perhaps all other places. And then we would be nothing, as the last words of the book say, but “late / Additions to its catalogue raisonné”.

Starting this review, I’d set myself the task of, for once, not commenting on Edgar’s weirdly old-fashioned poetics where complex meditation is worked out through strict rhyme schemes that would have pleased a medieval troubadour. But the success of the poems in this fine book is so dependent on the distinctive movement of the ideas in the verse – the tension between syntax and the imposed discipline of rhyming end words and enjambments, often across stanza breaks – that it’s simply not possible to avoid the issue. We often (as editors, perhaps, rather than critics) speak of poets’ finding their own voice and the brilliance of Edgar’s work establishes that this poetic method is absolutely right for him – the poems we have would be pale shadows of themselves if they were done as free-flowing “poetic” meditations in a more contemporary manner.

Rereadings VIII: Les A. Murray, Poems Against Economics

Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1972, 70pp.

Half a century, as I’ve noted elsewhere, can be a very long time in poetic history: it’s the time between the death of Dr Johnson, for example, and the publication of Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott”. It’s now fifty years (more and less) since the publication of Les Murray’s Poems Against Economics. It’s his third book if one counts his contribution to The Ilex Tree (made up of sections by himself and Geoffrey Lehmann) as a single book but perhaps it would be more realistic to describe it, ala Fellini, as Murray’s second and a half. Poems Against Economics was the first complete book of Murray’s poems which I read and I remember, even today, how impressed I was by the long sequence “Walking to the Cattle-Place” which makes up almost half the book. Fifty years on seems a good time to revisit it to see how much it has changed.

The first response is to feel that it does not seem at all dated. It’s true that there are features in our culture which have changed radically in that half-century and that these would have affected someone with Murray’s view of the world and its history. The rise of the digital era, for example, has meant that notions of community have changed considerably, even in the rural world. It would also have been interesting to see how Murray – a card-carrying non-joiner – positioned himself in the now pointed conflict between left and right over the possession of Australia’s history and culture. But, if Poems Against Economics appeared this year, I think most readers would hail a brilliant individual voice with its own achieved self-mythology and an often narky relationship with the sub-culture to which most of his readers belong – something unusual in poetic history. I try not to make too many speculative comments about literary history in these posts, but one does feel that poetic history in the last forty-odd years lacks a clear outline. There are no revolutions that a new poet simply must take into consideration – adopting or rejecting – as there were at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries as well as in the immediate post-war period. Largely because the internet makes almost all texts available, poetic models, modes and fashions are a smorgasbord of possibilities for anyone setting out on a poetic career and have been for quite a while. Murray’s beginnings as a poet occurred during the last years when Australian poetic history had a clear shape and clear faultlines: the “conflict” between the poets collected in The New Australian Poetry and an imaginary coalition made up of Murray, Lehmann, Robert Gray and followers. Time and rational consideration show this to be a fairly crude categorising of poets, certainly in terms of their poetic modes, even though it might have been an accurate description of their social groupings.

My aim in this particular rereading is to look at Murray’s early work from a poetic perspective. This was difficult at the time because the ideas in the poetry – it’s content – tended to overwhelm initial responses: there was a lot to engage with, and probably be outraged by, at that level. Fifty years on, Murray’s early self-myth is completely familiar and it’s good to be able to put it aside for a moment and think about those early poems as poems. And my conclusion is that they are a lot more unsure of themselves at this level than seemed to be the case at the time. The special locus of this uncertainty, it sems to me, is how Murray deploys himself as a poet: how he enters his own poems. I now see Poems Against Economics as a book experimenting with a possible solution.

Murray’s thirty pages in The Ilex Tree are particularly interesting from the point of view of searching for a way the poet responsible for the analysis and ideas that drive the poems can present himself. Its final poem, “Driving Through Sawmill Towns”, is still a brilliant poem, a mature work perfect of its kind. And “Noonday Axeman” is also a poem that would be kept in any brief selection of Murray’s work though it wears its ideology more openly and is full of problems when it comes to how Murray is using himself in the work. But many of the other poems don’t seem like Murray poems at all. There are dramatic monologues like “The Widower in the Country” where Murray’s father’s experience can be displaced into a third-person monologue, and “Manoeuvres” and “Deck-Chair Story” take the Murray theme of young country men who joined to serve in the First World War and deal with it in terms of monologue. “The Burning Truck” uses a technique which has more promise in the long run, using an allegorical scenario to conceal (or convey) a fragment of Murray’s worldview. A truck, set alight in a wartime strafing, trundles remorselessly through a country town. It attracts some of the young men and they follow it to the end of the poem where the allegory is sealed by the last word which describes them as “disciples”. Murray’s idea, expressed elsewhere in various forms, is that causes, ideologies, attract those young who are not firmly anchored, and become false religions. There’s nothing new in this reading of the poem but it’s interesting to ask the question of where Murray is in this scenario. He can be found, not in propria persona but as a character, in the lines, “And all of us who knew our place and prayers / Clutched our verandah rails and window-sills . . .”. In other words, conventional faith and belief in a structured community will prevent an exodus following the false gods of fashionable ideologies.

Another interesting early venture is to use a faux-ballad mode. “A New England Farm, August 1914” imagines news of the outbreak of war arriving among rural communities. This happens in the refrain, “But who is this rider on the road / With urgent spurs of burning silver?” The poem itself, a little like “The Fire Autumn” from The Weatherboard Cathedral, comes dangerously close to saying that the First World War is old Europe burning the trash of its own civilisation in the same way that Australian farmers burn cornstalks: when the farmers watch “birds come dodging through the smoke / To feast on beetles” the poem makes at least a visual connection between burning off rubbish and a wartime battle scene. It is not so much a morally outrageous thing to say as an embarrassing one: the kind of thing an adolescent boy might believe before he discovers that human beings are not symbols or ciphers. But poetically the ballad mode is interesting because it suppresses the poet’s individual point of view in favour of a sense of an entire community speaking. This is a specific kind of inflation which I’ll have something to say about later. Another ballad, this time from The Weatherboard Cathedral, is the brilliant “The Princes’ Land”. Instead of being in the Border Ballad mode, this is imagined as being heraldic, high-culture medieval though its quatrain form is very much in ballad style.

Leaves from the ancient forest gleam
in the meadow brook, and dip, and pass.
Six maidens dance on the level green,
a seventh toys with an hourglass,

letting fine hours sink away,
turning to sift them back again.
An idle prince, with a cembalo,
sings to the golden afternoon.

Two silver knights, met in a wood,
tilt at each other, clash and bow.
Upon a field semé of birds
Tom Bread-and-Cheese sleeps by his plough. . .

The poem goes on to imagine the revolutions which destroyed this aristocratic medieval world. Tom Bread-and-Cheese becomes a murderous activist who “walks in his sleep in pools of blood” and, in a final revisiting of the scene, the knights jousting have become gentlemen fencing and the prince and Tom have become princes of the plough and bread (something the royal families of Scandinavia could be said to have adopted but not the royal family of Great Britain). It’s a complex poem and its content isn’t really relevant in this brief overview, but it’s interesting to see how Murray appears in it. He begins by distancing himself from others and their way of reading the book of history – “Some will not hear, some run away, / some go to write books of their own, / some few, as the tale grows cruel, sing Hey”. In contrast, “we who have no other book / spell out the gloomy, blazing text, / page by slow page, wild year by year, / our hope refined to what comes next.” My reading of this, though I could be wrong, is that it is designed to speak for ordinary citizens who don’t have ideologies to make sense of what is happening or the power to create an interpretation of their own. They have to simply suffer, like the people who watch the burning truck run through their town but don’t follow it, or the mothers of the end of “A New England Farm” who grieve at the announcement of war because it is their sons who will run to enlist. There is a definite sleight of hand in locating oneself, poetically, with the non-poetic and I don’t think it’s a sustainable position. If you keep locating yourself as spokesman, eventually there are going to be tensions with the community you claim to be espousing and you may turn out, in its eyes, to be no more than one of the truck’s disciples.

“Driving Through Sawmill Towns”, the last poem of Murray’s section of The Ilex Tree, describes the experience of encountering these townships on the border between forest and cleared rural land. The speaker has driven his car down from the uplands – “having come from the clouds” – and gives a description of a place where people pay due deferences:

. . . . . 
when you stop your car and ask them for directions,
tall youths look away - 
it is the older men who
come out in blue singlets and talk to you . . . 

It’s an entry into the Murray sacred and all the details seem surrounded by haloes – demotic haloes, admittedly. It works, at least this once, because it is ambiguous about the positioning of the “I”, the driver of the car. If Murray had positioned himself as one of the townsfolk, this would have been nothing more than an assertion that the life I live is better than yours. But the driver has an ambiguous position as part the poet himself and part an innocent outsider stumbling on this sacred site. It touches on a crucial issue in these early poems where Murray clearly worries about the fact that he spends a good deal of time in the city despite the moral superiority of a simple rural life. “Noonday Axeman” is very much about this issue,

. . . . . 
Though I go to the cities, turning my back on these hills,
for the talk and the dazzle of cities, for the sake of belonging
for months and years at a time to the twentieth century,

the city will never quite hold me . . .

But it isn’t an issue I want to pursue here since I’m mainly concerned with the poetic issue of how Murray experiments with placing himself within his poems. The fact that it’s a poet who oscillates between city and bush though, isn’t entirely irrelevant.

In The Weatherboard Cathedral, “Recourse to the Wilderness” and “A Walk with O’Connor” are fairly straight pieces of autobiography, generally free of the burden of dealing with Murray’s attitude to the conflict between city and bush. This gives them a measure of success as poems but means that they aren’t a vehicle in Murray’s development with any great future as models. “Evening Alone at Bunyah” is also autobiographical but reduces any potential charge of egotism by bracketing the poem with stories of Murray’s widowed father. “The Abomination” is an interesting poem from the point of view of the poet’s stake. I read it as a dramatic monologue – with the “I” figure distanced from the poet himself – and as a kind of extension of “The Burning Truck”. Killing trapped rabbits, the narrator is attracted by a fire deep in the roots of trees, an example of the fires which will “suck your breath away / if you kneel before them too long”. In a sense, the fire demands to be worshipped and that is why it is an abomination. Whether it represents a specific ideology or something chthonic and primitive, or is just a temptation to the young, doesn’t really matter. Finally, there is “The Fire Autumn” where, I think, Murray hopes that his analysis of the relationship of the northern hemisphere to the south will be complex enough to sustain the poem. Unlike “A New England Farm”, which deals with the same material in a ballad-like structure, “The Fire Autumn” speaks in Murray’s own voice but nothing really protects it from the charge of a sententious tone and a pompous set of propositions – “The cesspools of maturity are heaving with those who leap short. / Some are citing as Europe’s last knowledge (Oh burning Israel) / that nothing not founded upon the irrational can stand . . .”. It’s always seemed to me to be a failure of a poem, a problem that Murray is going to try to solve in his next book.

And so, after this overlong introduction, to Poems Against Economics. It’s made up of three parts: two long sequences – “Seven Points for an Imperilled Star” and “Walking to the Cattle-Place” – with a brief set of squibs – “Juggernaut’s Little Scrapbook” – in between them. This central group, easily passed over, does have some relevance here because it contains statement poems which almost omit the author all together, and the result is a problem that lasts throughout Murray’s career: the tighter and more epigrammatic the poem, the less comprehensible it is, even for readers really well acquainted with Murray’s ideas. “Sunday, Having Read My Sheets” has puzzled me since I first read it and I’m no closer to making sense of it now:

Face-brick in please and thank you streets,
Tower blocks squinted at bottom to top
Like immensely steep accounts, impend
More. And a strange soil haloes them.

To think how many died for a wheel
That was to stay on till Moscow but
Not make Kazan. Then somehow it did.
A sad and complex win for steel.

Now the Aryans rub at caste again,
O stateless state of the brahmin lords!
O gnostic heaven, with just my peers!

The New World must have frightened some
Badly, to fight three ducks on a wall.
Hide in the open and last it out.

It’s part, of course, of the book’s attempted assault on the mechanisms of capital which is foreshadowed in the title (the idea of “poems against economics” has a grim humour that most readers of poetry probably miss: it is a very unequal battle, a little like a sparrow solemnly taking on an elephant which barely registers its existence). The second stanza refers to the Wehrmacht’s assault on Russia in the Second World War and I think the third stanza makes fun of Eurocentric intellectuals who think that their analyses entitle them to be redeemed from history and to live in a heaven which will only include their own kind. The final stanza obviously refers to refugees from Europe who have arrived in Australia and recalls parts of “The Fire Autumn” as well as poems about Murray’s father-in-law in later books. But the mode is a kind of compression of authorial ideas, satisfying to the author but frustrating to the reader. The author only exists in them as a generator of ideas which are then shaken kaleidoscopically to produce a dense and resistant text which might make its creator smile but are unlikely to have that effect on readers.

The first of the sequences, “Seven Points for an Imperilled Star”, is Murray’s first attempt at a large sequence where a tight imposed structure fights interestingly against the fact that individual poems are often in quite different modes. It’s a manner which will be repeated in “Walking to the Cattle-Place” and “The Police: Seven Voices” from the next book, Lunch & Counterlunch, where the title of the sequence, probably taken from Dickens’s “He do the police in different voices”, suggests the possibility of approaching a subject in a variety of modes. I think the attempt behind these sequences is to solve the problem I’ve been describing. It isn’t only a matter of a unified variety of modes, it’s also a way of dealing with a variety of ways the poet can position himself in his poems.

The structure of “Seven Points” is built around the idea of the number seven – there are seven poems and the first is made up of seven parts – the number of points on the stars of the Australian Flag, something that may suggest that Murray sees these sequences as confederations or commonwealths: different but united. Seven-pointed stars have also a wider heraldic significance which often exploits the fact that it is a star which can be drawn without the pen or pencil leaving the page: that is, it has a kind of unity despite its seven apices. “Points” is also, of course, a pun so that the title could be read as “Seven comments for a country in danger”. In the first poem – or sequence – “Towards the Imminent Days”, we meet Murray in a domestic mode, celebrating the marriage of Geoffrey and Sally Lehmann. But the image of the poet in the poem is one of incipient inflation which is balanced by some self-mocking. The inflation either derives from, or is a mimicking of, a Celtic mode. Murray’s love of Gaelic culture is well known and “Vindaloo in Merthyr Tydfil”, a later poem in the sequence which has no apparent relation to any dangers Australia may be suffering, is a comic piece that deliberately echoes Dylan Thomas – “I sang for my pains like the free”. Welsh rather than Irish, of course, but still Celtic. At any rate, we meet the inflated self:

. . . . . 
Singing All living are wild in the imminent days
I walk into furrows end-on and they rise through my flesh
Burying worlds of me.
. . . . . 
But now I am deep in butter-thick native broom
Wading, sky-happy, a cotton-bright drover of bees. . . 

The context here is hieratic: marriages are, when inflated mythologically at least, sacred rites and the poem is conceived as happening during Advent, the “imminent days”. But this first poem is also a congeries of modes and poet-positions: the sixth section is a comic story of the problems father and son, father especially, have with a rampant bull anxious to find other cows where he can make “herd-improvements”. And so, in a sense, “Towards the Imminent Days” re-enacts the structure of the sequence which contains it. Other poems use the self differently. “Lament for the Country Soldiers” is a fine poem perhaps because of the fact that the poet removes himself to a large degree and simply offers a lamentation for the fates of the boys from the country who enlisted because of an appeal to loyalty even though that loyalty was to the “king of honour” rather than the king of England. “The Conquest” does something similar though there may be something ironically satisfying about treating a man of the age of reason – “Phillip was a kindly, rational man” – in a fairly reasonable way. At the end, Murray positions himself as a representative, guilty voice of the present thinking about the fate of the indigenous populations:

. . . . . 
A few still hunt way out beyond philosophy
Where nothing is sacred till it is your flesh
And the leaves, the creeks shine through their poverty

Or so we hope. We make our conquests, too.
The ruins at our feet are hard to see,
For all the generous Governor tried to do

The planet he had touched began to melt
Though he used much Reason, and foreshadowed more
Before he recoiled into his century.

“Walking to the Cattle-Place” has a similar conception behind it to “Seven Points for an Imperilled Star” in that a unifying subject – the way a farmer in the present day partakes of a cattle world that goes back millenia – allows for a variety of modes and a variety of ways a poet can be in the text. Rereading it, I’m not sure that the force of disunity is overcome by this thematic unity though I had no such problems fifty years ago when the excitement of the content was enough to dispel doubts. At the time it was thought to be a dazzling display of erudition, amongst other things, and thus a defensive bulwark against hostile critics who saw only rural quackery in Murray’s analysis of things. Again, nowadays this erudition doesn’t seem quite as striking, again, perhaps, because with the internet anybody with a few hours to spare can get up subjects like the role of the bull in Vedic and later Hindu beliefs, or in the Irish Tain.

“The Boeotian Count” is a comical list of cow’s names – “Maudie Maisie, Shit-in-the-bail . . .” – whose name derives from Murray’s essay distinguishing between the cultures of Athens (city-based, abstract, producer of dramas, modernising etc) with Boeotia (rural, producing poets, non-abstract etc). A ‘boeotian count’ is, in other words, a list. When the poet does enter this poem, it is a self-mockingly bathetic way though it retains enough abstruse knowledge to balance this:

. . . . .
          I give you thanks
Moocher
                and Dopey                              old Cornucopie
        and Honeycomb                                        rainbeaded
                                                                               and warm
                                               I  pray  that  Hughie
                                                    will send you
                                                        safe home
                                        where ploughing is playing
                                where Karma is Lilā.

The conception of the entire sequence has an element of inflation about it because the farmer is imagined to be the inheritor of this long tradition of animal husbandry so that when the first poem ends “I will follow cattle” and the last poem ends “I have travelled one day”, the deliberately humble tone doesn’t disguise the degree of inflation: this is a poetic self moving through a single day but also through an immensely complex heritage that he is able to articulate thank to his erudition. This is established at the very beginning where we are introduced to the Sanskrit for various stages in a cow’s life something that is likely to be both impressive and daunting for a reader but which may have the justification that in the Rigveda, at least, cows are associated poetically (for difficult-to-grasp reasons) with dawn and Murray’s sequence wants to trace a single day which has to begin at dawn.

Amongst the variety of positions and modes in the sequence there are strangely conceived pieces like “Stockman Songs” and “Poley Bullock Couplets”, the latter imagined as being short statements by a bullock in a way that foreshadows Translations from the Natural World where the poet removes himself to allow an animal to speak in its own way. “Hall’s Cattle”, though not written as a ballad, is a narrative about Ben Hall and allows the poet to be no more than a sophisticated narrative voice and “Novilladas Democráticas” is also a narrative of a kind, though imbued with a distinct narratorial personality, which describes bull-riding, conceived as an Australian equivalent of the classic aristocratic bull-fight: the bull wins.

“Walking to the Cattle-Place” also contains one of the best-loved of Murray’s early poems, “Birds in Their Title Work Freeholds of Straw”, the second poem and thus one set in the early morning. Its subject is children, a subject where Murray has a deft and sympathetic touch. Because of this, although it contains the predictable attack on city-based capitalism – “as the dairy universe / Reels from a Wall Street tremor, a London red-shift / On the flesh-eating graphs . . .” – it concludes with the image of the small children, up since dawn herding cows, now “dead beat at their desks” in school instinctively translating the Latin for something like “Caesar arose and summoned his soldiers” as “Caesar got up and Milked then he Got his soldiers”. It’s a poem that also softens the usual opposition of town and country by including a side of country life which, if not bad, is at least highly eccentric:

. . . . . 
I can tell you sparetime childhoods force-fed this
Make solid cheese, but often strangely veined.
I’m thinking of aunts who had telescopes to spot
Pregnancies, inside wedlock or out
(There is no life more global than a village)
And my father’s uncles, monsters of hospitality . . .

That image of the strangely veined cheese that is produced by the milk recalls an image from “Evening Alone at Bunyah” where Murray contemplates a picked up stone looking at the veins in the quartz and reflecting that an individual stone like this – like the poet himself – “reflects the grain / and tendency of the mother-lode”.

Ultimately, this idea of a non-sequential sequence is not one that Murray continues or needs to continue. By the time of Lunch & Counterlunch we already have poems in the modes which Murray will use throughout the rest of his career. These include ultra-compressed riddling pieces like those in “Juggernaut’s Little Scrapbook” but also the more relaxed, complex expository and celebratory pieces like “The Broad Bean Sermon” and “First Essay on Interest”. When he does return to longer sequences, as in “Sidere Mens Eadem Mutato”, “The Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle”, “Machine Portraits With Pendant Spaceman” and “The Idyll Wheel”, there is a clear unity in tone and mode.

Andrew Taylor: Shore Lines

World Square, NSW: Pitt Street Poetry, 2023, 97pp.

Although it might not be a word that one would want to use too much in serious criticism, Andrew Taylor’s Shore Lines seems a more secure book that the previous Impossible Preludes. And part of that sense of secureness might derive from the opening two poems that are something of a coup. The first, “The Grave by the Sea Called ‘Granny’s Grave’” could be described as a retrieved poem about a retrieved history. Written in 1981, it is about a grave on the Warrnambool coast dating to 1848 and said to be that of the first white woman to die in the area. It was subsequently either misplaced or deliberately omitted from Taylor’s later books. As a stand-alone poem it would certainly have been worth including in its natural position in the “New Poems” section of his UQP Selected Poems and was only “rediscovered” by local historians researching the matter of this early grave. It’s a very “Taylorish” poem, stylishly literary – it is supported at either end by allusions to Valery’s great poem about the cemetery by the sea – and meshing in with Taylor’s poetic obsessions in that this is a grave on the coast, on the meeting place of sea and land. If you live in South Australia, the sea is the Great Southern Ocean and many of Taylor’s poems celebrate its erosive effect on the soft rocks of that coast. Mrs Raddleston, the name given on the basalt headstone, died in the same year as the great uprisings of Europe, a rather different sort of erosion. “Mrs Raddleston”, leaving Europe either forcibly or by free will, “came finally aground on this great wave of sand” which is itself unstable since the wind and the sea are always threatening to move or overwhelm the grave. Again, metaphors from the sea are used for the wind and the unstable land:

. . . . . 
Her freedom here was to live a life of the sea
where the land’s edge rises in great waves
in the punishing wind. I can hear it tonight
the wind in the trees crashing down like surf
. . . . . 
                          The black headstone
poised like a solitary surfer rides the wave
of approaching winter. A fine drift of sand
is blowing and the marram inscribes inane
circles of grief and panic about her grave
where the wind is rising, and she tried to live.

“Revisiting, after Forty Years” is not so much about revisiting the grave as about revisiting the poem. Revisiting is a natural impulse associated with age and since large numbers of poets now live and write into their eighties and beyond, it’s inevitably going to be a growth genre of modern poetry: like all poetic genres capable of being done well – as here – or badly. Mrs Raddleston’s true name turns out to be Ruttelton and she died impoverished and her husband was a convict. The researches of the present correct the ignorances of the past although the present has its own set of unanswered questions which the second poem is built around. And the perspective of the contemporary poem is strikingly different from that of the old one. “Why is she buried here?” it asks, so far from the township. Was it fear of plague?

. . . . . 
                    Or was it some
hope that her grave could be memorial
to an effort they had made
leaving their stony crofts or grimy slums
crossing disastrous seas to conquer and subdue
another people’s land? Where passing boats
could dip their flag at such a sacrifice
of lonely death? Or where the whales
migrating as they pass here every year
might raise their ghostly transient salutes?

Someone pointed out that Heracleitus’ statement that you can’t enter the same river twice not only implied that this was because the river had changed but because the individual entering the river has changed also. One of the features of “revisiting” is that it marks not only the changes in the place revisited – the processes ranging from the gentrification to the abandonment of childhood haunts – but in the individual doing the revisiting. How much an individual changes is always a matter of debate: people have for a long time been speaking of the self as an assortment of features that we cobble together under the impression that it has always been a coherent phenomenon. But there is no doubt about the changes that take place in society itself. Australia is a very different place in 2023 from the Australia of Taylor’s boyhood in the fifties. The last lines of the second poem remind us that the “whaling industry”, which we would now consider both cruel and environmentally destructive, was a major feature of the economy of South Australia into the sixties. The passing whales’ “salutes” are not only ghostly because the spray of their soundings is insubstantial but also because they might well represent the ghosts of their ancestors.

In the grander scheme of things where attitudes to homosexuality, the environment, Australia’s geopolitical situation, women’s rights, indigenous people’s rights, among many others, have altered in ways that somebody living in the fifties and sixties of last century would barely have believed possible, whaling could only represent a minor example. But the last poem of this first section, “Where are They?”, deals with the more major issue (at least, more major to most of us: balancing ethical positions is always fraught) of the indigenous inhabitants of the area, concluding, after a series of stanzas each of which asks “where are they?”.

. . . . . 
Where are they
whom we hear in the plover’s lament
in the wind’s whisper and the distant
insistent rumour of surf
on the empty beach?

There are difficulties here, of course. The issues facing a country at any moment in its history seem absolutely the right ones to most people at that time. But, as any revisiting shows, they can change alarmingly quickly and one of the dreary, predictable comments of the aged is something like: “How do you know this is what is important? I’m old enough to know that these things change rapidly.” At my most idealistic about poetry, I want it to be an art of either direct or indirect critique of all generally accepted notions at any given time. But it would be asking a lot of a poet to stand outside the current collection of “issues” that dominate Australians’ thinking about their world. Taylor has enough poetic dexterity to make a good poem like “Where are They?” to the point where we never feel that he is a mere spokesman for contemporary pieties. And the perspective of age and its ability to revisit means that he is able to accept the fact that the past has its own integrity even if that involves slaughtering whales, ignoring the fates of indigenous peoples, and so on.

The second section of the book opens with a poem that reminds us of one of the strongest features of Taylor’s poetry: his extreme sensitivity to what is ambient. His first book was, for example, called The Cool Change, and its title poem registered a sensitivity to weather, something most unusual at the time when on the social plane, issues like the war in Vietnam dominated, and when, on the poetic plane, there was a kind of multi-pronged attack on whatever looked like a kind of sensitive Georgian quality. As his poetry progressed to cope with its own Sturm und Drang – the death of his father while Taylor was in the northern hemisphere, marriage break-up – it retained this sensitivity. Swimming – immersing oneself in the waters of the ocean – is a continuous theme, as is the exact tonality of the weather, the current temperature and humidity and the likelihood of changes. “Weather”, the first poem of the second section of Shore Lines, is actually a complex meditation about the phenomenon itself, rather than a simple registering of the immediate surrounding air. It works by investigating the relationship of external to internal weather. Or, perhaps, it uses the notion of weather as an indicator of the sorts of interior states that affect how a poet lives and how he writes:

. . . . . 
But weather is inside us
like sunrise it recalls us from our dreams
of Japanese temples or the grief
of what is perpetually lost
or the absence of what was never really present
to meals and conversations and waiting.
So weather is a shape of waiting
that’s forever on the move . . .

As I’ve said, it’s a complex meditation and it’s hard not to think of it as touching on crucial areas of Taylor’s long writing career. It certainly yokes the mundane – the ambient environment, social life, travels to places like Japan – with the more conventionally poetically stimulating – dreams, the griefs of loss, and a certain kind of unrealisable desire, “the absence of what was never really present”.

The rest of the poems grouped in this second section seem to be about events in the immediate environment. It’s tempting to say that the revisiting of the first section is balanced here by the experience of visitations. The most common of these visitants are the birds, the “morning visitors” who “alight on my balcony” but they can be a woman in a blue dress playing a violin in a time of bushfires that is soon to morph into a time of pandemic. One of them, Spanish Moss – which brings with it overtones of its exotic place of origin – lands “gangly and languid / on the back of a chair”, almost a definition of insubstantiality. Another poem, “Dead Trees”, is hardly about visitations but is definitely a little allegory made out of the immediate environment where dead trees in a park, unnoticed by “families on bikes, / women in raffia hats, one / or two very hot joggers”, wait to be visited by council arborists:

. . . . . 
One day a truck with chainsaws
and maybe a loader tagged on behind
will pay these trees the attention
they deserve. After all
they’re the park’s elders, the tallest
and greyest, their fingers
reach for the sky they’ll one day
ascend to, as the fierce red crackle
of their wisdom blackens
into ash and a new beginning.

Whether the trees represent ordinary elderly people here, or whether they represent the fate of elder poets is a moot point and arguments could be made for either case.

At the end of the book’s penultimate section, we revisit meditations about the distant personal past with three poems about family history. Family albums, lost aunts who died so young that the nephew in childhood barely knew of their existence, and grandfathers, are all fairly conventional subjects and it says something of Taylor’s genius that these poems are not at all clichéd. The photos in the album, for example, are ancestors from a distant past who have a lot to say to the present but who cannot speak. And the present would dearly like to speak to them as well: they are as likely to be able to answer questions we pose as we would be to answer their questions. Again, it is a reminder that, in a culture which seems for odd reasons anxious to pass judgement on the past, the past is, after all, a foreign country where they do things differently:

. . . . . 
                   Can we reach them
after so much neglect from a world
that would have them utterly confused
should they enter it today? They are
stranded in time, yet their silence
has an old-fashioned eloquence
that demands a reply. They’ll hear 
nothing of what I say, and I know
little of their untold stories, heartbreaks,
triumphs and bereavements . . .

The third section of Shore Lines has some poems with a rather more abstract meditative cast, a reminder, I suppose, that a poet who is so sensitive to ambience can at the same time be a distinguished intellectual. Both “The Book in the Fountain” and “Peregrine Falcon” want to explore the nature of a poet’s raw materials: words. In the former – a kind of stylised allegorical scene – the printed words of a book lying underwater are leached away and become part of the world of the goldfish and the pigeon, inhabitants of the elements of water and air:

. . . . . 
               One day
someone will fetch the book out
and lay it on the fountain’s wall
to dry. Ruined by the water
it will be unreadable – unless
you listen to the fountain’s 
quiet syllables and watch the pigeon’s
thoughtful nodding in agreement.

This notion of words as being part of the natural world rather than expressions of a human consciousness is continued in “Peregrine Falcon” whose central metaphor imagines words as being like flotsam subject to the violent activity of the interface between water and rocky coast, one of Taylor’s distinctive topoi. Everything here derives from the metaphor of the opening lines – “Words don’t stand a chance against the surf / that picks them up like feathers in a storm” – suggesting that this is a poem about poetry in a time of relentless social upheaval. The feathers/words finish up as part of a nest which the falcon builds in the crevices produced in the rockface by the relentless action of the water. All this forces us to read the falcon as a rather noble image for the poet although in the poem, the bird is a small object indeed, operating at the point where a raging sea meets a rocky coast. Added to this is the fact that it is a peregrine falcon, a bird whose name means “traveller” so there might be an intended connection with Taylor himself who is an indefatigable traveller. Words retain their metaphorical status as independent, living things in “Visiting Peter” which describes a visit to Peter Porter imagined as happening while Porter is surrounded by words, “so many jostling verbs / outstretched adjectives / nervy adverbs all / rubbing shoulders with those little / ands and buts and ors etc”. Only when the social activity of hosting a guest is over can these words organise themselves so that they can “converse with him / and later, on the page / with us.”

Seeing Taylor in terms of his relationship to the immediate environment – immediate in time as well as physical proximity – counterbalanced by the perspectives that a long creative life gives to the relationship between present and past, makes a good background against which to read the fourth section of Shore Lines, a group of ten poems titled “At Coogee”. The first temporal perspective comes out of the difference between this current home and the earlier one of Warrnambool. This isn’t, as the first poem says, a “surf beach”. This is not

. . . . . 
my childhood beach – all Southern Ocean
storms, blistering wind, adolescent
sex and memories of my father’s
persistent fishing. Yet at times
as spent waves gnaw at my feet his voice
reaches me in the night, as far and weak
as the green ripple on the screen beside
his bed, so many years away.

But, as the poem says, some guilts and traumas don’t change when the environment changes: as the Latin motto says, the stars may change but the mind remains the same. There is also an apocalyptic perspective in the way these poems deal with bushfires and the pandemic: together these provide a sense of time as linear and moving towards catastrophe. The message of the sea is, however, rather different and it is imagined as speaking of vast stretches of time and holding out hope of human survival:

. . . . . 
Be patient. I have been here
millennia and am not going
anywhere. I weather 
whatever Time throws at me. You too
will endure, and defeat that tiny
antagonist. Then you’ll come down 
to me again, where I’m waiting
with open arms to embrace you.

It’s hard not to register that use of “weather” as significant, covering as it does both the immediate environment and the action of water on rock. It seems a satisfying bonding of the two issues.

Shore Lines, as though wanting to avoid any incipient pompousness, finishes with a semi-comic rehearsal of creation in three poems. God, having invented time and history wants to liven up the contrasts in his creation by adding a little depth and drama. There is no doubt about how this will be done and who will do it: into the Garden of Eden “He placed a man and a woman / and let them get on with the job”.

Rosanna E. Licari: Earlier; Amy Crutchfield: The Cyprian

Rosanna E. Licari, Earlier (Port Adelaide: Ginninderra, 2023), 128pp.
Amy Crutchfield, The Cyprian (Artarmon: Giramondo, 2023), 72pp.

Books of poetry are usually more than a random dump of poems. They, like the poems they contain, tend to have a structure, sometimes loose and sometimes very tight. Its function might be positive: to show the poems up in the best light by putting the strongest ones first, for example. And it might be defensive: to resist a charge of randomness or to place poems near each other so that they give each other some support and deepen the context of any single work. Both these books – Rosanna E. Licari’s Earlier and Amy Crutchfield’s The Cyprian – raise the issue of book structure: it’s likely to be one of the things that a reader notices early on.

Despite this, in the case of Licari’s Earlier, one’s first impression isn’t of its structure so much as its size. It’s a big book, made up an amazing variety of poems ranging from rehearsals of cosmic history and the processes of evolution, to historical portraits covering a spectrum from Giordano Bruno to Mary Anning and Rilke, to snapshots of family history (where it touches the genre of migrant experience), to laments for lost loves, to lyrics (at the beach or in the garden) of life now. One’s initial reading suggests that there are at least two books’ worth of material here, one perhaps dealing with the processes of historic deep time and the other with personal poems. In fact, it turns out to be a remarkably unified book, it’s just that the unifying features aren’t those of theme and style that readers are used to.

The first of these features is a consistent cast of mind spread across this widely varied subject matter. It’s hard to find an exact adjective for it, though “hard-nosed”, “wryly sceptical” and “unillusioned” came to mind. The first poem – it’s also the title poem – is a straight down the line exposition of the development of the current world – a modern, scientific origins story. But, of course, the original point of creation is, scientifically, unknown and the opening of Licari’s poem, “Perhaps, the loneliness wanted / to share its darkness”, carefully avoids the certainties of the Priestly writer’s first chapter of Genesis choosing instead, as its text, the so-called “Hymn of Creation” from the tenth book of the Rig Veda. This is unusual among the various religious texts of creation for its uncertainty and downright scepticism. Wendy Doniger, putting it first in her selections from the Veda, speaks of it as desiring to “puzzle and challenge, to raise unanswerable questions”. As the hymn says, “Who then knows whence it [creation] has arisen?” The sceptical, questioning spirit is in keeping with Licari’s poetic sense. It’s perhaps no accident that the title of her first book proclaims the same opposition to religious explanations: An Absence of Saints.

Coupled with this is what might be called the direction of the gaze: it is unremittingly backwards except for some of the conclusions which gesture towards the future. As the book’s title suggests, its interests are in the past and the way the present has developed out of the past: that is, in the “earlier”. It doesn’t feel, in the poems themselves, that there is anything oppressively deterministic about this but it is everpresent. I’ve mentioned the first poem where the poetic tension lies in the opposition between the vastness of historic time and the inevitable compression that all poetry imposes on its subjects. In this case nearly fourteen billion years are covered in eighty short lines. There’s also a tension in that, although the view is backwards the material is pushing and developing forwards: humans are allotted only the last four lines of “Earlier” but they are seen walking “naked / through wind and savannah, / their dark eyes fixed on the horizon”. “Evolutionary Lap” is another poem in this territory. It is about swimming laps and looks, on the surface (I apologise for the bad pun), to be a lyric poem about the experience of living physically in the rhythms of water. But its conclusion – “your head and elbows / moving in and out of the splash // as if preparing to fly” – inverts the poem into one about evolutionary developments. “Evolutionary Lap” is followed by one of the many ekphrastic poems in the book, a piece based on Willian Robinson’s “Bright Sea at Cape Byron”, where one arrives at sea and sky after struggling through lush undergrowth but “this delicate blue has no concern / for the distant headland / or your curious desire to plunge forward”.

The family history poems detail the poet’s first few years in Rijeka and Trieste before emigration to Australia and you feel that the interest in the detail is very much about what the past contributes and what it withholds. How much of such a migration, for example, is determined and how much simply part of the vagaries of life. A long poem, “Oliver”, is about a cousin, dead at nine months, whose photograph the author has known from childhood. The history of his death exists only in partial comments over the years and, in the poem, this is worked into the domestic image of a gecko flitting in and out of the kitchen looking for odd scraps. Some losses last, almost unimaginably, a whole lifetime:

. . . . . 
                        Her loss had a relentless hunger. And
in her solitude, thoughts fed on themselves. When my aunt
was very ill in hospital and the breast cancer had
metastasised, we didn’t know how long she would last. It had
been eating her up slowly. Sitting by the bed,

my mother said, She’ll go soon. I asked Why? Mother looked 
up and said, I dreamed of her with the child. 

Here, known history is a thing of shreds and patches but the underlying process of grief is as remorseless as the processes of evolution. And the nature of personal history is the subject of another poem in this fourth section titled significantly, “New Histories”. Here, the mother, in a state of dementia, creates new versions of her life so that she is convinced that she visited Africa and “gave lectures to the scholars of / Europe and Russia”. Sometimes the backward view shows only a simulacrum of the real history.

The book’s fifth section begins with a poem, “Paradeisos”, which establishes the garden as the central location of some poems which are personal though not in the migrant-family-history genre. Licari’s garden is a pretty contested place, where there is an aggressive neighbour (introduced in an earlier poem, “The Spaniard”), and the “yells of neighbour’s children slam against the high wooden fence”. But wild as the garden is, the great regular processes go on underneath – the centipedes, burrowing beetles and worms – and above – the bees and spiders. “Shimmer” is a poem where all these other perspectives enter:

There’s no one here as the soft rain presses
the day into eucalypt leaves and bark.
In drops of water, glimmers of red, yellow and blue
and again red. Move through its shades to crimson,
two syllables crushed from Kermes insects
which dyed ancient cloth and shrouds:
a colour privileged in both life and death.
The sky bears down, draws me out to the distant haze
into the dome of the world. Its fickle blue
does not comfort – sun, rain and sun - 
the humidity thick as ritual smoke.
It seeps into vines and ferns as does yellow and
blue to utter viridity. But I contemplate indigo
and how I will step out from another night,
its nebulas forging new stars.

Tonally this is done in high lyric style and there isn’t so much of the wry, clear-eyed tone that I have said is common to Licari’s poetic position. But its interesting complexities sustain it, I think. Firstly, it brings into a poem set in a garden on a rainy day, the ancient origins of the word “crimson” – “two syllables crushed from Kermes insects” – and thereby continues the concern with the operation of the past which is contained, often unnoticed, in the present. Secondly, by concluding the survey of colours with indigo, the colour of the night, it enables one of those juxtapositions of perspective that run through this book: domestic garden and pale blue sky opposed to one of the largest events we know in the universe – star creation.

Earlier is a rather surprising book and my emphasis on its tonal unity among a wide variety of forms may be only one way of uncovering unities in its widely varied poems. But it is that tone which informs a late poem, “Causality”, whose title warns us that mechanisms which operate across time to produce outcomes are always present even if not perceived. It’s one of a series of beach poems and is a compressed picture of the present from an ecological point of view:

The tideline, a scar of fishing hooks, cigarette butts and broken plastic. My toe bleeds when it moves across the sharp break of a bottle that once held water. Flask parts now mingle with the greater blue. An offering to the deep. Minute shards find a home everywhere. Microplastics float into the mouths of zooplankton, into fish, into us. All flesh infused with it. Wading into the shallows, I drop to my knees in the soft sand. I cup my palms to show gratitude. A brisk wave slaps my face.

It’s a world and a poetry where rhapsodic celebration of the joy of living in the world is given short shrift by reality.

Amy Crutchfield’s The Cyprian is a much slighter book than Earlier and, perhaps as a result, is even more intensely organised. One might even say over-organised. It is arranged in five sections, each with a title for Aphrodite translated from the Greek: “Who Turns to Love”, “Armed”, “Common to All”, “Delayer of Old Age”, “Protectress of Births”. Most of these were new to me (Anadyomene and Callipygos being the only titles I knew!) but they all appear to be attested. In fact, Aphrodite seems to carry dozens of epithets around with her, although they are comparatively late. I know it isn’t strictly relevant to Crutchfield’s book, but I share her interest in Aphrodite who has always seemed an odd figure to me. She comes from Cyprus (hence the title “Cyprian”) perhaps as a figure initially associated with copper mining – why else would she be married to an ugly, lame smith? She is part of that westward movement where figures from Mesopotamia and the Levant wind up in Greece. But where you expect an avatar of the great, stately Middle-Eastern goddess of birth, sex, death and rebirth, you find instead a figure who seems early on to have sunk into a sort of sexy, fun-loving girl. In Homer (mid to late eighth century BCE) she is already trivialised, fainting on the battlefield from a cut to her hand in the Iliad and getting trapped by her husband when she gets into bed with the god of war in the Odyssey. The fact that this latter sexy/farcical episode is not narrated by Odysseus but by the Phaiakian rhapsode Demodokos seems to add to the sense of its being a little infra dig.

There is no doubt though that Crutchfield takes Aphrodite seriously as a guiding figure over poems that are, mainly, about love and death. There is also a strong tendency towards the ekphrastic: the first poems are sequences which explore a statue of Pothos and Picasso’s “Dora and the Minotaur”. The first of these deals with desire in its incarnation as an actual god. Pothos is variously thought of as a son of Aphrodite and a son of the god of the west wind: either of which seems a good origin for desire. Crutchfield’s poems are interested in what motivated the sculptor Skopas (the existing statue is a second century AD Roman copy) and in what he knew of his subject:

. . . . . 
Did he catch it in a calm pool of water
or watch it pass as the shadow of a cloud across the plain
face of an apprentice
in the workshops at the growing temple?
What had he learned of longing and its
fierce metamorphosis?
Because the categories are not fixed,
needs jostle on the ladder and we
do not sleep, we do not eat.

She is also interested in the fact that the statue was originally misnamed as an Apollo – the god of, among other things, art – and the fact that pothos now gives its name to Devil’s Ivy: a plant so indestructible that it can survive without light. Like desire itself. The Picasso poems also explore the perversities of desire, Picasso and his lover/muses being an excellent site for such investigations. The final poem of the four focusses on the moment when Picasso switches his attentions to Francoise Gilot and asks

. . . . . 
What is a goddess when she’s forgotten?
First the plinth and then the doormat.
There are not enough museums
for all we once believed in.

Each day she starts 
a life after, but not without . . .

Which recalls the odd question that begins the book’s prefatory poem, “Egg”, a fine lyric about loss rather than desire: “What shall the mother of the dead be called? / As widow is to wife, / what of the woman left behind?”. The last poem of this opening section, “Camera Obscura”, is about the solar eclipse in North America in 2017. It seems a long way from the poems of desire that accompany it but there may be a clue in the last of the Pothos poems: Desire survives and flourishes even in camerae obscurae – darkened rooms.

The second section has some more personal poems of desire but also an interesting meditation on Helen of Troy, especially the way in which Lattimore translates “kunopidos“ – “dog-eyed” – as “slut”. The complex (and uncertain?) characterisation of Helen in both the Homeric epics enables Crutchfield to arrive at a “multiplex” figure, including an embodiment of all the fears that ultimately derive from desire.

The poems of the other parts of the book, as their Aphroditic surnames suggest, tend to deal with death and loss more than desire. And the death and loss is complexified by being seen in a narrow domestic sense, always related to being a child or having children. I think the best of them is “Beautiful Corpse” which, presumably, takes its title from the Surrealist game of “Exquisite Corpse”. The poet brings four children to the dead body (we aren’t told who the dead person is but children’s grandmother is an outsider’s guess) not to pay standard respects but “to hear the corpse speak”. It’s a powerful and very convincing idea that the dead can communicate to us, not by “sables and visitations” but with a kind of eloquent deadness:

. . . . 
I could explain it, the amalgam
that makes a person, but the corpse insists.
Lips, almost resting, glimpse of teeth,
say leave this with me.

Both Earlier and The Cyprian have poems about poetry itself: bordering on what I usually call “poem-poems”. “Some poems birth easily. Others don’t” says Licari at the opening of her poem about how her mother’s dementia creates a new history and “Degrees of Flight”, begins with a portrait of what Hollywood America loves to call “writer’s block”:

Call me tonight
because I’ve been scribbling
the same poem for days. 
Lately, I have stopped 
not just mid-sentence but
at the beginning,
after the first letter,
or even between the space
where my hand moves
from air to paper. . . 

It turns out to be a poem about the dark – in all its meanings – but does have one of those spreading-of-the-wings moments that often occur in Licari’s work. In The Cyprian there is “True in the Senses” which connects poetry with truth:

I have always been a liar.
Some years I lied on the page as well – but
the poem won’t stand plumb.
Truth is ballast – without these stones
a poem is a pleasure craft, heeling in the wind. . .

For someone who sees one of lyric poetry’s great achievements to be its refusal to accept existing and fashionable ideologies and fantasies, the idea that a poem has to be “true” for it to work is more than a comforting thought even if the alternative – that the truest poetry might be the most feigning – could also be true.

Philip Hammial: Dervishing

Woodford, NSW: Island Press, 2023, 96pp.

It’s always good to revisit the amazing world of Philip Hammial’s poetry, described with impressive accuracy by a quote on the cover as “a torrent of mischief, dark humour, idiosyncratic construction and invigorating chaos.” Dervishing is a two-part book made up of twenty-five pages of poems and nearly sixty pages of prose pieces. All but three of the poems are in one of Hammial’s familiar poetic modes, fairly extended pieces which are “surreal” in that their energy seems to derive from internal transformations as much as subject matter and which almost always create a shape by, in the last lines, returning to the opening statement or a variation thereof. And these openings are usually quite intense eruptions of a strong and slightly garbled speaking voice: “Only one Exit: climb the wolf ladder to the sheep sky & / jump”, “Work your Jesus: rob your hands of their money”, “Man must truss!”.

The prose pieces are in Hammial’s “realistic” mode whose magic derives from an interaction between the remarkably varied and often hair-raising events they narrate and the fairly denotative, off-hand prose style. The material comes in part from Hammial’s remorseless travelling but also from biographical material from his adolescent days and about his time as an orderly in the Athens State Hospital of Ohio. Twenty-odd out of the nearly fifty pieces are recycled, often with slight emendations, from the 1989 book, Travel / Writing, shared with Anna Couani, a book that deserves to be saved from “the teeth of time”. The emphasis of the prose poems in Dervishing is a little different, however: at least the aftertaste it leaves is slightly different. Travel left one with a strong autobiographical sense of Hammial’s harum-scarum youth in Detroit, shared with schoolfriends whom he references in poems written nearly three quarters of a century later (in fact one of the epigraphs to Dervishing is a statement by one of those friends, Ralph Peckham: “Fifty years from now nobody’s gonna believe that we did all this shit in the 50s and 60s”). The Dervishing selection does contains these sorts of poems. In “The Float”, set, I think, in college days, he and his friends build a ghastly wheeled float and smuggle it into an otherwise bland parade:

. . . We borrow a wagon from my landlady’s son. Search-out and bring-back missions are deployed. Inspiration is found in trash cans and in a pile of discarded timber. Soon the wagon is bristling with sticks, an eight-foot high porcupine on wheels; and on its quills we impale rotten oranges, apples, grapefruit, cucumbers, heads of lettuce and long slabs of rancid bacon . . . my art teacher, watching from a third floor window, gives me an A for the semester.

In the earlier context of Travel/Writing, one was interested, as a reader, in the outrageousness of the prank but now what seems interesting is the way it prefigures much of Hammial’s later sculptures, knocked together out of items found in trash cans, outsider-art style.

Another theme of the Travel poems, continued here, is the description of experiences as an orderly in the Athens State Hospital, Ohio. Working in psychiatric wards, a young man gets a close look at madness – a very Hammial theme, especially when the madness of the staff is investigated. Again, in Dervishing, the sense is not so much of a recounting of a young man’s extreme experiences but rather of experiences which will flower in Hammial’s art, always attuned to madness. The first poem of the Dervishing selection, “ECT”, occurs a third of the way through Travel. It is genuinely disturbing – I seem to have it stuck in my mind since its first appearance – and describes ECT treatment meted out by a “Cuban refugee with no psychiatric training” who insists on wearing “a black suit, black shirt and slim white tie”. As the piece says, in conclusion,

. . . To say nothing of a large adult male, it’s surprising how strong and ferocious a ninety pound little old lady can become when she’s confronted with this inquisitor and his machine. It takes four of us to get her up on the table.

Some of Dervishing’s prose pieces that don’t appear in Travel clearly link into Hammial’s creative life. “The Sahara”, for example, begins as an exotic travel piece in Agadez, Niger, but moves on to an attempt to find a charm against the “evil eye”:

. . . After the race I go to the outdoor market and with the help of two Nigerian merchants have a charm against the evil eye made for me by an old Tuareg medicine man. His stall is filled with bones, teeth, mummified birds, bits and pieces of wood and stone and herbs in plates and jars. I’d wanted a vulture’s skull but he doesn’t have any in stock, so I settle for a crow’s head. He cuts out a hood from a piece of leather, wets it and sews it around the skull, leaving the black beak sticking out.
Give me the evil eye at a poetry reading: bad luck, it’s back on you.

Again, it’s the world of assemblage from detritus and its magical potentialities. “Heidelberg” describes seeing some outsider art in a bookshop window, meeting the manager and her family including her partner – who survived capture by the Russians during the war and ten years working in coal mines in the Urals – and his two sons, one of whom is autistic and the other who “doesn’t spend much time in this world”. You feel that Hammial is at home here – there are hundreds of paintings of a naïve artist, Pellegrino Vignali, in the attic – as most of the rest of us probably wouldn’t be. A tip by the bookshop manager leads to another poem which recounts visiting the Prinzhorn Collection – a collection of Outsider Art made in the 1920s – and later the Wolfli Archives in Berne. Both of these visits are described as “one of my best days”. “Dr Chandra” describes three visits – one in 1964 and two in 1969 – to an amazing man who both translates and prints books with extraordinary energy:

. . . And then to the bookshelves containing all of the books that Dr Chandra has edited and in some cases translated, including a Sanskrit/Hindi/English Dictionary that runs to twenty thick volumes. How one man could find time in one lifetime (he’s now forty) to edit so many complex, thick volumes AND print them is beyond me. . . Now we’re taken into a large room where seven elderly Tibetan monks are reproducing from memory and with the help of magnifying glasses the 8000 gods in the Tibetan pantheon, a huge project which Dr Chandra hopes to finish in the near future . . . At my request, Dr Chandra explains in simple language what a mandala is and how it works. By the end of his explanation I’m in bliss . . .

I’ve dealt with these pieces at some length to try to see the reasons why this group has such a different aftertaste for the reader compared to the selection in Travel though, on the surface they are pretty much of a piece. Once one begins to think in terms of the processes of Hammial’s creativity, its tendency to draw inspiration from the productions of Outsider Art, its interest in assemblage and detritus, its interest in madness and confrontation, these are prose pieces that are a long way from the sense one might have had earlier of the documentation of an early delinquent life followed by a fiercely peripatetic one. They are a lot more than that, more central to reading Hammial’s poetry than an exotic adjunct.

Two final points might be made about this prose section. Firstly, I think that this is the only one of Hammial’s thirty-six books (the energy clearly doesn’t lie only in the poems!) to use a photograph of one of his sculptures on its cover. It’s an assemblage of a head mounted on a light-stand with an inverted bowl on top and is thus fittingly called, “The King”. Secondly, the book’s title comes from one of the later prose pieces describing a visit to the house of the “mad mahdi”, the slayer of General Gordon, and afterwards to a dervish “performance” at a local cemetery. Rumi’s whirling dervishes are usually seen as balancing ecstatic frenzy with some kind of control, but Hammial concludes by contrasting the dervishes of Omdurman with those of Konya in Turkey, the historical centre of the ritual:

. . . Around & around they go in a cloud of dust. It’s hot, it’s wild, the drums are hypnotic. Any resemblance between these dervishes and the carefully choreographed dancing of the dervishes in Konya, Turkey . . .

and leaves the piece on these ellipsis points. But it’s a comment not only about dervishes but about poetry too: there’s a difference between true ecstasy and controlled ecstasy and Hammial’s art, it says, reasonably politely, belongs to the former.

And so to the twenty-two poems that make up the first part of this book. As I said in the introduction to this review (and have probably said innumerable times in other reviews of Hammial’s work) my sense of these fairly extensive poems is that they belong to a distinct sub-group in Hammial’s poetry (probably the largest sub-group) and have certain ways of developing, referring and moving. There are dozens of different types of surrealism and it would be a useful, if exhausting, project to try to map out these kinds (the general mode is now a hundred years old – Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto was published in 1924) and then try to see where Hammial’s work, and Outsider Art, might be positioned. Would Breton have allowed either of these to claim the title of Surrealist, for example? At any rate, what stands out in Hammial’s poetry, apart from its energetic drive, is the way that drive shifts from one subject to another. It’s an art, that is, of transformations.

This reading, I’m interested in the material that undergoes the transformations. There is autobiographical material of different kinds. One is the issue of age. Though Hammial’s intense energy shows no signs of slackening, it’s significant that he was born in January, 1937, and the issue of age and its different perspectives on what one has done, does emerge every so often. In Dervishing, the first poem, “On a Warm Summer Night”, begins,

What have we here? – a ramble for
a somnambulist, yours truly through a life
some dreamer lived & now it’s time to say goodbye
to rock & wave & Pussycat & the goat on the hill.
So how about just one more thrill: Hannah
in a kitchen with tea to pour. Watch me
stumble & spill. . .

And the final poem of the group is significantly titled, “Last Words”. Again, there is a poke at the solemn niceties of conventional poems about death in that the poem is made up of the final words of prisoners (mainly Americans) before execution. And they are all pretty mad. The last of the last words, for example, is from Aileen Wuornos a prostitute who shot and robbed seven of her clients and was executed in Florida in 2002: “I’m sailing with rock, and I’ll be back like Independence / Day with Jesus on June 6”.

Another feature of the material that stands out in these poems is the breadth of Hammial’s cultural knowledge. While the shifts and transformations occur, it reminds me that the material being used is much more sophisticated than one might expect in more conventional surrealist poetry (if that isn’t an oxymoron). “Rauch” uses material about the German Painter, Neo Rauch, and his critics. “Silas Green”, beginning as a poem about Hammial’s early hometown, Detroit, (which, suffering worse than most from economic downturn is more full of junk and detritus than most) shifts to a description of a travelling circus of the first part of last century, listing significant names who all sound like something from an American comic strip:

. . . . .
            Her street is all avenue, mine 
is mostly alley. Though of course I’ll take you 
wherever you wish to go. So will an elephant if you ask
nicely. I might take this opportunity to pay homage
to a few of the principals of the Silas Green Show
(1904-57): Ford Wiggins, Hortense Collier, Prof.
Eph Williams, J. Homer Tutt, Salem Tutt Whitney,
Ada Brook, Nipsy Russell! Well done people!
So let’s pick one of these circus folk – Hortense
(my choice) - & put her on a trapeze that’s swinging
in slow motion towards us but, like Proust
in the Bay of Corinth in that poem 
by Baquero, almost here, almost close enough
to smell the rose in her hair – swings back, fades
into temps perdu. . .

but, as this shows, modulates comfortably into high culture with its reference to the poem “Marcel Proust Cruises the Bay of Corinth” by the Cuban poet, Gaston Baquero. If Hammial’s version of surrealism can be described as extreme experiences used in poems which push structure as well as syntax to distortion, then the material used is authentic and amazingly varied and often sophisticated in the breadth of its cultural reach.

But, as I said before, a lot of the material comes from a quite different area of scholarly speculation: the self. And a self in its mid-eighties has a lot to think about. The first poem introduced the life of an elderly self as “a ramble / for a somnambulist” and “In My Opinion” is a grotesque version of an overview of life and also a consideration of the role of material that is passed over as mere detritus, junk:

no funk has it all over defunct.
Who put the oranges in your 30s?
Who put the grapes in your 50s?
Who toys with who here?
I know where you hid the spoons.
You don’t know where I’ve hidden the forks.
. . . . . 
If what’s hidden wants to be found it will sing
in a dead language. What’s junk
for a shrink is bunkum for a ward nurse.
Who put lemons in your 80s?

Willo Drummond: Moon Wrasse

Waratah, NSW: Puncher and Wattmann, 2023, 84pp.

This is a complex, intriguing and quite exciting first book. The central two (of its four sections) are a kind of poetic search, not for the various certainties or states that poets yearn for, but for a single poet, Denise Levertov. As a long time admirer of Levertov – surely the most likable (and one of the most rewarding) of the post-war school of American “New Poets” – I’m immediately well-disposed and it’s a disposition carried through the other poems of Moon Wrasse. Of course, it raises the question of what one wants from “pursuing” another poet. A poet wants poems, perhaps, as an intellectual wants a better and fuller understanding. But another poet always remains, ultimately, out of reach: the quest valuable but the grail unobtainable. You can feel this in poems like “On Finding and Not Finding Levertov” and “Cedar Tree” in which Drummond visits Valentines Park in Ilford, a place looming large in Levertov’s childhood. In the first of these the issue is one of maturity: the difficulty is to try to see the world through the eyes of a child, even if the child is a nascent poet experiencing the “double vision” of places both in their ordinariness and in the more vibrant life within them, a vision which is the basis of Levertov’s first book, published in England before her emigration to America. “Cedar Tree” is a poem of frustration: touching the tree doesn’t produce the frisson of connection with the poet. In a sense it’s a pilgrim’s frustration but, thinking about the tree rather than the young Denise Levertov, there is a connection of a kind Levertov would have responded to:

. . . . . 
And though I felt
more than a thousand

years of life humming
there, in which you believed,
under which you cultivated

a life of Awe,
I could not
palpate the precise

pulse of your making. For
what matters
             is not
what is
    or how
            it was

but how you saw
it . . .

Since no smart-phone camera can catch any of this, the poet is left with “a reduction, / or nothing // resembling a path / to you . . . “.

As an outsider, it’s hard to be confident about what the relationship between these three poets is. On one level it has a kind of archaeological drive whereby exploring the work of Levertov leads, at a lower level, to the work of Rilke and which might, conceivably, lead to his poetic antecedents. If not an archaeological impulse, it might be an exploration of the layerings of influence. I have always thought that Levertov’s response to Rilke was a response not so much to his poetry as to his pronouncements about the correct attitude on the part of the poet, of the correct attitude vis a vis reality. It’s no accident that, using the references in Moon Wrasse as a sample, Rilke’s prose (his letters, the Notebooks of Malte Laurid Brigge) figures more largely than his poetry. For Levertov it established the stance of the poet as a high and demanding calling and she carried that throughout her career. Her poetry, however, is entirely different to Rilke’s, being very much of its time and place in its sense of being “open” or “naked”. There is, for example, none of Rilke’s formalism in her work and one of her indisputable achievements is to retain the notion of a high calling but combine it with her own, less hieratic, American open-form poetry to the point where she might still be used in classes today to give readers an idea of what such open forms can achieve when exploited by a great poet. Just as Levertov’s poetry is quite unlike Rilke’s, so Drummond’s poetry is quite unlike either of these two mentors. It works much more by quotation and allusion and the resulting poems can often seem more like assemblages rather than expressions of a clear, personal lyric voice. A group of poems from the second section of Moon Wrasse take as their starting point Rilkean phrases which Levertov had used as part of an index to the poet (something that I wasn’t aware she had done). This results in a triple layering rather than a single allusion and produces poems of satisfying complexity. Again, this process of quoting and layering is one of the available styles of our times so perhaps there is a certain, pleasingly regular, initiatic chain that links a poet of the 1920s with one of the 1970s and one of the 2020s.

The first and fourth sections of Moon Wrasse are not at all about finding and not finding a precursor poet, though many of the themes are interconnected with the poems from the middle parts of the book. Here we seem in a world of liminality and transformation, of dispersal and accretion, but also one which poses questions about the nature and possibilities of lyric poetry. In the case of the former, the totemic animal is the fish of the title which (as usual, if I sound knowledgeable about this, it is courtesy of Wikipedia) is a “protogynous hermaphrodite”, that is it changes sex from female to male. This idea of gender transformation is, obviously, one very current today and various members of the animal and plant world have been pressed into service as symbols. The title poem itself, is, in contrast with the earlier poems of the book, where disappointment, depression and failure are often paramount, a near rhapsodic poem about personal experience: in other words, a lyric poem. It certainly isn’t a po-faced “capturing” of an odd, smallish fish:

. . . . . 
Here
        you are
        forming, transforming
twinkling your webbed toes
shaking your tail
crescent. Lyre-wrasse
we cycle
through the dappled light
of the casuarina -
holding hands
like younger lovers
in a film
in a dream

All is calm and comfort
here, moving in
our translucent
cocoon
“self-made” and safe
as houses -
Or as a fresh-made pair
of parrot fish
pyjamas. 

The precise personal relationship behind a poem like this is never really available to a reader, as it never is in lyric poetry. What, after all, do we know about the minutiae of Catullus’s love for his brother beyond what two poems tell us about the intensity of his love? But we know enough to appreciate the slightly comic elements and the domestic-rhapsodic tone. It also has a place to fill in the structure of the book whereby the bleaker poems of the first section are, symphonic-fashion, replaced by a more optimistic tone in the final part.

The first section, too, has a totemic being, the mangrove. It is introduced in a prefatory poem, “Seed”, which focusses on the fact that mangroves (like other animals such as humans) are viviparous: that is they produce a miniature version of themselves which they then allow to disperse. Another poem, “Propagules for Drift and Dispersal”, works on the symbolic meanings of this for the author: “When I was one such kid, I couldn’t wait to flee / this drowned river valley . . . . . Through sheer force of willpower / I’d build my own terra firma; show life was more than a sentence // -based rehearsal . . .”. But, of course, there is also the inevitable symbolic echo of the experiences of a lyric poet whereby the poems are produced and dispersed in publication, the “Go litel boke” kind of envoi that can preface (as in Catullus) or conclude a larger work.

The other poems of this first section are marked by expressions of grief and loss. Again, a reader isn’t privy to the exact details of this but “Unspoken” and “Ways of Seeing”, with their emphasis on the moon and the Egyptian way of calculating the beginning of a month by the state of the moon, suggest that the issue is pregnancy. The book’s first poem, “The Act of Making”, begins with the proposition that “There is always something to be made / of pain” and finishes by suggesting a kind of stoicism: “Parched // you shake barren dust / from boots, walk on”. And “Sail”, one of the poems that first attracted me to the book, is very much about the moment when someone collapses into depression imagined as the wind – which has previously bellied the sail and produced a flowing forward motion – suddenly dropping:

. . . . . 
Experience says, in time,
                         the canvas will snap

taut. Right now
this sheet is the shape of living.

The ladder’s blown
the world’s all wailing wind.

The final two poems of this first section both search for consolation, one in grief and the other in transformation. “Archaeology” uses the “diving into the wreck” kind of metaphor to see the grieving process as a journey through an underworld, as much like miners as archaeologists. I read the ending as bleak but optimistic, although I might have the tone wrong:

. . . . .
      so when we reach the water table
    on which our city floats
when we glimpse the rusted ladder that leads towards the light

      we know to stow our picks and grasp with two hands, the frame
   of each breaking, tenderskinned
ending, to the ink of night.

“Some Words for Migratory Birds” recalls the interest in dispersion perhaps used as a metaphor for transformation. In this poem, the personal elements – the poet’s stake in the metaphor – are not, again, entirely clear, but the transformation occurs within a couple imagined as travelling like migratory birds and the conclusion is challenging but ultimately optimistic, something rather different to the tone of the earlier poems of this first section:

. . . . . 
Thing is, the slightest shift in alkalinity
sets the whole thing in motion. We must
conserve our energy, for there’s just
so far to go. Here
                             listen to my voice:
                             the world is waiting for you
                             and you flight-notes. What
                             will you make of them?	Turn
                                                                               face northward                                                        
                                                                                                       embark –

“Archaeology” derives its metaphor of “an archaeology of grief” from Helen Macdonald’s memoir, H is for Hawk. I know this only because the note for this poem tells me so. There are nine pages of notes for the poems of Moon Wrasse and they are a kind of topic in themselves. Many people will find this a bit extreme and recall William Carlos William’s disgust with the way in which “The Waste Land” (another poem with extensive notes) had driven poetry back to the classroom when it should be focussing on the reality that surrounded the poet. The fact that many books of poetry have their origins in a project undertaken for a higher degree adds to this schoolroom/scholarly quality. But the growth of notes in recent books is obviously generated by the conjunction of two factors. The first is that it is increasingly common for poems to begin not in ambient reality but in other poems, either by generating a new text from the old or – as in Moon Wrasse – layering existing work, together with the author’s own contribution to make texts that are sometimes assemblages and sometimes just highly allusive. When coupled with the fact that there is a drive to out writers as plagiarists, you can see why poets want to make sure that they credit every use of another’s work. I’ll quote the note to “Archaeology” in its entirety though it is one of the shorter notes to the book:

“The archaeology of grief” is from Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk (2014: 199); “forgotten ways of sight” is an allusion to a phrase from the same passage; “silver moon not yet lost / at bottom of silted well” is an allusion to a line from Denise Levertov’s “Everything that Acts Is Actual,” Here and Now (1957); “weigh” and “by… carat… of heart” are from Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke Vol II 1910-1926, (Trans. Greene & Norton 1948: 297); “blood”, “glance and gesture” are from Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (Trans. Norton 1949: 27).

Readers might object to such material on the grounds (which have never been entirely, logically demonstrated) that a poem should “stand on its own two feet”, but a critic is likely to be thankful that that at least part of the inner workings of a poem should be laid bare.

Sarah Holland-Batt: The Jaguar

St Lucia: UQP, 2022, 127pp.

Sarah Holland-Batt’s brilliant new book is very much built around her father’s long illness and eventual passing. Not only is it the subject of the book’s first of four sections but the final section, which looks like being – like the third section of her previous book, The Hazards – about place and culture, is distorted, as it progresses, into poems about firstly her grandfather and his place – Gibraltar during the war – and finally her father in the long concluding sequence, “In My Father’s Country”. Not that readers of Holland-Batt’s work won’t have met the father before. He appears in “The Woodpile” an early poem of her first book, Aria, chopping wood in what seems to be a symbolically significant scene: the stacked wood encourages decay and various kinds of spider although “the heartwood burnt longest”. And in “Embouchure” and “The Flowers on His Bedside Speak of Eternity”, both from The Hazards, we re-encounter him, this time in a serious stage of the illness. The grandfather, especially his painting, also appears in two poems of Aria. In the light of the intense focus of The Jaguar, these seem like preliminary sketches, poems more interested in the poet’s unease than in forensically describing the father’s illness and seeing how something so extended and debilitating can be approached by poetry. We also find a reference to her father’s death in her excellent book of brief studies of individual Australian poems, Fishing for Lightning, when she looks at Brendan Ryan’s “A Father’s Silences” as an example of elegy. She has a response that reminds me of my own when my first child was born: astonishment at the fact that the world seemed to be going on in its ordinary way as though it were unaware that something earth-shattering had occurred. Of course, she met with “things dying, I with things newborn”.

If one compares “The Burr” – the first poem of “In My Father’s Country” – with the first poem of the final section of the book itself, “Driving Through Drystone Country”, you can see how one of her many talents – the ability to deal with landscape in a verbally tactile way – is given an allegorical twist that in no way reduces the verbal intensity. “Driving Through Drystone Country” contains what I think is a non-symbolic registration of environment:

. . . . . 
Bronze field barns
slope in local vernacular -
sandstone cubed with a level eye,

quoins of gritstone
bracketing each corner.
Slovenly roofs pitch

over hay store and cow stall -
industry of the particular -
and everywhere the regular metre

of drystone walls, 
arrowheads of shale
fitted with flagstone precision. . .

This is brilliant of its kind – I like the way “pitch” is converted from a noun to a verb – but its kind is registration, the proof for us readers of poetry that prose must attain a pretty high level before it can bring off anything like this when, in a novel, especially, it enters one of its descriptive passages.

The opening of the first of the eleven poems that make up “In My Father’s Country” has the same kind of precise evocative registration:

It is guesswork, this slatternly backcountry
I climb in darkness:

ice shirring gunmetal moors,
each hillock and rise

a cairn of tortoise stones,
slate in skid and trip steps . . .

but here it is overlaid by the way the poet is entering the landscape. Here it is not a matter of just registering but of deploying the idea of a trip through the landscape of her father’s origins in Yorkshire (I think) as being simultaneously a search for him. And “a search for him” is also allegorical since it is a search to understand the parent whom she has been watching unravel during his long decline. In fact, the second poem of this sequence says:

                    Your dying

has taken the better part
of two decades, as if,

handed this one last task,
you have resolved 

to do it exhaustively . . .

That word “better” might carry a little more weight than it usually does here, especially if we register that that is probably almost the entire length of Holland-Batt’s writing career, making her father’s decline and death more than a solitary traumatic event. In a very practical sense, understanding her father’s life is also understanding her own.

“In My Father’s Country” maps both external and internal landscapes and it has, at its heart, a kind of progression through time as well as landscape, beginning with his boyhood and ending with his death. The poems of the first section of The Jaguar, though they too are organised chronologically, don’t seem to be about the progression of the illness. I read them almost as a set of variations, responses to the question of how one can deal with these events poetically. The first one, as its title, “My Father as a Giant Koi”, suggests, looks to the power of metaphor. But the poem’s central metaphor, instead of being a simple comparison to convey something of the man’s state, is allowed to develop a life of its own, pulling the poem away from the hospital bed towards the world of the koi. It’s not an unusual technique in poetry but here it is strengthened by Holland-Batt’s ability to make the metaphoric world as densely registered as the world of the hospital. The first few lines will show what I mean:

My father is at the bottom of a pond
perfecting the art of the circle.
He is guiding the mottled zeppelin 
of his body in a single unceasing turn
like a monorail running on greased steel,
like an ice skater swerving on a blade.
His scales are lava and ember dappled with carbon.
His tail, a luxurious Japanese fan.
He is so far beneath the green skin of duckweed
he cannot make me out, or I him. . .

One shudders to think what Newton, who described poetry as “ingenious nonsense”, would have made of this, but creatively it is very compelling. The intense poetic language is reserved not for the father but for the metaphor of the fish – “his scales are lava and ember dappled with carbon” – even to the point of deploying metaphors – the ice skater, the zeppelin, the Japanese fan – which at one farther remove illuminate the central metaphor of the fish. And, of course, one doesn’t have to be a sharp hermeneuticist to see that there are multiple other ways of reading this poem. The following of the metaphor of the fish, for example, might be designed to deflect the poet from facing up to the reality of describing the symptoms of her father’s mental and physical decline openly. If deliberate, this could be read as an additional expressionist layer to the poem saying, “Look how bad it is that I take refuge in a spiralling of metaphors”. If it is unconscious, it might be that the tension between the situation and the baroque metaphors give a structure to the poem that the poet recognises as “working” and producing a satisfactory whole.

Something similar occurs in “The Kindest Thing”, another poem from this first group. It deals with a specialist’s advice to withhold antibiotics so that her father will die from pneumonia which he calls “the old man’s friend”. This, and the handsomeness of the doctor provokes a double metaphor: python and mantis:

                  he is almost shining 
with charisma and vitality, this man who coaxes
patients towards death like an emerald boa
stretching its pink jaw  by inches
until the glass frog is entirely inside the snake’s head,
subsumed into the hypnotic knot of its body,
its scales flexing electric green as new leaves,
its white lightning bolts rippling and contracting -
or like the sinister musk blossoming
of an orchid mantis – limbs variegated
like borlotti beans in a flecked rose and cream -
swaying like a silken flower to lure
the dreaming crickets in . . .

There is a lot that is provoking this more than extended metaphor. The poet finds herself attracted to the handsome doctor of death and the extended metaphor might be read as partly a kind of personal distraction from one’s own self-disgust. And in a way the poem enacts this because the imaginative language of the metaphors is as seductive as the operations of the boa and matis themselves: it’s hard not to think of this poem as “the one with the rose and cream borlotti beans”. At the same time, as the poem goes on to explore, this isn’t a matter of relinquishing oneself to death but of relinquishing someone else – “I am offering over my father, tenderly / unhinging death’s jaws”.

The second section of The Jaguar begins with a poem of place and leads readers to expect that having dealt with the father’s illness, this might be a group of poems about place, travels and cultures: like the third section of The Hazards. But this section, too, seems, like the last, to be dragged towards the subject of the father. The second poem, although seemingly, by its title, about Pikes Peak, a mountain in Rockies, is really about the onset of her father’s illness, a mild stroke experienced while hiking there. The next poem, “Substantia Nigra”, looks at an X-ray or MRI of her father’s brain but it too is, in a sense, a poem about a place: here the centre of a human brain. There are other poems about the father’s travels and planned travels and they continue the sense of the father’s decline as a kind of black hole warping the spacetime of the poetry, forcing itself on to them so that what should have been poems about place and culture are distorted.

The only section which initially seems free of this distortion is the third where Holland-Batt deals with the other distressing aspects of emotional life, especially the failure of relationships. Even here, though, the father makes an appearance – or non-appearance, “Miles away / my father is disappearing” – in the poem “Alaska” where summer in New York and a partner’s story of how his friend’s father took his own life leads the poem to shift to the suicidal spawning run of salmon in the icy rivers of Alaska:

. . . . . 
I turn to you to say I blame them, these fathers
who do not wait to see us grow up
or what we make of their tyrannical love
but you’re silent, already sleeping,
and morning is coming on again, another morning. 

No need to point out the homophonic pun of the repeated word of the final line.

In this third section, although there is less of the intense verbal registration and the extended involved metaphors of other poems in the book, there is still a baroque, over-the-top quality about many of the poems. They aren’t, in other words, stony evocations of personal misery: the poetry is driven by a kind of hyperbolic exuberance. “Instructions for a Lover” is a good example of this playful baroque:

Bring me lemons and mint, a pitcher’s fishbowl
loaded with ice and slices of cucumber,

a Tom Collins in a tumbler, the fizz of it.
Give me sulphur summer heat, tarry sidewalks,

a tired hydrant geysering over the street,
a plane ticket to the Virgin Islands or Madrid . . .

One’s tempted to say that this might be what is asked of a poem rather than a lover but even this playful expansion of desires is constrained by a sharp finish: “and above all, take note of all the things I say – / pull me closer, push me away”. Another poem, “Ode to Cartier” has no such return to practicalities in its conclusion. A celebration of bling – “I want to be decked and set – / smoke rolling from my porte-cigarette, // plush as a leopard’s pelt . . .” – its finish – “let me die in peace // with the silk of a jaguar’s breath / huffing in my ear at dawn” – arrives at the animal of the book’s title, an animal that has gone through various modifications, including appearing as a car (a Jaguar XJ) which the poet’s father buys on impulse as is mind begins to become erratic. “Affidavit” is, like both these poems, a baroque extravagance of desire:

Fly me on a Lear jet to Antibes
          and lay me in state on a sunflower chaise.
Read me the rich list. I want to be chased
          with coconut oil and redacted
behind Jackie O shades . . .

We can also see the attraction to extended developments of hyperbolic metaphor in these poems, the kind of thing I looked at in “My Father as a Giant Koi”. “Parable of the Clubhouse” begins with a metaphor used at the end of a relationship – “When it ended, he said I had never let him in” – and opens this out in the most extended way possible:

. . . . . 
as if I were a country club with a strict dress code
and he’d been waiting outside all those years
without his dinner jacket, staring in
at the gleaming plates of lobster thermidor,
score of waiters in forest green blazers,
and the stout square shoulders of other men
who alternated tweed and seersucker over the seasons . . .

and so on. It brings me back to the issue of metaphor in Holland-Batt’s work, metaphor as something subject to the same intensifying and development as other features. In one of the poems, “On Tiepolo’s Cleopatra” – undoubtedly written with John Forbes’ great poem in mind – she imagines the reclining Cleopatra looking with contempt on the world Mark Antony brings with him:

. . . . . 
this is your idea of wealth, is this all it takes
to woo you, poor rubes, there is a land beyond metaphor
there are luxuries beyond empire’s comprehension – 
and to prove the point, I’ll swallow a pearl.

The notion of a “land beyond metaphor”, conceived as something a little more than saying that riches are a metaphor for true wealth, is an intriguing one from a poet whose use of metaphor is so complex and seemingly driven.

Dominic Symes: I Saw the Best Memes of My Generation; Pam Schindler: Say, a River

I Saw the Best Memes of My Generation (Canberra: Recent Work, 2022, 79pp.)
Say, a River (Port Adelaide: Ginninderra, 2023, 70pp.)

The initial pleasure in connecting these two excellent books derived from what seemed their absolute difference. It was both rewarding and fun to actually read poems from each book alternately and I was tempted to structure what I want to say about them by seeing them as opposite poles of the poetic spectrum: the one being tonally inclined to the wry and in terms of subject matter very much about how we are located in the (comparatively) new digital age; the other, tonally serious and thematically concerned with how we live and interact with the natural world. A little thought showed this to be misguided: there are far more alien outposts in the map of poetry than these: “language” poetry, found, conceptual poetry, the various forms of text-fiddling, multi-authorship poems, and so on. In fact, thinking of as much of contemporary poetry as I know and imagining it as a map or many-cornered geometric shape, these two books would occupy a reasonably central position and might even be able to speak to each another.

Dominic Symes’s I Saw the Best Memes of My Generation is, I think, a little betrayed by its title which suggests a certain facile cleverness. The reality is rather different. True the poems have a wry, often self-deprecating tone but they also worry about things in a serious and moving way. Admittedly some of the things worried about can be worried about in a reasonably comic, shoulder-shrugging way. The first poem, “Algorithm”, for example, is a list of contemporary insecurities, its title, presumably, deriving from the digitally structured way in which, nowadays, our profiles are matched to what is fed to us so that the tailored input we receive shapes us by confirming and strengthening our prejudices: no need to engage in real argument with an opposing case here. The poem begins with a sense of loss of identity when the world doesn’t process us correctly:

stood before an automated door
that refused to acknowledge my existence
I thought
but I’m here . . .

and goes on, through various contemporary angsts, to finish with the fear that one’s previous digital history will create a portrait of the self that will make getting a job tricky:

now I watch the candle
folding in upon itself
anxiously encoding its light
upon the ceiling of my bedroom

while I’m up all night
deleting statuses from when I was 19
in case I ever want to get a job

I like the compressed transition described when the ancient lighting method – the candle – encodes itself on the ceiling. It’s part of a contemporary sense of time being speeded up by the accelerating pace of technological development (something that was predicted, at least in general terms, by the book, Future Shock, now more than half a century old). It produces a sense of premature ageing that many of the poems in this book reflect. Since the gap between twenty and thirty now seems more than it did previously – caused by the nature of technological developments that the former are on top of – it’s no surprise to find a thirty-year old poet looking back to a time – what might previously have been imagined as a golden age in an infinitely distant past – when “time online was / less anxious – not a threat / to national security”, or one didn’t have to apologise for pontificating about love to someone “under 25” as he does in “Machu Picchu”. Time present is “no country for old men”, except that for Yeats being old was being sixty whereas now it is more like being thirty.

“Late Night Thoughts” is a kind of compendium of reasons for a contemporary depression, or, at least, a way of feeling oneself a failure in the contemporary world. It’s a list, imagined as being items seen from the window of a speeding train: “past all the times you said you’d read an article when you’d only read the headline . . . & the loyalty schemes you signed up to only to harbour years of frustration at all the spam . . . every time you nodded confidently in the seminar about Bruno Latour // every Bergman film you lied about enjoying . . .” It finishes by asking “why a train?” to which there are a couple of answers. Firstly because, archaic as trains are, they are a symbol of a sense of life moving quickly, too quickly for calm ratiocination. And secondly, because there is a kind of Australian poetic tradition of seeing train journeys as a symbol of life itself, something going, as in Slessor’s great poem, to unseen destinations, “mysterious ends”.

I Saw the Best Memes . . . is also a book that has a lot to say about the nature of poetry both in its subject matter and in its methods. I’m attracted to the poems formally. Many of them have a satisfying tension between a superficial unity derived from the subject matter and a tendency to pull apart derived from the fact that Symes is a poet who operates in discrete and pithy pieces of observation. This can be seen to good effect in “Scatole Personali”, an extended piece about Rome, where the structure of discrete observations is reflected in the title which (if my reading of the author’s note is accurate) derives from an art exhibition in Rome in which boxes of found objects were laid out on the floor and viewers were encouraged to take things. The method feels a lot like the poetry of Laurie Duggan but the personality behind these observations is rather different. With Duggan one gets a sense of wry but dispassionate observation of aspects of the world and of human cultures revealing themselves in odd and surprising ways. In Symes’s work, I think, the impress of the personality of the author, and especially of the awkwardness of contemporary living, seems stronger. I can’t imagine a Duggan poem beginning, as this one does, with

Rome opens its doors
but is never around
when I choose to stay in

          so in a way
          we miss each other
          but still I get to enjoy
          sifting through cupboards
          & using the free wi-fi . . .

One of my favourite poems in this book is the concluding one, “Nice Things, Artfully Arranged”, which pointedly asks, “how do I go fitting all this in / one poem”, the “all this” being not only meditations about marks and traces – very much material for a poem-poem – but also about the issue of compression and the inevitable fact that poems, the smallest and most ephemeral of the art-products of human creativity, often have the ambitions of containing the largest range of experience. And keeping the poem from being an intellectual exercise is the issue of grief underlying it in the references to his grandmother’s death and wake. It’s an issue and a setting which also occurs in “The Coffee Coffee Drinks” which is built around a necklace given by his grandfather to his grandmother. How can a small “heart-shaped chamber” contain that much love. How can a poem contain that much of the lived lives of the world, let alone the vast non-human expanses of the universe?

Emotion, in the form of underlying grief, is a feature of Pam Schindler’s Say, a River. If the dominant issue of I Saw the Best Memes . . . might be said to be how we live and love in the contemporary world, Say, a River might be said to be about how we respond to the loss of loved ones expressed as an intense engagement with the natural world. It’s a world where digitisation seems to have made no impact and as a result detractors will find it old-fashioned and admirers – in which I include myself – classic and timeless. Just as Dominic Symes’s first poem set the scene for what is to follow, so does Pam Schindler’s:

the flame tree scatters
little silk goblets, Chinese-red
loosed handfuls of scarlet

the storm, passing at a distance,
is a clot of dark gestures,
flung brushstrokes – stilled,
suspended

and the flame-tree scatters
the light red and the dark red
little stemmed cups

and it is a tree scattering itself
against the light
mingling red into its own shade

exclaiming itself
in wet red silk
against the painted light

On the surface, this could be read as a painterly version of the classic “capture” mode, obsessed with getting the exact colour of the flame-trees’ spectacular blossoms “down” in words. But the context of the other poems, which often deal with loss, makes one rethink the scene. That passing storm with its “clot of dark gestures” that looks originally like a visual contrast to the “Chinese red” of the blossoms, also wants to be read as the darker background which in other poems is overt grieving. In other words, the natural world where most of these poems are set, bears a responsibility to reflect human emotional life, not in a one-to-one “pathetic fallacy” way, but in one much subtler where the balance between the inner world and the outer, “natural” one is constantly explored. A poem later in the book, “Fig-tree / Fig-bird” might well be, fairly covertly, about this issue. The two – tree and bird – are so intimate and similar that it almost seems as though the fig-tree had produced the birds as an expression of itself. It’s tempting to read the relationship as that between the natural and the human world and this might be supported by the end of the poem:

 . . . . .
in its dark foliage
wings speak to leaves,
to hands – who is it
sings in this tree?

I think I am the sand’s familiar
how it shapes feet for walking
for printing its skin

The question of whether the bird is singing, or the tree is singing through the bird can be read as asking whether the natural world forms us or we simply express ourselves and our griefs and excitements with the natural world as a background. And the way the same issue is transferred out of metaphor in the last three lines supports this.

Loss – more frequent in these poems than excitement – interacts with the world in intriguing ways. A really fine poem, “The Leaving”, shows how well the “outside” world can be deployed in an elegy. It begins with a walk towards the water with carefully observed details that prevent the allegorical nature of what is going on dragging the poem towards vagueness:

your brother with you as you walk
down to where the air goes fuzzy with salt
and a boat carves the green bay,
a cormorant on every channel-marker

you sing him a hymn from childhood
the sand braided with the tide
jellyfish like heavy-petalled glass flowers
sea eagles rafting the wind . . .

The “walk towards the water” is, of course, the walk towards death and so at the end, “it is suddenly too deep / and he goes on without you”. Although it is a standard trope (think of Paul Dombey or Tennyson putting out to sea) the quality of this poem lies in its precision about a natural world which generally has to serve as an allegorical image. The idea of the ocean as one’s death is also used in another intriguing poem, “Or This Way”, written as an answer to a short poem by Anne Kellas, and configuring death not as a plunge into the deeps but as a quiet retreat into the familiar shallow waters of a bay:

 . . . . .
I will head out across the shallows
the flat shelving seabed
ankle-deep, dappled with sun

and flatten myself like a stingray
into a resting hollow
and pull up the sand like a sheet . . .

As a counterbalance for the tendency of poems about the natural world to inhabit only a very small and precisely rendered portion of that world, there are also poems in this book that deal with more exotic locations. In fact the last of the book’s three sections might well be read as different ways in which poems can inhabit a wider world. And this doesn’t only happen because they are set in places like Iona or Assisi but because sometimes they deal with ethical issues – “Stolpersteine (Stumbling Stones)” is about the German art-project which involves placing plaques in the pavements where Jewish victims of Nazism lived. One of the last poems of the book, “As if, Curlews”, describes the birds which leave Queensland in autumn to fly to Russia for the northern breeding season. The poem ends by imagining the riches of the northern spring – “the insect burgeoning // as if only such plenty / could feed such flight”. It may be fanciful, but I want to read this as an expression of poetry’s pull towards wider vistas, something that will be in opposition to the intense focus on the local that Schindler’s treatment of the natural world – as in the first poem, say – involves.

To try to bring these very different books together by way of some sort of conclusion, I note that the final word of I Saw the Best Memes . . . is “trace”, a word pregnant with contemporary (well, fairly contemporary) significance. There are traces in Say, a River too and Schindler is very sensitive to the worn signs that populate parts of the natural world she is exploring. “The Old Track Signs: Little Lake Valley” is, as the title says, about the old sign cut out to name the place and expressing the hope that words in a poem might be left in a similar way to commemorate a death. And “The Old Track Signs: Lake Holmes” describes in detail how the words “Lake Holmes”- “two English words” – are carved in “frayed silver wood”. It’s an example of a trace but one that is, temporally speaking, very shallow. As the poem says;

 . . . to know its old name
is beyond our listening 

and before that? a presence
of darkness and silver, nameless
dip in the moraine,  
a pool for the wind’s shaping.

Peter D. Mathews: From Poet to Novelist: The Orphic Journey of John A. Scott

Amherst, N.Y.: Cambria, 2022, 242pp.

One of the defining motifs of John A. Scott’s poetry and prose is the recurrent notion of an underground lying beneath the surfaces we are accustomed to treading on. It is the source of his interest in the myth of Orpheus – who ventures into one version of that underground in search of Eurydice – and the complex notions of creativity and death which, following Rilke and the late nineteenth century French poets, he teases out and deploys. There are many other undergrounds from the sewers of Paris in Before I Wake to the network of tunnels which underlie the reality of the events of N and connect distant times and places as well as distant and dissonant voices. The imperative for poor Telford in N is expressed by the sinister Esther Cole when she tells him that, if he is to uncover how her husband died, he will have to “dig deeper . . . not just for my sake but for yours”. Digging deeper is also the imperative that lies behind good criticism, differentiating it from material that considers that its task is, Petronius-like, to separate “good” from “bad”, and from material that thinks that its main function is to bolt a specific, contemporary interest onto a defenceless text and see how it matches up. Peter D. Mathews’ book, From Poet to Novelist, is an example of good criticism in that it sees its function to be to tease out what the underlying generative structures in Scott’s work are. It’s not an easy task since Scott’s books are, for all their superficial attractivenesses, immensely complex in construction.

Although structured as a chronological survey of Scott’s books, From Poet to Novelist: The Orphic Journey of John A. Scott, has, as its full title suggests, an interest in framing how that chronology can be approached. In fact the book as a whole is sensitive to the balance between the extraordinary thematic and methodological unity underlying Scott’s work and the diachronic perspectives that are sensitive to developments and changes. As such it embodies a tension underlying much good criticism: on the one hand there is the desire to trace developments and changes and on the other, the desire to find underlying, everpresent generative obsessions. The major change that the book concerns itself with is Scott’s “abandonment” of poetry for fiction. The “death of the poet” is something the book is especially attracted to and its overriding Orphic notion of death, dismemberment and rebirth nicely deals with the fact that Scott’s most recent book, Shorter Lives, is, generically, a poetry book, despite its prose poems and prose sections.

A number of things are clear from Mathew’s investigations of these seven books of poetry and six novels. The first is that the literary cast of their author’s mind owes most to the literature of nineteenth century France not only in the frequent references to the poetry and prose of that period but in its themes: the nature of desire and its complex forms inside human lives, the nature of art and the principles on which it operates and by which works “of art” are generated, and so on. Secondly, there is a remarkable unity in Scott’s work, despite the radical differences in tone: the term “livre compose” is used and in Scott’s case it is accurate. Remarkably different as the books are – compare the high campus comedy of Blair, for example, with the fraught intensity of The Architect – they share underlying themes and generative procedures: their unity is well beyond the obvious one of having been written by the same person. Thirdly, there are three crucial texts for making sense of what Scott’s “project” (to employ an overused term) is: “A Stitching of Water: Notes Towards a Poetic” of 1993, “Towards a Scriptural Realism” of 1996, and Scott’s doctoral thesis of 1997, “Approaching Coherence: Reflections on a Writing Practice”. As Mathews says:

The eventual development of the notion of “scriptural realism” derives from two key objectives. First, Scott reveals that “for the majority of my writing life I have sought to produce texts with an ethical trajectory, whilst still declaring the methods and processes of their construction”. This imperative partly explains why Scott has little interest in replicating the experimental approach of Robbe-Grillet. “My books seek no claim on this ‘authentic real,’” writes Scott, “yet their enquiry into human behaviour places them at odds with texts of zero readability. . . . . . Scott’s vision of “scriptural realism” thus eschews the false opposition between experimental and realist writing, innovatively deploying characteristics of both approaches . . .

This seems to go to the heart of the poetic and novelistic issues that Scott is dealing with. There is a perceived opposition between, on the one hand, the realist novel with its ability to look intensively at human behaviour, especially the ethics of human behaviour, while, at the same time, deploying plot devices that ensure that we keep turning the pages and, on the other, those experimental methods – the nouveau roman and the productions of the Oulipo, for example – which are capable of pulling the veil aside from the illusion of reality that realistic fiction deploys in the interests of a more honest vision of what a text is and what the author’s role as generator of that text is. Scott’s “scriptural realism” is really an intelligent compromise which – and this is where the genius lies – gets the best of both worlds. Scott’s fictions are built out of complex narrative devices – including unacknowledged quotation, superimposition of texts and their significances, phonetic translation, distortions of existing texts, to name only a few – which are not entirely hidden and can be found by readers prepared to dig beneath the surface of the text: Mathews makes much, in his analysis of Before I Wake, of the way in which a hyper-realistic portrayal of Parisian streets and restaurants is deliberately undermined by a single temporal impossibility. But Scott’s work is also immensely pleasurable at the superficial level.

A good example of both the underlying methodology and Mathew’s careful exposure of it might be found in the chapter devoted to Warra Warra. This novel has always seemed something of an outlier in Scott’s work in that its surface seems to mimic the genre of the popular ghost story. I think admirers of Scott’s poems and novels have always felt a little uncomfortable with it. Blair, another novel mimicking a popular genre, has enough brilliant prose at its surface to be attractive on that level and “Preface”, the finest of Scott’s pre-novel, long poems balances features of the “uncanny” genre of fiction with a surprising and unexpected amount of humour, especially in the letters in which Carl ventures into the London popular music scene.

A superficial reading of Warra Warra might see it as little more than an expansion of a clever idea. A commercial aeroplane explodes over a rural town in New South Wales but the spirits of the dead passengers begin to appear to haunt the inhabitants. Thus it plays on the notion that Australia’s inhabitants saw the newly arrived English colonisers as ghosts of their own departed. The ghosts become increasingly dangerous and, after wreaking violent havoc on the townspeople, eventually set up their own community, replicating the cosy English houses and gardens they have left behind and thus beginning to take over the land and impose their own culture. If Warra Warra were no more than this it might also be no more than its unfavourable initial reviews saw it as: a popularly written book in a popular genre with a clever idea as its starting point but with the fundamental problem (noted in a review by Ken Gelder) that the inhabitants of the town visited by the ghosts are not indigenous Australians but white Australians, only a few generations earlier than the ghosts who descend on them, despite the fact that the town itself and its major protagonist, Bill Pemmell, have names that relate to indigenous resistance. Beginning with two more sophisticated responses by David Mesher and Suzie Cardwell, Mathew’s chapter takes us into these issues in a subtler way, one more worthy of the book’s author. Mesher makes a connection with Laurie Duggan’s book on the visual culture of Australia, Ghost Nation, and its idea of “ghost” as not being “a shadow of something which is dead, but in a visual sense of images which ghost each other”. Scott, in “Approaching Coherence”, describes his method of “stitching” together existing texts as “not a characteristically postmodern adaptation of collage (Schwitters) or photomontage (Heartfield) but rather a form of combination printing (Henry Peach Robinson). As Mathews comments:

Warra Warra, then, is not only a ghost story, as its subtitle announces, but a “ghosted” story, a narrative that is created by the repeated layering of ideas and references that appear to operate on a single, interrelated textual plane.

Warra Warra declares itself to be more than a good idea expanded into a pastiche of a genre of popular fiction in many ways. One is in the context of Scott’s work, where it is part of a development whereby internal workings of desire, abuse and guilt are slowly moved to a national level, something made increasingly possible by moving from the fragmented forms of the poems to the longer, discursive possibilities of the novel. There is a lot about the Algerian dead in Paris in Before I Wake, and The Architect (whose core text is the The Book of Job) is, at least in part, about postwar Germany and its relationship with its Nazi past (as well as being, according to Mathews about “the dangerous susceptibility of the Australian mindset to the seductions of authoritarianism”). Warra Warra concerns itself with Australia’s colonial heritage not as something from the past but as something layered, photographically, onto the present. Warra Warra has echoes of the books that precede and follow it, radically different though they are. The Architect is about a devastating betrayal that the elderly German architect commits on his innocent Australian admirer: like The Book of Job, of which it is a kind of avatar, the betrayal is a horror that comes “out of the blue”. Warra Warra begins (after some throat-clearing scenes which establish the community of the town) with a brilliant narration of the remains of an exploded passenger plane crashing down out of the sky on the township. The Architect has, near the end, an apocalyptic scene in which Von Ruhland re-enacts God’s address to Job from the whirlwind: Warra Warra begins with an equally apocalyptic one. And N, the next novel, it should be remembered, contains, early on, the bombing of Darwin, again, fire from the sky. The Book of Job is also recalled in Warra Warra when the priest, O’Phelan, finds his bible opened at the page in which Eliphaz describes a vision arriving “at the hour when dreams master the mind and slumber lies heavy on man . . .” O’Phelan’s desperate attempt to cobble together an exorcism from random texts that he barely understands as well as popular texts like the novel, The Exorcist, which became a popular film, is, by the way, a semi-comic version of Scott’s own method of stitching texts together and a reminder that there are faux-poets in many of Scott’s works, especially Blair.

Mathews devotes some space in his chapter on Warra Warra to dealing with the book’s problematic conclusion in which the ghosts decide to leave aboard a paper ark and descend into one of Scott’s flooded cities. It’s a puzzling conclusion, slightly reminiscent of the final, “Exodus” section of Rodney Hall’s Just Relations, which might act as a reference text for the book although its hyperbolic, “magical realist”, style is a long way from the cooler, realistic prose of Warra Warra. As Mathew’s points out, we can hardly expect a triumphant conclusion to a vast problem such as Australia’s colonial heritage anymore than we could expect The Architect to solve Germany’s postwar problem with its Nazi past. It is an issue which has puzzled me since I first read the book and I’m impressed by Mathew’s approach which is to take the reader back to the individual issues of desire and guilt. In summary, he convincingly sees the book’s conclusion as being about fulfilled desire and the restlessness this produces:

The ghosts are caught in a pernicious cycle of nostalgia for their English homeland that brings them no actual satisfaction. The paradise they have created is entirely superficial, an external performance that becomes more empty with each reenactment. . . . Repetition thus functions as a form of emotional entropy that turns paradise into its opposite . . . . .This crucial theme of repetition, of returning to the past, drives the downward journey of the ghosts to the flooded city of Cudgegong . . . a descent into a watery underworld that releases them from a “power which for so long had held them in this state of neither life nor death relinquishing its grip”.

It’s a convincing solution and derives from extended engagement with the text, something not available to most time-pressed reviewers of novels. It certainly makes sense even if it makes our initial readings of the book embarrassingly superficial. The idea of “ghosting” as simultaneously a textual and anthropological practice is valuable though Warra Warra is not a one-dimensional parable/allegory about Australia’s dispossession of, and cruelty towards, its indigenous inhabitants. Rather it is a book (surreal ending and all) in which various allegorical possibilities lie over the top of the narrative. One of these, by far the most important, is the record of Pemulwuy’s war of resistance, but there are others. The novel begins with fire from the heavens and ends with a flood of sorts (at least a protracted spell of rain), a character called “Noah” Thompson is building the ark which eventually is mocked up into a version of the aeroplane that the ghosts “arrived” in so that biblical apocalypticism also overlies the narrative. And perhaps Mathews is right in seeing how important the theme of satisfied desire is in the experience of the ghosts, raising once again the theme of the inauthenticity of white Australian culture which was a major issue as early as the 1930s.

Thus Warra Warra, unsurprisingly, turns out to be an infinitely more complex text than early reviewers picked up. My widow’s mite in its interpretation involves the luring of the ghosts into the ark. It can only be done by recreating their original boarding of the aircraft with the ghostly flight attendant calling out instructions. This reminds me of Bunuel’s film, The Exterminating Angel (whose title alone resonates with almost all of Scott’s work). In the film a group of middle class citizens are trapped inside a house by a mysterious force. They eventually realise that the only method of escaping is to recreate the exact situation before the entrapment began. And it works.

My only lasting reservation about Warra Warra comes from its realist, popular fiction, mode. Usually Scott’s texts are coruscating and brilliant on the surface but Warra Warra’s surface prose is that fairly dreary narrative style that Australian novelists seem to fall into when they set their plot in a rural community. One of the passages that Mathews quotes, part of the character-establishing scenes of the novel’s opening, will show what I mean:

Jack Elliott and Ron Aitken sat opposite each other at a free-standing table within easy reach of the bar. It was the same table they had occupied from the days when they’d returned, each on his separate journey, one from the cement works, the other from the abattoir, up to thirty years before. The table notched along two sides with burns from Ron Aitken’s forgotten cigarettes. . . 

Scott is a brilliant stylist and this can only be a parody of the flat prose of Australian rural narrative, down to the carefully chosen neutral names for the two men. But it forms the bulk of what readers experience when approaching the novel and is one instance where I have always felt that the “benign realist” surface is unattractive and too dun-coloured.

To leave Warra Warra as a critical test-case and return to Mathew’s excellent book, it’s extraordinary how much lies below the surface in Scott’s works. There are references, teased out here, which I have never seen: the origin of the repeated theme of letters that one character passes on to another to read in order to determine whether they would have been “bearable” has a passage of Derrida as its source (or perhaps merely as a text that chimes with it). David Brooks reflects what will be a common experience for admirers of Scott’s work when he says on the book’s cover, “There are a great many ideas and details, which had not occurred to me or that I had not yet discovered . . .” So many, in fact, that one feels, after reading Mathew’s book, that it really might be no more than a primer, encouraging readers to dig deeper and more carefully, rather than being exhaustive. In fact, in Scott’s case, criticism might play an unusual role. Different writers hope for, and get, different things from criticism (ie another’s careful and sympathetic reading of their work) and in Scott’s case, I’ve often wondered what criticism can give him. There will be little that readers like Mathews or Brooks or myself can tell him that is new and we are, in a way, doomed to labour in territory that he knows intimately: we are unlikely to be able to offer any intriguing new perspectives to this particular author. To use one of his references in N, we will wander in amazement through the complex structures of his work knowing that we can only follow in his footsteps; like Professor Lidenbrock in Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth who, exciting adventures and discoveries notwithstanding, is always only ever following in the footsteps of Arne Saknussemm.

Sarah Day: Slack Tide

World Square, NSW: Pitt Street Poetry, 2022, 109pp.

Sarah Day’s new book begins with a prose quotation which explains its title. One might think that the moments between outgoing and ingoing tide barely need definition but the passage, in pointing out that though the water surface may appear placid, there are likely to be important and often conflicting currents running underneath, fits Day’s poetry so perfectly that you can see why it was included. Day has always been a poet sensitive to the complex phenomenon that might be called “what lies beneath” and the way in which this interacts with what lies on top. The title poem of her first book, A Hunger to be Less Serious, is a description of traffic being halted at a canal bridge which opens to let a boat pass through. It’s an emblematic scene that is rich with allegorisable possibilities: the drivers and passengers leave their cars to watch the boat pass serenely at eye-level, “carrying on board a gleaming catch / of strayed dreams and wish-fulfilments”, for example. But it is also a scene in which the drivers imagine driving onto the bridge as it opens and then crashing into the water: “The water-surface puckers with the quick current, / underneath, the grey deepens steeply; / its effect is sobering, satisfying”. A memorable poem from a later book, The Ship, describes a town suffering from the subsidence caused by centuries of mining so that when a house is sinking, its occupier “took it as given that a far distant / farmhouse had risen to view from an upstairs window”. Here the cumulative misery of the mining life of the past is what “lies beneath”, as the poem says, “far, far below on thought’s periphery”.

One could cite dozens of such symbolic situations in the poems of her eight previous books and there are plenty of them in Slack Tide. There is the title poem, for example, describing the experience of entering mud at the side of a flooded causeway at night, stepping “from the blackness / of air into blackness of water”. The world that the daylight-living, air-breathing protagonists enter is one with its own history, its own confidence, and one whose inhabitants have their own integrity:

. . . . . 
         The familiar is strange
as an underwater garden in lamplight,
an arrangement of star-struck shrubs
and tiny trees, idealised metropolis
for a myriad fish for whom the enchanting
is quite normal – neither are they troubled 
by our turbid wake. . . 

“Ouse” describes the profoundly powerful tides of The Wash in East Anglia and “Undertow” – the poem which follows it – the experience of being controlled by the contrary forces under the water. And a later poem, “The Mud Layer”, operating at a less forbidding, faintly comical, perspective, describes a mother swan attempting by example to convince her ducklings that the underwater world, the world of mud, is rich in nutrient possibilities. The chicks prefer the world above where they can “scud freely / and right way up, across mirrored clarity // of liquid blue sky, cumulous, green shoots of rushes, / and the flawless reflection of their blithe unruffled selves”. It might be a little allegory about the frustration of parents with their children’s generation but if that were the case it would be contradicted (or balanced) by an earlier poem, “School Strike for Climate”, in which the generation of the ducklings is the one that might actually achieve something in the fight against climate denial. More likely, I think, is that the allegory of the swan is to be read as demanding attention to the richness of the world beneath. In “Ouse”, after all, the tidal flood brings renewal and is likened to breath which, in the form of oxygen, reinvigorates the blood.

To step back from individual poems for a moment and look at this oft repeated scenario in Day’s work, we might say that the world above symbolises the everyday, sometimes the trivial, but always a human perspective – for better or worse. The world beneath reflects larger processes, inexorable, often dangerous to humans, but also capable of being benevolent. Like the currents of “Undertow”, though, they can’t be fought against, only yielded to. These wider processes need not be cosmic or geological – though they often are. They can also be human-based activity on a large scale. Day’s previous book, Towards Light, engaged with this because it was, as its title suggests, very much concerned with contrasting the light with the dark. There, one of the forms that the dark took was her mother’s mental decline and death and the title poem seemed more hopeful than demonstratively positive. A longish sequence in Slack Tide, “Kissing the Cobra”, has a similar, rather bleakly positive ending after a tour through contemporary misinformation and ecological stupidity:

. . . . .
Even the night birds are silent.
Red Mars hangs in the lens of the telescope
its extant life an augury of what we might become.

Will the little birds, the silver-eyes
and wattlebirds, the honeybees
all recall we left out bowls of water for them?

The opposition of the brief flicker of the humane positive against the darker backdrop of human stupidity and destructiveness (what a poem by the Queensland poet, David Rowbotham, described as licking honey from a thorn) is a common theme in Day’s work. Early on in Slack Tide we meet the crescent honeyeater going about extracting nectar:

. . . . . 
For a moment, a second really,
the relentless statistics
on the day’s news
blur behind the intimacy
of the beating wings, the tiny flower
relinquishing its sweetness
to the busy tongue.

And the book’s final poems, “In the Air” and “Voyager I” both take human creativity in the form of song as the expression of honey. In the former, listening to something written in Naples in the early seventeenth century – a time as violent as our own but perhaps less endangered – is a reminder that, in a context of “the plundering of rivers, // removal of trees, forests, farmland, / the poisoning of long sleeping aquifers”, some notes on a score might represent “a compassionate moment”. In the latter, the little disc containing the Bach concerto and “ancient songs of Arnhem Land” eternally travelling through interstellar space, may be the only survivor of the entire human race – its good and bad.

“Aldinga Cliffs, South Australia” is an extended poem built around the interaction between large, generally destructive, processes and momentary but positive flickers of light. It begins with a faux-naif but very significant line, “There’s no getting away from things”, and goes on to describe a visit to a site where monarch butterflies can be seen mating. The journey is full of two of the powerful processes. First there is geological activity evident in the cliffs with their “pebble threads to denote other epochs / of Earth events” but also in the beach shingle which has seen millions of years wear away at stone to produce pebbles “suffused with coloured hieroglyphs”. Secondly there is the equally remorseless process of human carelessness and stupidity so that you have to try consciously to

. . . . . 
                                    not notice
it is sea spurge and invasive weeds that are
their lover’s beds in the cove in the cliff
and that the cliffs themselves
are being eaten away by the ocean and wind and rain,
by runnels and rivers that have not soaked into earth
because the land for miles has been razed of its trees
and scrub and native grasses, and overgrazed
so that topsoil has followed rainwater down to the sea. . .

Balanced against these two processes are the butterflies, endowed with wings that look like the stained-glass windows of a church – short-lived expressions of hope and beauty like a honeyeater or a seventeenth century Neapolitan song.

There are poems in Slack Tide which, rather than balancing dark with light, inexorable processes with moments of illumination, prefer to deal with the processes themselves. In the case of geological and cosmic time, the issue of perspective becomes significant. In “Solace”, concentrating on the moon helps to steady the mind since in that larger perspective, “we might almost / think our great mistakes / inscribed onto land, / atmosphere, ocean, / were minor, trifling”. And “Long Clock” celebrates Danny Hillis’s complex project of building a clock that will record not human but geological time. Another of the larger processes underlying our existence is the inevitability of loss, those things that are devoured by – in Aubrey’s phrase – “the teeth of time”. One sequence, “Standish”, describes what is, in effect, the loss of one of the poet’s grandmothers, not to age and time but to incarceration in a now-destroyed English mental institution while “One Thing and Another” – a nicely judged title that uses the same shoulder-shrugging cliché as the opening line of the Aldinga Cliffs poem – details the slow but steady diminution of her father’s previously active life.

Slack Tide is, in some ways, a more outwardly looking book than Day’s earlier ones but only slightly so and only in specific ways. The themes have always been present but here there is a touch more anger and frustration and a slightly more pointed preparedness to name and shame when possible. Moving into a more public sphere involves problems for a poet where the great poetic resource of suggestiveness might have to be put aside for more direct statement. One of the techniques that poets use in this situation is allegory and Slack Tide is full of allegorical scenarios. The book’s very first poem, “Transhumance”, deals with the Covid pandemic. It’s method of preventing it’s resulting in no more than journalistic recording, is to imagine the spread of the disease to be like the spread of human populations and then write the poem from the point of view of one of these metaphorical humans:

It happened more quickly
than anyone might have expected,
we were unsure whether
we were shifting from mountain
to plain or low ground to high.
There were false starts,
many reluctant to leave
the familiar old terrain.
Then suddenly we were all
on the move in both hemispheres
and in every continent. . . 

In a similar way, “Ivy” looks carefully at that omnipresent species of semi-parasitical plant and sees it as an allegory of capitalism at its most exploitative extreme:

. . . . . 
The imposter that is the familiar
thrives on all six continents,
has founded a lush new social order.
It knows neither diplomacy nor democracy,
only how to look after itself.
Exploiter of space and sunshine,
expansionist over earth and root,
seeker of fissures in soundness,
it is impervious ro bramble thorn
and claw. . .

Allegory involves readers in some interpretive work but compensates them with the pleasure of having “worked it out”: it’s probably significant that the little poem about the honeyeater is called “gnomic”. But allegory isn’t always as simple as in “Ivy” and “Transhumance”. “Whipsnake” describes how the poet’s companion, in a normal, humane gesture helps a small snake climb out of a dangerously hot sand dune by building a little ladder of “driftwood // and dried seaweed”. But the poem finishes by suggesting (I think) that innocent actions might assist what are, ultimately, evil processes:

. . . . . 
The snake seems to understand your intent
finding refuge at least in the ribbon of shade.

It is black, venomous
as cruel actions born of old sorrows.

You turn without waiting to walk along the beach,
your gesture light as innocence.

A poem from Towards Light, a villanelle called “Sea Ice”, takes us towards the farther end of allegory where simple certainties of interpretation no longer exist. On the surface (!), it is a poem about how the sea ice breaks up into smaller floes but two elements make me want to read it allegorically. The first is one of context: the book in which it occurs includes a later series of poems detailing the slow disintegration of the poet’s mother’s mind. The second is the use of the word “self”:

. . . . . 
Frazil ice is granular and lacks
a crust: the heft and turbulence below
stirs up a slush; the solid mass reacts

as now the waterline, like wax,
recedes, yields up the pieces of the self below.
The slowly setting sun lights up the cracks. . . 

It could be no more than another poem about the way in which the forces below the surface disturb and eventually destroy the world above, but it’s tempting to read it as an allegory of the way in which the disintegration of the mind in dementia reveals the self in fragments.

At any event it is worth thinking about the technique of allegory as a way of allowing poetry to face brutal realities (what Yeats described as poetry’s “responsibilities”) without being mealy-mouthed or merely rhetorical and without sacrificing all of poetry’s immense capabilities of widening perceptions and making suggestive connections. Allegory is a trope and so it is, in essence, about a surface meaning and a deeper meaning and in this it mimics the idea of a world above and a world below. Given how much the relation between the above and the below is an important part of Day’s view of the world, there’s an attractive consistency in deploying (even if not in all the poems) a technique which adopts this at a hermeneutic level.

Peter Bakowski: Our Ways on Earth

Canberra: Recent Work Press, 2022, 73pp.

Contemporary poetry, at least for the last two centuries, has often been accused of obscurity and difficulty. True, this may be a result of woolly thinking or bad writing, but it can also come from a desire to push into unknown territories: territories of language, of the inside of human minds and emotions, and, more recently, of texts themselves. It’s rare to find a poet who is simultaneously comprehensible at a single reading and also poetically and thematically sophisticated. Peter Bakowski has always seemed someone with his hand in the air offering to step into this breach. And there is nothing accidental or unconscious about this. Many of his poems have statements to make about both the function and mechanisms of his poetry. “Fire, fire, in the mouth of many things”, the first poem of his second book, In the Human Night, uses images bordering on the surrealist to require a transformative power for poetry:

I want your poem to
turn my train ticket into a canary,
I want your poem to be like
a gunshot in a convent,
I want your poem to cure
the forlorn man who can’t see any further 
than the horizon of his beer,
I want your poem to 
turn his eyebrows into ants
that will bring him a tambourine . . .

Of course this is distanced in a way that something beginning “I want my poems to . . .” would not be, but I’m sure it is designed to be read as an expression of a desired power for poetry rather than, say, as a pastiche of a rejection slip by an over-excited editor, or the encouraging remarks of a fellow-poet.

By the time we reach this most recent book, the opening poem has become “Driving Instructions” conceived as an extended metaphor whereby writing a poem is imagined to be analogous to driving:

Start the poem with a verb,
release the handbrake that’s a comma,
but slow for the intersection of two thoughts
.  . . . .
Upon reaching the destination, try to accept that it may not be
the destination which you had in mind,
but that’s poetry for you.
Check that your licence for it
hasn’t expired.

And between these two there are a host of poems speaking about what he wants his poetry to do, about the effect of reading other poets and where poetry stands (perhaps shakily) in what is really a fully-expressed humanist vision. Running throughout the books are a series of self-portraits, a sub-section of the portrait poems that I’ll speak about in a moment. One of the first of these, “Self-portrait in East Melbourne Flat, 22 June 1994” from In the Human Night finishes:

. . . . . 
In the meantime there are
more poems to write.
I like to try to put
a small truth in each one.
Say, about the size
of a mouse or a matchbox.

And in the same book is a poem for Charles Bukowski – another writer of “say it simply like it is” poems and a poet with probably the same Slavic surname as Bakowski – which says:

. . . . . 
You’ve taught me
to be lean in the poem,
to say the thing
directly,
the way the hammer
says things
to the nail. . .

You can detect the slight scent of a danger here in that the plain-speaking model often derives its strength from the intensity of experience and sometimes that experience is based on a fantasy of a kind of pared-down, vagabond, hard-drinking, peripatetic life that is generically American, not Australian. No doubt this has its origins in the Depression but a century later it seems a distinctly American fantasy. In another country an equivalent fantasy might be of staying in one’s village, growing gracefully old, smiling at one’s grandchildren and killing pigs. And, as readers of this site will know, I don’t like the idea that these fantasise are transferable across cultures, even if they come from a country which has had, especially in the last seventy-five years, an overwhelming influence on our popular culture. Bakowski writes a number of poems on this theme, crediting the model of the Americans as something that, in his earlier life, encouraged him to travel, virtually penniless, and thus escape the dreariness of factory work. But as the books have gone on, this model has rather faded and the poet of the later books is one who has his own view of poetry, people and places and doesn’t attempt to tap into a foreign fantasy.

I described Bakowski’s stance as humanist and it’s a comment that deserves both expanding and defending. The core of it involves focus: that four-centuries-old shift away from cosmic and god-based perspectives to a human position. “Man as the measure of all things” doesn’t mean the abandonment of the transcendental but rather the notion that the human is the standpoint from which perspectives can move out into cosmic proportions or down into sub-atomic ones. There is very little of God or the cosmos in Bakowski, or, for that matter, of quantum mechanics. A “human” perspective is also, though, a double one: it involves looking into the mystery of the self but at the same time it involves looking at the mysteries of one’s fellow humans. There is nothing, in other words, necessarily narcissistic about the perspective that replaced the God-centred one of the high European middle-ages: plumbing the characteristics of one’s fellows can be as daunting as speculating about the attributes of the deity. As another of Bakowski’s self-portraits, “Self-Portrait with Beliefs, 19 October 1997”, says:

. . . . . 
I’m trying to write about
what it is like
to be
a human being,
but without fail,
each one I encounter
causes me
to tear up
my latest definition. . .

It’s difficult for a critic not to move into a classificatory approach when faced with the substantial number of poems contained in Bakowski’s books. Perhaps the most important category are the portraits but it’s a category that you have immediately to subdivide. There are the self-portraits, the portraits of the creative greats (and less greats), fictional portraits, and the portraits of fellow citizens. This last group, and the author’s benevolent stance towards them, is well introduced by an early poem:

. . . . .
The streets, of course
are full of poems,
rushing off to work,
fretting at each kerb,
waiting for the hiccup
of each cursed traffic-light. . . .

This poem, “The Dictionary is Just a Beautiful Menu” adopts a tone of note-to-self – “Tsk at their velocity / and bad taste in footwear, / but write of your love for them still, / write of your love for them still. / Undress them carefully . . .” – but the opening poem of Personal Weather, looking at a similar scene of “City workers during morning rush hour”, is less self-admonitory and more aspirational:

. . . . . 
There’s the story of each person, on the trains, trams and street corners.
How vulnerable you are, how strong you are. I want to reveal your
Essence via the camera of this poem, as you swarm and 
Rush in the business district, glancing at your wristwatches.

There are a number of these “portraits of ordinary people” in this most recent book and they all show a sensitive non-judgementalism and a blessed freedom from the various currently available ideologies. “Backwater Song” describes a potentially fraught situation in which a man’s partner has abandoned him and his meetings with an overweight sheriff who had slept with her. Both are profoundly unhappy and ill=placed men carrying a lot of bad things with them, but the poem focusses on the slow growth of their relationship:

. . . . .
This year Floyd and I have gone forwards - 
talk about favourite baseball pitchers and Dixieland tunes,
how both of us don’t always like to study ourselves in the mirror
first thing in the morning . . .

“Isolated Cottage off Gelantipy Road” also describes a relationship between two men who are a fair way down the social ladder but is is rather different in that it doesn’t suggest that there are any dark waters flowing underneath. Whereas there might have been symbolic significance in the fact that the men of “Backwater Song” at the end of the poem are playing chess, there isn’t the same symbolic potential at the end of this poem where at Christmas the two friends share lamb chops: “raw for Thommo, well-grilled for Ron”.

The ”creative” portraits of Our Ways on Earth include Joseph Cornell (the maker of box collages), Caetano Veloso (the Brazilian singer/activist) and Syd Barrett as well as an opening group of Lucian Freud, Philip Larkin and Graham Greene. None of these are of the titanic dimensions of the subjects of the odes of Beaver’s Odes and Days, but a reader is always interested in whether a poet like Bakowski is responding to similarities or exploring differences. The Freud-Larkin-Greene group focusses on the relationships between artists and people and thus investigates the issues involved in the act of portraiture itself: both technical and moral. The Freud poem, for example, looks at Freud’s confronting treatment of his subjects, a kind of extreme portraiture that can be damaging to both subject and artist. The Larkin poem catches him in the middle of a letter to Monica, also concerned about “injuring the recipient” as well as conveying himself as a writer who is “selfish, unfaithful, dutiful, supportive, morbid, witty”. And finally, Greene is seen in his character of traveller and visitor, something which makes a reader think not only of Bakowski’s portraiture but also of his own travels. Greene is described as melting into a foreign (Asian) city, picking up its method of operating while learning to “blend into an arcade’s protective shadow / or move surely through a barrage of peddlers”. The blending, though, involves dissolving one’s self and so it’s possible to read this poem as an exploration of the way in which the art of portraiture (which is, after all, no more than one of the attempts to understand something which is different) requires a loss of the self.

These various portrait types are only one of the kinds of poems that Bakowski produces and, as I’ve suggested, they are a complex enough group in themselves. I haven’t, for example, spoken about poems from earlier books which are titled as portraits but are of fictional characters: “Portrait of Edith Murtone: Fiction Writer”, for example, from Personal Weather or “Portrait of Leonard Drysdale, District Sales Manager, Birmingham, England, 1946” from Beneath Our Armour. And then there are those which have a first person point of view as opposed to those in the third person. One of the new developments in Our Ways on Earth is a series of poems spaced throughout the latter part of the book dedicated to the lives of a (presumably fictional) family. Whether these are portraits – they don’t announce themselves as such – or simply narrative character studies is a moot point but it’s a reminder of the way portraiture can overcome its status as a single penetrating snap-shot and move into something closer to continuous narrative.

But any catalogue of the types of poem which Bakowski writes would be very limited if it only dealt with portraits. He has a nice line in very short – often two-line – pieces which can be images or just witticisms. One, in this new book, called “Beneficiary” – “Far below the hairpin bend / a fox drinks rainwater / from an upturned hubcap” – nicely, with the help of its title, suggests how the human disaster of a crash can be reinterpreted in the natural world as something valuable. It demonstrates a sharp eye. Another of these, “At the Dentist” – “You may find out / that not every tooth likes its neighbour”- is what I have called a witticism and when these kind of ideas are gathered together you get another category of Bakowski poem. They could be called “list poems” I suppose and can be found in many of the earlier books: “Times for Drinking Tea in China” from Beneath Our Armour is one such poem: “When you’ve bargained well at the market // When you’ve cleared stones from a field . . .”. In Our Ways on Earth there is “Observations and Suggestions” mysteriously dedicated to the Russian composer Alfred Schnittke:

A puddle is water relaxing.

The middle rungs of ladders don’t get the credit they deserve.

It’s hard to get an octopus to try on a jacket.

The one-winged bird may peck the hardest.

Don’t get used to being used.

Look at what you do for a living and at what living you do.

Witticisms and images are all part of an attempt to describe “what it is like / to be / a human being”. In the former, language with its odd accidents and structures does the work while in the second the world reveals part of its mystery to the sharp-eyed observer. It seems right that such comparatively slight pieces should form part of Bakowski’s project.

Finally, of course, there is the issue of poetry itself, especially a poetry priding itself on caring for its reader even if it doesn’t always care for its poet by leading him (as the book’s first poem says) to destinations he hadn’t entirely expected. Wit and images are part of the fabric of the larger poems and do the work of sustaining them and preventing their being nothing more than prosy explorations. It’s somehow fitting that the last poem of the book should echo the first poem of “In the Human Night” in being a “list poem” focussing on the power and transformative possibilities of the art:

A poem is more jazz than recipe,
more breast milk than formula.

A poem is daily life
or an inky break from daily life.

A poem is the glad yellow of lemons.

A poem is an odd sock made into a hand puppet.

A poem is medicine which tastes better than you’d imagined.

Sometimes it’s a big breaking wave
effervescent around your driftwood bones.
Sometimes it’s a big blundering wave that flattens your sandcastle -
so you start another one.

An optimistic view of what poetry might be able to do – and what it might demand of its poet – as part of a simultaneously modest and wildly ambitious humanism.

Rereadings VII: Michael Dransfield: A Retrospective, edited by John Kinsella

St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2002, 92pp.

In just over one hundred days it will be fifty years since Michael Dransfield’s death in 1973. A half a century, as I have observed elsewhere, is a very long time in literature, especially modern literature and especially modern poetry whose history – influenced at least partly by the accessibility of poetry from what were, in the past, unavailable cultures and languages – is inclined to develop at breakneck speed. With a nice harmony, it is twenty years since the publication of this retrospective edited by John Kinsella which, itself, appeared after the two major contributions to understanding Dransfield’s life and work: Livio Dobrez’s Parnassus Mad Ward: Michael Dransfield and the New Australian Poetry (1990) and Patricia Dobrez’s biography of 1999.

Kinsella’s book is an ideal introduction to Dransfield for those in 2023 coming for the first time to what now must seem like a poet of the distant past. Like all critics I have my own imaginary selection from Dransfield’s poems and it would contain even more poems from the first book, Streets of the Long Voyage, despite the fact that nearly a third of the poems of that book are included here. I might also have tried to find space for pieces like “Sub Judice” and “I Do This I Do That” from Drug Poems, “Returning” and “The Process” from Memoirs of a Velvet Urinal, and “Lonely as a Cloud” and “Distance” from Voyage Into Solitude. The poems Kinsella has chosen make an excellent introduction to Dransfield’s obsessive themes although this is surely because Streets of the Long Voyage is itself such a good introduction to these themes, containing as it does the earliest poems of leaving (“Pas de Deux for Lovers”) and its concomitant themes of journeying (“Morning, Silk Road”) and minstrelising (“Minstrel”, “Goliard”). We meet the first Courland Penders poems (“Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man”) with their evocation of the imaginary, inherited decaying country mansion that occupies such an important place in Dransfield’s imagination and we meet the first of the drug poems (“Overdose”, “Fix” and “Bum’s Rush”). And, in a piece like “Lamentations”, we get a first taste of a generalised anger about his contemporary culture: a dislike of its colonial past – “They ringbarked the Dreamtime” – of Capitalism and of city-culture.

Tracing Dransfield’s career – not always an easy task because of the fact that the poems’ dates of book-publication don’t necessarily coincide with dates of writing – you can see the treatment of these themes darken as addiction and its concomitant ill-health casts an ominous shadow. The first drug poems are comparatively dispassionate accounts, for example, but in many of the poems in Drug Poems (which reprints some of these earlier ones) there is a flaunting of being a drug insider, cool with other users’ dying and happy to reproduce its sub-US slang – “in the bluejean days / when acid was still legal / we used to sell shit for fourteen an / oz & everything was cool & the DS only had / three cops”. At the end of this darkening – a period when, as Rodney Hall, the editor of the posthumous The Second Month of Spring, says, Dransfield was “a man in the desperate throes of a struggle to survive, far less concerned with illuminating the metaphysical relationships of culture and the natural order” – there is a clear tone of paranoia and the result, at its worst, is something like “Bi Shits Revisited” a crazy assault on David Malouf for expressing reservations about The Inspector of Tides in a review. It’s a long way from the tone of the earlier poems whose titles alone – “Chopin Ballade”, “On a Theme of Taktakishvili”, “Scriabin” – and so on, indicate comfort with the arcana of “high” culture. (In some of these early poems, we seem to be in the same world as early Slessor with its comfortable inhabiting of the late medieval and the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It could be a matter of influence, of course, and we know that the young Dransfield wanted to impress Slessor but it may also be something that happens to prodigiously precocious young poets who want to expand into areas that they feel they inherit as part of their territory.) And the distance travelled in a career of eight or nine years is expressed by these changes of tone, I think, rather than changes of theme. The one important theme which is only hinted at in poems from the first book is that of solipsism, the state where windows become mirrors. “Miss Havisham” – based on Dickens’s character who, abandoned on her wedding day, spends the rest of her life locked up in a suite of rooms – and “Chaconne for a Solipsist” are important poems here. But, it could be argued, this is just the solitariness of the journeying theme, or the Courland Penders retreat theme, developed in a darker key.

Solipsism is a subject treated at some length in Livio Dobrez’s book and it should be noted that it, Patricia Dobrez’s biography and Kinsella’s introduction share a common interest in positioning Dransfield and his work as though this was the central desideratum. Livio Dobrez’s book is an attempt to argue that Dransfield is more central to the poetic movement anthologised in John Tranter’s The New Australian Poetry than most people then, or in retrospect, have believed. In other words, it attempts to put him into a version of literary history both in relationship to his peers and to his forerunners (largely represented by Hall and Shapcott’s anthology, New Impulses in Australian Poetry). It also, unusually for poetry criticism in Australia, explores connections with the visual arts, positioning him especially vis a vis the painting of Brett Whiteley. Patricia Dobrez’s biography is, as its title, Michael Dransfield’s Lives: A Sixties Biography, suggests, an attempt to position Dransfield in relation to the unusual times in which he lived and wrote, the times of hippiedom and the Vietnam war which were already requiring a lot of explanation to the generation that followed them. Kinsella’s selection, too, is a retrospective attempt at positioning, trying to move Dransfield more in the direction of the issues which Kinsella himself was speaking of and which have, in the last twenty years, become even more dominant: settler status, colonialism, environmental issues and a more postmodern sense of self and art-styles. In an engaging introductory essay to this selection, he sums up his view of Dransfield as: “Environmentalist, critic of the power establishments of the day, libertarian with personal safeguards, and, I believe, an anarchist individualist”. And he makes a good case, despite the fact that, superficially, this looks like nothing more than a back projection of Kinsella’s own interests.

Such a perspective does, of course, have an influence on the selection of the poems but I can say at the outset that there are no really bizarre omissions or inclusions in this retrospective selection. No matter what perspective you read them from, Drug Poems and Memoirs of a Velvet Urinal are poor books by Dransfield’s standards and are only lightly selected from here whereas the two posthumous volumes edited by Rodney Hall, Voyage Into Solitude and The Second Month of Spring (especially the former) are treasure troves and are selected from generously, as they should be. Mapping the tastes of an editor against selections is actually quite an enlightening practice in Dransfield’s case. At one extreme there are the three anthologies compiled by Robert Gray and Geoffrey Lehmann. Two of them omit Dransfield entirely and the other – The Younger Australian Poets – includes only two minor pieces accompanied by a contemptuous “explanation” which describes his philosophy as being made up of “hippy clichés”. In other anthologies – by Vincent Buckley and Peter Porter, for example – the selection reflects the tastes of its editors more than such selections usually do and so, in a way, Dransfield could be seen as something of a litmus test for anthologists, focussing more than almost anyone else the editor’s notions of what poetry – and Australian poetry, specifically – actually is. A subject that might repay a lot of careful study by some imaginary scholar in a utopian future.

I want to continue this issue of positioning Dransfield in this Rereading but to do so in a counter-intuitive way, rather as a sort of “thought experiment”. The other positionings operate on the basis of the poet’s having a set of beliefs, sensations and practices which are, in some way “expressed” in the poetry: in other words, for all the sophistication of the analysis, a communicative model lies behind it. And Dransfield is rich pickings here since, as all commentators and critics note, at the “beliefs and practices” level he is a lively mix of contradictions. A “hippie” with a private school education; a pacifist with a respect for the military (his father and grandfather were soldiers); a dropout and drug-user driven by old values of pride and dignity, obsessed by an imaginary aristocratic past; a ruthless critic of the capitalist power-structures of his country who considered himself to be a canny real-estate dealer; a self-indulgent ascetic; a “tell it like it is” realist who tried to convince others that he owned an ancestral estate. And so on.

What if we position Dransfield in terms of poetry itself, asking not “Where does he fit in the history of Australian poetry or culture?” but “Where do his poems fit in the world of poetry?” – that pan-cultural, pan-temporal expression of human creativity? In other words, to subjugate the beliefs and practices to the poetry rather than vice-versa by asking how useful his themes are in the poetic cosmos rather than trying to evaluate their correctness in social analytical terms. I think the first thing that emerges in this notional approach is that contradiction or tension within the beliefs and practices forms a very valuable base. This leads one into thinking of the different relationships ideas can have with the poems that manifest them. At the opposing pole to rich contradiction, for example, would be the situation in which the poet has a coherent but complex philosophy that lies behind lyric poems that only express a part of the complicated web. To understand a potent piece like Yeats’s “The Second Coming” you have to know a bit about Yeats’s distinctive notions of the cycles of universal history and to make any sense at all out of “Byzantium” you would have to know a lot more. This, of course, is grist to the mill of academic approaches to literature because it introduces an ennobling intellectual quest motif – Can I construct a map of the ideas that lie at the heart of x’s poetry? – though it also tends to have difficulties when a poet’s convictions undergo modifications over time. Another potent generative device for lyric poetry is frustration, which could just, perhaps, be seen as a sub-species of contradiction. All of those extended sonnet sequences spawned by Petrarch’s love for Laura are generated not by the emotion of love or by the poet’s conception of the nature of love but by the continuous frustration of denial so that individual poems keep returning to the same issue from a slightly different perspective like a robot vacuum cleaner negotiating a chair leg. And something similar could be said of the troubadour tradition of the thirteenth century. At any rate, without following this lead too far, it is possible to claim that in Dransfield’s case, a set of contradictions might be enriching poetically rather than debilitating.

The broadest description of Dransfield’s place in poetry is as a lyric poet, though this is a “Western-heritage” notion and might lead to complicated attempts to define the meaning of the word “lyric”. But keeping it as a notional, provisional description we can say that lyric poets tend to share some personal features and some poetic features. The former of these I want to abandon immediately since the psychological profile of poets is beyond any expertise I have (and, I suspect, beyond anybody else’s). On the other hand, though, there is something familiar about what one might call Dransfield’s impracticality or lack of perspective. Shakespeare (or at least his Theseus) passes this off as a “head-in-the-clouds” phenomenon whereby the poet’s eye “in a fine frenzy” oscillates between heaven and earth, ie between the ideal and the sordidly practical. One thinks of Li Bai as a classic of this type and I suspect Catullus was too: it certainly takes a lack of balance and perspective to insult Julius Caesar.

But putting the murky world of the psychology of lyric poets aside, we are likely to find that the map of types of lyric poetry is a complex one, describable only by using all sorts of complex topologies. The best start might be with a cloud since the borders of “lyric” are very vague (should dramatic monologues be included, or something extended like “Lycidas”? If “Lycidas” what about an even more extended lament like Shelley’s “Adonais”?) and we would need to keep the outline “fuzzy”. My own image for what happens inside this cloud is that individual poems exist on a series of scales (I want to avoid the word “spectrum” since it suggests clinical diagnosis) which I imagine as straight lines in the form of sticks. As an example, there is a scale that goes from “Self-contained Object” at one end to “Fragment of Process” at the other. Another is a scale that goes from “Momentary Disposable Engagement with the World” at one end to “Masterpiece that the World will not Willingly Let Die” at the other end – those poems that deliberately try to change the history of poetry. There are dozens of other scales and an individual poem will seem like a node penetrated by a lot of sticks when it is mapped onto them. Importantly a poem’s description is the sum total of its scales and no one is necessarily more important than the other.

One scale which I will look at a bit more deeply is that of the poet’s position and stake in the poem. At one end are those impersonal poems (sometimes called “song lyrics”) in which, although an “I” may possibly speak, and although intense experiences and emotions may form the material, it is entirely a conventionalised personality. You don’t listen to “Yesterday”, for example, to learn about Paul McCartney’s problems. At the far end of this scale (on the “right” so to speak) are poems which are anguished (or ecstatic) and marked at every point by the situation of the poet: Ben Jonson’s “On My First Son” being one example from a long list of possibilities. This scale enables us to locate – though it is in only one of many dimensions – something like Byron’s “So We’ll Go No More a Roving”. In a way it masquerades as a folk song and so wants to be placed at the left end of the scale but we know enough about Byron to know that it is built on specific personal experience: exhaustion and disgust from too much sex at the Venice Carnival and the sly little dirty joke of the sword outwearing its sheath – delivered, one imagines, with a knowing wink to the audience – means that we should drag it farther to the right of the scale.

This is only an example. Using a Formal to Informal scale, Byron’s poem would appear close to the left end (it is three, four line, regularly rhyming, metrically rhythmical stanzas). Dransfield, like almost all lyric poets, operates in a variety of styles so that his collected lyrics look like a kind of cloud within the larger cloud. But I want to test out this idea of positioning him poetically rather than thematically by focussing on a single poem, ”Pas de Deux for Lovers”. It comes from the second section of Streets of the Long Voyage and is the third poem in Kinsella’s selection:

Morning ought not
to be complex.
The sun is a seed
cast at dawn into the long
furrow of history.

To wake
and go
would be so simple.

Yet

how the
first light
makes gold her hair

upon my arm.
How then
shall I leave,
and where away to go. Day
is so deep already with involvement.

Readers (with the exception, presumably, of Gray and Lehmann) have admired this poem since its publication and fifty years and a succession of modal changes in poetry are unlikely to have changed this admiration. It can be looked at in terms of Dransfield’s ideas and responses, of course, and be seen as a poem reflecting a dropout’s tendency to prefer serial relationships but it looks different from within the perspective of lyric poetry itself. Like Byron’s poem, it suggests that a personal experience rather than a generalised one stands behind it. In other words, it is expressive of an individual’s actual experience although there are no obvious hints like Byron’s joke, and the assertion is based on an informed subjectivity which most would go along with although there is no evidence that would stand up in a court of law. This tension between a conventional speaking position and an individual, personal one can be frustrating for readers I think though it doesn’t seem to be as frustrating for poets. As readers we want to see Catullus’s poems to Lesbia as intense expressions of his love for, and frustration with, an actual person, probably Clodia Pulcher. But there is always a group of scholars arguing that the entire situation is a mere convention unrelated to any specific experience. The more intense the poems the more frustrated are the readers since we are forced to choose between entirely different, even contradictory, responses: intense engaged sympathy for a fellow human or admiration for a clever job brilliantly executed.

And then there is lyric structure. “Pas de Deux for Lovers” would be reasonably close to the formal end of the Formal to Informal scale. There are all sorts of formal structures of course, rhyme patterns, verse patterns, syllabic counts and other numerical patterns, and so on. Deep down, you feel, most lyric poets have a tendency to formal structures: they are not something imposed by dreary literary traditions that the great bravely react against. Dransfield’s poem avoids all patterning of sound – rhymes, half-rhymes, internal assonance and consonance etc – and is decidedly un-Tennysonian. Its structures involve the interaction of syntax and line length. Enjambments – the default device for the movement of the syntax into lines – enable the six sentences to be spaced into a stanza pattern of 5,3,1,3,5 lines, something that has a formally pleasing quality (I’ll avoid speculating about the potential numerical symbolism and the avoidance of the number two except as the unit by which the stanzas are reduced – going away – and increased – staying and suffering the involvements). It’s, obviously enough, a poem about balance something that it enacts mimetically by having the quintessential proviso word “yet” at its exact centre. It not only balances the two desires – to continue a relationship into a world of lasting “true love” or to break free into a world of serial relationships none of which can be restrictive – but it also balances the firmly assertive propositions of the first half with the dreamier thoughts of the second.

In fact – not too sound too much like one of the early New Critics – it could be said that there is a tension within the poem between balance and change. The formal structure indicates balance as the controlling principle but the language suggests a one-way journey from certainty to doubt. And it does this at a number of levels. The opening two sentences are strong statements: morning ought not to be complex and, as a metaphoric development of this theme, the rising sun creates a jungle of complexities as though it were a seed cast into the ground. By the latter half of the poem we have moved into a much less assertive tone indicated by the very slightly precious fact of the sun lighting up the girl’s hair, and the very slightly mannered phrase “where away to go” (both of these give the poem a rather pre-Raphaelite air) and so the final statement does not have the certainty of the two opening sentences. (This matching of sentence to theme would put the poem towards the left of another imaginary scale which might move from mimetic to non-mimetic.)

This is a lot of space to spend on a single poem but it barely scratches the surface when it comes to trying to describe its position in lyric poetry generally or in Dransfield’s lyric poetry specifically. But if we look at structural features in Dransfield’s poems we can see similarities with other poems not necessarily associated with it thematically. Another great early poem is “Epiderm”:

Canopy of nerve ends
marvellous tent
airship skying in crowds and blankets
pillowslip of serialised flesh
it wraps us rather neatly in our senses
but will not insulate against externals
does nothing to protect
merely notifies the brain
of conversation with a stimulus
I like to touch your skin
to feel your body against mine
two islets in an atoll of each other
spending all night in new discovery
of what the winds of passion have washed up
and what a jaded tide will find for us
to play with when this game begins to pall

It’s a two part poem which since it is sixteen lines and breaks at the ninth line might conceivably be seen as an extended sonnet with additional lines at the octet and the sestet. The omission of all punctuation prevents it being, as “Pas de Deux for Lovers” was, a matter of the interaction between sentences. But it does share with that poem a movement from celebration to a much more down-beat conclusion: something always interesting in poetic shape when most readers expect conclusions to be conclusive and upbeat (think of Rilke’s panther and Stevens’s snow man, examples I have used before). The initial celebration of the skin, couched in a set of marvellous images and done in high style moves towards simple statement – “I like to touch your skin / to feel your body against mine” – and then transitions to an extended sea metaphor whereby the lovers are, memorably, “two islets in an atoll of each other” but which leads to a conclusion where passion is jaded and the couple look only for remnants: presumably sexual memories. It is a poem with a powerful and unusual shape. Possible famous companions from the world of lyric might be something like Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan” which begins with high activity and concludes with that famous flat last line, “Before the indifferent beak could let her drop” – an anticlimactic climax.

At a certain level of structure these two poems are not atypical of Dransfield. His advice about structure – “You put the knife in and, in the last line, turn it” – doesn’t preclude an attraction to the downbeat. “Fix” ends with a double twist: “For a while the fires die down in you, / until you die down in the fires. / Once you have become a drug addict / you will never want to be anything else”. Students of rhetoric will know the technique used in the former as antimetabole (“This man I thought to have been a lord among wits; but, I find, he is only a wit among lords”) and would analyse the second as some sort of pun or equivocation on two meanings of “want”. “Fix” might well fit into a mimetic section of the world of lyric since the comparatively intense tone of the body of the poem – “send the dream-transfusion out / on a voyage among your body machinery” – leads to this conclusion in a way that mimics the drug high and the way it inevitably leads to a comedown. The success of “Fix” lies in the way the end is simultaneously intense and downbeat. Or, to revert to New Criticism-speak, there is a tension between the mimetic representation of the rise and decline of the experience that the poem speaks of and an imposed but common-to-the-lyric-poem movement towards an affirmative, upwardly directed finish.

Another feature of the outputs of lyric poets is that they tend to at least try some poems that are at different ends of the various scales that the bulk of their poems inhabit. Tennyson tried long, narrative poems, Browning short ones. Had Dransfield live a long and healthy life he may well have moved into modes which would have made the shape of his output completely different. As it is, there are a couple of pieces which show him reaching beyond his normal operative modes. “Society” from The Inspector of Tides is a set of eleven numbered statements:

1.	The citizens group in categories/officials, wives, children, priests, revolutionaries.
2.	They enter the compartment assigned to their category/ classroom, office, kitchen, garret. . . .

In a sense this is at the mimetic end of the mimetic – non-mimetic scale since it reproduces the mechanised divisions of the capitalist view of the citizenry. But it is also worth looking at as a kind of poem vastly different to Dransfield’s other poems, even those concerned with the vices of Australian society.

And then there is “Love (dialogue) poem”, a piece between lovers built out of reproduced dialogue:

Where can we go today
He’s in Liverpool Street.
We could go to the Park.
Someone might see us.
Where then.
. . . . .

We’d better get dressed. You’ll miss your train.
It doesn’t matter. Will you ring me before you go?
If I can. It’s a bad scene.
When are you leaving . . .

Enough of the detail makes us confident that this built out of one of Dransfield’s own relationships – it is in fact, thematically, a “leaving poem” – rather than a sort of playwright’s exercise in transcribing overheard speech. But it’s an outlier in what is otherwise a reasonably consistent lyrical output. Neither it nor “Society” are likely to appear in selections like this one of John Kinsella’s.

Lucy Dougan: Monster Field

Artarmon: Giramondo, 2022, 100pp.

Lucy Dougan’s fourth book operates in the same territory as the last two of its predecessors – White Clay and The Guardians – exploiting the unexpected perspectives of her distinct vision of the world. A good deal of the apparatus of the book – its title and the description included in the blurb which is transposed from the back cover into the half-title page – prepares us for this. Monster Field is an idea taken from Paul Nash to express worlds which are apprehended momentarily at the edge of vision and which have the power to disturb the preformed, edited view that makes up our sense of what is happening. I have a feeling that this is very much post facto. Lucy Dougan’s poetry has been interesting exactly because this has been her mode of operating and it’s a mode that enables her to escape conventional tropes and predictable interests and responses. She lives simultaneously in an ordinary and extraordinary world and anyone reading her poems would have picked this up without requiring any kind of critical apparatus (Creative Writing Project-style) as a support.

At any rate: some examples of the unusual. The first poem of the book, “The Throne”, focusses on a chair which the poet finds outside the local library. Unable to fit it into her car – significantly because a child’s seat for her grandson (ie a family responsibility) is taking up the room – she cannot take it home and thus domesticate it or, more likely, put it alongside what in an earlier review I called her “homely totemic animals”. It remains in its own context from which it will derive whatever meaning it has. So far this is a predictable kind of poem in the Dougan universe but there is a lot more to it than this – it isn’t simply a poem built out of a single attractive idea. There is a barely stated personal element, for example: the poem’s first line is “In crisis” and it’s a dis-ease which seems to be responsible for a kind of paralysis: “I go to the local library / and do not take out / the book I find, / this one or that one first, / what matter?” And the poem finishes by allowing the chair to have an effect because, if it had been domesticated, it would have been used in front of a bathroom mirror and, having left it, the poet acknowledges this in a perhaps unconscious way by using the car’s mirror: “though I fix my hair and do my lips / before I reverse away”. It’s a good introduction for someone reading Dougan’s poetry for the first time: a certain blandness of tone and anecdotal narration matched with underlying dis-ease and infected by genuine strangeness.

“The Throne” is echoed by a poem in the last section of the book, “Gomi Office”, where some passing boys have arranged the rubbish in a kerbside council pick-up so that they recreate an actual office with table, desklamp, phone and – again – chair. The boys may intend no more than a whimsical parody but to Dougan it’s rather more than this. Like Malouf’s bicycle, this office is a visitor from another world, rather lost and looking for its own context. To the observer it raises the question – as do others of this type – of what kind of world it might inhabit where it is as much at home as we observers are in our own world. As a result, it is a poem which concludes not by describing how the poet is affected and drawn to the totemic object but by how it leads one to speculate about alternative worlds:

. . . . . 
At night it is perfectly at home
beneath a sliver of moon
and the trees with their leaf outlines
neat as paper cuts.
I dream a man comes to work
at this gomi office -
a ”one man for the use of”
kind of man,
but I cannot for the life of me
fathom the clock he will punch.

Each of the three sections of Monster Field has an epigraph which gives some idea of the poems that it will contain though the overall interests are so consistent that these probably should just be seen as groupings. The first is a quote from Deborah Levy – “It was true that I had no idea how to endure being alive and everything that comes with it” – which emphasises the personal costs of the poet’s contemporary life. The second, from John Berger – “I propose a conspiracy of orphans” – encourages us to think of the de-contextualised visitors as orphans, and the third – “All the blood facts that follow me to bed at night” – warns us to expect the world of dreams to be dominant. The second section begins with an orphan poem, “Leonie”, which centres (a metaphor to use carefully here) on a statuette which the family has taken around with it over the years. It becomes one of Dougan’s totemic guardians – “Stranger, stay with us, / watch over us / never leave us” – and in this sense it is as close to a predictable poem as we are likely to find in Dougan’s work, but the actual poetic structure is more complex and intriguing than that.

. . . . . 
If I were rendered blind I would know
your lightly pitted cheekbones,
your brow line, your rough underside and slight headache-inducing
scent of epoxy resin in which a finger could snag a glassy splinter
of what it is you keep inside the void of your cast.
I cannot see you as empty for in your hollow head lives the clamour of us all.
And something else, you still abide with us
even though our mother and father are dead and gone . . .

The poem seems to have a double perspective. We see a set of scenes (in other poems, expressed as photographs) of family life with a changing cast and different locations and points of view although all have this humble statue buried somewhere in the background. But we also see the statue as the central focus of vision, staying fixed while almost everything else changes around it. It brings together, in other words, the ordinary life in this world and the life of one of the visitors.

Incidentally, the three poems I have looked at briefly so far are on pages three, thirty-three and sixty-six of Monster Field and for a while I was lured into a kind of speculative numerological hermeneutics with all the possibilities that entails but, on reflection, I think it’s probably no more than an accident though that is a decision, in poetry, not to be taken lightly.

Among the homely objects which have been living their lives alongside the author’s and her family’s, like the statuette, are, predictably, dolls and, perhaps less predictably, some miniature lusterware horses. Dolls are celebrated and examined in “The Dolls” where the power of these toys is evident in their ability to frighten the poet’s children. They are, really, figures of power rather than nostalgia. They are not inherited from childhood but bought at a crisis moment:

. . . . . 
I still remember the texture
of the day I found the dolls.
I swung down the street
feeling open, reckless,
and I swear the dolls called to me
. . . . 
To this day, I think of it
as a return -
the moment I brought myself back -
agreed that warring selves
could live beneath my skin . . .

“The Claphams” deals with a specific genre of dolls and imagines the world through their eyes, a world in which they understand that the children who are responsible for their sad state of repair nevertheless possessed a “frenzied love” for them that the adults who do the repairing never can. Though the poem focusses on the two dolls, its concern is really with human beings and the possibilities lost in adulthood by the editing out processes that we are forced to apply to the world – always much stranger and resonant than it appears to us (something brilliantly conveyed in a poem about two foxes from The Guardians which seems to have lodged in my consciousness and refuses to remove itself).

“The Horses I Threw Out” inhabits the same territory as these doll poems. The model horses, thrown out “in a fit of anger”, are also creatures removed from their context and the poem speculates as to what this might be:

. . . . .
What had their wider world been
before this unhappy fate?
An unlocatable “Planet Lustre”:
their hooves cavorting on the carpet
at my mother’s lover’s house . . .

In a sense they are out of a context because they fall between two periods of the poet’s life: the childhood one and the later one where objects – like the dolls – were collected because of their sensed power. Like the Claphams they had been injured by the child’s love but never had the opportunity to settle into being potent items from the past. What is striking about the poem is the intensity of the poet’s grief and guilt:

. . . . .
O little abandoned horses,
I am sorry, I am sorry.
Where was it that we travelled
my unharnessed companions? . . .

It’s expressed in a single line with a repeated sentence and is very moving.

Guilt and regret figure largely in another poem, “The Wallpaper”, which is not about objects but about contexts. A childhood friend has wallpaper depicting a forest put up behind his desk and realises from her silence when she sees it that she doesn’t like it. In a way, her response is a childish one because she hasn’t yet learned – as adults must – to tailor responses to other people’s likes in a way that takes their feelings into account. There is a lot that could be teased out of the idea of an alternative context being provided for a person by a superficial change in their habitat and the poem does follow this direction at least to some extent. But the overwhelming drive of the poem is emotional rather than phenomenological:

. . . . .
It is so long ago now.
So long since you lived there.
So long since we were close
(as if we had both vanished into the well-laid depths
of the wallpaper wood with no search party sent).
. . . . . 
I was such a stupid girl
and yet there you sat
in your wood
with never a reprimand.
Down the bombed-out years
I imagine you sitting there still.

An emotional response of guilt and regret may be less sophisticated than the intellectual possibilities of exploring notions of alternative worlds but it is undeniably powerful. And certainly more powerful than the contempt that runs through two poems about a school “Home Economics” course which could be said to refuse to accept that the past itself is a different context: as the famous quote says: “they do things differently there”.

One of the aspects of the idea of objects coming into our world from other worlds is the realisation that they can be present in entirely unmystical ways. Our view of life – the view even of the most altruistic of us – necessarily involves placing ourselves firmly in the centre and relating what passes and what we experience to ourselves. But to do this we edit out the complex contexts that are connected to what we see. So a man we do not know, passing us in the street, is a man we do not know. But he has family, genetic history, employment – and a host of other connections – of his own. Our view, even when we are at our most negatively capable, is ruthless in cutting out the entirely ordinary otherworlds that lie all around us. There are many readers who would argue that one of the functions of great narrative – the worlds of Tolstoy and Proust, for example – is precisely that: to give us some sense of the incredibly complex worlds which everyday life demands that we devote so little time to that they may as well not exist. Dougan’s “Girl on a Rug With a Cat” explores a painting (I assume) of just what the title says but wants to move outside the frame to speak of what is omitted: the person who made the rug, for example, or the way the cat’s hair is growing and the way the girl herself is experiencing life “making a start inside” her. “In this scene” the poem says at its end, “a lot remains unknown, / just as it always does”.

A final poem that deserves some attention is the lugubriously titled “Features on Artistic Women Who Live by the Sea in UK Magazines”. It begins in a mocking mode which continues the title’s comical ambiguities: it is the feature articles which are in UK magazines not the women’s facial features, and neither the sea or the women live in these magazines. These are women devoting themselves to “upcycling” repurposing junk to become saleable items. To this extent it fits in with the world in which chairs turn up outside libraries and in which passing boys rearrange kerbside detritus into an office. The poem’s structure is to move from mockery to approval:

. . . . .
Artistic women who live by the sea,
I’ve changed my mind.
I hope that patrons come in droves to your doors
and pay mightily for what you make . . .

and we sense that the reason for this is that the efforts of these women are not in themselves trendy and faux-artistic; that’s an impression we get from the glossy and expensive magazines in which their stories appear. In their way, they, on the shores of Devon or Suffolk are objects taken out of their usual worlds and they respond to other objects in the same situation. Like dung-beetles (to use an unnecessarily cruel analogy) their activities are valuable. They only seem initially contemptible because they are first met in an eminently dislikeable fashion magazine surrounded by “spreads / for pricey anti-ageing creams”. In this sense, they too are objects taken out of their worlds and put into an alien one. As with the chair that Monster Field began with, context is everything.

Theodore Ell: Beginning in Sight

Canberra: Recent Work Press, 2022, 73pp.

Theodore Ell’s book has all the features that one hopes to find in a first book of poems: a distinctive manner, a distinctive tone of voice and a distinctive view not only of things in the world but of what a poem might make of these things. There is also an avoidance of the conventional styles and solutions that one is likely to find in contemporary Australian poems although the book’s title, which works at a number of possible puns, does use a technique common among poets. “Beginning in Sight” can be read as “Beginning Insight”, but its more apparent meaning is that we should expect the sense of sight to be the dominant one in the poems that follow – it will be where they begin. And this is certainly established in the book’s first poem, “Mooring” – whose title also suggests that it will deal with the way that the poems are anchored – which begins with two stanzas of very precise visual registration:

An estuary no road has reached. Staked mangrove flats,
forest shelved high above the sea-grass. On surfaces wavering and firm.
a brightness fit to crack. Beneath still keels,
green stirrings. Late lamplight in coves, where at some noons
white sails slide in or away. Slow skirmishing dragonflies.

Brief haven. Dwindling retreats. Vacant, intermittent houses
crouched over the shallows: slant timber, wavelets at doorsills.
Unfamiliar craft laying creels in the channels -
striped shoals hurry to gaps among the mudbanks
where the heron is poling. . .

All of this is brilliantly and confidently done. One of the poem’s dedicatees is Robert Gray and for these two stanzas we almost seem to be in a Robert Gray poem. But the rest of the poem moves away from registration to think – in complex and not easily graspable ways – about the interaction between this bucolic holiday scene and the perceptions of the humans who inhabit it. The stillness of the scene encourages the feeling that “the present” has been “editing matters in our absence” and the poem goes on to a complicated conclusion:

. . . . .
                                The upriver wind
carries voices after every wake. If they too came
only in rare crossings, low hearsay,
as when thunder out to sea sends tremors through the ebb-tide pools -
then we might overhear the teeming that has weighed this air

past remembering, that drifts among the stilts of creaking floors. Know,
as though blind, an old touch at the elbow. Dive through
    the sun’s clutches
from grey pier boards into cool cyphers.
Fluent silence, occlusion of echoes. Hours when not a vessel moves,
when the sky infiltrates standing water, screens cloud=abysses 
     on the inlet –

then we might take peace unawares. Then hide it among these 
     remnants, these appearances.

Despite the difficulties of this passage for a reader, there is no doubt that, at the widest interpretive perspective, it wants to explore the relationship between the painting-like stillness of the estuary and the reality that lies outside it (it can be heard in the words spoken on boats which go past, leaving a wake, and an impression of an active social world). In other words, it’s a poem which registers the sight-impressions and then goes on, after that elegant twist – “In stillness we suspect the present of outwitting us” – to explore the relationship between the human and the landscape. For all its difficulties (which may, it’s true, derive from my inadequacies as a reader) it’s a really impressive opening poem, tying in with the book’s title, and establishing its author as a poet to be taken (that is, read) seriously.

In fact, one way of approaching the poems of Beginning in Sight – not necessarily the author’s way, of course – might be to look at how visual registration interacts with what a specific poem seems to want to do. At one end there is a group of molto espressivo poems led by “Whitsunday Passage”, which begins with the author in extremis – “Where, wearing love’s cast-offs and dreading all faces, / once ever, I wished not to be saved from poetry”. What follows is description:

. . . . .
The shielding stance of the waves, ushering islands away.
Slender hands – blue veins beneath those shining robes –
 
leading émigré mountains, arms around their offspring,
towards the vanishing line, where broken spray glimmers

sometimes, beckons from past the edge. The rumoured
mazes of the reef. A distant laughter. Beside me, mute sands,

sleepless, altering their shapes. Drifting in the end and wading out.
For the disbanding of years. Its beginning in sight.

There is a complex interaction going on here. Personal distress doesn’t entirely impose on the reading of the landscape in the style of the pathetic fallacy, although this is part of it. The landscape is metaphorically humanised at first so that the flowing currents look like slender hands with blue veins and the mountains seem to have arms around each other, but by the end of the poem, it is the fluid nature of the water, and, especially, the coastal sands, that the poem fixes on. Again, it can be read expressively as saying, “my life in this crisis seems to be becoming shapeless and directionless” but this is counterbalanced by the strong verbless style in which description is done in the poems of this book. The registrations are the opposite, in other words, of the shifting shapes of the sands off the Queensland littoral or the “mazes” of the Barrier Reef.

None of the other poems of Beginning in Sight are quite as anguished as this although there are poems of loneliness. “Votive Lines” deals with the grief of loss – “Friend, you have left hours of silence” – and “Watershed” deals with recovery from pain and illness. Both move straight to landscape, “Watershed” beginning with:

Sleep over ministering sleep,
tresses of rain

drift over the lake -
pins and needles,

intermittent silvers
where no depths stir:

water rising to know water,
allaying creases.

At last this is your only pain. . . 

Yes, it is a metaphor for a kind of post-pain sleep but, like all metaphors which are not merely conceptual, that landscape of water meeting water as rain brushes across a lake, has a strong tactile presence. It’s interesting that another poem which could be said to belong to this group is the final poem of the book, “Convalescence”, which, as its title suggests, focusses on a recovering patient returning to his garden. Thematically one can see how it ties in with Ell’s fascination with sight in that the garden has physically changed while its owner has been away – presumably in hospital. What is odd – at least to me – is that this is the most conventional poem of the book, the only one that might conceivably have been written by a number of other contemporary poets: an odd situation for the poem with which the book takes its leave of us.

At the other end of the spectrum, well away from the lyrical expression of pain of poems like this, are the poems in Beginning in Sight which are narratives, at least, narratives of a kind. “Generators” is an unusually extended (thirteen page) piece detailing the lives and doings of three generations at the one place. It’s difficult for an outsider to know the poet’s exact stake in this but presumably there is a family connection (suggested in the title, “Generators”) with the pre-war university student who converts the windmill on the rural property into a generator, the girl who looks at the way things work through a microscope and the two children who accompany their mother to the place when that girl has become an old woman. The poet’s position may be unclear but the tight narrative method is not. As expected, it focusses on the visual to the extent that the opening of the first poem is a description of the windmill that will be rigged to power the generator. In a fairly minimalist poem, this is quite an extended treatment which speculates on which metaphor is likely to be most accurate:

All patina, dial and pirouettes
the windmill

hovering above the corrugated roof
could be an airman,

standing, arms folded by a runway
. . . . . 
three-sided ladder, sunflower in chains,
face like a second’s glare from a locomotive wheel,

slow cards dealing hand from hand
but not into a deck –

a sudden peak above the house . . .

It’s not only a poem about precursors, it’s also a poem about sight and the different perspectives that can be involved. The pre-war university student goes on to work on aeroplanes and planes, with their god’s-eye perspectives, are recalled later in the sequence as “a chalked line following / minute wingtips, // an arrow in blue silence” where they are contrasted to the two children who look into the black of a letterbox – “a hole in brightness” – to see how far a breeding pair of doves have got in their own “generation”. The bird’s-eye view might seem to be contrasted with that of the microscope but the view through the lens does have the capacity to convert whatever it is minutely examining into a landscape – “You’d swear it put whole acres / under glass – pasture in medleys, wheat parquet”. In other words, “Generators” is a minimalist but very complex narrative with not only works by emphasising visual images – that windmill is hard to get out of a one’s mind’s eye – but by being a poem whose theme is, at least partly, about sight.

Another poem that might come under the heading of narrative is the four part “Verges” which details, in an unusually lively tone, four driving experiences: a near accident, overtaking a cyclist, looking for a house in someone’s past and arriving at a holiday destination. Although, as the title suggests, these share a kind of liminality, it’s a subject broached through precise description so that, for example, the “not so elder” cyclist who the car overtakes, has a “rear wheel laden side to side, all kit and gear, / the caricature of a snail swagger”.

Another two poems which might be included provisionally under the heading of narrative deal with the first world war and the embarkation of Australian troops for Europe. The first of these, “Vessels”, is based on one of the photographs of these embarkations from Albany so that its engagement with the descriptive is obviously a part of its conception. It begins,

Lavish even for spring,
these brass mornings.
Picture-hats, flags and insignia,
anthems on the quay –

never mind the rust on the clear air,
milled and scuffed up
by four-abreast files
laddering the roads in khaki . . .

And you feel that Ell wants to animate a frozen black and white image by precise description and make the kind of exhilarating transformation that occurs in the “colorizing” and sound editing of war footage in the recent They Shall Not Grow Old. “Sojourners”, about a quarantine station, tries to do something similar, I think, when it introduces “this cove // for the dozing pennants, the bared nodding masts” and it seems entirely a part of Ell’s style that the opening sentence should be a single word, “sea-grass”, which is a reference not only to the place but metaphorically to the underlying currents that cause soldiers to be laid-up in this way.

Finally, in this sketchy catalogue, there is one of my favourite poems in the book, “Freehold”. It begins with a violent storm and, again, focusses on the visual, especially in the effect the storm has on how the landscape might be seen:

. . . . . 
                                         Glimpses
of rearrangement. As if a coverlet

lifted and shaken would model new hillsides.
As if an unstrung vine would throw a road off,

sling tar. Sheer weight mows sun into avenues,
battles to cull loose wood and stake new orchards,

a charge finding loopholes in the barricade
of settled shapes. As if to clear the homesteads,

take up the trodden floor, part land, peer in.

It appeals to me because I want to read it as a poem about what poetry (including a poetry like Theodore Ell’s) might do: restructure reality or, at least, restructure how we see reality, overturning and reconfiguring all those things which our established and approved cliches force us to see in a particular way, mounting an attack on “the barricade / of settled shapes”. It might be over-reading one small work but if that’s the case it’s an over-reading I’m happy to pursue. It emphasises that sight is more than just part of the book’s thematic material and its distinctive approach to that material: it can be part of poetry’s wider responsibilities. The more “glimpses of rearrangement” the better.

Alan Wearne: Near Believing: Selected Monologues and Narratives 1967-2021

Waratah, NSW: Puncher and Wattmann, 2022, 252pp.

So large is Alan Wearne’s collected body of work, exploring the lives of Australia’s under-, working-, and middle-classes that Near Believing: Selected Monologues and Narratives 1967-2021 isn’t at all a traditional selected poems, the sort that tries to collect the best-known and most important examples of a poet’s work and present them in such a way that a new reader can get a compressed overview. True, this could be said of the last two sections of Near Believing, the one selecting from the short poems of The Australian Popular Songbook and the other, “Metropolitan Poems and Other Poems” selecting from among reasonably recent mid-length narratives and monologues. But Wearne’s poetic activity in the last quarter (or perhaps even third) of the twentieth century was dedicated to two very large works, The Nightmarkets and The Lovemakers which, put together, amount to nearly a thousand pages. The former is represented in Near Believing by a single long monologue and, although the latter gets nearly fifty pages, including Kevin Joy’s long monologue “Nothing But Thunder”, it’s only a fragment of the enormous and complex whole. In the case of these two mega-works, in other words, readers get not so much a selection as a sampler, something that might give one a faint sense of these books and perhaps, hopefully, lure one to explore their complexities further.

One of the things that Near Believing does is confirm the ambit of Wearne’s interests. He is, basically, a poet observing his own postwar generation. There are glances at the generations after this and something more substantial than glances at a generation or two before. In The Nightmarkets, for example, much of the interest in the love affair between leftist journalist Sue Dobson and the patrician politician Jack McTaggart derives not from the different worlds they inhabit – that of a dope-smoking inner-urbanite and that of a patrician landowner – but from the generational difference. And standing behind McTaggart is his mother, Elise, a representative of the generation born in the late teens or early 1920s. (Wearne seems to have a special affinity with this group – women reaching adulthood in the late 1930s – and this may well be because it’s his mother’s generation.) I don’t think that Wearne ever strays, generationally, outside these boundaries, though his work is so substantial that I could be wrong. At any rate, at least up to this point, he has never done historical reconstructions: there are no renaissance painters or bishops (pace Browning) and certainly no voyaging Australian explorers, all alone or otherwise. So much for temporal limits. In terms of space, Australia, especially Melbourne, is strongly the centre, as one might expect, and there is an emphasis on the postwar suburbs like Blackburn, Wearne’s own locus familiaris, although the Mr Asia Syndicate dimension of The Lovemakers means that the poems do make trips to south-east Asia.

Newcomers will be amazed by the extraordinary complexity and detail of the lives that are on show in these poems but admirers and critics may be able to use Near Believing as the kind of overview that makes it possible to ask some basic questions about a brilliant career spanning more than half a century, questions which haven’t perhaps been able to be answered in any satisfactory way before. They are what might be called “second-level” critical concerns which are really beyond the ambit of reviews which, after all, are required to look closely at a book immediately it is published. When there was, briefly, at least the skeleton of a scholarly critical community in Australian literature, one used to be able to say that they were topics later students might take up in their postgraduate theses. Now they look rather like questions that a reviewer poses but can’t really answer: in today’s language, cans being kicked down the street.

At the risk of writing a review which is a set of questions rather than a set of observations, I’ll begin by listing some of these issues and then have a look at one of them in some – if inadequate – detail. One of them is the need to see what patterns of progression there are in Wearne’s poems. In other words, what does that phrase, “as his powers developed”, mean in this instance? How are the most recent poems, “Near Believing” and “Press Play, different to “Eating Out” and the selections from “Out Here” from Wearne’s second book, New Devil, New Parish? Are they better – whatever that might mean? Then there are the characters themselves. Do his women characters seem more developed and less likely to be stereotypes than many of the male characters and if so why? Are the large, aggregated works like The Nightmarkets or The Lovemakers the formats in which Wearne’s genius is shown to best advantage or is it the more minimalist portraits such as are found in the sonnets of The Australian Popular Songbook? (Again, readers can slot in all my reservations about value judgements in the world of creative activity here.) What is the poet’s stake and his role? Is it a dispassionate responsibility to document; is it a humanist responsibility to allow characters to express something of the fullness of their personality, especially in the monologues; is it a desire to analyse underlying social patterns in Australian society (especially in the cultures of prostitution and drugs and their interaction with personal and political lives)? Or is there fundamentally a moral vision – as was the case with Dickens – describing character and social constructions but having a very strong judgemental view of aspects of them? If there is this evaluative component, is it aligned with those generally accepted by the intellectual/creative class of today or is it opposed to them? What is the function of the growing predilection for comic doggerel? Why is it that Wearne himself appears as one of the characters of the long narrative sequence, “Operation Hendrickson”? How are the enormous cast of characters differentiated: do they have different speech patterns, for example, or does their individuality only lie in the complex interaction of family, sex, suburb (always important in Wearne), friends etc – an interaction that produces the ideas and opinions that the character is keen to share with us (in the case of the monologues) or that the narrator wants to explore (in the case of the narratives)?

I’m especially interested in this last question, and the first thing to say about it is that it isn’t a simple issue. One always has the sense that there is a basic “Wearne style”, that he is, in other words, parodyable. The same can be said of Browning, surely the founder of the specific genre that Wearne works in. One of the features, in Browning’s case, is a kind of bluff energy that animates even a depressed old painter like Andrea del Sarto. It’s an energy deriving from the desire to express oneself fully that often keeps monologues poetically alive, pumping through enjambed pentameters. And that energy can lead to a kind of gigantism that is difficult to rein in. Every student thinks that Bishop Blougram goes on too long and the same can be said of Sue Dobson’s two monologues in The Nightmarkets and especially of Therese Lockhart’s in the same book (it runs to well over two thousand lines). At any rate, a poetry which is driven by energy is likely to have the same powerful pulse whether the speaker is an inner-urban activist from The Nightmarkets or a drug-running Kevin Joy from The Lovemakers. And this pulse seems to determine repeated syntactic structures so that a passage from Near Believing’s second-last poem:

                     And if on Saturday evenings
that station’s Sexuality Show was somewhat fatuous
(though for those times and on its terms well meaning)
often it seemed we both were giving
differing answers to quite similar questions . . .

seems identifiably a passage by Alan Wearne with its “and if” opening, its deployment of “somewhat” and the balance of the last clause. Wearne is obviously sensitive to this issue whereby characters, no matter how different, sound “somewhat” the same and a note at the end of Near Believing explains that certain passages have been omitted when he found himself “announcing to his creations: “Truly, this isn’t you speaking . . . it’s me!”. There are also quite a few slight emendations to “Climbing Up the Ladder of Love”, Sue Dobson’s second monologue from The Nightmarkets, and the one included here. Again. I’ll bequeath a detailed study of these amendments to some imaginary scholar of the future but one of their functions is clearly to make Sue sound more like herself and less like her creator. To take a single, not necessarily representative, example, the original,

Yet, even if portions bore, I thought, love some to last.
This starts my career, it must. But was about to get cast
by John in some wilting bloom role. . .

becomes

[“]Yet even if such portions bore,” I knew, “love some to last.
This starts my career, it must. . . “
                                  Though was I set to be cast
by John in some “wilting bloom” role? . . .

The original has two very Wearnian compressions: “love some to last” – ie “I would love some of them to last a long time” – and in the next line, “but was about to get cast” – ie “but I was about to get cast” – and presumably the existence of two so close together makes Sue sound more as though she is speaking a kind of Wearne-speak than the author is comfortable with.

This underlying style doesn’t inhibit verbal differentiation though; it can just provide a context in which it can occur. For me the strongest part of this Selected is the last section made up of individual narratives of medium length and the first of these, “Chatswood: Ruth Nash Speaks”, is one of my favourite Wearne poems. It is built around the Bogle-Chandler mystery of the early sixties where two of the guests at a New Year party for CSIRO scientists, Gib Bogle and Margaret Chandler, went off together for some extra-marital shenanigans. Their poisoned bodies were later found at the Lane Cove River but no murderer was identified and there have been many theories about the deaths ranging from a prank gone astray to a sudden eruption of hydrogen sulphide from the river floor. The party was held by Ken Nash, another scientist, and his wife, Ruth. The whole poem is a monologue which Ruth delivers in lolloping, bathetic couplets and it has a wonderful opening:

. . . and we are, in best sellers or movies, near press-ganged to pretend
how simple, bland beginnings might prologue a ludicrous end,

so there’s Gib on arrival lightfooting it down our hall,
and there’s Gib a day later lightfooting bugger all.

We think we know the limits? We’re merely to follow this text:
Lives unfold lives fold, here’s one hour here’s the next.

And where in a plot place “the heavens”, their ever-expanding No?
Well you barely ask such questions of the CSIRO,

for (lab coats, leather patches, pipes and British cars)
my other half worked with boffins who rarely trusted the stars. . .

It’s a gorgeously precise evocation of Ruth Nash who is clever in her own way and rather outside the male domain of the scientists at the party. She must, incidentally, have been born in the early twenties and is thus a contemporary of Elise McTaggart who, with her friend, Molly, has a similar position vis a vis the male political world of the postwar Menzies government. She is thinking, through the poem, about the mysteries of the events of people’s lives, rather as a narrative poet must and she’s quite removed from the mental processes of science: as she says, “Well you barely ask such questions of the CSIRO”. She’s less uptight than her husband – who objected to Margaret Chandler’s husband’s Hawaiian shirt – and there’s a slightly larky quality about her conveyed especially beautifully in that phrase “lightfooting bugger all”. All of this is transferred to her tone of voice in the poem itself. We aren’t told about her parents, suburb and school as we might have been in a longer monologue, and so this has a minimalist quality. But her personality is as strongly conveyed as Kevin Joy’s or Sue Dobson’s. As a poem it’s a masterpiece in miniature with a sharply individuated speaker.

Another poem worth exploring from this point of view is “A Portrait of Three Young High School Teachers”. We aren’t told the date of the portrait but it feels like the sixties or even, conceivably, the decade before – a period when the three young women “in full, pleated, white or floral-patterned skirts” are not allowed to wear slacks. The poem opposes female friendship to the way in which the high school “does things” and thus to the way in which prevailing social structures do things. The idiom of the poem sounds like reasonably familiar Wearne narrative:

. . . . .
And if outside, starting at Holland Road
(after which they’ll circle out into those whatever-beyonds)
the instant museum of jingles and choruses, slogans and chants
continue their parade:

a Peace Congress for both civic-minded and pest,
or for the troubled, the naïve, the plain inquisitive,
Revival Crusades making sure of merely nothing . . .

As the poem says, “friendships can at least delay these dour, sour uncertainties” and it’s the friendship of Ruth, Frances and Yvonne which is the subject of the poem. The power of the last stanza is that the language moves from that of conventional narrative to direct speech in the form of a very elegant invitation:

            So, walking to their staffroom
Ruth, a young woman at her most formally informal
tells Frances: “A few folk are coming over
this Saturday. Yvonne and her fiancé will be there.
You and your husband are very, very welcome.”

It could be argued that this is not so much the individuated speech of a precisely defined character so much as the clichés of a particular class but it doesn’t feel that way to me. The contrast with the third person narrative ensures that it seems to the reader immensely human and really quite moving. It’s the mark of an author with a sure and very delicate touch and just as Ruth Nash stands outside the world of the scientists, so these three friends stand outside the structures of school and wider society.

One way of investigating both the processes of individualisation and the issue of Wearne’s development of a poet might be to pick similar figures appearing in early and more recent poems. “Waitin’ for the Viet Cong” is a piece that chimes with Sue Dobson’s experiences in The Nightmarkets. A leftist activist (admittedly from a middle-class background and with an academic father) finds herself in a situation which challenges the values she has evolved for herself. In The Nightmarkets, as in the earlier “Out Here”, the plot is deliberately rather tenuous and the author leaves you in no doubt that it is the characters that are to be highlighted and the function of events is to challenge and define these characters. In a sense this happens in “Waitin’ for the Viet Cong”, but the situation is so good and so full of ironies that it is hard for a reader (at least, it is for me) not to be much more interested in it than I am in the central character who is, after all, just another activist facing social change. To summarise: the central character falls in love with a French girl while they are both in school but when, older, she travels to France to renew the relationship, she finds that things have moved on for Antoinette:

. . . . . 
       Nothing I would ever do had been so planned,
so mis-planned.
               Candidacy and scholarship were certainties
whilst French would never be a problem:
wasn’t it all mine, not as a kind of loan
but the zealous gift which, steeled and committed,
I thought had chosen me, such being that on-cue bravado
History and love both offer.
                            Shy, arrogant girls,
hadn’t we kept each other’s photographs
“Moi sur Les Barricades”, “Me and my Collective”?
Maybe. But what hers had hardly shown
was all the ground she’d filled, she’d travelled,
which wasn’t, I knew, mere breasts and a boyfriend
. . . . . 
          Then catching this right-through-me look of hers
I knew what she was seeing Here’s that Australiene again
(some place like that)  a pest from my past,
and how right now in the compost of our caprice
and paranoia, my Antoinette was truly blooming . . .

The Australian sums this experience up as “She cut me and I caught a chill” but the chill turns into something much more life-threatening. So far, the poem exploits the ironies of the way in which changed times and conditions challenge previous experiences and values, not entirely different to the questions Sue Dobson faces when she finds herself in love with a member of the privileged rural elite. But the next irony of “Waitin’ for the Viet Cong” is more delicious. Her life is saved by the unremitting efforts of her parents and Australian consular staff, exactly the people she has spent her activist life fighting against:

. . . . .
         Week after shaky week I’d little else but sweated,
though now someone was saying my name and I caught that
monotonal national voice diplomacy never could dispel.
Whilst all those manner of people I wished exterminated:
governments, Foreign Affairs, specialists, flight crew, anyone
wanting the world purged of every Antoinette-and-I
were helping to lift, mend, fly and propel me
through Customs and out, school girl ruthless still . . .

It’s an irony worthy of Henry James (who would surely have hailed it as a “germ” suitable for expansion into a Jamesian novel) and it reaches some kind of resolution at the conclusion when the character shares a joke with her father. It’s too complex an issue to go into here, but one would like to spend some time comparing this woman’s idiom with that of Sue Dobson, even if the issue is complicated by the fact that Sue’s monologues are imagined as occurring almost immediately after the events she describes whereas the character in “Waitin’ for the Viet Cong” is looking back on her life from a much more mature viewpoint – she’s described as “recently retired”.

“Waitin’ for the Viet Cong” raises another issue which perhaps I should have added to the list of issues that one would like to see examined in Wearne’s poetry. The final section of the poem, after the daughter’s laughing with her father, is a strange imagined poem/song in a tricky rhyme scheme:

We knew Struggle, we knew Truth,
          Knew Hué and Hai Phong,
Served such causes in our youth,
          Waitin’ for the Viet Cong.
Whilst Johnson, Nixon strafed the North,
Bellowed each July the Fourth:
“Longin’ for the Viet Cong to win girls,
          Screamin’ for the Viet Cong!”

And so on for another five stanzas. I’ve quoted it simply because to try to describe it in a way that made sense to a reader who doesn’t have the book would take a lot of space. It’s really hard to know what it’s doing as it seems so out of keeping with the monologue style of the poem and its proliferating ironies. It can certainly be said of it that it stops the whole poem from being too po-faced and it isn’t something Henry James would have been able to do. Perhaps it ties in with Wearne’s obvious delight in comic poetry seen in poems like “Dysfunction, North Carlton Style or, The Widow of Noosa” or “All These Young Australianists . . .” from Prepare the Cabin for Landing. (Interestingly, the first of these occurs immediately after “A Portrait of Three Young High School Teachers” in that book as though to say that there are more registers available to the poet than the solemn, sensitive tone of that poem.) The whole technique appears first (I think) at the end of The Lovemakers where Barb and Neil’s relationship – one of the running themes of this nearly seven hundred page book – is concluded in a tone which is the opposite of what a reader might expect:

          Neil was in Melbourne attending a funeral,
he called up his old flame to check out her scene.
          She was delighted and jumped at a meeting,
before he’d fly out from Tullamarine.

Her heart was kickstarted, it wouldn’t stop thumping
with part of what happened and part might’ve been.
Then she panicked; if Neil has a touch of the cold feet
won’t he run off to Tullamarine? . . . 

And so on for another eighteen stanzas all finishing with Melbourne’s airport’s name providing a rhyme. At the time it struck me as a daring experiment, a way of avoiding the solemn rounding-off that a long narrative poem might be expected to have – as Ian Metcalfe’s final section of The Nightmarkets has, for example. Perhaps its appearance here and in “Waitin’ for the Viet Cong” is a sign that it is part of Wearne’s long-term thoughts about tone and conclusions.

Wearne is a great poet with a freak hypersensitivity to people, their inner lives, relationships and conflicts, and the familial, educational and suburban elements that make them what they are. This sensitivity allows him to tap into the almost infinite complexity of our subjectivities. Michelle Borzi, in her excellent introduction, quotes Sue Dobson’s remark, “Take any normal street of average length . . . / Simply concentrate on / a street of a suburb: that’s mindblowing!” Admittedly, in this passage from the first of her two monologues in The Nightmarkets, Sue is talking about the sex going on in that street but sex is only a part of the infinitely complex interactions of human beings. It may be that there are other people around the place equally as sensitive to human subjectivity as Wearne and one should really focus only on Wearne’s unique powers of giving imaginative expression to this material. I made a brief list at the beginning of some of the questions that a mature literary culture would be asking of such a poet. Another one to add to the list might be the question of the extent to which he is a social or a biological determinist, answering Ruth Nash’s question about the role of the heavens, perhaps. Deciding which of his vast cast of characters is able to make the freest choices might take a long time.

Marcelle Freiman: Spirit Level; Peter Skrzynecki: Travelling Among the Stars

Spirit Level (Waratah NSW: Puncher and Wattmann, 2021, 67pp.)
Travelling Among the Stars (Np: Vagabond, 2022, 208pp.)

It’s a fact well-known that the advances in medical science in the last half-century have enabled those who have access to them to live longer and healthier lives than those of previous generations. This seems all to the good but I wonder whether many have pondered the effect that this has had on creativity, on poetry specifically. Since poets are now likely to survive longer, how does this affect their own sense of the shape of their writing lives? (And for that matter, since critics survive longer too, how does that affect their engagement with “the literature of their times” since the “times” might well be getting towards three-quarters of a century.) I don’t think it’s simply a matter of what has always happened being mathematically extended (or distended). There may well be tangible changes that occur when poets get into their seventies assuming that the inner life continues to grow and change and the creative impetus survives. One of these changes might well relate to memories which, I think it could be argued, alter in quality, significance and insistence as writer approach the deeper recesses of age. Marcelle Freiman’s and Peter Skrzynecki’s recent books come from writers now in their seventies – late seventies in Skrzynecki’s case – and they are both very much books built on memories, exploring the fact that memories are far more complex things than the simple word suggests. When the life of the poet has also been marked early on by the experience of migration with its imposition of a double identity, memories have an extra edge although it could be argued that the memories of everyone who reaches their seventies are memories of a childhood so far in the past that it might just as well be “another country”. A past where, as Brook Emery says in a poem in his selected, “We used to eat Chiko Rolls, Sargents Pies, / Pluto Pups, Polly Waffles, Rainbow Balls . . .” could seem nearly as unfamiliar and exotic to a poet of the third decade of the twenty-first century as a foreign country of origin like South Africa.

Which is a good point at which to look at the poetry of Marcelle Freiman. Spirit Level is her third book – she is hardly a prolific poet – and, like the other two – Monkey’s Wedding and White Lines (Vertical) – is a book dominated by memories of a South African childhood of the apartheid era. To make matters more complex, her grandparents, on both sides, were themselves migrants from Latvia and Lithuania. The striking cover of this new book alludes to this by showing an extraordinary photograph of Freiman’s mother as a child in Lithuania. It’s alluded to in a three-part poem called “The Mother Poems”:

My mother sits in her armchair – by her side
photographs and a document assembled in a frame:
1931 a Lithuanian passport: the handwritten words identify
my grandmother Chana b. 1903 and Mina b.1926.
Alongside, a snapshot in a forest of birches - 
a satchel on her shoulder, the child looks straight at the camera,
her heart-shaped face, a half-smile,
the shine of a clear lake through the trees . . .

Photographs like this, a way of embedding and preserving a fragment of a past, have only been known as a mass phenomenon since the beginning of last century and can act as triggers of memory or, as here, something that extends our responses back beyond the time of our own consciousness as a marker of the memories of those who went before.

Freiman is a more complex poet than simply a purveyor of migration memories and her work is especially concerned with the visual arts, the poems often responding to, or taking as a starting point, paintings, especially contemporary Australian paintings. But the theme of memory is an important one and its importance is established in the first poem of her first book in which a sun-shower in the garden in Sydney generates, willy-nilly, a childhood memory:

. . . . . 
I remember -
another sunshower in November
called a “monkey’s wedding” in Africa -
the picture leaps charged by rain in sunlight
and eyes transformed to childhood
imagine a red sky and monkeys. . .

Here, right at the beginning, we meet the idea of memories not as something indulgently cherished and polished but as something that calls from the past to the present, insisting on being registered. Spirit Level emphasises this by having as an epigraph a quote from David Malouf, himself an expert in the complex phenomenon of memory: “The world not as it was, or as we were, but as we find ourselves again in its presence”, stressing that memory is a way of living in the present rather than moving ourselves into our pasts. And the first poem, “Still”, might even be imagined to be a revisiting of “Monkey’s Wedding” in that it replaces a sunshower with a dry landscape and a fascination with the content of a memory by a fascination with the precise requirements on the mental plane which will allow such memories to emerge:

there is a stillness I require
no rain drumming the surfaces of things.
now, there is no quiescent water
rather a dry crackle of grasses, a sunset in Africa
yellow-brown and moving soft as hair.
only the child’s eye can see
a memory like this. . .

The title, “still”, referring to the mental state, also – probably deliberately – connotes a photograph, imagined as a single frame in the continuous movie of life, and, as I’ve said, it’s one of the ways in which memory is triggered. Almost the whole first section of Spirit Level is devoted to memories of a South African girlhood and they are poems which raise a lot of issues. The first of these is the question of why particular memories should occur. Guilt is obviously a powerful driver as is trauma: in a couple of her poems Freiman describes the memory of a man crying out for help while lying on the road bleeding after a bicycle accident. And in the poems of Spirit Level there are a number of reasons for memory which, like guilt and trauma, might apply to pretty well anyone. There are family memories, for example, which, considered in the cold light of age, are messages about our selves in the present since the outlines of genetic heritage are made clearer. In “The Mother Poems”, for example, the poems move backward so that they conclude with a portrait of the mother’s mother, someone who escaped the anti-semitic pogroms of Europe to settle in South Africa:

. . . . .
Through wordless nights, with steel wires
tying her to family, she made new life in the sun – my mother
a proof of it: snapshot of a young nursery-school teacher
wild-haired and free at eighteen.
Ambiguous, the losses of family not spoken,
the traces would ripple close to the frames
of my mother’s silence, beyond my limited grappling,
my vision too narrow to fathom, even now, years later
in this room.

Here the “losses of family” refers to the fate of the grandmother’s mother and sister, killed in Lithuania at the end of the war. It isn’t a trauma of immediate experience to the author but one whose “traces would ripple” – a reminder that the far past is part of our present, even if we barely know its outlines.

At a social level, a particular kind of memory forces itself into the consciousness of someone growing up in South Africa. In Freiman’s poetry it isn’t so much an issue of having lived under an oppressive, even psychotic, political regime, so much as the lack of childhood awareness of the nature of that regime, of its oppressed majority living in the townships. It’s partly an inevitable guilt reaction about a child’s insensitivity to the lives of the house’s gardener and servant. And guilt and shame are powerful impulses that drive memories into our present. But there is a poetic problem about such memories in that poetry has a strong drive to work its own magic on them, teasing out meanings, emphasising symbolic elements, slyly punning, and so on. In other words, treating these memories as material for poetry when they might be something that is trying to communicate in its own language and doesn’t want to be shepherded or translated into a free-standing poem. To me, one of the least satisfying poems in Spirit Level is “Country of my Birth – written 27 June 2013” a highly structured set of memories of South Africa interweaving the author’s own experiences with the life of Mandela then approaching its close. It’s a portrait of “a country of misery” but the attempt to work the intractable material into some sort of shape is not only a failure but I think a misguided attempt at the poetic level. Something similar could be said about “The Dam”, a much more satisfying poem built around the childhood memory of an afternoon swim at the grandparent’s place in a concrete reservoir under a windmill pumping up water from artesian levels. Unlike “Country of my Birth” there is scope for a powerful sense of the tactility of the experience:

 . . . . . 
holding the ladder, I backed in, heels pressed,
                 toes gripping the sludgy coating.

Above our heads the windpump clanked as the wind changed direction,
        its tailfin a sail, blades turning lazy and squeaking . . .

And it continues – it’s a long poem – with these powerful tactile memories before switching to an interest in why such memories arise. It describes standing in Sydney, “by a stand of ti-tree bushes and eucalyptus” and experiencing a kind of revelation of plenitude, cast very much in terms of the strata that underlie existence. The poem finishes by reverting to the memory of the afternoon swim in childhood where the windmill drew up the water that was underneath the dry South African “straw-coloured grassland”. Again, this is to make sense of the memory as a proleptic experience of a kind of grace underlying the harsh surface: the poem, early on, reminds us that this is also a country where seams of gold lie underneath. The poetic issue, I think, is one of control. To make a good poem a memory is harnessed to an intense experience of the present and the result is a satisfying poem as poem. It’s just the purist in me that worries whether the situation might not be that memories deliver their message in their own language and shouldn’t be translated and structured. It’s a poet’s problem but a significant one and it’s probably the reason why I prefer the poems of memory here, like “Greyhounds – on the plots” where there is no translating or interpreting and little apparent structuring.

Peter Skrzynecki’s Travelling Among the Stars is a book full of memories and their effects. In fact his poetry, since his third book, Immigrant Chronicle, has been located in memories of the past. These have often been deployed for their recording quality – the word “chronicle” in the title is significant here – and for their social relevance as part of the attempt to understand and celebrate the effects and achievements of post-war immigration from Europe. In a sense there is nothing new in Travelling Among the Stars but the importance of the book is that it shows us – or, at least, me – that Skrzynecki’s poetry is not a comfortable repetitive mining of a standard stock of memories but rather a poetic oeuvre built out of obsession: these are memories that don’t go away though they may derive from experiences more than half a century old.

The core memories are located around two scenes. The first is family life in Sydney starting in the fifties and then following through to his parents’ deaths. The second is his time as a recently graduated teacher in a one-teacher rural school in Jeogla on the New England Tableland. I think we first meet Skrzynecki’s father in the second poem of Immigrant Chronicle where he is memorably described as someone who “kept pace only with the Jones’s / of his own mind’s making”. From there he has gone on to make regular appearances (or the poet’s memories of him have) and probably establish himself as the most loved father in Australian literature – at least in my knowledge of Australian literature. A number of the poems of Travelling Among the Stars detail one of the distinctive problems of age. We have in our possession small objects that are “left over” from our parents’ lives: in his case, his father’s shoe-last, watch and alarm clock, in his mother’s, “small plates and cups, statues / she collected”. Their value is only as a tangible adjunct to memory (I have an ugly cigarette box that my father was given when he left his job in England before we emigrated to Australia) and this can only have a painfully short life: “Who will save them / when I am dead – my children / who have lives of their own / or their children . . .”. It’s not a problem faced by those who die young.

Memories of his first stint as a teacher occur in both There, Behind the Lids and Headwaters – earlier books than Immigrant Chronicle – and in those poems you can feel Skrzynecki struggling with modes of writing about them. Fifty years after the publication of his first book, these memories seem to have settled into a mixture of surprise and rhapsodic celebration, an almost Wordsworthian celebration not only of the natural world and its inhabitants – Skrzynecki writes very well of the local people of the area – but also of the accession of the desire and ability to write. There’s a certain paradox in the fact that what seemed at the time an exile from the comfort and love of the family home into a difficult post in an unheard-of town hours to the north should result simultaneously in illumination and a realisation of one’s talent. But perhaps it isn’t such a paradox.

My sense of the function of memory in Skrzynecki’s work over the more than half-century of his writing is that there are tensions there which are made clear in this recent book. There is no doubt that there is a process of memorialisation going on, if we define memorialisation as a gift given by the present to the past. Those in the present pay homage to those who have passed by keeping their spirits alive, to an extent at least, in memory. Any chronicling does this even if its basic aim is to understand some phenomenon of the past like post-war migration. But there is a push in the opposite direction that I think grows as we age: the past forces itself on us in memories and demands that it be heard. Feliks Skrzynecki is a slightly more active figure, for example, in the poems of this book than he was in the poems of the earlier ones. The first poem, “My Dear Father”, is a letter to the dead man, written in order to “reconnect” and is thus more of a resuscitation than a simple description would be. Most tellingly in “A Visit from My Father” we have a dream – not announced as such until later in the poem – in which the father

  arrived unexpectedly
carrying a travel bag and asked
if he could visit.
“I won’t be staying long,” he added,
almost apologetically . . .

It’s ultimately a poem about dying and the father, still carrying his bag, leaves through customs at the airport where the son can’t follow him. His final message is that “once you pass through the gates / there is nothing to be afraid of”. But though it is advice about the future, to me it reads as a case of a memory – in the form of the father – imposing itself on the present, refusing to be something passive that can be conjured up in the present when the poet feels like memorialising the past. It’s no accident that when one of the Jeogla poems, “Wollomombi Falls (2)”, speaks of the memories of the place, it does it in terms of a similar visit:

. . . . .
Fifty years and it still surprises
by coming to mind
like a relative
who arrives without notice -
a reminder of youth and identity
in a home where I boarded
and knew that I belonged.

This idea of memories as the past insisting on paying visits to the present rather than passively recreated as memorials is put well by Pasternak in his autobiography (although there is an important distinction to be made between visits and gifts). Speaking of his memories of meeting Rilke, he says, ”I am not presenting my recollections to the memory of Rilke. On the contrary, I myself received them as a gift from him”.

Claire Potter: Acanthus: New Poems

Artarmon: Giramondo, 2022, 76pp.

The poems of Claire Potter’s new book, like those of its predecessor, Swallow, are simultaneously fascinating and challenging. It feels as though the book itself understands this and does its best to help you because there is a lot of material devoted to exploring what it is that the poems are actually doing. To begin with, there is a short note, preceding the first poem, which describes the inspiration behind the capitals of a Corinthian column. A basket covered with a roof tile was placed above the grave of a young girl. A dormant acanthus plant grew around the pot and over the tile, curving inwards as it rounded the corner. Seeing this, Callimachus decided to use it as a model – a challenging one – for a new kind of capital. This image is crossed with a quote from Derrida that seems to say much the same thing: “Everything will flower at the edge of a desolate tomb”. In a way these are both assertions that the baroque will evolve around emptiness: as Merwin says (or implies) somewhere, the bigger the emptiness of the doorspace, the more elaborate the decoration of the doorway. Why this is the case can be open to debate? is the emptiness loss or absence – they aren’t entirely the same. Does the art compensate for the nothingness or does it derive from it and thus, in a way, express it? The answer to that probably depends on where the philosophical tradition that you work within comes from. To make things a little more complex we are told, at the end of this note, that the poems of the book “might be said to begin” on the overlapping edges of the two accounts (Derrida and Vitruvius – who tells the story of Callimachus’s inspiration) and thus introduces the word “edge” which is going to figure largely in the poems to come. At the other end of the book is its blurb. Readers of these reviews will know that it is not a genre that I ever feel is very helpful for a critic and, I suppose, it isn’t intended to be since its main function is to lure innocent readers to buy the book. But in this case, the blurb has more help to offer, describing the poems as dwelling “in the landscapes of edges”, being interested in “surreal gardens, oblique geometries, cloud rooms, witches, and childhood remembrances”, all elements that can easily be traced in individual poems. Acanthus is also accompanied, as are all Giramondo’s books of poetry, by a sheet containing an Author Note on the reverse and, again, this is more than helpful:

An enduring line running through Acanthus is perhaps one that inevitably moves obliquely or sideways. Looking back now, many of the poems traverse the clarity of a dream-like state: diverting from an imaginary centre and meandering across strange ground. As with all poetry, fragments matter; figures and objects – as if on the level of the bee – are significant; unintelligible feelings turn into a blueprint language that errs and wanders in order to find a resting place. Nothing in the collection was fixed beforehand, you could say the writing took place in order to think a way through, think about certain things or events that at the time didn’t have any formal presence in my mind . . .

This degree of help is unprecedented and although those who don’t like the poems will think that this poet is protesting too much, I can see a fascinating attempt to make sense of – or to make a whole out of – very disparate poems some of which are extremely strong.

And then there is the help to be derived from the poems themselves which are often explicit about what they are trying to do to the extent of making it a kind of meta-theme. “Counterintuitive” is perhaps the closest to what I call a “poem-poem”. It begins with a passage by Gerald Murnane as an epigraph, a passage which seems to dissolve the writer-meaning-reader relationship in favour of “images and feelings in a sort of eternity”. There’s a not uncommon paradox in the fact that the poem which follows speaks very meaning-communicatively, almost prosily, in advocating a poetry of edges and intuitions:

There is a writing that escapes the head, rustles
          like stars of purple thistle,
moves the tiniest bones of clavicle, tilts like
                    a compass from centre to radius to peregrine. This writing
          cannot be analysed or
     understood by conventional means. Its solitude is written
in a vine that veins a crumbling edge, the foliage
           of a dream in amber . . .

and then modulates into the world of acanthus leaves developing around the edge of a tile. If it works as a poem it is because this expository introduction develops in a way which rather performs its own subject by moving into a metaphorical undersea world: “Sometimes from the seabed, it having become impossible / to work on land . . . / I drift to an underwater forest”. And this is only the first of a set of transformations. Underwater lights are likened to “paper lanterns / I pressed at other times” and the poem leaves the sea to speak of the “other times” which turn out to be liminal, edge-times:

                        At twilight for example or sometimes before dawn
               when I decrease myself and my misreadings in the camouflage
          of singing grasses where the tourmaline colours
     in a nest of eggs could stand in for a palette
of seaweeds and stones. Here the elements become
     woven, here the words come in the noon of heatwaves
                    backwards, forwards, sea creatures in bricolage
                             images and feelings in a sort of eternity
                  that float in a trilogy of windowpanes – the flaw
of the paper, the fleck of the eye, desire attempting to feel its way
      rub its runic skin against the arch of page

One of the reasons for quoting this poem at length is to give readers some idea of what Potter’s poetry actually feels like. Encountered on its own in a journal, say, I think this would be fairly daunting but within the context of an entire book, where it has an explanatory, and thus helpful, role, and where it is surrounded by friends in the form of poems which work on the principles that it speaks to, it looks a strong piece. The “flaw / of the paper” and the “fleck of the eye” are those revealing moments at the edge of concentration, the moments when Potter’s poetic self begins to become interested, the moments “too visible to be seen straight on” as another poem says. The exact nature of the “desire” which is attempting to feel its way is a bit more problematic. We are anxious to work out what it is since it hints at the thematic forces behind the poetry but is ambiguous. It could be nothing more than good old physical desire: this would suggest a core interest in the complexities of relationships. It could be the desire to find a structure and development in one’s life: this would account for the poems which revisit childhood and also for poems like “Of Birds’ Feet” and “The Birthday” which are very much about direction. Or, at its most extreme it could be no more than a desire to push one’s own poetry to explore what can be done with material that comes from the edges of things. At any rate, in a poetry so full of development and transformation it is understandable that readers search for reasonably familiar, conventional underlying certainties in as many poems as possible: ailing parents, problematic relationships, childhood memories and so on.

Other poems which have a methodological component include “The Art of Sideways” and “Plant Poem”. The former of these is one of the more difficult poems of the book even if its title makes its subject perfectly clear. It begins with a striking metaphor which determines much of what is to come: the diminution of sunlight as the northern winter solstice approaches is likened to the sleep of “a yellow snake in a tight burrow”. I think the basis of this connection is the sense of the sun circling lower and lower on the horizon (to the point where, if London were a thousand kilometres farther north and touched the Arctic Circle, the arc of the sun’s course would barely rise above the horizon at mid-winter). But the snake is also an image from Australia – “Last summer I stood over a sheath of snake in the bush” – something that introduces the issue of the poet’s journeyings and developments. The central section of the poem is an extended description of the snake’s shed skin, another metaphor for an individual’s development, but the main concern of the poem precedes this:

But just as rain can fall sideways   and eyes look aslant
might a northern winter   not widen light in the way
a snake   exceeds its skin?

Again, this wants to be read as a guess on the poet’s part that the changes in her life that are happening in the northern hemisphere may be changes in the quality of her perceptions but before we get to such a straightforward concluding assertion, there is a complex passage:

Trees are empty on the sidewalk   their fallen leaves   layered
and overlapping   like shelves of ancient papyruses
One tree casts a long shadow   two arms striking upwards
as though piqued   by pavement light
Between the shadow lying flat and still   and the tree standing
long and tall   there is an angle of forty-five degrees.
There is Icarus   falling from blue   to decimal   to amber
The distance between north   and south   is mapped
with the shape   and angle   of his eyes
The snake’s skin is colourless   his eye invincible
The winter light is warm   piercing darkness
a trajectory that points in all   directions

There are two puzzling parts here. The first is the issue of how the shadow of a vertical, winter-struck tree can be at forty-five degrees to the tree itself when, if the surface that the shadow falls on is a road or pavement (presumably “sidewalk” is used when it isn’t the accepted term in either Australia or the UK because it involves the word “side” which “pavement” doesn’t) it should be ninety degrees. The only solution I can offer here is that the shadow falls on a wall. It isn’t entirely a trivial point since Potter’s poetry reveals an interest in angles, not only as part of the sideways, edge-seeking view, but as something measurable. There is a nice poem about a couple and “the incandescence of love / and hate in two ordinary / people”. It is called “Eighty-nine degrees” and the line “eighty-nine degrees to the usual” shows it to be derived from E.M. Forster’s famous description of Cavafy as “standing at a slight angle to the universe”. Potter’s poem, and perhaps her poetry in general, wants to be more precise than this and actually to measure the “slight angle” as being one degree. Then there is the issue of Icarus, falling into the poem much as he fell from the sky. His presence is made less surprising by the context of the book’s other poems: he appears reasonably frequently as an image of plunging descent. The puzzle for me – which may be no more than a result of my own readerly inadequacies – is how he can fall from blue (the sky) through “decimal” to amber. It can’t be a matter of falling from one colour to another via a measurable process of declension since declension is measured in degrees which derive from the old Babylonian sexagesimal system and are thus not part of the decimal system. And why “amber”? Possibly it is a description of the northern winter light that the poem is concerned with or possibly it involves the meaning of preservation – it does occur in “Counterintuitive” in that sense: “a dream in amber”.

“Plant Poem” is rather a different beast:

The decision of a plant
to grow this way or that
might mimic the decision
to leave by this door or that
but ultimately like a plant
one stays put, moving only in minute
imperceptible degrees, craning
the neck for example towards the sun
towards light that remains glacial
towards peace that carries spurs
towards a singular voice, a neon
strobe which may flicker or be broken
but which nonetheless shines
some small thing inwards to pinken
the discoloured mind, brighten the worsted
eye looking this way or that
towards a door ajar but not open
extending just enough to hear as well as to feel
the work of the feet outside.

The mode of this poem is quite different to that of “The Art of Sideways” in that it is syntactically “smooth” moving through its propositions sequentially. Other poems are inclined to break the material up into individual units even if only by tab spaces so that the structure of such poems seems more like an assemblage. At their most extreme these poems begin to look as though they might be closer to the “field” style of half a century ago and it’s perhaps significant that three of the poems from Swallow are built around propositions from Olson’s Projective Verse essay. It’s interesting to see something that always looked to be so much “of its time” get a sympathetic run two generations later. (A passing reference to “roots and branches” in “Call them Blueprints of Weather” deliberately alludes to Duncan’s book, born of the same period and ethos as Olson’s essay.) As do many of the poems of Acanthus, “Plant Poem” also exploits a context that has become familiar. It’s familiar metaphorically because the plant recalls the acanthus curving around its roof tile and familiar thematically because it’s about seeing things at the edge of vision. The stationary observer picks up “some small thing” which is capable of flooding a “discoloured mind” with fresh colour. That then enables the poet to both hear and feel what is happening in the world outside of their anchored mind. It is, in retrospect, a very Romantic poem, concerned with the nature of the interaction between the mind and reality. One could almost read it as a gloss on Coleridge’s “Dejection: An Ode” where the state of the poet’s mind “colours” the reality he sees and only the access of “joy” will enable him to throw a net over the phenomenal world. In Potter’s poetry there is none of the all-encompassing interactions of temperament that there is in Coleridge: for her it will be a small thing that works its way back into the perceptual and poetic apparatus.

Having dwelt for so long on poems that explore the methods behind the book, it seems trivialising to begin to list the book’s themes and I’ll simply touch lightly on them. One of the foremost is the notion of transformation. This can appear in a number of guises. It can be a matter-of-fact assertion that recalls the opening of Kafka’s story. A prose poem, significantly entitled, “Metamorphosis”, begins with the poet as spider centred on her silk threads and attached to the world. For all its vulnerability in the face of wind and rain it’s a stance engaged with the world from which poems can be made but the darker implication is that the poems are in the “benumbed form” of a captured bee or fly. Transformation is something enacted by metaphor of course in that the tenor is altered by the existence of a vehicle. I’ve mentioned the way in which the snake of “The Art of Sideways” enters the poem as an explanatory connection – the arc of the sun is like the coils of a hibernating snake – but it then becomes part of the fabric of the poem, altering its direction and transforming it as it does so. In “Slow Corsage” the detailed observation of the way a fellow train passenger holds a loaf of bread as he prepares to leave is disturbed by the sight of a camellia blossom when the poet gets home and the poem is then transformed from social observation into something quite different – “I became distracted from any trace of the tall man with the bread upon whose lapel, given the chance, I might have pinned a day-old camellia” – perhaps, as in “Plant Poem”, exemplifying the idea of the small thing which enables a wider comprehension.

Perhaps the most striking of the many manifestations of the idea of transformation occurs in “Pond Weather” which begins as an immersion poem – this time into a pond in the middle of London – and seems to want to be a poem about the dissolving of boundaries. But it changes direction radically at the end:

. . . . . 
Silken as a cormorant my mother arrives out of the trees
Her wings rake the pond into an exclamation of black glitter

She addresses me from her wingspan, her beak
clapping like a pair of scissors

I rise amphibian into her weather
A fugue of water beetles drifts into the brocade

They form a net of black eyes
She drinks a blue moon from their gaze

Hatching herself from bird to
woman to mother

It’s a strong poem and one that a reader would remember from even a casual first reading. Looking into it a bit more closely, you can see that the way in which it is a kind of transformation in reverse adds a lot to the dynamics of the poem – the thing that ultimately makes a poem memorable. In the edge-dissolving world of the pond it’s quite possible to transform one’s mother into a bird, it’s an environment ripe for transformations. But there is something exciting and challenging about the reverse process. Does the mother call the poet back to reality, a reality in which she is not going to be a bird but a mother? Is it that a domestic relationship – mother to daughter – trumps the transformational world of poetry? Whatever the answer, the poem has both a strongly memorable structure and, of course, that image of the “beak / clapping like a pair of scissors” – also something that is hard to get out of one’s head.

Transformation – metaphoric as well as actual – is only one of a series of themes in the poems of Acanthus, in fact the vaguer word, “interests” might be more suitable. An obvious question that a critic might pose would be to ask where are the poems which, instead of taking their own natures and grounding in edges of perception as their theme – as in, say, “The Art of Sideways” or “Plant Poem” – simply use these perceptual methods to generate poems. These will be poems which have nothing of the “poem-poem” about them. I would choose a couple of poems here, “Errand” and “Antigone”, as representative of two different kinds of result. The former begins with the image of a mother bird flitting in and out of bushes like someone sewing:

In and out of leaves   the blue tits sew the garden
because to the mother bird   in my mind   I’ve tied
an infinite string   as she zig-   zags fervently   shirring
distance in a loose smocking   of air

Faded winter grasses   rosebushes tinted with rust
amulets strung with the dry hairs of weeds
the entirety of the field   broken open   restitched
and engrossed   with minute wing-

work   a prowess   I must   remember   when putting seeds
out tonight for birds . . .

and it then moves on to become poem partly about doing necessary work (another theme of the book) and partly about the mother. “Errand” – whose title indicates both work and a side to side flitting movement (it derives from the same source as “erratic”) – is a poem that wouldn’t be too disorienting for a reader with no other knowledge of Potter’s aesthetic and thematic interests. Our reading of it is deepened by the context of other poems but we would not be lost without them. It may be complex, in other words, but it’s not really challenging. At the other extreme is “Antigone”, a poem I rather like now – partly because of its apparent refusal to bring poetic methods into the fabric of the poem – but which initially I found frustrating and irritating.

In a room circled by nets of gorse
I wept in a long black dress
Across the window, plovers rake the sky
with the gold dust of feather
I replay dreams with an abacus of stones -
hang-gliders, Catherine wheels, meadows
of butterflies because I curved into the sunken bell of his shoulder
unmarrowed his beard from everlasting snow
I threw dirt in ferns of silt and loam – there was no midpoint
between a daughter and a father
The hem of my skirt felted in bog-blood, billowing
like a diatribe in my uncle’s burning ears. In a room
circled by nets of gorse, I hung
in a long black dress

Not a poem that anyone is going to feel comfortable with immediately. The title itself is a very strong element, invoking Oedipus, his daughter and her uncle, Creon, and is capable of distending any poem it is attached to. To my mind, the tension that animates the poem is that between its mythic context and a domestic situation transformed, perhaps, by dream images. Other poems in the collection help a little: it is hard not to find a connection between the girl in her dress here (together with all the other images of circularity) and the spider in her web in “Metamorphosis”, for example, but, fundamentally this is a stand-alone poem with no connection to the theme of how the poet’s perception works. Is it an early poem, a little outside of the methodological emphases of Acanthus, or is it a new direction? An outsider can’t really tell but it’s just possible it’s the latter and that Potter’s next books will feature more poems of this kind where she decides to stop using an examination of her poetic methods as subject matter.

Brook Emery: Sea Scale: New and Selected Poems

Waratah, NSW: Puncher and Wattmann, 2022, 291pp.

Since I’ve written about Brook Emery’s last three books – Uncommon Light, Collusion and Have Been and Are – individually (the first two reviews can be found on this site) I don’t want to be guilty of too much repetition and so here I’ll focus on the new poems that accompany this selected and also, at the same time, I’ll try to explore some general issues that apply to all of Emery’s output. The new poems are begun with an extended set called “Self Portrait: Provisional Sketch” and concluded with another set “Self Portrait: Sea Scale”. This piece of structural organisation in miniature encapsulates something that can be seen as a crucial dynamic within all of Emery’s work: the tension between the reasonably aleatory processes of the mind that his work has always acknowledged and the desire to impose some kind of structure or order on the poetic expression of it. This could be rephrased as a tension between process and the creation of an aesthetically satisfying object. Process poetry – “I do this, I do that” – responds to the fluid nature of our lives, both mental and physical, in the world, but must, by definition, avoid those aesthetically pleasing structures that poetry, like all the arts, inclines to exploit: balanced juxtapositions, for example, or conclusions where the rhetorical level of the language is heightened.

You can see a lot of organisation going on at the macro, book-structuring level throughout his work. In the most recent book, Have Been and Are, all the poems apart from the last have poetic (or semi-poetic) epigraphs and the poems respond to these and employ them in varying ways. (It reminds me of the sequence, “Improvising with Flaubert”, from Emery’s first book and raises the general issue of the way in which quotation and literary allusion – sometimes at a very faint, gestural, level – are part of Emery’s poetic personality: the dailiness of life for anyone in the literary world involves the continuous entry of other literary texts if it is going to be honest about what goes on in the mind when the subject is going for a walk or washing dishes.) Collusion, the book preceding Have Been and Are, is imagined as a dialogue with a figure, K, and intersperses long meditations with short poems about what is happening at that moment in the local environment, a structure that recalls Bruce Beaver’s Odes and Days except that long and short are kept in separate compartments in that book. Uncommon Light was built around the tension between the human move to transcendence (to a divine light) and the horrors of human viciousness. Misplaced Heart, Emery’s second book, is structured in six sections, each with an introductory sonnet that begins with a metaphor for what the mind is: “The mind is a misplaced heart” is the last of these. Finally, even And Dug My Fingers in the Sand which might, as a first book, have been nothing more than a collection of successful pieces, has a strong six-part structure in which the opening poem of each part is also the title of that part. On top of this the first and last poems are seven-part sequences and thus have a similar balance to the two self-portraits which bookend these new poems.

All this argues for a strong impulse towards formalism in Emery’s work and a heightened sense of how units can be deployed to create an effect – an effect of aesthetic satisfyingness or conceptual unity – on the material at hand. And very often the material at hand is the opposite of satisfyingly shapely because it wants to follow the processes of the mind as it responds to particular stimuli. The two “Self Portrait” poems are a case in point. The first of them seems to imitate the random connections the mind makes when dealing with a theoretical issue:

How then shall we proceed? Word by word, fearlessly,
cautiously, line by line, one foot after another, again
and then again, seduced by the pull of a sentence
(as Marianne Moore would have it) into near and far,
where an umbrella and a sewing machine
circle uneasily on a dissecting table: implausible,
but interesting none-the-less. I write now
what I couldn’t write before or after, the inner
out of oneself, out in the world, write myself
as other in the “I”, doubling, tripling,
twisting in and out of shape. Reason is all we have,
reason lets go, is not near enough. Consider the body
and its out-of-body, the between where unknown waits.
I make my memories now, the gut a second brain,
skin a free-trade zone where words are coins.

In a way the centre of this poem is the reference to the umbrella, the sewing machine and the operating table. It derives from Lautreamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror and was taken up by Breton as a surrealist position: a total lack of conventional aesthetic shape in an idea can still produce an exciting juxtaposition. In Emery’s poem it stands for one kind of shapelessness – the result of free-associating and letting the words generate the meanings – and his embrace of it is accepting but cool: “implausible / but interesting none-the-less”. The rest of the poem focusses on the nature of the writing “I” and its relationship to the “written I” before finishing by making a gesture towards the mind/body dichotomy of Western philosophy and thus introducing one of Emery’s persistent themes: What is the mind and how does it work?

Having made this distinctive start in pursuit of a self-portrait, the other eight poems in the sequence explore various parts of the problem. The second poem, for example, treats of the dangerously attractive nature of words themselves and its introductory statement,

“Lugubrious”, there’s a word to conjure with,
what a mournful mouthful, which brings to mind
“lucubrate”, “lubricious”, “luscious”, but this 
could go on forever: pellucid, lucid, limpid,
even Lumen Scientiae that long-forgotten motto
of my old school where we studied Latin, French . . .

suggests the way the mind moves from one topic to a related one quite casually. It’s a movement repeated in the passage I have quoted above where out of the sounds of words arises the motto of his old school which then leads to memories of himself as a language-learner and -user before returning to the lubricious attractiveness of words themselves:

             “Bamboozle”, now that’s a word!
What might be its derivation, who might have
coined it? Should I look it up or let it be its own
hypnotic, almost onomatopoeic self? “Hornswoggle”,
boondoggle, befuddle, lollapalooza.

I want to say that the other poems of the sequence spin out from this initial concern with self and language but the metaphor “spin out” begs the question in that it assumes a particular relationship between the elements, as though the poem were structured as a developmental set of variations. Reading “Self Portrait: Provisional Sketch”, one has a stronger impression of a mind hopping almost arbitrarily among its themes, operating, in fact, as a mind rather than as a conventional poem does. Emery’s poems always have a strong forward drive and this is another way in which he seems to be a successor to Bruce Beaver, but whereas the drive behind Beaver’s poems, their skill with enjambments and long syntactic units, seems to come from an aggressive assertiveness, Emery’s poems seem driven by questioning and restlessness. No-one so consistently asks questions and the appearance of a question doesn’t weaken the drive but rather strengthens it, even when the question is just something that the mind produces as part of the way it plays over reality. Take the opening of the sixth section:

Can the mind be simultaneously consistent and complete?
The answer may have passed this way, may be hiding
in the words, erased and re-worked, erased again,
the derivative masquerading as original,
perpetually pitoning up the same sheer mountain face,
perpetually slippery-sliding down again, confounded
by the impulses of the heart, the temptations of the eye,
the doublespeak of distinctions with very little difference.
Is it possible to be a body without a mind,
or a mind without a body? Come, you Greeks,
come Descartes, to my assistance! Is it
matter within mind . . .

And so on, the tone recalling an earlier passage, “Is metaphor inimical to thinking / or essential? Ask Hobbes, ask Vico, don’t ask me!” There is nothing formally philosophical about this. It’s not pompous and it doesn’t aim for the serenely denotative of, say, late Stevens but instead confronts a series of issues stirred up by the mind as it considers ways in which its owner (or partner, or slave) could begin to make a portrait of himself. But to return to the issue of thought and form and the question of what shape the processes of thought have in Emery’s poetry, whether they have an aesthetic quality in themselves or must wait for one to be imposed, one part of “Self Portrait” seems to suggest that Emery thinks that the latter is more likely. A self-portrait is going to involve some kind of recreation of the past when the self was a child. Of course, as all autobiographers know, to describe one’s own past is to recreate a past self from the perspective of the present self, a process of “doubling, tripling” that Emery speaks about in the first section. The past appears in the poem’s fifth section and it is deliberately introduced not as a logical component of a self-portrait but as a random association produced by some hot weather:

Today, we huddle inside, wish for air-conditioning,
wish for fans, complain of February’s heat
as though it wasn’t always so, and suddenly 
it feels like 1959 again: the Bondi tram
is running on time, and the one down the cutting
to Bronte Beach; milkshakes are malted
and come in metal cups; milk is delivered to our door
by horse and cart . . .

And in a later section when the past is considered – “We used to eat Chiko Rolls, Sargents Pies, / Pluto Pups, Polly Waffles, Rainbow Balls . . .” – it’s subsumed in a comparison of the processes of cultural change so that the self of the poem is “out of time”: in not podcasting, blogging, or following people on Twitter, Emery describes himself (as many of our generation might) as “an analogue fish flummoxed in a digital sea”. The point I’m making here is that what one might expect to be a solemn attempt to recreate one’s past in all its sensual preciseness is allowed to slide into a predictable lament for the speed with which things have changed. If this seems a rough judgement, it can be said to be confirmed by the opening of the next section:

I seem to have gone a bit skew-whiff
in the aforesaid. Despite my intention, this poem has become lament,
a debased form trailing threads of self-indulgence
and nostalgia . . .

All of this analysis is really just an attempt to argue that the basis of Emery’s poetry might be an alertness to process in the form of observing and recording the movements of the mind. And that this produces material that although it has no aesthetic shape in itself, does fulfil one requirement that most of us hope that the aesthetic does: it is true to reality (I’m aware that there is a considerable literature in which poets have argued that the best poetry is the “most feigning”). The shape has to be imposed and this can be done at the macro level by a good deal of organisation and at the textual level by a mode of writing very sensitive to the questions that drive it on. The fabric of the verse is also thickened by a strong tendency to quotation. Again it’s a technique that might derive from Beaver’s Letters to Live Poets (a book celebrated in an early poem from Emery’s first book) where quotations are inserted frequently, although in Emery’s case they are acknowledged quotations. And, as I have said in the beginning, it is no more than an accurate and truthful representation of the processes of a literary person’s mind. Quotations, whether entire and acknowledged, or mere syntactic gestures (as in the “trailing threads” of the last quoted passage which is an ironic glance at Wordsworth’s “trailing clouds of glory”) are not intrusions or showings-off but part and parcel of the way in which a mind like this works.

In keeping with the desire to structure at a large level, this book-length group of new poems finishes with another approach to the issue of self-portraiture. Unlike the first, which begins with a mix of first principles about conceiving and describing oneself – language, text and perspective – this final poem, “Self Portrait: Sea Scale” is located in the sea, an element which in the work of another poet might herald a commitment to a grounded life but which, in Emery’s poetry is a symbol of reality in a permanent state of Heraclitean flux. Matter, as another poem says, “is movement – / restless, oscillating particles tensely bound”, and we merely “live on the fringe, not at the heart of matter”. Also interestingly, this longish sequence has two human characters: the poet in the sea and a man “on the shoreline / facing the horizon” who performs a complicated and ultimately uninterpretable dance cum exercise. I’m probably skating over a lot of complexities here but it is hard not to read the existence of the two humans as an example of the doubling that the first sequence, “Self Portrait: Provisional Sketch” spoke of. I read it as an expression of a double existence: the first in the sea of “reality” and the second – standing on the shore between the flux of the sea and the solidity of the rocks that lie behind the shore – making the equivalent of poems in his body motions. At any rate the final poem of these new poems wants to end on a note which is simultaneously upbeat and undeceived about the inevitable processes of temporality. It begins by quoting Issa’s famous haiku which, in a few words, encapsulates the human response to flux by art:

What unfolds here, unfurls, is grace
(On a branch / floating downriver /
a cricket singing). I give thanks
for joys which come unbidden,
which cradle the uncommodified body
in a caress which could as easily kill.
I will take the devil’s deal for more of this,
for the dance, the sounding beauty, knowing always,
that I will surely end.

Many of the other new poems are brilliant. Again, as we expect by now, they are carefully divided into groups by theme and each section is marked by a three line poem which responds to the group that has gone before (the first “Self Portrait” group, for example, is followed by “Devote less time, O Poet, / staring into the mirror: / you can’t write your own reviews). The first of these groups is very much in Emery’s mode of philosophical speculation and its first poem, “Rendezvous” is devoted, yet again, to describing the odd and unpredictable movements of the mind. As a poem, it is structured around four descriptions of mind, beginning: “that dematerialised, invisible thing, / swaying like a ship’s light in a storm, / picking out memories, slights, landmarks / which may not exist at all . . .” and so on. You feel that the poem is built as though it were a compressed version of the sonnets which occur throughout Misplaced Heart. The second of these poems, “Pickpocket”, is about how the mind plays tricks in terms of our experience of time and change, allowing one state to overlap another. Memory, it says memorably,

                                  contrives
to catch us off-guard, pick time past
from our empty pockets or put it back again.
Nothing mysterious here, other than a dawning realisation:

that the obvious can still surprise is, in itself, a surprise.

Another poem, “Joe Palooka”, focusses on memories, also, describing the way images of the past, of childhood, recur unpredictably:

 . . . . .
The past comes back stuttering, backlit
and un-sequenced like slides rattling and sticking
in an old-fashioned carousel:

A scene with a dog you can’t recall, children in cashmere,
three-quarter pose, awkward in a photographer’s studio,
a paddling pool made of canvas . . .

One thinks of the description of school life that the second of the poems in the original “Self Portrait” sequence falls into when it looks as though the poem is going to be about language.

Sea Scale collects the work of a major poet. It’s outlook – “demotic/philosophical” as I’ve described it earlier – seems to derive from its location. It’s a Sydney book in ways which it would be difficult to be too satisfactorily specific about – after all, all of Australia’s major cities are on the sea, inhabiting the symbolically potent landscape between rock and wave. But it does seem work which echoes, though it is very different, the poetry of Bruce Beaver, another poet of sea and shoreline. But, as I’ve said, rereading these, essentially twenty-first century poems (Emery’s first book was published in 2000), I’m struck be the tensions between the accurate delineation of process – especially the processes of the mind – and the desire to make aesthetically satisfying, even beautiful (a word that many of Emery’s poems worry at) structures. “Is this shape without pattern”, asks one of the new poems, making an important distinction but leaving it, as so often in Emery, an open question. Finally one might focus not so much on the tension between process and form as between experiencing and writing. Writing is imposing a kind of shape, even if no more than the shape of an interrogative clause, but the writing act, as Emery has said somewhere, involves a lot of fiddling, playing and exploring. It is not a logical controlling of meaningless flux. Typically, one of these poems brings the act of writing and thinking about writing into the texture of the poem itself. After making an analogy (very relevant in terms of form imposed on process) with the Second Law of Thermodynamics, a law which, narrowly interpreted, would require process to triumph over form, Emery stops himself:

     That’s going too far:

stretching a milestone moment in physics and turning it into
      a cheap poetic trick.

Peter Boyle: Ideas of Travel

[Sydney]: Vagabond Press, 2022, 160pp.

Like his 2019 book, Enfolded in the Wings of a Great Darkness, this new work suggests itself as at least a kind of diary by giving the dates “September 2020 – November 2021” at its conclusion. It differs from that earlier book, of course, in that the former was really a grief-diary, marked by responses to loss. Ideas of Travel records poems made during the pandemic but makes no specific reference to those times apart from choosing, as its focus, the idea of travel, one of the great losses of the period. In fact, one might read the title as a humorous take on the cliché that, since “real” travel is denied us, we might profitably choose to focus a little more on “inner” travels: read some books, play board games with the family, etc. The very choice of the word, “travel”, over the more poetically acceptable synonym, “journeying”, in the title leads me to think that Boyle might have had that irritating cliché in mind when he found a name for the collection. Significantly, the word “travel” doesn’t occur in any of the one hundred and forty poems that make up the book.

It will come as no surprise to readers of Boyle’s marvellous poetry that this is a book of a very different sort of journeying to the conventional, touristy kind. We could describe the journeys as voyages into the self but, although all of the poems here are, in a sense, internal voyages, this isn’t really a satisfactory description since they open out into otherworlds that are vast, even infinite, and which the voyager often can only dimly intuit. Of course, to travel one has to have a geography, and one of the pleasures of Boyle’s poems is the way we are lured, as critical readers, into trying to be precise about that geography. The simplest map of the kinds of journeys being undertaken can be found in the book’s very first poem, a prose piece in which the reader is invited to see the “small stone lozenges of a path” which leads over the hills and, literally, far away, since the path will provide a standpoint from which “if your legs can carry you, you can stand on tiptoe and see the infinite”. I am always a little leery when the mathematically problematic matter of “the infinite” is invoked in poems, but this is only a prelude to an immensely complex geography. If the poems of the book were no more than an extension, through various modulations, of the invitation to experience the infinite, this would be an unrewarding book indeed, but there is surprisingly little repetition and a good deal more exploration in Ideas of Travel.

Another early prose piece – No 8 – is a complex extension of the first and, at the same time, the beginnings of an overt geography. It speaks of a series of roads, each deeper than the other, or, at least, each running under the other:

The road went further down under the trees, under fences and slowly decaying houses, below high-voltage barriers and under purple fields of bracken and thistles. Entering the ocean, it continued unperturbed across sunken valleys where cattle once grazed, over the skeletons of abandoned shepherds’ huts, below the stone slabs of the drowned city.
	And, beneath the road of your waking breaths, the road of not-seeing, not-moving, the well-paved royal road of sleep, and under sleep the road of spiralling dreams – and under that, the lone solitary road, a road with no one on it, the road where all the dreams of a lifetime, remembered, not remembered, fuse together, stretched out under the world’s inner sky. The long quiet space of the one flash of light that held you.

Interestingly, the poem doesn’t begin with the road of ordinary, “everyday” life – the one we barely register as we drive to work or to the shops – but with a slightly surreal one, a road travelling through a drowned city. I take the significance of this to be that Boyle resists being fitted into the common scheme whereby poets are seen to remind us that we aren’t really awake to the realities of the world and allow our brains to be fooled by overriding perspectives. In Boyle’s poetry, generally, we take for granted his distinctive view of the world and our perceptions of it: it’s a starting point, not an end product. The next two roads in No 8 are dream roads, a reminder of the importance Boyle’s poetry places on dreams. Dreams, together with conscious “poetic” conceptions, form the major image- and structure-producing elements of this poetry. But I read the final road – “the long quiet space of the one flash of light that held you” – although it might be read as a statement in apposition to the road of totalised dreams – as a separate road, a road which opens the way to many of the poems of this book.

There is a lot of stress here, for example, on childhood especially as a time of flashes of light. In fact Boyle comes close to the conventional notion, here, that childhood is a time in which the perception of the infinite, of magical otherworlds, the true nature of things, and so on, is a natural response which is only ironed out of us by the act of growing up and being properly socialised – what Boyle refers to in one of the poems as a process whereby you “marshall on your carapace / woven over a lifetime”. Sometimes childhood is recalled by an event in the present, as in No 48 where being hospitalised as an adult brings back memories of being hospitalised as a child. Something is happening a second time and “I don’t know if seventy years separate the two events or seven minutes”. Childhood is also a place and state of mind which the adult attempts to revisit. No 66 describes this painful process of climbing a hill towards a childhood home and finding the houses on the way full of “threatening larger-than-life figures all wearing masks and garish summer costumes from the 1960s”. These turn out to be “witches and wizards possessed of an exquisitely refined malevolence” but they form an impassable barrier, “I am only a block now from my childhood home but I know I will never get there. No matter how far I walk, life offers no right of return”. No 134 describes one example of a blessed “flash of light” in which a door to childhood and childhood’s superior perceptions is held open for a moment:

At random, at the wrong hour
for the space of a few heartbeats
memory holds the past open
ready to be touched:

one winter morning in childhood
in the open door
watching my breath
ghost itself in the spiralling air.

And then there are the dead. They play a major role in the poems of this book, perhaps because of Boyle’s recent loss. They live below – as they do in the ancient cultures of Homer and the Hebrew bible – and visitations to them involve the downward movement that is so potent in Boyle’s poetry. (A single poem about a childhood memory, No 24, which looks, on the surface, quite unexceptionable, may be important here. In it the boy climbs upwards towards a cave from the inside of which he feels that he could tunnel to the centre of the earth. It almost seems an image out of Jules Verne’s narrative of journeying to the centre of the earth but it is significant that to go down into essences you have first to go up.) Although the dead are gathered “in small crowds, their hands / lightly joining” in regions below, they are also inside us. One of the poems about his dead mother, No 81, speaks of how the dead live within us:

Now she is dead
I carry my mother inside me.
It is how the earth is made.
In an inner space behind space
out of the everyday, the chaotic,
the greater and lesser disasters,
she fashioned a single thread 
of luminous being.
. . . . . 
Lost, now ash or air,
the dead we love have gone
so impossibly far inside us.
Brushing against the curve of silence
we touch most deeply
only what we can never hold . . .

As another poem (one which, incidentally, deploys the odd, and in this book, repeated, image of shirts on a washing line) says:

. . . . . 
Between the rows of freshly planted shrubs
the dead have given up
on resurrection. From now on
they will speak only from inside us –

whispering scrambled incantations
from their manuals
of grief and love, trying to mend
the broken universal translation machine
that ferries us across time.

The dead lead another life within one of the lower worlds and Boyle’s poetry is especially sensitive to the way in which different worlds impinge on each other. These might almost be thought of as a variety of contact narrative, of the sort that anthropologists are fascinated by: that moment when two cultures with radically different interpretive frameworks meet each other. Poem No 23 imagines an inhabitant of an underworld as moving upside down so that it is “underneath its own shadow, stretching downward into the earth’s remotest layers”, an image which ensures that “our world” is “at once doubled and deprived of foundation”. Not unexpectedly the most moving points of contact are those between the living and the dead, something that recurs constantly at least in Western cultures. An early poem, No 14, imagines meeting with the lost partner, rather like two bubbles touching, and each partner is writing to same work: “And the poem you and I are writing now, / on our separate sides of the void, / glitters as impossibly as silence . . .” A potent image.

Thus far in this review I have been forced to adopt some of the worst practices of critical analysis in attempting to treat the book as a whole, a solid mass of poetry, and then to abstract some of its features. The nature of Boyle’s notions of the geography of his different worlds really forces one to do this but I want to look now at some of the features more specific to the book’s poetry as poetry. The first thing one would observe is that the book is made up of both prose poems and free verse pieces. The conceptual frameworks that underlie Boyle’s work make it immensely suitable to prose poetry: we are going to be fascinated by complex and striking ideas rather than by the skilfully chosen line and stanza breaks. But there is, within the poems, more variety than one might initially see. There are a few poems with what I would call a distinctly hieratic cast. Take poem No 33, for example, made of three stanzas each beginning “Music for the five princesses” and ending with a comment about the realities which these creatures never know: “Grief”, “The bones’ deep pain, the heart’s emptiness” and “Love’s grief”. Each stanza deals with a specific activity or skill of these imaginary princesses and this adds to the sense of patterning in the poem. It’s just possible that it is an allegory prompted by an experience of some contemporary’s luxurious life, or it may even be about how formally constructed poetry – what the princesses do – doesn’t penetrate the human experience very deeply. If the latter is the case then there is a deliberate irony in writing a more formal poem than usual about the blessed but empty life of these privileged princesses whose lives are eminently formal. But whatever the motives generating the poem are, it does represent a momentary change of mode from the contemporary free verse of most of the poems. Poem No 47 is not dissimilar. It describes an accession of desire to which even the elderly are subject even if “it’s the wrong time of life for this / breathless visitation”. But desire is expressed as the arrival of Apsaras – the erotic, dancing demi-goddesses of Indian classical mythology. The humorous disjunction between these creatures and the ordinariness of modern Australia – “The Apsaras have come for tea” – is what drives the poem and, although it isn’t as formal as No 33, it has a quality rather different from most of the other poems. The same could be said of No 127. Here the material is straight, as they say, from the Boyle playbook in that it deals with the difficulties of launching out into life’s journey, but the structure is very formal. The first stanza announces that there are “five layers of leave-taking” and the central stanza devotes two lines to each:

. . . . . 
ragged bush choked with vines and lantana
                  running down to the harbour,
the water’s blue crests flecked with sailboats
                  and passing ferries,
the strip of shoreline opposite with its white cliffs,
                  its miniature houses and cars,
and, beyond, the open sea stretching
                  clear to the horizon,
behind the horizon, across immense oceans,
                  the glittering facades of other worlds . . .

There is something stately and attractive about this sort of construction, especially in contrast to the free-flowing stanzas that make up most of the other poems.
Finally, there are the short lyrics. These might be described as poems which don’t so much explore the complex geography of Boyle’s vision but rely on it when they go on to make a statement or image. They are often very striking as poems and they also have something to say about a certain kind of lyric poem in general. Great poems like Blake’s rose and sunflower are simple statements arising out of a complex view of things. As such they adhere to the requirement of the “purest” lyrics that they be both simple and have a “thrown-off” quality about them: as though a dozen might be written effortlessly in a day. They also have a “throw-away” quality about them: as though they were no more permanent than the situation they catch. And we know that in the cultures of the world millions of such poems are “thrown away” in that they never achieve the status of being copied or, in later technological cultures, of being printed and circulated. (When I think of this I always shudder slightly at the way in which the “lepidum novum libellum” of one of my favourite poets, Catullus, survives in a single flawed manuscript from the middle ages and of the way in which so many Latin poets, some named by Catullus, don’t survive at all. And that in a globally dominating culture with a manuscript-copying industry. The slightness of this kind of lyric means they don’t have the same survival chances as the more solid epics, histories and long, philosophical poems.)

Sometimes, as in the case of No 126, Boyle’s lyrics are striking statements made possible by the view of the geography of the world which the rest of the poems – and Boyle’s earlier work – explore:

Everything that seems infinite
is only once.
A dog barking, a day passing.

But at other times they are allowed to register something of the emotional experience of some part of that complicated world-view. My especial favourite is No 122:

After pitching the heart
to the line of the sky

to descend a little, entering
the humble foreground of being –

upside down, at full speed,
to join nightfall’s raucous procession
of cockatoos cascading through trees.

Geographically, it’s a “going-down” poem, but it’s hard not to respond to that wonderful final image of cascading cockatoos.

A. Frances Johnson: Save As

Waratah, NSW: Puncher and Wattmann, 2021, 76pp.

The poems of Amanda Frances Johnson’s fourth book have the same kind of double focus as those of her earlier collections. They look towards personal and family history as well as outwards to a world that seems fraught with intimations of apocalypse. And, as with the earlier books, the poems are divided into large sections with related titles in a way that stresses that these are not self-contained poetic subjects. In The Wind-up Birdman of Moorabool Street there were future, present and past sections; in Rendition for Harp & Kalashnikov the three sections were homophonic puns – “Soar”, “Sore” and “Saw”. Here the two sections are “Save Us” and “Save As”, the former generally made up of poems focussing on individuals and the second on wider, public concerns. It’s perhaps worth pointing out that the title of the latter (which doubles as the title of the whole collection) is something of a motif in Johnson’s work. It appears as early as in the poem, “Future Ark”, from The Wind-up Birdman of Moorabool Street where the saving of species is done digitally – “inside the darkened hull, / /under haloes of urgent ultraviolet, / you hit save as”. A somewhat similar scenario of a future flood generated by climate catastrophe appears in “Ultima Thule: Swimming Lessons” from Rendition for Harp & Kalashnikov and the same pun, “save as”, is deployed at the end. At any rate, the way her books are structured suggests a desire to see relationships between poems that look outward towards the gathering storm and those that focus on individuals, especially family members. These latter poems tend not to explore inner lives but rather lives under great stress and as such could be seen as intimate versions of those that focus on planet-wide matters.

The first poem of the book stresses the interaction of personal and familial with the broader environment in which these are located:

I was a daughter of lead, petrol my childhood.
Bowser and breast fed the same rush -
stains on the drive sump lakes for doll picnics.
“Nice clean Amoco” was seatbeltless.
The futura was Ford. Opec. Crude.
Combustible plant and animal corpses. . .

and as such it perfectly establishes the book’s double focus. But it also sets the tone in a way that is quite complex to explain. To summarise: good poetry – it is often said – unlike journalism, doesn’t draw its energy from the things it is dealing with but rather from its own resources: an introverted artform. When it comes to the apocalyptic quality of the times in which we live balanced against the personal pain of ageing, dementia-suffering parents and relations, good poetry can’t expect to derive its energy from the misery and fear it faces. Johnson’s approach to this has always seemed to be to make sure that her poems stay afloat by, on the one hand, their textual density and on the other, their conceptual sophistication. So that first poem, very much about the oil-based culture of the end of last century, wins readers over by the way it uses the idea of the poet as a “daughter of lead” – a description repeated at the beginning of the first three stanzas. This also establishes a kind of hieratic tone which is slightly at odds with the whimsicality of the conception. It’s a tonal tension that occurs throughout Johnson’s poetry: a clever conception as a way of dealing with obvious (almost cliched) environmental issues helps to strengthen the texture of the poem because there is a slight dissonance in tone between that required by the subject matter and that provided by the conception – which might be humorous and almost larky.

The book’s second section, “Save As”, begins with poems which serially address standard early twenty-first century environmental issues: deforestation, coal-dependence, space junk (though the poem, “Moon”, has a more general view of pollution on earth than that suggests) and global warming. And these poems work hard, at a conceptual level, to escape the charge of allowing clichéd subject matter to produce a cliched poem. The first of them, “The Violent Trees”, might have developed out of the image of a war on trees as it is conceived as a dramatic monologue spoken by a soldier in an army which is attempting to put down a kind of imaginary (or faked for political purposes) insurrection by an army of trees. That makes a start at producing an uncliched poem but it is made more satisfyingly complex when it introduces the issue of poetry itself. One of the reasons for the speaker’s hatred of trees is the idea that trees are responsible for bad poetry by providing conventional nature images. They, like poetry, need to be taught a lesson about discipline:

. . . . .
          Trees teach the slouch-hatted soldier
the deceptions of camouflage, provoke anew
the wild, bloody signatures of white foresters.
I blame trees for straining poetic excess:
“verdancy”, “mote”, “middle distance”, “landscape”.
Like me, the politician plays a useful role,
busily extracting, taking nature down,
teaching poetry a lesson, discipline. . . 

Raising the issue of poetry immediately complicates the author’s location – as a poet – in the poem. It’s worth noting briefly here that another feature of Johnson’s poetry is the way she increases the poems’ density, and hence their ability to stand on their own feet, by the use of puns and allusions. “Mote” and “middle distance” recall Max Beerbohm’s celebrated parody of Henry James, “The Mote in the Middle Distance”. Assuming this is intended, it is hard to see what role it was designed to play but it is a good, brief example of this method of increasing density by a particular kind of intertextuality and warning the reader that there are unexplored avenues to surprising places behind the surface of the text.

The best example of conception and density might be the title poem, “Save As”, which is ostensibly about global warming but is conceived as an address to that “muscly thug” the sun. Of course, any such address makes one think of Donne – “busy old fool, unruly sunne” – and so the poem is built by allowing “The Sunne Rising” to infiltrate it and prevent it sliding into a predictable lament about the disappearance of Arctic ice, etc. Donne’s poem is not about global warming but is an “aubade” – a morning-after-love poem – about his relationship with his lover (and the way in which that can encompass the whole universe). This fact alters the direction of Johnson’s poem so that she imagines her partner leaving to escape the sun:

. . . . . 
Your solution, dear, is pack
the hybrid wagon with the rags
of modern time and drive
to the other side, as if time
apart in remnant bush will cure
when leaf and love are done. . . 

“Save As” is, thus, a love poem crossed with an environmental protest. I’m not sure that this crossing works linguistically – “Thou art teary now” – but conceptually it produces something very intriguing. And as with “The Violent Trees” – and other poems – the role and function of poetry is involved. And the prospects are not good: in an environment where “climate-denying princes play us” poetry can only “elegise the fight” and as a result, as the poem says, when you press “save as” on the keyboard, “world fails to attach to worlde”. The “real” world doesn’t obey the rules of what is, simultaneously Donne’s cosmos-defining love coupling and the world of a mere verbal construction such as a poem.

The issue with a poetry that relies so much on an intriguing and challenging conception to rise above a cliched approach is that, although there is something intellectually and aesthetically satisfying about this, it can also be at odds with the tonal environment of the situation. Someone fighting the bushfires of 2019-2020 might well, in fact, see it as smart-arsery typical of poets. It’s a very old problem but each new attempt to solve it can produce something valuable. I think Johnson is a clever exploiter of the tonal dissonances that I have been speaking about and the way “Save As” connects to Donne is a good indicator of where she, at least, finds solutions. The so-called “Metaphysicals”, of whom Donne is the most important, revelled in conception – the more dissonant the connections, and the more dissonant the resulting tone, the better. The bully-boy tone of the opening of “The Sunne Rising” – “Busy old fool, unruly sunne” – is an obvious example, being far from the solemn, nature-struck tone expected of a conventional lyric address to the morning sun. These dissonances infuriated Johnson’s namesake, Samuel, as we know, because his very different notion of poetry involved skilful execution within conventional approaches and, above all, a tone in keeping with the solemnity (or humorous possibilities) of the chosen subject. I think we are happier with Donne than with the slightly more “journalistic” world of Eighteenth century poetry but the fact remains that, although intriguing conceptions excite us, help a poem stave off cliché, and strengthen the fabric of the poem itself by generating exciting tonal dissonances, there still remains the issue that the poem is driven away from being a proper response to the crises it wants to respond to.

Putting general issues aside and getting back to this excellent book, it is hard not to see it as a kind of compendium of conceptions. “A Short History of Aluminium Cans”, like “The Violent Trees” is a monologue and the interest lies in the fact that the speaker is a can himself (itself?) meditating, as humans need to do, on the environmental damage caused by his own existence as well on his bleak future prospects. Again, conception is bolstered by textural densities. He says “For my part in that, I’m sorry”, echoing Kevin Rudd’s parliamentary apology to the stolen generation, and, interestingly, “What’s left is aftermath, / demise of brand auras, refund / potential . . .” Here the joke is that the can sees only the horror of the demise of the can, rather as humans think of the catastrophes ahead in terms of the havoc wreaked on their own species. But the word, “aftermath”, suggests an allusion to Randolph Stow’s great poem, “The Singing Bones” and it’s tempting to think that part of the conception of the book as a whole might be an intertextual response to that poem’s concern with how the present is built on the bones of a past with very different values and how those bones continue to sing for those who can hear them. “My country’s heart is ash in the market-place, / is aftermath of martyrdom” is a reference which chimes very well with Johnson’s concerns and the word “ash” has already appeared in the poem “Save As” which speaks of poetry’s “ash-in-glove”.

“Ring-in” is another example of a poem approaching a very conventional theme – having a dead parent’s personal property returned. It’s one of the personal/familial poems from the first part of the book and is conceived as a description of a trip, with a friend, to a mortuary block “in a rainy satellite town of failing industry” to retrieve, especially, her mother’s rings. The approach to the place has a memorable and metaphorically dense description”:

. . . . .
                       We find the place, a plain Besser-brick parlour
framed in doric grief, the short drive massed with orphaned
icebergs that can never know life as a true rose . . .

The “orphaned icebergs” are those medium-sized pyramid-shaped rocks that people used to paint white and use along drives. They are orphaned because the word used to describe the way icebergs break off glacial ice-sheets is “calving” and these rocks are taken out of any parental context – like the poet herself, here. Again, the theme of poetry appears in the metaphor used for the noise of the friend’s tapping on the car window – “I can’t hear against the rain’s dolorous half-rhyme, and you, you are typing / on the roof, on your old Scalextric” – and the poem finishes, as its title suggests it might, with a series of puns on the word, “ring”:

We drive off together, all three, your sun-spotted ghost-hand in mine,
rings tight, but not tight enough; this unbearable ring, a ringing-in,
I peer through the wet windscreen, wiper blades noisy, ragged gulls arguing
for chips and a decent bird book entry. I see my friend is crying.
But me, I am desperate to spot a true rose.

The title poem, “Save As”, has set me thinking in terms of Metaphysical poetry and the tensions between the tone expected of the subject matter and the delight in the yoking by violence together. I’m momentarily inclined to see John Donne as Amanda Frances Johnson’s totemic poet and in this connection it is good to look at the one poem in the book where the conception is so complex that it is very difficult for a reader to twig to what is going on. “Death in Venice” appears in the second part of the book just before “A Short History of Aluminium Cans” and after another Italy-based poem, “Drought Faith”, which describes the moment when the Vatican, in 2017, turned off its fountains as a response to severe drought conditions: there are a lot of metaphors about sources, the flow of faith, “myths of perpetuity” and so on, here. “Death in Venice”, however, is a puzzle from beginning to end and this is because it’s difficult to understand the conception. It’s ostensibly about the dead:

We knew better than to come back,
marry ourselves underwater - 
no better church, our dull bones said,
than history’s murk lagoon.

In sleep, marble lions roam
with intent. Eyes closed,
stone paws gentle our necks,
force ersatz land claims.
We resile, ash-scattered.

There! Our old selves crawl
back to meet us. Marble, flesh
and water compact but remnant
amphibians won’t photograph . . .

I’m not sure at all what is happening here though that doesn’t stop one enjoying the poem. Its reference to “land claims” makes one think that this is as much about Australia as Italy. It’s positioning after “Drought Faith” makes one think of Venice’s experience of the same drought and the way in which lowered water levels might bring the bones of the past into view. My final, tentative reading is that it is really about history and how, in all places, history is built on the bones of past inhabitants. And these can, despite a radically different present – there are now “Nigerian hawkers” at San Marco, and cruise ships operate relentlessly in the area – still be brought alive enough to confront the present. As the poem makes the bones say, “we rise, open-mouthed, to the surface, / hoping to see ourselves there”. As such “Death in Venice”, a most un-Australian poem in terms of its setting, may well be a response to Stow’s “The Singing Bones” in which bones are allowed to sing their own song.

Adam Aitken: Revenants

Artarmon: Giramondo, 2022, 90pp.

Since his first book A Letter to Marco Polo, published in 1985, Adam Aitken has always seemed, at least to me, the quintessential Asian-Australian poet. The double-barrelled quality extends right down to the genetic level because he is not merely the child of an immigrant Asian family but the product of a marriage between an Australian man and a Thai woman.

His development as a writer took place during a period in which such issues developed rapidly. The migrant experience moved from postwar European migration to Asian migration. At the same time the response moved from a need for documentation to extensive theorization both of the migrant mind-set and of kinds of hybridity. As an intellectual development, this latter is not something I have followed but I can say, as an outsider, that it is more likely to produce interesting results poetically than the idea that poetry’s main function is to document. On the other hand, it’s not likely that much poetry of any interest will come out of an intellectual (and career-academic) subject area – something that good poets have always seemed to know instinctively.

Letter to Marco Polo is made up of poems written after its author’s stay in Thailand during his early twenties. The aim of the trip and the writing that followed is clearly to make some sense of the Thai component of his heritage which, at the time must have seemed the more exotic and intractable. The poems tend to be built around the strangeness of individual characters like his uncle, “the old chief prosecutor”:

. . . . . 
No one left to send to hell he took up poetry;
manuscripts scattered a desk wide as a raft.
Wrong-doing locked in glass -
teak cabinets, swords laid to rest.
Who knows what life subsists in buffalo horn trophies? . . .

but also around odd events, the kind that somebody welcomed as a long lost relative needing a proper education in fastidious Thai etiquette might experience. The key to what made Letter to Marco Polo an important book in the mid-eighties is that the poems result not from a desire to document strangenesses or exploit them as poetic material but from a forensic drive to make some sense of a hybrid self. It’s a book of exploration, in other words, rather than poetic exploitation.

There is a big shift in emphasis that slowly develops in Aitken’s subsequent poetic career. The early poems seem to suggest that it is the Thai side (the mother’s side) of the poet’s life which needs exploration. It’s understandable since for a boy growing up quite conventionally in the seventies in Sydney with a brother and single mother (the father left when Aitken was thirteen) the Asian component is what seems to need exploration. This is made doubly exotic by being mediated through the mother who is not in any sense a straightforward migrant woman, bearer of a simple ethnic identity: her background includes being fluent in French and a lover of French literature, and being the first Thai woman to get a fork-lift driver’s licence in Australia (her later life is detailed in the poem, “Cairns”, from Eighth Habitation). But as the books have gone on, the father has played a greater and greater role. The reason for this might be simply psychological – in middle-age all men have to come to grips with their father in some way or other – but I sense that the real recognition is of the fact that the father is just as mysterious as the mother. To generalise this out, in other words, “familiar” Australian culture is just as exotic as South East Asian. But to follow the psychological line for a moment, the father is certainly an ever-present, slightly larger-than-life extrovert for the poet’s childhood who, in the poet’s adolescence, becomes an absent figure. He doesn’t make a debut poetic appearance until “Sonnets for ‘58”, a sequence from Romeo and Juliet in Subtitles, Aitken’s third book. It’s a sequence built around trying to understand what happened between your parents and how they – whose life histories you have been intimately involved with – managed to actually fall in love, marry and produce someone like yourself. And the hard evidence – despite the fact that both parents are still alive – is only really letters and old photographs. “A Biography of 13”, in the next book, Eighth Habitation, is a fine poem built around that unlucky number, and it makes a start at exploring the father’s (and son’s, of course) genetic heritage from a great-great grandfather who established a successful brewery, to a great grandfather who was a successful major in the First World War, to a grandfather who fought in the next war, down to his own father:

. . . . . 
13 years after V Day my father went to Singapore
and bargained with a waif at Changi
for 13 postcards, “so cheap”
he just had to buy them.
His talents were letters, logistics,
advertising copy, wearing suits.
At the Office Party in Bangkok
he danced, quite pissed, in women’s lace
then swapped the Major’s “lucky” digger hat
for a set of Dutch clogs.

When I was 13 my father left home . . .

This initial view seems to see the genetic history as one of decline but the father is a much more complicated figure than that: his often apparently empty-headed extroversion being balanced by business (and social) talents and an odd drive to be obsessively detailed, both in the carefully kept-up correspondence home and, especially, in the keeping of lists. This emerges in “Archive” from later in the book which is really material excerpted from the father’s diary and gives a clearer sense of the obsessive behind (or in direct conflict with) the amiably, boozily social, being. Another fine poem which precedes “Archive” is “The Fire Watchers” built around his mother’s furious burning of all of his father’s (generally rubbishy) books after he had left and the father’s interest in accidents – which looks like a prescient response to the shape of his career – an interest that is passed on genetically to his son:

. . . . . 
In the city he would always love
my father would slow down to procession pace,
passing accident scenes.
I asked a lot of questions then, a kid stuck on “Why?”
Obsessive, thirteen, and forensic I could memorise
the number injured, type of vehicle, angles of incidence.
Years before crumple zones,
crash dummies or digital instruments . . . 

By the time of Aitken’s brilliant prose memoir, One Hundred Letters Home, the father is centre stage – although a good deal of time is spent on his mother’s later history as well. The book takes its title from the exactly one hundred letters, carefully recorded, that Aitken’s father sent to his own mother when he moved to South East Asia in 1956. As a book it’s a probing of the life history of Aitken’s parents but it also reflects – as perhaps all the writings about poets’ parents do – an interest in the genetic origins of the poet’s own creative drive. Seen in this perspective, the father, with his obsessions and an approach to life that is most likely to end in failure (conceived in terms of how competently one deals with the world and navigates one’s places in it), seems to have more to contribute than the mother who comes across as having a steely competence about such matters.

At any rate the growing significance of the father prepares the way for this new book, Revenants, which, significantly, begins with the poem, “Xmas, Singapore 1957”:

Much better than that
Melbourne day
in ’56 -
so my father wrote
in blue fountain pen
on airline parchment
 
to his mother Jean.

Apéro-time then
English goose + trimmings,
a bottle of BOAC Bordeaux,
2 anti-acid for dessert
all in best company.

In itself it might not be the strongest poem in the book but it is hard to imagine one which better heralds the obsessions that drive many of the poems. For anyone for whom Revenants is their first experience of Aitken’s poetry, it might be quite a puzzle: “Yes, but so what?”. But on the other hand it makes clear to such readers where the author’s interests lie. Another of the early poems in the book, “Luang Prabang”, tells the story of the Frenchman who improved his mother’s French (before her marriage) and inculcated the important love of French literature but it, too, is a poem exploring genetic inheritance since it concludes with Aitken recording the result of his researches into paternity that are written about in One Hundred Letters Home: “The Frenchman who was not my father”. It’s an important blow at simplistic notions of how the creative gene is passed on.

While the first section of Revenants goes on to contain poems about South East Asia, the second section begins with “Sincerity”, another father-poem. This time the location is a hospice, a sign that personal interaction between father and son is reaching its inevitable conclusion:

. . . . . 
In the end, when you’re in ICU
don’t be dumb enough
to talk fitness to your ailing father 
or compare that to poetry.
Talk Buddhism, or Hinduism,
allow the staff to believe.

We didn’t argue, we both agreed to agree
more often, or not to say we didn’t agree. . .

This is followed by a poem, “The Far East”, which perhaps provides what current cliches would call “a more nuanced view” of the relationship, exploiting Western views of the East – a region of inscrutable inhabitants engaged in endless, intense mercantile activity – to make what seems to be a final judgement about a tortured process in which “you became / the template of my becoming”. The ending is a sustained deployment of metaphors of the give and take of trade:

. . . . . 
Some days I’m so extreme,
in the sense of far away,
too far away to calculate a trade,
like Marco Polo locked in a castle
on the edges of a distant green sea.

But on a sliding scale I’m
neither Oriental nor mean.
My tender presence brings you the key:

the gates open, at least an inch,
and the corridor sounds again,
with all the merchants of my desire
wanting a sale, offering closure.

The other component of Aitken’s poetic drive is response to particular environments, as though the complexities of family can be put aside and the poet function poetically as the observer he is, no matter what the significance of his own hybridity and the international relations of the countries he is in. So Eighth Habitation concluded with a sizeable group of Cambodian poems. Archipelago is like an entire book of such poems (based in France) and the final section of Revenants is devoted to more “French” poems, reflecting his current home. There is a lot of variety in these poems and considerable density to the point where one is tempted to feel that leaving family as a subject behind enables a freer dip into the complex possibilities of poetry. There are poems that “capture” an ambience (“Seasonal Domestic”) or a famous site (“Monet’s Garden, Giverny”), a poem about Stendhal and even a list poem – the objects on sale at a bootsale in Chateau St Victor. There are also three poems which relate to the book’s title and introduce something of a new theme. The revenants are, initially, imagined ghosts of people “who died too young” and a kind of alter-self which appears in a dream. The issue is taken up in the last poem, “Revenants Again” which asks what the functions of these figures are:

Not here to entertain
Nor forgive . . .
Then for what?

Guaranteed to pester
Break the ice
Or clear the air

To bring out the shining
To remind me to relax

Cast off, troubadour,
Stumble into the dream
And get well soon.

It’s hard not to read this as a note-to-self about the poet’s entire history as a writer driven by obsessions, especially those relating to parents and heredity. They aren’t guilt figures, in other words, and can be seen as a source of emotional liberation rather than a nagging problem that simply has to be solved no matter how many words it takes. It looks, in other words, as though Aitken’s future poetry might avoid the issue of family altogether and concentrate on the registering and exploring of the places he inhabits. But, of course, that’s only a guess and, if he intended this poem to be read that way, it would be a guess on the poet’s part as well as mine: experience teaches us that ghosts which demand to be placated can be fractious and unpredictable, and have a habit of appearing when they are least expected.

J. S. Harry: New and Selected Poems

Artarmon: Giramondo, 2021, 306pp.

One of the really distinctive voices among those poets whose careers begin in the 1970s belongs to J.S. Harry. She shows no particular allegiances among the groups, anthologies and received influences (usually American) of that period, doing her own thing in her own way. This new, posthumous collection forms a kind of companion piece to Giramondo’s earlier Not Finding Wittgenstein – a gathering of her Peter Henry Lepus poems – and together the two provide an ideal introduction to an unusual and fascinating voice. In addition, this New and Selected has a valuable introduction by Nicolette Stasko which, although it provides little in the way of standard biographical information (dates, occupations, travels, correspondence, etc), does give a strong sense of what the author was actually like as a person (something lacking in the most scholarly of recent literary biographies, built out of months spent in a library among the subject’s papers).

She is a very hard poet to describe adequately even though fifty years have passed since the publication of her first book, The Deer Under the Skin in 1971 – the fifth book in the Paperback Poets series of the University of Queensland Press. I’ve been reading her work since that time and find myself coming up with shifting notions of what is at the core of her poetry. After looking at this Selected, I’m inclined to see its central tension as a drive towards lyrical forms tempered by a distrust of many of the features of that form. This distrust is something shared by the poets of her time, some fearful of the dominance of a homogenised “lyrical ego” (rather a straw man since good lyric poetry is likely to present the self as something even more complex than theoreticians of the unstable created self are apt to imagine), others preferring to attempt to adopt the models derived from such contemporary approaches as “field theory”. Most, perhaps all, seem to be fearful of a kind of lyric smugness, or even the lyric kitschiness of the worst of the Georgians. In Harry, dealing with this distrust takes many forms. Sometimes it is countered in the structure of the poems themselves while at other times it produces a whole series of balancing poems devoted to issues of language, logic, poetry and meaning: Wittgenstein, Russell and Ayer tend to make appearances here.

The very first poem of The Deer Under the Skin, “The What O’Clock”, looks like an attempt to write a contemporary conventional lyric poem:

A puff-ball
on a slim green stem
is more attached
to earth than I.

The wind will tear
its seeds away -
perhaps they’ll root - 
Words root. My words? Mine?
. . . . . 

If first poems in first books often establish a sort of keynote, I think this does exactly the opposite: it lays down an extreme beyond which the rest of the poet’s work will never go, in fact may even fight against. I think – although I haven’t checked exhaustively – it is the only poem in her entire corpus that uses the first person pronoun as expressive of a conventionally simplified personal voice. In dealing with dandelion seeds it also risks being twee: as I’ll show later there is a recurring element of what has to be called “tweeness” in Harry’s response to the world (ducklings, the soft noses of animals, mossy hollows, compound adjectives, etc) and one of the tensions in her poetry is how to allow this in as a genuine personal response to the world while at the same time exercising a poet’s toughness. Interestingly “The What O’Clock” is revisited in a later poem, “Whistling the Fluff” from the 1995 volume, The Life on Water and the Life Beneath. By that time the nature of Harry’s interest in levels and in the balance between creation and destruction had become a little clearer. This poem is interested in three elements: the breeze, the seed and the fluff which enables the seed to find a home before itself being destroyed. The seeds themselves can be carriers of new life if they are lucky to fall into mud (or, as in another poem, into a “clump of horseshit”) but they can also fail and end up as food for the local birds, “taken out” as a memorable phrase says, “by some / gutblocked Duck of Chance”. The structure of the poem is to abandon any simple celebration of “a whole new / green generation” of “gold-flowered / weed dandelions” and switch to focussing on the fluff which carries the seed and which, unlike the seed, is able to exist, if only briefly, in the air.

The tensions between the drive towards lyric and a more analytical poetry of forensic examination especially of language but also of poetry itself, is often expressed in the structuring of the poems within her books. In The Deer Under the Skin, that opening poem, “The What O’Clock”, is followed by “How Old Pity Left the Poem” which imagines the poet killing pity (one of the expressions of tweeness) by extreme GBH:

So then I smashed him up
systematically
bashed his face and bled him
he slid down the wall
over-ready
The blood brightened
his greasy clothing . . .

It finishes with the identification of victim with abuser: pity is, of course, the poet herself: “I am the bugger he said / I am yourself”. This is followed by a three-line poem, “Guinea Pigs” – “on bad days / it is sweet to watch them / nibbling their lives like grass” – again lyrical but dangerously close to the cute. The fourth poem is the important “The Little Grenade” which is exactly about the tensions between lyricism and its opposite, though here the opposite is not a poetry investigating the philosophy of words and meaning, but a poetry of explosive action. It doesn’t, however, necessarily consider “explosive action” to be simply a politically incendiary result (the dream of many poet-activists of the sixties and seventies). It’s a bit more complex than that:

The little grenade
wanted poems that explodexplored
or pushed candles
inside the pumpkin people
to make flames sputter and drip
where their darkness bulged. . .

And the friend of the little grenade is on the side of a sensitive response though this isn’t described in terms that are entirely approving:

The he that was a friend of the little grenade
liked poems that sat fatly in the middle of stillness waving their feelers
The poems that he wrote were lumpy mattresses
stuffed with kapok. Or flock . . .

Although it is a poem of oppositions, the conclusion suggests a kind of compromise: “there will be room for explodexplore and stillness / in one of the corners”. It’s also intriguing that in tone and conception, this poem is designed to be read in Hans Christian Andersen mode – the ultimate in twee. Conceiving the central characters as “a little grenade” who has a friend described as “the he that was a friend of the little grenade” is not so far away from the world of ugly ducklings and little mermaids. Again, as with the decision to open her first book with “The What O’Clock”, I think it is a matter of deliberately raising an issue that the poet finds causes tension rather than suppressing it.

Evidence for this as a carefully evolved strategy is present in the way the next two books repeat the structure. Hold For a Little While and Turn Gently begins with its title poem, an overt discussion of kinds of poetry, perhaps expressly the “explodexplore type”

. . . . . 
He conceived of a style that could
                 rise up	off its page
and stop us cold as the steelpoint
sunk in, upto its hilt,
                  yet making fire
in the belly . . .

The poem further separates itself from lyrical assertion by using a technique Harry adopts in other poems: that of allowing the voice to be a parody of a bemused bureaucrat:

. . . . . 
What he did say was
that the Cora Indians	do not find it meaningful
            to distinguish
between the words of a man and his deeds	between
the sounds of a “mind”	and the moves of a body.
When we had proved, to our satisfaction,
that he was not	a Cora Indian, (and that there was,
            for him, some slight nuance
between the sound of the idea-knife in his
   “mind”	and the feel of a blade in his body)
                          he was quite dead . . .

At any rate, “Hold For a Little While, and Turn Gently” is followed by a poem in full lyrical mode, rabbits and all:

Already Someway Off

and peaceful
in the distance far
from the small fires
flickering,
the smells
of the raw
meats cooking,
there is a clearing:

here
a rabbit
grazes
the stubble
on his cheek;
the sun
moves out
through a rift
and suddenly
it is evening

As with so many of Harry’s lyrics, this contains its own “anti-lyric” elements. A peaceful scene contains rabbits but also the smell of cooking (something rabbits, and other innocent animals, might well be subject to). Death and violence are always present in such apparently arcadian scenes in Harry’s poetry.

Not to over-emphasise this point, the same structural set-up occurs in her next book, A Dandelion for Van Gogh. The first poem is the first part of a diptych the second part of which turns up half-way through the book. “Parts of Speech as Parts of a Country” immediately follows an epigraph by Russell pointing out that the meaning of words is “distilled” from their use rather than the other way round. Both parts of the poem, “I as Desert” and “He/ He Tried” narrate the same surreal story in which someone escaping the accusation of consenting to conventions by breaking through a wall (“its alive / crustations of habit”) finds themselves beheaded by a single axe-stroke on the other side. Not a straightforward poem but it is followed by one of Harry’s best, straight-lyric pieces, “Temple-Viewing”,

respectfully
barefoot
mute as lovers
a pair of spotted turtle doves
enter the green silence

walking on round
brown wooden stones
sunk between
white pebbles

it is the japanese garden
to a japanese temple
the dwarf bamboos
sway in the wind
dipping
              to the soft
chimes
      of the windbells

& the doves
who are visitors
from india

nod & bow
at the ground as if
they were in accord

with both the customs
of the place
& matters invisible

It’s a wonderful poem in its own way even though, just as Harry probably didn’t want this to be the only kind of poem she is remembered by, so a reader wouldn’t want his or her entire poetic literature to be written in this mode. But, as in all good lyrics, the reader is invited (or expected) to contribute to the poem, fulfilling the wish of the poet quoted on the blurb of The Deer Under the Skin that “there should be room in each poem for the imagination of the reader to work in”. In the case of “Temple-Viewing” there are allegorical issues to be recognised: these doves are from India which is where Buddhism originated before spreading east in its Mahayana form. There are also contextual elements in the form of markers of those situations that, from the rest of her work, we can see that Harry is especially sensitive to: here it is the wind which sways the bamboos and activates the windchimes. In a sense it is the same wind as the one which disperses the seeds of the puffball in that first poem. It also brings sound into what seems to be an entirely visual representation and this is a technique used in the fourth poem of A Dandelion for Van Gogh (the alternating structure is continued) where a visual portrait of the goings on at a lakeside is finished with sound: “A crowcoloured dog / gallops over the hill / while the voice of his colour / caws above him”.

The idea of contextual elements in the form of distinctive responses by a particular poet leads me to look at some of Harry’s very distinctive, and endlessly repeated interests. These are not to be dignified by being called themes but they are, instead, I think, characteristic patterns of thought and, as such, take us closer to one area of Harry’s creativity. In fact one of the reasons for Harry’s remaining such an interesting poetic voice for a reader may well lie in the fact that we can see the shape of her mind a bit more clearly than we can for most other poets. Perhaps the most dominant element in her mental setup is a sensitivity to vertically organised layers, something forshadowed in “The What O’Clock”. Sometimes these layers are allegorised out into a simple binary of upper=life versus lower=death. But sometimes there is evidence of fertility-in-corruption in the dark underworld where, for example, in “Wind Painting”,

. . . . . 
there is one fat gold
dandelion for van gogh
tethered by its own sap
in the black damp shade
by a clump of horseshit

Here, as often, any tendency of lyric to move towards the cute is countered by a healthy linguistic vulgarity of image and word.

In the layering of these poems there is also the issue of death and destruction, something closer to a theme than the cast of a poet’s thought. “Navigating Around Things” from The Life on Water and the Life Beneath, begins as a typically Harry-ish lyric description of a scene, unusual only in that it is immediately declared to be “windless”. We meet cardboard cartons that seem to be imitating birds before meeting actual galahs themselves – “eyes only / on what is relevant to galahs”. The next to appear are galloping horses, typically, for Harry, producing “in the ovens of their bodies” steam from one end and dung from the other so that an object moving horizontally generates material that moves upwards and material that moves downwards. The horses are photographed by a man, fittingly described as a “downwardly mobile young professional” on

. . . . .
  an “indefinite
unpaid vacation” – from a job

with a broking office; not at all
suspicious he’s been

“floated”, on the air current,
outside a high-up window,
like a Kleenex with snot on it . . .

Eventually the poem turns to the life beneath the water which is comprised mainly of eels who have developed the unpleasant skill of sucking newborn ducklings down:

. . . . .
the large eels suck like centripetal force
that drags the water
out of the bathtub
                      & suddenly
in the dying dark
alone down an eel
goes a trusting fluffball . . .

This interest in layers and the various ways in which they can be allegorised is everpresent in Harry’s overtly lyrical pieces but it is present also in the non-lyrical ones. The title poem of The Life on Water and the Life Beneath is an extended narrative of a man taking a boat out into the waters over a town which has, Adaminaby-like, been flooded. We find, at the end, that it’s a suicide poem. The man has lived with the genetic scar of having had an axe-murderer for an uncle: the genetic heritage being conceived as something lying beneath the surface of an individual. The whole lengthy sequence is interwoven with references to Debussy’s tenth prelude, “The Sunken Cathedral”. And in the previous book, A Dandelion for Van Gogh, there are two poems which rework layers in a parody of bureaucratic incompetence. “This Explains” is a solemn denotative analysis – entirely misguided – of the difference between a chimney and a ferry presented as a kind of report:

. . . . .
You say	this explanation	does not fit	your problem’s appetite . . .
If only	you had told us sooner -
instead of hazing us	with that query, about
chimneys, ferries, & cargoes – what you needed to know
we could have projected
an entirely different	set of developments, specifically
designed to locate
                  “ideally suitable stocks”
of consenting human heads . . .

But the material of this faux proposal is based around issues familiar in Harry’s poetry: the interest in the horizontal motion of the ferry as opposed to the vertical motion of the smoke. The fact that the chimney stays still while the smoke passes vertically through it, reminds a reader of the comment in another poem, “it is strange to speak / of the hill as ‘rising’ / when the hill / stays exactly / as it always has”. “This Explains” is also a poem that tempts interpretation. I have always, for no real reason that I can justify, associated it with the Holocaust even though those victims were moved by rail rather than by ferry. But someone must have put in tenders in the correct impersonal prose, to actually build the extermination camps. On the other hand, it might be more humorous poem that it seems, something like the Monty Python sketch in which the architect presents the design of his housing block replete with rotating knives.

“The Gulf of Bothnia” also uses a deliberately non-lyric voice to deal with the levels peculiar to that upper branch of the Baltic Sea where water of the northern part is virtually fresh (from the large number of rivers feeding it) and that of the southern part is salt. At the same time the land is rising out of the sea with what, in geological terms, is considerable speed. This is a poem where the levels are not of earth to sky or of the above-water to the underwater world but rather of levels within the water itself. The anti-lyrical element is present in both the images used and the tone of the narrator’s voice:

. . . . .
boat houses sit in cow paddocks
falling green on their knees into grass
waiting for the sea to come back
& the boats to visit -
much as grandfather & grandmother
might’ve waited	for “life” to come back
to visit them 
on the old-age farm – had they lived
by the gulf of bothnia near the top . . .

Two poems from the “New Poems” section of an earlier Selected poems, “Brindabella a Shot for the Seventies” and “Mousepoem” are good examples of where this lyric vs anti-lyric opposition has developed later in Harry’s career. The former is a description of a complex scene that, for all the fact that it seems superficially like Harry’s other lyric descriptions (“Sleepers in a Park, Centennial . . .”, for example, or “Walking, When the Lake of the Air is Blue with Spring”) is drenched in blood and death. A trout is being gutted and inside it is a beetle which had fallen into the water and been swallowed; nearby is a fox which has been shot (the poem’s title puns on the two meanings of “shot”) while it was on its way to kill the young of a wood duck. But the processes of life go on: flies breed on the dead body and parrots feast in the trees:

. . . . . 
he hangs now in the poplar
ropestrung by that brush

flies make their reproductions 
where he swings red in the sun

red & green
king parrots gorging
on green apples

high	four thousand feet up

“Mousepoem” is an example of structure by misdirection. The context is one of erotic disappointment – “Her lover departed / to the warm purry / bed of his wife” – which has resulted in a poem. This poem is described as so slight that “if a mouse breathed on it, / it would collapse”. This common syntactic ambiguity (the poem would collapse, not the mouse) enables “Mousepoem” to move into the mouse world:

. . . . .
        the mouse which is made
of tough, mouse material, whiskers, ears,
small, quick, risk-assessing eyes
. . . . .
Who would wish for blind, hairless
mouse-children, but a mousy mother?
Does a mouse wish
or are children merely what happens to it
wishless but wanting?

and so on for the bulk of the poem until it returns to the character’s poem of loss in the final three lines. In other words, the excursion into the slightly twee world of the mouse is structured as a distraction from the mental anguish which is the real subject of the poem. This represents, I think, a later poem’s view of the temptations of cuteness which Harry fears.

Before I finish this brief report from the strange poetic world of J.S. Harry, I need to say something briefly about the Peter Henry Lepus poems because, although they are collected in Not Finding Wittgenstein and generally omitted from the chosen poems in book under review, this does have a section of new Peter Henry Lepus poems as its final section. These poems were a major development for Harry although they were, to me at least, puzzling when the first appeared. An imaginary rabbit, straight out of the world of Beatrix Potter is allowed to wander through texts, free in time and space, and meet up with those philosophers whose true subject is language and meaning. In having a “famous fat little British rabbit” as its protagonist, it brings into the world of analysis of meaning and the nature of words exactly that element of cuteness that marks popular culture of the late-Victorian/Edwardian ethos and still has attractions today. It is, I think, Harry’s way of dealing with this element in her approach to the world which is, in earlier work, dealt with by alternating the lyric with the forensic/surreal and it suited her well and produced a kind of poem that works for both poet and reader. In allowing a cute rabbit to wander among complex texts these poems symbolise the tension between tendencies in the lyric and explorations of meaning that I’ve been focussing on here. As poems they are, in keeping with Harry’s later work, rather bleak. They are set in the Iraq of the gulf wars among a cast not of philosophers but of journalists and scholars. Peter himself is engaged in a double comical quest: he is “researching” a book on the pre-socratic philosophers and, at the same time, trying to get into Iran because a friend of his, a huntsman spider named Clifta, has read Omar Khayam’s line about Jamshed and Bahram the great hunter and thinks that Bahram must be an ancestor of hers. The complex set-up of the Peter Henry Lepus poems ensures that these new (and final) ones cleverly balance the cute with the bleak.

Rereadings VI: Bruce Beaver: Odes and Days

Five Dock: South Head Press, 1975, 103pp.

This is a book published in the middle of a decade which looks, with the perspective of half a century, to be the most important in the history of Australian poetry. With a similar perspective we can also say that this book looks to be the climax of Beaver’s poetic career. It comes as the third of a kind of trilogy – Letters to Live Poets and Lauds and Plaints, being the other two – which now look to be the pinnacle of Beaver’s output. Later works, especially the fascinating autobiographical work, As It Was, have their moments, but Letters to Live Poets, Lauds and Plaints and Odes and Days are an undoubted high point of Beaver’s poetry. There are other perspectives too. The 1970s are usually seen predominantly as the site of an opposition between the “new” poets, collected a decade later in John Tranter’s The New Australian Poetry, and a group of poets loosely associated with Les Murray. The perspective of half a century shows that the truth of the situation is a lot less clear: neither of the so-called parties was quite as organised as people thought at the time. Poets, Australian poets, are perhaps not instinctive joiners of literary groups. At any rate, Beaver could have been claimed by both groups. As an older poet (born in 1928), connected with Grace Perry’s Poetry Australia project – a project that probably doesn’t get as much analysis as it should when the 1970s are being considered – and having a temperamental distaste for the counter-cultural activities of the young of the time, Beaver would normally be slotted into the Murray “party”. But he is the poet who opens Tranter’s anthology and the opening poem, the great elegy for Frank O’Hara (conceived as a letter to that poet), sets the tone for an anthology open to the influences of contemporary American poetry.

But creating maps and plotting the terrain of poetic history is (or should be) only a minor part of poetry criticism. What matters are the poems themselves. Odes and Days, as its title declares, is conceived in two parts: a set of elevated, extended poems followed by forty-seven short poems written almost in diary mode – “weeks of daily verses scratched / into this small notebook”. This twofold structure is an example at a macro level of one of the deepest generators of Beaver’s poetry: a sense of the double, most especially as two responses to the world. Undoubtedly it derives from his own psychological problems – a major part of his history as a young man is described in As It Was – which, whatever its exact clinical description, involved periods of elation followed by depression and a suicidal sense of his own worthlessness, but also periods of optimism about his fellow human beings alternating with periods of intense and furious (he calls it Swiftian) loathing for the human race. This psychological duality runs through all his poetry but Letters to Live Poets is probably where it is seen most clearly, especially in poems like XII, one of the great descriptions of psychic unease:

. . . . .
I’m never likely to forget
the day I walked on hands and knees 
like Blake’s Nebuchadnezzar, scenting the pit.
So it’s one day at a time spent checking
the menagerie of self; seeing
the two-headed man as half as much
of twice of everything; curbing the tiger;
sunning the snake; taking stock of
Monkey, Piggsy, Sandy’s belt of skulls.

The binary construction of the second book of this group of three is expressed in its title. Lauds and Plaints has poems which are built around the two possible poetic reactions to the world: celebration and despair. Odes and Days, on the other hand, can be said to have a single focus, despite its being based around binaries, and that focus is on creativity. In the Beaver world, creativity is not a simple expression of the positive phases of his personality but something which can have quite sinister overtones. The source of the creativity is not a bland, nymph-like muse but an altogether more potent force that he here, I think for the first time, calls his “daimon”. It is a word that grows more common in the books after Odes and Days.

The first of the “odes” is exactly about the nature of creativity. It is a long and complex meditation beginning:

Where does the fire come from
that burns in us like a lamp’s flame?
Not consuming the being
but using the body for a wick

so that lower and lower
the living fire descends in us
while ever higher and higher
the fumes of our immolation ascend.

Significantly, we are immediately presented with a binary conception of the whole process whereby part of us – the creative activity – ascends while the body is slowly consumed not as fuel but as a wick-like vehicle for the fire. The poem goes on to attempt to answer the question posed in the first lines, firstly by using the analogy of the flower on the stem of a plant, fed by the sun, and then exploring the image of the sun in some detail. Again, this is done in binaries for the sun is “more like Prometheus bound / than the bringer of light” – it is a hostile force which, like the protagonist of Aeschylus’ play, “writhes / and fulminates in its glowing shackles” and from which we need to be protected. But, “twin flames / there must be to experience: / one that renews the life / of things and one that cancels flesh”. One of the poetic sophistications of this first poem is that after nearly fifty lines of high-toned meditation, it modulates into an introduction to the situation in which the book is conceived. The poet is standing at the entrance to Grace Perry’s home in Berrima where he will be a visitor and write many of these poems. The sun that has become an answer to the question of the nature of creativity is a sun actually experienced as “the filtered warmth / through the green laden branches” which can also, in keeping with its double function of light bearer and destroyer, be much more violent:

         then I moved
and felt the oppressive fist of noon
box me about the ears
and drive me giddy indoors.

Even the little flower – a grape-hyacinth – which was pressed into service as a symbol of the sun’s ability to produce something small and beautiful from the soil, is an actual flower seen outside The Magistrate’s House which is the location of these poems.

There are nine “odes” of this sort, turning over notions of the interaction of personality and exterior source of inspiration (between the fourth and fifth of them are an important set of seven biographies of genius which I will look at in more detail later). The fact that Beaver is a visitor on foreign ground casts a distinctive light on the first of these. The third poem imagines a servant seeing in the blossoming of a tree in spring outside a window a symbol of a world going about its own processes far removed from the mundane and imposed task of dusting a desk. The poet as visitor sees the same tree a few days later and speaks of “my servant and my master selves” being blessed again by the tree’s “transforming ritual”. This “two-headed man” becomes part of the menagerie of self in the next poem which – another binary – allows the celebratory quality of the third poem to be balanced by a much bleaker tone as it looks at the darker side of creativity. The metaphor is not the beast selves of Monkey as it is in Letters to Live Poets XII but that sinister bird, the cuckoo:

The cuckoo-poet kicking out the fledglings
and even the parent birds from the convenient
nest in which he prepares for the proving
flight is doing only

what he was made to do. This does not justify
the damnably ruthless doing but explains
what happens to the friends and lovers
unfortunately his. . . .

It’s not only a general statement about the ruthless activities of the artist, the antisocial results of adhering to one’s inner vision, but a specific response to his own situation as guest. The last lines convey something of the state of self-disgust familiar from Letters to Live Poets:

. . . . . 
                   The spring is chill
that drives me to rehearse my two-
note tune of love and death.

And I have come into the decent lives
of loving friends and buffeted with thoughts
their nestlings, taken all the while
the freely proffered food,

to leave upon the generous table-top
a turd or two of anecdote and verse,
the dedication of a book,
pin-feathers for their nest.

This balance of the light and dark sides of creativity is continued in the six and seventh of this group of odes (their actual numbers are XIII and XIV). The former wants to celebrate creativity

. . . . . 
And yet the moving, making act
continues intermittently.
The special seeing and the half-conscious
ordering of words into a chant

that changes consciousness in others -
for good or bad’s the moral catch -
justifies most. . .

and the transformative power is seen in terms a move from winter to spring. There is nothing merely symbolic in this in Beaver’s case: winter brings physical distress in the form of neck pain – “an icy / hypodermic has snapped off in / the tendons of my neck” – a recurring experience which is an important part of the poet’s relation to the world and the subject of “Letters to Live Poets VI”:

Pain, the problem of, not answered
by dogma, orthodox or other-
wise. The only problem being
how to bear with. You may have an
answer ready. I, only the 
long-winded question breaking words
up and down the crooked line,
the graph of pain. Burns got it
in the neck. That’s where it gets me. . . 

The transformation to a world in which “the hour and I are warm again” is intensely felt rather than being a situation with nice, exploitable symbolic possibilities. As I’ve said, the following poem is its dark counterpart. The overriding image is not, this time of the cuckoo but of its arboreal equivalent, the strangler fig. It’s a more complex scenario than would appear on the surface. While the host tree is locked in a battle to the death with its “sinewy matricide”, there is a third element in the bees which are “not overly concerned / at the silent impasse / of tree and predator vine”. They are the bringers of fertility and creativity: “their metier was to fecundate / the living and the dying; / with blossoming / their day begins and ends”.

There is an extreme level of parallel and organisation in the odes section of this book though I have never been entirely sure what the organising principle is. Taking a clue from the continuous “Beaverian” alternation of light and dark and the emphasis, in the Beethoven ode, on the late quartets, I wonder whether Beaver isn’t imagining the structure to have musical parallels since, in the forms of “classical” music, the alternation of major and minor, adagio and allegro, is s crucial factor. With this in mind it’s hard not to see Beethoven’s Opus 131, the great seven-movement quartet, as a possible model for these nine poems. At any rate, the ninth takes a suddenly different tack by interesting itself in the poet’s antecedents. It is set on the late September Jewish festival of Yom Kippur – the day of atonement – and leads to Beaver thinking about the “Jewish eighth” part of his heritage as well as the others of “a motley sum of antecedents; / the Frankensteinian machine // of forebears nondescript and stubborn / to be accorded recognition”. It enables Beaver to think about the relationship between those who are creative and those who aren’t since “the silent ones” are not only part of his genetic history but also those readers who make up his readership. It’s a subject broached in Letters to Live Poets which is, as he says, addressed not only to poets but to a reader of poetry, “a not-impossible creative reader, a live poet in his or her own sense”. Ode XV finishes with a modest assessment – unduly modest to my mind – of Beaver’s own abilities, especially in relationship to the geniuses of the central section:

. . . . . 
Perfection of the life or art’s
a genius’s prerogative;
mere talent has no simple choice.

It manufactures book and babes
because it must. The rest is chance.
Schismatic, average, sensual

the muffled voices of our time
interpret Babel, prophesy
in tongues, and I along with them

in doubt, in all but ignorance
of antecedents and vocation,
put one foot before another,

proffer one hand instinctively
toward the mediators of 
high art, holding my talent close,

interpreting the human scene
in endless ambiguity
with peers as numerous as clerks.

A night and day suffice to judge us -
all guilty, all innocent, because
all complex found before the gods.

Superficially the seven odes devoted to the biographies of genius, slotted in as a sequence in the middle of these poems, looks like an attempt to investigate creativity by looking at case studies, a process that will widen the inquiry by moving it away from the limitations of one poet’s experience. Perhaps the sequence was conceived this way, but there is nothing mechanical about the portraits presented here which I think are among the high points of Beaver’s creative life. Biography, as we know, can take many forms, all of them unsatisfactory. The largest, most scholarly multi-volume work (something like the de La Grange biography of Mahler) still captures only a fragment of even the outer life, let alone the endless complexities of an individual’s subjectivity. At an opposed pole is the “biographical sketch” reducing a life to a minimalist skeleton. A variant of this is what might be called the “poetic biographical sketch” which often involves an intuitive stab at defining the essence of a person and then expressing it in a poetic form which is even shorter than the conventional sketch. It’s a case of poetry’s claiming to be able to say most in least and good examples of it can be found in Auden’s work from the 1930s, especially poems like those devoted to Rimbaud, Houseman (sonnets), Melville and, of course, Yeats. Another poetic way of dealing with biography is in sequences where each poem can take a period in the life, or a feature of the individual’s character, and express it imaginatively. Interestingly both of these kinds of poetic biography occur in Beaver’s treatment of Rilke, one of his favourite, and most influencing poets: there is a single ode in Odes and Days and an extended sequence (twenty-three pages) in the later book, Charmed Lives.

The seven creative geniuses who appear in Odes and Days are, in order, Hölderlin, Beethoven, Brennan, Mahler, Rilke, Delius and Hesse. Although Mahler was born before Brennan, and Delius before Rilke, the ordering is roughly chronological if one looks at their outputs. But it is tempting to look again at the Opus 131 as a structural model since these odes, as they are positioned, alternate language geniuses with musical geniuses. They were something of a shock at the time because they revealed a talent for striking and incisive portraiture that Beaver’s previous five books showed little sign of – it is hardly a signature skill of someone who seemed to oscillate between confessionalism and a fast moving lyricism. Hölderlin’s life, for example, blighted as it was by an early madness which led to him spending the last forty years of his life in the care of a kindly carpenter, begins with “He did grow old and he must have known it” a striking sentence and a striking approach to the experience of madness which Beaver himself must have related to. Rilke’s ode begins “He said the alps were too distracting” before using this to explore the possibility that the great poet of taking things within and making them into poetry (especially in the New Poems – “Nothing / was not sacred: a truncated marble, / a ball on a water-spout, a panther”) found the final sight of the alps too much to absorb. And the poem devoted to Hesse begins with a series of analytical, single stanza propositions about the very genetic inheritance which will recur in Ode XV:

If one’s father is a clergyman
and one is male
one becomes either a canny business-
man, a politico or a writer.

If one is Hermann and loves his father
there is nearly
another saint in the family until
the peculiar daimon asserts itself.

With a grounding in comparative
religion it’s hard
not to revert to pantheism
with a bias to the humanistic.

And there’s nothing so likely to abort
the clerical as
a clerkship in a well-stocked bookshop.
Hermann held one for four years. . . 

There is the shadow of a pattern in these portraits – a striking and incisive opening followed by a quick sketch of the subject’s life seen from the perspective of this opening – but there can be no question of an endlessly repeated trick. The portraits are, in contrast, remarkable for their variety of approach. The Beethoven portrait, for example, whose beginning lines – “Gneixendorf – a name like / the snapping of an axle-tree” – are a quotation from the composer’s letter to Haslinger written to introduce the town where he wrote his final works: the ending of the Opus 130 which would replace the Gross Fugue, and the Opus 135. It is, for the most part a dramatic monologue focussing on the way in which art can be some kind of compensation for domestic woes. But there is a personal element in that you feel that Beaver attributes to Beethoven (probably accurately enough, given the evidence) the same sort of out-of-control disgust and fury which he, himself, suffered at his worst moments. Here Beethoven’s anger is directed towards his sister-in-law, the probably innocent mother of his nephew, Karl:

That canker of menses and venom,
his mother – My ears crack with pressure
so that I almost hear -
almost feel –

her grating mew against 
the farting ground-bass of my brothers.
O friends, not these tones! . . .

The ode’s structure is also not as linear as the other portraits, and reverts to Beaver’s characteristic binaries by contrasting Gneixendorf with Heiligenstadt the village to which twenty-four years earlier Beethoven had retreated, probably with suicide in mind as his deafness became more acute.
Even more distinctive is the ode devoted to Delius. It is seen from the perspective of a shadowy figure, Thomas Ward, who came across Delius in Florida and for a short while taught him compositional techniques, and then pretty much disappeared from history:

. . . . . 
Wards’ time was up by fall. His task
complete, he left the other’s life as easily
as he had entered to work at a church.
No more is ever heard of him. . . 

Narratively this belongs to that tradition where the point of view is of someone who tangentially sees an important historical event. Thematically, I think Beaver’s interest here is in outsiders who make the functions of creativity possible. Sometimes they are teachers, like Ward, at other times patrons, and these latter appear inevitably in his various poems about Rilke, a serial exploiter of well-bred patrons of the arts. Given the setting of this entire book in Grace Perry’s house, there is undoubtedly a glance at his own position and a nod to Perry as, in his case, an enabling friend. At any rate, the theme is of the exploitation of patrons because the poem finishes with another example:

His guest and mentor then is Grieg.
They milk an income from a wealthy uncle
and so begins the maelstrom of
his early making and debauch.

The rest is music. Never such
was heard or will be heard again on earth
as those exquisite harmonies
wrung from mortality and love.

Finally in this survey designed to establish that these poems are all very distinctive productions rather than the extended mining of a stumbled-upon creative seam, there is the ode devoted to Mahler which gives no details about that short and stormy life but which is a recreation of the nightmare, fairy-tale world which Mahler’s music so often draws on.

Perhaps the creative figure with whom Beaver finds himself most connected is Brennan and the portrait begins with an acknowledgement of that poet’s own experience of lauds and plaints by describing his late romance with Violet Singer and her death in a tram accident:

To have come thus far within, without,
an honoured man and slandered, past the middle
way of years, a youth and life’s work past,
to have come upon such love.

The simplest meeting of two oldest friends
who, strangers a month before, became such lovers
that time itself became a twice-told tale:
then, nothing; now, all. . .

Brennan occurs a number of times in Beaver’s work, perhaps most importantly in “Winter Dreaming” from the posthumous volume, The Long Game, where the personal parallels are stressed simply by the fact that, oppressed by weather, Beaver finds Brennan “and his load of ancient night” coming into his mind. He has no illusions about the size of Brennan’s talent – “He was a monster with a minor gift / Rating somewhere between James Thomson and / Dowson, no major talent certainly” – which fits in with Beaver’s tendency to see himself (over-modestly) as possessed of a “little talent” rehearsing “my two- / note tune of love and death.” But he understands Brennan’s position as someone who, having spent “two long magian years” in European culture, returns (as Patrick White would half a century later) to its dry polar opposite:

From Europe to the country he called home,
that olden mother-continent of the South,
the dragon-lover of her haunted children
and art’s ultima thule.

Incredibly he essayed in the brazen
ears of his never-fellow countrymen
the good news of the poets of the silent
music. He was ignored

or ridiculed by the nominally educated.
Even his peers rejected the dense structures
and tortuous order of his celebrations
and lamentations both. . .

But the two years in Europe are paralleled by the two years with Singer, not in contrast as the two villages of Beethoven are, but in consonance.

Beaver’s talent for portraiture is exploited in his later work though the subjects are not usually part of this forensic examination of creativity. Someday someone will look at Beaver’s portraiture in more detail than I can here, but Charmed Lives contains the extended life of Rilke and Poets and Others has the brilliant portrait of Richard Packer which I have quoted in an earlier Rereading, as well as “Poems for Adrienne Rich” which is conceived in the letter mode, much like “Letters to Live Poets I”.

And so to the forty-seven short poems which make up the Days section of Odes and Days. Although they range in length from twelve to twenty-five lines and cover a range of subjects, there is a tonal and structural unity about them: no-one, coming across a few of them at random would have any doubts they are by the same poet. What they share is Beaver’s distinctive energetic, poetic movement. The tendency of the odes to divide into short stanzas embodying a single proposition is replaced by a structure which is always a single stanza and usually contains only a few sentences. Beaver is a master of making a poem power along, driven by its own internal dynamics which include long, remorselessly enjambed sentences. There are also throwaway metaphors which give the impression that they might have been exploited but that the poem had no time. The same could be said for the extended adjectival phrases which obviously point to a desire for accuracy but also suggest that there is no time to find a more syntactically conventional way of stating the same thing. There are also some wonderful, clever, clinching conclusions. Some of these characteristics can be seen in a single poem, No 17, a poem rehearsing one of Beaver’s themes – his extreme sensitivity to seasonal changes:

This first official day of spring,
started with hay-fever and sodden
handkerchiefs, ends with smoky
milky light falling on the hail-
stripped trees, the dented
iron roofs, the benzine-fumed
and oil-stained streets, blinking
back from slivers of the
hail-shattered windows
of the big storm of Sunday
last. Legitimate spring
will smooth out the bruised,
storm-cowed psyches, set
new leaf chirping in flutters
of warm air like green
birds on the stripped
branches. And of course the birds
themselves are preposterously
vocal – poets must be
reincarnating sparrows,
on wings of song and
a little lousy.

The subjects of these poems are the homely and immediate details of life. But since it is a poet’s life, it isn’t exactly the same as that of most other people. There is a good deal of reading (two of the poems talk about the prose of Henry James brilliantly and No 33 is a daunting list of obscure books that Beaver would like to sample) and, of course, a good deal of writing to go along with the usual events of visits, seasons, objects on the writing desk. In this sense these poems complement the odes’ concern with creativity since they document it in its immediate, down-to-earth environment. There are also examples of Beaver in his angry mode. Poem No 40 begins innocently enough as a registering not of the state of the season but of the quality of the air and quickly moves on to be an excoriating and funny attack on the world of car-lovers:

. . . . . 
The place is lousy with machines.
The streets harbour them
like a colony of gigantic cockroaches
feeler to feeler, bumper to bumper.
And if Saturday night rocks
with copulating couples,
Sunday morning sways
with lovers recumbent
under machines, oiling grease
nipples, adjusting fan belts,
feeling with eerily erotic
fingers the goddess’s private parts.
And when some of them die, they die
welded into her, unparted in death,
while the lives of the rest are truncated
obsessed, in rusting thrall, fouling the air.

These homelier poems are distinctive and they are in a mode which grows more common in Beaver’s later books. Some of them do, however, look back to the earlier poems from the Odes section of Odes and Days. There is a portrait of the NZ poet James Baxter which is also an elegy

. . . . .
We never met though I saw him once,
bearded, in unkempt gear, wintry
blue feet in battered sandals, 
a pretty girl with him – St Francis
and the snow lady. . .

and No 19 might well be a combined portrait of Hölderlin, Schiller and Goethe. There are also poems which are essentially letters to other poets – Nos 39 and 42 – recalling the style of Letters to Live Poets rather than that of Odes and Days. But for all these continuities, I think they represent the establishing of a new mode for Beaver’s later work.

K.F. Pearson: The Complete Apparition

Melbourne: Black Pepper, 2021, 285pp.

Somehow it’s hard not to warm to a book whose acknowledgements page tells us that many of the poems about “the apparition” – the character or state that the whole lengthy work is devoted to – “have been rejected by prominent magazines and anthologies. I would like to thank them for authenticating the nature of his character. The few that did take poems I do not embarrass by naming them”. And you can see why it would be difficult to get these poems into journals. Most of them are attempts to define something indefinable and their strategy is to continuously look at the subject from different angles, different perspectives and different genres: not something that produces stand-alone works. On top of this the poems are often very rough, sometimes even doggerel though – I’ll look at this later on – this seems to be a deliberate ploy on the author’s part, perhaps to avoid the unwanted elegances of symbolism.

Pearson’s obsession with “the apparition” can be traced, at least for an outsider such as myself, to The Apparition’s Daybook, a slim volume of 1995, and a later volume, The Apparition at Large, from 2006. Only one of the poems from these two books is included in The Complete Apparition (I think) so this isn’t going to be one of those rolling accretive projects like Pound’s Cantos or Berryman’s Dream Songs. In fact it couldn’t be, since the poems of the earlier books are first person pieces from the point of view of the central character himself. And the result is quite different to – and, in a way, more restricted than – the outsider’s attempts at definition that make up The Complete Apparition.

What can be said about the Apparition himself? Although there is a certain comical paradox in a reader attempting to define in prose what more than four hundred pages of poetry doesn’t really do, it’s still a question that one has to ask and a reading strategy one has to adopt. Firstly it can be said that he has sometimes a physical manifestation and sometimes a non-physical one. As a tangible character he can appear in a number of different guises and in a number of different roles. The most important is as a man who exists in the world, regularly taking walks and watching the ducks on the lake or the Kookaburra on the Hills Hoist, but at the same time being invisible to everybody else, not because he is technically invisible but because people don’t see him or, at best, see him as something that “disturbed them at the edge of vision”. To those who are receptive he will pay a visit, and many of the best poems are about these visitations. The opening of “Johnny-come-lately”, for example:

The arriviste has arrived
on your doorstep, late at night.
Mere pressure of the fingers opens
all dark hallways of your house.
There’s an almost-pad of footsteps
like muted shivers from the past
as they approach down corridor
though you’re asleep and still sleep on 
a moment before the restless air
requires you shift, then startle awake
to something short of recognition
but with a certainty of presence
you could not deny, nor have the will
to object to in the instant of your stirring.

It’s hard to say what’s come upon you
by an invasion (or your calling forth)
of one beyond the realm of easy comfort . . .

At other times he becomes identified with the downtrodden, appearing quite often as a swaggie “on the wallaby”:

With dilly bag and walking staff,
he strolls his lonely way,
to meet the future or lose the past . . .

In these concrete manifestations he has a specific set of interactions with those who are in the right state of mind to perceive and accept him. He isn’t a simple embodiment of saintly visitation, poetic inspiration, intercession or annunciation; in fact he needs others so that he can have a sense of his own existence. A late poem in the book says “do not disremember / yourself who are his author” and an earlier one, describing him as being in subjection to “a mistress or master” shows him wandering in ‘sleep mode’ awaiting the summons that will activate him:

. . . . . 
He can doze, despair and await a summons.
He does not himself possess a lure.
His time is all the time in other’s hands.
I you ask him, he could be your creature.
Applicants are warned, although without one,
he is, once yours, an imposing figure.
He has the power of insinuation.
They speak for him but he’s the more secure.

Although we are in the world of paradox here – an imposing figure who doesn’t have a figure – this component of the poetry has a solidity that is reasonably easy to grasp. Indeed it invites allegorical readings. He could represent that sensation of dwindling into invisibility and irrelevance that can come to most of us late in life. Conversely he could represent a visitation which shakes us out of the conventional tracks on which we run our lives so that we realise that while we thought of ourselves as free, in actuality we were entirely constrained by “mind-forged manacles” that we couldn’t even see. We could read him as interceding – certainly this is the image that the book’s last poem leaves us with. We could read him as an Ariel figure, an embodiment of inspiration. And we could also read him as an erotic figure, specializing in night-time visitations. This latter view gets some support from reading the earlier book, The Apparition’s Daybook, which is more like a sequence and could be read as a modern version of the renaissance sequences detailing a love affair and focussing on the lover’s sense of being insubstantial when apart from the loved-one. This is certainly true of “His State”:

My condition makes me suffer
a state I’d not prefer,
to be dependent on
a certain gazer’s whim.

To know when out of sight
I am in no-one’s thought
brings me to the brink.
I am, but you don’t think.

But these reasonably substantial portraits of the Apparition – as visitant, as tramp etc – are only part of the complicated fabric of this book. There are very good poems defining him negatively, especially those in which various social structures – religions, the law, military intelligence – try to cope with him and, of course, fail completely. A group of three poems early on summarily dispatches the legal world, the police world and the mercantile world, and the first of these, using the equivocal language of legal process, double negatives and all – “The unresolved not impossible non sequitur / his is, your Honour, is not incapable of repair” – is not only a lot of fun but also an example of the way language can approach the indescribable as a mesh of contradictions. He is also a creature who sometimes leans towards the messianic, “despised among men”, a “figure on the hill” – the Beatles’ fool as well as the preacher of the sermon on the mount – an avoider of activism as much as religious structures:

. . . . .
No mass hysteria ever could persuade him
on St Peter’s balcony or in Tiananmen Square
but roads or floorboards or a verge of grass
that are the ways by which he finds his way
can summon him like an hypothesis . . .

There are also a host of theatrical references which set a frame of disguise, impersonation, exits and entrances for him – in a poem from The Apparition at Large he describes himself as “a tragedian in civilian garb”. In “Debut” he is an outsider “lured inside by a cabaret tout” who is forced to perform: the famous long-handled shepherd’s crook doesn’t drag him off the stage but onto it. And as “Any Proscenium in a Storm” says,

. . . . . 
Less a charade, more harlequin
     with colour leached from clothes
his hold, once curtains part, is in
     Republics of Suppose.

Finally, there are also two memorable descriptions of him as a sufferer of “reverse Alzheimer’s” – “He doesn’t forget but is forgotten” – and as a “reverse pilgrim”, one who goes:

. . . . . 
     not to the shrine
     with relic or lock
     of a martyred saint’s hair
     her mother cut off
     when she was a babe,
or on a beaten track to sacred rock or tree,
     but rather he’s the one
     who wanders to be found
     in drawing room, or byway,
     or hidden in a crowd. . .

These are all concrete manifestations – even though the approach is often paradoxical – and as I’ve said, they aren’t the entire picture. Sometimes he is completely insubstantial as in “Selfie” where it’s said, “Spotlit at any camera angle / there is a sheen but nothing stable” but also in those poems which relate him to gaps. In “The Resting Place” he lives in “the discrepancy between the time / on wristwatch and the mantle clock” and in “The Finer Things” he is a “devotee of interstices” who “has spoken well of filigree”. This idea of a creature of the spaces between things is probably best expressed in “A German Poem Read in his Youth” from The Apparition’s Daybook, one of a number of poems that refer to Morgenstern’s comic poem about an architect who, much to the discomfiture of the local authorities, steals the spaces between the palings of a fence and makes an edifice from them.

The book’s structure whereby seemingly endless attempts at description and analysis are brought to bear on what is conceived as an indescribable and unanalysable phenomenon seems a satisfying one to me. Each fits well with what poetry does because each of the poems is, in itself, a complete entity but is also only ever one possible approach to life. And the book uses this well by allowing the approaches to be in completely different styles and genres. There is a good deal of warm-hearted parody going on here, for a start, and you can hear snippets of Robert Frost, Kipling, Henley, Burns and Stevens – the latter’s “let be be finale of seem”, if reversed, might make a good epigraph for the project. And Les Murray’s “An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow” – a poem dealing with an individual as anonymous and ungraspable as the Apparition – makes an appearance in “In Praise of Cowards” which begins, “Ah! the whisper sighs around the Showground. / It is heard in Fitzroy, and on Fitzroy Street”. But the apparition also appears in different settings and genres. There are a couple of Gordon- or Paterson-like gestures at the bush ballad including “Before Back of Beyond” – a nice paradoxical title – which begins in full bush ballad galloping style – “Way out where the track’s exhausted / far beyond the dingo’s cry” – before reverting to more conventional rhythms. And “Recitative” sounds like those twee late nineteenth century poems about childhoods remembered and lost:

There’s a sigh that hovers near the memory
of a passenger seat and an aura gone by
that’s why there’s a yearning
to be just returning
along the track to Make Believe. . .

So much for the variety of genres. There is also quite a variety of styles. Sometimes the syntactic style is very awkward – these are poems that share with others an uncomfortableness with the way English deploys a compulsory definite article “He wields stick with ferule”, “or who has stilled brass tongue of bell” – but I think the awkwardness is a kind of deliberate rawness: it’s not there in the earlier Apparition books. This is a poetry, in other words, that wants to sound more like Blake than Tennyson. And a number of poems are written in a rhymed two-line stanza style that I find very attractive, again they nod towards Blake and also to the ghazal form. Take, for example, one of the last poems, “Pebbles”:

Who reads a chapter before sleep
has plot lines her dream may keep.

Who hesitates is taking time
to weigh the waits, to find the rhyme.

Who spends ten minutes with an orchid
knows the earth’s good habitat.

Who plucks a pebble from a pool
feels water close once hand is pulled.

One who observes her walking feet
looks up to see who she will meet.

A kookaburra on a rotary hoist
lifts breakfast to a higher place.

Who studies formation of a leaf,
green or skeletal, finds relief.

It probably belongs to a group of poems whose relationship to the apparition is a bit tenuous – “Corona Wreath”, for example, is a straightforward Covid poem in which the apparition doesn’t appear either as a figure or a set of moral imperatives – but it has that nice, raw Blakean quality.

What to make of this strange and intriguing book, when all is said and done? A central hermeneutic problem is that an “outside” reader such as myself can’t really define the poet’s stake in the whole project which, since The Apparition’s Daybook was published in 1995, has now occupied its author for more than a quarter of a century. There are obviously autobiographical elements – the kookaburra on the Hills Hoist and the daphne that lines the lane recur so often that they lead a reader to think that this must be happening at the author’s home. One of the most important poems, if we are looking at this question, is “His Letter of Support” from the second book, where he has a kind of alter ego relationship with the poet, describing him as “my amanuensis”. The apparition can also be allegorised as both inspiration (something that visits the poet) and poetry (and its authors) itself, a force able to play a non-activist but important part in public affairs and to celebrate the generally uncelebrated. But these two readings are mutually exclusive: the apparition must be either outside the poet or a part of the poet’s life and personality; that is, on the inside. Pearson’s stake in all this can probably only be described by the author himself, and although that is a situation that applies to almost all poets, it’s especially complex here in this extensive and multi-focussed collection.

Petra White: Cities

[Sydney]: Vagabond Press, 2021, 64pp.

Petra White’s Cities is a slim book by current standards but it is a dense one and there is a lot to be said for connecting it to its predecessor, Reading for a Quiet Morning. Both, for instance, begin by broaching crucial themes in the form of a revisiting and reconstruction of an existing myth. In Reading for a Quiet Morning the myth revisited was Ezekiel’s strange visions “at the edge of the Chebar” during the Babylonian exile. In Cities it is the old Greek story of Demeter and her lost daughter, Persephone. Taking an even longer perspective we can see that White has often employed sequences to work away at a theme and often these sequences are comprised of quite different poems. What strikes me about “How the Temple was Built” – the long sequence based around Ezekiel – and “Demeter”, is the way they each seem bifurcated, able to develop in two different directions.

“How the Temple was Built”, for example, begins as a kind of exploration of the relationship between artist and prophet. Its impetus is Blakean, I think, involving the notion that a “perception of the infinite” is the beginning of all inspiration, poetic as well as prophetic. God is thus a voice within Ezekiel whose promptings take us towards ideas like inspiration. But from early on the poems leave Ezekiel behind to focus on his dead wife (here given the name, Esther) who, becoming an angel, is able to be a part of the history of the fall and thus the human race’s entry into the real world. She’s a female principle and an angel of expansion – an issue not, of course, separate from notions of human creativity. The sequence finishes by returning to Ezekiel, and also the last chapters of his prophetic book, to describe the mad details given for the construction of the heavenly temple in a new Jerusalem. It’s a long sequence – nearly book length – and it takes several readings for an outsider like myself to feel at all at home in it, but I think, in retrospect, that it’s quite a major achievement, even if I can only give a sketchy account of it here.

The Demeter poems at the beginning of Cities share, as I’ve said, this thematic bifurcation. Demeter is the ultimate mother – willingly or forcedly plunging the earth into perpetual winter in search of her daughter – and thus a focus for a whole thematic area of motherhood. But motherhood isn’t just a one-directional expression of love from mother to child, it is also the looking back of an adult child at their mother: that is, it enters the rich world of family, genetics and upbringing that many poets have exploited. The last of the Demeter poems is a longish sequence called “Persephone at 40” whose very title makes the point. And the second series of the book, “In Front of the Sea”, concerns itself with White’s mother, seen both in memories and photographs. The question the sequence asks is an obvious one, “Now I’m a mother myself, how do I reinterpret my relationship with my own mother?” and this is pretty much the same issue that Persephone encounters as she crosses into early middle age. In “Chicken Shop”, looking at a photo of her mother holding her as a baby, she says that “her long future wriggles its gills in my blood” and in “To My Mother’s Ghost” she sees her mother as a kind of revenant, perhaps coming to tell her how much she loved her, an experience which the poet’s recent motherhood makes possible. It’s a sequence in which what to an outsider is a comparatively clear-cut if powerful experience is seen as intensely complex with the author positioning herself as both a Demeter and a Persephone. It’s also a sequence in which the sea appears as an image of psychic instability – something that will occupy the last poem of the entire book. After the sequence of poems about her mother is a single poem, “For My Daughter Ten Weeks Old”. In a sense this is an elegant, almost old-fashioned, high-toned lyric of address (one wouldn’t have been surprised if it had rhymed, for example) but it’s opening line, “Stay afloat, in your wobbling pea-green boat”, prepares us for the final poem of the book which will deploy the Odysseus myth and also use the sea as a symbol of unsteadiness.

It would be impossible to underestimate the significance of motherhood in this book and I’m not going to try, but one of the features of the Demeter poems (as it was of “How the Temple Was Built”) is White’s interest and response to the humans who enter the poems either as inhabitants of the city in the latter or as the dead and potentially dead in the former. It’s an area where the allegorical possibilities of the myths are rather cut off: we know that the author is, on the one hand, Ezekiel and Esther, and, on the other, Demeter and Persephone and a lot of the bifurcated pleasure of poems like this is that they hover between mythic recreation and disguised personal “confession”. But if the humans of the sequences are of a separate order to the divine figures then the second of these is rather supressed. It’s a technical issue that I have met before and I haven’t explained it very clearly here, but my real interest is the way in which the poems come alive when they deal with a divine figure responding to the small creatures that make up the human race. We can see it in “The Corn” where Demeter, knowing that the mother-love of ordinary mortals cannot match hers, is nevertheless sympathetic towards their suffering while she is wreaking havoc:

. . . . . 
That love that slugs a goddess -
they can barely stand their own little cupfuls of it
ripping their hearts.
Those cottages littered with rancid grain, poor bodies
in the fields . . .
. . . . . 
How I once adored the golden mornings when the tufty
harvests fell into being from my hands,
and the slumbering black world
came to at a tick from me.
And all the people were fed and happy
as zebras without predators . . .

It’s a moment of re-evaluation from a new perspective and one’s reminded of the great moment in Paradiso where Dante, near “the final blessedness”, looks back down on the earth that he had a few days previously been living (and fighting) in, calling it “that little threshing-floor” – though Dante’s attitude to the people of this floor would be a lot more dismissive than it is in these two books. “How the Temple was Built” itself begins with a loving description of the small folk who inhabit and construct their city:

     In the frail city that burns from within
and all along its distances
people organise into families,
make more of themselves,
bedeck sadnesses, build houses,
a town, a king and queen, princes,
footpaths and passageways, hiding places,
make weapons, listen for war,
violate, love, murder, ground themselves
in the concept of home, cultivate
adorable individual souls, speak of forever
and ever and believe
they have time . . .

And later describes,

    This peculiar town, it swarms in itself, with its handmade gods
vivid as puppets held up to the burning sun,
its superstitions rooted as fact, nourishing itself
with industries of fear and fate, its clever canopy
that turns the voice of God
into a howl of the wind, a skittering of something in grasses . . .

and so on. Perspective is what matters and one of the problems of beginning with the infinite (or the nearly-infinite in the case of the God in Job) is that it’s a very long leap to the ordinarily human. But there’s a verve in the poetry that deals with the ant-like humans that leads me to think that the impulse behind these poems is fundamentally humanist.

Nothing could be closer to the scurrying humans of “How the Temple was Built” or the suffering ones of “Corn” than the poems in the last half of Cities which are – at least roughly – travel-diary poems. We follow White as she follows her partner from Australia (its “delicate orange-blush / tracery they call ‘the Outback’” seen from the passenger seat of the plane) to London and then Berlin. Although they are built on a continuous series of observations – as travel poems tend to be – they are complex pieces in themselves, partly because of the interactions of the themes which run through them. Sometimes they are “mother” poems – there is something symbolically satisfying about the way the baby is virtually a newborn on the initial flight so that newness of place and life are combined – sometimes they gravitate around issues of love and marriage and sometimes they just make acute comments about the new environment so that in a London square, “The homeless man’s camp is gone / hoovered up with the efficiency it lacked” and in the flat geography of Berlin “A siren lifts above all else, two notes / played maniacally, / this emergency / hurtling into the arms of the city”.

But underlying these poems are both psychological sensitivities and mythical structures. The beginning of the first of them “To London”, which describes the departure, describes Australia seen from above, as I have said, and immediately moves to a memory of the past:

There I ran with the hippies,
free as a stray dog, dole forms
signed with an eagle feather.

For readers who are arriving at White’s work for the first time this will seem an odd reminiscence to drop in but those who have followed her writing will see it as a recurrent item. It appears first (I think) in a longish sequence from her first book, The Incoming Tide. It is called “Highway” and, though the poems and their approach vary – as they do in all of her sequences – it covers this trip with “hippies” across the Nullarbor towards a nirvana in the east. And references to it occur so regularly in White’s poems that its significance as a journey undertaken during a bad period of aimlessness and psychological lowness slowly impresses itself on the reader. It becomes rather less of a young adult’s madcap adventure and more an experience which embodies psychic dis-ease, recalling, for example, those references to his experiences as a child working in a blacking factory which occur in almost all of Dickens’s novels.

The final poem of Cities is set in London in July of 2020. It is carefully called “Home” and thus balances “To London”, the first of these travel-poems. But it also balances the opening of the entire book in its deployment of myth. Whereas the beginning sequence was based around Demeter and Persephone, “Home” is built around the myth of Odysseus and Penelope, the great myth of homecoming – after, in the case of Odysseus, time not only spent at sea but also in the Underworld ruled by Persephone. Given that White’s poetry tends to be centred around dis-ease, depression, awkward relationships with her mother, with her own past, and even with her co-workers during a long spell in the public service, “Home” is a remarkably upbeat poem, beginning with an image of equilibrium. It finishes with an image of Odysseus “sat among his people, his son” settling “a little heavier into the earth”. This stability replaces his voyaging mode which is a symbol of an unsteady life, a life where one’s legs are “wobbling and rippling” and where it is always possible that the boat might sink, just as it was always possible in the opening of the earlier “To London” that the “perilous” plane, might fall out of the sky.

Before this conclusion, though, is a stanza which summarises the experience of not feeling stable or steady:

In the otherwise empty Trafalgar Square, the homeless men
for whom the city is neither inside nor outside,
stale home on cobblestones, a wandering sense,
stand up, sit down, roam back and forth, sidle into
the blue July sky.
Twenty years ago, on the Nullarbor Plain
I walked, or knelt,
enveloped in the hygiene of space.
My fragile brain set like a flower in the desert,
thoughts flew, none could be caught,
believing only in a fizzing distance
in which my gaze could dissolve,
naked in the desert air, shitting in soft holes,
desperately becoming,
this wild source . . .

It’s no surprise that the “hippie” pilgrimage should turn up here as a symbol of a lack of a sense of stability and steadiness. Those who know their Odyssey well will know that during his visit to the Underworld, Odysseus is told by Tiresias that after he returns to Ithaka and Penelope he must placate the god Poseidon who has been the cause of his traumas. And the way to do this will be to voyage not on the sea but inland carrying an oar on his shoulder. When he arrives at a place where people are so ignorant of the unstable sea that they ask him why he is carrying a winnowing fan over his shoulder, he can make propitiatory sacrifices and then return to his home and a tranquil old age. Everyone has a different way of overcoming a psychological (and physical) lack of stability.

Jane Gibian: Beneath the Tree Line; Amanda Anastasi: The Inheritors

Beneath the Tree Line (Artarmon: Giramondo, 2021, 88pp.)
The Inheritors (North Fitzroy: Black Pepper, 2021, 57pp.)

The author’s note which accompanies Jane Gibian’s Beneath the Tree Line begins by saying, “More and more I have become preoccupied with the natural world and our place in its increasingly precarious situation”. This together with the emphasis on those who will be stuck with our mess in Amanda Anastasi’s The Inheritors inevitably suggested their connection and a chance to round out, as it were, the emphases behind the books reviewed in my previous two posts. In fact, both books have more in them than an obsession with the cumulative toxic effects of the Anthropocene, Jane Gibian’s book, especially. Its five parts comprise five different perspectives on living which could be summarised, very crudely, as: living in the world, in language, in the digital age, the act of living in itself and living in the natural world.

Some of these poems, especially those of the opening and closing sections, are very fine lyrics often working by cross-breeding a couple of different approaches so that there is an air of conjunction about them. This might well be an extension into lyric meditation of the essential mechanism of the haiku, a form which Gibian has often used. For example, the first poem of the fourth section (which I have categorised as being “about” living itself), “Sound Piece”, is essentially about memories, that important part of any living that we do. Part of the dynamism of the poem comes from the way it focusses on sound memories and their interaction with visual ones. Indeed, it ends with a striking visual image:

. . . . . 
                             A lower drawer consists

of walking into threads of old spider webs, the distant
grumble of a bus arriving at last. This section
for sea creatures: the skeleton of a fossilised fish

with eerie blank eyes and slender barbel, rasp
of scales and the graduated spiral of a shell so
flawless we lean into the ocean’s hum. A stripe

of sunlight across our shins, leading to a shelf
that preserves the pang of a muted light
gleaming from the window of your last house.

Throughout the poem there are the kind of tensions between visual and sound memory which the reader will feel underneath this final section. The idea may be that, as human animals, we continually rate the visual sense above the aural one and that the tension between them can produce a fruitful dynamic for a poem. But there is also the strategy of organising the memories. We might have expected a straightforward list – I have written elsewhere of the interesting complexities and issues of any kind of list in a poem – where the refusal to organise the list in any obvious way is itself a structural device because it exploits tensions between a perceivable order and randomness. Here the memories are organised in terms of a “curiosity cabinet”, one of those weird pieces of furniture beginning in the seventeenth century in which mementos were stored. Such cabinets shock us by the way in which items are ripped out of any context but the virtue of this device poetically is that the memories themselves come to the author devoid of context. They are also wonderfully precise: “The next drawer / slides open to the sound of rain and the plinking // of flags blowing against flagpoles”. It’s an intriguing structure because it acknowledges the aleatory element of remembering while at the same time providing a framework. I’m reminded of Tony Judt’s marvellous The Memory Chalet in which, dying of ALS, unable to sleep or even move, he structures memories of his life (transcribed by an amanuensis during the next day) by assigning them a room in a hotel remembered from childhood. There’s nothing so desperate and extreme in “Sound Piece” but the complexities of the structure strengthen the poem making it – of course – a sound piece of work.

I’ve described the first section of Beneath the Tree Line as “living in the world” but it might be more accurately described as “living with the seasons”. Most of the poems engage in some way or other with subtle seasonal changes. The first poem, “Tilt”, describes that transition that all Australians understand between January and February. January, even for those with jobs, always seems a holiday, a slightly guilty extension of the relaxation of the Christmas to New Year week into the whole month that follows. But by the end of January all that is over: children have gone back to school, the cricket season is winding down, the tennis is over and people are beginning to think about the forthcoming football season. So the change to February isn’t so much a matter of registering subtle changes of temperature as subtle changes in the citizenry:

February, a cake fork fallen from the plate,
the sedate beat of bat wings
in the mango tree. We’re sewn into place

with work, seams restitched at the elbow,
the slow spread of January past, fading
the improbable flight of pelicans.

Only in January could the ample shell 
of a spider float from the cliff to settle
at our feet on the sand; before the scooter

of March gathers speed, a second-hand offer
spruiks wetsuit for tall thin man: the tilt
of the earth’s axis, the year tapped open.

But the conventional shift from January to February is not quite as innocent as it was in our youth. Seasonal change is one of the things affected by climate changes and Gibian’s poetry is especially sensitive to this. “Less Golden” plays with these seasonal changes, “It was in March, no it was April . . . when we noticed that each year / autumn is less golden”. And “Light Less Guarded” might have been used as an example of the doubled approach that I wrote about with regard to “Sound Piece” since it deals with seasonal change in a framework of playing a toccata on a keyboard – “the start of winter’s turning in the golden scent of those // flowers . . . light less guarded”.

These first poems are marked by their ability to register very subtle seasonal changes, but they also – in keeping with contemporary experience – have well-done sinister touches. The cake fork fallen from the plate, the first image in the first line of the book, might well be one of those sinister details, as might the beat of the bat wings and the shell of the spider. Gibian is really good at this particular version of sensitivity. I can remember a poem from an earlier book, Ardent, in which a description of the “harsh wind” of an October describes the way people on jogging machines at a gym move “up and down in waves, as if fleeing / something terrible, their faces grim masks”. Tilt and balance are no longer innocent words: they are part of that sinister notion of “tipping point” at which changes to the environment have an exponential effect rather than a gradual, linear one. A final point to observe in this first section is the frequent reference to streams of water, usually underground. I’m not exactly sure of its significance in poems like “Street of Hollows” and “Light Less Guarded” but there is no doubt it is not accidental. In the former it might be no more than a symbol of underlying fear – “a note // of dread trickles through the senses” – but it more likely refers to the burying of streams by “development”, and the way that such waters emerge as seepage.

I characterised the second section as containing poems about living in language but this group is actually a little more complex than this. Language has always been present in Gibian’s poetry but the perspective is quite distinctive. She concentrates on the experience of adult language-learning. We all admire and envy the situation of those who are polylingual from childhood but there is something very significant about learning a language as an adult when one’s mother-tongue is so ingrained that it is, essentially, how we conceive and express the world. The subtle changes that happen as this iron-hard matrix is painfully stretched (or, perhaps, dismantled) is exactly the sort of thing that an especially sensitive lyric poet will be interested in. In Gibian’s case there is a special interest because her second language is Vietnamese: a tonal language with very precise emphases unshared by an Indo-European language like English. “Double-jointed”, the first poem of the group, is a good description of, among other things, the way meaning is declared in the tones rather than the syllables:

In the mesh of a tonal language, there’s sound
slipping over furtive vowels; with it, meaning dragged
crookedly in its wake, a worn hem coming loose . . .

“Lash” is a good example of the double structure that I described “Sound Piece”. It’s both love poem and language poem: the opening line, “My dearest, the belly and the heart overlap here”, referring not only to a physical situation but to the fact that in Vietnamese the words for “belly” and “heart” express overlapping semantic fields (or, at least, I assume so. I wouldn’t want readers to think that I’m competent in Vietnamese). It’s not uncommon that reality is divided up for a language’s nouns in a different way to which it is in English. Words for colours, for example, can be puzzling: Old Icelandic seems to make no distinction between blue and black and the exact way in which the colour spectrum is divided up in Homer has often occupied scholars. At any rate it’s a conceptual challenge for people learning languages and just undermines the inherited way that their mother-tongue processes reality. “Lash” concludes by nicely tying together the language experience and the love experience, the latter by concluding the poem as a love-letter: “But in this language / of few tenses I remain lashed to the present, and yours always”.

“Earshot”, whose title puns on the idea of a person being assaulted by a language within hearing, is an attempt to speak about the subtle effects of learning a language as an adult through a process of immersion in the culture of the language. It is enticing, all-pervasive but also almost always beyond the grasp of the learner who has to go through a kind of linguistic version of “traveller’s syndrome”:

Language approaches from all
directions, with caresses & gestures
in the genial air, an earworm

burrowing into a brain sparking
with connection. Its ornaments
could be the servants of melody,

but it becomes evasive, whispering
just out of earshot & retreating indignantly
when you reach to clutch at words . . .

And, finally in this group, there is “In Slumber” which makes, behind the metaphor of a snow-covered landscape, a comment about the linguistic health of the world. Under the snow is silence, but plants which are in hibernation are like languages with only a few speakers and so on. It’s perhaps designed to be a reminder that linguistic extinction is as distressing a current problem as climate change and species extinction.

The central section of the book is very much about living in a digital/locked-down age. The mode here alters from the generally lyrical cast of the earlier sections to one of assemblage and “found” observations: “Seventeen Titles on the New Books Shelf: June-July 2019” will suggest the representative method of these poems. It’s not a mode that ever does much for me but I can respond to the fact that every age speaks for itself and in its own way and there is something attractive in the idea that the digital age should reveal itself in assemblages of, say, email responses and on-line reviews as happens in “Leftovers From a Pirate Party”. I think the most impressive poem of this group is the first, “Under the House”. It may be because, although it assembles, it avoids quotation. It begins with images of disturbance in the present and ends by capturing a sinister ambience brilliantly:

. . . . .
                                   Behind you
on the highway for some hours after,
a car with one dimmed headlight,
sinister in the early evening.
The light bulbs seem too bright for the light fittings
at your in-laws’ house. In the painting, the dark fleshy
leaves, almost purple-black,
curl inwards as if to meet
something craven in you.

The fourth section – introduced by “Sound Piece” which I have looked at already – is a little harder to pigeonhole than the previous three. If “Sound Piece” is about memory and how it can be organised, so is the second poem, “Recomposition”, a piece that seems to be essentially about how we relate as units to the some total of our memories, “a portrait assembled across / years”. But the later poems are about pregnancy: “nesting” and being a parent of small children. Again, though the subject is conventional, the treatment never is: a sign of a really worthwhile poet. I’m especially taken with the three “Nesting Songs” and with “Slipstone”, a fine rendition of the semi-delirious state induced by looking after the needs of a new-born:

Untrodden rhythms: the pace of your life
a tightly wound timepiece on short
rotation, slight distinction between darkness
and light, slipstone or clingstone, peach

or nectarine: thoughts verdant and ropey
twist in night colloquies . . .

If the first section of Beneath the Tree Line dealt with living in a domestic world of subtle and often sinister changes, the final section contains poems that address living in the “natural world” as it is more usually conceived. These are poems that involve getting out amongst the trees whether they are the mangroves accompanying a river that has been overtaken in its upper reaches by human habitation – “wilder here / than the subdued trickle through bricked-in / culverts” – or the angophoras of a southern tableland recovering from summer bushfires. Again, the overall tone is permeated with suggestions of threat so that the fascination (in “Further South” and “Restless”) with the complex way in which a forest regenerates always leads the reader to remember the human origins of the fires which had provoked this. One tricky poem, “Lip”, finishes with an image a river carrying a “curled raft of leaves” towards the lip of a waterfall, and this again is an image of threat even though the poem’s main focus seems to be on the inclinations and desires of the author. Another crucial, though not uncommon, tactic of these poems is to work on the inner/outer relationship plotting first one then the other as metaphoric, so “Lip” speaks of the “mind’s / unseen lake”. There are also inversions of perspective: in the significantly titled “Within” a journey inside a gorge reduces the observer to being a “smudge of red soil” or a “dry spiralling leaf of pandanus” and in “The Peeling” – which I have been reading as a poem essentially about writing poetry, or, at least, the status of the written word – the observing eye is merely that of a “warm-blooded animal” from a mosquito’s perspective and her hands are, nature fashion, nothing but “peripheries”.

If the sense of threat and dis-ease is an underlying theme of Beneath the Tree Line – running through it rather like the underground streams that seem so important in the first poems – it’s entirely on the surface of Amanda Anastasia’s The Inheritors, whose poems focus specifically on climate change. Its title provides a clue that its concerns are with conditions of life for those coming after us: our children and grandchildren. Its title, of course, repeats that of William Golding’s novel about the displacement of the Neandertals by modern humans and I wondered if this might not be a deliberate allusion, exploiting in some way that novel’s tragedy of a declining people faced with a bewildering change in their circumstances and unable to adapt to it. On reflection, I doubt if it’s the case, though, since there is nothing and nobody in these poems capable of allegorically representing the new species of that novel. Anastasi’s book is in two parts: the first part has poems which are set in the present but look forward while those of the second part are usually set sometime in the future. And this is a future whose intricacies the poet obviously enjoys exploring, one whose symptoms vary from messed-up breeding times in Greenland to reality TV programs in which a group of contestants have to survive not the jungle but the streets of Melbourne on a summer’s day.

Books dedicated to poems on a single theme are often ultimately uninteresting because repetition seems more irritating in poetry than it is in any other medium. The Inheritors avoids this by exploring as many ways as possible in which the single theme can be approached. Anastasi has a talent for the gnomic and this produces a series of poems in one-line stanzas which are spread through the book. It’s an attractive form since it blends compression with expansive development. There is also plenty of tonal variation and some poems – “Lady Returned”, whose vision of the future is of one with sex-dolls that ultimately prove unsatisfying, and the imaginary programs of “TV Guide” or the headlines of “2029 News Headlines” – are funny, even if grimly funny.

The framing poem for the first section, and, indeed, the book as a whole, “Newcomer”, makes no reference to the climate crisis. It is about a new baby and the way in which its future development – its initial socialisation and then its reaction against this in later years – can be plotted. But, of course, this baby will become an inheritor and so the subject is broached by omission. There is also a sense of the kind of shadowy dis-ease which is reminiscent of the early poems of Gibian’s book. You can see this is in “Parameters”, which describes living in an outer suburb of Melbourne and feeling at odds with the house – “I bump a hand or leg // against the corner of the bedside or kitchen table” – to the point of becoming more like “a temporary lodger”. The first of the poems with single line stanzas, “Monostich I: The Turn”, is interested in those decisive early markers of the onrushing change. It reminds me of the sensitivities of the first section of Gibian’s book as well. Certainly we would expect poets to be sensitive to internally registered markers of change that are missed by most of us. One of the single lines in this poem says: “The people of the sea are moving inland”. To someone who lives a couple of metres above sea level on a sand island, this resonates uncomfortably: an especially disturbing observation.

John Kinsella: Supervivid Depastoralism

[Sydney]: Vagabond Press, 2021, 144pp.

Supervivid Depastoralism is Vagabond Press’s contribution to getting the prodigious output of John Kinsella into print. It’s an output that seems to require several publishers just to keep up with the author. Its unusual title is also something of a guide, reminding readers that they are going to be exposed to a very complex and highly idiosyncratic approach to the ecological state of the current world and the reactions of one poet living inside it: each of its two words is a neologism pressed into service to play a role in Kinsella’s view of things. It’s the kind of title that doesn’t appeal to the sort of publishers who hope their books will appear on bestseller lists: I’m reminded of the story that Thomas Mann’s Lotte in Weimar had to have, in its English translation, the grotesque title The Beloved Returns because American publishers were worried about a title in which two of the three words would not be familiar to their hoped-for audience. Or perhaps they hoped financiers would buy the book having misread “returns” as a noun rather than a verb.

Seen from a wide perspective, Kinsella’s poetry is largely about the “environment”, that is, the natural world in relation to our treatment of it. But his perspective is ethical as well as ecological, focussing on that old issue of how we should live in the world. Readers’ first experience of this poetry is often to be numbed by the complexity of its analysis, the continual dragging in of new perspectives often reduced thereafter to nonce words: as the title demonstrates. There is some truth in this but beneath it you sense that this poetry is more personal than analytical, more doubting than dogmatic. It’s possible even to see it as a poetry of the self, but a self inhabiting a crumbling environment. Someone like John Clare, faced with the early horrors of the Industrial Revolution might make an analogy, though, as we’ll see, it’s a Hungarian poet whom Kinsella chooses.

At its simplest level, Kinsella’s position is, as various of the poems assert, vegan, pantheist and pacifist. One should disturb the natural processes of the world as little as possible. This might be an almost Jain-like position although in that religion it is the belief in reincarnation which demands that devotees never damage the creatures of the world. But to even mention the Jains raises the issue of limits, something that occurred to me in my reading of Kristen Lang’s book in last month’s review where there seems an absolute break between living creatures and, say, rocks. In Kinsella’s case I wonder at what point interactions “impingings” become insignificant. If you are careful with rabbits should you be careful with mosquitoes? If you are careful with mosquitoes should you be careful with mites? And so on. He is obviously driven to fury by the crassest end of the scale: mining companies destroying country deemed to be unproductive, pastoralists employing mass herbicides, morons shooting native animals. These are at a macro scale and produce a mixture of anger and despair that runs through much of his poetry. It raises the question “What should be done?” but that isn’t quite the same question as “How should I live?” and it’s in the answer(s) to the latter questions that this poetry become most engaging. The major decision is, ethically, to allow all orders of creation their right to exist and to respect their unique and, finally, incomprehensible way of grasping their world. One of the long poems in the book, “Cultivating a Testament: Bending Space” has a fine description of this sensitivity to, especially, birds:

. . . . . 
As light bends
as we see around
the corner of a tree
the bark-piercing
grubber, a magpie code-
breaker as all magpies

see around the limits
of the age so determined
with space a song-reach
a warning a call a consensus
or a tyranny: what’s a yellow-
plumed honeyeater if you watch
without seeing the way

air and light shift
to accommodate its exquisite
presence its claim and no claim
which is what you aspire to
but are stuck in an XY co-
ordinate’s dimensional thinking? 

Pressing the physicist’s notion of the deformation of space-time by mass into an explanation of the way in which all observer’s affect, even if only slightly, the objects they study, may be drawing a long bow here but the point is a good one. The Kinsella mode of living at a practical level will involve respect of difference and as little impingement as possible. It comes in to play when decisions about all aspects of life have to be made: should water be trucked in during a dry spell, for example, or how does one discourage rabbits from burrowing under the foundations of one’s house. But again the issue of limits arises. It’s hard for a reader not to notice that the orders of animals such as birds don’t behave with the same thoughtful care: in the insect world birds are as rapacious and brutal as humans are in their own world. Should one save a bird rather than a fly? If so, why? Don’t flies have their own beautiful “presence”? I don’t think these are objections to the way of life Kinsella is exploring, but I can’t help but feel that a lot of ways of thinking about our environment involve value-derived chains of importance which are only another way in which humans have imposed themselves on things: I’m not sure there is a “natural” order.

This concern with how we should live leads to what has always seemed to me that the most important issue in the poetry of disaster: the positioning of the individual (in this case, poets) and his own stake in the events. One of the features that makes Supervivid Depastoralism such a good collection is that the caustic analytical perspective is turned on the author as well. A simple example might be “Poiesis: Whistler!” in which Kinsella reminds himself that there are many reductive forces hampering the mind and imagination’s desire to be properly attuned to the immensity of experience. These will “close myself off” and may be no more than simple physical issues: “bothered by the glare the overly bright day and my eyes / losing focus which interrupts even stuffs-up my hearing”. But this is followed by a shift in which there are a set of accusations that might be made by outsiders but also might be made by the poet himself “I am second guessing I am filling in the song I am stacking / up my outdoors cred my exposure to the surprises of classification . . .”

All this of course is worrying about issues at the ethical/intellectual level. At the poetic level regular readers of Kinsella’ work will have noticed that poems are often built up out of surprising conjunctions. True, some are logically explicable, usually as metaphors, so that the domestic issue of rabbits undermining foundations (“Destabilising (The) Pastoral” and “Eclogue of Shoring Up”) moves to issues of how to deal with larger scale destruction. But just as I’m always interested when the logical gap between the two parts of a metaphor becomes almost unbridgeably wide, so I’m also interested in experiences that are yoked together (to borrow Johnson’s phrase) in unlikely ways. Such moments I think tell us a lot about a poet’s cast of mind. In Kinsella’s poetry you get a sense of just how intense the mind’s activity is by the sheer unlikeliness of connection. “Decoding a Tartini Violin Concerto” for example connects the music with water seeping from a valley wall and the book’s longest and most expository poem, “Late Sunlift Testament While Listening to SYR4 (Christian Wolff)” also joins its meditations to a piece of music. Again, detractors (Dr Johnson would have undoubtedly been one) will claim that this is nothing but mere quirkiness whereas I find in it the pressure of an immensely active intelligence that really isn’t interested in notions of aesthetic propriety. An interesting poem of this sort is the dauntingly titled “’Screech Owl’ (Eastern Barn Owl) During Ingmar Bergman’s The Magician”. Here Bergman’s wonderful meta-film which never denies the possibility of magic (and explores its effects wonderfully) while continually deconstructing it and showing its artifices gets pushed up against the cry of the owl to argue (as I read it) that the magic of the natural world is of an order that doesn’t need to be interpreted from the human perspective of occult powers. It derives from the alternate universe of the natural world’s methods of operating:

. . . . . 
its mesmerist’s eyes uncloaking night
to show what forces don’t have to be

harnessed as “powers” but are there in their
own rights and not ours to own any more

than their own splice of surprise and apprehension,
and wonder and rodent fear, a most bizarre

mix of compulsion and tendency,
of dark matter and body heat.

Another feature of Supervivid Depastoralism that might conceivably come under the heading of conjunctions are the appearances of two other poets, Miklós Radnóti and Les Murray. If they are conjunctions there is nothing strikingly unusual about them, however. Radnóti is a fascinating presence in this poetry: a poet himself obsessed by the pastoral form of the eclogue who was murdered by his own people having been worked to exhaustion as a Jewish labourer during the war. He continued to write poetry throughout this period in extremis and his last “eclogues” were found in a notebook on his body when it was exhumed two years later. It’s not hard to imagine any poet in the accelerating natural disasters of today finding here some kind of image not only of what might happen to a poet but of how a poet might respond by writing obsessively as the light fails. One poem of Kinsella’s describes the relationship as a bond returned to after a quarter-century and “Thinking Over the Missing Sixth Eclogue of Miklós Radnóti” begins with a passage summarising the situation of contemporary poets:

There are many poets voicing
out of isolation or demi-isolation
or ranging about around isolation: all types.
How silent we are together in our lonely speech,
our shouting into disrupted winds, the range of spread . . .

The second poet is also a ghost figure: Les Murray. Two poems engage with him directly, one as elegy and the other as dream. The first of these, “Elegy for Les on a Stormy Night and the Next Morning (Breaking a Drought)” is an impressive piece confronting immediately the differences between these two poets obsessed by landscape and pastoralism before moving on to focus on what they shared. Murray of course was inclined to blame issues of rural degradation on an urbanised middle-class. In his “The 41st Year of 1968”, recent bushfires were blamed on developments out of hippy culture which refused to allow “settler-style clear felling” of native trees, and destructive industrialised farming was seen as deriving from overseas meat-eating habits, “a London red-shift / on the flesh-eating graphs”. As Kinsella’s poem says, “Leaning, / we might have talked it over, disagreeing / on whom and what to blame . . .” In the later poem, Murray reappears in a dream in which he wants to discuss the previous poem:

. . . . . 
I am obviously bothered because we discussed weather
in my elegy and changes of weather in the state of death,
and I said that the only states I recognise are states of matter.
It was a dream in which birdsong from different parts
of the earth drifted or cut in, and we remarked on their
perspicuity in terms of the travelled words we were using.
You asked after family and friends and I said, I never

knew your family beyond what you told me, Les. And you
said, All the voices are in there and that is my job.
It is my job still, I wished he’s added, but he didn’t . . .

This is the dream presence of a ghost but Murray appears in an even more insubstantial way in Supervivid Depastoralism in a couple of places in other poems where moments of style sound very like Murray’s own poetry. The poem I have spoken about briefly before in which a screech owl interrupts the watching of a Bergman film, has a passage

. . . . .
It’s an interruption that opens hope for all works
and nights of valley ways, the small community

of disassociation and its edgy living, its distress
of semi-older ways . . .

where the phrase “its edgy living” recalls a line of Murray’s (though I can’t at the moment place it). And when one of the poems of “Graphology Surroundings” says that a red wattle bird is “working / its terrain” this inevitably recalls the wonderful sentence, used as a title in “Birds in the Title Work Freeholds of Straw” from the “Walking to the Cattle Place” sequence. The former may be no more than a distant, ghostly echo, but I read the latter as a deliberate allusion in homage.

Radnóti and Murray are specific poets. Poets in general don’t fare so well in Supervivid Depastoralism. As part of the “Arts” in general they must sustain the charge of complicity. It is powerfully put in “Memory and ‘Consolidation’”:

Growing up in an era of settler
“consolidations” where each trail
is re-opened or built-over and each
building rebuilt and each hardship replayed,
“we” trace heritage with funding.

Which is not to diminish any form
of suffering, but to question motives
of fact vs. pathos, The Arts underwritten -
support of consolidation: artistry
and adroitness, so much work
of flair with little protest but plenty

of self-affirmation. Each policy shift
accommodates as much as needs be taken
in to maintain the best interests of the established,
the flow of profits. It’s that base, that ugly. That lyrical. . .

One of poetry’s potent drives – to accurately realise the natural world in words – is also questioned in “Pivots”:

. . . . . 
All “Art” pivots but is it overly satisfied
with its own rise and fall, its accomplishment
of mimicking wing and leg, appendages and hesitations
or tipping into a pastoral reclusivity
because it claims to be able to feed so many? . . .

And one of the angrier, darker poems at the last part of the book speaks harshly of poetry’s obsession with itself, presumably in the dynamics of its history as well as in the way an art looks at itself as it is composed:

. . . . . 
Poetry having so little to do – really – with the pastoral, it rabbits-
on about changes to practically nothing because it hears only its own song-strains . . .

One might stretch the issue of the Arts out into the post-enlightenment development of the sciences in the West. There is a potential contradiction between the gift of the sciences – an unimaginably deepened appreciation of the way the natural world works, its almost infinitely complex web of interaction of which what is called ecology is only a small part – and the knowledge that the sciences are, like the Arts, funded and are complicit in the activities like industrial farming and mining that Kinsella most abhors. It’s a theme touched on in various poems of this book but one would probably need to reread a substantial part of Kinsella’s extensive work to form any conclusions about where he stands on this issue. It may be that he is equivocal about it, in which case it would fit in with my sense of his poetry as being more seeking and worrying than dogmatically conclusive. One poem from Supervivid Pastoral, “Poiesis and the Occupation of the Valley”, does speak unequivocally about the natural sciences. Beginning by observing large-scale landscaping in a valley and seeing this as a kind of reductive response to land, it moves on to:

                     to a display case of singing honeyeaters
pentatonic against all invasive analysis of their syrinxes
those little brag sheets from universities and institutes
from big business and public/private collaborations
about something revealed in the make-up of bird
or insect as utilitarian . . . 

Though Kinsella’s poetry recommends a hypersensitive state of observation, sometimes things have to be dead to show how they worked when they were alive.

Kristen Lang: Earth Dwellers

Artarmon: Giramondo, 2021, 90pp.

This century has seen the human race enter a condition not previously experienced. Cyclic spells of natural disaster, warfare and horror have always been a part of our existence but I think it is the first time that we have ever felt the fragility of the natural world. It is quite remarkable how a few years ago we might have seen the Amazon basin, for example, as a stupendous and daunting natural phenomenon, a fit setting for danger, adventure and discovery. Now it seems an endangered and delicate ecosystem. And the same could be said of things like the oceans, “smaller” things like the Great Barrier Reef, even smaller things like individual species down to a host of microscopic phenomena. There will be those of course who claim, and have claimed, that this is just politically motivated fear-tactics designed to help a smug middle-class push its agenda in a culture war. A quarter of a century ago this might have been a poor, but at least a tenable, position but it certainly isn’t now. The mongols aren’t just a vague rumour from the East: they really are coming.

From the altogether narrower perspective of poetry – both its writing and reading – one wants to know what effect this will have. It’s important because it isn’t simply a matter of a new theme to be merrily added to the existing ones: it involves a new way of experiencing the world. In other words, it must effect a change at the very heart of how most poetry – poetry which operates where inner self meets the outer world through language, rather than focussing on language or poetry alone – conceives itself. If reality becomes less a solid block of existence and more of a fragile and unravelling web, then poetry might be one of the first activities to register this. It may be going too far to see poetry as a sort of hyper-sensitive marker, a human equivalent of the green tree frog or, more morbidly, the canary in the miner’s cage – I doubt that poetry can any longer claim that sort of social relevance. But we certainly expect poetry to make some kind of change as human sensibilities change. It will also, although this isn’t strictly relevant to a review of a new book, affect the way we think about the poetry of the past which dealt with the natural world. Wordsworth’s sense of Nature as a powerful force which educates (in the original sense of “drawing out”) the individual’s soul relied on a sense of the solidity of the natural world embodied in the mountains of the Lake Country.

Kristen Lang’s Earth Dwellers is one work which focusses on the human response to this new situation and this alone should make it intriguing. It isn’t a book of poems of case studies and it doesn’t play the contemporary game of blame or adopt the contemporary tone of outrage. Instead, its poems try to explore what the new sensation of the fragility of the natural world actually feels like. One of the keywords here is “entanglement”, a word made more familiar in the very different science of quantum mechanics – though there may turn out to be analogies between the quantum world and the physical world which are more than merely metaphoric. The book’s dedication – “For the wombats and the slime moulds . . . And for all who work to protect the entanglement, the network of lives, billions of years in the making, by which the Earth is more than stone” – is our first meeting with the word but it isn’t the last. The notion of “entanglement” – non-unravellable interconnection – doesn’t in itself herald a new sensitivity since it is an intellectual concept rather than an emotional one but many of Lang’s poems want to explore it. In fact, in a sense, she has always been exploring it. The first poem of her first book, SkinNotes, contains the word in its first line and you can’t get more emphatic than that even if the entanglements focussed on there are those of genetic history. And entanglements, closer in kind to those of Earth Dwellers, figure prominently in her second book, The Weight of Light.

“Wading with Horseshoe Crabs” is a more expository piece than most of the poems of Earth Dwellers – I’ll talk about the variety of modes of these poems later. It begins with the inconceivably long pre-human existence of life on earth:

. . . . .
                                                 Already
there are spiders – four hundred million years of occupation.
Beside them: diatoms, turtles and sea jellies. Bristleworms
and sundews. Skinks and ants and . . . not ourselves. Not nearly.

There are butterflies. Bandicoots and geckos. Eucalypts.
Wood moths and quolls. And when humans do emerge.
we’re inside the entanglement. Earth-lines in every cell . . .

I read it as a poem not content with the truisms of human evolution but an attempt to make us confront the emotional, behavioural and social consequences of it. Two poems before “Wading with Horseshoe Crabs” is “The Roar of It”, a less expository and more visceral recreation of someone’s sense of the endless changes that surround us from the subatomic level to the human level “Sand sucked out of rivers / into more New Yorks, more Bangkoks, more / Luandas”. In a sense the roar is the roar of entanglement in action. Interestingly a little lyric piece is placed between these two ambitious poems. “A Small Child Finds a Ladybird” recounts a child’s fascination, her identification with the natural world, and the adults’ response of disappointment that they have lost this minute example of recognising entanglement through identification:

. . . . .
           She is
bug-eyed. We
are behind her,
wanting even
half
of her gaze.

When the poems of Earth Dwellers want to focus on the response to entanglement they introduce other recurrent key concepts which might be summed up as penetration and porosity. We continually meet a speaker in the process of registering great natural patterns as they move through him or her. The first poem, “Arrival”, concludes with “The day rolls, / the world tumbles through me. In the wave of its momentum”. It’s a way of reminding both poet and reader that our tendency to see sunrise as an event followed by noon and sunset is a human-centred perspective. In fact, the process is a continual rolling as the earth turns and we just happen to be stationary objects that it rolls over and through. As “The Turning” says, “How the dawn does not end but travels, / always arriving”. This seems to be a kind of touchstone – there are innumerable experiences of the “sulphur roar of the sun” in these poems – a way of resetting one’s perspective on the self and the natural world.

Another image which relates to entanglement is the idea of “stitching” though it differs slightly because it is an intentional act (on someone’s or something’s part) rather than a passive response. We meet it in poems I have already referred to such as “The Turning” which concludes “stitch marks / through us all” and in “The Roar of It” which has a passage dealing with entanglement at the sub-atomic scale:

. . . . .
                              In her gaze -
        a fusion, so entangled there cannot be names
     or borders. She is stitched into molecules
        up quarks    muons    the tremors of time
  in the strange-fleet     puckerings    she calls the hours
      she calls the years     millennia     aeons . . .

But stitching also operates at a less literal level. A pre-dawn meteor shower over the Himalayas is described as a “needle-point burst / mending the sky like a tailor, / his thread invisible” and “Headland” is an amusing poem where the processes of dissolving the boundaries between self and world – “the sun’s warmth / woven through my marrow” – involve skinny-dipping. When the couple are disturbed by the arrival of visitors,

We dress each other, stitching into our clothes the rock-
rhythms, the pull of water, the tattered lines of the shells . . .

All of this sets up in the reader a kind of sensitivity to such images so that, when we read in “Postcard From the Island” – a description of connections largely underwater – of the seabirds “bombing the waves in the distance” we are quite ready for the assertion that this is another stitching image like the meteors: “The rush // of their beaks, the muffled thwok sewing him / into the hug of the undertow . . .”

Many of the poems, beginning with the second, “Learning the World”, and then spaced throughout the book, involve the experience of being in a cave with the lights extinguished. This isn’t so much an experience of entanglement as a chance to reboot one’s responses: as “Touching the Dark” says, “you remove distance / by turning off the eyes”. But it’s also an experience of actually entering stone and, as a result of the porosity of the self, taking some of that stone into oneself. The “status” of stone is something I am not clear about in Earth Dwellers. Are we entangled with it? Does the book want us to see stone as a different order to the multiform varieties of life that humans are part of? We may take it into ourselves but is it part of us? I like stone and, in another life, would probably rather be a geologist than a biologist so I’m keen to see whether the poems of Earth Dwellers (and, for that matter, poems like “These Mountains – What the Body Cannot Keep” from The Weight of Light) think there is an absolute break between the inanimate world and the animate one. Of course, it may all be there and it’s only my misreadings which are causing me to be unsure about it. There isn’t much doubt that the other great division of reality – the one between non-conscious life-forms and conscious ones – is one that these poems aren’t very interested in sustaining. In that sense it is an anti-conventional-humanist book seeing connection with the world of life-forms as more important than the free-standing, incipiently solipsist emphasis on that mysterious state, consciousness. But then, of course, slime moulds don’t write poems and probably don’t worry about whether or not they are entangled with wombats.

One of the technical problems of Earth Dwellers is a result of one of its virtues. At no point does this seem to be a mere “project” book of poems, the kind of thing which, in proposal form, can be bowled up to a body issuing grants or a board accepting enrolments. It is far too varied in its modes for that, moving from expository pieces like “Wading with Horseshoe Crabs” to extended narratives like “Mount Duncan” or “The Woman and the Blue Sky” which recreate the Romantic mode whereby experience of the natural world is best done in poetry by taking a reader slowly through it. And then there are lyric pieces like “Blue Light” or “The Vanishing” as well as “The Mountain – Eighteen Views” where the brief images are put together to make a larger, multi-perspectival whole: not an original form but a good one. The problem, as I see it, is that this mix of styles involves awkward decisions about how the poet herself is to appear. Even the shift from first person to third between poems takes a bit of adjustment for a reader but here we get a gamut of experiencing selves from “I” to “she” to “the woman”, not to mention “we”, “he”, “the man” and “they”. We could rationalise this by saying that this variety prevents the poetic ego being emphasised so that the dominant theme – experience of the interconnectedness of the world – is not, ultimately, subordinated to the overriding importance of the poet’s consciousness: that would be an irritating paradox indeed. In other words, the perceived awkwardness of moving from one kind of poetic participant to another is a necessary de-centering of the self. But I’m afraid that that would look like what it is: a rationalisation. Somehow the multiple modes, which work so well to provide different perspectives, don’t work so well when the question of how the writer is to be fitted into these poems is raised. I don’t know what the solution to this problem is. A poet can scarcely write “hard” lyrics, leaving the self out entirely but conveying that self’s perspective when the subject matter is exactly the issue of personal response. Readers will have to wait for Lang’s next book to see how she approaches this issue.

John Hawke: Whirlwind Duststorm

Flinders Lane: Grand Parade Poets, 2021, 60pp.

Poems come claiming many different identities. There are those that aspire to be no more than songs, those that exemplify a previously worked out aesthetic theory, those that worry at an aspect of their author’s inner life, those (“I do this, I do that” poems) that want to take a slice of random individual experience of the world, those that are slabs of discourse engaged with issues of the world, and so on. The feeling I have about the fine and rather unsettling poems of John Hawke’s second book is that they aspire to be strong, free-standing objects. And I don’t mean by this that they are just tightly structured well-made pieces – though they are that – rather that they shun being dependent on meaning for their strength and stability. At the same time, they don’t seem to relate to the generative imperatives of Surrealist poetry where, in that deeply French way, unity derives from development out of a single unified process.

Trying to be clearer in my own mind about this, I go looking for parallels in the extensive domains of poetry. One local similarity might be with the poems of Emma Lew which I have written about on this site. Each of these tends to be a self-contained narrative scene whose threads of connection to place and time in the world are often not clear. It isn’t a comparison that can be pushed too far though because her poems are usually thematically consistent in themselves, they don’t juxtapose elements as Hawke’s poems tend to do. Another analogy might be with the first poems of Wallace Stevens’ Harmonium which introduce puzzling but consistent worlds – though the surprised/rhapsodic/baroque tone is a long way from the tone of the poems of Whirlwind Duststorm. No doubt a bit more thought would dredge up other analogous poetries but for the moment an example might help to make this murky description a little clearer. The obvious place to start of course is with the book’s first poem, and sometimes the obvious place is one of the best places. The poem is called “Axis”:

One sulphurous puff, then the white stick
is flicked spinning in a flare of sparks,
red globes throbbing down the harbour channel.
One vulnerable hand lifted, its sallow disclosure
pallid as the history of human error
pasted on placards, where arc-lights scatter
a brittle confetti: the florilegium of choice.
These itinerants marred by the stages of grieving
gather by handfuls at the terminus, swell into masses.
Some still bear marks of disfigurement
like mortal wounds, gashes insecurely bound,
heaped in the exhaustion of travel.
Most are older than usual, in loosely
drooping camisoles, or subsiding gowns.
A woman offers a baby she has never fed
to another for burial, passing in aura
through the mirror’s cathexis, the attendants
hunched in flag-bright uniforms,
paddling a ghost-train sleigh under the patchwork
awning of a coral tree, through scarlet petals
and tunnels of black opal. Then a steel door slams to.

The strength here seems to me to lie in the visual clarity of the images. The weakness in the slight straining at the level of elevated language. These are features that can be found in most of the poems of this book. For the reader the pleasure (or frustration if you are used to a different kind of poetry) comes from the natural attempt to harmonise these strong images. A group of people are treated to three different ways: they derive from a fun park, gas chambers and a Dantean approach to the river Styx. My reading of the poem – entirely tentative – is that we are presented with several unifying readings, none of which can be fully defended. One is that this is just people entering Luna Park (the metaphoric reference to ghost-trains, later in the poem ensures that this reading can’t be simply dismissed) and the other possible readings – the dead awaiting transportation into the afterlife (a reading that would balance this opening poem nicely with the last line of the final one – “He doesn’t realise that he’s dead”) or victims of the gas-chambers awaiting their fate – are simply metaphors. But people entering Luna Park do not have “gashes insecurely bound” though those on the edge of the afterlife well might. And then there is the odd title which could be read as guiding the reader towards the idea that these visual images are to be seen as being on an axis or thread. As I have said, this represents only my tentative response to a single poem but the tension between precise visual images and a kind of suspension of interpretation is not a bad way of describing what goes on in many of these poems. It also, interestingly, locates the unity and strength of the poem not in the poem itself but in the reader’s responses to it, an interesting move in aesthetics and one which recalls the shift made by phenomenologists. But more of that later.

A similar interpretive suspension could also be said to happen in the next two poems. “The Demolition of Hotel Australia” looks on the surface like a reasonably approachable allegory. The hotel was demolished in the 1970s (a period that a number of other poems look back to) and it must have been tempting to see this as a symbol of that Australian tendency to bury its past, especially the creative elements of that past, in the interest of new national narratives. But the poem itself resists these simplifications. Yes, Australia’s history is there – the hotel has a “midden-room”, for example, with a “full-size figure / of a Gadigal warrior blackened with charcoal” – and so is the hotel’s history – Sarah Bernhardt’s suite is there – but the texture of the poem, simultaneously surreal and sharply precise, means that a reader is unsure of the status of the individual images. “Running with the Pack” seems to set up and then subvert an equally simple structure. It looks on the surface like a set of images of Sydney that might be seen from a car or bus travelling down Paramatta Road, a structure that recalls Slessor’s “William Street” and establishes that poet (who also appears in “The Demolition of Hotel Australia”) as a key text behind Whirlwind Duststorm, or at least behind those poems in it which take Sydney as their location: sharp but fragmented visual images, “snippings of idiot celluloid”, are the raw material. But “Running with the Pack” has a far more surreal set of images than Slessor would ever have allowed himself and, in the central part of the poem it allows itself to move into biographical snippets before returning, at the end, to images of the street:

. . . until one night a car skidded on its roof
against the pole outside our front door –

the topless waitress from the pub across the street
brought hot sweet tea in her netted singlet

to the white-haired suspended passengers.
Singed by the traffic slipstream we passed

secure in an insulating cloak of diesel, running
with the pack over six lanes of Parramatta Road.

Not all of the poems of the book work in this way: that is taking on the challenge of creating a sense of the integrity of individual poems that doesn’t derive from its usual source in a reader’s interpretive comfort. “Wheat” – “The long tresses of wheat sobbing / as the wind stamps out its black dance . . .” – is almost a conventional lyric to the extent of having a conclusion

where even the wind’s tongue is caught, the canvas blowing
like a lost mouth,
like someone who has been forgotten
but now wishes to speak, after so many years of silence.

which introduces an image that deepens the significance of the strongly visual image that the poem is mainly occupied with. And “Underground Comedown” develops straight out of its title as a concatenation of visual images perfectly coherently threaded on the theme of a thoroughly seedy life.

The two most overtly surreal poems in the book are both sonnets and form something of a pair. “Sea Priestess” and “The Illustrated Library” don’t offer interpretive clues which they then whisk away, as “Axis” does, although the former, in being dedicated to the English musician “Jhonn Balance” and using a title from an album he contributed to, may suggest that clues lie in the lyrics of these songs.

Situated right in the centre of the book is something that seems, at least on the surface, as utterly unlike the kinds of poems I have been trying to describe as could be. It is a seven page prose description of the experience of attending a wedding reception at a local RSL. This makes it sound rather trite but it is far from a bland realist account and has kind of Proustian quality in its high style. And in Proustian manner, the narrator is led into processes of evocation:

. . . . . The guests’ cars, moulded to a sneer in the latest design, lie silent beneath a sheen of ice, as the final words of a contract that will cause an irreparable division in time are recited. The private essences of that previous life are retained, like your olfactory association of shell-shaped stones with the perfume of a privet bush, fleeting as the brown striped tail of a tiger snake as it slides from the track before your advancing footfall, concealed in pine-deep shadow at the mossy corner where a small dog once sank its teeth into your grandmother’s stockinged calf . . .

There are a couple of ways of approaching this piece (tentatively sidling up to it might be a more accurate metaphor). The first might be to acknowledge its daring since it could look to a casual reader like a filler stuck in to bulk out a slim book of poems. Of course it isn’t this but the author takes a big risk that it might be seen this way. A more generous way might be to see it as an experiment of the same sort that the poems are – a piece which has a structural integrity derived from tensions within it. And just as “Axis” contained interpretive tensions – none of the three images is the dominant one – so this contains tensions which are more about style and the way styles deal with reality. It suggests to readers that it might be read autobiographically and this leads us to expect an elegant but essentially bland prose style. But it continually moves into more expansive and “higher” stylistic realms. The Proustian quality is one of these but so is the conscious exoticism. Take, for example, the omniscient analysis of the lives of some of the participants:

. . . . . Some regard nature as a resource to be transformed by labour into an earthly paradise. Others, having perfected their housing renovations to a lacquered sheen, believe in conservation – even to the extent of the exclusion of any human presence, including the Baku pygmies, Mongolia’s Dukha, and the Lickan Antay people of the Atacama Desert . . .

Finally, there is the piece’s epigraph, “after Archie Schepp”, which creates a tension for the reader that is going to persist throughout the seven pages of the piece. Archie Schepp, who dwells well beyond the borders of my musical knowledge, is an American jazz saxophonist who, interestingly, left a musical career of very high credentials to become an academic. The “after” suggests that the mode of “The Wedding” might either derive from a recorded piece of Schepp’s or, more likely, derive from his improvisatory style. Ultimately it isn’t a question I can answer but it does point to a final comment that needs to be made about Whirlwind Duststorm: it is drenched in musical references from Rachmaninoff to Captain Beefheart. There is hardly a single poem in which music does not appear to the extent that it is tempting to say, only slightly hyperbolically, that this is a book that comes with its own soundtrack.

These are poems that work as poems, as I have said, attaining a solidity and independence that doesn’t depend on consistency and simple interpetability. Music may lie behind that as a structural model but the book itself points readers in a rather different direction by having, as its epigraph, a quote from Sartre:

If, impossibly, you were to “enter” a consciousness, you would be picked up by a whirlwind and thrown back outside to where the tree is and all the dust, for “consciousness” has no inside

a Delphic comment that simultaneously suggests, explores and denies a possibility. It can’t be ignored though because it provides the title of the book’s title poem and seems to be taken up in the blurb: “Consciousness is like the experience of the poem – of being in perpetual motion constantly distracted by the images before us . . .” This presents us with the possibility that, lying behind these poems, is the philosophy of Phenomenology with its focus on the individual’s experiencing apparatus rather than on the outside world of contingent phenomena. A poem, it says, is to have a structural integrity which is analogous to the self and not derived from its accuracy vis a vis externalities. It’s an intriguing possibility but it isn’t possible for a reader, having only these poems, to know whether it is the driving force behind their creation or just a post facto idea that helps create a sense of unity in the book. What matters in the end are the poems: it’s hard, even for a potent theory, to turn an uninteresting poem into an interesting one – and the poems of this book are both interesting and possessed of a disturbing strength.

Stephen Edgar: The Strangest Place: New and Selected Poems

Melbourne: Black Pepper, 2020, 284pp.

Stephen Edgar always seems to me to be one of the most unusual of major Australian poets. Half a century ago there was an important shift from poems that made their way in the world as objects structured by conventions of rhyme and metre to what is usually called free verse but is really a recognition of a poem’s right to be a piece of discourse as long as it fulfils the obligation of being an interesting piece of discourse in terms of its conception and its execution. Fifty years produces an awful lot of examples but an obvious one might be Les Murray’s “Bulahdelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle” which is, in a sense, a pastiche of an Aboriginal song cycle and whose challenge – successfully achieved, most readers would think – is to avoid any sense in its tone that it is mocking either Aboriginal singers or modern holiday-makers. When contemporary poets do use the old metrical/rhyming structures there is usually a touch of post-modernist flamboyance about it: “I don’t really believe in these archaic modes but I can do them perfectly well”. A sense of the attractions of formality always accompanies poetry no matter what phase it is in and contemporary poets are more likely to be attracted to the sort of arbitrary formal structures that the Oulipo group exercise themselves in generating.

In this environment it is odd to find a poet whose entire work (the poems selected here cover, by the author’s reckoning, forty-four years) is conceived in poems that work within complex rhyming patterns. There isn’t even a modest prose poem to be found slipped in among the eleven volumes. Part of the satisfaction of writing this way might derive from the sense of mastering very difficult techniques, of exercising a craft skill at a very high level. The objection, of course, would be that this is an obsolete craft skill – like establishing a boat’s position with a sextant rather than GPS, or learning how to plough with a team of Clydesdales – but it has plainly stood Edgar in good stead. There is an argument to be made that one of the crucial skills in English language poetry – independent of any contingent “state of the art” – is getting complex syntax smoothly into an existing, equally complex form. Clive James rated this technique highly and it is no accident that he found in Edgar a very sympathetic fellow-poet. Once we shift the issue away from rhyme and metre towards syntax and how clauses and phrases harmonise and create dissonances with line and stanza breaks, we perhaps move the debate to a more valuable level. From this perspective, as I’ve said in writing about Clive James’s work, Spenser is almost the originary poet of English: nobody before or since has so consistently and apparently effortlessly worked complex syntactic structures into an invented form. And the fact that poets from Milton to Keats and Tennyson recognised his genius in this respect shows that running through the long and complex history of form in English language poetry there is a belief in this as a foundational skill. Spenser, in this sense, has more to teach poets than his spectacular contemporary, Shakespeare.

One could look at the formal dimension of Edgar’s poetry at some length, and the passages I quote when talking about his thematic material will provide plenty of examples, but an initial sample might help. Here are the final stanzas of the last poem of the first section of new poems, “Childish Questions”:

. . . . .
In bed at night
All the old childish questions still
Persist, to which no answer can be right:
If time began, what came
Before? When it all ends at last, what will
Succeed that vacancy? And other trite
Futilities to frame,

And hold intact,
Concepts beyond them to conceive.
Dream-lit projections of the mind enact
A garbled masquerade
From laws so strange and shocking to believe,
While hinting at a mental tesseract,
Within which is displayed

Their intricate 
Array, dressed in simplicities,
Which some dream self may grasp and contemplate,
And, like the spaceman hurled
In Interstellar through interstices,
Of time to his own future, then relate
To this, the daylight world.

The verse pattern is a variant of a familiar one in Edgar’s work, in this case rhyming abacbac. The two “c” rhymes make a sense of closure – the last word of each stanza in (I think) all of Edgar’s rhymed poems picks up an earlier word, even though the pattern may be different to the one here. But two elements prevent it being the kind of deliberately bathetic closure that one often gets in quatrains (as in Eliot’s, “The lengthened shadow of a man / is history, said Emerson / Who had not seen the silhouette / Of Sweeney straddled in the sun”). Firstly there is an enjambment across stanzas which is an admission that in the combat between imposed form and syntax, the latter is being respected, indeed here it is being allowed to expand into a full and complex length. Secondly, the stanza form being seven lines, rather than a quatrain’s four, there is more opportunity to let the syntax breathe even while it is being firmly constrained by the rhymes. All in all, whatever one’s attitude to old-style forms in poetry is, this is an impressive technical achievement even if one of those necessary inversions – “to which no answer can be right” – does establish a slightly old-fashioned air.

But why do it? The poems of this new and selected give a clue to at least one possible answer. The obsessive interests lying behind the new poems are perfectly expressed in the title, The Strangest Place, for these poems are almost an anatomy of worldly weirdness, a catalogue of the different ways in which the reality of phenomena can’t really be trusted. At one pole there is the poem I have already quoted which imagines reality to be an ungraspable projection – a tesseract – of dimensions unavailable to us. At another pole – in tone as well as interest – is “Parallax”. Here, the author, processing through reality – in this case the scenes met on a humble daily walk – thinks of himself as a recording machine like the cameras on the Mars landers. This leads to a memory of an advertisement in which, rather like the notorious “Potemkin Villages”, a fake reality in the form of screens is held up before the camera so that the “real” Martians can get on with their lives undisturbed behind them. “Parallax” wears its worries about reality very lightly, finishing with nothing more than a downbeat “that dubious effect . . . screening who knows what”. So does “Hampstead Incident” where the setting is not the daily experience of walking but a memory, forty years old and thus dangerously untrustworthy. On a hot day in London, two women escort a group of naked children – one of the girls, at least, close to puberty – into the park:

. . . . .
All ages – young ones bringing up the rear;
Both sexes – and, most striking, at the head
A girl who would appear
To verge upon pubescence.
And when her glance met mine, did she profess
The uninhibited
Boldness of a child, or an adolescent’s
New knowingness?

A striking memory and one which, one can imagine, is the subject of a lot of recountings on the author’s part when social occasions lapse into the “strange things I have seen on my travels” mode. And, of course, this makes the memory more solidly set and at the same time less trustworthy. The poem concludes by considering what might have happened both in the memory and the reality:

We watched them part the morning to reveal
A wish-fulfilling glimpse of Eden, or
A page of the surreal,
That tempted us away.
Or would a barked instruction of “Take two!”
Betray the conjuror?
The crowd peeled back, and closed on them, and they
Were lost to view.

In other words, is the memory distorted by the desire to impose an image of Edenic purity on the scene or is it just a “weird” event? Or, metaphorically, might it have been part of staged reality for a film? In the latter case the film director – the conjuror – would, like the Martians erecting the screens, have been the creator of this particular reality. And this conjurer figure, the being who controls what it is we think we see in the real world, appears throughout these poems. Here he is a film director whereas in “Mise en Scene” he is a novelist grown bored of his fictions and who leaves the poet to loiter in a reality which is merely a fiction. In “Inside the Frame” the poet looks at one of those toys in which fine particles slide between two sheets of glass or plastic, forming, as they do so, patterns that suggest mountains. The poem begins by taking the illusion as reality:

How instantly those distances collapse:
The farther peaks
Glimpsed fadingly through serried gaps
Of scarp and bluff, the cirques, the valley floor.
A blizzard out of nowhere shrieks
Its coming and dimensions are no more.

The Alps? The Cairngorms? Or this ornament
Your two hands tilt . . .

The poem finishes with a more metaphysical suggestion about the controlling force behind these illusions and thus enters a tradition at least as old as the gnostics for whom reality was a ghastly mess created by an inferior god. The world, it says at the end, might be no more than a program engineered by “supreme, / Conjectured beings”. “Dream Run” uses a similarly long-established image for an untrustworthy reality. It recounts travelling at night by train from Paris to Geneva and, on the journey, dreaming of seeing the towns that the train passes and which are obscured by the dark, as clear as they would be in the day. In other words the dream creates or reflects the actual reality leading to the inevitable question of who is dreaming whom and which is the real.

Poetry, usually, doesn’t do well with such nakedly exposed metaphysics and works best when deploying suggestive metaphors. From this point of view, one of the book’s most interesting pieces is “Feather Weight” which describes one of those performances in which somebody (of bizarre talents) balances a series of objects on top of each other creating a unified, balanced, and, in a sense, working, object. It’s rather like the strange created world of the conjuror and just as fragile:

. . . . . 
And there it balances and oscillates
As though spellbound,
Like those who watch. On tiptoe then she plucks
The feather off that made it all cohere.
The structure instantly recalls
It’s weight’s
Disjointed elements and falls
In clattering disorder to the ground.

It’s not only an allegorical technique like this that prevents these poems being sterile and fanciful metaphysical speculation. There is also a sense of the poet’s stake in this view of reality. There is a lot in these poems which register an emotional unease as well as a metaphysical one. There are poems, for example, about women in the author’s life suffering dementia. The behaviour of such patients is, in itself, an example of the weirdness of the world but, more importantly, dementia produces a view of reality analogous to the one that the poems are worrying about and thus moves towards a question which is often propounded: Are the mad simply those who see reality as it actually is?

Balancing the psychic component of this uneasy view of the world is the author’s interest – almost, one might say, a drive – to get beyond or behind the flakey world of an untrustworthy reality; to get “outside the frame”, to be at least on speaking terms with “the conjuror”. A fine poem, “Time Was”, narrates the unsettling experience of passing by a demolition site on a regular walk. Though nobody is ever seen working, the house simply becomes gradually disassembled, like a film of its construction run in reverse. This leads, inevitably, to meditating on what would happen if the process continued, if it reached back into moments before the observer, a “reservoir / Of unrecovered time” so that as the “real” world moves forward in time, it also moves backwards. The poem finishes with the question, “And what if we stepped in?”, which is only partly a time-travel question since it is implicit in “Dream Run”, where we might ask what would happen if in the dream the narrator had seen himself dreaming in his wagon-lit bed.

The new poems of The Strangest Place are so consistent and so focussed that a couple of questions emerge. The first is whether this theme of strangeness has always been present in Edgar’s poetry and the second, more evaluative, one is whether these poems are weaker then those of the past because they show a narrowing of his approach to the world or whether they are stronger because they have a clarifying unity of focus. Since the poems are followed by a tightly pruned selection of earlier work, The Strangest Place carries with it the material that might enable these questions to be answered. Ideally – in Dante’s eighth heaven perhaps, where criticism is carried out with ethical and scholarly purity – one wouldn’t entirely trust the current selection – it might be influenced by recent interests – but reread all of Edgar’s published work. I have reread a good deal of it looking for answers to these questions but I haven’t been able to face up to the issue as well-prepared as I would like to be. But what can be said is that the uncanny, a response to the oddness of things is present in the poems from the first book, Queueing for the Mudd Club. “Friends” and “A Death in the Family” from that book certainly have the same tone as these recent poems, the first worrying about the degree to which friends and lovers are imaginary beings “you carry about selfishly inside” and who occasionally don’t match the person in reality so that they are “Like an imposter whose perfect act / Slips briefly and thereafter / Is suspect”. It’s rather as though the Martian screen had a hole in it which momentarily showed the real world beyond.

One of Edgar’s regular interests lies in observing the scene before him, especially when it involves water, as in, for example, “Ulysses Burning”. The interest is really in transformation, the strange effects of time – the sun’s setting perhaps – on the visual appearance of the world. And often these scenes are framed. A memorable early poem, “In Search of Time to Come” imagines early man, within the safety of a cave looking out and seeing the cave mouth as, significantly, a screen. It’s tempting to read this as a kind of counter-poem to “Time Was” since the direction of time is the opposite. The family in the cave look for a reality which they can comprehend but, like people in the present, they have to live not having the power to look beyond the screen:

. . . . .
Only the cave mouth, that changeable screen,
Opens a gap
In the circumference; and when the light
Is gone, they have no words by which to trap,
Or the notions by which words could mean,
What that black window’s showing for them to detect,
As they look, perplexed, into the night
And stare,
Then turn towards each other’s bodies to tap
Their comfort. Someone, they suspect,
Is out there; and they’re right. We are out there.

There is also the issue of time frozen, or at least distorted. One of the new poems, “Song and Dance” is about how the courting songs of two blue-capped finches are so quick that a listener cannot take them in. When they are slowed down to the point where they make sense, they are transformed into something like whale-song. In keeping with the themes of the book, this is a case of the weirdness of the world revealing itself with a little fiddling with time and that is taken to an extreme when, in “Eighth Heaven”, time is frozen completely. This is one of Edgar’s great poems and in it he visits his parents by entering a frozen image of them, in the past, in their own home, moving through their world, observing things but unable to interact with them because they are like “a one-sided hologram”. The newer poems add some perspective to the conclusion of this poem because it invokes that great moment when Dante looks down to the little threshing floor of our sublunary world. He is looking down from the perspective of the heavens but he is also in a position “outside the frame” in the perspective which enables a traveller on Mars to look down from on high and see both sides of the screens which are being erected for the astronauts. Something related occurs in “Dreaming at the Speed of Light” from History of the Day. And then there are the narratives involving uncanny elements, especially Eldershaw; the uncanny being, in this perspective, a little temporary eruption of a true, hidden reality into what is considered to be a “normal” one.

These observations about the thematic material of the new poems in The Strangest Place and their relation to the earlier work, are only a rough description of what is there but they form an interesting connection with the formal, rather old-fashioned, poetic style that I described at the beginning of this review. It’s very hard to resist the temptation to say that if reality is both perceived and felt as an untrustworthy, shifting thing – a Martian’s screen or novelist’s fantasy – then there must be a sense of balance in getting these perceptions into strongly-built, stable, well-braced verse-forms. If you convey such perceptions in an equally unsubstantial poetic mode, there is a possibility that the result is merely smoke and mirrors – a situation, many would say, that perfectly describes nineteenth century French Symbolist poetry. Everybody needs at least one anchor in an unstable world. For some it is the self, for others it is others – that is, relationships. I think that for Edgar it is the world in which propositions emerge as syntax which is then, with great skill, worked into existing rhyme patterns. Perhaps the poem becomes a world in which the poet is the conjuror/film director/novelist and the world he creates is not only one in which he is “outside the frame” but it is also one in which he can trust the world that the poem contains.

Peter Boyle: Notes Towards the Dreambook of Endings

[Sydney]: Vagabond Press, 2020, 143pp.

Peter Boyle’s new book should probably be read in conjunction with his previous volume Enfolded in the Wings of a Great Darkness as being profoundly influenced by the death of his partner. These are poems where death, memories, otherworlds and revenants turn up regularly. But it would be wrong to see it as marking any kind or radical change in emphasis in Boyle’s distinctive and impressive poetry. As far as I can see (and critically guess) it’s a matter of an altered emphasis on themes which have been present since his first book, Coming Home from the World.

One of the most important of these themes might be described as the carrying of the weight of the world, a subject reflected in the name of the first of the three sections of Notes Towards the Dreambook of Endings. I think it has a double meaning. Firstly there is the existential one of the world we carry within us and the way in which that relates to the world outside. This carried world may be made up of personal experiences – especially griefs in recent poems – but it is also our genetic heritage and the way in which we are produced by the external world, an issue that needs confronting despite our cherished subjectivity. Secondly there is the world in its ethical dimension as the home of outrageous wrongs and cruelties. This is an important theme in Boyle’s earlier books and one way of reading them might be as a consistent attempt to get something of the cruelty and the concomitant suffering present in the world into poetry. Rereading some of his earlier poems, I’m not sure that it has ever been satisfactorily managed: poems like “On Sydney’s South-West Line” and “First Shift” from The Blue Cloud of Crying, which try to introduce specificity, don’t seem to play to Boyle’s strengths, no matter how laudable their aims. Something like “Group Portrait, Delft, Late Sixteenth Century” from What the Painter Saw in Our Faces is much more successful – “dealing with” the horrors of the Spanish wars in the Netherlands – because of its more complex frame and the fact that, in introducing the theme of art and its complicity in oppression, it folds the poet into the issues it raises.

At any rate, Notes Towards the Dreambook of Endings contains poems where the self, in a state of dis-ease because of the death of the loved one, is particularly sensitive to the weight of the world. “Sorrow” describes that state by personifying it as an everpresent companion not to be traded “for anyone’s else’s product / marked happiness”, but concludes by claiming it to be a proper burden rather than a temporary discomfort:

. . . . .
It insists that you do not look away,
that you walk with it.
Sorrow says, owning me
is owning the due weight of a life.

The closest that these poems get to outright denunciation of politically inspired cruelty is probably to be found in “Post Howard” – a complex allegorical image involving the “inspector of underwater prisons” and whose title is the clearest indicator of its target – and “Crossing Over”, a piece about refuges at borders which has a surreal cast and a way of treating its subject that expands the idea of crossing borders from the experiences of refugees out to the situations of all psychic travellers. In “On a Drawing by Giacometti” and “The Plea” (a description of a Margaret Olley painting) the weight of suffering has to be seen in the subjects of paintings. In the latter case the ultimate plea, recalling Dante’s La Pia, or perhaps Purcell’s Dido, is “remember me” a request the speaking dead make of the living. These dead, including of course the poet’s partner, are visitors and a poem about the Pukumani totemic poles concludes with the dead offering themselves not only with the request to be remembered but with the reminder that the dead have experiences that we can enter:

. . . . . 
marks that say     Walk round me     Walk through me

in all we have     in all that’s missing

that we know nothing
that we are guests here
that we are summoned

so little of what we are stays in the light

Finally “A Time of Endings” seems to expand the dis-ease out into premonitions of apocalypse where “drop by drop / a man knows the earth is changing / and hurries on”.

Perhaps the clearest presentation of the idea of the world being what has produced us, and hence that we carry this weight with us rather than the more predictable weight of our unhappiness with the way the world is, is to be found in “Crowded Out”. It’s a poem that reminds us that our selves are a continuously changing part of a continuum which goes far back before we turned up as individuals:

The world presses in,
a towering river of debris glittering
with specks of one on-going explosion.
All of us are morphing,
our faces layered with many faces, two eyes
gazing upward from the ending of time.
. . . . . 
From somewhere far inside us
a young woman from a millennium ago
rises to the surface, comes close
and we shiver with all her tenderness.
At the place where our breath is suddenly held back
a child is there, watching the trees above him . . .

Counterbalancing this weight – at least to some extent – is a drive towards some kind of transcendence that, in Boyle’s work, often takes the form of imaginative expansion. It’s expressed perfectly at the end of the book’s first poem, a prose piece which begins with personal unease – “Slowly messages come in about the Memorial Service” – moves to observations of fellow citizens and from there to the issue of “urban grit” poems and concludes:

But I don’t want to write Sydney urban grit. I want wide fields opening into the solitude of the universe. I want a ghost to whisper this poem from under the paving stones. Exquisite perfumes stirring from the other world. A small life-buoy where I bob happy in my timelessness. I want to lie naked on the beach and commune with the deity.

Placed first as it is, it’s tempting to read this as a statement of practice or even a manifesto but I think that would distort it somewhat and ignore its slightly self-mocking – at least humorous – tone. What it records might be better described as a tension between the call of the weight of the world and the call of the imaginative infinite. And this view is supported by the book’s second poem which is built around the notion of the tensions between the inner self and its worldly location. At any rate, many of the poems of Notes Towards the Dreambook of Endings explore the ways in which imaginative expansion and transcendence – communing with the deity – operate. And it’s here that we get a sense of the complexity of Boyle’s poetry because imaginative expansion is never reduced to a simple proposition: instead it’s a doorway to possibilities.

Take, for example, “Stopping by Piles of Waste on Sunny Evenings” whose title alludes to Frost’s poem and may well indicate that we should read its content as being engaged with that poem:

Abandoned planks, an old tyre -
a god of travellers hidden
in a kerbside altar of discards -
I stop to pay homage.

From their side
ghost people – a scrabbled waste -
gaze out at me – 
a woman’s arm
unhinged from her long brown garment
trails useless . . .

We almost seem in Patrick White territory here – though the piles of waste awaiting kerbside collection don’t exactly inhabit the world down at the dump – where the divine is located in the abject. “The Angels Assigned to Me”, while hardly being about waste and decay, does find the angelic in a group of middle-aged ladies in ballet outfits waiting to rehearse who momentarily surround the author “seated alone in meditation”. More conventionally, transcendence can be located in the arts, especially music, so that “Listening to Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, April 2020” set in Italy at the horrific early stage of the pandemic in that country, can see the music as a spiritual vaccine, “a tonic against despair”. Something similar happens in another poem in which a condemned emperor plays one of the Mozart piano concertos before his execution – “these groping finger-strikes / against despair, into the pure / futureless air”. A prose poem fittingly called “Music” is probably the place where this issue is explored most thoroughly. It begins with an allusion to The Tempest – “Bright music came to me across the water” – and goes on to explore the effect of hearing a piano being played from a pavilion across a river. The emphasis is on distinguishing this music – played only for the player’s own satisfaction – from the functional music to be expected at events like weddings. The fact that it is cut from a context of usefulness makes it more like real art and more capable of performing the miracle of real art:

. . . . .  What sounded across the river now came to me completely freed of occasion, stripped of whatever might join it to meaning or social purpose. I dwelt within an unpredictable grace where each clear bright note might be the last sound on earth, and yet the notes balanced and sustained each other. . .

Art is one thing, of course, and theology quite another. Boyle gets close to trying to be specific about his sense of the transcendent or the divine in “Of the God of Isaac and of Jacob”:

There in the backward ebb of time
we watch you growing as
you grow endlessly beyond our hands,
visible in the purple wonder
of trees in summer, or lying
on a table top as a sleeping fly
sheltering beneath its wings.
You are just as present in the microbe
that enters through a pinprick
in the skin or the vast
turning of a hillside
from gold to brown.
This afternoon of hot wind spiked with rain,
a small dense cloud
you rise towards us from the valley floor,
or, when we are suddenly nowhere, you appear
speaking to us
from inside sleep.

What we have no name for,
enduring when nothing endures.

One gets a mild shock at first to see the transcendence Boyle is obsessed by located in terms of one of the existing theologies. Of course, that particular god is, at the beginning of the poem, divorced from Yahweh – an historical phenomenon whose evolution from tribal god to cosmic overlord is, surely, a result of Jewish religious writers responding to historical imperatives rather than a response to a process whereby the imaginative infinite expands its divine figures. At any rate, this god is soon identified as something dimensionless who communicates in a number of ways, rather as the dead do. But it’s a poem which sets one thinking about transcendence, about our “endless efforts at expansion” and where this comes from. Is it an internal, psychological (or chemical) drive, is it culturally created (it’s certainly culturally mediated) and what sort of variations does it play? I’m not sure that these questions are central to Boyle’s poetry but someone in the future will read his work carefully enough to perhaps detect a pattern of hints as to what his assumptions about such questions are. At any rate, Boyle’s is really a humanist poetry in that the divine is subordinated to the human rather than vice versa. A poem appearing not long after “Of the God of Isaac and of Jacob” in the book, “Figure in a Small Icon”, investigates the subject of a religious painting in just the same way that “The Plea” does, by focussing on what is present in the face:

. . . . .
If the earth explodes this night
and I am all that is left of humanity
any future sentient being
will judge us to have been creatures
given no other means of defence
than the nakedness of their gaze.
They will see only the godhead buried
at every moment within us – 
not the deceit, the violence, the greed
that ruled our days.

The last section of Notes Towards the Dreambook of Endings gives its title to the book as a whole and thus establishes its importance. Most of the poems recount dreams and have that slightly eerie narrative style which we associate with accounts of dreams – “I am standing in the front garden of my cousin’s house in Mosman”, “I am at a poetry festival in South America”. Dreams and poetry are, of course, close kin – texts full of meaning but resisting absolutely confident single interpretations – so there is something doubly complex when they are folded inside each other. Presumably, as it is a “dreambook”, we must read this as a kind of diary of thirty-six numbered dreams during the period following his partner’s death, and the dreams will contain keys to the healing process the mind undergoes. But not all of the poems are recorded dreams – some (12, 31 and 34) are “conventional” Boyle poems and might well have appeared in the earlier two sections of the book.

As dreams, their “content” is marked by an obsession with visualising the afterlife in different ways. There is a lot of movement both upwards and downwards, and the “otherworld” can be a religious college (4), a shopping mall (9), “an immense city famous for its concerts, its theatre . . .” (5), “an island in the wide fork of a river” (28) or a village on the Russian steppes (6). And the tone contains a lot of anxiety which, for a specialist sufferer of anxiety dreams such as myself, rings very true indeed. The first poem of the sequence is full of anxiety though it is, rather surprisingly, an anxiety about the poet’s work and its value rather than the partner’s fate. Perhaps, whatever a poet’s situation, concern about the vocation is paramount. The seventeenth poem is a brilliant dream in which the beloved partner slips away and is pursued through kafkaesque urban landscapes by an increasingly desperate poet. It concludes:

That we should have found each other once among life’s million roads of chance. To feel your hand now slip out of mine, to lose you on the countless intertwining paths of the dead. A circle closes. I am alone. A small child once more, stranded in the immense maze of the world, suddenly nowhere.

These aren’t the final words of the book but they make an appropriate, and slightly ambiguous ending (“nowhere” is, after all, described in “Of the God of Isaac and of Jacob” as a receptive state in which we can hear the god speak) for a magnificent collection. Peter Boyle’s poetic career is quite unlike that of any other Australian poet and Notes Towards the Dreambook of Endings is probably the most accomplished (a word critics should avoid) of his books and certainly the best introduction to his way of looking at the world and exploring its imperatives.

Philip Hammial: Inveigling Snafus

Woodford, NSW: Island Press, 2021, 110pp.

Philip Hammial’s latest collection – his thirty-fourth – is an opportunity for readers to re-enter the strange and compelling world of his poetry – something we have been doing since the mid-seventies. The length of this career makes the energy of the poems all the more extraordinary and, as readers of the various reviews I have written of his work will know, I think energy is one of its defining characteristics. And it’s an energy that shows no signs of faltering as the poet enters old age – the “Age of Frail” as one of the poems calls it. Inveigling Snafus forms something of a pair with Detroit and Selected Poems which was published in 2018 in the US. Ideally this latter book (an update of his previous selected, Asylum Nerves, with the poems from the first ten years of his books dropped and replaced by a full-length version of his 2011 volume, Detroit) would provide a career overview against which Inveigling Snafus could be examined for developments, or at least, changes.

On a first reading of these new poems we are in a reasonably familiar world, familiar perhaps in its unfamiliarity. But for those who haven’t met Hammial’s distinctive manner before, a few lines from “Ante” in this book will help:

. . . . . 
            Shish kebab time
in Toe Hold, Colorado. Burned to a crisp: the lamb
in sister’s oven. Mom’s shoes always
two sizes too large, no wonder
she can’t run.
                        Badgers 
in the kitchen again. Go there & you’ll probably
be poached for some China job. Sorry, I misheard
the Chattanooga Cho-Cho whistle, thought it was
the Shanghai Express. When Shaoqing coughs
her wrinkles deepen.
                                      Cherries
are (pop)ular now, everywhere, but they cost
a fortune . . .

As with much poetry that we use the vague word “surrealist” for, this seems to generate energy not only through its pointed, slightly fretful style of address but also through the imaginative transformations that keep the verse moving so that the popular 1940s song “Chattanooga Choo Choo”, misheard as a faux-Chinese “Cho Cho”, transforms into the 1930s film, “Shanghai Express”. And then there are the aural and conceptual pleasures of imagining a town in Colorado called “Toe Hold” where shish kebabs are available. And not just available: the phrase “Shish kebab time” suggests mysterious routines of ingestion which are not only inexplicable but likely to be violently enforced by some Kafkaesque agency.

But to return to my initial interest in the changes that might be going on in Hammial’s poetry seen over the long stretch, it’s first of all important to stress the continuities. Many familiar motifs reappear. There is that interest in the state of being taken somewhere, involuntarily, often in mysterious vehicles with wheels that are unusual in some way. It’s a compelling image, literarily, and undoubtedly relates to the train-hopping obsession detailed throughout his poetry and especially at the end of Inveigling Snafus. “Tide” speaks of “wheels to roll little me / to a finish line that some bastard deleted seven / centuries back” and “It” speaks of “you on your wheel / & me on mine”, tapping into the pun whereby wheels can be things you are broken on as well as things you travel by. Another buried pun in these strange, enforced journeys is on the word “career” whereby the strange journey can modulate to the poet’s professional career, or just his passage through life. You can see this in the significantly titled “Steering Clear” which is, I think, about being a poet in Australia (small pond) imagined as being challenged by “some motor-revving red-light / smart guy with a master plan for malcontent up- / manship”. It turns out to be a silly competitiveness:

. . . . . 
                          Should, as consolation,
we buck in the narrows, go Gargantuan among
perceived (ill conceived) Littles, be cowboy gun-
slingers at OK Corrals, the more fool us? – a fuss
at neck & face, no matter which the point of which
is what? – to concede defeat to Fast Eddy smart guys,
Pain & Glory left in the dust?

Another Hammial motif might be called “institutions” especially of medical care. This really conflates two distinct subjects: hospitals (the frequency of visits to these inevitably increases with age) and asylums – an essentially biographical motif in Hammial who served early on as an orderly in a psychiatric facility in Ohio. They come together in “Penny Hates His Booth” a three-part prose poem in which entering an MRI machine transforms in the second stanza to entering a German bunker from the Second World War and, in the last stanza, into being prepared either for the guillotine or torture and finally executing one of his weird journeys:

. . . . .
Strapped face-down to a rough wood table you sent me at breakneck speed into the “oven” to execute a series of maneuvers: forward, back, to the left, to the right, forward, back . . . it seemed to go on forever, my brain being destroyed by radiation . . . Hours, years later I was released.

Doctor, torturer, executioner.

Finally, in this quick survey of Hammial topoi, there is poetry itself which can appear as a career or even something related to medical care. “A Baker’s Dozen” is a set of little prose pieces which are about poets and their poetry. At times these can sound quite conventional. “Establishment Poet” – “Fake tongue, real teeth, fake lips, real throat. And the poems that emerge, how can we tell which are fake, which real?” – is only, for example, a slight, surreal step away from the poems of someone like Martial. Issues of poetry and careers appear in a number of other poems – “Grass Infinity” speaks of a “muse debt” – and one of the most important later poems in Inveigling Snafus, “At Home in the Imperium”, a piece about living among the horrors of contemporary life (it finishes with a description of 168 workers on a cultural project in Manila being deliberately buried alive in cement so that the project won’t be delayed) begins with:

Out there beyond the horizon – a pincushion of voices
arguing about me – my place in the Australian 
poetry canon. Boom! If you listen carefully you’ll know

that the sewing machines are fountains, are torpedos
aimed at Liberty ships . . .

This opening starts by recalling Randolph Stow’s wonderful poem, “The Singing Bones” – surely deliberately though this kind of allusion isn’t common in Hammial’s poetry – and then uses a pun on “canon” to modulate to the kind of military hardware that the current world calls for from its poets. Finally, there is “Contriving” which I read as being about – at least in its opening – the poet’s career:

Not bad, this contriving, for a defective.
Unclean in the extreme, the sum
of a big-yield exercise in slum clearance, namely
my peekaboo-that-thought-fell-flat head
back in the game. Poetry? Let’s not
get too ambitious – Demarcation one of several
lines I’ve already wrongly crossed, stumbling, a bundle 
of fever as flamboyant as a ghost in a Noh play, ie.,
Wham! Bam! Slam! Thank You Little Miss Muse;
overlook, please, my messin’ up & get me
over your barrel (the Motown equivalent
of over a rainbow). . .

This serendipitously allows me to begin to speak about elements of Hammial’s poetry which are either new or have become more pronounced as the number of his books has increased.

The most notable of these is the growth of poems specifically relating to Detroit (Motown) Hammial’s home until adulthood. These have increased in frequency generally over the last dozen books or so, but Inveigling Snafus seems to replicate in miniature the longer development since the frequency of the Detroit poems increases rapidly in the poems of the last part of the book. It’s hard to think of poet as distinctive as Hammial going through the fairly predictable process of finding in later life that his thoughts stray more and more to the details of his early life and the place in which these events happened but it may be that, simple a process as it is, this is what is occurring. At any event, it gives us a slightly different parallax view of Hammial as, simultaneously, an Australian poet of his generation (he appears in John Tranter’s The New Australian Poetry) and a Detroit one.

It also raises the issue of personal elements and experiences. Often Hammial seems to be writing about a mad alternative world whose exact relation to the current one is a matter of debate – Martin Langford, in his introduction to the earlier selected, Asylum Nerves, argues that “an important aspect of his project is the desire to re-enact the crazy energies we work so hard to disarm with familiarity and inattention”. And he’s right, I think, to focus on the energies rather than, say, political and social situations. But contained in this alternative world are substantial slabs of autobiography, almost always about adolescent experiences. “At Home in the Imperium” is an assemblage of passages done in different styles and one of these, the hair-raising instructions for how to get to a party in the ghetto area of Detroit is done as straight autobiography: “Lock your doors; keep the windows rolled up; cruise / through stoplights, never stop; park in front of the house; // blow your horn; we’ll come and get you.” In a poem like “Carpet” the autobiographical conclusion forms a sudden shift which can still be seen as a surreal disjunction:

What happened to the promised miracle?
Cut short by a convulsion in which
I was in over my head? – drowning 
not waving & haggling for stones
that would print as matter & not sink, just
this once, without a trace. In situ
in other words, spraddle-legged & jumped-up
to a cat in a cage perch, that fool
with the chair & the whip dispatched like cocaine
in one of Pablo’s fly-by-night planes, straw-boss pick-ups
for divas in whose august presence I’ll never
stack up not even with a tidy-up. Go ahead, snigger
if it makes you feel good so do I It (as the proverbial last straw)
convinces me to close ranks with those heroic throwbacks
who enhance what I regard, rightly or wrongly, as
a positive downsizing, down (to a size) where “Good luck”
I can slip through unnoticed, sentries asleep on their feet,
Barbara Wysong, high school sweetheart, & I trudging
through falling snow to Paradise,
Michigan, nights of moon cake, days
of circus (too many rings to count) first it was
a house of straw, then a house of paper – the story of how
she said goodbye & married a money man, yours truly
riding the rails, hitchhiking Bombay to Delhi
with Sikh truckers, a sky burial on the outskirts
of Lhasa, wild boars on a Roman road in Iran . . .
unrolling, a Persian carpet, the promised miracle.

I’ve quoted the entire poem here because, although it demonstrates how an autobiographical inclusion can perform a striking evolution in the structure of the poem, there are also a lot of Hammial “issues” here that one could explore at far greater length than I (or my readers!) can afford. It’s really, for example, a “vehicle poem”, but here the vehicle isn’t a grotesque contraption on wheels but a magical Persian carpet (the fact that the title locks together with an item in a list in the last two lines is a reasonably common way in which Hammial gives his poems a sense of structural unity). It also contains the potent idea of “downsizing”, which occurs in a number of the poems of this book and makes one feel that there is a stronger economic/political dimension here than in other books – “Options” is a good example. But downsizing is about losing personal status and also about losing transcendental, “magic carpet” aspirations – “what happened to the promised miracle?”. The “fool / with the chair & the whip” and “days / of circus” are circus references and circuses as well as nursery rhymes and fairy stories are a rich source of material for Hammial, recalling Rimbaud’s “barbarous sideshow”. There are a lot of verbal transitions: “jumped-up” seems to suggest the later “stack up” (an odd cliché, come to think of it), “tidy-up” and “pick-up” – the emphasis being on the word “up”, part of a magic carpet ride as opposed to the “down” of downsizing. If I were forced to make a stab at summarizing the poem, I would say that at least part of it can be reduced to: Forget about easy promises of transcendence, accept a reduction of self-image from the idealised heroes of one’s youth, don’t take a short cut to a higher life by marrying or inheriting money, abandon yourself to obsessions – in Hammial’s case, serial travel.

An earlier book, Travel, contained autobiographical pieces about Hammial’s life in Detroit and these prepare us, somewhat for the same elements in Inveigling Snafus, including the book’s final “poem” which is a six page prose piece listing Hammial’s experience of giving in to the obsession with riding on freight trains, an honourable mode of travel dating back to the Great Depression in America but here a drive to both get away and expand experience. If this mode of Hammial’s work seems surprisingly straightforward, one is always reminded that it might be a case of a bizarre reality described realistically.

These comments about Detroit playing a greater role in the poems late in Hammial’s career were introduced by looking at the last lines of “Contriving”. These lines also introduce a couple of other issues. One is the reference to the sado-masochistic in “get me / over your barrel” which is an example of spanking/flogging fetishes that recur pretty often in Inveigling Snafus. In a mad world of desires, energies and compulsions-from-above this seems entirely fitting material, just as the circus world of “the / tumblers, the funambulists, the cockalorums, the Jills / and the Jacks” does. But there is also the phrase, “my messin’ up”, which introduces an element of dialect which is common in the poems of this book and which I don’t remember as being common before. There are “gonna”s, “doncha”s and even a “’sponsibility”. It seems to mark a desire in these poems to make a statement about linguistic level (avoid high style, stay low) but it is also willynilly a statement about place since these are American idioms rather than Australian ones.

Rose Hunter: Anchorage

[np]UK: HVTN Press, [2020], 113pp.

Rose Hunter’s first full length collection (I haven’t read earlier chapbooks) appeared in 2017 and announced a distinctive voice that it took a while to accustom oneself to. The poems seemed to be wrestled out of personal experiences which were themselves a continuous wrestling with relationships, dislocation, addiction and illness. The wrestling here is the key I think and it prevented the book being either a conventional diary of misery or a confident mining of experience. To add to the mix is the fact that almost all of the poems of Glass derived from experiences in the thoroughly alien culture of Mexico where external reality often isn’t as stable as it seems and the borders between the ordinary and the fantastic seem remarkably porous. Again part of the attraction of the book was that it was not a canny and professional exploitation of the foreignness of Mexico (with inevitable cameos of the famous “Dia de los Muertos” – the “Day of the Dead”); if anything life in Mexico City and later in Puerto Vallata seems experienced in a comparatively unexceptionable, almost suburban, way.

We usually say that a book rewards careful reading but Glass actually requires really careful reading to feel any sort of confidence about the goings-on inside it. A friend dies in a car accident on the road into Vallata from a tourist site called El Eden (in a place like Mexico almost any innocent place name seems right for extended metaphoric exploitation); there are other male characters (the macaw man, the sky-teller, the character of the “Yellow” series) some of whom seem versions of the dead friend but an innocent reader is never entirely sure. Then there are the five title poems that are really about alcoholism, or at least an alcoholic episode, and other poems dealing with the experience of “dead legs”, a temporary paralysis. (It’s no accident that Lowry’s Under the Volcano, surely one of the definitive literary representations of alcoholism, takes place in Mexico City on the day of the dead.) All told, Glass is a complex mix, a challenge to the reader who needs both to try to make sense of the experiences out of which these poems are wrestled while at the same time reassuring his- or herself that this is not just a prurient interest in someone else’s troubles but is genuinely required by the poems themselves.

Two of the poems from Glass make a good introduction to Hunter’s poetry and set the scene for a look at her new book, Anchorage. The first of these is “Pretas”:

and not merely something blurry between spikes. vallarta
was a city of ghosts i had to leave in the walking past: hidalgo

      up that alleyway (for you kid, I don’t inhale)   or
flailing down stairs forty-five degrees, langostinos where you yelled
      at plankton                  madero jacarandas aguacate where
we yelled at each other, insurgents and cárdenas where you dropped

milk thankfully not vodka, phew!       villa not much by the sea
where we lay, how to forget what we’ve done to each other
      but open the window          no way

basilio badillo where we smoked          olas altas
who fell in the plant box who picked each other up          alley
unnamed, where I fell, alone        gutters and red
running, your warm hand on my back, drug sick heart sick
      rise and fall          iturbide          cuauhtémoc

      skipping down stairs to meet you a smile to break a face
to meet you or further down     guerrero, couldn’t wait! malecón
how could I get to you fast enough thinking of things I had to
      tell you and what you would say and how you would laugh

your gravelly delight          in the salsa isle in the toothpaste aisle
on the telephone on the way to cinco de diciembre in the R04 in the
R08, couldn’t wait!          on carranza your greeting smile
      through the bars back when you had flesh back
      when we could smile at each other back then.

The title is an obstacle at first because, drenched in Spanish as Glass inevitably is, one assumes it to be a Spanish word but its true origin (if I speak knowledgeably here it’s thanks to Wikipedia) is Hindi where a preta is a wandering ghost driven by hunger to make contact with humans. So the poem is a kind of compendium or collection of remembered moments, rather like a set of mental snapshots. And the method of construction of this virtual album is to locate each memory in the street in which it occurred. The rather marvellous interpretive experience for a reader is the way in which what appears on the first couple of readings as a weirdly surrealist piece, almost like a poem made up by interweaving a Spanish text with an English one, quickly comes into focus once we realise that the Spanish words are all street names. The fragmented and disjointed quality – which is a feature of other poems and perhaps reflects the desire honestly to represent the fact that the poet is not so on top of these experiences that they can be distilled into shapely aesthetic objects – is mimetically justified in this poem since the images are incomplete flashes. Also mimetically justified is the surreal effect of “Alebrijes” – “the dragon head on your chicken back / turkey feet and cowrie legs, wattle dewlap quill cuttle / ventricular” – in that the poem describes a bizarre papier-mache carnival procession. This seems a demonstration of Garcia Marquez’ comment about his “magical-realist” style: the style is realistic, it’s the reality it describes that is magical. My point here is that Hunter looks for ways in which to make poems uniquely conceived and structured. She seems, at her best, to be searching for moulds for experience that will be both standalone and interesting in themselves. “Pretas” might have been titled trendily something like “Images of Loss on Fifteen Streets” to draw attention to it’s structural way of dealing with experience though I’m rather glad it wasn’t.

The second way in which Glass makes a kind of useful prologue to Anchorage is thematic. There is a lot in it, for example, about place, about moving and leaving. In keeping with this is the whole issue of the temporarily paralysed legs since that prevents movement. Most of the unequivocal assertions – “make sure it’s the right house you’re jumping out of”, “we don’t like to admit that we could have just left anytime” – are about leaving and there is a memorable passage in “Central Camionera”:

. . . . . 
                           you become irrelevant
to the place you’re leaving right before you leave it.

their concerns look strange to you, the leaving one.
also their jealousy, forgetting you have often been jealous of

leaving people who are always on their way somewhere
better than we are now, regardless of where they are going . . .

Significantly, Anchorage begins with a poem about leaving – or at least fantasies about leaving – but one in which a good deal of attention is paid to the way the issue is framed and presented. It’s a four part poem and the final part is most like a conventional poem detailing a trip to the north – presumably, in the light of what the first three parts deal with, to watch the salmon spawning run. As with the poems of Glass there is a partner and half the energies of the poem (half the energies of many of the poems in these two books) come from frustrated interactions with this partner:

. . . . .
                         Where are we going
and for how much longer, your answers are vague
and you ignore all demands to stop. Ready to leap
out of the window hitch back where I didn’t

come from, preventing it, the distance
travelled (the way the already ventured

serves to cement the presently occurring)
and curiosity . . .

This seems a rendition of a post-war Existentialist’s position: thrown into life, a situation without logic apart from that which is established by previous events, the “already ventured”. But the first section of the poem, narrated from the point of view of a reluctant and rebellious salmon – “I’m // not going to dump all that turned up / in my body in some backwater then / hang around waiting to die” – sees the desire to jump ship as being the rejection of the deepest possible instincts. Interestingly the salmons’ drive is towards the site of their spawning, their “home” in the most compelling sense of the word, whereas the poet of the final section knows that flight, jumping out of the “right house”, will not lead to a return home but simply to yet another place which is not a real home.

The rest of the poems that make up the first part of Anchorage are a kind of album of animal metaphors for the protagonists, and their abrasive relationship, laid out in the first poem. The second poem is about being “out of place” in a town where they have (perhaps) come to see caribou. It begins with a lovely description of cross-purposes and non-sequiturs:

a screwdriver when you needed a rice
cooker, an armadillo when you
needed rain, a carjacking at a picnic
and again (because no one answered the
first time) why did you bring her here? . . .

The partner appears as a jellyfish in “Medusozoa” and the poet as both puffer fish and puffin in two of the other poems. As well as these animal incarnations there are poems which focus on being somewhere strange. “What is Costco” opens with the memorable line – “This is not my familiar so it is not my strange” – and the second-last poem of the section, “The Incomplete Truth” (probably also set in Costco) contains all of the elements of irrationality involved in staying/going, loving/hating, understanding/incomprehension that run through the poems:

How many ruptures take place just like this
the matchstruck sun leaping, the squander
of beating wings on tire & curb
painterly dreams & batshit crazy

to be somewhere else: I gaze
at your knuckles, petals on a trolley
thinking of you under a life raft

of toilet paper (your
muffled voice), or neck deep in drums
of tuna (I had never seen you so happy)

The second section of Anchorage is devoted to a place – Las Vegas – at least as exotic as Mexico City. And, as in almost all of Hunter’s poems, it deals with a relationship bubbling away within that place. Just as the first section began with a poem dependent for its success on an unusual concept and structure, so this section begins with a poem, “[Anchorage] or [Las Vegas]” built around the idea of allowing the reader to insert either the main city of the desert state of Nevada or the main city of the snow state of Alaska into a gap in the text. It’s a structure that recalls the final section of the book which is made up of multiple choice questions about different bird species. The fun, but also the driving power behind this as a structure that can be exploited poetically, is the interaction between the wildly different possibilities which usually derive from totally different ways of conceiving the bird. So one stanza from the poem devoted to the Turkey vulture offers, as answers to the question of what the vulture uses to stay soaring, “the hob-heeled fist of chance”, “thermals & updrafts” and “various bribes & official oversight”. In the case of “[Anchorage] or [Las Vegas]”, the two cities represent not only environmental opposites but also emotional opposites between which a host of possibilities for living can be strung: Anchorage probably being there for the notions of emotional stability implied in its name.

At any rate, in keeping with places that seem exotic and create a single iconic image in the mind of the reader, Las Vegas is a lot more than its gambling strip. The second section of Anchorage produces poems rather more challenging for an innocent reader than those of the first part of the book. Its conception of Las Vegas is complex, too, and the notes reference a number of works about understanding its strange environment. There are two poles to the place: the well-known hotel/casino strip and the atomic testing grounds to the north-west. The former is the basis of poems like “Paris to Flamingo”, “High Roller” and “Flamingos” while the latter appears in a poem like “Desert View Outlook”. These are structured as impressionist pieces in which an observer progresses through the environment. In “Paris to Flamingo”, for example, whose title refers to hotels but has dim reverberations of origins in a city and a bird, the catalogue slowly unrolls:

. . . . . 
the Montgolfier Balloon: a lone castanet
or snazzy pyjama-striped doorknob teetering
over the Arc de Triomphe
& La Fontaine de Mers (girls girls girls
holding fish) the Eiffel corporate duck
the background ph, an angel trumpeting
the black beehives of traffic lights
& bare asses of Bally’s yeah girls girls . . .

while “Desert View Outlook”, although set in a visit taking place in the present, wants also to catalogue the iconic images and comments made about the explosions in the 1950s with the bizarre – and to a poet, intriguing – names given to their operations: “Buster-Jangle, Tumbler-Snapper, Plumbbob / Ranger, Latchkey, Sunbeam, Tinderbox”. The temptation to allegorise a toxic environment must be very strong for a poet like Hunter and I think she does well to resist it although in “I Get These Messages All the Time” she does allow herself to do it for a brief moment: “I radiated / a destructive centre . . .”.

But what happens in the poems of this section is a lot more complex and challenging than a response to a striking physical and cultural environment. For one thing the response is very sophisticated, thanks, as the notes show, to her reading. “On Fremont” finishes up being fascinated by the “open air mall” with its roof which is simultaneously enclosing and open:

. . . . .
      let’s love this aviary topiary butterfly house crystal
palace Quonset hut nut loaf cake tin canopy

& take pleasure in the sadness it brings
a curved space of strength we can’t reach

the horizon does not appear & perspective
is always about to arrive . . .

And “What is a Canopy” is a kind of gloss on its epigraph that “The interior spaces of Las Vegas . . . are arboreal: they evoke the lost forest environment that the desert has taken away”. And there is also the issue of water, far more a matter of the interaction of business, politics and law than in most places, explored in “Water”.

But to see this section as being a place-oriented poetic exploration misses the point a little. In Hunter’s poetry the self is never a solitary observing thing but is always wrestling with a partner. So a poem looking at the suburb of Summerlin and giving a very precise rendition of an artificial environment (reminiscent, at least for an elderly generation such as my own, of the desert development at the end of Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point) begins with her partner telling a lie: “(Which is where you tell them we live, I’ve heard it / bald-faced with my eyes)”. “Flotsam/Jetsam/Wreckage” is, I think, an attempt at a summing up of an emotional situation using the multiple choice structure of the bird poems although in this instance all answers can be correct. And a group of four poems, beginning with “A Story”, while alluding to life in Las Vegas, are really about the relationship and the writer’s situation.

Both Anchorage and its predecessor present fascinating challenges and introduce a voice and an approach (or set of approaches) that I haven’t seen in Australian poetry. The sense of the poetic self as always part of a struggling couple is most unusual and the fact that the poems never become mawkish is quite an achievement. It’s a self that seems trapped and anxious to escape but isn’t confident that there is a self and a place that can be escaped to – hence the symbolic potency of the “dead legs” in Glass.

Rereadings V: Martin Johnston: The Typewriter Considered as a Bee-Trap

Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1984, 65pp.

Regular visitors to this site will know that these “Rereadings” are my excuse to look again at books which have meant a lot to me in the past but which, for one reason or another, I haven’t written about. I have long been wanting to revisit Martin Johnston’s last collection of poems, not because I feel that after thirty years it would be interesting to see whether his reputation has grown, plateaued or declined but because there are a number of very difficult poems in the book – especially those of the large, final sequence, “To the Innate Island” – that I might understand better if I could devote some serious time to them. Entirely coincidentally, 2020 saw the release of Johnston’s selected poems in a volume, Beautiful Objects, edited (with an excellent biographical introduction) by Nadia Wheatley, designed to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of Johnston’s death. This volume, together with John Tranter’s Martin Johnston: Selected Poems and Prose, published in 1993, is a sign that readers of Australian poetry might be less prepared, in Johnston’s case, to let his memory slide into oblivion than they are in the case of other poets born after the war.

Johnston himself was a fascinating and very complex character. For a writer he started life with a host of advantages. Both parents, George Johnston and Charmian Clift were writers and he grew up in both Australia and Greece and was completely bilingual. This also meant that he inherited two, very different cultures and, perhaps more importantly, two very different poetic cultures. But it was also a tragic life in that his mother committed suicide in 1969 and his father died a year later of a chronic lung problem exacerbated by alcohol. His younger sister committed suicide in 1974. A half-sister, Gae Johnston died of a drug overdose in 1988 and Johnston himself died after a heart attack resulting from alcoholism in 1990. This seems to an outsider a pattern to be explained either in terms of inherited genes or a curse on the House of Johnston but it isn’t right for an outsider to pontificate on these matters. A saner approach may be to point out that there is a very old Greek sense (classical Greek rather than Byzantine Greek) of the gods withholding something subtle but vital from the gifted – just to make sure that humans don’t become hubristic. They might, as in the case of Ajax, give you great physical strength and glory in battle but withhold a certain mental balance, or they might, as with Cassandra, give you powers of prophecy but withhold the ability to make your prophesies into effective warnings. Trying to define exactly what was withheld from Johnston is difficult, of course. You could suggest simple things like freedom from the addictions of alcohol and nicotine or rather more complex things like stamina or a singleminded obsession that harnesses stamina. As Tranter’s book makes clear, Johnston’s writing career is littered with uncompleted projects ranging from biographies of his parents to an overview of genre science-fiction to a life of General Makriyannis.

Trying to locate and define what kind of poet Johnston was is a difficult task, even with the perspective of more than thirty years. One might start with the notion of intellectual-poet. Although it seems an obvious enough category – Christopher Brennan as opposed to John Shaw Neilson, for example – like a lot of such categories it tends to crumble if used too much. At the beginning of the sixties of last century (when Johnston was a teenager on the island of Hydra) Vincent Buckley took over from Douglas Stewart at The Bulletin largely with a policy of making the poetry more intellectually sophisticated than had been the case. Buckley, together with Hope and McAuley, are thus obvious candidates as “intellectual” poets, though we usually use the more derogatory term, “academic”. Whatever the case, and the radical differences between them, they are more like each other than they are like Johnston or, for example, John Forbes. The difference, I think, lies in the relationship with the ideas that are tumbling through the head. In Johnston’s case, this is a stand-alone pleasure: whereas other intellectual poets might be noted for the sophistication of the mental apparatus that they bring to issues, they are still referring to equipment rather than to the ideas themselves. Reading Johnston’s interviews, it is quite clear that he both registered, and mildly worried about, his tendency to delight in the play of ideas that might have no particular relevance to the living of lives. He frequently makes comparisons with chess, a game of staggering potential complexity but of no immediate cultural or political effect. As he says to John Tranter in the interview in Makar (republished in A Possible Contemporary Poetry):

Elsewhere I think you’ve brought me to task for my obsession with chess; as you say, “a beautiful but useless game”. I tend to think of poetry, I must admit, substantially in terms of beautiful but useless objects. I’m not clear exactly what poetry is meant to do. A game of chess is an intensely dynamic, intensely kinetic object within a static set of parameters, a fixed set of rules. The same, I think, in a much more complicated way, applies to the way language works in poetry . . .

The play of ideas as a self-contained activity, capable of being expressed (or “captured” or “developed”) seems close to the core of Johnston’s practice, though as I’ll say later, one wouldn’t want to assume that this is at the expense of the ability to write about “human” things like the agonies of loss, or a sense of permanently being “in transit” between countries and cultures. But the “play of ideas” leads towards figures like Borges who is, I’m convinced after revisiting the issue, the figure whom Johnston relates to most intensely. And so I want to begin this look at Johnston’s poetry with the figure of the “blind librarian”.

In Borges’s fictions the essential idea that all attempts to understand reality are constructs imposed on reality is developed into a rich range of results. Johnston’s early essay on Borges follows these through, looking at repeated Borgesian symbols – the knife, the tiger, the library, the labyrinth – as well as themes. It leads to a very sophisticated (and suitably vertiginous) reading of “The Garden of Forking Paths”. Borges’s essentially idealist position simultaneously raises the play of ideas and possibilities in a creative individual’s mind to the highest of creative levels – approximating the activities of the slightly shameful creator-deity of the gnostic universe that bulks large in Borges’s references – while at the same time reducing it to the level of a pointless, even predictable, repetitive and unoriginal, activity: beautiful but useless. But such uncreative creativity, whereby the only possible perspective is one of continuous irony, is not devoid of emotional intensity. Early in Johnston’s essay he quotes Borges’s response to the challenge that his work comes across to some as “cold, impersonal”:

If that has happened, it is out of mere clumsiness. Because I have felt them very deeply. I have felt them so deeply that I have told them, well, using strange symbols so that people might not find out that they were all more or less autobiographical. The stories were all about myself, my personal experiences . . .

Of course, this is said ironically because the Borgesian conception of authorship is one in which all authors are related or, rather, essentially the same author. “Autobiographical” which to us (and a naïve interviewer) implies the stamp of absolutely unique personal experiences, to Borges means something infinitely wider. This aside, however, it’s important to register the extent to which Johnston is more than a poet tossing around ideas. There may be a tendency (to quote Borges again) to “evaluate religious or philosophical ideas on the basis of their aesthetic worth and even for what is singular or marvellous about them” but there is also a powerful human component. Although the beautiful objects will be beautiful not for language or metaphoric richnesses but because of the shapely beauty of the ideas they bring together and allow to interact, they don’t do so in an emotional vacuum.

This pole of Johnston’s creativity is well represented in the title poem of the collection I am focussing on:

 The Typewriter Considered as a Bee-Trap,

is no doubt less than perfectly adapted
to its function, just as a bee-trap,
if there are such things, would hardly be the ideal contrivance
for the writing of semi-aleatory poems about
bee-traps and typewriters. Why, in any case,
you are entitled to ask, should I
want to trap bees at all? What do with them 
if caught? But there are times, like today,
when bees hover about the typewriter
more frequently than poems, surely knowing best
what best attracts them. And certainly at such times,
considered in terms of function and structure,
the contraption could be argued to be
anything but a typewriter,
the term “anything” being considered
as including, among all else, bee-traps,
softly multiplying in an ideal world.

For all its lightness of touch, this is a complex poem. At a simple level it borrows the cliched simile for ideas – “bees in one’s bonnet” – and describes the act of writing as a way of trapping such ideas, “getting them down” onto the page. The only real relevance at this level to what I have been saying is that the raw material is, in Johnston’s case, ideas rather than emotions or reality. The first of its little labyrinths is the not uncommon one of its being a poem about the writing of a poem – like his early, semi-comic poem, “Gradus ad Parnassum” or John Tranter’s “Ode to Col Joye”. In this mode, though we only have two levels, there is always the sense (especially if one has the obsessions of Borges in mind) that there is an infinite set of levels below: there might be poems which are about poems which are about writing poems and so on ad infinitum.

Why this allegory should be considered “semi-aleatory” I am not entirely sure. One possibility is that poems about ideas – at least the poems about ideas that Johnston is talking about rather than solemn expositions of some theory or other – always have a random quality because they do not originate in the need of something like an emotion or a theory to be expressed. They have no obligations and hence a greater freedom although they also have to face the challenge that they may be considered to be merely aimlessly playful. At any rate the end of the poem, specifically its second last word, requires us to read it in a Borgesian way. The “ideal world” is not necessarily the “perfect” world, it is a world in which ideas have a reality as they do in Tlön in Borges’s great short story. So the typewriter can be a contraption whereby ideas enter and proliferate into the “real” world. My own inclination is to read this situation as paradoxical (and hence labyrinthine) since the word “typewriter” suggests a “writer of types” an imposer of patterns on a vast reality which is impossible to describe without reduction. Borges, Johnston says in his essay,

starts by questioning all the constructs and interpretations we impose upon reality: language, modes of perception, modes of thought. All, to him, are more or less formalised, which is to say ritualised orderings of a reality which may have no order at all, or an order which is simply not accessible to us, or which corresponds only accidentally, or never, with our versions of it; we do not and cannot know.

The paradox, if that is what it is in this poem, is that the “writer” of such imposed types is also the vehicle by which the imagined object, the otherwise non-existent (or yet to be invented) device for trapping bees, can exist and proliferate. The reminder that “ideal” is being used in this specific, philosophical sense, then goes back to infect the word when it appeared, apparently innocently, at the end of the third line: it’s not that the bee-trap is an imperfect device for accumulating ideas and writing poems, it is saying that in the world of ideas a bee-trap may not as yet exist. Moving on from this, it is possible to read the poem as a device for establishing bee-traps as existing things, just as the hrönir of Tlön came into existence. This is all a vertiginous reading – and I am confident that its author expected that a proper reading would be, on the model of his own reading of “The Garden of Forking Paths” – and there may well be other ways of approaching it (the disjunction between its light tone and its explorations, for example, or the nature of the largely unidentified emotional bond between writer and poem, or the way in which its title is part of the poem forming an additional line to the required number for a sonnet and perhaps reflecting the Borgesian view that a poem is not an understanding of reality but an addition to reality) but I’ll stop there as there is much more to be said about the other pole of Johnston’s poetry, best represented by the extended sequence, “To the Innate Island”.

“To the Innate Island” is not an easy work to get to feel comfortable with. It comes, interestingly, accompanied by an extensive set of notes which, like those of Eliot’s “The Wasteland” (a poem which stands behind much of Johnston’s drive towards longer, multi-part poems) simultaneously clarify and obscure. The notes connect this sequence with an earlier one, “Microclimatology”, and the two poems are clearly connected in that they have a more diary-like structure and carefully note the sites that individual poems refer to. It’s a specific sort of diary though and far from conventional. It records, above all, time spent in Greece but not as a visitor, rather as someone treading an extraordinarily dense and specific cultural and historical reality – treading, that is, the atheist’s equivalent of holy ground, a secular pilgrimage. It is also, in complex ways, a visiting of an interior landscape and this, it seems to me, after much cogitation over the matter in the last thirty-odd years, is the meaning of the title. (Significantly its first word contains a crucial ambiguity: it is both a voyage to an innate island and a dedication to that island.)

The first poem, “The Shadow Screen”, is also one of the most challenging. Its title refers to the Greek puppet theatre, it is set in the town of Paralion Astros on the Argolic Gulf (literally in Arcadia) and the conclusion of the note devoted to it says, cryptically, “For the village, the sea and the cat, see ‘Microclimatology’”:

The small grey cat in the yard has a knack for the punctuational.
Confronted with unfamiliar yoghurt, it curls
bristling into a fluid query, later ingratiates
itself into tactful receding aposiopesis towards the garbage bag,
illuminated exclamation over the yellow light
of a butterfly to be slapped and broken, lays out evenings
in commas at the window, sentences from Proust
lapping to night where all cats are grey.

Spreads its net of signs, assumes
the harbour and the lights folded into the hills, and we see
suddenly from within the cat’s eye; itself
or a merely perceiving Maxwell’s demon, see eye and world
and shifting waterline between them, uneasy
that over the sea fauve stripes flow, our old paintings
of a felt jungle pulling back
the keen small mind of a cat, retracting its claws
temporary, promissory, conditional
upon a saucer of milk – yet do they see colours at all?

“Caught while attempting escape”:
                                   a tinge of sun
slid away past a lost flash of thought, apt cat’s eye,
fastened onto the suggestion of a web
of just such salmon-silver scales as just then the harbour
flaunting when the white daze of streetlamps snapped along the mole
dropped into place to the acetylene
fishing-boats’ drumbeat in a slick of rain
scattered over the twisting blue scarf of the beach.

As I’ve said, this is both diary (“here we are staying for a while in Paralion Astros and the lights of the fishing boats are very beautiful in the evening”) and non-diary; a celebration of a place and an investigation of issues that arise from one of the inhabitants of that place, “the cat”.
Despite the note, the cat in “Microclimatology” is a pretty minor figure in that poem but an interesting cat appears in an early, equally complex poem, “Sequestrum”:

There’s a special sort of madness in the colours 
beyond the spectrum: not infra-red
but the colours of shapes around the corners
of fogged-up glasses when, in the evening,
trees are faint white networks through the sky.
Perhaps the cat, at least knows them,
Not our cat, of course, but some impossible
Osiris sun-cat with convolvulus ears . . .
. . . . . 
But the cat makes passes, feints
at those pale fruit like fishbowls, or the curlew
chimes on the belltower, rattles at the window.
Birdlime and aspic, golden nets to catch the time:
here is no inland sea.

In both this poem and “The Shadow Screen” we are in the world of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus where 6.341 speaks of networks cast over the real in order to provide a system for understanding it. It is only a short step from there to Borges’s position that all such interpretive networks are “wrong” in the most demanding sense but right in that they can be enjoyed for their occasional aesthetic graces.

All of this seems to belong to the same matrix as “Microclimatology” and “To the Innate Island” and it’s possible that its odd title (a “sequestrum” is a piece of dead bone that breaks off) indicates that this poem is a mere free-standing (though humbly necrotic) offshoot of a larger project. My initial reading was to see the cat as a homelier, more modest version of Borges’s tiger. The tiger is, in itself of course, a complex symbol but Johnston provides a description of what he, at least, thinks it is in his essay on Borges when he says that is “the nearest approach to something that is ineluctably there, as the concrete embodiment of pure energy . . . . . [it is] self-seeking, self-defining, dependent upon no-one, it is metaphoric of the Ding-an-sich (und fur-sich) the impossible thing-in-itself of Kant . . .” On reflection, however, I’m inclined to read the cat as emblematic not of an unapproachable reality but of the way literature throws its own net over reality – perhaps the cat as failed tiger. In the opening stanza the postures of the cat are continuously aligned to written language and the quoted phrase “caught while attempting escape” can be read as a reference to the paradox that, in attempting to “catch” unmediated reality in words, language throws another net over the whole thing.

One of the crucial “pilgrimage” sites of “To the Innate Island” is Yannina the major city of north-western Greece and the capital, in Byron’s time, of Ali Pasha. Yannina is interesting in that it contains a lake and the lake contains an island so that geographically we are in the world of possible infinite regressions. “Finding Islands”, the second poem, is, if anything, more complex than “The Shadow Screen” and its structure seems to be to move inward (towards the essential, innate, island in the lake at Yannina?) while at the same time celebrating the unstoppable movement outward of Greek culture – not “classical” Greek culture but the medieval culture of hermits imagined to be founding the great eyrie-like monasteries and shepherds and painters moving northwestwards:

. . . . . 
                                    while new-moon bindlestaffs
fringed and striped, drift up through Wallachia,
Moldavia, hill-villages of smoke and dung, into worlds of grass,
over snow and lava, paying out
the luminous eel of lies, shining over the horizons
from Mani to Vladivostok, littering the hoarfrost
with lives of saints, fiddlesticks and fake-amber worry beads . . .

It’s another net but a culturally potent one.

The whole twelve poem sequence concludes with two poems the first of which, “Water Garden Snapshots”, reintroduces the cat (it, like the first, is set in Paralion Astros) and the second, “The Whistlers of Phaistos” introduces the Phaistos Disc, a rare example of the Linear A script, which has remained uninterpretable since its discovery at the beginning of the twentieth century.

“Water Garden Snapshots” seems to me one of the most intriguing sections of “To the Innate Island”. It begins and ends with references to “the inner garden which we never visit” which I read (not in a Borgesian way for once) as a symbol of the self’s registering and structuring faculties. Since these are largely unconscious, it is a place we never visit. It is a place where insects ”proceed quietly / about their unlearned webwork of small occasions” – another network reference – and the cat is “a cloud behind the bay-branches”: an everpresent though slightly camouflaged phenomenon. The most difficult part of the poem involves the transition that follows this establishment of an image of an inner garden to the repeated image of a boat tentatively entering “the bay”. Can these be reconciled? What is the physical point of view of the narrator? It’s tempting to separate the two and imagine someone watching a boat while occasionally checking on what was happening in their inner garden, but the poem resists this since, as the boat makes its approach, “the cat withdraws behind the bay-tree”.
At any rate, the poem wants to explore the continuous and slightly varied approaches made by the boat. This must be an image, coming close to the climax of the sequence, of what someone like the poet is to make of the freight of his experience of Greece. A realistic, snapshot of contemporary life is suggested:

 . . . . .
Or land at last and view the conventional scene:
oil-slicks and oil-logged gulls, fist-sized lumps of tar,
aerosols, beer-cans and blue plastic bags. And mosquitoes,
midges, caddis larvae, fat spiders, culture and nature.
This is the point where the script indicates: acceptance . . .

Another approach is to “row off / with your cracked oars and unstopped bunghole” though perhaps this is no more than suicidal reaction to the sordidness of a contemporary Greek coastal scene. Another arriving boat scenario imagines the boat having come to the wrong continent entirely – “’Lemurs in the leaves! Is this a joke? / This is Madagascar!” – at which point, significantly, “the cat takes its mask off”. The final image of the boat seems to me to be Johnston’s description of his own living/writing/psychological apparatus:

The boat is loaded
with a second-hand phrenological head,
a smuggled ikon of the Last Judgement,
an insufficient supply of hardtack,
a postcard of the Disc of Phaistos, gold on blue . . .

In other words, a poet with an interest in psychology but only out-of-date theories of it, a remnant of religious belief acting as a good luck charm and, as always with poets like Johnston, not really enough of money and other necessities for survival.

The last object on the boat of the self, the Phaistos Disc, serves as a segue to the final poem, “The Whistlers of Phaistos”. Obviously, the disc acts as a metonymic symbol of the unrecoverability and, of more practical significance, the indecipherability of the past, but its function in this last poem is a bit less predictable than this. The disc is a remnant from an earthquake in the palace of Phaistos (perhaps even the eruption that destroyed the Minoan culture of Crete) and the poem wants to compare Arthur Evans’s lavishly reconstructed Knossos with Phaistos. Evans’s lurid reconstructions are a classic case of the spreading of interpretive nets and the whole first part of the poem brings us back to Borgesian descriptions of the possible meanings of the universe (such as that the Great Wall of China might be a “get-well card to Mars” or that the disc might be a “model of the Great Spiral Nebula”). Contrasted to the disc are the three “whistlers” – “an old man, / a young man, a brown wooden woman in black, / playing badly on tin-whistles to the lizards and tamarisks”. The poem introduces both Minoan flute playing (an antecedent of the whistlers) and ancient serpent worship before making its final statement about how an individual carries cultural complexities and indecipherable realities within:

A twittering of flutes on the transparent hill:
the palace is pulled away for a split-second
when we can’t help
blinking - 
by some particular last attachment, the call of a priest,
a bough breaking, sandal-strap
aflap on smooth paving-stone,
eye that sees the whole of it through time:
adjustment: and we see only
blind inner skin of our eyelids
and for so short a time we can’t draw the irrational inference
to think it to a world, rightly.
The ceremony. Bunting and bands
and three tin-whistles. The elect
passed through the gates: through time and words:
spinning, onto the Disc.

It’s a complex final statement and one that leaves me with a lot of interpretive problems still. The individual clings to arbitrary attachments in the culture which prevent him from seeing “the whole of it through time” but I’m unsure of Johnston’s attitude towards our tendency to make “a world” out of the little we see and how this relates to Borgesian idealism. At any rate, the sequence leaves us with the image of a hieratic procession of life and art into an unrecoverable past.

One of things that strikes one rereading The Typewriter Considered as a Bee-Trap is the contrast between the poems of “To the Innate Island” and most of the other poems in the book. These are sonnets, adequately designed for the kind of meditations I have described in the title poem. The sections of “To the Innate Island” are, by contrast, built on expansion, variation and development. In a sense they are a good deal shaggier than the other poems but they also have more room for explanation. Often the shorter poems overcome the limited nature of their “scanty plots” by being gathered into sequences. One such is the opening group of six devoted to the story of Odysseus and Polyphemous. On first reading, these seem little more than examples of a standard, late twentieth century tactic of narrating an event from the point of view opposite to the conventional one and discovering, to everyone’s entirely predictable surprise, that things look very different from that angle. At first the series looks as though its interest is in cultural clashes: Polyphemous, seen in The Odyssey as being an antisocial solitary and thus, in Greek terms, as having no culture at all, gets to ask, “But how would you have done / on my IQ tests?”. But as the poems progress it seems clear that the opposition between Odysseus and Polyphemous is an opposition within an individual mind conceived, perhaps, with an eye to Freudian and Jungian readings of Homer’s original. At the end of the final poem, it’s Polyphemous who gets to say:

                       But at least,
you bastard, blind as I am, and a hostage
to your stiff-twined cordon of darkness, I
am still the one who writes the poems.

Another sequence of sonnets is “In Transit: A Sonnet Square” – square because it is made up of fourteen fourteen-line poems. Anne Vickery has written well about these poems so I will only concentrate on two of their subjects (apart from pointing out that the title alludes to the changes between cultures that are an essential pert of Johnston’s life and poetry). The second poem is about biography, important to Johnston because his own biography, as I said at the beginning, was so distinctive and because so many of his abortive projects – from lives of his parents to a life of Makriyannis – were biographies. And the poem focusses on the psychological impasses faced by any biographer who wants to understand his or her subject. While people can be treated as free-standing entities, it’s usually possible to cobble together some sort of theory about the shapes of their lives, but as soon as the picture is widened to include genetic history, things become problematic:

 . . . . .
Back past the sold houses in the lost domains
down in the midden-humus
glows the rotting trelliswork of “family”,
odd slug-coloured tubers wince at the touch
with feigned unanthropomorphic shyness . . .

The second subject is the issue of “poetic belonging” and is the material that the last of these poems is made out of. I began by trying to place Johnston as a poet and focussed on the distinctive intellectual cast of his mind. Another, more obvious way, might have been to locate him within the group of poets of his generation, those collected in John Tranter’s 1979 anthology, The New Australian Poetry. The poem is dedicated to four of the poets of this group – Laurie Duggan, John Forbes, Gig Ryan, John Tranter (as well as to MJ, Johnston himself). It’s a poem about being home after travelling – though, of course, the travelling has been to Athens and, as such, is a journey to what is really a very different, more complex “home”. It alludes to studies by Konrad Lorenz showing that baby greylag goslings fight as though they had fully grown and extended wings – a nice comment on poetry wars. But the poem’s final statement is that poets should “make love not imprintings”. That is, be members of a group by free choice based on admiration for the writings of its members rather than instinctively.

Thom Sullivan: Carte Blanche; Ella Jeffery: Dead Bolt

Carte Blanche [np], Vagabond Press, 2019, 69pp.
Dead Bolt Waratah, NSW: Puncher and Wattmann, 2020, 111pp.

Two impressive and enjoyable first books whose similarities and differences go some small way to helping map out the possibilities of contemporary lyric poetry, especially in relationship to place. The accomplished poems of Thom Sullivan’s Carte Blanche, for example, include pieces like “Moorlands” and “Hay Cutting” which apply what might be called visual lyric techniques to the rural landscape of South Australia. They exploit the always interesting tensions between compression and expansion, suggesting much in little and the general in the specific. “Hay Cutting”, for example:

Brown Hills shave back to corduroy
in the final hour of light.
On the hill-line a tractor rumouring on -
riding a wave of grass,

skirting knuckles of quartz
that punch through clay.
It comes and goes through nightfall -
a blazing white, low star.

There’s a lot to be said for this kind of poem: it fixes a scene brilliantly but has an imaginative wit and grace that a film (or photograph) of the scene would never have. There is quite a bit of this (what I am calling visual lyric) in Carte Blanche – other poems spaced throughout the book work similarly: “Idyll”, “Vigil”, “In Camera”, “Summer Dam” and so on. But such poems always come with an unstated personal component: some poets are always inclined to revert to a “home” landscape and some go so far as to see themselves as personifications of a particular place, an identity that can lead to an overblown sense of self-importance as though the poet were a kind of expression of terroir. The poems of Carte Blanche seem to me, however, to operate more on the oriental inflection of visual lyric: especially the poems of the great Tang masters, which are often built on a response to a foreign environment passed through in the manner of the “wandering” sage/poet, though rather than wandering, these poets are often making a point of visiting significant cultural sites. One of Sullivan’s poems, “Two Tanka”, overtly references this oriental model and its first poem, set “on the fabled Shenandoah” is at least true to the principle of representing a foreign, rather than a local, environment.

At any rate, a book filled with poems as good as “Hay Cutting” would be impressive but perhaps a little limited. What makes Carte Blanche engaging is that the poems explore the nature of “place-lyric” quite rigorously. Take the book’s first poem, “Threshold”, for example:

To drive out on a dark dissertation of road,
to walk awhile on its gravel shoulder.
A mopoke alights from a roadside tree: it is,
in its moment, weightless – a grace note of the if only,

of its existential absence. A tidal shift
in the wind over the paddocks. A fine grain of stars.
To stand on the threshold of this trespass,
memorising – as though it’s all you will recall.

It has the same visual acuteness as the poems I have mentioned: the way the wind moves over the grass (or grain) of the paddocks is “a tidal shift” and this is reflected in the “fine grain” of the stars of the night sky. But the underlying element is a personal one and it isn’t just a way of finalising and deepening a description, as it often is in the oriental tradition. The personal runs through and against the entire poem. I’m not sure exactly what this personal element is: most likely it’s a farewell either to a place or, less likely, a person. The tidal shift now reflects the state of the poet rather than simply the place and thus a sensitivity to liminal positions – common among lyric poets – gets internalised. The more I read “Threshold”, the more I find myself engaged by the title which has always seemed to me to be a misspelling as though the word for the place of crossing over has been shorn of one of its letters – it’s not an “old” where you stamp your feet but a “hold”, at least in my guesses about its etymology. In other words, it’s always seemed a word which enacts its own meaning: it can’t represent both sides of a door (“thresh” on one, “hold” on the other) but has to teeter, balanced on the doorstep itself. Fanciful, probably, but lyric poetry can get you that way! And then there’s that odd word “dissertation” in the first line, used as a metaphor for the road into the dark. On first reading it seems to be dangerously close to being precious, something good lyric poetry always avoids, but it’s clearly meshed into the personal component of the poem. It’s also matched in the first line of the second stanza by “existential absence” a most unusually abstract phrase which is, again, dangerously close to preciousness. Finally, there is that weird word, “trespass” applied to the road’s movement into the dark but also, of course, to whatever crucial decision the poet has made. It, too, is a nice choice since it exploits the word’s origins as yet another passing over – this time into illegal territory.

“Threshold” announces a kind of poetry fusing the visual with the personal in its own way. Many of the other poems of Carte Blanche could be read as ways of exploring how images can be joined and structured. One of the pleasures we take in the oriental lyric derives from the way the images are laid out, one after the other, without being enmeshed in hypotactic structures. The oriental lyric in English is an immensely complex issue, far beyond my competence, but either the originals, or the English language traditions of translating them (begun by Pound and Waley) create a sense of images which are simply presented and self-contained without having any of the tensions of disjunction that occur in European poetry: the peach blossom follows the moving water and there is a heaven and earth beyond the world of men. It’s easy to produce this effect in English but it can’t ever seem to be more than a pastiche. Many poems in Carte Blanche experiment with using colons and spaces. “Elaterid, Harbinger”, a poem about the subtle changes that announce the transition to a new season is an example:

a beetle enamoured with my lamp : a harbinger
of spring : as if the pear tree blossoming
on the footpath opposite was not enough :
or the budding persimmon : or the bottlebrush flowers
I didn’t notice till today : there’s evidence of spring
in abundance : the enduring dusk that’s holding
still : days that are shifting southwards : subtly :
to an alternate frame of evergreens : an alternate room :
throwing the first shadows on the eastern wall . . .

Here the units connected and separated by the colon are mainly items in a list but a more complex poem like “Suburban Panopticon” – “birds have their own topography : overlaid / on ours : which is vertical and detailed : / with its own system of needs : . . . ” – takes items out of what would normally be the matrix of argument – or at least statement – the kind of thing which is usually full of subordinate clauses. The importance of these experiments becomes clear when one reads a poem which deliberately avoids them. “Easter Morning” details the simple experience of moving into a forest, way from family who are “hunting eggs”. In the forest there is the experience of starting a bird and losing track of its rapid flight. Then the poet steps out of the forest and finds himself surprisingly close to the people he had left. There’s plenty going on here at the symbolic level: the date of the experience, a possible reference to Dante’s “dark wood” or to Alice’s entry into Wonderland, the sense of the mysterious, possibly transcendental, in the forest itself which is always only a step away from ordinary reality, and so on. But the poetic technique is quite unlike anything else in the book in that it is profoundly conventionally syntactic, beginning with the narrative cliché of a participle:

Walking down across
the paddock to the forest
I slid in a dimple
of dewy grass and sent
a sudden hare scuttling
from its hollow, down
across the open ground
to the tufted grass
at the threshold of
the forest . . .

In the context of the book this might be the most extreme experiment, perhaps to see if powerfully felt symbolic structures are enough to support a poem. “Easter Morning” is fascinating but a lot more like other poets’ poems than are those of the rest of the book. I prefer the distinctive approach of pieces like “Elaterid, Harbinger”.

In this series of experiments with the best way of dealing with images of place, there is also “Grampians Panorama, 4x6S” which mimics the way in which a series of photographs can be placed alongside each other to create a panorama moving from a road to a roadside shed, to the horizon and then, on the right “a wall of sheer haemorrhaging / cloud”. It’s an interesting effect and it ties in with a interest in photography that comes into a number of poems. It’s also not something available to the classic oriental poets although the eerily symmetrical blocks of the poems in their original script might have something of a similar effect. This isn’t a complete description of the experiments this book makes. Its title poem and a sequence called “Vox” try out rather different subjects and really couldn’t in any sense be about place; “Eden En Effet” is a kind of inverted version of Perec’s novel, this time using “e” as the only vowel, and “Jukebox” is an experiment with getting a more jazz-like syntax.

But finally, to return to the theme of place and the mode of oriental lyric, there is the longish sequence, “Memorial: Great Ocean Road, 2004” detailing a journey in the south. The emphasis is on significant objects and memorials though the first and last poems are mood pieces which bracket the journey. On first reading it seemed an odd series, not really in keeping with the interest in thresholds and subtle states that the other poems in the book are so good at. But, on rereading, I’ve decided to see it as an example of the other side of the classic oriental lyric: the tour to significant places. If Li Bei could travel over virtually the whole of China and, nearly a thousand years later, Basho over the deep north of Japan, it seems fitting that a good Australian poet should perform the same feat in our deep south.

One is tempted to make a spurious connection between Sullivan’s book and Emma Jeffrey’s Dead Bolt by beginning with the observation that many of her poems are set in the orient – in Shanghai to be specific. But in fact the two books could hardly be more unalike. Dead Bolt is anchored in personality and one of the (admittedly negative) strengths of the book is that it exploits this without ever being coy or cloying. There is always a strong sense of the author whether she is killing spiders, admiring the scaffolding around Shanghai, watching butter-bream on Stradbroke Island or staying with her parents. Another negative strength is the way the poems resist the diaristic: each poem has to have enough of a conceptual distinctiveness to stand on its own feet: and most of them do. “Buying Satin Dresses at Yu Garden” is built around its author’s bicycling. Early in the poem it is casually mentioned that she buys the dresses in passing, on her bicycle, “one foot grounded” and at the end of the poem “both my feet / are already off the ground”: it’s a simple but strong piece of poetic scaffolding. Another poem, “Pomegranate” tells of a friend who cut herself. A halved pomegranate reveals blood coloured seeds but at the end, when we are told that “she is almost through / the dark half of this year” we realise that hovering behind is the myth of Persephone, trapped for half of each year in Hades on account of having eaten six pomegranate seeds.

Not only in individual poems but in the book as a whole there are strong interests also sometimes staying quietly in the background. Obviously there is an interest in place but there is also an interest in time. “The Hotel Coronado” seems at first to be a poem about a famous Californian hotel but it is also something frozen in the questionable taste of its own time. An early poem, “Simon Schama’s The Power of Art” is, again, more about time than art as it spins out from the documentary’s use of the historical present, concluding, “Perhaps it’s lucky I’m still here / in these rooms / in the present tense”. This might also go some way towards explaining the importance of the series of poems, spread throughout the book, on van Eyck paintings. The resonances they have lie in the way the paintings fix a weird past and bring it into a present. There is also a good poem about the poet’s partner reading The Iliad. The poem doesn’t say that this happens in Shanghai though the position of the poem in the book makes this likely. At any rate it’s a case of bringing something alien in both time and place into a different time and a different place. As a result of these structures, interests and complexities, Dead Bolt is quite a compelling first book. Personality on its own isn’t enough to sustain a poetic career but there is a lot more here that promises good poems in the future.

Jaya Savige: Change Machine

St Lucia: UQP, 2020, 107pp.

Jaya Savige’s third book has arrived nearly ten years after his second. And there was a six year gap between that book and his first. It’s not a prolific publishing record for an important younger poet but it does give the sense of major developments happening between the volumes, something that a reading of the poems themselves supports. It certainly seems a career in which risks are taken and unpredictable avenues are explored rather, as is sometimes the case with other poets, of a successful method being intensively mined to produce a book every year or so. The title of this third book is Change Machine and, though the poem of that name is about a change machine at Waterloo station which is not disinfected during the English version of the Covid crisis when “charity lags in the polls”, it can be secondarily read as a description of the poet (or perhaps, any poet) himself. (It might also refer to a poem itself though the changes poems effect are more likely to be in the life of the author than in the outer, political world where, as we all know, it “makes nothing happen”.) Notions of change and development vary of course with the situation and background of the individual. As someone of mixed Indonesian/Australian parentage born in Sydney, growing up on Bribie Island and now domiciled in England, there is a lot of hybridity in Savige’s history – something explored in “Spork” a poem from late in this book – and that must affect any ideas about development.

At any rate, change, and it’s more judgemental counterpart, development, seem to me to be the proper way into Change Machine. One of the first things one notices is the high density of formal play in these poems. The first of the four sections is an extensive set of sonnets whose familiar fourteen line form does nothing to harmonise the subjects of the poems in either content or tone. In other words, it’s not a “sonnet sequence” but more an extended interplay whereby the variations in sonnet form itself – the various rhyme schemes, the positioning of “turns”, the division into stanzas, and so on – are mapped on to equally important differences in subject and tone. It begins with poems about personal difficulties and ends with poems celebrating a child’s appearance in the family, though, without detailed biographical knowledge, it’s hard for readers to be absolutely confident about this personal element. One of the features of the experiments here – though it is something that can be found in the other two books – is what might be called aggressive juxtapositions. The first poem is an excellent example. Its title, “ROTFLMAOWTRDMF”, is an immediate challenge for anyone from the pre-social-media age but it is, thankfully, explained at the end:

Egypt hasn’t had a native king since Nekhtnebf
held out at Memphis
against the Persians, then his nephew
didn’t. But even that wait seems no more excessive

than yours. Engineers measure the average life
expectancy of a system by the Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF).
(Working backwards, then, from Brexit to Suez,
Westminster needs an oil change about every seventy years.)

Replays show a peloton, summoning the dregs of oomph,
grow tangled in the thirty elbows of itself
before crashing into the base of the Arc de Triomphe,

when – finally – your jacket pocket vibrates with a kiss,
and the emoji for rolling on the floor laughing my ass off
with tears running down my face.

This is a striking and rather wonderful little poem. It is “about” good news, presumably good medical news, arriving after long delays and frequent attempts and the poetic pleasures it contains derive from the way in which something intimately personal is conceived, initially, on a vast scale (not unlike my own favourite in this mode, Catullus 11, which I think I have written about on this site). So the poem begins with the history of Egypt over the last two and a half millennia, moves to the technical measurement of a systems failure, comments on the contemporary horrors of England, describes the slow-moving but inevitable catastrophe of a crash in the Tour de France (a perfect metaphor for the current English crisis) before finishing with the crucial phonecall. Tonally, the gap between the beginning – in full scholarly/esoteric mode – and the conclusion – in social-media mode – is so wide that the way the poem can hold them together is one of its pleasures. At the language level there are all kinds of pleasures too. The title looks not entirely unlike the typically unpronounceable name of the last native Egyptian king in the first line and it’s repeated in the acronym MTBF. Something similar happens with the oomph/Triomphe rhyme. Here as elsewhere, conventions of rhyming are adhered to but the extreme (not to say silly) nature of the words being rhymed conveys the impression that complex feats of linguistic manipulation are being achieved but that they aren’t designed to sink into the background as necessary poetic structuring but to draw attention to themselves and thus create a tone of effortlessly overcoming formal requirements but without having any real belief in their ultimate value: it’s all part of a game.

One of the functions of rhyme in this book, as in the case of “oomph/Triomphe”, seems to be to highlight verbal weirdnesses in English, to create an alienation effect which will prevent the language being a mere transparent carrier of meaning. English is a weird language, looked at from the outside, with its mix of Germanic and Romance elements and some Greek thrown in at the technical level. Of course for native speakers it is very difficult to see a language “from the outside” and one’s own language always seems absolutely “normal”, even “natural”. I like to think that one of the features of this book is an attempt to help us see its oddness. It is present in Savige’s earlier books but not to such a degree and interestingly, those earlier poems which use this effect feel very much like the poems of this first section of Change Machine. “To the River Burning”, in Latecomers, (it is also a sonnet) begins with a suite of bizarre rhymes: “backache/Andromache”, “pax/Astyanax” and “nicotine/St Augustine”. In Surface to Air there is “26 Piazza di Spagna” – again a sonnet – with “blitz/glitz and “fountain/Yves Saint Laurent” as the rhymes of its first stanza and “First Person Shooter” finishes with a truly grotesque rhyme: “Oh, go on then, grope in / the darkness of your purse for ibuprofen”. Although it’s an effect I noticed on first reading these books I wasn’t then sure what the point of this deliberate ungainliness was. It is such a common feature of the first part of Change Machine that it does allow for these speculations.

In Change Machine the issue of rhyme is brought to the surface in “Give It a Rest, Mr Fowler” which is angry not about language but about Thomas Fowler’s comment in the DNB that a clergyman commemorated the deaths of his ten children “in doggerel rhyme”. Having lost a child himself, the poet is especially sensitive to this – understandably so – and it is tempting to allegorise the poem out into a critic’s insensitive dismissal of poems, metaphorically a poet’s children. It also has that pleasing structural complexity of being a text about a text so that three elements are nested inside each other: the poet’s comments on Fowler’s comments on Staunton’s comments. It reminds me (not entirely randomly) of Hope’s “Meditation on a Bone” where the same three-part nesting occurs: the poet speaks of a scholar who speaks of an inscription which contains a story as tragic as the life of Edward Staunton. Similarly “Plunder (Business as Usual)” is about the strange rhymes of the song, “Down Under”, which always seem desperately forced and one has always had the impression that the group singing them didn’t want anyone to look at them too closely. This poem finishes with a direct address to the song-writer: “P.S Colin, in case you think I am pulling a fast one, / I readily admit I nicked your ‘Kombi-zombie’ rhyme / for my Woombye poem / (but not the ‘nervous-breakfast’ one.”

If the first section of Change Machine is a kind of putting of the sonnet through its paces, the second section explores the possibilities of a different kind of rhyme. Called “Biometrics”, it’s made up of sixteen pages of poetry rhyming by anagram so that a line ending with the words “wiring hadn’t” can “rhyme” with lines ending in “handwriting”, “din, gnat, whir” and “thawing rind” amongst others. It’s a daunting technical framework to establish but it has two advantages. The first (I assume) is that it gives the poem a chance to generate its own meanings rather than slavishly follow, prose-like, the path established by the subject. In other words it reminds one of Auden’s comment that one of the virtues of rhyming is that the rhymes suggest new meanings. The second, and more relevant to what I think Savige wants his poetry to do, is that it taps into the linguistic weirdness that I’ve spoken about in looking at rhymes. Everyone who does cryptic crosswords knows that anagram clues often declare themselves to the solver by their slightly unidiomatic quality (they don’t have to of course: “racing tipster” is a perfectly idiomatic anagram of “starting price” and “eleven plus two” is, eerily, a perfect anagram of “twelve plus one”). It can be seen that in the world of crosswords, anagrams create the same issues that rhymes do in formal poetry: are the best examples those which are so skilfully done that we barely see they are there, or are the best those which have a slightly alienating linguistic effect? I think Savige is committed to the second of these alternatives.

The results can be, at a poetic/linguistic level, quite striking. The opening of the first of these poems, “The Convict Lying Low by Hampton Court, Speaks” is elegant rather than grotesque in its weirdness:

Home is the hoof-crushed water mint,
the hard rushes, and an adamant stonechat
declaring mid-morning’s parliament
again in session. I wear stag scent - oath

hosed into the osier in ample train,
chains of white-gold water like enrapt mail,
warm links aglitter in the pearl matin.

Here “parliament” rhymes anagrammatically with the last three lines. Another poem, “Credo, Décor, Coder” extends the rhymes into terza rima formation and the final of the group, “Carousel” begins and ends with lines in which the last words are anagrams of the first: “Dense night is a needs thing”, “A slide show of old wishes”. Although there is a degree of verbal play in Savige’s first two books – the third poem of Surface to Air, for example, begins, “A serene riot of bees, a pollen air”, not an anagram but a homophonic pun on the French poet’s name – these new poems are all a long way from the rather Maloufian early poems set in the sands north of Deception Bay. But I like the change.

The book’s third section, “Hard Water” is, as its title suggests, a home for poems about the hardness of things: dead and beaten children figuring prominently. The developments here tend to be conceptual rather than verbal and poems like “Hard Water” and “Mr Michelin” – “Mrs Allen was fond of discipline . . .” – are not even especially striking at a conceptual level: they seem to rely on the domestic horrors of their content for their strength. But “Hossegor” and “Tips for Managing Subsidence” are a couple of poems which have their own way of going about things. The first of these is built on the odd fact that a town in Gascony and a town in Tahiti host successive events in the surfing tour. There are extracts from Banks’s journal recording the proto-surfing practices of Tahitians at the end of the eighteenth century but, of course, nothing from the literature of the Vikings who established Hossegor nine hundred years earlier. At this level it isn’t much more than a poem built around a particular historical irony, a not uncommon mode. But the poem gets animated by the conjunction of the sort of solemn scholarly style of its opening (shared also by the opening of “ROTFLMAOWTRDMF”) and the brasher language of pro surfing:

Surfing probably didn’t occur to the Vikings
     but then you never know – maybe one of Asgeir’s men
          found himself oaring his chieftain’s faering

for this Biscay shore, just as a set wave jacked -
     the kind that narrows the eyes of the guns
          who yearly light up the Quiksilver Pro

(Slater, Fanning, Medina, Florence, Parko) -
     and intuiting to lean down the face of the monster
          felt it take, the shove as the hull slotted flush

into the vein of the sea god . . .

It deserves its place in this section because, for all its linguistic brio, it is, ultimately, a poem about the arrival of European thugs on a comparatively innocent shore – “the guns will return” – and this is more “hard water”. Ultimately one might have reservations that this is no more than a contemporary piety from one side of the culture wars but it remains a terrific poem in which an historical conjunction is animated by a conjunction at the language level.

The second of these two striking poems from the third section, “Tips for Managing Subsidence”, has a similar, though less intense verbal fracture in that it begins with a rather solemn discussion of a structural engineer’s comments about cracked foundations before moving into a far more tragic idiom. But this only reflects the conceptual shape of the poem whereby the narrator moves from a quiet engagement with the engineer to a surreal development whereby the death of their child prompts the narrator’s wife to descend into the cracks in the house searching for the child. Surreal might not be quite the right word and “magical realist” might be better but the power of the poem derives partly from the tragedy of the loss but more from the painful gap between the po-faced opening and the painful conclusion whereby the narrator, by training a telescope down the cracks in the foundations of the house (as well, symbolically, as the foundations of all stability) can just “make her out: / ropeless, shivering, a speck // at such a reckless height . . .”

You can look at the final section of Change Machine from either the perspective of content or form. It’s title, “There There” bridges both because the “content” meaning is one of consolation, and this is a section that has poems which deal with other aspects of its poet’s current status. These include being a hybrid (“Spork”), an Australian in the weird environment of English culture (“Stagger Lee at Her Majesty’s”, “Surveying What Adheres”), and being an Australian Joyce scholar (“Coloratura”). There is also a poem about wingsuit flying that I assume is a poem about writing poetry. But, formally, “there there” is a repeated phrase and two of the poems of this section set themselves the bizarre task of ending each line with a phrase that involves a repeated word – “Lang Lang”, “hush-hush”, “Wagga Wagga” or a word that has a repeated syllable – “murmur”, “pawpaw”, “couscous”. I’m not sure that the result is very attractive for a reader but, presumably, for the poet it fulfils the requirement that formal restrictions should be able to create meaning to an even greater degree than does ordinary rhyme. The first of the poems, with the wonderful title, “Fort Dada” – Freud’s “fort da” distinction reduplicated to make both a place and an offshoot of surrealism – spins out into the biography of a girl from Wagga staying at a spa in Baden-Baden drinking ylang ylang and so on. At the end of this last section is an experimental move – which I suppose can be called formal – of writing in the mode of Finnegans Wake, distorting words into a constant stream of puns so that “Husband, mountain, cooled volcano” becomes in the transformed version, “Hushbound, mountchain, coiled for-kin ache”. How permanent a development in Savige’s career this is, I’m not sure. Nor am I sure as to whether, if you copy Joyce’s mode, you also copy his world-view: in this case the idea of a world-dream that Finnegans Wake was designed to be. On the surface it doesn’t seem a fruitful possibility – it hasn’t been a road many have followed since the book’s publication eighty years ago – but then, with poets, one never knows where developments will lead.

Laurie Duggan: Homer Street; Selected Poems: 1971 – 2017

Homer Street (Artarmon: Giramondo, 2020, 120pp.)
Selected Poems: 1971 – 2017 (Bristol, UK: Shearsman, 2018, 289pp.)

An earlier book, Leaving Here, was built around Laurie Duggan’s move to England in 2006. Homer Street is a kind of counterpart, being based on final poems in England before a return to Australia at the end of 2018. The first of its three sections is a farewell to England in the form of a valedictory poem, fittingly called, for such a visual poet, “A Closing Album” and a set of additions to his English-based series, “Allotments”. This structure (and structure is one of the things I will focus on in this brief review) is repeated in the second section where an initial poem, “Six Notes for John Forbes”, is followed by a set of additions to the Australian equivalent of “Allotments”, “Blue Hills”. The third section is an anthology of poems about painters, “not strictly ekphrastic works” as a note at the end says, but reflecting in their variety of approaches something of Duggan’s larger methods which have always involved a variety of responses to the world itself.

One can describe this variety of response, in the poems of Homer Street, by looking (slightly randomly, admittedly) at the additions to “Allotments”. Number 112 is an example of extreme minimalism (another issue I will want to return to):

orange sky (Sahara dust)

glare of a wet street

At nine words and twelve syllables this is minimal even by oriental standards. It’s built, like so much minimalism, on registration and contrast: the wet environment of England is contrasted to the dust in the air from the Sahara which is providing the visually brilliant sky. Of course, it isn’t an entirely innocent contrast and I read it as introducing a very distinctive feature of Duggan’s poetry (a feature which always makes his poetry attractive) in that there is an oblique acknowledgement of the way a growing isolationism in England is threatened (that might be too strong a word) by an alien invasion.

There is more of this not entirely innocent observation in a poem like “Allotment 108”:

the door of the Bloomsbury Room
swings shut,

St George flags ruffled by
cold air off Museum Street;

a man with a basset hound
collects coffee from Ruskin’s Café

These are three observations about the Bloomsbury area of London but the flags suggest it might be a comment on a kind of genteel cultural nationalism and this is supported by the fact that the second stanza takes place on Museum Street, leading a reader to suppose that these three little images together suggest a certain kind of mummification of England’s cultural past converted into capital. The images themselves are not invented or manipulated to provide a nice, clean symbolic tableau. One always feels in Duggan’s work that the observations are “genuine”: Homer St, for example, is a real street, not an invention designed to activate convenient puns about homing-pigeons and Greek poets. This is a world which, if looked at correctly, can, at moments, reveal itself.

Sometimes the poems record more obvious jokes – “Allotment 116”, for example: “for realism / the right of way / from Brogdale Road/ blocked by developers”. Throughout Duggan’s work these are the sorts of things that get collected into his “Dogs” series which are made up out of a collection of such jokes. But “Allotment 113” is quite different to any of these: it is a prose poem detailing the experience of waiting for a poetry reading. Although poetry readings figure largely (as do pubs) in earlier “Allotments”, this is really a personal, almost diary entry though, as one would expect, the visual receptiveness is very keen.

The Australian section of Homer Street begins with “Six Notes for John Forbes” a poem which overtly refers to an earlier “English” poem, “Letter to John Forbes”, from the 2012 collection, The Pursuit of Happiness. Both poems celebrate Forbes as someone who was capable of seeing the forces underlying cultural and economic superficialities: in other words, someone who can see when the world reveals its own mechanisms. Although Forbes was a completely different poet to Duggan, there is much in their work which is in harmony and there is a well-disguised sense of “Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour” behind these two poems. “Six Note for John Forbes” focusses on Australia but the second stanza turns back to England:

I wrote to you a few years back
that England wasn’t the place you knew
now it’s even less so, or more:
the superstructure of class
showing through the fake edifice of “merit”,
all that bedrock pomposity
and servility that characterises the place
as Jacob Rees-Mogg, a seeming parody
turns out to be the real thing. . .

It’s a letter which enables Duggan to explore the imperatives behind his own poetry. Typically the result isn’t a manifesto , more a meditation on what Duggan thinks his poetry is doing and what he feels it needs to do. At the same time it reminds readers that the death of poets is a theme in Duggan’s work that exists in quite a different dimension to the registration of life in the English or Australian present.

The Selected Poems: 1971 – 2017 gives readers a chance to look at these things over the span of a lengthy writing career. It seems to me that the poems reveal two crucial issues. The first is the easiest to identify: what is the nature of the material. As I’ve said above (and in other comments on Duggan’s books) the essential material is the world as it is: an orange sky, St George flags ruffled in the street. These are usually, but not always, visual images – one of the advantages a poet has over a painter is the mobilisation of material from the other senses, especially hearing. It’s a matter of focus (an earlier “Dogs” poem from the beginning of the century contains a little poem in which a twenty-six word title introduces a four line poem:

A NEAR PERFECT DEFINITION OF POETRY SUPPLIED BY A QUEENSLAND POLICE TRAFFIC OFFICER DESCRIBING WITH A DOUBLE NEGATIVE A MAJOR CAUSE OF THE CHRISTMAS ROAD TOLL

“momentary lapses of inattention”)

There are also personal reflections, diary-like notes on the way the world is affecting the observer who is no mere registering plate.

The second involves selection and structure. Author’s notes about their poetry are generally only a little more helpful than blurb endorsements but the Author’s Note to Homer Street is very revealing:

I often work in the form of the sequence, an area between the long poem and the short freestanding lyric. This comes out of a sense that I am writing a long discontinuous poem generally and that everything eventually finds its place. . . . . . I’ve never felt that there was a single way to write poems though there are a few that I seem to use a lot. The results are always something more than the process, at least in any poems which succeed. I think I have always been a minimalist, if a minimalist with content, and that I will always try for what so many of the great modernists have achieved: more with less.

The second part of this raises the issue of minimal verbal description: what to leave out. And “Blue Hills 98” from Homer Street, refers to it specifically:

what to leave out
(the detail of all those tiles
instead of the sweep
of a roof
                 the art
of knowing when to stop

It’s an intriguing issue in poetry because one of poetry’s traditional strengths is its ability to do “thick” description either by massing images (think of Hopkins or something like Murray’s “Bent Water in the Tasmanian Highlands”) or exploiting the synonym-rich, consonantal qualities of English. Duggan’s poetry feels “modernist” in its deployment of a drier, more denotative diction (initially invented early in the twentieth century to tell late-Victorian poets that reacting against their predecessors by increasing the lushness was the wrong direction) but the contrast between detailing the unique “thisness” of each of a million dreary roof tiles and focussing instead on the sweep of a roof involves abstraction (isolating shape) rather than suggestiveness. Although I’ve said this many times in these reviews, I will say again that lack of a minimalist tradition in Australian poetry has meant that is a very “loud” poetry inclined to be discourse-dense. In such a culture anything minimalist is hard to get off the ground. If there is no cultural tradition of minimalist suggestiveness it can probably only be achieved by abstraction.

Opposed to the visual registrations are the mental ones. The body of Duggan’s poetry has a surprising amount of personal reflection. As I’ve said there are continuing meditations of the death of poets in poems like “Ornithology” from the 1990s. There is even, quite early, an extended biographical poem, “Adventures in Paradise”, although the impulse behind it seems to be as much parodic as confessional. I don’t think that all the personal responses mount up to a failure to be a dispassionate observing eye; I think they are based on the idea that observation – even of the moments in which the world reveals itself – must always include the observer. One never wants to praise a poet for tact, but Duggan’s usually wry inclusions of himself and his responses very rarely cross the social line into egocentricity. Nor, as a counter, do we ever think that the wry, self-mocking tone of this component is a clever social mask.

A lifetime’s work of careful observation produces a large mass of usable material and it leads to the central issues of Duggan’s poetics: namely – how to organise this stuff. This is a question with two dimensions. The first is the issue of what makes an observation or set of observations a genuine poem. The second is, how can these small poems be organised into larger wholes.
In the case of the first, although a certain amount of aesthetic policy (as, for example, the commitment to modernist practice and to minimalism) is present there is no doubt that the method is intuitive – a dangerous adjective to use, I know. But all poets operate with a test of “Does it work?” and I think Duggan is no exception. One could go on looking at poems from these two books for a considerable time but I suspect that even really close scrutiny might not produce much more than the feeling that generally the poems have a shapeliness built of balance and contrast rather than climactic rhetoric – you aren’t likely to find, for example, flocks of pigeons making ambiguous undulations as they sink downwards to darkness on extended wings! But most crucially, one never gets a sense, as one does with minor poets, of a simple template lying behind everything. Duggan’s poetry at the minimal level is based on an extraordinary variety. No doubt someone with an analytical-critical mind will in the future (if there is a future for dispassionate literary scholarship) attempt a complete analysis of all these different structures but I’m content to remain with a subjective sense of variety, supporting it only by the evidence that the extensive results are never predictable or boring.

The issue of the larger structures is also intriguing and one suspects that, as time has gone on and the bulk of Duggan’s work has increased, it has become a pressing problem. The third section of Homer Street might be relevant here. There is immense variety in what the poems do: some are descriptions of paintings that require a kind of immersion, others look at a painting from a critical distance and make a wry observation or joke (as in the one line poem devoted to Boucher: “only Cupid’s chafed arse is real”). I’m intrigued not so much by this variety – though it prevents the series looking like a “project” – but by the decision to organise the series of forty-four poems in alphabetical order by the artist’s surname. Alphabetical order is simultaneously a high level of formal organisation and a rejection of organisation itself because it doesn’t convey any information about the author’s judgements about the material. I’m reminded of the practice of Persian classical poetry where the divans are organised in alphabetical order (oddly enough, of the rhyming syllable). This plays havoc with Western readers since it rejects the orders made out of date of composition (which a contemporary critic needs in order to speculate about developments, imaginative growth, etc) or by theme.

So much for these middle level structures. On the largest structural scale, Duggan has made two attempts at unified, book length works: The Ash Range and Crab & Winkle. The latter of these is a large compendium of responses to England made at the beginning of his stay there. Since it is built around an entire year, it is in its structural essence a diary: it describes itself (again one wants to say, wryly) as “a warped Shepherd’s Calendar for the age of climate change”. But it is also an assemblage of experiences, observations and texts. It never occurred to me at the time of its publication but I have a sense, rereading it now, that its author’s interest in it may have been as much dictated by internal issues as external ones: it could be read as an experiment in seeing exactly how wide a variety of materials a single year produces. And this could, perhaps, be a preliminary to answering the questions, “What does my poetry do and where can it go?”

The Ash Range has fewer structural problems to solve. It is a portrait of a specific place, Gippsland, made up by selecting and assembling historical documents and so there isn’t any difficulty with determining what is relevant and what isn’t. The principle problems involve what “Blue Hills 98” calls, “knowing when to stop”, what to omit from the vast amount of material available and then how to organise it. The Ash Range was reprinted in 2005 by Shearsman and now includes an introductory essay about the process of writing it. It is striking how much of this essay is devoted to issues of structuring the material and it is tempting for a reader to guess that Duggan has become more focussed on the general issues of structure as time has progressed. On its first appearance The Ash Range might well have been a single experiment, an attempt to write a “documentary poem”, but by 2005 it was enmeshed in an overall concern with structure.

All of this, I suppose, leads to the question of what the nature of Duggan’s achievement is. In one way, it might be simply to be unique. Although he has close friendships with poets like Ken Bolton and Pam Brown, he isn’t entirely like them. He doesn’t seem to have any followers and there is no punchy manifesto-like statement that might prove the basis for a School of Duggan amongst younger poets. It’s even hard to work out what the legacy will be, half a century from now. He could be read as a recorder of his times, somebody alert to the world as it is who will be a richer source of material for future historians than current scholarly works of cultural criticism which are always underpinned by some theory which is sure to have a short half-life. But that doesn’t seem to square with what he has done. Worrying about it brings up the issue that Duggan covers a wide sweep geographically in his work. If he was a chronicler of any sort one would expect that place would be fairly strictly controlled. If The Ash Range suggested that he could have been a poet of Eastern Victoria, other poems – those in the Blue Hills series, for example – move to many locations in Australia. And then there are the English poems as well as poems about North America, the Basque country and so on.

He could be read as a poet-diarist progressing through life (and different countries) observing things and then making poems and books out of the material. But diarists tend to be more self-obsessed than Duggan is: although in England he gravitates to pubs he doesn’t seem to have the obsessive clubbability of a diarist. Is his total work a kind of livre compose shifting in tenor and subject as the personality of the author shifts but retaining that essential central thread of self? This seems to tap into lyrical pomposity in a way that is at odds with the tone of Duggan’s work. The two words that he links his star to in the Author’s Note that accompanies Homer Street are “minimalism” and “modernism” but these are far too imprecise (or, perhaps, multivalent) to act as guides to interpreting his work as a whole. I don’t, obviously, have any answers to this, only the hopes that the wonderful work continues so that it will leave this challenging problem for future readers.

Todd Turner: Thorn

Waratah, NSW: Puncher and Wattmann, 2019, 79pp.

A second book always gives readers a chance to see what in the first book was central and what was tangential, stuff to be got out of the way before moving on in one’s poetic career. And Todd Turner’s Thorn begins by making an immediate connection to its predecessor, Woodsmoke. The last poem of that book called “Fieldwork” in a deliberate reference to Seamus Heaney’s poem (and the book it gives its title to) was an extended move down into the detritus of a forest floor, into the lives of beetles and their larvae, nesting in the rotting remains of dead birds. It summarises the recurrent images of leaf-rot and its inhabitants which recur in the poems of that book. But it’s also about the searching as much as the symbolic significance of creative decay, the foul rag and bone shop of a particular heart, and perhaps it’s also about the limits of poetic knowledge. The first poem of Thorn is called “Thread” and is about a similar search, even if the setting is the inside of a person’s body and mind rather than the forest floor.

It is actually quite a daunting poem for a reader to come across first up. Something begins internally – “A pulse, an inkling. Numinous wellings” – and tracking it to its source opens out into a metaphor of landscape – “an unremembered wilderness”. We are told that this is done “more out of hope than quest” which is possibly a reminder that the archetype being invoked here, Theseus in the labyrinth, uses the unspooled thread (the English word “clue” develops out of the word for a spool of thread) not as a way in on some quest but as an exit strategy. At any rate the landscape becomes an internal one, overlaying images of the natural world with those of the body, overlaying silt and sinew:

. . . . . 
Though it takes something more or less
like groundwork for the tracks to reappear
in the vein and slipstream of a path
made unfamiliar to you now. Still,
you forage the pith and purblind chamber,
the heart hauled bloodlines of inherent bone.

And out of the marrowing absence comes
an undertow, tinctured within the weight,
a kind of nothingness that’s been threading
away in the silt and sinew of some buried truth,
like the pause before the breathless becoming
of a word that draw on its implicit shape.

This is complex and not entirely comfortable for the reader. The main issue is the question of what it is that emerges out of this weird internal geography, and the two candidates are probably poetry and one’s genetic history. If it is the latter then the reference to a word will have to be read as an expression of features of one’s past. Certainly, as one tries to work one’s way into Turner’s complex view of the things that make up his interior landscape, these are themes that recur.

At a fairly basic level, there is the theme of work, given a pre-eminence in both books. The first poem of Woodsmoke was a strange little piece about regularly shelling peas and there is always an emphasis on labour in Turner’s poetry. It is encapsulated, of course, in the pregnant phrase “field work” in which one works in an actual field of grass, grain and rotting plants but also in a metaphorical area of one’s expertise. (Interestingly, in this latter use of the term, fieldwork is seen as one method of research for sciences like Anthropology or Linguistics in which one actually gets out of the library or seminar room and into “the field”.) In “Thread”, field work is recalled by a related and equally pregnant word, “groundwork”.

“Thread” shows us is that the commitment to being “bottom-up” and always beginning with a respect for the ground of any issue, whether it is something as internally complex as the metaphor here or something comparatively unexceptionable like domestic tasks or rural labour, is a part of Woodsmoke that will continue in Thorn. Thorn also shows us that the interest in parental forebears isn’t something that the earlier book got out of the way but is, instead, a continuing obsession. I use the mealy-mouthed phrase “parental forebears” because there isn’t much in the two books about current family life (partner, children) and what there is is easily outweighed by poems devoted to the poet’s parents. The poem, “Kooravale, 1959” in Woodsmoke, which dealt with his mother’s flight from an overbearing father, is expanded into an eight-sonnet sequence in Thorn. And the greater length allows for some really interesting explorations. The title, “My Middle Name”, gives something of a clue since the series is not only about the way his mother and father fled by train to the capital but about the way in which such a denial of a parent on her part produces an absence in her son, reflected in his lack of a middle name. And so the sequence begins:

The sound of my middle name is silence -
my birthright by my mother’s reckoning.

We were bound by the broken bond,
the standoff between my mother

and her father . . .

Among the pulses and inklings that rise from the lower depths of consciousness and have to be listened for carefully and attentively are the inheritances of parents and grandparents in the form of our genes. “Heirloom” (which is “after” Hardy’s poem “Heredity”, itself a celebration of the way facial features outlive their incarnations in an individual and thus defeat time and mortality) focusses on these intimations. Genetic features are, in the language of the forest floor, things “you sense by impulse, like shoots of an under-level earth” and which resurface having been “sprung in roots”. Hence the title since these genes are “not a jewel or a thing you can touch” but instead a kind of loom in which a recurring pattern appears as long as one is receptive to it. It’s no accident that the poem includes the words “clue” and “trace”.

The second section of Thorn, devoted to poems about animals, looks, on the surface, to be a kind of relaxation into poems of observation, but actually it forms an extension of the themes of the first part in that it is their relationship to the ground, their “field work”, that interests Turner. Magpies for example are immediately introduced by a process of correction (as was the concept of inheritance in “Heirloom”) as being creatures of the ground rather than the air:

Easily mistaken as unearthly
yet far more grounded
than otherworldly,

poised and counterpoised
on two taut limbs,
strolling the parks . . .

The snail and the echidna (whose image features on the cover) are celebrated as indefatigable dwellers on the floor, especially the latter who gets a six-poem sequence to itself concentrating on its slow evolution “past the bones of dinosaurs” and development into a “site-specific excavator / of the underground”. Two poems of this section are devoted to the horse which does not, superficially, seem a candidate for celebration since it was domesticated specifically to carry humans rapidly across land in a way which ignored the gritty specificity of the mud and gravel of the long-trodden tracks that our distant ancestors were stuck with. The first of these poems is about a fall, and thus is interested in the way the rider and her horse make contact with the ground. The former says that it (ie riding) “is in my blood” which suggests that we should transfer the interest in the subtly felt intimations that Thorn is interested in into a pattern of the self that can derive from the forest floor of genetic instincts, rather like the face in “Heirloom”. But, at the same time, it’s hard not to feel the poem’s interest is also in the literal mud which both rider and horse finish up in.

The second “horse” poem (it’s not its fault that it’s just called, “Horse”) looks like a set of metaphors derived from the landscape whose function is to “capture” its subject. But what the poem does is conceptualise its horse as an embodiment of that landscape:

Bending to the earth, the silhouette of a horse
is a hillside, dense as almond wood.
From wither to tail, a bristling escarpment
drops to a levelling range and a broadening flatland,
its bare-blank spine, cradles the sprawling horizon
and valley depths . . .

It’s a most unusual perspective, carried on through a lengthy poem, until, finally, the dozing horse moves not into the landscape but into its own mind – “Motionless, under half-closed lids it has slipped, / as if flown from the bars of an unlocked gate, / bolted to the blind spot between its eyes, / dawning headlong deep in the dew” – a movement that recalls the first poem of the book as well as a fine poem about horses in Woodsmoke, “At Cobark”.

As though to make clear that this pattern of belief and imagery is not the whole truth about life and poetry, and that to see Turner’s poems as an assault on all forms of rising above, of transcendence, is to see only half the picture, there are a series of poems in Thorn which are exactly about balance. “Solar Lunar” explores the interaction between sun and moon in a “dance between gravity and space” that determines the interaction of light and dark on the surface of the earth. Although this cosmic perspective seems a long way from the forest floor, the interest is in the balance of light and dark and the final lines – “the bright rhythms / in sync with the dark degrees of under-goings” – suggest that our “under-goings”, interpretable as experiences (what we “undergo”) as well as deaths, involve a return to earth and mud. “The Juggler” and “A Ladder” are both concerned with balancings between the earthy origins of things and some kind of transcendence, what the latter poem calls, “ascension / as if the world were put on hold”. One of the most interesting poems of this section is “The Sweet Science” a poem about, of all things, boxing – it follows a poem called “The Ring” but that is about a wedding ring! “The Sweet Science” fits in with earlier poems because, in being about “ringcraft”, it recalls those words, “field work” and “groundwork”. Boxers work their ring as echidnas work their fertile detritus and poets work their themes and obsessions. The poem’s material derives from the well-observed variety of the boxers – amateurs, old pros, a “toe-tuned Joe Marvellous”, and so on – but its focus is on the common experience which is, in a phrase that deliberately recalls the end of “Solar Lunar”, “the undisputed dance to undergo and overcome”.

Not unsurprisingly there is sometimes a Wordsworthian turn in some of these poems, a detailed narrative of external experiences which form part of the “growth of a poet’s mind” as they do in The Prelude. We can see this in “The Raft”, “At Willabah” and “Tent”. There’s a relaxed expansiveness about these narrative-based poems that isn’t found in dense poems like “Thread” and, as with all such expanded narratives, the meanings are allowed to unfold as part of the fabric of the poem resulting organically from the events it recounts. True, each of them finishes with a climactic image. In “The Raft” which is written in the past tense and recounts a childhood experience of launching a raft, we are left with the symbolically significant image of someone leaping from the solid ground onto a raft, becoming “suddenly adrift, / all at sea, toeing the waters of uncharted skin”. It could be about that moment in adolescence when we realise that, far from being the centre of the universe, we are afloat in an inconceivably complex social ocean. Or it could be about what happens to poets when they begin a poem and find themselves frustratingly but creatively “all at sea”. “At Willabah” is also about setting sail – this time in a canoe – and it concludes with an image of the poet on his back looking upward at the stars. “Tent”, the book’s last poem and hence not one to be taken lightly, also seems to be about the balance between the forest floor and the stars but also the balance between the private world, symbolised by the tent, a “pinned-down dwelling place, / small abode”, and the great world outside. It may even be committed to investigating the notion of the perceiver and his or her interactions with the perceived.

These narratives are fine, stately poems and, presumably, Turner is faced with the issue in his further work of how far he should go down this track (an apposite metaphor) and how far he should confine himself to the intense and compressed meditative lyricism of pieces like “Thread”. He is such a good poet that it will be fascinating to see what choices he makes.

Aidan Coleman: Mount Sumptuous

Mile End, SA: Wakefield Press, 2020, 55pp.

Aidan Coleman’s first book, Avenues & Runways, is an example of a comparatively rare thing in Australian poetry: something in the minimalist tradition. To risk a gross generalisation, Australian poetry, viewed from a very distant perspective, does seem word- and assertion- heavy as though, in a country with a very small audience and a fairly low professional standing, poetry and poets have to be seen to be working hard and producing nice thick texts. What subtle suggestivenesses there are are likely to be framed by dense text. Avenues & Runways belonged, I think, to a sub-branch of this minimalist mode which is usually called Imagism. The word (and, probably, the mode) was invented by Ezra Pound in 1915 and he is responsible for one of the examples that all poetry readers know: “In a Station of the Metro”.

It’s clear that part of the drive behind the Imagists was a reaction against the verbosity of the Romantic and Victorian traditions. As with the processes of poetic history generally, the natural movement was towards the opposite extreme. But, just as a contemporary minimalist Australian poet has to withstand the accusation of being no more than an effete gesturer, so Pound was compelled to emphasise intensity and compression rather than cultured suggestion. His own description of the lengthy drafting that produced “In a Station of the Metro” is probably not trustworthy but it does stress the process of compression and extraction that resulted in a more intense and focussed result: it isn’t a bland putting together of two images – like a student’s haiku writing exercise – but rather a capturing of an intense but fleeting moment of experience conveyed through an image. And the experience isn’t a culturally general one: it’s a unique experience of a unique individual. If the mode still speaks to us it is probably because, although we are in no way like Ezra Pound (in personality as well as in historical context!) we know that we have similar intense and fleeting experiences and if we were good poets we might have been able successfully to convey them. That’s the roundabout way in which the Imagist poets “spoke for” their generation.

They also – though this might seem to be wandering a long way from Aidan Coleman’s new book – cleaned out the language of poetry: no mean feat at the beginning of the twentieth century. It’s the language rather than the imagery that places the Imagists at the beginning of English-language modernism. Pound’s poem is, compared to the poems of his first books, fairly denotative. We might quibble at “apparition” but generally there is nothing in it that might not have been written today, more than a century later. The same could be said for Hulme’s rather marvellous, “Autumn”. But the same couldn’t be said for all of Pound’s poems in Lustra because of his complex engagement with the literature of the past, both Romance and Oriental. One of the interests of “In a Station of the Metro” is that the two images which are combined are, respectively, something drawn from the European world – Paris – and something suggestive of oriental art traditions, but also something absolutely modern combined with something suggesting the japonoiserie of the previous century.

As I’ve said, this seems a long way from Aidan Coleman’s poetry but it does set it in some kind of perspective since someone choosing the minimalist path is likely to run up against many of the issues foreshadowed a century ago by the work of the Imagists. In some of the poems of Avenues & Runways the imagist form is exploited for its mix of compression and surprise. Take “She’s”, for example whose compression is advertised not only in its shapely skinniness (whose swaying lines visually mimic the subject) but in its refusal to allow the title to require an extra word:

She’s 

the choppy swing
of hips
riding

a cool breeze
through
this café

like the sea
parting
for Egyptians

Everything depends here not on a red wheelbarrow but on the last word. Where we would expect Israelites, we get Egyptians. The Reed Sea parted for them too but it closed over their heads and destroyed them. It’s a nice poem about casual eroticism – it’s after all a “cool” breeze – and its mesmerising effects on others. It’s also structured so that the knife isn’t turned until the last word, and that in itself provides a strong formal pleasure.

Another poem, “Estates”, uses the imagist mode to describe suburban sprawl:

Here, on empty blocks,
the grass fists and flames,
sizzles by day
or hums with the dull voltage of insects.

The houses built are set out neat
as breakfast on a tray:
the water tank,
the shed, the velcro-lawn.

Now it’s evening, lights come on.
You hear the echo
of a bouncing ball, 
bikes rewinding the streets home.

A train brews to boil
then simmers;
the crossing bangs
its pots and pans.

In a sense it is four separate imagist pieces put together to make a combined portrait and the structure of the combination is based on time: two daylight stanzas are followed by two in the evening as though the structure were a kind of expanded example of the old one-image-matched-against-another. This larger structure is one protection against the charge that the minimalist approach is merely precious. Of the individual stanzas probably only the last one has an immediacy and force that Pound would have approved of and it’s a moot point whether the entire poem could not have been successfully reduced to this single stanza. It does, after all, have all the implied connections between suburban domesticity – the “pots and pans” – and the infrastructure of housing developments along railway lines. On the other hand it’s an aural image (and a strikingly accurate one) and the larger structure of the full poem allows for a mix of visual and aural.

Finally, “Wednesday Nights” describes driving home after an evening class:

And then these Wednesday nights
driving home; the meditation
of a straight road; the cut and paste
of shopping centres, service stations,
the rhythm of street lights.

Three lanes and few cars,
there’s nothing else to read or mark.
The road opens onto fields;
the airport, set against the dark,
calling in lost stars.

It’s “about” the relaxed meditative state that a regularly repeated, and thus familiar, journey on an empty road can induce. It’s intensified because the previous activity had involved a high degree of concentration on specifics: reading and marking. Just as the road opens up into fields and an airport, so the mind, too, expands. The “lost stars” will be plane lights which do, in the distance in the night sky, look like moving stars. This poem works more allusively than the other two I have quoted because Coleman’s first book reveals a general interest in airports – in its title, for example – and we add to this poem the framework image of takings-off: of meaning in a poem as well as planes. “Wednesday Nights” is thus, in its own small way, a poem-poem, revealing an interest in expansion, of “taking-off” not only of the mind’s movement into meditation but of the poem’s movement into wider meaning than its homely domestic material. It’s a point to return to when looking at Mount Sumptuous.

Such a first book would normally have made its follow-up especially interesting because minimalism as the path of an entire career rather than a single, first volume probably requires even more daring. External events – in the form of brain cancer and a devastating stroke with long-term implications – made the situation of the second book much more complex. Most of Asymmetry is an exploration and expression of this crisis. Just as Peter Boyle’s Enfolded in the Wings of a Great Darkness tested how well his surreal poetic mode could cope with something as overwhelming and ordinary as the grief of loss, so Coleman’s illness is a test of the imagistic style which he continues into this second book. Peter Goldsworthy gives a good description of the situation on the back cover of the book (not a place that is usually full of enlightenment) when he says that the poems of Asymmetry “read like some profound and moving metaphor for the process of writing poetry itself”. This is true but the nature of the situation, of extreme closeness to death and then aphasia protects the poems slightly. Since what they deal with is of itself powerful, they are not as reliant as the poems of Avenues & Runways on the sophistication of the poems’ shape, images and resonances. Some are no more than pared-down descriptions of hospital experiences: “. . . The click / and dull bounce of machines . . .” But later, as the poems describe rehabilitation at home and a shaky return to work, the true imagist perspective is recovered. In “Reading Aloud”, for instance:

1

The eyes nervous
dragonflies
over the hazardous page

A deep breath in .  .  .

Then mount the wobbly tightrope bicycle of speech

2

Each syllable locked
in an opaque shell

Each word to be jigsawed,
parcelled, stamped
in a wink or flash of the tongue

Like America sometimes
I trick the iambs
or guessmudge my way clear

Again, in imagist style, this is really two different images: one for the preparation to get back on “the wobbly tightrope bicycle of speech” – a very memorable final image – and the other for the actual performance with the tricky syllables. And yet each stanza has its complement of interestingly clashing images: the first, for example, of an image from the natural world – the eyes moving nervously like dragonflies – butted up against an image from the circus world.

This is all some kind of background to a reading of Coleman’s third book, Mount Sumptuous. It was an interesting book to think about in advance of reading. Would it be a kind of return to the style of the first book? Would the events recorded in the second provide a new perspective on the possibilities of the imagist style? In fact, what the third book does is focus on issues of meaning and especially of authorial control over meaning. In this sense it is a far more challenging book than the first two, but more challenging for the author as well as for the readers. I think its aim is to retain the minimalist component of the imagist aesthetic in its resistance to all kinds of lushness, especially verbal lushness, but at the same time to explore ways of widening the gap between the items that are brought together in the poems.

Sometimes the rationale for the images makes obvious sense to the reader. There are, for example, a series of six poems spread through the book with alternative titles of “Primary” and “Secondary”. This gives plenty of warning that these poems will be based on the colour wheel whereby three primary colours – red, yellow and blue – are interspersed by colours – “secondaries” – formed by the mixing of the primary colours on either side. The six poems are organised so that each primary is followed by the secondary across from it on the colour wheel: red is followed by green, yellow by purple, and so on. Since each poem is basically a group of images united by their colour, they are given a logical rationale, but if the colour is stripped out (either by readers imagining themselves colour-blind or by imagining the images on an old black and white television) one is left with the issue of the interaction between images at the level of meaning. The first poem, “Red”, doesn’t really present any great difficulties for a reader. Its series of images includes a first car, mouths and apples in stories, children’s scraped knees and teacher’s corrections, carefully and unthreateningly written in green rather than red:

My first car red as a half-sucked
Jaffa, the crackling bacon
of its radio. The brick of all-meat
towns you dress
to kill on Fridays. The O
of mouths and round
of targets – you recall, in panic-big letters,
the shiny apple from a story

best avoided. Red is not
my favourite colour the child screams,
over khaki shorts and wounded knee.
Now the teacher chastens gently
in lowercase green.

Although these images are all butted up in imagist fashion, there is a clear overriding theme derived from the fact that they are all about the past and actually move backwards in time as the poem progresses. There is a case of cross-over between images when the auditory image for an old car radio – “crackling bacon” – connects to the “all-meat / towns” that the adolescent goes to the movies or dances in. The second image puns on the cliché “dressed to kill” in its meaning of “well-dressed” and the unpleasant but widely accepted euphemism that slaughtering animals for meat is “dressing” them. This links across to the phrase “wounded knee” in the second-last image which, apart from its homely meaning of childhood gravel rash is also a reference to the notorious American massacre of the Lakota Indians in 1890. So one could say that the larger units which are being connected here are about childhood and slaughter. More than that, as a reader, I can’t say, except that perhaps the poem’s interest is in the way in which, as children, we are prepared for “adult” horrors by stories.

My point in looking at this poem in detail is to explore whether this series of poems is organised so that they become more open, more tenuous, more “difficult” for the reader as they progress. The last of this suite, based on orange, is the last poem of the book:

Easier to paint
than rhyme, this volatility. A poet-envy
of the art-fluke, or ripeness
cut in segments sucked to the pith.
A plaintive case deflating
on a snack bar counter
where citrus men
swash fizz through lunch
and later repair the voltage of night
in the out-of-sync bounce
of signal and blinker.
You take a little kindling, the light
of a cupped match,
to hazard across deciduous campuses:
the vast, blue continent of theory. Go softly on.

It begins with a reference to the fairly well-known fact that “orange” is one of those words in English for which there is no rhyme. But, of course, for someone writing in an imagist mode it’s a reminder of the primacy of the visual. After this introduction there are two main images: a group of electrical repairmen having a lunch that involves swigging orange soft drink before going out “to repair the voltage of the night” and the poet himself lighting a match on campus – a hazardous thing to do when there are a lot of dried winter leaves around – and an attack on “the vast, blue continent” of, presumably, abstract thought (I don’t think it refers to the “Theory Wars” since they are too far in the past). That this continent is “blue” is a way of bringing the poem up against the primary colour opposite on the colour wheel. I don’t think, on reflection, that there is a great difference here with the first of these poems in terms of the demands it makes on a reader. Its final words, though, do lead on to another issue of the poems of Mount Sumptuous.

“Go softly on” is a quotation from Hamlet. Fortinabras, Hamlet’s alter ego, the man he might have been, or might have wanted to be, were he not cursed by irresolvable indecisions, says it while giving instructions to one of his soldiers. Coming as it does as the last words of the last poem of Coleman’s book, it is almost inevitable that readers should see it as a kind of note-to-self, a decision to continue in this “soft” imagistic vein which is quite capable of starting fires. The quote is also part of the book’s extended web of allusions. Some of them are to such high-culture items as Hamlet, but many are to far humbler phenomena. The balance between the two is interesting since it shows a desire to avoid a poetry with nothing but high-cultural allusions and resonances in the classical Chinese way. There is room, in other words, for bandaids, brillo pads and Blue Light Discos. Many of these are explained in the extended notes at the back. And these notes are far more detailed than they need to be: nobody capable of reading poems needs to have explained what Auslan is, or that band-aid is the generic name “for a small adhesive bandage” as well as the name (without the hyphen) of a “charity supergroup”. The effect is odd and these notes become part of the book and part of the reading experience of the book in a way that is quite different to the explanatory notes that turn up at the back of a lot of books of contemporary poetry. In a sense they are a bit like one of the poems themselves, extracting brand names and television show names from the poems not with the aim of explaining the references but of putting them together in a set of statements that is organised in the same way as the poems are – by surprising and powerful juxtaposition. Looked at this way it brings Coleman close to something that one would think was a long way from the aesthetics of his poetry: an oulipo-like generating of a text out of previous texts.

The other poems of Mount Sumptuous traverse a scale from, at one end, complex but intriguing and engaging to, at the other, really incomprehensible to the reader. Comprehensibility doesn’t here mean “with an understandable and paraphrasable meaning” so much as something which, though resisting simple interpretations, still gives a reader something to grapple enjoyably with. The first three poems, “Oracular”, “Cartoon Snow” and “The End of Weather” belong to the easier end of the scale. Their juxtaposed images are intriguing to an outsider and continuous rereadings produce, at least for a while, a feeling of familiarity and confidence. A poem like “Proper Opera, a Rom-com” comes perhaps from the middle of the spectrum:

Laws I follow
your lead

in breaking
we kiss

the lights turn 
headlines

bright
with recidivism

The title which has a near anagram followed by a rhyme puts a high culture form next to a popular culture one – as though anagramatisation and rhyme might be ways of making the things connect. The sixteen-word poem that follows might be barely comprehensible but I think we know roughly in what area its meanings lie: in erotic love processed through the laws of two different forms. As an example of the far reaches of the spectrum, I would choose “Jolt”:

Men’s heads pull them
through the suburb like fists,
their trolleys missed and lately collected.
Skin is not equipment
in this shaking off
of targets. Living is all
you digress for:

your heart tuned to the plane’s
engine, the slide of air
plateauing at speed,
in what seems certain, blank
and endless - the countenance
of our hostesses.

It’s not a poem entirely without footholds (images of movement through, suggestions of taking off and flying that recall poems of Coleman’s first book) but, after many rereadings, it yields only nugatory results – at least to me!

I think it is at this extreme end of opaqueness that some of the interesting issues in this book and in this mode arrive. If an author, writing in a minimalist mode, retains absolute control over meaning, the writing process might be no more than throwing out a series of clues to the reader while having the answer firmly in one’s pocket. The reader then jumps through the hoops provided and, like a good dog, returns with the answer. This is undesirable for both writer and reader and one can appreciate Coleman’s abdication from this sort of imperial control over meaning. But once it happens, all the emphasis is thrown on the writer who must be confident that the images he or she is juxtaposing have a rightness in themselves independent of meaning. As a non-poet I can’t say whether that is easy or difficult, commonly done by poets or rarely done, but it is a form of creative intuition and the entire viability of a poem is a heavy burden for an essentially unexplainable process to bear. Mount Sumptuous avoids the pitfalls that the poetry of Coleman’s first book might have led him into but it will be interesting to see whether it provides a viable and sustainable model for the future.

Graeme Miles: Infernal Topographies

Crawley, WA: UWA Publishing, 2020, 95pp.

In a poetic culture where individual poems often seem to be cut from slabs of discourse spun out from a recognisable set of obsessions, Graeme Miles’s poems stand out as having a strong individual integrity. They are poems (this is his third book after Phosphorescence and Recurrence) which, in other words, you have to live inside a bit before they begin to suggest their power. The “recognisable set of obsessions” is there but because each poem tries to be a free-standing event, it might be better to call them interests. It does pose a problem for a reviewer since the default approach is usually to search out underlying themes. I’ll be doing this in the case of the poems from Infernal Topographies but at the back of my mind is always the knowledge that the best approach to poems like this (as in the case of the poems of Peter Porter, say) would be to look at a few in detail and comment fairly obliquely on their shared themes. Unfortunately, that doesn’t make for a good or readable review for readers looking for some overall sense of what a book is doing. So I’ll look mainly for patterns of themes but compensate by calling them “interests” to try to take away some of their usual dominance. If I’ve space, at the end I’ll look at one or two poems in detail.

One of the places that looks as though it would provide a good position from which to describe these “interests” is the final section of the book called “Dream Genres”. Since a note tells us that this was a sequence written on commission, there seems a likelihood that its subjects are things thought about consciously rather than simply popping up one day as a poem among poems and setting readers the task of finding how it fits into the poet’s work. “Dream Genres” is made up of a couple of poems each under a series of five general headings: “More Rooms to the House”, “Dead Friends”, “Trying to Get Back”, “In the Vicinity of the Temple” and “The End of It All”. That’s five sub-headings to which can be added a sixth: dreaming itself. We could interpret the dreams of the first section – in which the dreamer, who lives in a “weatherboard bungalow”, finds doors leading to new, unknown and spectacular rooms – as being about visions of domestic life but also, using popular modes of dream interpretation whereby a building represents the dreamer’s self, as being about the self and the expansion of that self in surprising directions. We could also interpret these rooms as metaphors for poetry, a great expander of consciousness but also something which, at its best, leads poets and the readers of their poems into unexpected areas. Each of the four elements so far – dreaming, domesticity, the self and poetry – are major interests in Miles’s poems.

The second section touches an interest that anyone would identify on the most superficial of readings of Infernal Topographies: extinction, the dead, and the way the dead revisit us in memories and dreams: as the book’s title poem says, “since if / there’s one thing certain from infernal topographies / it’s the neighbourly feelings between deaths and dreams”. The dead can be dead friends – a number are about the death of Lucas North including one whose title, “The Inevitable Elegy”, seems an attempt to forestall the objection made by one part of the poet’s brain to another, that a poem like this is too entirely predictable – but they are not necessarily as immediately personal as this. One of a sequence of poems called “Domestic Fauna” details the visit to the family home, either in dream or in an imagined scenario, of a Tasmanian tiger. Although there’s the inevitable plucking of the guilt string, there is more of the unconventional in what the poem makes of this visitation from the dead:

. . . . . 
      It was like meeting someone
whose suffering you’d heard about,
someone excluded come out
of the past. It could almost have been
a person disguised or a sleazy god
in an old myth, hidden in a skin.
It had the look of someone condemned
who knows he’s innocent and has something on you.

“A sleazy god / in an old myth” seems to take us into territories not entirely predictable in a poem about the extinction of the thylacine. It recalls another, quite different poem, “Vehicle”, a breezily written narrative (its first sentence sounds like the beginning of a joke – “A mortal and a god step into / a vehicle”) which explores the situation in which gods act as drivers of chariots: Athene in Diomedes’ chariot in the Iliad and Krishna in Arjuna’s in the Mahabharata. Although it might seem a stretch to call this a visitation of the dead, in a sense it is because the poem is set in a modern car and the gods are dead figures from the past, here communicating by inhabiting a living body, that of “the mortal’s mortal friend”. Interestingly, getting into a mortal body, feeling its limitations and scars, not to mention its future decay and death, is described as a frisson for the god. But eventually the gift that the god gives to his mortal companion is the ability to see everything around him not as forms of vibrant life but as things living under the sign of future extinction. Eventually he is allowed to look into the mouth of the god:

. . . . . 
Instead of the homely apparatus
of digestion, you see how it’s alright
that worlds devour themselves, that some
old fault
in ape-kind can’t help but poise
its everything on a final drop, pretending
it’ll save itself at the last chance. . .

At the poem’s end some quite complicated things occur as the passenger sees, in the depths of the god’s devouring belly (the images here are more Bhagavad Gita than Iliad), himself looking in:

your shoulders relaxed, eyes fixed
on the shifts from cells and thermal vents
to eyes and mouths, and thoughts about thoughts
about thoughts.

That is, spanning evolution from simple life to material life to intellectual life. Interestingly, intellectual life – “thoughts about thoughts / about thoughts” – is seen in terms of a Chinese box structure, or one of replicating mirrors. It makes intellection progressively less tangible rather than stressing, say, the ability of thought to understand the processes of evolution and extinction, though that might be too naively positivist for its author. But the structure of these receding repetitions seems to occur often in Infernal Topographies. It produces a poem about imaginative language, for example, in “Some Similes about Similes About Similes”. It also ties together extinction with an interest in perspective making meaning out of the simple perspectival terms, “vanishing point” and “lines of sight”, each of which produces the title of a poem. A vanishing point is the moment of extinction, the loss of something’s ability to self-replicate, a singularity – to draw on the language of cosmology – rather than something which makes a representation realistic and acceptable.

As usual, in reading Miles’s poetry, following up connections drags one inexorably away from the main point which is here, the interest in the dead and their tendency to communicate with us. There’s a poem in Recurrence, “In Himachal Pradesh”, which has stayed in my memory. It describes the way in which “a family planned all year a wedding / for a groom dead fifteen years / and a bride never born” because it was wrong if he were “left single / with his sisters all married”. That’s communing with the dead with a vengeance. The happy couple are impersonated by “local kids”, but the parents “called them Radha and Krishna”. Perhaps the gods slipped into their skins during the ceremony. The second section of “Dunes”, in a way that mediates between reality, dreams and fiction and recalls Cervantes (or, perhaps, Calderon, or, perhaps, just the Spanish narrative tradition generally) imagines the poet dying at the age of eighteen and living out the rest of his life up to the present as a brief dream, shaped by the familiar dream mechanisms of wish fulfilment and anxiety, compressed into the last few moments of his life:

. . . . . 
               The dream fades
a bit when I suspect what it is
and there’s a furtive, lying feeling when I write
the date, knowing it’s really ’94.

Among the dead who are inveterate communicators with us are, of course, the poets of the past who start talking the moment we open one of their books. Infernal Topographies includes a translation from the poem by Callimachus in the Greek Anthology which is addressed to his dead friend, Heraclitus (not the Heraclitus) stressing the inability of death to destroy poems. It’s a classic trope but the issue is dealt with in far greater complexity in “An Archaism”. It seems at first that this will be a poem about the way the past is contained (and speaks to us) in old forms of language: like, the poem says, “eremite” rather than “hermit” but it develops rapidly so that archaism is imagined as a set of messages from the past – oracles – whose reliability is always suspect (one of the book’s other poems deals with the story of Croesus who, in Herodotus, is remembered partly because of his trick to test the accuracy of the various Greek oracles before entrusting his future to one of them). And just when you think you have a reasonable handle on what is happening in the poem, it shifts gear again:

. . . . . 
                                 He coughs
like someone knocking in morse code.
And he tells you all his correspondences:
a perfume, a virtue, an image.
Names and orders of angels, a leader over each,
a series of doors, corridors, mazes
of playing cards and tarocchi, to paper over
what neither is nor isn’t, where you can
pile up the negations as deep as you like. . . 

I read this as examples of archaic beliefs and poetic methods. Although the poem later speaks of “grails and trances” and this might lead one to think of the whole history of beliefs dating back to the twelfth century and extending into the seances of the fin de siecle, I think, on reflection, that it really is speaking only about the poetic practices of the French writers of the last half of the nineteenth century for whom the Kabbalah and the grail of Arthurian romance were an important part of their mythology. These are the Symbolists, of course, and one’s confidence in reading the poem in this specific way – rather than being, generally, about the beliefs of the past impinging on the present – is that another of the major “interests” in Infernal Topographies is the issue of French Symbolist theory. Matching the two translations from the Greek Anthology are translations of poems by Jean Moréas, Maurice Rollinat and Georges Rodenbach (the only one in any way a familiar name to me because one of his works formed the basis of Korngold’s opera Die Tote Stadt). You get the sense here of a writer exploring the works of this group and trying, in a poem like “An Archaism”, to come to grips with an inheritance that involves a lot of beliefs to which the only response might be a pile of negations. But two other poems in Infernal Topographies relate to the Symbolist movement. “In a Symbolist Mood” (which immediately precedes the translation of the poem by Moréas) looks like an experiment in that mode:

Distant, untouchable night is stooping
over fingers of street-lights
that push her away. And the children of night?
The children of night are in hiding
wherever the dark still is,
under their mother’s gauzy veil
or in the street where an ambulance
just passed.
          I was drunk once
in a dream, years ago.
The bushfire sun was orange
and I said that I wouldn’t 
remember this.
            So disjunct things drop,
as you forget them, with an oily, lurid swirl
of dream, a little drum-roll on the lids of the eyes.

Two logically disconnected images are juxtaposed, together with a brief statement of this fact, to form the structure of the poem. The first is of street-lights (which appear in other poems in this book). I’m not sure whether the “children of the night” are Count Dracula’s wolves or something more obscure but the contrast with the bushfire is extreme. One of the features of French Symbolist poetry is that since the unifying thread is unstated, the surface of the poem can be made up of a rapidly shifting set of correspondences that have no relationship to one another when seen as the objective part of the poem. It could just be a matter of European poetry stumbling on the power of poetic disjunction and it’s reflected in this poem. Another poem “Salt and Ash” describes the burning down of an old house built “in the year of the Symbolist Manifesto” (1886). It’s one of the poems in Infernal Topographies set in Tasmania, a state haunted by extinctions and the convicts of its past. I don’t know whether “Salt and Ash” attempts to be a poem in the symbolist mode but it finishes with rituals which attempt to stop the ghosts of the past reappearing in the present:

. . . . . 
The house where coaches stopped
on their way to the Huon, let down
a limp, thick arm of smoke,
pointed to the gap where the Southern Ocean starts.
Bury its ashes between high and low tide.
Salt seal it against unhappy returns.

I promised at the outset of this review to look at at least one poem in terms of itself and its structures alone, rather than as part of an intersecting mesh of “interest”. I’m very attracted by the complexities of “From a Colony”

Here stones, there sea. Some
hills, a river. Enough to make a world.
In the river flecks of gold so the people
come and from the hills watch
each other moving. On this hill
they see a horse, say esva,
on that hill say hippos. The head man
of hippos meets head man of esva.
Hand shoves into soft chiton. Hand shoves
into leather. Esva-chief falls under kicks
from lanky kids at hippos’ side.
Everyone watches. And the esva-folk decide
not to go to the hippos-hill with long knives
but join them, use them against the others.
And in years they bury the hippos-chief
under their hill, remember him
with black goats and warm blood.
Under esva-hill they hide their man-god
swallowed by the earth, the horseman
murdered in his sleep. They watch
from the hills, and in the pits and on low altars
warm blood and black fleece, sand.
Hands are shaken tight as strangling.

It’s a drily recounted, almost parabolic narrative. What holds the poem together, and drives it on, is its fundamental oppositions between the two tribes. The poem’s opening, geographical, setting is based on binaries – land vs sea, hills vs river – and this acts as a preparation. The story the poem tells is one of those which, in its simplifications and abstractions, seems almost on its way to myth itself. But it can be read in the opposite direction as a fleshing out, in this case a fleshing out of the old linguistic classification of the Indo-European languages into centum and satem. (For those not familiar with this early piece of historical-linguistic analysis, the Indo-Iranian languages developed some proto-Indo-European consonants differently to the Western languages and the difference is captured in the different words for one hundred: Latin centum and Avestan satem. It’s also expressed in the different words for horse: Latin equus and Greek hippos as opposed to Sanskrit asva.) If it fleshes out an opposition it does so at the most abstract level because it is hard to imagine such separate branches of the Indo-European family ever facing each other: that doesn’t really happen until the time of Alexander and Chandragupta. So I think it’s ultimately a poem about two very different cultures. Both are treacherous but the “esva-folk” (it’s significant that the word “folk”, redolent of Herder and nineteenth century German romanticism, is used rather than “people”) work by engaging with their enemies and using them against others. Most importantly they spawn different notions of life after death. The leader of the hippos people becomes, when he dies, a noble warrior, possessor of imperishable fame in the Greek sense and celebrated with sacrifices while the leader of the esva people is converted into one of the many gods who will later populate the subcontinent. But though it is a poem about two cultures, it is also a poem interested in the acts of narrative becoming, whereby an abstraction is fleshed out into an imagined event and an event is abstracted into a myth. A poem full of interest in a book full of interests.

John A. Scott: Shorter Lives

Waratah, NSW: Puncher and Wattmann, 2020, 136pp.

John A. Scott’s spectacular Shorter Lives is made up of a series of poetic biographies of crucial figures in the development of what is usually called Modernism but which, as the distance from it lengthens, looks less like a movement and more like a rejection of the nineteenth century and everything it stood for. Developments in art, literature and music, often violently ideologically opposed to each other, were gathered together by this common drive to a rejection of the past on the basis of the principle that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. And the rejection of the European nineteenth century is something that continues to this day, one hundred and twenty years after the formal end of that century, especially in the grotesque parodies of nineteenth century culture – as embodiments of all the issues contemporary Western life disapproves of – that appear in popular culture. This seems unprecedented: it’s normal to kick your parents as you struggle to make an individual life, but not normal to keep on kicking the crumbling skeletons of your great-great-grandparents.

Scott’s book includes biographies of Rimbaud, Virginia Woolf in her childhood incarnation as Adeline Virginia Stephen (this biography ends in 1904 at the time of the breakdown which followed her father’s death), Andre Breton, Mina Loy and Picasso, with brief suites devoted to Charles Cros (an erstwhile friend of Rimbaud) and Ambrose Vollard, the great art dealer of modern painting and commissioner of Picasso’s famous series. A note at the end of Shorter Lives tells us that this volume is the first of a projected trilogy and so the cast of characters will treble. But even then, these lives can only be a sampling of the tumultuous events of early modernism. One’s sense of the project is that the sheer size of the material of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century means that no biographical overview is possible, and no single character can bear the burden of representing the movement(s). This makes it possible to approach the entire issue poetically, looking, as I will try to show, for patterns, threads, connections, repeated images and so on – the kind of thing that a major poet would do almost instinctively.

And so the first thing I would want to stress about this book is that these are poetic biographies and the word “poetic”, as usual, is open to a slew of interpretations. The crudest, perhaps, involves the notion of obsessive interest. Scott has been concerned with the literary and visual arts of this period, especially in France (which usually claims the privilege of inaugurating the modernist movement) from the beginning of his career. In an interview recorded in the early eighties he spoke of the impulses behind his earliest poetry:

In fact a lot of my early poems and many in The Barbarous Sideshow were part of a vast master scheme which I never completed and which was going to be a sort of contemporary, twentieth-century mythology. It had two major fictional characters named Rudolph and Miranda whose lives were intertwined with those of a lot of people in the first twenty years of the century – the Dadaists, for example . . .

Forty-odd years is a long time to harbour a project and Shorter Lives is obviously a long way from the projected work of the seventies but the impulses are clearly the same. Of course it could be argued that there is nothing unique to poetry in obsessions – sober historians have their lifelong projects as well, no less renowned than those of poets – but obsession is only a preliminary poetic feature here.

A second involves the issue of imaginative freedom. Not everything in these biographies is “true” or “real” according to the principles of historical honesty. Scott doesn’t only allow himself the freedom of imaginative reconstruction or speculation as a conventional biographer might, he allows himself a full imaginative engagement, changing the reality where he wants. One way of describing and comparing the portraits of Shorter Lives is to look at the degree of imaginative freedom that each contains and to speculate as to the reasons for it.

The first life is, fittingly, that of Rimbaud. Whereas most cultural historians are prepared to credit Baudelaire as being the first “modern”, he always seems to me to be an artist going about his work without an unusually intense animus directed towards the artistic culture he inherited: he was a devotee of Wagner, for example, perhaps the quintessential locus of late nineteenth century art. It is Rimbaud who throws the first sizeable grenade. One of those geniuses who, very quickly and very early on, run through all the possibilities of past and contemporary art, Rimbaud was just as profound an enemy of the early precursors of modernism – the kinds of multiple movements of the fin de siecle – as he was of the past. Scott’s life goes from his arrival in Paris to his death in 1891. It contains a section in which Rimbaud returns to London and lives in a basement flat flooded by water which rises and falls according to the tides. The material comes from Rimbaud’s own Illuminations – as it does in the next section which imagines Rimbaud in Aden – but it is also a theme in Scott’s work. His second book is called From the Flooded City and it may be worth pointing out that one of the most powerful of his earlier poems, “Elegy”, is built around Rimbaud’s death. Dismemberment (Rimbaud’s leg was amputated) is another recurring theme. At the conclusion of “Rimbaud”, there is a section which imagines a later life for a Rimbaud not struck down by syphilis. Here, readers not entirely au fait with the lives of French poets in the late nineteenth century will be relieved to know that the imaginative status of this section is clearly signalled:

Arthur Rimbaud misses seeing the Twentieth Century by nine years and three weeks. How different if he had chosen to resist the desire to lie with one of the beautiful Adari women . . .

In this section there is both imaginative expansion of the “what if” variety – Rimbaud serves as a war correspondent for Le Monde during the First World War – but also expansions whereby the line between the real and the imagined become blurred. One of the rare later pictures of Rimbaud is a photograph of him as a trader in Harar wearing a fez. Now, in this imagined later life, his head has adopted the shape of the fez so that he needs only to colour it to attain “a permanent headpiece”. He also travels to Venice and unwittingly introduces the plague which will kill not only Thomas Mann’s Aschenbach (from Death in Venice) but also Visconti’s Aschenbach – a very different character but from a film “adaptation” of the novella. There is a sense here of one of the dominant modes of the entire book: what is present within the poetry (or art) enters into the world of “reality”.

Rimbaud is also imagined to have been a pioneer of the process of cutting up texts and making new texts from them – a process that has survived into modern poetry where other textual practices of the time, automatic writing, for example, have not. The first section of this “Life” shows him borrowing a journal which has poems of Baudelaire but whose pages he must not cut. Hence he makes his own poems out of the half-lines that he can make out by prizing apart the joined pages. At the very beginning of Shorter Lives we meet the significant phrase, “misreading where necessary”. Something similar happens in the brief suite of poems “by” Charles Cros which follows the Rimbaud life and in which the poems, a note says, “were assembled from mistranslations of the French originals”. Again it’s a recurring theme/method in Scott’s work: there are “versions” of Propertius in the earlier “Preface” (which, with “Elegy” shows Scott at the grand guignol boundaries of his art).

The Rimbaud portrait, which is at heart derived from a careful study of everything that is known about him, allows itself, in other words, a good deal of imaginative license, often deriving expansions from the works. If one approaches the book from this point of view, it can be seen that the Picasso portrait, a set of twenty-four prose poems, allows itself (I think) only a couple of such expansions. In the fourth poem, Picasso’s mistress, Marie-Therese Walter, produces the kind of demon-child that “Elegy” concerned itself with:

. . . . . 
For several months the creature remains hairless; what will be horns are barely knuckle-like lumps. The genitals, an inheritance from Picasso, are fully-formed and would be of prodigious size even for an adult. From the first, Marie-Therese deems it satanic. She quickly learns how it shies away from candle-light, rears, swivelling aside with astonishing dexterity. Mercifully, the horned boy dies, par hazard, glimpsing its own grotesqueness in a glass – death by self-sight – a condition previously noted in creatures half-bull, half-human . . .

The studio used by Picasso in the rue des Grands-Augustins is where Balzac wrote his famous story “The Unknown Masterpiece” in which three painters – including an as yet unfamous Poussin – discuss a work by Porbus. At the end of Scott’s life of Picasso, Porbus and Poussin reappear to look at one of his paintings, converting Picasso into the third of the painters, the fictional Frenhofer.

The central “life” – that of Andre Breton – is entirely fictional (and very funny). Breton is imagined as arriving in Melbourne during the Second World War and, while in a hotel, having Trotsky dictate a manifesto about art and revolution to him in a dream. Breton writes the words on his bed sheets and then later finds that all the hotel’s bed-linen is dealt with by Chang’s Chinese laundry which, he discovers, has affiliates throughout the world, all of which contain libraries of sheet writing including one in Djibouti which contains the bulk of Rimbaud’s work imagined to have been produced in Africa. The Breton “Life” is almost entirely in prose that doesn’t aspire to be read as prose-poems. It is in fact a part of Scott’s novel, N, which was deleted from the final version. It fits in very beautifully here as a centrepiece which looks at Australia in Surrealist terms – Breton is fascinated by the rebel and proto-surrealist, Ned Kelly, and by Nolan’s photographs of Kelly’s armour which recall the African masks which became influential in the twenties. It may not be intended but there may also be some sort of judgement passed here on Breton, a walking mixture of gullibility, excitableness and quarrelsomeness whose history remains locked in narrative prose, rather than poetry. Again, significantly, the work alters reality, especially early on in Breton’s voyage to Australia:

. . . . . It was at this time Breton came upon the idea of charting the course on his copy of the Surrealist Map of the World. As, perhaps, a direct consequence of this (for what other explanation could there possibly be?) islands mysteriously began to amass and to disappear to the astonishment and consternation of the crew who, for example, would be confronted by shorelines hundreds of miles in excess of the islands they had visited many times before. The Bismarck Archipelago, for instance, was now a group of major islands easily exceeding the size of India. Breton’s map and glass were confiscated and the remainder of the journey via the British-French Condominium and New Caledonia passed without incident. . . 

Either side of the Breton portrait are lives of Virginia Woolf and Mina Loy. Both stick close to the facts and have comparatively few imaginative expansions. Those that are there, as in the case of the Picasso life, stress the demonic. Woolf’s madnesses will, presumably, occupy a later section of her biography, but there is a lot of concentration in this section on the sad life of Woolf’s half-sister, Laura, the daughter of her father, Leslie Stephen, and his first wife, Thackeray’s daughter, Minnie. A damaged child, she is portrayed here as a creature of demonic violence. One of the Stephen/Duckworth children’s hobbies at their holiday home of Talland (in St Ives, Cornwall), was smearing treacle in tree branches and then catching the moths that were drawn to it. The section, “Mothing”, describes this and continues:

. . . . . 
                   The following morning,
Laura is out to lick the branches. Her large
          head bent forward, face

          wallowing in the
treacle and moth-dust. Her eyes raise at their
first approach: “br-br-br -“ she essays, but can
get no further down the narrow passage
of its letters. “Branches,” Ginny offers back.
“Sweet, hard branches like Brighton Rock.” She and
Nessa, scheme – imaginatively girl-to-
girl – upon their stuttering (honey-tongued)
half-sister fixed upon the bark. Breathlessly,
they catch her tongue within the jar, and take it
(‘br-br-br’ it thrums) inside the house to pin.
Meanwhile, back in Laura’s slowly working
mouth, the treacle seeps into the cavities;
and sets within the gums.

The introduction of a demonic element into this well-known familial environment might explain why a section is devoted to James Stephen – “Jem, A Brief Digression” – a completely mad relative and suitor of Stella Duckworth, rather than Stella’s later husband, the reliable and profoundly sane Jack Hills.

In the life of Mina Loy there is a brief passage in which her husband, Arthur Cravan, draws a pen quill from her back and gets ink by soaking her hair. This has a very “Preface”-like quality. And later, in another Scott-like moment, Loy actually enters a painting: Richard Oelze’s famous Die Erwartung. As I have said, the Virginia Woolf life takes us only as far as 1904 by which time she is still Virginia Stephen, not yet Virginia Woolf. The Mina Loy life begins at almost exactly that point, leaving out the first part of her life – her marriages to Stephen Haweis and Arthur Cravan. Loy is not as significant a creative figure as the subjects of the other lives but she does have connections to a wide range of important people including Marinetti, Duchamp, Picabia, William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore. She is also intriguing because her various attempts to write down her own life focus on the figure of Arthur Cravan, her second husband and nephew of Oscar Wilde. He only appears in this life as a figure of the past being brought into words. He is, in fact, what he was in life: a disappearance, an absence – in this he resonates weirdly with Rimbaud. Most likely he chose his name (one of many – his baptismal name was Fabien Lloyd) so that his Christian name recalled Rimbaud’s. His baptismal surname Lloyd also, as the poem points out, contains in itself Mina Loy’s surname (itself a conscious blurring of the original “Lowy” which her mother thought to be too Jewish – the patterns and repetitions in these lives can begin to get vertiginously complex). His disappearance – taking a repaired sailing boat for a test run in the Gulf of Tehuantepac – is one of those which spawned, Rimbaud-like, its own set of myths: later sightings, found remains and so on. Scott, focussing on Loy’s later life, has a lot to say about her relationship with Joseph Cornell, the reclusive fellow-maker of box art. There is also a brilliant set of poems about her life after the war in the Bowery slums of New York where people sleeping on the streets simply die of cold: a kind of prefiguring of the current pandemic.

Why there is this comparative restraint on imaginative expansion in the lives of Woolf and Loy is a difficult question. It isn’t a case of available detail since, although the biographical facts about Loy are fairly sparse, Woolf must be the most over-exposed individual in twentieth century art with her extensive letters and diaries completely available. Perhaps it is because neither Loy nor Woolf move so fully in the world of the demonic as Rimbaud and Picasso do. Breton, on the other hand, simply inhabits the land of the irrational whose principle is: Whatever can be imagined can be real.

This quick look at the degrees of poetic/imaginative expansion in these lives also points up another element that one would want to call “poetic” though, again, writers in other genres might object. And that is the high degree of formal organisation of the entire book. It is structured in seven parts which are organised symmetrically. At the centre is Breton’s visit to Australia. Outside of it are the lives of Woolf and Loy, each fragmentary but structured so that the latter takes off where the former concluded. Either side of these are the two suites – the sonnets of Charles Cros and “The Vollard Suite” in both of which a good deal of imaginative expansion takes place (Vollard finds among his paintings works by “someone Pollock, someone Warhol, someone Bacon”). And then at the beginning and end are the lives of Rimbaud and Picasso.

This patterning is reflected in the styles of the sections. While Breton’s life is, as I have said, told in Scott’s elegant narrative prose, the opening and closing lives are really prose poems. In fact there is a good reason to feel that the method of the twenty-four images we get of Picasso is designed to make us recall Rimbaud’s Illuminations. In contrast, the lives of Loy and Woolf, though they contain prose sections, are predominantly done as sonnets, poems which have a distinctive visual shape (rather than a simple line count) in that both the first and last lines are indented. It’s a poem shape that dates back to Scott’s earliest work in The Barbarous Sideshow but here its complexity is multiplied by a set of conventions which are, so to speak, bolted on to the text. There are passages set in Courier font to indicate quotation from the author, there are marginal glosses and also footnotes. Virginia’s half-sister, Laura, has her effacement (she was eventually “institutionalised”) represented by having appearances of her name screened. James Stephen has his speech done in an old-style wedding-invitation font. The visual effect is spectacular and the poetic effect is intriguing because it is yet another attempt – more successful than the usual double columns etc – to move poetry away from linearity into multi-level meanings and perspectives. Of course, the downside is that it’s a nightmare to quote and I expect that in this book’s many reviews there will be few actual quotations from the lives of Virginia and Mina – the textual challenges would make it too difficult.

Finally, on this issue of what the word, “poetic” in the phrase, “poetic biographies” might entail, there is the question of the sensitivity to patterns and repetitions. I’ll take one example only from the dozens one might list. Mina Loy’s life includes detail about her son-in-law, Julien Levy. He was the son of a wealthy American real estate dealer who, though to some extent besotted with Mina (“inappropriate” sexual bonds are also a feature of Woolf’s life) married her daughter, Joella. He set up a very important art gallery in New York and introduced many of the artists of the modernist period to America with Loy acting as his Paris agent. One of these was Arshile Gorky. In mid-1948 Levy was driving in rain with Gorky as passenger. The car overturned, Gorky was left paralysed and unable to paint and shortly thereafter suicided, having “gone through the empty house, seeking out his favourite spots and preparing an individually-made noose for each of them”. The third of the three poems of “The Vollard Suite” – the next section of the book – describes Vollard’s death in 1939. While he is returning to his house, his chauffeur-driven car loses control on the wet road, somersaults, and Vollard is killed when material from the back of the car flies forward and breaks his neck. A note tells us that one of Vollard’s clients, Maillol, also died (in 1944) when the car in which he was a passenger skidded and rolled during a thunderstorm.

This is a fairly obvious example of the sort of chimings that attract a poet’s attention though they might be blurred within a straightforward, individual-based biography where they can only be interesting contingencies that would be relegated to a footnote (assuming they survived an editor’s pen). Another example might be the complex issue of movement, especially between countries. But there are other patterns within individual lives which are picked out in the poems. Rimbaud’s constant “drive to the east”, his continuous efforts to get away from Roche, his home, to the warm lands of Africa, are frustrated continually and, when eventually they are successful, turn out to be no more than a preparation for his final return home to die. Mina Loy’s constant movement seems a symbol of the idea of transforming the self and, possibly, making a “modernist” self. We see her passing through doors and a quote from the New York paper, Evening Sun, speaks of her as “already half-way through the door into / Tomorrow.”

Continuous rereading prompts all sorts of other examples and perhaps the most convincing connotation of the word “poetic” is that the method encourages (perhaps demands) an imaginative expansion on the part of the reader. I find myself beginning to plot my own course through this landscape, wondering, for example, what Woolf and Loy, as little girls, were doing on the day Rimbaud died. There are the birthdates also. Virginia Woolf was born on the 25th January, 1881 and Mina Loy on the 27th December of the same year. There are suggestive but entirely fortuitous harmonisings here: one opening the natal year, the other arriving at its close. And then there is Picasso, born on the same day as Woolf but three months earlier. Nothing in Shorter Lives explicitly connects this pair but one could meditate at length about one being a mirror image of the other: one whose madness expresses itself in creativity and a violent assertion of sexuality, the other in some way internalising the madness into psychotic, self-destructive spells. One working through a succession of partners, the other clinging to one, etc etc. And then there is the fact that Picasso is born exactly ten days after P.G. Wodehouse a figure who, in a way, represents exactly the opposite of modernism (though he lived in France for a time and migrated to America, like Mina Loy, and wrote for American musicals which might be seen as part of the reaction against nineteenth century, Germanic musicals). He also, unlike Loy and Picasso, had a direct experience of the demonic, not so much in being imprisoned by the Germans but in being tormented by English newspapers as a Nazi-sympathiser, a victim of the demonic powers of the popular press. I’ll stop here. Once one includes someone like Wodehouse in the landscape, the possibilities become vertiginous and that way madness lies!

The fundamental issue that its nature as a succession of “poetic biographies” raises is whether Shorter Lives is a contribution to the historical reconstruction of modernism (done by looking at the sorts of things conventional biography omits) or whether it is another, parallel universe to the actual historical period, one in which a poet can allow himself imaginative entries and expansions and one in which the creative powers of the individual artists are allowed to create a reality. I’m not entirely sure – an embarrassing admission for a reviewer. As evidence that it is the former is the fact that there are no wholesale changes to known history: Virginia Woolf doesn’t conduct an adolescent relationship with her half-brother (and first publisher) Gerald Duckworth, and Mina Loy doesn’t shoot Cravan in the wrist. The imaginative scenes are grafts rather than “alternate universe” changes to the historical timeline. I would like to sit on the fence and say that it partakes of both with perhaps a slight leaning toward the latter. Presumably the later instalments will help to clarify this problem. But, despite ones uncertainties about exactly what kind of book one is reading, it’s impossible to overstress just how extraordinarily fertile and imaginatively dense Shorter Lives is: there is more complexity and achieved ambition in half a dozen of its pages than in most books of contemporary Australian poetry.

Martin Langford: Eardrum: Poems and Prose about Music

Waratah, NSW: Puncher and Wattmann, 2019, 153pp.

Music is the most emotionally engaging of the arts/entertainments, the one we hold most closely to. You can lose friends after arguing about music whereas you are unlikely to lose friends claiming that Thackeray is a better novelist than Dickens or that Antonioni’s films are overrated. Martin Langford’s Eardrum is entirely about music. It is immediately engaging (at least to me) but unusually difficult to write about because one is continuously breaking off one’s own composition to argue with some specific point or to follow another one further. This usually doesn’t happen with books of poetry where a critic is able to retain a certain personal distance from what a poem wants to say about society or a tree, or wants to do in some experiment with form or language.

Eardrum is made up of three parts: a nearly booklength collection of poems; an extended set of short poems, some of which could be called squibs, some more like epigrams (the section is called “Minims”); and a final set of prose pieces, meditations on music. There are a lot of structural issues at play here. When you first pick up the book, you think immediately of a kind of symphonic structure (though of only three movements) with “Minims” – which reminds me both in tone and form of Peter Porter’s “Scordatura” from his Afterburner – as a sort of scherzo. But for the conclusion to be prose seems odd. Is it analogous to the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth which tries to negotiate a move into an entirely different form? Could the three parts have been reversed? Not really because then the prose ideas would predate the poems (structurally) and make the poems seem like statements of a predetermined set of understandings. It’s a complex business and I’ll have more to say about it later when I try to analyse the relation of prose and poetry in this and Langford’s other work.

The next thing to recognise is how dauntingly wide, deep and, most importantly, ecumenical Langford’s grasp of music is – far wider than mine and far more ecumenical. Punk and Rock get treated in the same dispassionate analytical way as does Classical. (At this point let me – as thousands have before me – remind readers of the inadequacy of this term which simultaneously denotes all “art-music” and art music in the brief but crucial period between the mid 1750s and, perhaps the death of Mozart in 1791. To keep calling art-music Classical Music privileges the sonata form of a movement away from the home key to which the music ultimately returns. It’s a bit like defining lyric poetry since Sappho in terms of Renaissance works and calling it not “lyric” but “Petrarchan”.) At any rate, the ecumenicalism is built into the structure of Eardrum. The opening poem, “The Finales” – whose title and subject is a nicely timed irony – is about art music. Its subject is one to which many of the poems and prose pieces in the book return: the notion that nineteenth century music is cursed by its striving towards an unattainable transcendence:

A Beethoven ending is not a true ending.

It can’t be. There are no such things.

He raises the volume.

He tensions the strings and attacks . . .

Eases silk across skin.

Still God refuses to happen.

He pounds with that great club, his talent;
empurples the air
with the claim that a world has been won –

leaving his heirs
to the doubts after Ludwig – . . . 

I think, as I have thought throughout my rereadings of this book, that this is a little unfair. And here, as with the term “Classical Music”, I’m dragged away from Eardrum and into my own thoughts on the subject. What matters in an art form is not the restrictedness of the possibilities in which it operates but how it accommodates to these. I think Beethoven – a genius rather than a talent and one who had experienced more than most of us of the vicissitudes of both History and personal disaster – knew that the structures of his great public works, pieces like the odd numbered symphonies, Fidelio and the Missa Solemnis were failing gestures, perhaps glimpses of God and human unity that were never possible, but made the gestures nevertheless and changed the inheritance of Haydn so the these gestures arose from the music. He knew, in other words, that he was banging his head against an unbreakable ceiling and it is significant that his endings (the Ninth Symphony, the Opus 130’s original Grand Fugue) are problematic – though perhaps more for us than for him. If I have concerns about the music it is that the great Beethovenian climaxes (notoriously that of the fifth symphony) sound military to my untrained ear.

Again, this is something of a distraction – the kind of distraction that Eardrum constantly leads me into. My initial point was that the book’s structure declares its ecumenicalism. The first poem is about art music, the second, “The Stone Song”, about music seen as the expression of the long human drive towards violence and cruelty. It’s not exactly the same as the military sound that worries me in Beethoven’s “grand” works but military marches are part of it: demanding that all march in the same time towards a goal established by others. It’s a music which, the poem says, can be found in the nastier banter of the lounge room during peace time

. . . . . 
but which will – if the hunting comes back -
soon flower again
to a stale room, a barge smeared with blood.

The third poem is about Ligeti’s “Atmosphères” a mid-twentieth century avantgarde piece known to people because of its appearance in Kubrick’s 2001. We have left the problems of the nineteenth century behind only to encounter another set of difficulties:

The inversion of scale is complete.

This is not music
where selves loom as monsters of doubt -
driving the action-plan, searching for home -
flailing around as theatre and actors and script.

Here there are only
immense folds of darkness.

At one point: some wingbeats.

Then: miniature dialogues, off.

Based on the kinds of things that other poems have to say, this should be read as approval, I think. The word “dialogues” always has positive connotations here and Langford is usually interested in contemporary music which turns its attentions otherwhere to form a counter arc to the development of harmonically based music. After this poem comes a poem about the Rolling Stones’ early signature piece, “Satisfaction”; then one about the shakuhachi flute being played at Government House under the watchful eye of a painting of one of the English kings so that a music which explores “prairies with no known co-ordinates” is contrasted with what postcolonial critics would call a measuring imperial gaze; then a poem about dance hall music.

This survey-like shape recurs in the order of the next section, “Minims”. It begins with a poem about Punk – “Punk: when ‘wanna screw, / wanna screw, right fucking “now,” / was a moment of cultural significance”, follows this with a poem about jazz, then a poem juxtaposing Furtwängler’s wartime conducting of Wagner with the bland big-band music of victorious American soldiers. Next is a poem about Sinatra. One of the “Minims” catches this width of reach nicely, exploiting the surprises that can derive from considering “serious” and “popular” music as parts of a whole:

James Brown,
live at the Apollo -

or Mitsuko Uchida,
calming a trill -
both are the music of bodies.

So the range is very wide. But the position is distinctive. The music critics we usually read, ranging from Rosen and Ross down to humble liner notes, are often content to see a work in the context of developments in music history, occasionally making gestures towards broader cultural phenomena such as Romanticism or Modernism. Langford comes at music as a phenomenon of creativity enmeshed in a particular social setting. The driving forces – as we will see later, often the conflict between the mind and the body, or understanding and dance – are at quite a different level of abstraction and in quite a different location. As the first of the prose pieces says:

A recurring theme of Western music has been the way that, whenever the iterations of the subject have started to pall, music has turned to the dance: to lighten things up, to make things more bearable – or because we have a sense, anyway, of the necessity of interplay. If the eighteenth century’s celebrations of kings and their victories became pompous, then it was time to revisit the bourrees and scottisches where one could forget power for a while. Once those elegant suites began to sound thin, however, then it was time to explore something meatier: a journey towards ecstasy, perhaps. And when the claims of the symphony became unsustainable, then Prokofiev and Stravinsky could provide us with ballet scores. This is true not just of classical, but of popular music too, which also seems to exist in a tension between dance and the demands of story: for the word-heavy music of the sixties to disco, Madonna and Michael Jackson – and then back again, as the impulse to “say something” re-emerged with Jeff Buckley or Radiohead.

The last three poems of the first section make the most detailed and extensive statements. The first of these, “The Symphonists”, revisits the material of the book’s first poem: the massive achievements and limitations of the nineteenth century symphonic tradition. The hero of Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” is used as a metaphor for the moment of arrival at the sacred, challenging and unyielding place:

. . . . . 
Till – sooner or later -
as Rolande had done, long ago -
the claimants arrived
at the cliff-face of Ultimate Things:
a trumpet, perhaps – more sforzando -
then storm-winds of urgent repeats -
banging away – for a sign – for a path up the rock . . .

A great, dominating form reaches the point where the moves it wants to make or the questions it wants to answer are unachievable. It’s not a dissimilar situation to the nineteenth century European novel whose achievements are dauntingly vast but which ultimately becomes an impossible form needing, at the beginning of the next century, to be taken apart and rebuilt. Langford leaves the symphonists with a judgement that sympathetically acknowledges their greatness – “Mighty approaches. But failures as vast as invention. // As wrong as a gesture can be. // And as kind. And as true.” And his portrait of Brahms as someone who knew the end had come, that “harmonies stretched / in pursuit of more power all led neatly / to fractures and vacuums” but nevertheless “insisted you walk / in his rose-scented garden” is kinder to its subject than I have ever been able to be. One of the “Minims”, “The First Viennese School”, also pays tribute to the symphonic tradition inaugurated by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven:

who’d stare as far down
into chasms
as those who came later –

but who’d so much more home
to return to.

And the second-last of these final poems of the first part of the book, “Arcs”, looks at elements which derive from other than the great celebrations and searches of previous musics and are seen as counter-arcs:

. . . . . 
until, bit by bit,
there were tunes free from status -
Poulenc, with crackers at carnies;
Britten, on Midsummer’s Eve –

a music released
from its comic-book triumphs:

a bedrock without a home-key.

Not much to build on, but all we had left
once the claims of the tribe had been shredded . . .

This is all a crude summary of a complex and consistent attitude to music in all its forms. I think its best understandings are expressed in its shortest forms, as momentary illuminations, witty asides and compressed truths: as epigrams, that is. And it should come as no surprise that Langford’s previous book, Neat Snakes is a collection of epigrams, a form one wouldn’t expect to find alive in the first decades of the twenty-first century. In fact, Neat Snakes and Eardrum form a kind of pair – even though music barely appears in the former – and there is much to be said for reading them in tandem.

To return to the issue of the structure of Eardrum, it seems on first viewing to register a kind of defeat of poetry, an admission that ultimately poems must make way for prose. But the reality is more complex and revolves around the nature of the epigrammatic and how it can appear in both poetry and prose. Just because something appears as expository prose doesn’t mean it is locked into a rigid structure of assertion and logical support: there are more open kinds of prose that get called (admittedly, fairly carelessly) “poetic”. The final section of Eardrum is in this mode, especially the extended pieces, “Stave Dreams” and “Electric Dreams” which work by juxtaposition and suggestion and thus might be slid across the genre map towards that imprecise phenomenon called the “prose poem”.

Are the epigrams of Neat Snakes a kind of prose poem or is the epigram the opposite: a distillation of prose thought? Langford’s description of his interest in the epigram accords it a lot of features that we would want to call genuinely poetic:

. . . . . I became intrigued by the possibility of combining the defamiliarization of the poets and scientists with the lucidity that the aphorism had traditionally employed. Sometimes, writing can feel like an attempt to articulate an aesthetic, and although one may only approximate it occasionally in practice, its presence as an ideal – the search for a tension between lucidity and strangeness, so that the phrase can never quite settle – provided a kind of stiffening for the project, a background pressure or test which nevertheless helped to keep it afloat.

“The search for a tension between lucidity and strangeness” sounds like a good description of one of the features of lyric poetry whose attributes always seem to be made up of a whole raft of these sorts of tensions: abstract/specific, personal/communal, the natural environment/the inner life, and so on. And one of these tensions would be that between open and closed meanings – what one might think of as “poetic” versus ”prose” meanings. Are Langford’s epigrams “open” in meaning, or “closed”? It isn’t an easy question and reminds us just how crude our notion of the way prose communicates ideas is. Sometimes, as in “Every culture has its own way of averting its eyes”, the openness lies only in the fact that we nod wisely in response while trying to think of some examples from other cultures we know something of. The same could be said for, “No specific difference is fundamental: racism, sexism, class. We will nominate any difference we can build an advantage on” and “Our tolerance of reason varies with the threat that reason represents”. These are, in a way, polemical epigrams that ask for assent. Others are “poetic” in that they seem to encourage exploration without imposing a final meaning: “The right combination of mirrors should keep you from falling”, for example. It is significant that the shortest of the poems in the first section of Eardrum, “Bach”:

Just as the war
between knowing
and dancing
would lurch,
like a fate,
towards knowledge:

Bach
made it sound
as if nothing
need keep them apart.

could well have appeared in the second section or, straightened out into a single prose line, could have appeared in Neat Snakes.

Fundamentally, I think it is an issue of control over meaning (not the same as control over response which Langford analyses in a critique of Ravel). Langford’s poems seem to come out of an extended and coherent meditation on core subjects: in the case of Eardrum, music. So, although the poems are open to a certain extent, we are always aware that the author is, finally, in control of the meanings. He isn’t the sort of poet who will say, “I’ve no idea what it means and I didn’t when I wrote it. But it might be fun to try to work it out together”. Which of these two approaches makes for the better poetry ultimately, I don’t know. Control of meaning may oscillate with openness of meaning through literary history in the same way that the tension between music of the body and music of the understanding oscillates, in Langford’s view, through the history of music.

Michael Farrell (ed.): Ashbery Mode; David Stavanger and Anne-Marie Te Whiu (eds.): Solid Air: Australian and New Zealand Spoken Word

Ashbery Mode (Hawai’i: Tinfish, 2019, 130pp.)
Solid Air (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2019, 249pp.)

Anthologies tend to raise more interesting issues than individual books of poetry. It may be that they just raise different issues but that those they do raise are more obvious and pressing. They also have more structural issues than a book of poems by a single author. And then there is the question of what they assume their purpose is: to present the best, put some texts together for students, to establish a new literary-historical blueprint for the future of poetry, etc. Michael Farrell’s immensely enjoyable Ashbery Mode doesn’t try for any of these conventional aims. It is, essentially, a collection of poems celebrating the influence of John Ashbery in Australian poetry. I don’t think I have ever seen an anthology with such a rationale but that might just be an accident of my reading. At any rate, as a largely celebratory anthology – is it the poet’s equivalent of an academic Festschrift? – it makes no pretensions to creating new interpretations of the history of Australian poetry although, of course, it will select only poets seeing Ashbery as a valuable influence in their own work. And, as with a Festschrift, you have a sense of poets choosing which works to contribute. The book doesn’t anywhere say that this is the case but I’m sure, as a reader, that it is: in other words, the book’s structure isn’t entirely the work of a lone, godlike anthologist. One of its most charming features is its principle of organisation – always something of a bugbear for anthologists. It does this geographically, starting with Nicholas Powell and David Prater, Australian poets living in the reasonably remote Finland and Sweden, before working its way across the Atlantic to the West Coast of Australia, then up the East Coast, into East Asia and finally across the Pacific to the East Coast of the US.

As well as being a good introduction to some of the things that are happening in Australian poetry (or have been happening, as the assembling of this book seems to have taken quite a while and some of the poems included date back to late last century), Ashbery Mode is also a very interesting way of looking at the influence of a single poet, and the question of influence in general. Ashbery was a remarkable poet but even more remarkable is the extent of his influence, the consistently high regard in which he was held by younger writers pretty much throughout his life, but certainly from the publication of his third book, Rivers and Mountains, in 1966. I suspect that the earliest significant date for Ashbery’s reception in Australia is John Forbes’s Honours dissertation at Sydney University: it dealt with Ashbery’s first books when he was a very outré, avant-garde figure indeed. I’m not sure of its date (a copy is held in the Forbes collection at the Fryer Library of the University of Queensland) but it must be close to half a century old. And half a century is a very long time for a single poet to hold any kind of sway in English language poetry where fashions change quickly in response to the imperative that poetry should be new, individual and different.

Michael Farrell gives a long and convincing list of reasons for Ashbery’s continuing popularity as an influence in the brief introduction to Ashbery Mode. He begins with his own response which is that Ashbery’s tone enables him to convert language into extended poetic discourse. Again, this seems convincing enough. The length of Ashbery’s “long” poems and their modulations through images, disjunctions (the source of the famous “huh” interjections) and pseudo-logic seems to derive from some mechanism of almost endless fertility and the tone is a good candidate for the wellsprings of this. Farrell secondly isolates Ashbery’s interest in resurrecting old and (then) exotic forms like the sestina and the pantoum. Poems like “The Painter” and “Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape” might well be the first place a young poet in the last fifty years met the sestina form. I think this issue needs to be nuanced a little though. You would expect, for example, that Pound’s “Sestina Altaforte” or “Sestina for Ysolt” would be the most likely place for a first encounter with the sestina, but Pound’s poems come with a freight of medievalism that, if not positively irritating to someone in the last part of the twentieth century, would be, at least, not conducive to imitation. Ashbery’s sestinas feel “postmodern” in that they simultaneously show a mastery of a difficult form while at the same time giving the impression that it’s all a matter of poetic highjinks and not to be taken entirely seriously. So it becomes dependent, again, on tone: the slightly bland, “affable” bond between Ashbery and his readers.

I think the third of Farrell’s explanations for Ashbery’s extended influence is one of the most vital. Ashbery had no poetic creed to force upon the future of poetry. He did what he did, was interested in what interested him. The influence of Roussel, who produced large stretches of text spinning out from descriptions of items which were not justified by any thematic imperatives, can’t be underestimated here as the principal influence on Ashbery himself. As he says in the chapter on Roussel in Other Traditions (a work remarkable for searching out interesting and obscure moments in relatively little known poets but offering very little actual critical analysis):

No one denies that Roussel’s work is brimming with secrets; what is less certain is whether the secrets have any importance. In other words, is there some hidden, alchemical key for decoding the work, as André Breton and others have thought, or is the hidden meaning merely the answer to a childish riddle or puzzle, no more or less meaningful that the context in which it is buried?

This could well be a description of the reader’s experience of the work of Ashbery himself, especially long pieces like Three Poems, Girls on the Run and Flow Chart. But Ashbery doesn’t demand that poets reading him should go down this path of producing long texts whose internal dynamics and ultimate “meaning” are indeterminate. And so there’s a generosity and encouraging openness about Ashbery that one might not find if one looked at the poets who, before him, would be listed as the major influences on their contemporaries: Eliot, Auden and, in a narrower sense, Pound and perhaps Williams.

In Ashbery Mode then, fittingly, almost every possible response to the work of another poet is included. Some of the poems – those of Joanne Burns, Michelle Cahill, Tom Lee and Aden Rolfe, for example, sound a bit like Ashbery in their sudden meditative modulations:

. . . . 
& is there a dental clinic called the tooth
fairy; tootle’s wheels always seemed 
like lozenges of irish moss what is the relationship
between lungs and locomotives a question for poets engineers
or the medical fraternity, this word “fraternity”
think of a fence of weathered lattice that’s about to snap . . . (Burns)
. . . . . 
He knows the prices of things and tells me the same.
Blankets assist us in sleeping on the lawn, and stars
Break out as if they were jealous after having done so. I
Speculate on canvas lining and pull nuts
Out of my teeth. There exists no trick to honesty
People assure you, just do things and tell people about them
This much is clear to me. Promoted giggles
Spread about the room. Bread is the answer. Single
Lines shatter like a newly bombed lagoon
And dusk paints itself across the sky . . . (Lee)

Sometimes the connection is simply a reference in the poem or in an epigraph or, as in Hazel Smith’s case, a title which immediately suggests one of Ashbery’s books. Julie Chevalier’s two poems are from her book, Darger: His Girls, connected to Ashbery by the fact that Girls on the Run is a kind of Ashberian response to Darger’s text.

Many of the poems are, as one would expect, text-derived. The texts are usually Ashbery’s but not necessarily – Mark Mahemoff’s “Dear Superman” is made up from extracts of letters to Christopher Reeve after his accident. Stuart Cooke converts Ashbery’s name into “ash-brie”, Chris Edwards’ “Rat Chow” is “reconstituted from selected chunks” of Flow Chart, A.J. Carruthers and Cory Wakeling’s pieces are derived from specific Ashbery poems as is Toby Fitch’s “All the Skies Above Girls on the Run”. Whereas one might have expected John Tranter (an early admirer and friend of Ashbery) to be represented by “Anaglyph” – a poem made by retaining the opening and closing words of each line of “Clepsydra” and replacing everything else – he is represented by “Electrical Disturbance: A Dramatic Interlude” a longish, almost theatrical, piece imagined to be a debate between a “literary scholar” and “a company director taking on the guise of a naïve young man”.

This issue of text-generation is an important one in Australian poetry over the last thirty or forty years. Interestingly it is not part of Ashbery’s practice or, at least, I don’t think it is, based on my reading of his work. But since the reading of Ashbery’s work by even the most devoted admirer is likely to be fairly patchy there is no reason why I shouldn’t be wrong here. The only obvious example I can think of is the double-sestina late in Flow Chart which uses the same line endings as Swinburne’s “The Complaint of Lisa”. I’m ambivalent about text-generated poems which are clearly important in contemporary poetry (and probably enjoyable and rewarding to write). They also have impeccable postmodern credentials though the practice may be showing its age – it’s hardly new and I think of it as something more in keeping with the eighties and nineties. At any rate, they are a problem for critics: how can you write about a poem whose textual genesis you might have been told about but whose processes remain covered up? (John Tranter is probably an exception here because, as he has often stated, the various ways of computer-processing the originals provide only raw material which is then made into a poem. To put it bluntly, Tranter’s text-generated poems always seem like Tranter poems.) I think the results might be undesirable for the future of Australian literary criticism since it might lead to a kind of hermeticism whereby only those “in the know” – the friends and disciples – will be able to write sensibly about them. It could be said that something like this occurred in the case of Mallarme and of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake – in the latter instance a group of clued-up disciples were encouraged to seed short explanatory essays in available journals. But one can be fairly confident that there aren’t many Mallarmes or Joyces lying around in Australia’s literary landscape.

But in what is essentially a celebration of an individual writer’s work and influence, text-generated poems seem an ideal mode. Imagine what a dreary collection Ashbery Mode would have been if it had been made up of solemn elegies commissioned from poets when the great man died! There have been anthologies like that in the past and they have, blessedly, sunk without trace.

One of the things that makes Solid Air, an anthology of a revived form of performance poetry, interesting is that its contributors include both Australian and New Zealand poets, thus forming a South Pacific bloc that should probably be encouraged given developments in global politics. Interesting also because when the poems deal with indigenous issues, we get the conjunction of both aboriginal and Maori culture – two entirely different perspectives. It has an interesting Foreword by Alison Whittaker which, in its focus on breath, seems like a modern incarnation of Charles Olson and the Black Mountain school. And it has a good Introduction by its editors, David Stavanger and Anne-Marie Te Whiu, giving some kind of background to the Poetry Slam movement. This, inevitably, has a slight air of contest about it since it is keen to stress the importance of the material it is introducing. Like all such introductions, it has to balance the tension of claiming great successes and massive numbers while at the same time portraying itself as fighting a battle against an establishment (or Establishment) made up of publishers and print poets responsible for “poetry’s flagging popularity and book sales”. This inevitably is a cover version of a very familiar song: you can hear it as far back as the Beat poets and probably long before. It’s not a fiercely held position, either in the Introduction or in the poems included, but it does establish that there is an opponent. And all movements benefit from having an extendable, preferrably abstract opponent to keep their momentum going, even if one has to be invented.

The second slightly awkward situation in which the editors find themselves is that this is a print book. It belongs, in other words, to the museum culture of the printed word. Ideally, one expects in an anthology of performance to have a CD of readings inside the back cover (as Grand Parade Poets did with Benjamin Frater’s book) or, perhaps, a set of website links. The Introduction gives an elegant but sketchy justification for the lack of these when it says, “On these pages sit words that have often first been performed in a live context to an audience. The pulse of those moments still hangs between the lines.”

My response to Solid Air is to be interested in it and as responsive as I can be. I think it comes from a perspective and practice which is completely alien to me since I avoid even conventional poetry readings. But that is just me – I have a resistance to performance of almost any sort but I wouldn’t want to try to raise that to the level of an intelligently held position rather than a personal failing. It’s intriguing to find some poets whose work I know (“normal” poets, “conventional” poets, “establishment poets”? – the terminology is going to be a problem) turning up here: Jennifer Compton, Nathan Curnow, Ian McBryde and Π.Ο. for example. As the biography of the first of these says, “When it comes to the poetry side of things she likes to have it every which way possible . . . And she also very much likes the hurly burly of the open mic”. It makes perfect sense that a poet might see his or her own poetic practice as lying in a zone where full-on performance offers valuable experience and feedback. There are also other “conventional” modes which lie in a space just next to performance: found poems for example. Here Pascalle Burton’s textually-modified “found” poem, “What is Your Ceiling”, derived from the US Army’s wartime Japanese Phrase Book, could work well both in performance and on the page.

Putting Solid Air next to Ashbery Mode makes for interesting and revealing comparisons. They do not share a single contributor and it’s hard not to see both of them as outliers in the vast world of poetry. I have a suspicion that the contributors to either of them might be more hostile to the other than I am: as an outsider my task is to observe what happens in Australian poetry not to set myself up as someone to legislate or pass judgement about it. Being invested in the course of literary history is a dangerous game to play, anyway. When a definition of what is desirable in poetry gets floated, poetry seems to take this as an opportunity to do exactly the opposite. My sense of Performance poetry is that it is a phenomenon which flowers quite intensely and but doesn’t have long-term staying power. In the past, the existence of established venues could keep an outburst alive for a while, even decades, but they are often dependent on the energy of individuals and individuals have a habit of passing on (or away). Poetry Slam has introduced a new structure in its large list of prizes and they may well help to formalise the movement and prolong it. I have a wicked image of a future in which performance poetry becomes the only acceptable mode of poetry in Australia. If it ever happened it would be typical of poetic history for angry groups of young poets, all with published tankas and minimalist love poems spilling out of their pockets, to be picketing the performance halls.

Does a renaissance in performance poetry mean that souls will be saved for poetry? Will people who had avoided poetry on the grounds of an unpleasant school experience with an odd piece of text whose meaning wasn’t clear, be gathered into the fold and even, eventually, venture on some more of that difficult stuff that lies between the covers of a book? I’ve heard this argument made though, admittedly, not in the case of the kind of poetry collected in Solid Air. But I can’t see it happening: there is just too great a divide between the experience of a verbal performance and that of engaging with a poem on the page. Nothing experienced by a member of the audience for these performances is going to prepare an innocent new reader for Yeats’s “Byzantium”, say, let alone Dante or Homer. I think this derives from the fundamental difference between what goes on in a performance and what goes on in a reading. It’s the reason that, though we are fascinated when poets read their own (printed) works because it gets us closer to the creating experience, it’s always rather irritating when they are “performed” by someone else. The more skilled and intelligent the actor, the more irritating the reading. Coming to terms with a “conventional” poem is a powerful experience of connection with a personality which, in good poetry, immediately appears as distinctive. Often that poet is dead (and yes, probably white, male, right-handed, from an imperial centre, etc etc) and when that happens we have the especially potent experience of meeting a poet whose values are likely to be entirely different from our own – it’s what Auden called “breaking bread with the dead” a cornerstone of a “civilised life”. I realise that this looks like a distinction not between printed poetry and performance poetry but between contemporary poetry and the poetry of the past but it does help to introduce what for me is the overwhelming experience of the poems of Solid Air and that is how completely conventional their content is, how unconfronting. This must derive from the performer/audience nexus where the former must be speak the latter’s language, but for someone like me who values distinctiveness and difference, Solid Air is a bit of a wasteland: Indigenous people have suffered, and still suffer, discrimination; women must continue the struggle against the Male and, pace Emily Zooey Baker’s “Hey, Mary Shelley”, Mary Shelley was a great writer who invented science fiction.

David Musgrave: Numb & Number

Waratah NSW: Puncher and Wattmann, 2019, 81pp.

On its back cover, Numb & Number describes itself as “a kind of clearing” containing poems which “open up, sometimes painfully, sometimes joyfully, what it is to be in the world”. The poems will, in other words, clear away many of the obstacles to a more open, expressive poetry. But there is also a sense that this book is, perhaps, itself a “clearing house”, a collection of disparate pieces which need to be published to clear the decks for other projects. And Musgrave seems attracted to projects which are more complicated than a simple collection of individual poems. His 2016 book, Anatomy of Voice, is a remarkably ornate, almost baroque, construction “dealing with” the death of a beloved mentor but using among its structural props, Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and the emblem books of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. (As well as this, there is the fascinating experience of “auditory hallucinations” in which the mentor’s voice revisits from the past.) I mention this to make the point that there is a strong drive in Musgrave’s poetic imagination towards more complex structures than are implied in a conventional collection such as Numb & Number. It’s a book, which, for whatever reason, has a slightly rawer quality – in construction as well as in the individual poems – than both the highly structured ones and also previous works such as Phantom Limb and Concrete Tuesday.

Phantom Limb contained “Young Montaigne Goes Riding” a brilliant poem focussing on the processes and structures of thought. Numb & Number begins with “Coastline”, built around a walk along the endless curvatures of a coast. It’s a “walking poem”, not a riding poem, but it encourages the same kind of discursive processes of the mind. But there is a major difference between the poems which might be emblematic of the difference between a book such as Phantom Limb and Numb & Number in that here, an overwhelming experience – a broken-up relationship – presses on the consciousness and prevents it meditating freely or, at least, ensures that all meditation will ultimately gravitate towards an absence. And so what begins as an observation about the pattern of the pathway slides into a brief passage about jigsaws and on to the inevitable:

. . . . . 
fitting patiently on wet Sundays piece to piece,
sifting through the pile for the opposite

of a promontory of cloud: portable swastikas,
running men, whimsies, wheat sacks,
Swedens, Sulawesis, bits
of continent or a cauliflowered florescence, Mandelbrots
ferning into shapes running through my bloodstream.

And then the bigger pieces: the absent shape of you
to which no piece will fit, like emptied rooms
in a house no longer habitable.
Loss ineluctable: there is no cure, no magic zebra
crossing to a lossless world. . . .

It’s not just that the loved-one’s leaving is presented as a kind of super-massive black hole whose gravitational effect will ultimately ensure that all thought circles it more frantically before plunging in. The extended description of the jigsaw pieces – a metaphor that has a lot of pregnant possibilities in a poem set on a coastline since it is the “coasts” of the pieces that make them fit and produce a meaningful whole (or at least a meaningful representation of something) – could also be a way of avoiding the pain of the central topic by a desperate free expansion of an image. It could also be an example of the idea that a nothingness (a doorway, for example) is surrounded by complex decorative features which do nothing but heighten its emptiness.

Once love and loss force themselves into the poem, they pretty much dominate it although in a way that is in keeping with Musgrave’s imagination. The continents themselves, seen from the perspective of someone perched on the eastern coast of one, are seen as the earliest divorcees – “next to them we’ve barely tiffed”. The poem attempts a positive conclusion, reminding the poet that the pronoun “you” can have other referents and finally recalling the fact that a coastline is technically infinite – as the units of measurement decrease to approach zero so the outline of the coast, now considered to have followed the edge of the molecules that make up each individual rock, approaches infinity.

Interestingly, “Coastline” begins by exploring the optical illusion whereby to the viewer, the horizon line of the sea appears to be higher than the observer himself. Although this leads quickly, in the poem, to whimsical thoughts about being a dwarf standing on the shoulders of other dwarfs – a reverse Newton – its real significance is, I think, to establish a vertical axis to intersect with the very horizontal axis of a walk or a ride. I won’t follow this out in any length because I commented on it in my review of Phantom Limb on this site, but there is something fitting in the way in which this first poem, while registering the distorting power of grief, still wants to set up this opposition.

And there is, in the poems of Numb & Number, plenty of interest in the vertical component. It expresses itself, as before, in Musgrave’s fascination with his ancestors, especially those deep in the mid-nineteenth century. Much closer to the surface, to continue the metaphor, is Musgrave’s mother whose narcolepsy and cataplexy he describes in “The Narcolept”. This is a complex poem but its subject seems to me to be not so much sleep disorders as an interest in a genetic fault that can be traced back to the dinosaurs. The dreaming patterns of narcolepts are distinctive in being more lucid – that is, they can be recognised by the dreamer and even re-entered and modified – but there are also plenty of hallucinations. Musgrave imagines his mother entering the dream of tracing origins back to the Mesozoic:

The dinosaurs live on in chickens
and the dreams of an old woman
beached by an ocean of palsied sleep.

She’s following their footprints back
to a time before sleep
. . . . . 
those prehistoric footprints arrowing back
toward the start of the dream. Beyond extinction.

In the poem Musgrave says of himself “For as long as I can remember, I lacked / confidence in consciousness” and while the context suggests that this refers to a lack of confidence in his mother’s state of mind, it can also be read as applying to the author himself since narcolepsy is a genetic disorder that can be passed on.

In fact many of the poems of Numb & Number are concerned with how the figures of the past speak to us. In the way things are constructed in Musgrave’s work, this could be restated as asking how the ghosts of the past rise up to the surface of the present. One way is in dreams and another is in hallucinations (auditory and otherwise). But “The Transportations of George Bruce”, an extended piece, is interesting in this regard. It is a narrative based on the memoirs of a convict who escaped in the early nineteenth century, survived thanks to the help of some very altruistic settlers, and was eventually pardoned by the newly-arrived Governor King. As always with good poems there is a lot going on at the level of authorial connection that a reader can guess at. Firstly “The Transportations of George Bruce” is written in hexameters and reads like a pastiche of the Odyssey. Bruce himself seems on the surface to be a religion-crazed figure, likely to be in contact with angels. I think the interest for Musgrave is that Bruce can be seen as operating in a sordid version of the Homeric world, one in which the membrane between gods and men is quite thin. We are given a hint towards this by the earlier poem, “Waratah”, which quotes, as an epigraph, the moment in the Odyssey when Odysseus, on his way to deal with Circe, is met by a handsome youth – Hermes in disguise – who gives him the plant which will prevent the goddess enchanting him. The wanderer, Bruce/Odysseus, may not be communicating with his ancestors but he is communicating with representatives of another world. As such, he can be said to be “transported” in its metaphorical sense of being carried away by an experience, as well as in the conventional sense. He is also given to intense dreaming states:

. . . . . 
and the Goddess told me it was the canopy of heaven
and I must eat my belly full. And as I was eating
a beautiful man passed by the table, and the Goddess said
it was the Grand Arch Angel that brought the canopy
for me to eat. I watched him ascend through the window
at the top of the house and the Angels and Goddesses followed . . .

The sordid reality that Bruce struggles through is only one of a series of such realities. Poems like “Chyort” and, perhaps, “From a Train in Connecticut”, which follow “The Transportations of George Bruce”, though they are entirely different, reflect a bleak external world and it leads one to think that perhaps one of the aims of the poems of this book is to create a kind of anatomy of sordidness. “Chyort”, for example, whose title comes from the Russian for “devil”, recounts what must be a dream or hallucination of a moonlight trudge through what seems like a rubbish site:

. . . . . 
                    stepped through a rust harvest

of doorless cars and a ripple of tattered barns,
through fields of scattered cardboard, bound
newspapers, slashed and slithery vinyl
chairs and a chipped glossy dog, tailless . . .

Though the narrator climbs, there is no suggestion at the end of the poem that he gets out of this morass. “From a Train in Connecticut” is, on the surface, exactly the opposite, calmly detailing the life of a secondhand auto-parts dealer. But the presence of cars “wrecked, rusting, with tyreless wheels / and cataracted windscreens” establishes that we are not so far from “Chyort” and the proprietor, Joe, though he is preoccupied by the prospects of his baseball team, is someone who has had a dream that he has killed his oldest friend “and had been getting away with it all this time”. Another case of another world announcing itself through dreams, though this dreamworld, unlike George Bruce’s, is a much bleaker one.

There’s a lot more in this book that has this bleak outlook and, as I said at the beginning, both the poems and the book as a whole feel rawer than earlier ones. But bleakness is balanced with hope and the end of “Coastline” suggests that hope may triumph. The most overtly “hopeful” poem in the book is “Waratah”, an extended piece that has a rhapsodic tone created by repetition – “I’m clearing a space in Waratah” – and the use of present participles. In fact the poem feels as though it is a pastiche though what the original is I can’t quite place. Importantly the making of a new start by clearing the ground is accompanied by an acknowledgement of ancestors:

George Thomas Ferris, I’m back here in Waratah.
John Blake Quealy, I’m here in my clearing.
. . . . . 
Dorothy Downs Pawsey, I’m back here in Newcastle.
Eliza Augusta Prentice, I’m just down the road.

The land itself is not entirely salubrious, being dominated by the Moly-Cop factory but, by a nice coincidence, Moly is the name of the plant that Hermes gives to Odysseus. It is proof against bewitchment.

The issue of the overall tone – its balance between bitterness and the hope of renewal – and the motif of horizontal and vertical axes, comes together in the final, prose section of the last poem, “The Lake”. This lake’s shallowness means that the pasts which it symbolically holds will always be not far from the surface and so, in a search for forgetfulness (which also has a Homeric ring to it) the past will not entirely disappear. But happiness is still possible for the traveller in the boat, “the entire world had become nothing more than the membrane upon which you drifted for what seemed like forever”.

Rereadings IV: Richard Packer: Being Out of Order

St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1972, 73pp

This “Rereading”, like that of Norman Talbot’s Son of a Female Universe, takes its impetus not from the desire to investigate an entire book so much as to celebrate a much loved poem. In this case it is Richard Packer’s “The American Age” which I first saw in Tom Shapcott’s 1970 anthology Australian Poetry Now and then again, in its more natural habitat as part of a poet’s consistent output, in Being Out of Order, published two years later. I’ve known it, in other words, for just about half a century and I could still, if pressed, quote most of it from memory. Here it is:

In smoky weather Mal and I strolled the south sector,
past the crumbling husks of yesterday’s children,
and the gardeners watering the wasted bulletins
from eyes like squashed bullets.
                           “Mal,” I said. “Mal, old battler,
I’ve noticed a petrol flavour in the fountain,
and only this morning, only this morning, Mal,
a flaming prophet bent like a croquet hoop across
my coffee, while thrushes mourned;
and I emptied a stranger’s blood from my gloves.
I think it’s our time, brother pilgrim,
to summon our creatures, and take an ecstatic trip
somewhere beyond this cruelled horizon.”

Sadness crimped his mouth like a slip of string,
and we paused in a grove of broken flagpoles.
One more monument melted in screams,
and the gardeners shook. “Listen,”
said Mal. “On Mars the trivial sun creeps up
faint as my fingernail. Nothing sings unless
the lonely grains of ice -
their tinny dribble in those bankrupt pockets.
No harvest ripples there, and nothing sings.
                               Louden your transistor. And
pluck away that evergreen ear of yours for angelic trumpets.
Too late, too late for such election.
We have all fallen to living in our feet
and the American age. We must picnic here
on the plastic grass forever, and admire the many skulls.[“]

Face after face died of no rice, as we sat quite broken,
watching Christ shave his armpits for movie dollars,
and munching our TV dinner.
                                                    Overhead,
the steely locusts foamed and whined: the gardeners
begged an early shower of paper-clips.
It was true!
                    It was true!
We were parked for good in the American age.

It’s not difficult to sketch in some of its virtues. Not the least is the fact that American domination of Australian popular culture – usually dated as beginning in the postwar period and thus only in its infancy in the early seventies – has grown to be all-dominating in the way the poem suggests to the point where it is unravellable. We really are stuck though the locus of power has changed from Hollywood and Washington to Silicon Valley. More important in the poetic dimension is the way in which the surreal imaginative leaps match the fact that American culture has always been a home for the wilder reaches of the apocalyptic world view. This view, invented by Jewish writers more than two millennia ago to explain what their god was doing in allowing a series of other empires to trample over his covenanted people, has a well-established place in the “religions of the book” (intriguingly “The American Age” was translated and included in Dimitris Tsaloumas’ anthology of Australian poetry in Greek. You feel that it may have made a lot of sense in the poetic culture of that country). “The American Age” is, to summarise, a poem of contemporary comment that creates a style which embodies the situation – odd happenings in the pre-apocalyptic phase matched with personal impasse – that it wants to talk about.

Reading the rest of Packer’s work, one wants to say, initially, that this is an unusual poem for him. There is certainly nothing else stylistically like it in his three books of poems and his condemnations of contemporary life never, as far as I can recall, specifically blame it on the impositions of an alien culture; the villains are much closer to home. But it does fit neatly into the arc of his obsessions.

Packer’s output is hardly voluminous. There are three books of poetry and a stand-alone verse radio play, The Powerhouse, over a period of twenty-two years. But two of the books of poetry themselves include radio plays (assuming the twenty-two part “The Great Food Animal” from Serpentine Futures is a radio play rather than an extended suite of poems designed for radio performance) and this, by my counting, leaves a total of eighty-seven poems. And “The American Age”, coincidentally no doubt, appears exactly in the middle and so, though other poems don’t mimic its surreal flights, it does have a thematic centrality. And this isn’t in blaming imported American culture for the woes of the world but in describing a state in which there is no escape. In fact the arc of Packer’s three books of poetry – Prince of the Plague Country, Being Out of Order and Serpentine Futures – could be said to move from struggles to escape a bad world to explorations of possibilities of flight. It’s no accident that the first poem of Serpentine Futures – a complex piece with something of the grotesque imaginative intensity of “The American Age” – is called “The History of Flight”, the final word appearing, of course, in its two meanings of, first, taking off into a higher plane and, second, shamefully attempting to escape.

In general, in Packer’s poetry, there is a fury with the world – mercantile, military and soulless – which is matched by a fury with himself and his inability to escape or transcend or rectify that world. He is a being out of order in a plague country. There is a dynamic balance here which serves the poetry well. As I’ve said before on this site, Australian readers are likely to be wary of traditional satire – the ridiculing of contemporary vices and foibles – because it implies a stance of superiority on the part of the poet, something that infringes our sense of egalitarianism. Packer’s gaze is just as hostile when directed towards himself as it is when directed at the world – though for different reasons. He rarely castigates himself for being complicit with the mercantile world that he writes so much about, but castigates himself for being unable to move beyond it. As with Rimbaud, the alchemical, transformational power of art fails and leaves nothing more than an experience of a season in hell.

At lot of this can be seen in the first poem of the first book, “Prelude”, where a saxophone is heard playing in what can be recognised as a fairly standard allegorical depiction of the world as being made up of a prison – for all those implicated as victims or oppressors – and a set of equally imprisoning, loveless relationships for those who are, ostensibly, free:

. . . . . 
     It called against the windows
to husbands fuddled by their spawning debts,
     to odourless, lacquered wives,
urging them dance beneath the bruised sky
     with the jailbirds, their fellows,
for dead Orpheus, whose gay flesh they’d ripped
     for sandwiches on desks,
     and whose sweet blood they’d thieved
to guzzle from thermos flasks inside
     air-conditioned crypts.

     No-one became Eurydice
for that pain serenading from the slum
     built even in the tallest mind.
The tough wall stood. The townfolk drowsed
     on their pillows of nonentity.
I cried in my turn for a millennium
     beyond the sleep of flesh,
     for a faithful torch to lead
my soul’s long exile to its bride
     and faultless home.

Yes, it’s all a bit overwrought but it should be remembered that it’s an early poem from a long time ago. But it is, interestingly, about the way art stands apart from contemporary life and also about the way in which it fails. The melody (the song of the dismembered Orpheus) wants to transform the world by summoning it to a millennium in which lions lie down with lambs or, as the second stanza says, “warders would tear off their uniforms / and their bought importance / as prisoners clasped each other / each forgiving his brothers’ fall / and the long arm”. And at the end there is a return to the fantasy of the apocalypse which will introduce a millennium in which the soul is reunited with its bride – Orpheus, through his creativity, is reunited with Eurydice. Significantly for an essay involving “The American Age”, the book’s second poem is called “No Way Out”. This poem is an extended attack on the self, though there is an element of blaming external matters in it. Wanting to “ditch / the carcass of my life”, the speaker goes over the features of that life. Religions (and Packer has a developed interest in a broad variety of religions) fail him: “I’ve found no creed to be / the needed trainer for / the squabbling, lusting snouts / in my menagerie” as do the attractions of a socialised state which has “a master plan / to make all brothers” yet “can only fill your guts”. Ultimately the three possible releases that the poem deals with – “girls, states or prophets” – fail the task of finding “a cure / for being my disease”. Another poem, “Warning to the Rider”, provides a new perspective on this characteristic impasse by suggesting the image of a remorseless Hindu cycle of rebirth: “Rider of the poisoned wheel, / remember when your breath retreats / you must accept each cell again” and this odd conjunction of a Jewish apocalyptic sense with the Law of Karma seems to be the seed behind “Reborn Babylon” where the modern urban world, so much a source of loathing to Packer, is a modern version of ancient Babylon – not the real Babylon of course, but the symbolic Babylon of apocalyptic texts:

. . . . . 
For Babylon fallen as the seed
of yet another Babylon,
with only darkness in between,
is something you have always known.

And finally, added to this odd mix is a dash of Kabbalah. “The Night After Wormwood” is an extended dialogue between Everyman, the last survivor of mankind after a comet strike (the star, Wormwood, of the “Book of Revelation”), and the idealised figure of Adam Kadmon. Everyman takes on himself the guilt of allowing the world to become a soulless place:

. . . . . 
I now confess that I
unleashed the judgement hail
by sitting deaf and small,
and was the criminal
cursed by those dying lips. . .

And the poem finishes with Adam Kadmon invoking cycles of rebirth: “Sleep now, and wait the wheel’s next spin. / It is my peace in which you drown”.

Prince of the Plague Country has a couple of features then that save it from being nothing more than a grumpy poet’s assault on the obvious faults of his community. There is the odd synthesis of religious/philosophical interests for a start but, above all, you get a sense of poems motivated by a profound irritation directed both outwardly and inwardly. Irritation seems to be the trigger that wakes up Packer’s muse and, if the poems are angry and condemnatory, they still seem to derive from internal irritations. Packer began as a New Zealand poet – this first book was published there – and by the time of Being Out of Order had moved to Australia (interestingly his third book was published while he was living in England, thus making a nicely patterned triptych). Being Out of Order is a far superior book though it is based on the same irritations and frustrations. Whereas Prince of the Plague Country began with a poem about the inadequacy of poetry in a blighted environment, Being Out of Order begins with “Madam” a piece from White Goddess-land in which women – or Woman – has the double role of seducer/lover and destroyer. It’s a fitting introduction since the poems of this book do tend to focus on the infinite complexities of the relations between the sexes. And the dominant mode is dramatic monologue from a carefully chosen, oblique perspective. And so, for example, the Pygmalion/Galatea story is seen from the perspective of Pygmalion’s vulgar (ans invented) agent. And the story is given a deliberately bleak twist – the intensity of Galatea’s love kills Pygmalion and she ends up being shipped off as makeweight in a deal with a Cretan trader. Like all good oblique dramatic monologues we look into a complex and important situation – here about the idea that men fall in love with an idealised image rather than a real woman with bad results for both – through a not especially insightful or sympathetic narrator. One of the best, and funniest, of them is “The Wrong Beach” in which a naked, Venus Anadyomene kind of character, complete with shell, appears off the coast of some bleak northern beach:

. . . . . 
Our king was there before us. His iron toes awash,
he leaned that lonely, willed asperity of his
upon the pommel of his sword. The constant mountain wind
changed spray to diamonds in his steely beard.
“Get back,” he shouted, while we set our useless mutters
at him, moths at armour. “Get back, you warming slut.
This is no beach for you. Go south at once, Go south.”

She turned her peachy breasts away, and south she went
without complaint . . .

The poem finishes with the narrator – a minor figure in the king’s comitatus – being sensitive to what this rejection costs:

Not that I blame him too hard, since he is our leader
who brought us here for saving by rough elements,
and dines himself off granite as his law requires.
There’s time enough, he says, for chasing nymphs in heaven,
when we’ve proven heat can’t steam away our wills.
This rings fair enough: and if he stared too sadly on
that dimpled backside, well – it helps to know he too is human.

Though it might at one level be about men’s devotion to various causes and the way these require a controlling of normal sensual instincts (in other words the kind of processes required by, say, monasticism) it is also about the comic cultural differences between North and South. The thought of a Botticelli goddess being stared at by people used to, say, the abstracted interlaced art of medieval Anglo-Saxons and Scandinavians paints a very funny picture.

The last poems of Being Out of Order contain what are for Packer comparatively positive impulses if we interpret positive to mean seeing glimpses of how the frustrating impasse of the situation focussed on in the early work can be escaped – how we can release the parking brake of “The American Age”. “Where One Goes From Here” returns in its setting to the poems of Prince of the Plague Country: life is imagined to be a prison in which one is at the mercy of the warders. The speaker provides a list of pieces of advice to those wanting to plan their escape and these suggestions have as their common theme deceit and subterfuge. One should, for example, always speak loudly “of your intent / to seek a nectared atoll in some warmer sea” because the guards will be working on the assumption “that talkers never try the wall”. One should “endure the fists of discipline, insisting only that / your punishment’s by regulations not by whim” and you should “avoid heroics. No successful saboteur / leaped openly at throats”. Eventually when the guards have been “mirrored . . . / into the sleep of trust”, you can make your escape:

                                 Good luck, then.
Exercise the muscles of your faith
by studying the messages of those who’ve fled
before you, and now drink from individual springs.
They are brothers by consent
                                                    and more than kin to you.
Strangling one’s own hope’s the deepest danger;
the hope of fruitful islands where the heart is free.

“Rocks” is a celebration of those ordinary stones that can be said to be in order rather than out of it – “They are being what they ought / and where. // Which is more than can be said for humans, / who seem always to be nipping / each other’s rumps” – and they serve as symbols not of a desired transcendence but rather as seeds of what just possibly might produce some future blossoming:

. . . . .
What I see most to be envied in rocks is
the cool with which they make walls for us,
keeping us from the chirpy neighbour
and other beasts
                             while knowing all the time
they enclose the green shoot of a future  
that will dismiss us
                                   like the pterodactyl.
Rocks are truly the eggs of our impossible,
this being why we are driven to employ them
as bodies for cathedrals
                                           and gods.
They hold the voices of the sweeter unborn
we sense
                 and work to elevate them so
they may plead for us
                                        at altars we’re denied.

This of course looks to a long term future but the next poem, “Good Mornings”, is about the immediate present and its very occasional felicities that reside inside us “warming like your seed”. And the final poem, “Homecoming”, is a kind of elegy in what is, for Packer, a decidedly rhapsodic mode. It’s core concept is to identify the freed state, the “fruitful islands” dreamed of in “Where One Goes From Here” (which precedes it in the book), not as an imaginary place to be discovered but as a home always carried within:

There will be a homecoming. There will.
       Our cavern is not forever.
Roar of sunlight on the naked eye,
the snapped chain, the dance,
the unexpected bride and the absolute honey
in the restored garden,
these will be yours, will be mine, and together.

. . . . . 
The green 
shoot will break the rock. It will flower;
our tombs of loss will shatter,
and there will be a homecoming.
There will.
               There will.
                                  There will.

It’s not a positive vision that Packer invokes very often. It balances the sense of being mired in social and personal failure that dominates the poems of the first book but, as always with poems of assertion, a reader is never sure how much it is a triumphant achievement and how much it is the putting on of a brave and hopeful face, a result of an “evergreen ear . . . for angelic trumpets”. While Packer’s final book, Serpentine Futures (published with his Christian name altered to Lewis) is a bit beyond the ambit of this review it might be worth pointing out that if we treat the long sequence “The Great Food Animal” as a radio piece, like “The Uncommercial Traveller” which concludes Being Out of Order, then the last poems in Packer’s last book concern a visit to Auschwitz. Packer’s own comment on the book’s cover says:

. . . concentration camp facts always downwardly transcend creative values. It is probably impossible to write a successful poem about the holocaust, or any other apocalypse for that matter. One tries to fail as honourably as one can.

Packer died in 1989, three years after the publication of Serpentine Futures, at the age of fifty-four. His intense, irritated poetry which seemed to be derived from a dissatisfaction with himself as much as with the wider world was matched by his personality: he was notoriously quarrelsome. Bruce Beaver, who shared New Zealand origins with Packer, and was a good long-term friend, wrote a poem about him after his death:

Dear man, like me you were quite awful while you lived.
But then, we were half-dead for most of the time
and in these times of semi-thanatopsis we came closer
to life than most of those we knew; the partly-living
who did not acknowledge death in any of its varied
manifestations, a friend to some, a friendly enemy
to all, my alter-ego, your conscious shadow self,
certainly no stranger.

. . . . .
 
                                                            But
the big white bird took you away beyond all day-
and night-life once upon a last time of an apocalyptic
hyper-tensive seizure when your heart couldn’t cope
any longer with your already out-dated
attempt at a new self, half a new name, skinhead hairdo
or the like, leather gear and an improbable
turnover of new words minted too late in your last days. . .

Peter Boyle: Enfolded in the Wings of a Great Darkness

[Sydney]: Vagabond Press, 2019, 80pp.

This remarkable book is a kind of livre composé covering the twenty months which begin with the author’s discovery that his partner is suffering from an incurable disease. One’s initial response is that this will provide a difficult test not only for the author himself, but also for the Romance-influenced, surreal (to use a loose term loosely) poetic mode that Peter Boyle has pioneered throughout his career and which I have written about at some length on this site in reviews of his other work. Sometimes the background landscapes of his poems, though fictional, anchor them in at least the illusion of a solid reality: Apocrypha was, for example, an anthology of different kinds of poetry produced by different cultures in an imagined alternative world; Ghostpeaking was an anthology of poems produced by imaginary Romance language speakers whose biographies were provided – also anchoring the poems in some way. Here, the pain that anchors the poems is oppressively realistic and one feels, initially, that it might be difficult for readers to respond to conceptually elegant poems of dreams and dream images which are tied to a painful experience which they have either experienced themselves or can relate empathically to.

Actually, an alternative way of framing this question might be to point out that the most conventional, personal-documentary poetry, far from being at home in the middle of personal trauma, is actually rather challenged by it. It occurs most recently in David McCooey’s heart attack poems where such an immense disruption to a poet’s life at all levels demands to be “dealt with” in some way since it would be a deliberate lie to omit it and while the truest poetry may be the most feigning it can hardly be the most deliberately suppressing. In that case, as in others, various techniques can be deployed to prevent the poems being a mere hospital diary: a set of oblique lyrics, for example, or a single “confessional” piece that gets the issue out of the way. My point is that an extreme personal experience poses problems no matter what the poetic theory, methods and beliefs of the poet may be.

Only one of the poems in this book approaches the documentary:

we are people gathering in waiting rooms
our gentle patter
                                     builds a smooth
human feel to mortality
through words
                                     our joined breaths
renew their task:
to push helplessness a little further
off our shoulders

There are a couple of other poems – “And me, if I’m your keeper, / in this strange zoo” and “suddenly / it comes to us” – which also deal with the everyday realities of hospital visits though in a fairly oblique way. The latter, for example, speaks of a mysterious text from “the last emperor” – either Chinese or Roman – in which “death’s slowly / at first imperceptibly / widening thumbprint” is delivered in a kind of code. One could imagine an entire book constructed like this with a suitably sophisticated, European-surreal cast which would obviate any tendency towards simple confessionalism. But what Boyle has chosen to do (at least as far as I can intuit it) is to measure the alterations to his psychic state by observing changes in the messages that are sent to him as though the poems were made up of the traces we see on the monitors in an intensive care unit. This is a technique that involves being receptive and looking carefully at what comes in. And what comes in comes in from a variety of sources. Dreams, hypnagogic daydreams and fantasies are obvious ways in which the stressed body and mind sends messages but in Boyle’s distinctive creative set up, poetry itself sends messages when some words suggest themselves as the correct way to proceed with a piece of writing which has already been begun. And language – which Boyle, as a professional translator, has a particularly intimate relationship with – can also send its messages: there are some poems in Enfolded in the Wings of a Great Darkness which are founded on bilingual puns and homonyms, so that, for example, the fact that in some Romance languages the word for “conscience” and “consciousness” are the same seems to suggest a message from the depths of linguistic reality that needs exploring.

It is not to be expected, of course, that these messages should be couched in simple, interpretable language though there are occasions when they are. One such is the “Revelation on the forest path” an extended piece whose style seems to invoke Eliot’s confrontation with the familiar compound ghost in “Little Gidding”. Here the ghost is female – “like one returned from great distances / speaking” – and she has a lot of fairly straightforward advice that doesn’t require interpretation. And a lot of this advice seems to be about the function of poetry in contexts of crisis:

“All the truly matters is not there
or so so little
All the gestures and curling twists,
the filigree around the borders of lines,
bleach out
You build elaborate porticoes where no one will enter,
where nothing has entered”
. . . . . 
“It is not safe now
We do not live where you thought we lived
And perhaps there is no time now for
the building of monuments, even monuments of words
Too late now for those speakers of the lines
only you could invent
Just because you have breathed many mornings
does not mean you will always breathe
Just because the sun has risen over and over
many days in your life
does not mean it will always rise” . . .

But usually these messages have to be read carefully since their significance is not always immediately apparent. As one of the poems says:

As I unfold
the pages of
the dreambook
more and more
diagrams open out.

What was I assembling? . . .

Before going on to look at the possibilities:

Is it 
the elaboration

of a space 
soon to be evolved
for whatever remains
after us
. . . . . 
or perhaps these
chaotic diagrams are
the history of the abandoned . . .

In other words – or at least as I read it – messages from the world of dreams are not necessarily limited to the concerns of the individual dreamer. They have a component in which they are the dreams of much larger contexts that the individual partakes in. But despite this caveat, I think the idea of someone’s looking at hospital monitors without any other means of direct contact with the patient and deriving from that some kind of image of the sufferer’s altered state, to see the various messages from the differing sources as riddles “whose answer is yourself”, is a viable one. Or to use another image, “wading through / the fine-grained silt / that was the world”, the interpreter can make some sense of the river-of-life’s “moment-by-moment turbulence”.

What kind of observations is a reader to make? It isn’t the sort of book that one dips into; one needs to read it whole several times in order to find the motifs and repeated images. One of the most obvious is the idea of being dragged remorselessly into nothingness. In a sense the first three of the one hundred and fourteen poems play variations on this. The first interprets what may well be a simple observable image of the author’s surrounding suburbia as an example of how they all (in Eliot’s words again) go into the dark:

. . . . .
Beyond is the steady tug
of a long line of houses, of houses
crammed with people
going under

The words “tug” and “long line” ensure that we are predisposed to the image of a sinking ship here before the words “going under” appear but the second poem repeats the downward movement as a result of desk-bound weariness – “When your eyes are so heavy / you fall into space” – and the third introduces the repeated image of the self, rather like a meteor, undergoing a momentary illumination as it disappears:

so far a thing
he goes
into the zero

and 
glitters

These poems set up a recurring pattern of movement, often a fall, into complex corridors and tunnels. Sometimes the image is not of a fall but of a voyage (in a boat or spaceship) through a surreal landscape often, again, of corridors. Repeated images are, of course, part of the apparatus which unifies what really are fragmented poems coming from different aspects of the psyche. There are, in fact, many continuities in this book. An author’s note tells us that the series was written between January, 2017 and September, 2018 and we are often reminded of the season as the poems progress. There is also a regularly recurring description of the setting of a desk at night with a world outside. I have quoted the second part of the opening poem but the first lines describe how words pile up “on one side of the desk”. It’s quite refreshing to be reminded that poems are written not on the site of the experience which is being explored, but on a desk in front of a blank page or a computer screen. Oddly these references might be said to make these poems, despite their interest in dreams, metaphysical paradoxes and language, rather more solidly realistic than most.

I won’t go on describing the repeated images; they form the fabric of the entire book and tend to be spaced so that the book rarely seems to be tied down to exploring one particular approach. But, standing back a little, it’s hard not to get the idea that traumatic experience has sharpened the sense of dichotomy that runs through the poems. There is, spatially, the “here” as opposed to the “there”, the homely desk as opposed to the fall into nothingness, the forest as opposed to the burnt out landscape. But the fundamental dichotomy is that of light and dark. Presumably this has its origins in night-time composition (night being the best time to hear the messages of the dream-world) set against an experience of the dawn. A poem called “Stepping from a dark bedroom onto the wide verandah, daybreak” is entirely built on this dichotomy:

all the light of the trees
speaks for me
this presence

that makes the leaves 
more than leaves
.  . . . .
if you can feel beyond
these dark markings, blue
scratches where

the death lord has held me

within us
as far over us

this light returns

Light and dark are so dominant that one begins to think of gnostic presuppositions possibly underlying the work. And a slightly Jewish cast to some of the later poems – one is described by the author as being based on a poem from The Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse – supports this to the extent that early common-era Judaism, like early Christianity, was very hospitable to the influences of gnosticism (and other beliefs coloured by Neo-Platonism). It’s also a reminder that the figure of Jabes – an Egyptian Jew writing in Paris and a master of paradox – has appeared before in Boyle’s poetry. I have always been puzzled by apparently ineradicable assumptions such as that light is good and darkness is bad (one could include the strange geometry whereby depth is good – profound – and surfaces are trivial – superficial) and I’m attracted by works which invert this. In Tristan and Isolde, light is bad (der öde Tag) and dark good; in Antony and Cleopatra the Egyptians are people of the night and the decidedly unpleasant Romans are people of the day. What prevents it being a cliché in Enfolded in the Wings of a Great Darkness are a number of paradoxes whereby the dichotomy generates its own undoing. We have met a brief version of this in the third poem where the self as it plunges to extinction gives off light – a phenomenon which is an example of the wider paradox whereby words and poetry emerge from silence.

One of the poems which engages with this begins as a celebration of light – “its bright dependable / presence among us / moving into our rooms / brushing our bodies as we wake” – but then goes on to see light as being

   the closest 
we will ever have
 
to a metaphor
for being dead

vanished 
from so far off
we will glow

among our objects
and our traces

unspoken irreplaceable

the underworld’s
almost indetectable
shimmer

Admittedly this is not about light in the abstract so much as about the effects of light on human beings but it does complicate the presentation of light in the book. An earlier poem begins by speaking of the “end of the twisted valley” and our expectations, based on the general images the book supplies, is that some sort of descent into darkness will wait at the end of this painful experience. But, to our (or, at least, my) surprise, it is light that is waiting:

at the end of the twisted valley
in all the battering winds

at the foot of the door
a light

and the small step before the light
sheer     beckoning     bridgeless

In other words, in popular culture terms we are in the universe of Close Encounters of the Third Kind rather than of Pitch Black. What is a reader to make of the light/darkness dichotomy as it is revealed in this book? Perhaps the opposition holds and these counter-examples are no more than the psychic world providing – as it probably always does – mixed messages. Perhaps we should read it keeping in mind that much of the fabric of the poetry is generated by paradoxes.

And one of the most telling of the paradoxes is the fact that a book of one hundred and fourteen poems, written regularly during a period of inner anguish, should conclude by naming its own title in the final line. It reminds one of Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” though I’m yet to be convinced by readings of that poem which focus on a largely imagined metaphysical structure. In Enfolded in the Wings of a Great Darkness what might, in lesser hands, be the record of a time of pain, inevitably in the past tense, becomes a registering of messages from the self which are preparatory: the body of the poem precedes its title rather follows from it. Oddly enough, the title can be read, on its own, as presenting a benevolent, caring image of the dark rather than a symbol of all that terrifies us about impending mortality. But, even if we accept that there is ambiguity about the presentation of light and dark, it’s hard to imagine that that was what was intended.

Barry Hill: Eagerly We Burn: Selected Poems 1980 – 2018

Bristol, UK: Shearsman, 2019, 193pp.

At fewer than two hundred pages, Eagerly We Burn – the title is taken from one of the poems in a collaborative book with the artist, John Wolseley, devoted to birds – is a restrained and tight selected given the size of Barry Hill’s poetic output. The poems are organised by book but retrospectively (ie beginning with new work and ending with Hill’s first book, Raft) and there’s quite a bit of revision, especially of the earlier work, though it’s not rewriting, more a matter of adjusting and polishing. Raft was published when its author was forty-seven and the earliest poems in it were written when he was forty. That’s a late start for a poet but it does provide some clues that might help frame a description of what Hill has done and is doing. One gets a strong sense that the poems arise from what one is tempted to call “projects” though this can convey an inaccurate impression of a preconceived and planned intellectual quest. Hill’s projects might better be described as long term engagements with certain cultural, spiritual, intellectual, emotional and artistic experiences. Not necessarily an unusual source of poems but seldom done so exhaustively. Engagements like that are part of the powerful drive to extend the borders of the self, to, in Auden’s words, “twig from what we are not what we might be next”, and they tend to begin in maturity.

A good – and reasonably self-contained – example might be Naked Clay, a series of poems engaged with Lucian Freud’s paintings. At a hundred and fifty pages, it was twice the length of the average book of poems and nothing like the mere sequences that tend turn up in other poets’ ekphrastic work. I mention this vulgar matter of size just to stress how exhaustive Hill’s engagements can be. These poems work through the whole span of Freud’s career but one’s sense of them is that they want to come at the paintings from every possible angle; to probe not only the paintings but the capacities of poetry itself especially as it relates to the visual arts. Most of the poems acknowledge the painting to which they refer in their titles. Some of them describe the painting – “A smear of snotty cream / marks the forehead / for the squall” – rejoicing in words’ capacity to “capture” or at least analogously recreate the thick impasto of Freud’s technique. We might think of such poems as belonging to the historical origins of ekphrasis, involving a recreation and transmission of an original. But there are poems which enter into the imagined consciousness of the sitter sometimes as a simple statement of what might be in the model’s mind – “The girl with the white dog / as still as the door closed behind her / is daydreaming of mice / in a drawer of socks” – and sometimes as monologue – “In the palm of one hand / I can feel the soft weight of the bird . . .”, “Because I keep the company of lions / he’s given me a Jack Dempsey nose”. Sometimes he’ll make a stab at entering the consciousness of the painter himself: “Wasteground with Houses, Paddington, 1970-72” does this at length beginning with the death of Freud’s father – “As his father lay dying / and after the death of his father / he turned to look / out of his window . . .” and finishing:

Even now the eye can run along them like a hand
                   takes hold of a warm cock
                   more than half a dozen of them
to be frank to be crude to fuck this painting up, almost.

It’s what happens to views in miserable London light.
You can come back from somewhere else
                    from the Low Countries, for instance
feeling you have put so many things behind you
                    and looking out the window
                            as if for the first time
the most ordinary thing has an extraordinary glow
                            to it, has caught fire.

At other times the poems spin into Hill’s own autobiography. “Hotel Bedroom, 1954” begins “This painting hurls me back again / into where my first wife slept – / my dreading the day she’d turn to see / all my clinical tendencies” and Freud’s mother paintings lead to Hill’s own parents, the book finishing with a long poem, “Magnanimity”, which revisits life with these parents. Another extended poem, “In Sight of Death”, might be seen to be a version of the book in miniature but it also deals with the question of poetry itself and how it is influenced by the fact that it is enmeshed in a “project”.

The mother paintings and Hill’s “Magnanimity” also front up to the issue of the human body and the disconcerting experience of seeing it as exposed as it is in Freud’s paintings. In other words, the autobiographical drift that a number of the poems have is balanced by a generalised intellectual interest in the body and the way it is represented in the paintings. And that isn’t all that these poems attempt but it’s enough to establish the idea that Hill’s poems often are embedded in a multipronged assault on a particular issue. And sometimes the poems are only part of the process. Hill has a collection of essays and reviews, Reason & Lovelessness, which shows that many of the subjects appearing in the poems can be accompanied by some extended expository prose dealing with the same issue: in this case there are two essay/reviews relevant to Naked Clay – “Brushes with the Body” and “Getting to Grips with Naked”.

I’ve looked at Naked Clay at some length – and it is a tour de force – but in truth I could have done the same for any of the projects that Hill’s life and intellectual work embrace. “Exhaustive multipronged engagement” would be the best condensed description I could give of this poetry. I have written about Lines for Birds (another tour de force) elsewhere on this site but, revisiting it – and there is a good and generous selection in Eagerly We Burn – you can see that it shares a similar pattern though its interests are as far from the human body as is possible since it is concerned with birds, inhabitants of the natural world which we interact with but which are, ultimately, beyond our understanding. As in Naked Clay, there are poems of “capture”, poems of exploration and poems of scientific engagement: multipronged but different. At one extreme there is something like “On the Brilliant Engagement of Two Paradise Riflebirds” which deliciously evokes those amazing birds but is done as a monologue from the male bird’s point of view – “What we did was preen and groom / our feathers. We opened the orange / depths of our beaks / pleased at the split husks // the crimson fruit, its surrender”. This unusual perspective, coupled with the highly “literary” title and a set of possible double entendres means that a reader is always going to be aware of the possibility that the relationship spoken about is a human, sexual one. As a result what seems to be the most daring inter-species extension of the self might be, at the same time, a single-species love poem. The poem which begins the selection from Lines for Birds is “Thrush Summer (1959)”, a more straightforward piece of personal poetry:

That bird, in the heat
bursting out of itself.
. . . . . 
O summer thrush of youth
a rush of beaky songs
the streaming of bass notes
as if culture is new!
Conflagrations!
The corn under starry skies.
When we were young and ablaze -
spirit arrivals.

At first there seems no doubt that the bird must be subordinated to the human here since it’s a poem about the ecstatic sexual love of sixteen year olds. But Hill’s poetic personality is such that the bird is more than mere symbol. The young man moves out of himself into the bird – “Young man bird / woman at his call” – and in the last line the thrush is configured as the spirit which arrives to turn dreary adolescents into burning lovers. There is also an ambiguity in that last line – the plural “arrivals” nags one into thinking about it – so that perhaps it is the couple who are spirit arrivals. If that is the case then the superimposition of the bird and the couple becomes attractively complex: bird metamorphosing into the spirit of summer, Shaw Neilson style, and humans metamorphosing into spirit as well so that birds and humans are interspecially interwoven.

In Lines for Birds the first poem is not “Thrush Summer (1959)” but “Eagerly We Burn” which goes on to be the title of this selected. Whereas the former aspires to be nothing more than a complex lyric, hiding surprises under what seems to be a conventional genre piece, “Eagerly We Burn” is difficult at every level. Set in the aftermath of a fire in the scrub lands of north west Victoria and south west NSW it is partly a poem about the collaboration of artist and poet in the book. The drawings on paper are made with charcoal, the material that the fires have left behind but, just as the bush recovers quickly from fire – “there’s amber growth from tubers / frisky ginger everywhere” – so art and poetry are involved in recreation: “If it [the Honey Eater] perished it would live / in the lines you make”. This seems unremarkable enough but there are a couple of complexifying features. The poem’s first line, “From the war-zone of burnt goodbyes”, suggests that the bushfire itself might be symbolic of destroyed human relationships. And the very mention of fire recalls Buddhism – a subject appearing throughout Hill’s work and which I’ll speak about later – and the notion in the Fire Sermon that fire symbolizes the human world of sensory attachments. And this reading makes the tone of the title (and last line) tricky to establish, at least for someone approaching Hill’s poetry from the outside. It’s a matter of how Hill’s poetry engages with a different culture with a different attitude to the natural world, that is, an intercultural issue of the sort that others of Hill’s “projects” are involved with. Here it might be designed to reveal a double perspective on the same landscape.

If the poems devoted to the Freud paintings take us into questions of the body, the mother (introducing an analytical perspective established by Lucian Freud’s grandfather) and the multiple meanings of nakedness, and Lines For Birds takes us into questions of our relationship to other species, other “projects” of Hill’s bring us into the equally complex world of extending the self by encountering different cultures. He has moved west (and into the interior of Australia) in poems relating to experiences of aboriginal culture and east in poems engaging with Mahayana Buddhism. Interestingly not into the north – the equally disorienting regions explored in the past by people like Rasmussen and more recently by Barry Lopez.

The poems about Aboriginal culture have two loci. There are poems in The Inland Sea which are responses to life in Central Australia, what one might call lyrics with an analytical touch. These are counterparts to Hill’s work on the biography of TGH Strehlow (which, I’m ashamed to say I am yet to read) and they also mesh in with a series of essays on Central Australia collected in the second part of Reason & Lovelessness. In other words, there is the same sense of powerful intellectual engagement producing both prose and poems as part of the equipment with which it can be tackled. The central issues of any desire to expand the self by meeting the different are laid out in the opening paragraph of an essay called “Crossing Cultures”:

If crossing means overcoming difference, arriving at some point of identity, making a whole new home in another culture, this, with regard to Aboriginal culture, is next to impossible. . . . . . We may enter the other, yes, but only via the dream, the unconscious, night-time enactments of exotic signs. You might reach the other side, yes, but how do you safely get back?

Orientalism generation who see all such things as results of patriarchal imperialism (the Oedipal lambasting of ancestors is surely the dreariest of contemporary genres). I won’t go into this at any greater depth since Hill’s own poems about Central Australia are only a small part of his thoughts about the issue. But it does occur to me that the real “crossings”, the real points of contact and sympathy may need to be made not with other ethnicities but with our own predecessors whom contemporary intellectual positions tend to distort and cartoonise. Hill’s essay “Through Larapinta Land” isn’t free of this judgementalism when it looks at the work of Baldwin Spencer but operates by contrasting him to Darwin, a more acceptable nineteenth century intellectual.

The other component of Hill’s engagement with black Australia is in his booklength account of the life of William Buckley, the convict who, escaping from the first attempted settlement at Port Phillip Bay in 1803, lived among Aboriginal people before surrendering to the merchants who arrived thirty-two years later. Buckley’s case is fascinating and, seemingly, designed for a late twentieth-century treatment because of the complicated way it is locked in text. We only have extended access to Buckley though a ghost-written autobiography of twenty years later. And the author is a not entirely trustworthy journalist with an agenda (it rather recalls Rusticello‘s ghosting of Marco Polo’s travels). There are other textual fragments scattered among other people of the period who came into contact with Buckley. And so far from being a sudden trustworthy anthropological insight into the alien world (as, for example, Ibn Fadhlan’s meeting with the Vikings on the Volga) we have an enigma amongst enigmas wrapped in text. And given the local Aboriginal’s tendency to see a giant white man as a ghost, a whole new range of meanings is added to the contemporary phrase “ghost-writer” (Hill’s book is significantly called Ghosting William Buckley). What strikes one about the poems of this book – I’ll spare my readers a long analysis – is their variety and their varied angles of attack. The book isn’t, in other words, a smooth narrative (epic style) from a considered authorial position so much as an examination of what different kinds of poem can say about a particular moment, and which moments can be dealt with in which ways by poetry. The early poems, for example, look a little like eighteenth century ballads. Later on there are poems about birds and fish that recall the later poems of Lines for Birds. But, most interestingly, we can see Buckley as an example of that earlier question: “You might reach the other side, yes, but how do you get safely back?” In my reading, entirely provisional, Buckley loses his language (at least for a while) and his self, permanently. His later career is as odd as Alexander Selkirk’s or Swift’s Gulliver returned from the land of the Houyhnhnms. His isn’t so much an expansion of the self as an annihilation.

And it has a kind of relevance for those poems of Hill’s that deal with his journeys East since an evacuated, non-self seems something more in keeping with Buddhist and Taoist traditions than Western ones. The East is present in Hill’s poems from the very beginning. The first book, Raft, is structured around the idea of the Dharma raft, derived from a parable imagined to be by the Buddha. I’m not confident about the religions east of the Indus River which form a vast ocean in which I have only ever paddled but, as far as I can tell, the raft can be interpreted as the moral and sensory experiences which get the pilgrim to the farther shore and which are designed to be jettisoned once that shore is reached. The alternative reading (which leads one down a never-ending alleyway of paradox) is that the raft is the Buddha’s teachings themselves, designed somehow to be abandoned after success. I think Hill’s poems are based around the former interpretation: the early poems in the section, ”Floating”, are about the conventional subjects of lyric poetry – the self and its attachments.

But Raft is a first book. The East appears most importantly in two of the other books, Four Lines East and Grass Hut Work, published in 2009 and 2016 respectively. The former is a kind of superior visitor’s book with brief vignettes of India, China and Japan whereas the latter is close to a pilgrim’s book, a book of immersions. “Under the Sign of Necessity” from Four Lines East is a good example of the issues which, I’ve been arguing, Hill is interested in. It recounts a visit in Kolkata to the Bengali poet, Nabaneeta Dev Sen:

In the comfortable room, our bellies full
we had been talking ideas, of language,
and you had read a poem
the one about your young men hardened
by killing in the name
not of their mother, but justice.
And I had read a poem in return
one about the bomber with the pretty smile . . .

This is a vision of the best of East-West ecumenical bonding, poetry as a place in which shared and different experiences can be aired as parties come together in the best spirit – what the poem describes as “the loving silence”. But looking out of the bathroom window Hill sees two rickshaw men

     in the smouldering street light below
a near-naked man washed at the pump
the gutter startlingly clean all around him
his body as fresh as the speech
he directed like water to a man nearby.

The listener had a small towel over his shoulder.
He seemed to have all the time in the world. . .
A song must have linked the rickshaw men.
But then I had to turn away - 
Neither knowing their poem
Nor the wars they might be in.

The point of this scene (there are a few differences between its appearance in Four Lines East and Eagerly We Burn) is that there are limits to empathic relations between cultures just as, I suppose, there are limits to empathic relations between any individuals within a culture. Another fine, though entirely conventional, poem recalls the experience of the traveller – slightly fuddled by the “street fumes, prejudice, difference” of India and trying, by writing his diary, to “put / more definition into these daily labours” – coming across a leaf from the bodhi tree pressed between the pages of the diary. It’s a kind of call to meditation to free the mind from the endless detail of life:

. . . . . 
Coming upon the leaf might have put a halt
to the attempts at shape, at true memory.
After all, if a man is serious about that tree
he might abandon the thickets of words . . .

There is a justified sense that the freed meditative mind of Buddhism might be inimical to the kinds of poetry that appeal to us, a genuine and dangerous (for a poet) clash of cultures. The poem resolves it by allowing the leaf to have, on its underside, a “half dozen petrified eggs, like seeds” which enables Hill to, at least momentarily and provisionally, dissipate the tensions: “You continue to transport words across paper. / Tissues of flight, and eggs, find their place”.

It all comes down to the crucial question of how profound the cultural differences, especially between East and West are. If all humans partake of the same experiences merely inflected by the cultures in which they are embedded then a westerner can respond to those elements that help expand his or her personality or which offer expansive possibilities for poetry. And the same for an easterner experiencing the West. But if the cultures are fundamentally irreconcilable then, deep down, the result can only be a kind of cherry-picking. It’s good to appreciate the calm compassion of Buddhism, for example, but is it predicated on a view of the universe which is quite intolerable to a westerner?

My impulse is to belong to this school of irreconcilability and I need to speak personally here for a moment to explain why since it profoundly influences how I read these poems, why I like them and why I think the best of Hill comes out of poems camped in the difficult areas of the meeting of the two cultures. As I said earlier, my knowledge of the religions from east of the Indus is very sketchy and I’ve never had the sense of excitement and expansion that so many others, betters, have. My text for whatever understanding I have of the major religions of Asia and Europe is Joseph Campbell’s Masks of God series, especially the second volume, Oriental Mythology. This book is now nearly sixty years old and I’ve had my copy for fifty of those years. Even at its date of publication it must have produced groans from experts in the field of comparative religion and ethnology because of its synthesising sweep and confident (now, we would probably say, imperial/intellectual) analyses. Today it is probably in even less repute, consigned to the box of remaindered conspectuses alongside Frazer’s The Golden Bough and Spengler’s The Decline of the West among many, many others. But for all this, there is, at the opening of Oriental Mythology, a magical overview called “The Signatures of the Four Great Domains”. In Campbell’s view the fundamental split (the Indus River of religions) is between the West whose god is an independent creator, producing a world and human beings separate from itself, and the East whose god creates the world and its inhabitants by dividing itself so that all creation is part of the god. Each of these two irreconcilable religious cultures is then divided into two. The West contains the Greek-influenced response to being one of the creatures of the gods, stressing opposition and an argumentative stance towards the higher powers, not as a childish dummy-spit but as part of a mature development of an adult ego, able to face the difficulties that engagement with life will produce. It’s exactly the kind of culture that looks towards the possibility of expanding the horizons of the self by travel (at the benevolent level) but contains also the seeds of imperial conquest. The second component of the religion of the West is made up of the levantine religions of submission: Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

The East also has its double face. It is a culture of meditation (the divine is contained in the self) and expresses the importance of the yogic/meditative discipline in the famous metaphor of the lake. Blown by the winds of self and unfocussed thought, the lake produces only fragmented images but when the mind is cleared and the lake still, it produces a perfect image of reality. As Campbell says,

We should then see that all the broken images, formerly only fleetingly perceived, were actually but fragments of these true and steady forms, now clearly and steadily beheld. And we should have at our command thereafter both the possibility of stilling the pond, to enjoy the fundamental form, and that of letting the winds blow and the waters ripple, for the enjoyment of the play (līlā) of the transformations . . . . . But whereas the usual point of view and goal of the Indian has always been typically that of the yogi striving for an experience of the water stilled, the Chinese and Japanese have tended, rather, to rock with the ripple of the waves. Compared with any of the basic theological or scientific systems of the West, the two views are clearly of a kind; however, compared with each other in their own terms they show a diametric contrast: the Indian bursting the shell of being, dwells in rapture in the void of eternity, which is at once within and beyond, whereas the Chinese or Japanese, satisfied that the Great Emptiness indeed is the Mover of all things, allows things to move and, neither fearing nor desiring, allowing his own life to move with them, participates in the rhythm of the Tao.

The whole section finishes with a displaying of the four iconic figures of these religious sub-groups:

The four representatives, respectively, of human reason and the responsible individual, supernatural revelation and the one true community under God, yogic arrest in the immanent great void, and spontaneous accord with the way of earth and heaven [are] Prometheus, Job, the seated Buddha, eyes closed, and the wandering Sage, eyes open . . .

I’ve always found this profoundly useful as a rough map for negotiating the two Buddhisms (Theravada and Mahayana), Taoism etc and for plotting where the sites of conflict are likely to be. It helps explain why western poets have been more comfortable with Oriental (ie Chinese and Japanese) religions and poetry since West and East here share a fascination with the natural world and each has tried to pioneer ways of expressing landscape in words (or to pioneer ways of expressing the impossibility of expressing the world in words). It’s a moment of common interests, like the meeting in Nabaneeta Dev Sen’s room, where the differences are helpful and serve to expand perspectives and possibilities. But the poetic temperaments are so different: the western poet has to make a massive assertion of ego to write and publish or speak a poem, and egotism is an important driver in the western tradition, valuable as long as it is finely enough balanced: underdeveloped it produces the immature sense of the self that leads to victimhood, overdeveloped – well, everyone knows where that leads. The great poems of the Japanese and Chinese traditions don’t treat the self in any way at all resembling this. There’s an unbridgeable gap, in other words, between Wordsworth’s Prelude and Basho’s travels in the far north.

Western poets have learned from oriental poets how to move poetry closer to life-as-lived by exploiting diary form. It’s a form that reconfigures the poetic ego slightly by adding immediacy of response, provisionality, sketchiness and even disposableness to lyric poetry. I don’t want to imply that Four Winds East and Grass Hut Work incline towards a sort of devotional diary because the latter, for example, contains a major and extended poem like “On Getting to Grips with the Heart Sutra”. One of the poems of Grass Hut Work, “Basho’s Sin”, refers to the famous poem and uses it as a marker for the irreconcilability of the traditions that I’ve been speaking of:

Basho’s Sin

was leaving that child
by the side
of the road.

Only a larger Taoism
will do
to explain it . . .

It is part of a series in the book devoted to a pilgrimage not to a standard religious site but to the Peace Park in Hiroshima. It’s another point of painful interaction between West and East requiring attempts at reconciliation, of “facing the music” as one of the poems says. It also expresses the fundamental paradox of the Promethean ward of the City of Religion. As inhabitants of these suburbs, we can spare ourselves the mind-numbing niceness of the Dalai Lama and the mind-numbing abstractions of seemingly endless Buddhist “discourses”. In exchange we give the world the genuine miracle of the Hubble telescope but we also give it the atom bomb.

To be fair to Campbell, as early as 1962 he reminds us that his map of the great European and Asian religions is really a description of a past state. Interactions between them – poets and intellectuals travelling in both directions and spending extended periods of time in these locations of cultural otherness – mean that the boundaries are changing. I still think that the differences are irreconcilable and that most of the good things that emerge – as in Hill’s poetry – are likely to come from an open-eyed and open-minded engagement with these differences. But some sort of syncretism is possible and two thousand years from now the interactions may be shown to have produced whole new structures of religious and philosophical thought quite unfamiliar to the world of Prometheus, Job and the two very different sages.

John Jenkins: Poems Far & Wide

Waratah NSW: Puncher and Wattmann, 2019, 163pp.

The book’s title says it all in a way. Few recent books have shown such a variety of styles and poetic modes The styles range from sharp, Duggan-like, found poems – “Overheard on bus // It was like . . . / grasping at fogwebs” – to extended meditations, parodies and (in “The Annual Eros Motor Joyride”) exhaustive explorations of a single comic idea. The modes range from lyric to narrative and all the varieties within them. It takes a little while and a few rereadings to work out that this is not a grab-bag of recent work (“compendium” might be a politer word) but a coherent book, attempting, with some deliberateness, to push the boundaries of the possible in poetry, to reject conventional consistency which is, as one of the poems says, “a bloodless abstract, a lesser good”.

Jenkins’ previous book, Growing up with Mr Menzies, was, on the surface, an examination of life in the fifties and sixties in Australia, something of a celebration while at the same time something of a meditation on memory and the nature of history. At its core, it was a series of poems about the childhood doings of one Felix Hayes, born (like Jenkins) in 1949 in Elwood but soon moving to Box Hill, one of the outer suburbs of Melbourne which became a commuter base in the postwar age of prosperity supervised by successive Liberal party governments of Robert Menzies. The opening poem imagines Menzies kissing the new born Felix as part of a politician’s duties in that period and thus passing on a kind of blessing to a child who will grow up in the Australia he creates, one in which an improving standard of living and the opening of possibilities (especially in education) are counterbalanced by an apocalyptic background – the sense of living, as one poem says, “under ‘the shadow of the bomb’”. Many of the poems are in the familiar mode of a poet’s revisiting his or her childhood days but there are meditations on the processes involved – “Grain” and “Positives”, for example – as well as both external and (imagined) internal portraits of Menzies himself.

I dwell on Growing up with Mr Menzies at this length to point out that, essentially, it’s a hybrid work mating monologues with childhood memory-poems and meditations about the self, about history and the relation between the two. The core of the book is the imagined relationship between Felix and Menzies, the former representing youthful experiences revisited and the latter the dominating representative of capital H History – no accident that the book’s first line has Menzies bending over Felix in his cot. I think that this sense of hybridity is crucial to Jenkins’ work: he writes in many modes (including material co-written with Ken Bolton, and material involved in musical and theatre performance) not as someone unsure of their metier or as a professional writer turning their hands to whatever is required and pays, but rather as someone genuinely interested in mixing modes and exploring the interactions between them.

Hybridity involves the meeting of disparate things and as such it is perhaps no accident that one of the best poems of this new book, “Under the Shaded Blossom”, is a narrative about an imagined meeting between two utterly unalike individuals, Mafia fixer, Meyer Lansky, and magisterial poet, Wallace Stevens. Since Stevens travelled south (to Florida as well as Cuba) regularly for his holidays and Lansky was based in Cuba, such an accidental meeting is not impossible. And since, for most of us, the central paradox of Steven’s biography is his simultaneous addiction to poetry and finance, especially the finances of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company (resolved perhaps in the famous dictum “Money is a kind of poetry”) there is an additional frisson in the meeting of two men in their own way continuously involved in financial transactions. You get a sense here of why this fantasy meeting attracts a poetic mind like Jenkins. There is much to be explored in the meeting of speech (or sensibility) registers. Lansky’s indirect dialogue is done in the ineradicable style of Lower East Side: “A surprise visit maybe . . . that barber shop, where / the New York capos hang out Sundays. Short back and insides / all round! Schmucks is right! . . .” whereas Stevens is in full Stevensish tropical baroque mode:

. . . . . 
                                                           Mr Stevens,
elaborating a palette both abstract and precise, recalled at once the rail
journey down Florida. How Havana always welcomed his
appraisal, how real things revealed themselves to him,
they changed to music, passing an old casino in the park, where the bills
of swans had lowered slowly as he had neared. “For him?” In this way, life gave
its assurance to always change, that something new and shining would appear,
arising anew from its patina. (“Husks, wherein time was cradled.”)
The stone (he noted now) became rose, and clouds like lightest rose
at evening. And here, too, a single quiet dwelt, within poems made of things;
or orchestras played, balloons lifted into tropical nights at festivals . . .

(The allusion here to The Tempest, read religiously by Stevens every morning, is a reminder of the way in which that play formed the pattern in which he experienced the tropic south.) Lansky and Stevens meet, an offer is made (Lansky is looking for a respectable American- based company that can launder deals) and politely rejected and the two men part. This has a lot of allegorical possibilities: that the low is always an important part of the high (Caliban inhabits the island as legitimately as Ariel; and the shipwrecked include Stefano and Trinculo) but that, for their own, intrinsic reasons, they can’t deal with each other, is certainly one possibility, one supported by Jenkins’ note on the poem. Perhaps Stevens’s transformative rhetorical style can only operate after a refusal to deal with the world represented by Lansky and is thus an incomplete representation of the universe. My own tendency is to follow the path of looking at the poems of this book as being built on the notion of hybridity and thus reading this poem as saying that two styles or modes can inhabit the same space (here the dining room of the Hotel Nacional) and strike illuminating sparks from each other but ultimately remain separate. That is, for example, lyric poems can exist inside plays as songs but the traditions of the lyric poem and of the drama remain essentially unaltered. I’m not sure how defensible this is – but it’s a possible reading.

“Under the Shaded Blossom” is one of a number of short narrative poems in Poems Far & Wide. “The Man Who Lost Himself” and ”The Man Who Found Himself” have an abstract quality and are semi-comic expansions of the cliched use of those two verbs. “The Tent at Evening” following the amorous adventures of a circus knife-thrower who finishes up in Australia using a quintessential Australian – Bruce – as her whirling target perhaps recalls the meeting of Lansky and Stevens in that two opposites are brought together. Instead of the quick separation that happens in Havana, here one of the pair throws knives at the other, shaving off parts of his beard. It’s a more fruitful interaction but a very fraught one. And then there is “Charles Dodgson in Cheshire” recounting Lewis Carroll’s search for his stray cat, Minette, a cat as imaginary as the Cheshire cat since she has been created for the fiction. Like anything involving Carroll it thus enters complex realms in which imaginary and real interact. There is also “Slow Dissolve for Mr. D.” in which death takes a holiday in Hawaii (which makes one think of Wallace Stevens taking holidays in the tropics) and a dream poem involving a piano-playing lobster and his friend, a brick who turns out to be really a building tile. In all of these poems the core seems to be not so much any form of hybridity (though I suppose that having them as representatives of a kind of poetry rather different to the other poems of the book could be seen this way) so much as an interest of worlds within worlds. What might be called encapsulation is one of the themes of Poems Far & Wide, introduced in an ekphrastic piece about a Matisse drawing in which the artist includes himself as a reflection in the studio’s mirror and continued in “Burnt Wood, Birch Bark and the Village of Creation” in which seven tales are briefly told, each nested, babushka-like, inside the other. Nested tales – as in Borges and Calvino – always induce the theme of reality vs irreality, partly because a fiction is a non-reality produced by a real author in a solid, physical book. So imaginary stories about real people – Dodgson, Lansky and Stevens – rub shoulders with conventionally fictitious people like the Bruce of “The Tent at Evening”.

One of the most significant poems – it should probably be grouped with poems like “The Man Who Found Himself” as an “abstract” narrative – is “The Traveller (Man with a Suitcase)” charting the imagined travels of a figure derived from a painting: Jeffrey Smart’s “The Traveller 1973” which shows an anonymous, middle-aged man alighting from a bus (interestingly his reflection shows on the side of the next bus in line). Is it a narrative or a symbolic meditation? Perhaps both. It’s clearly allegorical although the presence of other poems in the book which detail journeys (especially journeys of revisiting) to actual places, helps anchor “The Traveller” in the real world. But most importantly it is a poem about poetry and process. The traveller lives in the world as we do in that he does all the ordinary and cliched things others do, here symbolised by the clichés of the tourist:

. . . . . 
Like us, he also smiles with friends in front of local landmarks.
Like we must do, he conspires with clichés, rehearsing nods and winks,
fake feelings, given templates, those de rigueur merely most
received . . .

But is distinguished from the rest of us by a heightened sensitivity to his own internal drives and processes:

. . . . . 
He feels something move him now, as he moves on: something oblique
yet tangible fills the world, as its true dimension: the quality 
of experience itself; the “poetic” inhering everywhere . . .

In this aesthetic, where the “poetic” is everywhere, there are not sacred sites (in the allegory of the poem these would be tourist destinations) since everything is a sacred site. The poet works through experiences which are “endless artefacts of miracle” and since he is on the edge of a kind of continuous becoming which is simultaneously travelling towards and immediately leaving behind, he is alert to, as the final line says, “their promise, being, erasure”.
Something of this idea of multiplicity and endless change is made into a poetic method in three poems which serve as a prelude for the book. The first of these, “Minifesto”, is quite clear about the kind of book a poetics such as this will produce:

Dear Reader, be warned . . . 
I think poetry is everywhere the poem goes,
the idea of a chosen plenitude: found in
hard-nosed science; in fantasy and dreams;
in satire, song, in wit and humour; drama high
and low. The list goes on: the simple and sublime,
serious or subtle, emotions fine and raw; in tradition
and the new; or words that seem to write themselves.
Equally in wonder, work and wishes; in reverie
while washing dishes, any human thing!

And Poems Far and Wide is the kind of collection that principles like this would produce: varied in every conceivable way. Thematically, though, there are a lot of consistent elements. I have spoken of the interest in encapsulation and mirroring. There’s quite a bit of “hard-nosed science” too, especially in the longish narrative celebrating James Clerk Maxwell’s field equations which, as Jenkins says, shapes the modern world’s view of what reality is. In “Maxwell’s Field” autobiographical elements of the man’s life are mixed with the idea of his being present in the poet’s world, a conceit deriving from the idea that the notion of the field begins wireless transmission which in turn begets digital transmission which brings the past into our own lives. Perhaps a good single example of the book’s idea of poetry and book-structure might be “Coathanger: The Opera” an extended piece which imagines a play/musical/opera celebrating the Sydney Harbour Bridge and describes not only a multi-media artform but also the process of its creation or evolution. An extended and exhausting attempt to celebrate a fleeting moment in a wildly hybridised art form.

It’s hard to think of another contemporary Australian poet who sets out deliberately to produce quite such a mixture of styles and modes. “Minifesto” justifies it by finding poetry – “a chosen plenitude” – everywhere. “Go with your strength” is advice given in a world which rather fears the dangers of over-reaching when one has multiple talents. But Jenkins’ talent seems to be exactly for this variedness (as opposed to mere variety) and the new things that can be made out of conventional materials.

Judith Rodriguez: The Feather Boy & Other Poems

Glebe NSW: Puncher and Wattmann, 2018, 136pp.

It’s a sad fact that The Feather Boy is Judith Rodriguez’ final book of poems. She died late last year. It comes after a long publishing lull. Once having gotten underway as one of the four Brisbane poets of Four Poets in 1961 (where she published as Judith Green) she published books at a fairly conventional rate up to her New and Selected Poems of 1988, but after that her publications became rather sparser. The Feather Boy is really a retrospective collection of poems written after that date – as she says on the book’s cover “These are poems of nearly thirty years”. The cover also apologises for the resulting lack of “a tightly-themed book” before going on to say that the times demand a book of varied concerns and interests as do the variety of “people encountered”. There is a clue here to the book’s genre. It seems to me to be a “final book”, a certain kind of “late work” in which the author allows him or herself a good degree of latitude. I was struck by the similarities with Gwen Harwood’s final book, The Present Tense with its “Six Odes for Public Occasions”. In Rodriguez’ case this means including poems which lash out at the outrages of the period and those that celebrate friendships – usually those in which the friend has already died. Comic doggerel poems get to be included (the annual ASAL parody nights have a lot to answer for here) whereas they would have never made it into earlier, “straighter” books. All in all, there is a certain unbuttoning in poetic matters and a focussing on the humane values of friendship as the dark comes ever closer and everything is pared down to essentials. In fact, friends – in this genre – perhaps replace children as the centre of intimate interaction, presumably because, in advanced age, one’s children have long since metamorphosed into separate and probably reasonably distant human beings.

The first “unbuttoning” involves Rodriguez allowing herself to be furious, in verse, with the public issues of the last thirty years. This is a case of the poet joining the broader community and sharing their outrage. The period from the late eighties to the present is, in Tacitus’ words, “rich in disasters . . . horrible even in peace”, although compared with periods of equivalent length – 1914–1945, for example – relatively light-on for horrors. There are poems about suicide bombings, pre-Fitzgerald corruption in Queensland, Abu Ghraib, and the imprisonment of the Uighur writer Ilham Tohti. The most important and desperate of these for Australians was the boat-people “crisis” initiated by the arrival of the Tampa with its rescued refugees. In retrospect it is a central event in Australia’s history, reminding those who blandly assumed that Australia was a country of decencies (albeit, fairly dopey decencies) that it could show another face. Though John Howard will obviously bear most of the opprobrium of history – for encouraging and cashing-in politically on this sudden revelation of a hidden dark side of Australian culture – both political parties, at different times, followed the ugly trail of demonization.

Everyone knows the poetic problems that these issues present. A poet, wishing to, at least, express their personal anger is required to find an angle that will result in something better than mere journalism or demonstration slogans. But this raises the paradox that a sophisticated, nuanced and angled approach to some public event – the kind of thing that poets and readers of poetry expect – aestheticises the event itself, replacing the rawer emotions of horror or outrage by the altogether more comfortable one of aesthetic pleasure. Rodriguez’s poems in the first section of The Feather Boy work most of the familiar techniques ranging from eloquent repetitive syntactic patterns to angled, symbolic approaches. “Boat Voices” is the largest attempt here, mixing recorded speech (sourced from newspapers) with comment but I don’t think it can be said to be a successful sequence. “To Sleep, 1986” is a lot more successful because just as the title is ambiguous – a poem addressed to sleep or a poem about the experience of going to sleep – so the entire piece is built on ambiguities. The horrors the poems touches on – “necklacing” in South Africa and the abandoned citizens of Chernobyl (another problem for poems of outrage is the way in which events are reduced to a single verbal tag, a use of language that a good poet would be very resistant to) – are nightmares but they also, in Australia, tend to take place while the southern hemisphere is settled down in sleep. Horrors in the northern hemisphere are, in other words, nightmares that Australians wake up to.

The most intriguing of the poems in this section seems the most oblique. “The Feather Boy” is the first poem of the book and gives it its title. That’s being foregrounded with a vengeance. And yet it is so acutely angled that it leaves me, at least, not at all sure of its drift: in this it recalls Murray’s “Dog Fox Field”. There is a footnote to the poem which adds a little context: a “feather boy” was a child used by partisans to follow up an assassination and the material of the poem comes from Paul Valent’s Child Survivors of the Holocaust. The child’s task was to hold a feather under the noses of the dead, dying and unconscious and count to a hundred. If the feather stirred the victim was either unconscious or trying to fake death and the boy’s task was to call out to one of the men who would then cut the victim’s throat – “If I call, / a knife makes sure”. The poem itself doesn’t declare its sympathies – Polish partisan murder detachments and German occupiers seem alike ethically unattractive to innocent outsiders – but it does allow the boy to speak of himself as acting for the oppressed – “And I call, for us crushed in hiding, // for all of us scattered, parents, cousins, our fates / feathers in war’s updraft”. The poem is built, metaphorically, around the notions of calling and breath, and, as a result, one wants to approach it interpretively as a poem about the role of poetry itself in these ethically fraught situations. That would accord with its being placed first in the section. But it remains rather elusive: it could be saying that situations of horror (the Nazi occupation of Poland) produce such a distorted world that a situation in which a child become the arbiter of life and death is not to be judged simply. It might also be saying that a poetry attempting to deal with contemporary outrage shouldn’t be expected to behave like a polite lyric in an anthology.

The other three sections of the book – “Weather, Times, Places”, “Celebrations” and “Near and Dear” – have exactly the occasional quality that I have spoken about. The dominant impulse here is memory, a lot more interesting, at least superficially, that outrage. And Rodriguez has always been interested in the mechanisms of memory. Often, in this mode, a shortish poem acts as a kind of box in which a small cluster of memories relating to a friend is kept. The book’s final poems are about long-term memories – of father and mother. Again, in this mode, our interest in the remembered detail often has the task of keeping the poem afloat – something critical purists would deplore and “final book” authors happily embrace. But there are two poems which stand out as being better than this. Like “The Feather Boy”, they choose complexity and suggestion. The first of these is the book’s final poem, “Cordelia’s Music for Lear”. It’s position – balancing “The Feather Boy” from the beginning – should be a warning that their modes might be similar. “Cordelia’s Music for Lear” follows two conventional poems about Rodriguez’ father: moving acts of love and contrition. A passage from “Dad” will give an idea of what they are doing and how they work:

. . . . . 
At 99, frail, frustrated -
me off teaching in India -
you told my kids how clever
I’d been, a “natural”. Like Grannie,
your school-results framed and hung.
Dad, I weep at your pride.
How dear a tale. But me away, you died.

Died understood. I took
all you gave, the faith in family,
the English cousins, brothers
you hardly saw in the staggered
boarding at school . . . 

But when we arrive at “Cordelia’s Music for Lear”, two poems on, everything is entirely different:

If I tell you your liegemen wait
and your monster horse
you peer through the crazed hedge
show off bird-tufts
and paste them with licky
to a horse-skull melting like candy.
You have to laugh.

Come from the twigs, summon
the lineage of straw
colouring-in our blood
to daub your scratches.
Father, I gather
your warrior-hand all bone
in my hand’s bowl,

in my shawl, in my hair’s shade.
My young esquires
paint birds upon their shields,
each golden eye
each rainy bird-voice
a washed soul beginning.
Lie soft, be called.

The fact that we are likely to be initially confused about what is clearly a very coherent poem is an indicator of being in the same room as a real poem. Again, the poem provides some context though in this case it takes place not in a footnote but in its title since Cordelia is the loving daughter whose love is not expressed and the non-expression precipitates the tragedy. Equally, since Cordelia narrowly predeceases her father, this can’t be imagined to be a poem like “Dad” to be sung over the parent’s body at the funeral. And the setting seems to be a childhood one of rocking horses and tin soldiers rather than the adult one. It’s not a deliberately surreal work, challenging the very notion of interpretation and there may be a key to it buried somewhere in Rodriguez’ letters or interviews or comments to friends, but for a reader it poses a lot of problems, not the least the meaning of the first four lines of the second stanza. All one can say, reading as an outsider, is that the poem’s tone suggests forgiveness, reconciliation and a final peace.

“Cordelia’s Music for Lear” and “The Feather Boy”, bookending this collection, opt for ambiguity and suggestion in dealing with, respectively, relations with parents (viewed from the perspective of age) and historical outrage. The other outstanding poem is “The Reading” which opts for complexity in dealing with friendship, the third of the The Feather Boy‘s concerns. It is dedicated to Shanti Devadasan an Indian friend with whom Rodriguez read Twelfth Night in a shop in a Chennai mall. And it’s the Shakespeare which continually interacts with their friendship to produce the complexities, Twelfth Night being the play of re-unitings (while Lear is a play of sunderings) made both significant and poignant by the playwright’s loss of his son, Hamnet, a twin whose surviving sister was called Judith. Rodriguez imagines herself playing the part of Olivia and Devadasan the part of the separated twin, Viola. She begins by thinking of the unlikelihoods of this reading in regions “Shakespeare never knew” but then immediately thinks of the reach of the great creative imaginations (especially one whose first name contracts to “Will”): a poet who set plays in Venice and Egypt is already at the border of the great unknown subcontinent:

. . . . . 
                                but given
a century, only a century, who knows?
Headed east by the Serenissima -
Philippi – Actium – the Nile, our Will
was ripening toward the Mahabharata,
the gallant tales, the gold-skinned delicate-
fingered dancing god and cow-eyed girls
and partnership in a Bollywood studio. . . 

But this is a friendship/sisterhood doomed to fracture since Devadasan dies before the age of fifty and no number of sacrifices or visits can stop this final sundering. The fact that she is buried on a place called Quibble Island provides another verbal complexity – this time a nasty irony in that all literature teachers might well be buried on a place with a name like that. As Rodriguez says, it is “somehow a comment on the mess of it all, / somehow laughter from beyond”.

It has been said that complexity (as opposed to complicatedness) is one of the features of “late style”. These three poems stand out for exactly that quality among a group of poems which is marked, if anything, by a loosening of poetic stays. Rodriguez’ great poems have always been those in which a very distinctive personality manages to find the right form in which to express itself so that, far from being lyrically universal, you have a strong feeling that no-one else on earth could have written them. “Nu-Plastik Fanfare Red” is one of these (interestingly the father makes an appearance there but only as a cliché, concerned about the effect his daughter’s painting her room womb-red will have on the house’s resale value) as are the magnificent “Eskimo Occasion”, “Writing a Biography” and “An Odd Voyage”. Though I’m not sure whether many of the poems of this book would be included in any retrospective selected poems planned for Judith Rodriguez, I think “The Feather Boy”, “Cordelia’s Music for Lear” and “The Reading” would undoubtedly be included.

Robert Harris: The Gang of One: Selected Poems

Flinders Lane: Grand Parade Poets, 2019, 224pp.

The Gang of One is one of those literary rescue efforts that need to be both encouraged and supported. Robert Harris, who died at the young age of forty-two, was never a dominant figure in Australian poetry, a fact demonstrated by his spotty inclusions in the various anthologies of the time. Had it not been for this book, a selection from his five books, together with some journal-published poems and some unpublished ones, selected by Judith Beveridge and with a good introduction by Philip Mead, he might have disappeared forever, like so many others. Instead readers can now get a far better perspective on a decidedly odd, and in many ways impressive, career.

The first thing that occurs to me, reading through all his books, is how hard he had to work to make himself into a good poet. Some people find their mode and their voice almost immediately, others publish a first book of what are, really, successful experiments before mining a particular vein in later books. Harris seemed to take until his fourth book, The Cloud Passes Over (1986), to produce consistently good poems. The first three books show someone not only not sure of the kind of poetry he wants to write but somebody without much of an ear for what makes a good line or a good sentence: he was, in other words, far from being dangerously fluent. The last two books, which are quite special, redeem all this, of course, and it makes one admire the dogged determination with which Harris pursued the idea of making himself into a poet over a period of perhaps a dozen years.

In both Localities (1973) and Translations from the Albatross (1976), one can see what Harris wants his poetry to do. These poems demonstrate an interest in the social world, both its individuals and its hidden mechanisms, while at the same time allowing for moments of uplift, usually involving elements of the natural world, especially light and clouds (though sometimes music). In other words, he wants to look horizontally at the social while retaining some space for a tentative upward look towards the transcendent. It seems likely that the interest in the social derived from an extended period (a later poem speaks of “seven years servitude”) doing odd jobs and meeting odd people (rather like Bruce Dawe before him). Some individual portraits work well enough – “Retirement of the Railway Ganger”, “Another One For the Road” and “The Enthusiast”, for example – but often the social appears in the form of extended, hectoring denunciations as in “From a Seat in Joe’s Seafoods” and “Concerning Shearers Playing for the Bride”. A few lines from the former will make the point:

. . . .
the blanket, affectionate
heart of night
is violently robbed of all serenity with
the coming of the hateful shrieks
of vampire sirens possessed of the calm,
of the always justified cops gone out
to beat up some shivering kids. . . . .

As I copy this, I’m yet again amazed by the gap in quality between this and the poems of The Cloud Passes Over and JANE Interlinear. It’s an extraordinary act of self-education; a very steep grade to Parnassus.

One of the dominant influences behind the poems of this first book is the work of Eliot, not someone one would necessarily recommend as an influence although Harris might have found himself sympathetic to the alienated portraits of Eliot’s early verse and to the religious component of his middle and later work. It’s Eliot’s “Four Quartets” which are used as a model for “Shift Workers” (not included in The Gang of One) which is clearly an attempt to find a meaningful framework for large statements about the alienation of low-paid workers arriving by train, those fleeing and dispossessed during wars and those who survived the Depression. The last two of the five sections attempt to balance the misery of these lives with intimations of a richer inner life symbolised by, in Eliot-fashion, a rose. It doesn’t work but you can see what it is attempting – balancing the social with the transcendent – and that it responds to the need for a new form in which this can be done, rather than single portraits or single lyrical moments of love and enlightenment.

Something similar happens in Translations from the Albatross. Although it finishes with a section devoted to Edith Piaf, almost all of the rest is about suburban Melbourne but these poems are inclined to flirt with more “open” form. They are also introduced by a quote from Olson and bracketed by two self-referential poems the latter of which, “Traditional for the Manuscript”, suggests that the fifty pages so far are mere “preparation for a voyage”. I’m not sure whether the form adopted by these poems is any better at dealing with suburban life than the more conventional forms of the poems of Localities. Indeed one of the more memorable poems, “A Reader of Poetry Comes on a Tea Warehouse”, is written in the earlier mode and is a fairly successful portrait of an factory and its workers:

. . . . . 
They claimed it was for the good teas I loaded my back
“good teas on a million tables”. The Boss
believed his fables? He could have done, he was young
and winsome enough in his thirty-eight year old folly.
The kind of person who’d like to make everyone pray.
Only once in seven years servitude
did I ever work for a stupider one.

At last they’ve gone broke and closed the place up.
I came on the building the other day.
Great red brick beast with nowhere to go
a great dead beast with sky shooting out through the windows.
Finding it empty
the asset locked tighter than capital
and being reminded of someone you once used to know
Frank / Bill / Victor / Nina / Rose
while thinking of nobody’s poetry.

But again you can see the attraction of larger, conglomerate forms and the “Homage to Edith Piaf” is an early attempt at a form which will, eventually, lead to the long sequence about Jane Grey. I won’t say much about it here since it is hardly a success – the open form which enables a move away from free verse narrative and dramatic monologues is just too open to have a focus and becomes, instead, arbitrarily allusive – and it doesn’t appear in The Gang of One but it is worth noting that its subject was one of the class of dispossessed drifters that “Shift Workers” dealt with and that she made a popular music out of the details of her life. The sequence is, thus, an introduction to a continuing concern in Harris’s poetry with popular music as an expression of the tone of its time. It’s also worth pointing out the Piaf poems are a homage which involves a pilgrimage for the poet.

The Cloud Passes Over marks the beginning of Harris’s real, sustained poetry. The varieties in subject and method seem genuinely informed experiments rather than desperate searches for a poetry that will work. And all of this is marked by a new and clear Christian commitment – the first three poems, “Ray”, “The Call” and “The Convert” are overtly about the experience of “conversion” and the titles of the latter two are a clear nod to the poetry of George Herbert. I’m rather morbidly interested in this because I might have imagined that settling into a fixed ideology such as Christianity (though admittedly one with host of intriguing loose ends) would have been bad for a poet who was already struggling with the search for his real voice. A teacher of Creative Writing at a university today, faced with a talented and very committed student who hadn’t as yet written anything profoundly satisfying, would surely be uneasy if the student one morning announced that he or she had become a convert to Islam, say, or Buddhism. But whatever the complex interactions between faith, ideology, conviction and creativity are, in Harris’s case the effects seem immediate and are certainly beneficial. The poems deal with two aspects of Christianity. The first is the sense of an individual response to the “call” of Christ and the second is an interest in the God of the Old Testament, especially as invoked by the prophets.

The first component of this is reflected in the first three poems whose titles I have already given and they quickly sketch out the area where conversion is relevant to the poems. In the first, for example, intellectual scepticism is faced head-on:

. . . . .
Soon He was calling, not He without His Friend.
In from behind the winter wind.

The loudest rain could not drown
that soft knock. If then I heard words
they were, Why not come from hiding?

You’re an archetype, I flung back. So
go away. Or said, Nah. Listen, says Christ,
listen be deaf you are deaf now you aren’t,
 
listen. I will be back. . .

Admittedly, the notion that living and resurrected gods are pretty common, especially in the Levant, is an objection of its period – a time of pop-anthropology – and thus hardly constitutes the full panoply of intellectual difficulties that Christianity faces, but it is refreshing to see that it immediately forms a part of the experience. It recalls one of the unpublished poems at the end of The Gang of One, “Christians”, which begins, “A lifetime of explanations? Pah. / Explanations only summon evasions, / the stupidest religious disputes, / or unbelief’s weary shibboleths . . .” before going on to list those same shibboleths, presumably bowled up by friends and acquaintances:

. . . . . 
Did you know that Jesus, alone,
or, you know, whatever you conceive him -
Allah, Buddha, the Force -
is solely responsible for war?
That everything’s just a metaphor?
And the Resurrection, you tell us,
is just another fertility cult
(gee whiz, I never thought that before) . . .

This helps to give a sense of the way Harris accommodated intellectual objections by using the not uncommon technique of imagining an order of experience above the “intellectual”. And this can only be done if the fragmentary experiences of that order are powerful enough to override the intellect (or even common sense). So a powerful part of the poetic experience relates, for Harris, to a personal encounter with the benevolent side of the godhead.

But the other side is present as well – the Yahweh of the Jewish bible who grows in the first half of the first millennium BCE from a cranky local god to an overwhelming master of the universe (or, at least, master of the world and the nearest stars – the then-known part of the universe). Many of the poems of The Cloud Passes Over were written in the mountains behind Bega and the violent onset of winds which sweep clouds over the landscape that one finds there, becomes a congenial place in which to read and think about the God of Hosts. There are a series of fine poems, obviously written at the time of this virtual retreat whose titles alone will give some sense of this: “The Cloud Passes Over”, “Poem on a Hilltop”, “The Snowy Mountains Highway”, “Isaiah By Kerosene Lantern Light”. I don’t know much of Harris’s biography (a good article by Toby Davidson in a recent Sydney Review of Books is helpful here both with its own knowledge and with a set of references) but to an outsider this time in the mountains, either with some specific labouring work or with the calm of a retreat, seems to fulfil all the requirements of the monastic. It certainly involves a lot of reconsideration of his thus-far unsatisfactory development. Take “The Snowy Mountains Highway”, for example:

In the former post office/general store
there were four rooms and two fireplaces
and my lanterns. At a desk I had made
from sundowns often past moon-set
I read Scripture.

There too I wrote about twenty
belligerent sonnets; shedding, I hope,
a lax, Frenchified English
derived from reading the Symbolists
in translation.
. . . . . 
I have placed myself here in the poem,
at work, check-shirted, to help myself remember
black branches I snapped at dusk, snow
at the wind’s edge, a wombat. Also

to dismantle any aesthetic
ideal, keep, or Magian use
from which I might write. . .

Of course, to move from what was then called “The New Romanticism”, with its obeisance to Rimbaud and Mallarme, to a hearty Thoreau- or Snyder-like experience of a bracing mountain slope, might be to move from one cliché to another. But even though that might be a danger, the proof is in the poems and this group celebrating the winds and clouds of the Australian Alps is terrific. And one reason for this is that the poems don’t rely on the conventional Romantic connotations of the windy upland to produce the poem. They are fascinating because they are cross-pollinated by the sense of the Lord of Hosts expressing himself in various of the books of the prophets, as a cleansing gale.

. . . . . 
But these nights
                   there aren’t any fishermen out
from caravan and tent enclaves,
                    their hair on end,
their lines frightened in;
                   no little white cloud
with damaged oars
                    passing over so carefully
that nothing below
                    may hear it think.
The Lord of all
                    is at large throughout His Creation. . .

Another reason for the fact that these poems impress so much may be that they concretise what in the earlier poems is no more than a glance upward towards the transcendent. Not only is the transcendent made more actual in the winds, it no longer looks – as it does in so much other poetry, including Harris’s earlier work – like a mere gesture to finish a poem and perhaps balance its bleakness. “Poem on a Hilltop”, which gets into the crucial question of how this spiritual experience of solitude and meditation interacts with (and dares to judge) the social world that Harris originally outlined as part of his poetic remit, concludes

Down the hills people still die for lack
                    not of what is to be
somehow found in poems
                    alone, but for promise
made at the rain’s origin,
                    your sons and daughters
shall prophesy, your old men dream dreams
                    your young men
shall see visions . . .
                    dying for years
by steady lights
                    mimetic of the candid stars,
gleaming on farm porches
                   blazing on solitary outbuildings.
Things become clearer
                    as conversation gets scarcer
until the day comes
                    when you must hear somebody
talking again, be all assent,
                    all nod and prompt to drink the life
that doesn’t examine itself,
                    the numerate life
with no use for wider meanings,
                    especially His.
But this man has repaired a fence,
                    another has drilled and drilled
for a well.

Even as you left the shadows of the clouds
                    went gliding over the parched, bright hills,
and rainbow coloured parrots
                    flew alongside you.

Poetically, the issue is whether the poem is weakened by its finish (as it certainly is by a virtual quotation from Eliot, earlier on). The parrots are rainbow coloured to reflect God’s covenant after the Flood and might be a mere invention, but the poem is so carefully concrete in its details (the specific activities of the working men, for example) that it convinces me, at least, that the arrival of the parrots is an event in the real world (like the swans Sibelius’s saw before his death) and that an accidental incident becomes illuminated into a genuinely potent symbol.

JANE, Interlinear and Other Poems is built around two large-scale pieces, an approach that, as I’ve tried to show, Harris’s work continually gropes towards. The first of them, “Seven Songs for Sydney” is about the HMAS Sydney, sunk by a German raider with the loss of all hands in 1941. It’s conceived as a performance piece and shows, as Toby Davidson says, the strong influence of Francis Webb’s “A Drum for Ben Boyd”. In fact Webb is a clearly detectable influence in much of Harris’s later work, resulting not only in straightforward allusions like the title of “Six Years Old” recalling Webb’s “Five Days Old” but also more generally in the knotty yet dramatic meditative style of many of the poems. Presumably Harris was drawn to Webb partly through the enthusiasm of Robert Adamson, an admirer of Webb and friend of Harris, but also as someone sharing a similar uncomfortable position – that of a poet-believer in secular times. At any rate, the conception of “Seven Songs for Sydney” is one of those which diminishes the central event and concentrates on the surrounding, social “waves”. It is interested in the effects of the disappearance of the boat on the communities that were nearby, especially those of Carnavon. But it isn’t simply a case of dramatizing a disappearance by focussing not on the disappeared but on those connected to them who have to wait – a time-honoured tactic for canny dramatists. Since the exact events of the sinking were not known and what was known by the military was not made public, we are in the Lord Lucan world of rumour, self-deception and paranoia. The entire sequence is, in other words, also about truth (with or without its capital letter), reality, community and poetry. As such it adds a layer of complexity to the sequence. And Harris’s own connection to the navy – where he spent a short time as an on-shore seaman in his early years – adds something as well. It still seems a slightly artificial piece – a performance on the poet’s part, deriving from the radio-plays of the fifties – but it has enough complexity to be engaging.

“JANE, Interlinear” it is at every level more ambitious. It is extensive enough to have formed a book in its own right, especially if it is connected with the final section of the book, “Recorder Music”, which looks at other participants in this historical event. It’s “about” the brief life and execution in 1554 of Lady Jane Grey, the cousin of Edward the Sixth and, as granddaughter of Henry VII, someone with a claim to the throne on her cousin’s early death. Again, Harris’s approach is to avoid all things which would reduce his narrative to a predictable set of dramatic monologues (probably by his heroine herself and her handlers) for that is a path to a drearily predictable and inert poem. Instead he focusses on issues and invents a form – the “interlinear” of the title – in which the layout of some of the poems looks rather like an interlinear edition of the bible which he had seen where, in a common format, the original text contains an interlinear translation into another language (the bible he refers to has Hebrew with a Greek gloss and also the same passage from the King James translation). He clearly wants the effect of this to be something approximating a very controlled open form, encouraging the reader to read both horizontally and vertically (syntagmatically and paradigmatically perhaps). I’m not sure that a reader is really going to exploit this much but it certainly solves the problem of avoiding producing predictable monologues or slabs of narrative. Much, in fact, is in a decidedly lyrical vein.

As always, it’s the poet’s stake in this sordid story that is intriguing. As an outsider I can only guess but I can imagine Harris responding very strongly to this figure of a well-educated intelligent girl going perfectly bravely to her death. She is, in effect, a candidate for Protestant sainthood. The second poem, “Speed Reading”, deals with the interpretation of Jane’s life as well as Harris’s own involvement:

. . . . .
                                                                                      finds her still
                                                one party                     the queen of

schism, the other             perfection. Or else          a heroine, one
tedious virtue in              lone readers keep           Katharine Parr, another,

Anne Boleyn . . .

And later (I’ll disengage the text from its matrix here), “They’ll say of / me, too, I wrote // a costume drama, took her for symbol, / as abstract, as / as eidetic; unborn / daughter, missing / wife, lost sister” using here the same technique as he has used in his “call to believe” poems of raising the objections first (though not exactly answering them). He is also concerned, throughout, to investigate the stake others have in visiting not only the texts but the sites of her life and death:

. . . . . 
           And she, divided,
attracts those who are divided,
the fissiparous seek their bridge
over sex, seas, time, phenomena,
and always, always, narrative defeats them.
The 19 year old exports from
Kansas and Osaka
are troubled to learn . . .

But Harris, too, is affected by the desire to step in his idol’s footsteps when in the twenty-seventh poem he speaks of revisiting the site of an apocryphal rescue attempt: “And I, eagerly, under trees / finding her path to a gap in a hedge. / To say for some metres / her path was mine . . .”

Although the poems circle around Jane’s life, her scholar-friends, and the relevant politicians, Jane Grey herself is rather an absence. This may result from the little detail there is about her – a lack that spurs on speculation – but it also has an effect rather like the poems for the Sydney: that there is a gap surrounded by complex designs, in fact a gap which favours complex designs. And the surrounding material spills over into the section cleverly called “Recorder Music” which has poems about Sir John Challoner who knew Jane and wrote a Latin elegy to her (culta fuit, formosa fuit – she was cultured, she was beautiful), her husband Guilford, her father-in-law, and her recent biographer, Hester Chapman (“Four years I’ve probed her book”). The last poem is about the man who is at the centre of the events, the Duke of Northumberland and recounts how Harris finds, investigating him, that, far from being the archetypal Tudor politician, sacrificing all to ambition, he actually did many benevolent things including, significantly, providing funding for the stage while he was the senior advisor to Edward the Sixth. If you have seeded the theatre that will eventually produce Shakespeare you can expect that poets from the unimaginably distant antipodes will be forced to think of you as “Enigma more than Beast”. But the end of the last poem in Harris’s last book celebrates him as someone who showed just how vicious and cruelly destructive the political world can be. It’s true that, horrific as Jane’s death is, in Tudor times beheading was generally a very quick and painless end (compared to the horrors that others had to endure) and Jane’s intelligent-schoolgirl faith would have ensured that, in her own mind at least, she would simply be making a rapid transition to paradise before the world could corrupt her. Certainly her fate is nothing in terms of horror compared with the fates of Sejanus’s children, say. But for Harris it’s a revelation of the dark:

. . . . . 
So rest in peace, duke of Northumberland,
there’s no man here will fight you in your shirt;
your best bid did help several understand
how black the actual blackness blackly gets.

Sarah Day: Towards Light and Other Poems

Glebe, NSW: Puncher and Wattmann, 2018, 108pp.

Sarah Day’s previous book, Tempo, was loosely concerned, as its title suggests, with time not as an overarching or structuring theme but rather as topic or perspective that recurred in what might have, otherwise, looked like quite different poems. There are plenty of poems about time in this new book, Towards Light, but the most important theme seems to be the issue of wholeness and its counterpart, dissolution, especially expressed in the opposition of light and dark. The last section is devoted to a particularly painful and personal experience of dissolution in her mother’s experience of Parkinsonism and her eventual death. The poems here are never a mere list of horrors but are always clear-eyed and analytical: the entire section reflects this in its title, “The Grammar of Undoing”. It’s tempting to see it as a theme subtly announced in the first two poems of the first section of the book: “Fe” (whose title is the chemical symbol for iron) is about the movement of Magnetic North, and “Fog” is about the way a visual image of a ferryman on a lake is obliterated by fog.

“Fe” is a fully rhymed sonnet – traditional forms pop up every so often in Day’s work – and so makes its point rather tightly. One would expect the continuous movement of Magnetic North – it now moves at a rate of forty kilometres a year in a circle – to disorient those animals which rely on it for navigation, to induce, in other words, a kind of dementia. But, the poem concludes, “Blood hears more than its own euphony / as the sliding behemoth in fits and starts / quietly adjust our compasses, our hearts”. The second poem asks us to imagine a lake in which a ferryman disappears into the fog of its title:

. . . . . 
your last glimpse of him
in profile, his dark cap
pulled low over his ears,

an upright silhouette at the wheel,
the little prow nose-up, optimistic,
Man, ferry, empty seats,
vanishing into the vacuum.
Gone, before you can draw breath . . .

Ferrymen are obviously burdened with being carriers of the dead across the waters of oblivion and this poem, in some ways quite a straightforward realistic descriptive piece (it is “set” in Tasmania’s Lake St Clair), is simultaneously a symbolic piece about dissolution. The fact that a sonnet is followed by an extended free verse meditation may in itself be a little symbol, deliberate or accidental, of the different ways meaning can occur in a poem: the latter running the risk of wordy dissolution and the former the risk of an over-tight structure that cuts off possible readings in the interests of the one true reading the author intended – a Magnetic North, in other words, which stays still. Intended or not, these two poems make quite an introduction to the book’s themes.

Although I have tended to present them as rather negative poems, preparing for the book’s final section, even these first two have their upbeat elements. The first concludes positively – those who are blood relations can adjust to one member of the family’s disorientation – and the second doesn’t exploit the negative possibilities of its image of a ferryman and his boat’s journey into the fog. This suggests that the first section of the book may be imagined as a counterpart to the last and it is true that other poems of this section – surely the strongest part of the book – are also quietly positive. One tells the story of St Anthony preaching to the fishes – evoking the tiled art of Lisbon – and finds a kind of positiveness in the grotesquely comical saint’s tale:

. . . . . 
I see now how the arced frame of the blue
and white tiled tableau repeats the arches
of the bridge, so that the whole metaphor
of foolishness becomes a tunnel into light.

Those last words encapsulate the form that the positive elements in Towards Light tend to take. It’s a difficult issue because poetically the positive only “works” when it is paired with the negative (in Bruce Beaver’s terms, lauds have to work together with plaints). Without this the positive can be nothing more than, psychologically, an expression of an upbeat personality (Christopher Smart, say) or, philosophically, a gesture towards transcendence. And “transcendentalist” appears in one of the poems, “Jetty”, which seems a kind of adjunct to “Fog”, since that earlier poem spends a stanza on the “high definition / concrete jetty with its rusting pillars / and yellow parallel lines like a highway’s / bolting towards the blank unknown”. The subject of “Jetty” is presented not as a gesture but as a delicate balance. It is as reality-bound as it is possible to be – “bolted to fact and need / with post and bollard // and plank” – but it also exists as something capable of taking us “toward a cool horizon, / the line of thought // poised above the plane . . .”.

Sometimes, in Towards Light, the symbolic light appears in a setting of trees forming what “Knocklofty” calls “a tree light atrium” and the title poem calls a “tea-tree corridor”. One of the features of a forest setting is, of course, that it is organic: rich processes of decay and dissolution are occurring underfoot balancing out the movement towards light. In “Overcoat”, the final poem of the first section of the book, we get to see this fascination with unity and dissolution in a social rather than a landscape setting. An elderly couple, looking as though they had “walked off an extras scene / in a Second World War film”, turn up in a doctor’s waiting room in which the other patients, as to be expected in that situation, are each locked in an inward turned near-solipsism:

. . . . . 
They had entered
from the dark corridor behind,
nodding a greeting to each and every person
waiting, even the girl on her mobile phone
talking angrily to the window glass
as if her mother, to whom she remonstrated,
was on the other side out there on the street . . .

At first it seems like a poem about the different customs of past times, better in some ways, perhaps, but barely relevant – even comic – today. But the other poems of the book enable us to refine this slightly. The old couple, for whatever reason, are engaged in their community and with the individuals who make up that community and it is interesting, and fitting, that they emerge not out of the light but out of the “dark corridor behind”. They represent the optimistic view that, in this book, is balanced against the bleak. By the time we get to the Parkinsonism poems at the end we realise that that disease not only fragments the individual mind but also cuts the sufferer off from the community of loved ones and friends.

By establishing a sense of unity as something that can also exist beyond a single person – in community, for example – “Overcoat” prepares for the second section of the book which looks at these issues in the broadest possible perspective. “Europe”, set in a plane trip at the time the result of the Brexit vote was announced in 2016, is a poem about Europe’s community and the forces which are at work to dissolve it. It’s a bleak poem about a disturbing event, sensing that community is always very frail and easily dissolved, that the miraculous vision of a peaceful Europe “after centuries of bloodshed”, an “idea, not a market”, has just had a part of its foundations removed. “Empire”, by way of contrast, is a poem meditating on the ethical issues of a certain kind of social unity. Someone of Day’s age is likely to find themselves, as a child, torn between the comforting sight of the spread of red areas on a map detailing the expanse of the great British empire to which they belong and the more disturbing idea – a shift which occurred in the sixties – that empire is an imposition, a bad thing. “At school”, she says, “we practised / doublethink, the art of knowing contradictory / principles to be true” whereas now “I’m more wary of / the shifting palimpsest of truths, the fanatic tides, / the celluloid transparencies, the overlaying slides”.

“Middens, Tasmania” continues these issues of imperial community and the survival of the past by speaking of the midden shells which turn up in the mortar used for the Georgian houses. “Dunes” comes at community by looking at the issue of urban development and what kind of role psychological and communal belonging have when seen in the perspective of the natural environment:

The suburban bus route
elicits in its rider
a mood of compliance
while it finds the longest distance
possible between two points,
allowing that time is expendable,
that mangrove swamps, ti-tree forests
and wild coasts become sub-divisions
with names like Anna Bay, Corlette. . .

But the land puts up its own fight. A boggy farm is described as a place “that wants to be marsh land” and the bus goes past a “derelict mess” of “concrete holiday apartments that / the inexorable dunes are repossessing”. I’m not sure of the author’s intentions as to the way a poem like this and “Middens, Tasmania” interrelates with the poems in the book which lament a drive towards dissolution but, as a reader, it is tempting to see them as a kind of ethical counter-image, saying something like: “Community is good, the forces that seek to dissolve it are bad; but in some cases – empire, urban sprawl – the issue is reversed and right is on the side of the forces which are doing the dissolving”. Of course, in the case of the natural world reclaiming shopping centres and holiday flats, it may be that a superior unity (superior because earlier) is defeating a mass-movement which is not a true unity at all.

The third section of the book, the longest, seems on the surface a more homely collection of pieces about birds, cows (in Galicia) and the natural world at large but here the same themes of community (as well as time) mark the poems out. When the birds of “Eastern Curlew” are about to migrate the flock undergoes that strange preliminary flutteriness – Zugunruhe – which, far from an expression of individual dis-ease, is actually a group phenomenon, as is the migration itself. The death of a hen is a long way from a meditation about Brexit but the connections are there when, in “The Last Days”, a bantam stays loyally with a much larger hen which is gradually succumbing to old age. Both “Pastoral” and “Camp Ground. Early Morning” are strongly denotative descriptive pieces whose raison d’etre might initially puzzle readers, especially if they were encountered free from the context of the themes of this book; both, though, in their own way – one devoted to human organisation, the other to animal – are portraits of a miniature society that clearly works.

This matter of scale – the way the macro can be expressed in the miniature – is an important general issue in Day’s work. It could be reasonably said to be important in any imaginative use of language, of course, because any sort of substitution, as in metaphor or metonymy, involves a larger being replaced by a smaller or (more rarely) vice versa, but many of these poems enjoy the disjunction between the wide perspective and the tight focus. In “Visitation” the poet, kneeling among weeds, finds herself passed by a flock of turkeys. Her position helps to reduce the difference in dimension between the human- and bird-worlds and she and the turkeys share some kind of brief moment together:

. . . . . 
Then one bird called to another in the queue to come and look,
at something new, their strange intelligence appraising
in those tiny heads while straining, it seemed, to supervise

their enormous bulk. The wire fences through which
they passed like water, were immaterial. The blue gum
the paddock, the clover and rye – we were all involved.

The poem, though, also makes an unusual act of imaginative expansion by casually commenting that the name of the bird, “turkey”, is that of the “gateway between East and West” a reference to the movement of peoples, historically, in both directions which has caused so much concern in recent history.

The same sort of gesture occurs in two poems, “Bede” and “The Music of the Spheres” – about the burning of Giordano Bruno – in the fourth section of the book. Bede, whose Ecclesiastical History of the English People might seem to be a monument of national identity and hence isolation, is celebrated for exactly the opposite since he is represented as someone who saw how the “migration tides from continental homelands” – the Germanic influx of the fifth century – were perfectly capable of forming a single people. He is also portrayed as someone with a great capacity for moving out beyond his conventional limits – from brain work towards handiwork “a man who loved good carpentry”, and from insular England to intellectual activities that were both of another place and another time:

. . . . . 
               In a world of ox and awl
 
and plough, Bede studied Plato, 
Aristotle, music, poetry,
calculated movement of the stars. . .

While Giordano Bruno is a byword for the kind of intellectual imaginativeness about creation which always wanted to break the bounds of the restrictive beliefs of his contemporary world.

Towards Light shows these themes consistently in the varied poems that make it up. But it also continues Day’s earlier work – it is the same poet after all. A little poem about fast-motion footage of the way two bean shoots compete recalls “Natural Selection” from her first book, for example. It raises the question of whether the process of natural selection is an example of unity or dissolution, or whether it shows unity as a dynamic process rather than a static one. And there are many poems which follow the previous book, Tempo, in being concerned with the effect of time. One of these, “Anachronisms II”, actually begins “I forgot to mention” and thus refers to the original “Anachronisms” in Tempo with, surely, the little joke that it is anachronistic to think that it is possible to add to a list of anachronisms in a separate book. In a sense then, reading Day’s work, is a little like an exercise in the kind of themes that Towards Light focusses on. Though it is highly structured it contains quite an assortment of kinds of poems – is the book a unity in itself? If it is part of a changing set of interests and obsessions across a poet’s career, is that change an example of dissolution? The answer, surely, is that it’s a widening out into new and larger unities.

Emma Lew: Crow College: New and Selected Poems

Artarmon: Giramondo, 2019, 122pp.

Reading Emma Lew’s first book, The Wild Reply, in 1997 I was tempted to guess that the generative method of its powerful poems was based on something like putting the characters of one novel into a quite different novel (usually Central European or Russian) – say like transferring the characters of Great Expectations into Pasternak’s Dr Zhivago – isolating a scene and then writing it as a fragmented monologue or third person narration removing all clues as to what either of the original novels might have been. Spending some time with Lew’s poetry while looking at this new and selected poems makes me realise how inadequate this guess was (though it has retained its attraction, to me at least, as an interesting way of generating a certain kind of poem).

For a start, not all of Lew’s poems are in the fragmentary, highly atmospheric narrative mode that we think of as being typical of her work – the kind of poem where, as Ivor Indyk says, it’s like entering a cinema after the movie has started. Take two poems whose position in the books in which they appear alerts readers as to their significance. The first is the title poem of The Wild Reply

I must not touch fire
Myth fire, adder’s fire
Sensual and deaf
The deep, swift fire

Why do I dream?
Flame speaks and sings
The great barn burns
Mirage creeps in

I need proofs, not flame
The false weight of flame
I mean by this fire
King, give me fire

The smelting and the forging
I have flame and lack nothing
Beast in my footsteps
Light up, burn

The seed and the spark
The first flame of love
There is no fire
But the poems are beautiful

This could, by a stretch, follow the model I have outlined, based on a beauty and the beast story, something like Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame with Esmeralda as the speaker. But it could also be read, more conventionally, as a lyric poem about the act of writing poetry, using inspiration – the fire – as a tool in the “smelting and forging” rather than something that needs to be transmitted itself. Of course, a reader always needs to guard against the tendency to interpret what may be designed to be something surrealistically resistant to interpretation as being an allegory about poetry itself, but the reading possibilities are certainly there. It might, conceivably, be a poem about love rather than poetry, whereby the “poems” of the final line are metaphors rather than actual results. In either case, what are we to make of the distinction, which the poem emphasises, between fire and flame? And there are other issues: who or what is the King and what has a burning barn to do with anything – unless something like Faulkner’s “Barn Burning” is one of the generative narratives. (Incidentally, the last poem of Crow College, “Lesson”, which recounts a woman joining in the spirit of revolutionary denunciations at the village level, speaks of a fire which “burned down the barn containing felt boots and galoshes” so there may, just conceivably, be a single narrative behind both poems.)

If “The Wild Reply” might be built on another model than the one I initially suggested, the final poem of Lew’s second book, Anything the Landlord Touches, certainly is. Significantly titled, “Poem” it is short and to the point:

Decaying thunder,
all the ordinary rain.
A raft of tiny fools,
a poem of nails.

There aren’t many clues as to how we should orient ourselves with this poem but we can say that it is a poem that expects us to interpret it in some sensible way: it clearly isn’t a piece designed to frustrate our instinctive interpretive attitude. And, the last poem in the book, it finishes with a line containing the word, “poem” – a word which, together with “poetry” and “poet”, is, I think, otherwise unknown in The Wild Reply and Anything the Landlord Touches. My “Poetry 101” reading of it would stress the difference between its two sentences. In a landscape of misty vagueness (a setting that appears in a number of Lew’s poems, including the opening poem of Anything the Landlord Touches and which thus suggests a deliberate bracketing) we meet a raft of tiny fools and a poem of nails. I’m not sure about the raft – it could be an image of the book itself with its freight of poems – but a poem of nails suggests an image for a successful poem as being something which is precise, powerful and prickly – not a bad description of Lew’s best poems. Or it could be that the raft of tiny fools is the readership of poetry (or of Lew’s poetry) and the poems contain the nails with which it is held together and with which it could be repaired.

These two poems, together with others such as “Nettle Song”, a question-answer poem interestingly involving fire, “The Recidivist” and “New Born” (from the “new” poems included in the book), should be enough to establish that there is more than one mode of Lew’s poetry. In fact The Wild Reply has a group of ten poems beginning with “Remnant of Sunset” which are perhaps earlier work and are not included in this selection but which might well be described as surreal lyrics. But the fact remains that highly atmospheric, fragmented narratives often with an Eastern European setting and suggesting a background of revolution, war and massacre bulk large in Crow College. The key word, as Bella Li notes in her introduction, is “atmosphere” and since part of what makes the atmosphere so sinister is what is omitted it seems likely that the reader’s experience of puzzlement in the face of the poem subtly adds to the sense of confusion. Some poems are less puzzling than others. “Red”, with its epigraph “Find some truly hard people” from Lenin, is a portrait of pre-revolutionary activism:

. . . . .
                        We were the hired
and the depraved, thin and dark and unjust,
prepared to burst in that ray of light when it came,
hearing nothing and scribbling until the stupid lamp
began to smoke . . .

And “The True Dark Town” is a disturbing picture of what must be one of the most troubling human experiences – that of arriving at a massacre site, seeing only the results. It’s a brilliant poem, worth quoting in full:

The snows were melting but I wanted to speak.
Swollen and undressed, filling the roads.
The mountains, so beautiful. We were afraid.
     Death buttoned my coat.

I smelled their odour when they came
down the incoherent paths of the mountain.
The petals of the flower were hushed.
     It’s the blood from that night.

A child has sheltered her books with her body.
A man was seen hoarding. Who can be sure?
This is the only thing I have rescued.
     It’s pitiful.

When the rain came, when they opened fire.
Such trifles as the noise of stars.
I had no idea the dead were so heavy.
     It’s autumn now.

The past will be a bitter land.
I do not trust the face of my father.
The wind, they say, is going to blow till the end.
     The fleas are hungry.

“The True Dark Town” is a good starting point from which to raise the next question about Lew’s poetry. At some point all serious readers try to move beyond individual poems and to make some generalisations about wider issues in an particular poet’s work. When the poems are successful, powerful entities they rather resist this and a reader has to widen his or her focus. But a wider focus often produces a vague and shifting image that is a bit of an insult to the finishedness of individual poems. In the case of lyric poets, writing out of a sense of the self that is more or less complex depending on their abilities, it’s not so difficult a task to look at shared and related themes. But in the case of these fragmented narratives it is extremely difficult and even as dedicated an admirer of Lew’s poetry as I am is likely to feel that her work is much farther beyond the grasp of my understanding than most. But “The True Dark Town” is a place for essaying a few, tentative attempts at old-fashioned thematic analysis.

To begin with the first line with its powerful non-sequitur, “The snows were melting but I wanted to speak”. Speech, silence and aphasia are issues that recur. The very first poem of The Wild Reply is “Of Quite Another Order”. I have always liked it but I suspect that may be because I can recognise its origins – it tells the story of Victor the “wild child” of Aveyron and is spoken by Jean Itard a post-revolutionary French physician who looked after and experimented with trying to educate Victor when he had been taken from the forest. My generation will know of these events from Truffaut’s 1970 film, L’Enfant Sauvage. Lew’s poem focusses on the contrast between absolute uncivilisedness (the sort of thing that is often represented by an experience of “the barbarians”) and the methodical operations of enlightenment science. As the poem says, “He was already the least curable, most diminished of people. / Civilisation increased his moments of sadness”). The tension is coded in each stanza where a description of the boy’s behaviour is concluded by the line, “Let them be collected. Let them be classed with method”. And, of course, there is the powerful sense of Itard’s endless speech being contrasted with Victor’s virtual silence. When he does speak it is with a fracturing of lexical conventions – “He used the word berg (mountain) to describe all things that are tall”. Again, with some structural bracketing, the subject of the “wild child” is revisited in “Pali” the second-last poem (before, that is, “Poem”) of Anything the Landlord Touches. This is a pantoum, a form which rather suits Lew’s style because it involves single statements and repetition and conveys meaning in a way quite different to conventional linear discourse. Why it is called “Pali” I’m not sure unless it is to suggest a language not understood but full of meaningful and important texts. It’s perhaps significant that the word “wild”, important to both these poems, is present in the title, “The Wild Reply”, suggesting answers from somewhere rather than logic.

Secondly, the bodies of the massacred in “The True Dark Town” come “down the incoherent paths of the mountain”. In other words they are described as though they were active visitants, and visitations of the dead seems to be another issue that the poems engage with. These can occur in dreams or, as in “Procedure”, in seances. This poem, placed first in Crow College, is a string of pieces of advice to a woman – “Always turn to the usurer. / Start out and remain a villainess / In the season of fake blossoms keep cool like the Minotaur . . .” – and it’s tempting to read it as a poem-poem since it’s final advice on how to run a séance – “Keep the situation dark, let the tinsel linger – / that’s how you’ll create a universe” – seems a perfect description of how Lew’s poems work: by ellipses and expansions. But, as before, that might be no more than a reflection of the fact that, faced with material resistant to simple paraphrase, it’s always tempting to feel that its hidden subject is poetry itself. At any rate, the dead, in dreams, seances or surreal narrations are a common feature of the Lew universe and nowhere more apparent than in “Jasmine”:

Breaking off a thread newly woven,
she falls silent. Her fear: that the dead
will jump up to settle accounts.
Little showers? Hail? She understands
this completely. So many thieves
wandering in the house. “The black wind.
Do you hear?” ask the ghosts . . .

“Multiple Kronstadts” is another poem (like “Red”) about historical revolutionary activity framed as a description of the possible arrival of the destructive, liberating figure:

. . . . .
I don’t mind your being a somnambulist,
bumping your head on all the hard walls
in the new shoes of the flat-footed
like the hanged, the gassed, the electrocuted.

I’m interested in the footprints you leave
in the mud Russians call “roadlessness”;
or are you coming by curtained car,
or by steamboat when the rivers are ice-free?

The more you shout about your strong nerves,
the more I want to fly in your air,
watching and not having to learn
the method of your wrecking hand.

Not a ghost, perhaps, but possibly appearing like one of the hanged, gassed and electrocuted, and certainly a maker of ghosts.

These recurring themes, are no more than a brief comfort to someone trying to read these poems as a body of work rather than as a collection of self-contained pieces. Identifying some of them is certainly reassuring for a reader because they act like little flashes of familiarity. Of course, there are more significant generalisations to search for – ethical and aesthetic ones, for example, but these poems are very resistant to simple statements about issues like these. I think someone has said, somewhere, that Lew must be the Australian poet that we know least about from her poems. Does this mean that occluding is one of the functions of these poems? I don’t know but whatever a reader’s frustrations these are, almost without exception, potent and disturbing poems. One’s major regret, perhaps, is that there aren’t more.

Simon West: Carol and Ahoy

Waratah, NSW: Puncher and Wattmann, 2018, 59pp.

Simon West’s fourth book begins with two poems which, in a way, embody the major themes of the work. The first, “River Tracks”, is a kind of celebration of the Goulburn River working its way north-west through Victoria to its meeting with the Murray just before Echuca. It’s a free-flowing meditative poem (recalling someone like Coleridge) and one’s first response is that this kind of poetry is a long way from the Italian influenced lyrics of West’s other books but the word “free-flowing” is slightly and importantly inaccurate. Inland Australian rivers aren’t free-flowing, they are muddy, rainfall-affected, often broken streams and “River Tracks” wants to exploit this quality. It isn’t just a matter of making a poem which mimics its subject: the rest of West’s poems show us that it is more likely that he sees an unavoidable harmony between what he wants his poems to do and the landscape that he inhabits. And it is a very distinctive landscape of river red gums standing in the channels, overflows and sandbanks of the Murray and its tributaries. The poetry, to match this, wants to move not by logical or imagistic assertion towards a triumphal conclusion but by surprising shifts and disjunctions. The significances which poetry seeks won’t be found here in a steady flood flowing majestically out to meet the sea but in oddities and surprises symbolised in the isolated pools left behind near the river after a flood event. So the poem ends with the poet, walking around a park in Shepparton made on the site of a place where the river has scoured out a track which it will fill at the next flood “letting us bide for a bit in common reflection”. These words, the poem’s end, are designed to be read in a number of ways. The first would stress the word “common” with its double sense of ordinary, unpretentious, far from the conventional Romantic sublime but also of communal, social, far from an incipient Romantic solipsism. Another would focus on the word “reflection” – also a crucial term in Romantic epistemology – with its double meaning of thought and physical reflection: the water will cover the complexities of the muddy, detritus-filled ground that West is very interested in and reflect the sky.

True to its plan of being more like a Murray-Darling river than, say, one of the east coast “Northern Rivers” like the Tweed or the Clarence, “River Tracks” spends its second stanza in a slightly unexpected investigation of the original names for the Goulburn:

Round Murchison it’s said the Ngooraialum
called you Bayungun, but Mitchell
might have got this wrong. Waaring
was also recorded, while downstream you were Kialla
and Goopna, deep waterhole,
living on in Congupna and Tallygaroopna.
Tongue sounds taken for runs, then stations
and finally the towns that drank you . . .

It seems a detour with a double purpose, at one level recording the processes by which original names were transmuted into the names of properties and towns and thus venturing into the territory of the study of the function of naming in landtaking. But this respectable and conventional interest is balanced against the very distinctive interest West always has in languages and their sounds. “Climbing the Tower of Babel” from The Ladder speaks of the complex emotional experience of language learning – “and doubt echoed, / ‘This isn’t yours to call your own’. / It was love kept me going . . .” – and it’s a theme traceable to the title poem of his first book.

And then there is the first stanza of “River Tracks”:

Never a straight line or a single course,
never blue. Most maps mistell you.
Eager to find where you finish,
they mistake your daydreaming, your loops
and faux pas and odd sidesteps,
your misgivings and floods of largesse . . .

On the surface (an appropriate cliché when speaking of rivers) this says that the complexities of the Goulburn’s course can’t be mapped (ie represented) without considerable abstraction and stylisation – that is, reduction. But it’s also a poem about poetry of course (another appropriate phrase), and may well want to make the point that various descriptions of poetry, especially those found in end-oriented disciplines such as literary history and literary theory, are always reductive, missing the point that the richnesses of poetry are often to be uncovered in unexpected twists, turns and seeming dead ends. It might also be read not as a general statement about poetry but as a specific description of West’s own poetry and thus a warning to anyone writing about it, saying something like, “In my work it’s not so much the big picture that counts as the surprises to be found in lesser things: bear this in mind when you write about it!”.

This all makes “River Tracks” a significant, even pointed, opening poem and raises the paradox that it might be a pointed poem about how poems aren’t pointed in the same way that Coleridge’s Dejection ode is partly a poem about not being able to write a poem. “Hans Heysen” also has a specific point to make. It is a poem about a painter’s problems in representing a gum tree and it uses material from Heysen’s own letters. The difficulty – as the poem begins – is “to keep the gum tree solid” given the way in which the distinctive morning light is echoed in the tree’s bark and thus tends to etherialise what should be a solid, earth-bound lump of timber. I read this as an example of the tension in any art between significance and “thinginess”. The Romantic tendency is inclined to favour the former and there is a swing to the latter embodied in movements like Chosisme and Neusachlichkeit. This might be a lot of weight for a comparatively small poem to carry and the last two lines – “as truth, world’s truth, not absolute, is blent / and filters through our pulsing temperament” – seem to locate significance not as universal, undeniable meaning but as a subjective, Romantic experience in itself.

The issues raised in these first two poems appear in later ones in the book. “Floodplains on the Broken River” is a dip into personal history and place (as is the preceding poem, “On a Trip to Van Diemen’s Land”) but is interested, as are many of West’s poems, in the richness of the subsoil: “I trod on litterfall and felt under foot / a stir of living things”. This takes us back just over a hundred poems to the first poem of West’s first book, “Mushrooms” – but it’s a recurring theme, a kind of alchemical change from decay to fruition that might – at a stretch – be made into a variation on Judith Wright’s “coral” approach to Australian culture whereby generations of the exiled and failed dead make a kind of base from which something might flower. And this idea of the riches underneath is the theme of “Walking in the Bush at Whroo” where the activity of the nineteenth century’s gold miners – digging downwards hoping to stumble on wealth is contrasted with that of the cicadas, “miners in reverse”, which move upward from the darkness to the light. I think this is connected with the question raised in the first poem of where significance is to be found and how it is to be found, suggesting that the answer is not as a random symbolisation but as a long-held loving development that sees, rather than makes, connections. At any rate these cicadas are not merely insects with a weird life-cycle:

. . . . .
But I listened and it seemed
those insects from the stones
were driven by a need
to avow old love with their own,
to fathom a dying branch
and the eggs left as a gift,
the spider-like nymphs that fell
to a course of katabasis
where, fostered by black roots,
the imago grew well-fed
as the living learn to bear
visions left by the dead . . .

This all rather makes Carol and Ahoy into an exploration of aesthetics, which is part of its interest but not the only one. There is, throughout the book, a strong personal theme. “On a Trip to Van Diemen’s Land” is about the poet’s family history:

. . . . .
Death wiped a shipwrecked generation’s slate.
Their children seemed to spring from wind-tossed seed
and grew staked to the mores of English State.
My grandmother denied her convict breed,
kept corgies . . .

But the poem does end in a poet’s resolution, significantly flavoured with a Latin (ie early Italian) reference to Aeneas carrying his father.

In a sense this is a preparation for the last three poems of the book. “Swimming” is about the death of West’s father and, to a lesser extent, his paternal grandmother and grandfather, figures symbolically carried from the wreck of Troy by pious Aeneas. It’s a more sophisticated poem than perhaps I am making it sound, as interested in absence as in significant, if inexplicable, presence – “The thought bridged both your being / and not being and made no sense”. This is followed by a version of part of Book VI of The Aeneid, “The Twofold Tree”, dedicated to West’s father. One can see why this is being done, even though it seems at odds with the style of the other poems. Aeneas’s descent into the underworld (the mythical equivalent of the “litterfall” and productive humus of the earlier poems) is prefaced by an encounter with the Cumaean Sybil, the instruction to find a golden bough (in which he is assisted by doves sent by his muse/mother), and the correct filial behaviour towards a drowned friend. All of which sets out Aeneas as a symbol for the poet, above all as someone concerned to carry his predecessors and their household gods to safety, rather as the cicadas “bear / visions left by the dead”. The final poem continues this Virgilian theme by being an eclogue, a conversation between two farmers (but, in reality, two opposed positions inside the poet’s own head) in which the complaints of the younger – an inevitable catalogue of personal miseries derived from the social set-up in which he lives – are countered (or, at least, opposed) by the elder who argues for making the most of your luck and going on writing: “Such fears / are better sung than dwelt upon.”

Describing the concerns of Carol and Ahoy and showing that they are present in the earlier collections rather obscures the fact that this book feels utterly different to West’s earlier books. One superficial feature of this might be the comparative lack of Italian elements. The earlier books showed someone inhabiting two different cultures and two different languages – climbing the Tower of Babel. When such things do appear in this book it is only in the distant echoes of Virgil’s Latin. But a more important feature is the mode of the poems themselves. As I said earlier there is often a kind of Coleridgean quality to them (I am thinking of important pieces like “Frost at Midnight” and “Dejection: An Ode”). They meditate in sophisticated ways while working along in a mundane environment. They sometimes sound extraordinarily old-fashioned – a word I don’t think I’ve ever wanted to use in these reviews – recalling pieces like FitzGerald’s “The Wind at You Door”. At one moment – in the second stanza of “On Looking into a Chinese Scroll” – I think I actually winced. When a poet is as good a writer of lyric poetry as West proves himself to be in his earlier work, this is something of a surprise, and the impetus to change one’s mode of working from complex lyrics like “Mushrooms”, “Out of the Wood of Thoughts” or “Roman Bridges” to this sort of post-Romantic ambulatory meditation must be a powerful one. Perhaps he is looking for a way of thrashing out issues that might, in the future, form the basis for another kind of lyric. Perhaps he wants to recreate the meditative mode for a new century. At any rate, I’m contented with reminding myself of the truism that really good poets follow their own imperatives and it’s the job of critics to keep up.

Clive James: The River in the Sky

London: Picador, 2018, 122pp.

It’s probably fair to say that Clive James’s conventional poetry isn’t widely admired by practising poets in Australia and one can see what the problem is. Most of the poems (there are exceptions) are beautifully wrought objects whereby what is essentially a prose idea – an understanding of an experience, a representation of an emotion – forms the structure of the poem. You can hear people arguing that this isn’t what poetry is at all. It’s not that the poems of his various selecteds and the most recent individual volumes, especially those written since the onset of his serious illness, are not often brilliantly achieved it’s that they rarely take the author and reader into surprising and unpredictable areas: into new meanings that can’t be encapsulated in elegant sentences. The River in the Sky (we met the title – a translation of the Japanese words for the Milky Way – at the end of his last book of memoirs where it was floated as a title for a novel about the Pacific War) might be a book which bypasses all these problems. There is a quality of undeterminedness about it which is very attractive. It might be described loosely as a collection of memorable experiences (some of which are familiar from the autobiographical volumes and earlier poems). But the interesting part is the structure whereby these experiences are organised. I’m not sure that James is himself entirely sure about the nature of this structure though, being far cleverer than most of his readers or critics, he can suggest a lot of possibilities – there’s never anything dumb about James’s uncertainties. And that uncertainty makes reading The River in the Sky all the richer an experience.

One of the possible structures that the book suggests for itself is of the epic: except, of course, at just over three and a half thousand lines, this can only be a mini-epic. And the genre of mini-epic allows for plenty of self-deprecating bathos that, in his prose, James is a master of. You can see all this in the opening four words: “All is not lost”. This quotes the opening of Satan’s magnificent rallying speech in the first book of Paradise Lost which is, of course, followed by a list of what hasn’t been lost: the unconquerable will, immortal hate and the courage never to submit or yield. In James’s poem what hasn’t been lost isn’t quite so grand or vicious. Instead it is composed of those memories which are still powerful enough to make a weakened and limited existence meaningful. The memories intensify as the capacities of the body to explore are reduced.

One of the generic features of the epic is the journey into the underworld, present in both the Homeric epics but also in something even earlier like Gilgamesh. In The River in the Sky, this takes place when James, remembering the ever-present Luna Park of his Sydney childhood, imagines seeing it from a restaurant across the harbour, supernaturally lit up:

Always the candy bulbs shone through the night,
But now they shone by day. I could see beams
Of colour in the sunlight. Were there prisms
Piled up like fruit, a rack of fresnal lenses?
A Technicolor Lichtdom stained the streaks
Of cirrus. Had they turned the place into
Some kind of laser farm? . . .

(The fact that this is done in serviceable pentameters suggests that it is an especially written piece for the poem. Other sections, clearly made up from notes, drafts and even sketches for other poems are likely to have a quite different deployment of lines and beats.) Taking a ferry to the fun park James finds his first primary school teacher, Miss Coleman, acting as gatekeeper (ie ticket collector). From that point on the visit becomes a journey through the dream world which is the modern equivalent of Hades in that it isn’t premised on a specific religious notion of life after death and is populated (as we grow older) largely by the dead. The musical accompaniment of the dream world matches James’s own musical education and another teacher recommends the ride through the River Caves. To get to the ride the poet has to pass through a series of crowds all, apparently, drawn from his Postcards television documentaries, a comment, perhaps, that certain parts of ones outward career have to be shed before the inner career can be understood. The journey turns out to take him from a crude exterior to an inner baroque architecture – the Amalienburg – in which the first ghost who speaks to him is that of Mies van der Rohe who sets out on a long discussion of the relationship between baroque extravagance and the severities of De Stijl. It seems a bit like one of the lectures from Paradiso at first but it also raises the issue of how this book is constructed, using here an architectural analogy. At any rate the journey into the River Caves continues by boat – film stars are seen in other boats rather as Dante notices shades of the famous in the different levels of Inferno – and finishes not where the poet expects that it might – “images . . .to do with love, desire, / Even salacity” – but instead with his father’s body, confirming that the experience of losing his father (killed at the end of the war, returning home from a Japanese prison camp) is the central, generating experience of his creative life. And finally, epic-style, there is a companion occasionally invoked. She seems rather like Odysseus’s Athene of Aeneas’s Venus but is called Adrastus. I’m nor sure why she gets the name of the king of Argos but she’s a constant presence in the wings.

But if epic is one possible structural model for what is going on here, there are plenty of others. There is the idea, for example, of the continuous journey – either sailing or flying or riding – in which individual memories are imagined to be ports visited or corners explored, on what is otherwise a coherent movement:

This is the way my memories connect
Now that they have no pattern.
All I can do is make the pictures click
As I go sailing on the stream of thought . . .

There are also plenty of images of circles and webs (including the internet of course which, in YouTube, makes memories of performances revisitable and thus eternally present) and one early passage brings the two together:

An aeon reassigned
To form the towpath now
Of the river of my memory

This is a river song,
Linking the vivid foci
Where once my mind was formed
That now must fall apart:
A global network blasted
To ruins by the pressure
Of its lust to grow, which proves now
At long last, after all this time,
To be its urge to die . . .

Images of circles begin early in the poem. The first description of bodily decrepitude describes seeing money spiders in their webs before going on to transform into discs – “each frail web / The intermittent image of a disc / that glittered like the Facel Vega’s wheel / Still spinning when Camus gave up his life”. (This early description raises the general issue of detail in James’s mind and in his poetry. Everyone knows that Camus died in a car crash but who knew the make of car? James has a sharp eye for precise detail, especially technical detail. It might be no more that the ability of an autodidact arriving from the far end of the civilised world. But the issue here is whether this is a prose virtue or a poetic one. I’m not entirely sure myself though I know that nothing would have been gained if Burns had told us the specific variety of Tea Rose that his love resembled.) At any rate the image of the circling wheel extends to cosmic proportions when the poem gets to focus, as it does a number of times, on the gorgeous disc of the Andromeda Galaxy towards which the Milky Way is slowly travelling. The River in the Sky finishes with a quickly modulated return from the cosmic perspective to the local one:

I had thought this ship was sailing
Across the river in the sky towards
Andromeda, but in the night it stopped
Quite close to home, and on the quay
Boxes were slung ashore that indicated
Another destination altogether,
Somewhere nearby and just across the river.
Don’t quiz me now on how I figured out
This was my destination, just a mile
Away, where my dear elder daughter
Had been building her new studio . . .

Another possible structure for the poem is that of the collection. One of James’s most affecting experiences of beauty involves being taken by his future wife to see the Breviario Grimani, a codex made up of illustrations of medieval life (rather like the better known Très Riches Heures). When The River in the Sky speaks of this as “a rich collection / Of pictures that redeem / The illusion of randomness / One piece at a time”, you know that this is being offered as a possible structural model: a collection of individual illustrations but bound together inside a larger, articulating form. And you get yet another image for the poem when the Grimani’s breviary re-enters towards the end (significantly just after the idea of sailing in the River Caves has been revisited) and James comments how:

Within the decorated borders
Of the magic book
The enchanted houses and the great
Ladies and their daughters
Flocks a mumuration of starlings
The congregations at the poles
Of the bar magnet
Echo within perceptions
Like the Almagest of Ptolemy . . .

This is the prelude to a tricky set of passages about the evolution of birds but the basic point is, I think, the idea that the poet’s mind, in this last (or, perhaps, nearly last) work operates not as linearly as it once did but more like the unpredictable reshapings of the vast flocks of starlings. You don’t see them in Australia but they appear in Europe especially in Rome: “The set of interweaving murmurations / My mind is now becoming / That once was clear for being simple”. It’s a nice symbol both of the complexifying of one’s intellectual reponses and of the way this long poem suddenly changes shape and direction.

One of the things that made James’s television reviews so memorable was its happy mixing of high and low culture, the belief that popular culture could not only be analysed in a sophisticated way (the origin of Cultural Studies) but that it should be accorded respect in its own right when it was capable of producing both beauty and energy. And beauty and energy are the hallmarks of the memories – “my fragile treasures” – out of which the “narrative” of The River in the Sky is made. If it comes as no great shock to find Ljuba Welitsch, famous for her Salome, next to Bill Haley and the Comets, James is largely responsible for that fact.

Ultimately, The River in the Sky prepares for a journey which is no journey. There is an explicit rejection of the ancient Egyptian model of a celestial after-life that one voyages towards so that one can go on enjoying ones vast and expensive collection of material goods. But for those blessed with fantastically rich inner lives, there will always be the question of what will become of these memories. The answer is, unfortunately, that they melt away or, as the poem puts it rather more memorably, they disappear in “the gradual tornado” of destruction. But, in the moments before dissolution they shine most brightly. As I said at the beginning, an aggressively declining physical state seems matched by a growth in clarity and brightness of memories. My first response to The River in the Sky was to compare it to Tony Judt’s wonderful The Memory Chalet. His fate was an even harsher one than James’s. Struck down by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s disease) which takes the use of all one’s limbs from one before taking everything else, he worked in the long sleepless nights on memories and his method of dictating the results involved using the geography of a Swiss chalet visited as a child as a set of mnemonics. The idea was taken from Jonathan Spence’s The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci and the downsizing from a memory palace to a memory chalet is a piece of humorous modesty worthy of James. It’s not quite the same situation as in The River in the Sky since the mnemonic system was used as a way of remembering the order of the memories and of Judt’s thoughts about them. And, as an historian, Judt saw his memories as having a value as historical data. But the memories have the same enhanced luminosity that they have in James’s work. Judt’s method of organisation follows strict logical procedures. He doesn’t have the issues of structure that a creative piece like The River in the Sky has, but it’s the struggling with structure that makes James’s poem so interesting as it sets out to be something more than collage but at no stage a thesis. How to make a long poem work and cohere has been one of poetry’s unresolved technical issues in the last hundred years. Pound’s Cantos, the first to raise the issue, might make an interesting comparison, but James would be unlikely to be impressed. In his Poetry Notebook: 2006-2014 he calls it a “panscopic grab bag” and “a nut-job blog before the fact”.

Liam Ferney: Hot Take

Santa[sic] Lucia: Hunter Contemporary Australian Poets, 2018, 76pp.

Reviewing Liam Ferney’s previous book, Content, I said that it seemed made up of poems which spoke of immersion in popular culture tensioned by a Savonarola-like loathing of the trivialities of public life. There was also a third element, a kind of autobiographical thread which allowed readers glimpses of a professional life spent as a public affairs consultant. Hot Take points in the same three directions although there are significant developments.

Those for whom Hot Take is their first experience of Ferney’s poetry may find aspects of it initially alarming. For all that it is so impressively au fait with contemporary life and its idioms it never, poetically, acts as mere comment. The poems’ structures are much more sophisticated and though John Forbes is often cited as a precursor, there are vast differences of tone and manner between the two (despite a group of references to Forbes and to the poetry of his greatly admired Frank O’Hara). And the distinctive style can’t be swept under the carpet of a loosely woven idea of surrealism. It’s the balance of (and tension between) the three elements that prevents the poetry being mere hipsterism, mere sneering at contemporary mores or mere autobiography.

One of Ferney’s most common ploys is to begin with a grand simile which ropes an item from popular culture into a context where you might not expect to find it. Thus “Requiem” begins, “a sock falls from the line / like the market / responding to rumours of Grexit . . .” The aim I think isn’t entirely to be “shocking” or even surprising, more to begin the poem by widening the possibilities for imaginative co-options. “Herrera” begins with the experience of driving through a traffic jam along Brisbane’s Riverside Expressway and begins, in both title and first lines, with football references:

We unpick the world’s catenaccio,
a Pirlo in an actual traffic jam . . .

You have to know of midfielders Ander Herrera and (the recently retired) Andrea Pirlo of course to make much sense of this initial gambit and this relates to an important issue in the “cultural immersion” dimension of Ferney’s poetry. Although contemporary popular culture is a medium in which are all, willy nilly, immersed, it is also a very spotty set of competencies. True, we have the sense that a certain generation in a certain geographical setting will share a lot of likes and interests but being an amateur expert in, say, underground Brisbane bands isn’t going to imply a similar competency with the bands of Sydney, Montreal or Berlin. I have no trouble at all with Ferney’s football references – Pirlo, catenaccio and Herrera; the Red and Black Bloc, the Blades and Addicks, and Berisha, or with the references to cricket’s Jack Iverson – but I’m lost with Peaches Geldof and the innumerable financial acronyms. I even had to look up the meaning of the book’s title. Popular culture is also transient with a vengeance, moving out of focus as quickly as it is grasped: one shudders to think of the amount of research and the volume of the footnotes that any number of breezy invocations of items of contemporary culture are going to need in anthologies a few years from now. This rapidity of change may be what “Threesome” is getting at when it says, “At the time it seemed like our time / had come but it was past before / anyone had tweeted about it”.

None of this grumbling is in any way an indictment of Ferney’s poetry which isn’t a celebration of popular culture or a polemical attack on lyric poetry’s attempt to rise above it while aiming at the “universal”. I read it as an attempt to broaden imaginative possibilities by co-opting references to make surprising conjunctions. And “Herrera”, for example, turns into quite a complex meditation which has, at its heart, the defence-splitting pass as a symbol of an elegant solution to barriers rather than a violent crashing through:

. . . . .
The pass weighted like a gull rising
on a sea breeze liberates us or
bars us from the skin of our soundtrack.
This is the threat of our days
in the middle of the beginning of the end.

He refuses fate;
our trucks make the night’s last delivery
in the deserted streets of the industrial estate.

It’s a complex and fascinating poem which begins by contrasting the traffic jam close to the centre of the city with the less “real” more “virtual” world of outer suburbs dependent (as I read it) on credit, the most virtual form of wealth. At the centre the poem asks, “Does anything actually prove our bona fides / in streets we have walked forever?” – a reference to the odd feeling of unreality that the contemporary world of identity and credit checks involves.

That these issues arrive “in the middle of the beginning of the end” chimes with an apocalyptic element that is more pronounced in Hot Take than in the earlier books. And throughout the book there is an interest in beginnings, endings and renewals applied to public and private life. They can be read both ways: the individual’s life reflects the wider crises, but an individual suffering personal pains can also, in the style of the “sympathetic fallacy” upload these into cosmic significances.

The very first poem, “(Happy) Endings”, announces the theme of endings and seems to follow it through at a personal rather than macro level:

what god gives on the day after the end
we mistook for a beginning

. . . . .

this time things will be different
a sportswriter’s breastplate for the world’s keen spears

                          & if we lose our friends
                          we’ll find them before we leave . . .

This adopts the tactic of squaring one’s shoulders and pushing on – and there is a good deal of the desire to tough things out in the book as a whole. “Aspirin: Take 12” is a bit of an assault on the role of pop music as a bland raiser of enthusiasm – “Take the Last Train to Parksville / all the way to poptimism, / everything will be all right / just sing this little song”. “Baguettes at the End of Days” has a title which evokes the apocalyptic and a content which raises the mysteries of contemporary existence – Peaches Geldof died twenty years to the day after Habyarimana and high tech searches can’t find the black boxes of lost airliners – but it finishes with the poet himself:

So I write poems about it
waiting for the butter to soften
& eat my breakfast at the end
of the world we built for ourselves.

The fatalistic but not necessarily entirely negative position of the individual is given at the end of “Greenslopes in March” where he is described as someone who has discovered “that if you dial up the moon and stare down the barrels / any great adventure can be tapped”.

But seen only from a non-personal perspective, history, especially the history of the future, doesn’t look too promising. “Notice to Remedy Breach” finishes with the human race as doubtfully legitimate occupiers of the planet  – “Too smart by half / we’re just squatters / Gaia waits patiently to evict” – and “I Like You But the John Locke Fan Club Can Get Fucked”, thinking about the behaviour of some football fans, says, “We’re all dickheads: it’s relative”. Another image for contemporary history is the crash. “Hungry Wolves” begins with a reference to the Dreamworld tragedy and “#sotheresthat” – admittedly a more personal poem – argues that although crashes seem sudden, there is usually a period before them in which they could have been predicted if we weren’t so keen on turning our eyes away from reality:

        And like a car accident it
doesn’t quite come out of the blue.
There are the long seconds before impact,
learning for the first time the wonder
of spring dawn malicking your new hair;
a tender moment wrapped around a grey gum.

“You Used to Laugh About” is also a poem finishing with a crash. The fact that the speedo is “jerry rigged to blow” suggests that it is referencing Speed but the rest of the poem seems to be more about a personal “crash” than an apocalypse:

. . . . .
        Nothing is a simple as
an aeroplane appears;
but if we get out in front of the story
         we’ll be better prepared when
we’re steamrolled by the heart’s highjacked bus . . .

I’m not entirely sure how we can get out in front of the story although undoubtedly “in front of” refers to placement rather than time.

I said earlier that this is a book interested in beginnings and ends – as well as the middles in the middle. It’s just possible that Shakespeare’s “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” acts as a kind of Jacobsonian generative text at the core of the book. It is quoted in “Modern Love” – “Tomorrow, & tomorrow, & tomorrow / are as faraway / as yesterday, & yesterday, & the Friday before” – and alluded to in “Leave” – “All our Armageddons”. It makes a good key text because in Macbeth the despair it expresses is both a response to objective reality and an expression of an individual’s depression which renders the entire world blank and meaningless.

All of this description really only supports the proposition that the same axes of popular culture, angry satire and autobiography, found in the earlier books are at work here. And they work really well: Ferney seems to me to be a poet steadily growing in sophistication and potency. The hip, throwaway tone of these pieces may alienate some first-time readers but the core of the poems, together with the complex ways they work, is neither cheap nor trivial. You aren’t going to get a conventional lyrical experience from them, tapping into the universal (and ultimately incomprehensible) experiences of life but they are turned towards life itself and not just the complex surfaces of contemporary life. The underlying image of the self – as lover, city-dweller – animates the poems and interacts in complex ways with the description of the state of the human race nearly twenty years into a new millennium. The ambivalent response to life – found in the already quoted finish to “Greenslopes in March” – is also beautifully expressed in “After the Rain”, another poem about a crash: “My city blossoms like an orchid or a cancer”.

Rereadings III: John A. Scott: N

Blackheath, NSW: Brandl & Schlesinger, 2014, 599pp.

John A. Scott’s N belongs, at least on a superficial reading, to the genre of alternative histories. The death of an independent, Norman Cole, in 1942 leads to the replacement of the Curtin government by one lead by Warren Mahony. The Japanese invade, the American forces, only newly arrived, depart and the Australian government retreats southward, making Melbourne the centre of “free” Australia and forming a new base for government at Mt Macedon. But readers expecting a conventional, realistic exploration of this new “reality-possibility”, will quickly register surprise since N is also a compendium of different styles and, more importantly, a compendium of imaginative, non-realistic scenarios.

Despite this multiplicity, the narrative is, however, dominated by the histories of two frustrated relationships. The first is Missy Cunningham’s love for the painter, Vic Turner, a relationship compromised by her loveless marriage to Roy and her desperate protectiveness of her son, Ross. The second is Robin Telford’s doomed love for Esther Cole, the widow of the politician whose death made the accession of the Mahony government possible. And the trajectories of these two relationships have, as one expects in Scott’s work, very beautiful and shapely structures. Each has a moment when a decision, quickly taken, leads on to a disaster which is, in its own bleak way, a kind of fulfillment. When Vic – as semi-official war artist – is camped with Australian forces entrenched opposite the lines of the Japanese forces in a stalemate that recalls – as much else in this genuinely “phoney” war does – the experiences of the First World War, and the signal to surrender comes through, he is given a chance to leave. Menadue, Missy’s brother and his immediate superior, planning to desert and operate as a guerrilla behind Japanese lines, offers Vic the chance to join him. He refuses on the grounds that the his work as a painter is only half finished and, since it’s given his life meaning, needs to be completed. It’s a quick decision and sets in train the events that will eventually lead to his brutal death in the mining camp at Yampi Sound in the Kimberly region of north-western West Australia. Menadue, whose decision is also quickly taken, will die spreading bubonic plague among the Japanese scientists experimenting on human victims in Camp 732 in Tallon “a town in the middle of nowhere”. In the other relationship, Telford, while involved in setting up the new governmental centre of Mt Macedon, comes across an old University friend, Wood-Conroy, while on a trip to Melbourne. (Wood-Conroy, a remorseless behind-the-scenes operator, is clearly based on Alf Conlon who, coincidentally, for readers of Australian poetry, was the employer of James McAuley and Harold Stewart, the authors of the Ern Malley hoax which, more and more, looks like a plot derived from a book by Scott). Wood-Conroy is about to return to America and, on a whim, offers Telford a job as “like-minded assistant”. Telford refuses on the very Telfordian grounds that “a good rank in the Public Service, assisting the secretary to Emergency Cabinet, was not something to let go of on a whim”. Shortly after, Esther Cole comes to find him and present him with the task of working out what had happened to her husband and Telford’s fate is sealed. Significantly, when all the explanations of the events are made at the end, it is Wood-Conroy who takes a leading role. He seems as close to omniscience (and thus perhaps to the novelist, though he is implicated in the horrors) as anyone in the work and his long debriefing of Telford at the end has about it a tone of “If you had come with me you would have known this all along and thus avoided all this suffering.”

Clustered around these two narratives (though “interwoven with” might be a more accurate critical cliché) are the stories of Albie Henningsen (whose character recalls “Inky” Stephensen), Menadue, Leon Mischka and Reginald Thomas. Henningsen is an Australia First proto-fascist who is arrested and interned at the beginning of the war and his complex and painfully comic story – conveyed as monthly “letters” written on official notepaper with its recurrent reminder “Do Not Write Between The Lines” – involves the Scott themes of “ghost-writing”, plagiarism and identity-theft as he attempts to write the “true history” of the Burke and Wills expedition before being made the official biographer of the Prime Minister whose government has interred him. Menadue and Mischka are involved in different campaigns, the former demonstrating, perhaps, how a soldier should behave in impossible times and the latter how an artist might. Reginald Thomas is an extraordinary creation, an innocent novelist and radio dramatist who suddenly finds that he experiences visions that turn out to be accurate, word perfect predictions of the future. Since this material is worked into radio plays, he is immediately imprisoned by security forces who find him – since he is completely aware of his future fate – calmly waiting for them.

The figure of Thomas is a reminder that although N can be seen, nominally, as an example of “alternative history”, a better description of it might be “alternative reality”. While having a Tiresias-figure like Thomas – breasts and all – could be seen as a stretching of realistic norms in the interests of myth, there are other parts of the novel’s world that are more weirdly surreal. Australia is given an alternative geography, for example, where the vast “inland sea”, imagined and sought for in the nineteenth century, actually exists: Burke and Wills have a boat waiting for them disguised as a cart when they reach Wentworth at the junction of the Murray and the Darling. A bunyip, escaped from the pages of Ola Cohn, roams the country. One’s sense of these distortions is that the world of the imagination – usually corralled within literature and the visual arts – interpenetrates conventionally perceived reality. Scott’s own work might be included here since early poems like “Flooded City” and “Six Sonnets: Even Their Stories” chime with the Melbourne’s freak tides during the war In N. It is during one of these floods that, when others are asleep at flooded stations, Missy voyages with “the boatman” in a barge full of pennies and hears mysterious voices of “other times, other stories . . .places you might try to reach at your own peril”. In fact, these waters are a specific manifestation of the most important element of this alternative reality: tunnels (as well as passages of water) connect different places and even different times. Telford’s    assigned accommodation is built over a network of tunnels – a labyrinth whose stations are marked by letters and thus, symbolically, the labyrinth of writing – that will draw him farther into his search. A short trip along a tunnel that one of his fellow deserters has fallen into takes Menadue, for example, far away from the line of the opposing armies into Tallon, deep in the interior. It is no accident that Roy Cunningham goes into the mines to draw the workers there, nor is it an accident that he should become disoriented and hear Japanese voices if not from another reality then from another place and a future time. 

Whereas the bunyip enters the narrative as a nightmare from literature, actual literary characters appear also. A brilliant narrative of an imaginary visit to Australia by the surrealist Andre Breton didn’t survive the editorial process, as Scott reveals in his notes at the end of N. But Gertrude Stein (together with Alice B. Toklas) appear when Missy’s son, Ross, is sent for his own protection to his great-aunt in Trentham. It’s a short, very comical episode (Ross overhears them in bed) but it is thematically connected in that Stein and Toklas spent the war in occupied territory and Stein is the author whose Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas plays with issues of ghost-writing and biographer/subject interactions. This episode also makes a contribution to the idea of N as a kind of anatomy of distortions since its first person voice is impossibly high-flown for a small boy, even one who has read widely.

And then there are the comic distortions of a recognisable, historical reality. The arrival of General MacArthur after his evacuation from the Philippines together with the American forces is a tour-de-force of fantastic, hyperbolic comedy just tenuously tethered to reality:

And then the General was with us. You would see him everywhere, MacArthur – on street corners, striding down Collins Street, his trousers (from the knees down to the cuffs) soaked, as though he had just stepped from a landing craft into the shallows of a beach-head ready to lead his men to victory.
            His posters were plastered outside dance halls, Schools of Arts buildings and mechanics’ institutes, in shop windows and on railway walls alike. In the evenings he would hold communion in St Paul’s Cathedral, or sing 30s favourites in the Melbourne Town Hall. On occasion he would drive to the suburbs to call numbers in the bingo parlours. He was well-loved. People flocked to get his signature in their autograph books; he would turn the pages to the back inside cover and in a tiny hand print:

                        By hook or by crook
                       I’m the last in this book.

And if it were a woman he would kiss her; and if a man, he would arm-wrestle with him on the pavement. There was, we found, nothing extraordinary about this – in America, we were told, all heroes did such things.
            MacArthur. And in his wake the American servicemen, battalion after battalion marching down Swanston Street with their baseball caps and their catcher’s mittens, decked out in padded uniforms with huge shoulders and wearing large helmets. Americans. Raising their gleaming trombones, their gleaming trumpets, clutching their banjos, whole divisions of them, picking in perfect unison . . .

Nothing, as I’ve said elsewhere, is more irritating than having the mechanism of a joke teased out but, since I have been looking at the sorts of surrealism present in N it is worth pointing out that this passage (soon to be balanced by the scene in which the Americans depart, done as a lyrical lament) is a kind of development of the kernel idea – MacArthur was popular – spinning out into hyperbole influenced by the film traditions of the pre-war American musical.

All of this means that N’s stance towards “reality” – its modes of mimesis – is immensely and fascinatingly complex and trying to describe some of them may downplay the sheer pleasure of reading the thing. Simple items from what might be thought of as the aesthetic dimension of the book would include the distinctive voice given to each of the narrators. Telford’s is especially well-done so that he sounds, in genre, rather like an Edwardian civil servant, telling “my own story” but sensitive to imposing on his audience and careful to signpost for their benefit: passages like, “By way of putting a close to these preliminary observations, I should say . . .” and “I need to say something of Wood-Conroy, conscious, as I put pen to paper, that by the time my story is read there will be many such memoirs and evaluations of the man and his work” capture his tone perfectly. More generally, the evocative power of the recreations of Australian life – most especially Melburnian and bohemian life – at the end of the thirties is overwhelmingly detailed and accurate without ever being oppressive in the leaden, fact-laden way of well-researched historical fictions. Missy’s early description of the town:

Ask, and the temptation would be to dismiss Melbourne as a dreary, sober, almost sanctimonious place. A city of steel-grey buildings to and from which workers, suited, dressed, in appropriately sober clothing, made their charges every day.
            But that is not as I remember it. To me, Melbourne was the time of after-hours drinks in the back bar at the Swanston; of a celebratory dinner, with carafe of wine, at the Balalaika (a Three Course Meal inc. Borscht 1/9d. Tea 6d a glass tumbler). Of endless arguments – with the Italian at the Leonardo, at Bill Dolphin’s violin shop or in one of the low-rent studios which flourished in the abandoned offices and condemned warehouses of the North-East, the artists’ quarter . . .

gives at least a taste of the kind of precision of the prose, here filtered through Missy’s distinctive voice. A later passage is a brilliant evocation of the radio drama of the day (I’m old enough to remember the late fifties as the end of that tradition), describing an evening with Lux Radio Theatre, 3KZ. And, of course, this isn’t mere period window-dressing since what is radio drama but voices from elsewhere, inhabiting characters from elsewhere and speaking to a receptive listener?

At least as important as this ability to evoke is the way that Scott’s narrative method involves the shaping of scenes. It’s a feature that can be found in his earliest poetry, especially when it moves towards narrative. One might think of it as being a dramatic imagination because it isolates specific encounters and focusses intensely on them. But I prefer to think of it as deriving from an aesthetic pleasure in shapeliness. Missy’s memories, the beginning of which I have just quoted and which veer from idyllic memories to the memories of the nightmare harbingers – the freak tides, the violent storms, the screams in the night – are concluded by a passage which balances the opening: “The city was not like this, I hear you say. This was not Melbourne. Melbourne was a dreary city. A sober, almost sanctimonious place . . .” It’s a very minor example but not untypical.

One could find hundreds of examples of this as evidence that it is at the heart of Scott’s conception of what a narrative is, but I’ll confine myself to one I have already introduced. During the artificial stand-off between Australian and Japanese forces, Menadue decides to desert in a passage whose title – “Another Front” – recalls Slessor:

A running Corporal Davidson appeared, shirt fluttering.
            “Call’s come through on the blower from HQ,” he gasped, half in breathlessness, half in astonishment, “They’re telling McIlwaine to surrender.”
            “You’re bloody joking!” Menadue exclaimed. And he stood there a good half-minute trying to make some sense of it. “I mean, what’s changed? We’ve been camped here staring at each other for what, nine, ten months? And all of a sudden we’re to give in?”
            “Something’s obviously changed down South.”
            “Is that what they said?”
            “No sir. Sorry. Just guessing. Just passing on the news.”
            “Who knows about this?”
            “At the moment only you sir.”
            “Nothing’s got through to McIlwaine?”
            “I’m the messenger, Captain. Just on my way to inform him when I saw you.”
            “That might be seen as disloyalty, Donaldson.”
            “Yes sir, it well might.”
            Menadue paused a moment, considering.
            “No-one’s going to be busting a boiler getting the news through, I’d imagine – what with us being here for so long already.”
            Donaldson gave a wry grin: “I wouldn’t think so, sir. Besides, the colonel’s not always the easiest person to find.”
            “It might take, say, another half-hour or more to get the news through?”
“Three-quarters at least, I’d think, sir.”
            “Very good, Donaldson. Carry on.”
            “Yes, sir.”
            Menadue checked his watch and made hurriedly for no-man’s land, for Turner – a lunatic figure amidst the greying plain and its far distant shimmer of an enemy, or what was now, absurdly, a conquering army.

The pleasure of this scene lies in the understanding of what the other is thinking which quickly develops between the two characters without any authorial explanation. It is very close to theatre. It also contrasts with a passage in which Telford is trying to extract information from the Reference Librarian of the State Library in that neither character has any understanding at all of what the other wants or knows and the result, as Telford says, is a “lunatic exchange” of verbal “nods and winks” – there is no authorial interventions because the scene is beyond understanding.

It is Menadue whose story provides an example of this shapeliness moved beyond the short, tight scenes into something much larger. After his “escape” with three others, the stolen jeep runs out of petrol and is jettisoned. At that moment

. . . he knows from the depths of it that to turn back, if it has ever been a possibility, is now unthinkable. There is a speech, a passage, he half-remembers from school, from Shakespeare, half-learnt. About wading in so deep one might just as well go on as return. He would like the authority of Shakespeare to make something of this journey (Enter Menadue, a Captain in the Australian Army, with Fisher, a Sergeant, and Cooke and Young, common soldiers), something more than how he knows it seems – a selfish rush for survival . . .

One hundred and twenty pages later we see Menadue for the last time when, together with Fisher, they work out a plan for infecting as many of the Japanese scientists as possible with the plague whose symptoms they are already suffering from:

            “Disguising the symptoms won’t be easy.” The ever-increasing pain. The disorientation. “Still, I always fancied myself as a bit of an actor,” Fisher continues. “I was in a couple of school plays. Shakespeare.”
            “Me too,” says Menadue. “Me too.” Suddenly as excited by this as anything he could remember. “In fact, you might be able to help me,” he adds. “At the beginning, back when we dumped the jeep . . .”
            Fisher nods.
            “Back then, I was trying to think of a line from Shakespeare . . . something about going so far, one might as well go on as turn back?”
            “Macbeth,” says Fisher, and he gathers himself for the delivery, the exhaustion that will come with it:
            “’For mine own good, all causes shall give way: I am in blood stept in so far, that, should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er . . .’.”
            “That’s the one,” says Menadue, smiling. Fischer continues it, then, to the end of Macbeth’s speech, as though it is something they should keep in mind.

. . . . .

“Ready to break in on our Oriental friends?” he asks, breaking the silence.
“Ready, Captain.”
Exeunt marching, then,” says Menadue.

The length of this quotation will give readers some idea of the extent to which this is a favourite example out of many. And it isn’t merely a stylistic coup: the entire nightmare world of Tallon – the rural town taken over for plague experiments – has a seventeenth century theatrical horror about it, especially when the town doctor wears one of the grotesque bird masks used by doctors during plague years in the hope of fighting off the infection.

N, in all its different modes, is united by this method of shaping narrative into scenes but it is also united by its shared symbols and significances. I have already mentioned the tunnels in which one can hear voices from “other times, other places” and through which one can move into different realities. And the entire work draws on many of the themes of Scott’s earlier work (and for which his first novel, Blair, is a kind of comic repository) from flooded cities to the fascination with the act of writing, especially the act of biographical writing in which – as happens to Henningsen and Mahony, Henningsen and Frank Clune – the character of the writer merges with that of the subject: a world of plagiarism, palimpsests, overwriting and identity theft. In a sense the entire media presentation of the war in N is a fabrication derived from copied reports about the earlier war, hence the stalled battlelines before the surrender. There are two motifs that are worth looking at briefly. The first of these involves the novel’s setting in the light of the debate about asylum-seekers in Australia. N begins with the government’s rejection of asylum for children on board the ship, Ville de Nancy, berthed at Fremantle (the “nancy boys” as Mahony, then a minister, cruelly says). The Nancy is the name Burke gives to the boat that he launches into the vast inland sea, named, we are told, after his sister. Henningsen’s new and revisionary version of the expedition is to be called “The Voyage of the Nancy”. It is a kind of nightmare combination of both ships which greets the prisoners of war as they encounter the inland sea on their march to work in the mines. The second is the play made with the word “Dig”. It is the word carved in the tree in Longstaff’s Burke and Wills painting; it is what cryptic crossword solvers call a “hidden word” in the inscription over Telford’s mirror – haud ignota loquor – and in the message left scratched on the railway platform for the surrendering soldiers – “Run Digger” as well as the initials of Telford’s loathsome superior, David Ivor Gelder. It is also the refrain of all Esther Cole’s urgings of Telford – “You might need to dig deeper, Mr Telford. Dig deeper” as well as being the way into the underworlds of tunnels. And, of course, it is the imperative for all followers of the clues in the labyrinth of fiction.

N is a wonderful work, perhaps a great one. Immensely complex yet amazingly clear. Multifaceted but single-minded. Dealing with great tragedies – at national and personal level – but often with a wry humour. Embodying many of its author’s obsessive themes but always an absolutely distinct work. Its re-creation of wartime Melbourne is superlative and rich with possibilities. In a world where streaming networks have made a practice of eviscerating fictions of their plots (or attenuating these plots as much as possible) and capitalising on the distinctive worlds they have created (the world of The Handmaid’s Tale The Man in the High Castle or Westworld, for example) by spinning them out into seasons’ worth of series, it’s a bit surprising that nothing similar has been done with N. An alternative-history, alternative reality Melbourne of the forties seems rich in possibilities.

Kit Kelen, Poor Man’s Coat: Hardanger Poems; Kevin Brophy, Look at the Lake

Poor Man’s Coat: Hardanger Poems Crawley, WA, UWA Publishing, 2018,197pp.
Look at the Lake Glebe: Puncher and Wattmann, 2018, 161pp.

These two books, different in so many ways, share something that makes a comparison between them almost irresistible. Each is written in response to a period the poets have spent in an environment far different from that which has produced most of their previous poems. Kevin Brophy’s book responds to a year (2016) in the north of Western Australia as a volunteer at a local school in the town of Mulan, next to Lake Gregory not far from the border with the Northern Territory. Kit Kelen’s Poor Man’s Coat is a response to time spent in the little Norwegian town of Ålvik situated on the upper reaches of the Hardanger fjord about 60km east of Bergen as the crow flies (though it would be a tiring mountainous flight). These are both spectacular venues of an almost completely different character – flat, red, dry as opposed to vertical, green, wet – but there is also a touch of the abject about each of them, even in the case of Ålvik which looks, for all the splendours of its setting on the fjord, to be a rather grotty little town, a “company town” dominated by a large factory, the subject of a poem significantly titled, “I Don’t Know What They Make in There”.

Of the two books, Kelen’s is likely to be the one which causes a reader more initial puzzlement. If it is true that books of poetry teach us how to read the poems within, then this learning experience takes quite a bit longer in Kelen’s case – not necessarily a bad thing of course. It’s a very unusual style not specifically designed for this book because you can find it in the earlier Scavenger’s Season, a book devoted to life in the Myall Lakes area and which shares not only a style with this book but themes also. “Time With the Sky” is especially reminiscent (or predictive) of the obsession with sky in Poor Man’s Coat and “Sydney and the Bush” begins “a patch of blue demands inattention”. Lyric poetry is, customarily, strung on a scale which at one end produces shapely, completed but resonating objects and at the other, fragmentary poems which reflect life lived as a process: Kelen’s poems seem all about process. The style mixes assertion with fragmentariness and incompleteness. Take, as an example of the style of Poor Man’s Coat, a poem like “On Blue Disc”, the opening poem of the section called “The Other Worlds” and, like the poems from the earlier book which I have mentioned, a poem about the sky:

time is weather

each syllable spoken
still goes round
it’s like the book’s afloat

on that world
after an all-nighter
it could be any dawn

never the same sun rises there
but every god gets a turn

we are our own pyjamas
day’s naked
dream it
waking wonder
how things will ever again lie flat

we dance around for a sparrow-fart hour
just to see what’s up

True, there is a sense of completion here that gives the poem a final shape but its deliberate bathos makes it almost a denial of lyric roundedness. Undoubtedly this is a deliberate tactic and it is a rejection of the shift to high style which is a cliché of conventional lyric conclusions. In fact the poetic method involves rejecting all conventional lyric graces and this contrasts with material (and location) that might seem to cry out for some lyric elegance. There is a strong sense of fragmented assertion and a reader quickly learns to respect the stanza divisions and build a whole out of very separate components.

The poems focus on the poet’s self and its interactions with a very distinctive environment. It’s not just that the emphasis is on sky, clouds, rain, mountain, trees, fjord, what is more important is the way the locations make the interaction (and arrangement) of these elements absolutely specific. The blue sky usually appears between trees and its appearances are determined by the season; similarly, the sun is always seen in different positions dependent on its season – “and over the cliff it comes / through treetops far and near / already at its winter angle”. Since seasonality becomes more important the closer one gets to the poles it’s no surprise that two of the book’s divisions include poems of summer and poems of autumn. The poems of the former celebrate the dominance of sun and warmth: the fjord (“a little whale’s way”) looks like a glass mirroring the sky, ivy “strikes up / as if just thought of” and the sun is “reluctant to set”. But it’s also marked by the behaviour of the locals – painting sheds, raking leaves and fishing – “the book hasn’t been written / to hold all one could do / on just such a day”. The autumn poems, likewise, include the activities of the human population – the summer campervans come back and people make the most of the remaining light to finish domestic tasks of sawing and painting – but it’s also the time when the “last blue” is “most meaning” and the time of omnipresent rain. And it is rain that is such a shaping force that it gets its own section, “The Rain Is Its Own Room”, though many of the poems here touch on an important move for the poems of this book in that they allow the self and the world of mountain, trees, sky and rain to interact and become synbols of one another. Not least in importance is the way that the flow of water in the rain can symbolise the act of writing and in “A Record of First Falls” many of these elements come together when a description of the light appearing after a day of “not going out / steady precipitation” is connected to the writing of the poem:

. . . . . 
the sun comes into it
now and then
nothing to depend on

rain sets the pace
but upstairs there’s another idea
you can see a light dusting
these signs the screen collects
won’t amount to much . . .

perhaps not but they do make a final, comparatively conventionally-structured poem, working with the syntactic possibilities of the phrase “light dusting” as noun-verb and adjective-verbal noun.

Rain as rain is celebrated in “Parables of Rain” from the Autumn section:

even before it comes
rain creeps into the joints

“an ache of rain” must be the measure
you want to light a fire . . .

but even in such an externally-oriented poem as this, there’s a movement at the end towards the symbolic identification of the environment and writing – water as writing, trees as books:

. . . . . 
rain is like a road here  
grey then it falls

this would be the gospel
but the book’s too wet to read

And the rain seems to affect all the other items in the landscape so that “Parables of Rain” is followed by “Every Day the Mountain Needs Naming” which has, as its modus operandi and poetic shape, a list of names for the mountain that looms behind the town, covering it in a kind of linguistic mesh:

September I call it Blueberry Hill
some days its name is Mud
or From-Which-The-Stream Mountain
. . . . . 
out of the corner of your eye
something moves
on the Mountain of High Suspense 
for instance it could be called
Slippery Track
Trip on a Loose Rock
Left Days to Crawl Back
(or more likely starve)
One Cold Night Would Put You in the Deep Freeze For Good
(Merciful Mountain)

Mountain of the Tumbledown Signpost
Mountain of the Tiniest Moth
After Work Brisk Hike Mountain . . .

There’s perhaps a touch of the naming parts of Murray’s “Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle” here but it doesn’t seem derivative at all and a poem undertaking the ritual act of naming something according to its appearance and uses results in an attractive and not overcommon mode.

Just as rain, the mountain and the sky (with its clouds that want to symbolise thought) bulk large in this environment so do trees which, like the rain, get their own special section, “Minded of Trees”, though they make appearances throughout. These poems are often marked by an imaginative identification but one, “Fairytale”, a faux-naif treatment of the cutting down of trees – “one tree wandered off” – finishes in a way that registers three of the uses of timber as paper, building material and something that can be burned to provide necessary warmth:

God knows where they were heading, those trees
no one’s ever seen them again

it’s a cosy book
this story’s in
under the polished beams
feet up by an open fire.

Since all of these items are needed by poets in this environment, there is nothing ecologically unaware about Poor Man’s Coat.

Kevin Brophy’s Look at the Lake is a complex and affecting, not to say, profound book. It is, from the outside, something of a compendium with portraits, documentation of place and documentation of odd, outsiders’ experiences and perspectives. But that doesn’t quite capture it and risks seeing it as the poetic equivalent of high-quality reportage of the “My Year Among the X” type. Perversely, perhaps, I’m inclined to read it as being made up of poetic challenges rather than the psychological and social ones that an experience of a new and alien community provides. Its challenges, then, would include the attempt never to sound like the sort of attractive project to accompany a grant or enrolment application and the attempt to avoid the tonal and stylistic sameness of a diary-based suite of poems. The challenge posed by odd experiences – like the ones in “After School” where some boys bring witchetty grubs to eat or “Canning Stock Route II” where “The map was more or less misleading / about everything but latitude and longitude” – is how to make a poem from them that doesn’t rely on the extra-poetic phenomenon of the experience to keep it afloat. And the same could be said of the descriptive pieces which are of everything from camels, christmas beetles and wild bulls to the town’s adults and its children.

And since Brophy is a fine and resourceful poet the success rate is high and the individual poems rather then the book’s conception, are where this success lies. There is a lot of variety in the structure of individual pieces and the way the experiences are approached. There are quite a few list poems, for example, a structure which avoids tonal variations and the usual way of creating the basis for a satisfying conclusion and provides, in exchange, a situation in which each item has to sustain itself. “A Day in Education” is one of these:

They tried to listen to their hearts.
They tried to reason with their souls.
They tried to tie the laces of new boots. 
They tried to line up like a nest of ants. . . .

There are many ways in which one could, in a poem, speak about students’ experiences, and others of the book’s poems exploit some of these ways, but this one works as a list. Although there is a lot of play with the tensions between items of the list – I read listening to one’s heart as a physical activity for children to show them something about physiology but it has a conventional metaphorical meaning which is taken up in the next line where they try to “reason with their souls” – a list reads like an anti-poem, structurally, which poetry, in its all-absorbing, poetics-rejecting way, has simply made part of itself and which it can then explore. The preceding poem, “Spirit”, is also a list but because it is a list of if-clauses it is dynamically structured to prepare the way for the clinching clause (technically called the “apodosis”) so that the poem can end:

if this is all there is for now and ever,
if brumbies’ nightmares are of being culled,
if the desert hears dying voices in our voices,
if there’s a spirit then we must be hearing it.

A poem like “Morning” has a quite different though not unfamiliar structure:

At seven o’clock they come in by the gate
sleepy headed, uncombed, bare footed,
walking as if they had walked all night
to get here.

They are preparing themselves
for a day in Standard English
at tables where the future might open
one eye and look at them
with something like a promise that says,
yes, is it possible to live
several lives at once and to walk around inside
each one of them like some Adam.

It’s built out of two parts, the second twice as long as the first. Each part has a climax but the climax of the first is only a preparation for the climax of the second part. The first produces that beautiful imaginative description that the children look as though they have walked all night to get to school and indeed a fine tanka-like poem might have been made out of this on its own. But the second part has a rather profounder climax since it involves not a visual felicity but a conceptual one: each child is given the possibility of living simultaneously different lives and each child will be as unique as Adam within that specifically framed life. (There is also a trick enjambment so that at first we think that the poem is going to say that the future opens itself for these children but then find that all it does is lazily open a single eye, cat-like, which holds nothing more than “something like a promise”.)

One could on at length like this about the poems in this book and never really rise above the sort of critical observations made in writing classes, but I want to stress that the structural keynote is variety and lack of an easy predictableness. True, there are some fixed forms – there are a couple of villanelles and some sonnets – but most of the poems have only their internal frameworks to support them. And the same could be said of the structure of the book as a whole. It very carefully doesn’t begin with an arrival (though it does conclude with the cleverly conceived and titled “Before We Leave”) but rather with a map:

. . . . . 
A finger like a bird of prey
casts its shadow on the open road,
lake, town.
The map never folds away
as neatly as it arrived, for its
soul, swollen a little with longing
to be known
wants to stay open on our laps.

It might be a fanciful reading but to me this recalls the more abstract meditative poetry of an earlier book like This Is What Gives Us Time and thus establishes a link at the same time as preparing a departure. When the arrival is narrated/described, it’s already the eleventh poem and has been preceded by another “Where is the Beginning of the Story” which, in narrating a child’s attempt to grasp western narrative styles (“She knows that every story / starts with a thin, proud / letter ‘I’”) asks the same question Brophy must have asked planning the structure of this book.

Given that Look at the Lake is poetry that arises from a temporary immersion in a culture that is at once part of ourselves and also alien (a point made nicely in the second poem, “Rice Puffs, Pringles, Lindt”) it is tempting to reduce the poet to the role of passive, transparent observer. But it is worth reminding ourselves that this is Brophy’s book as well as a book of life in Mulan. It is dedicated to his parents who both died (in deep old age, it should be said) while he was in Mulan, though he points out that they “urged us to go and they both had a strong interest in all we were doing there”. That’s quite a burden for someone to experience, to carry with them, and then to omit from the poems. So, fighting against the grain, I read this powerful book as one which explores poem shapes and developments in the poet’s inmost personal life. One poem, “Naming”, begins with an anecdote about Auden, and this brings to mind – to the mind of this reader at least – Auden’s comments about middle-aged travellers from the north who arrive in the Mediterranean (as alien and familiar a culture as that of the town of Mulan) “hoping to twig from / what we are not, what we might be next”.

David Malouf: An Open Book

St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2018, 89pp.

An Open Book is the third of a series of “late” books of poetry whose first, Typewriter Music, published in 2007 had been Malouf’s first book of poetry for 27 years. Malouf’s poetry has been a complex, evolving and experimental thing since his contribution to Four Poets in 1962, but has always involved an examination of the self, its history and growth, its connections to the outer world through the complementary modes of exploration and receptivity, its connections to the body, and the nature of creativity itself. These themes are present in the variegated landscape of Malouf’s creativity (it includes prose fiction, lectures, essays and libretti) but within the work as a whole these three books have a special place. The poems are less “experimental” than the poems of the middle period, such as those of First Things Last, they are smaller and, on the surface, often less ambitious. But they are easily underestimated and are, at heart, immensely compressed and complex, inviting and coaxing the reader into a poetic world that looks encouragingly straightforward, even anecdotal, on the surface but which proves to be fascinatingly complex and challenging. And the invitations are part of the style, part of Malouf’s canny invocation of shared experience marked by his use of that potent pronoun, “we”.

To say that An Open Book is part of a continuing group of collections with Typewriter Music and Earth Hour isn’t, however, to say that these books are entirely of a kind. Typewriter Music has remnants of an earlier poetry in an experimental exploration like “Mozart to Da Ponte”, a meditation on the relationship between music and language cast in what seems to be the style of a baroque passion with poems between passages of prose. It looks, in retrospect, like a holdover from the earlier style (and subject matter) of First Things Last and there isn’t anything as formally distinctive as that in this new book. But the connections are apparent when poems such as “Aquarius I” and “Aquarius II” in Earth Hour are extended into a third poem in An Open Book whose “At Pennyroyal II” seems a continuation of the earlier “Australia Day at Pennyroyal”. And, in An Open Book, there are a small set of translations as there are in the other two books, though one should point out that Malouf’s versions of Horace go back to his earliest poetry.

Much of this interest in continuity and change in Malouf’s work derives from his own assertions that all of the multiple creative activities he has been involved in form part of a coherent whole. This is true to the extent that it is difficult to know where to begin describing any of Malouf’s works since all the threads seem interconnected. An Open Book begins with a poem which, in Malouf fashion, is a “double” because “Partings”, while looking back nostalgically at separation from loved things and people, also looks forward to new worlds of experience: they are the two faces of a single coin. But I’ll begin with the poems that follow whose subject is memory, significant because, in the words of one of the poems, “nothing is ever / done with / or over”. The opening sequence, “Kinderszenen”, takes its title from Schumann’s set of piano pieces – not exactly “five easy pieces” but decidedly light and whimsical in tone. And Malouf, as so often, wants to suggest that these poems are not to be considered major statements and explorations but smaller, lyrical addenda. And, as so often, this can lull readers into the illusion that they are going to be confronted with something slight, perhaps a little gestural in its poetics and, above all, easy to digest. They may seem that way initially but they are also challenging poems. Like most of the poems of this and the previous two books they deal with a lot in few words – they are small but never slight. Take the first: a memory of a childhood’s family of two parents (one of each sex) and two siblings (one of each sex) and with the title, “Binomial”:

Privacies. Tongue-and-groove
whispers at a knothole,
bare bathroom
plumbing, bare bodies,
shock-white minus their clothes.
We put two and two
together and make more
or less a family.

The house, half a dozen
rooms in spin around
finger-to-lip
asides not to be sounded.
Later we take
its silences
off into a silence
space-deep beyond breath.

Empty suits
in a wardrobe.
Under the warm subtropic rain
empty faces
turned upwards underground,
forever dazed by
the distance between terms:
to a tittle, rule of thumb.

It’s a poem worth quoting in full because it has so many of the strengths of Malouf’s poetry, not the least that the decision to write a series of poems about memories of childhood doesn’t produce anything that is in any way conventional or predictable. These are not, for example, memories whose content is some sort of guarantee of significance – “My childhood was in a country unknown to Australians”, “I was traumatised by my parents’ behaviour” etc. Instead, the memories form the basis of components of the poet’s self and they have to form the basis of a working poem: something which, in Malouf’s poetics, usually holds together a number of disparate elements which open the material out and complexify it but in doing so, of course, run the risk of making it fly apart. The binding together is done by the movement of the verse itself and its metaphors and puns. In “Binomial”, as the title warns, there are a set of mathematical “terms”, a word with interesting punning possibilities – technical names, blocks of school attendance, conditions of agreement, etc – which remain potent even if they recall the title of a Hollywood film that is invoked in the title of a later poem in this book devoted to the private language of lovers. The title here, I think, plays with the fact that, within the household, things such as sex and age-group are conceived in pairs which, put together, take a binomial form. I won’t agonise about the difficult final stanza here (one of the things it does is warn readers early on that these poems require real engagement) but point out that the idea of pairing is part of a thread which includes the theme of a doubled personality (about which, more later) and leads, within “Kinderszenen”, to “Odd Man Out” where, now the poet has become a schoolboy, the issue of singles and doubles perplexes:

. . . . . 
This boy goes
awkward, on one leg hopping,
never lonely
enough. He deals
in singles, finds it odd,
since even
he has a shadow,

two hands, two eyes, two
sides to every question,
and paper.
He develops an ear
for echoes from the further
shore of a silence
too wide to spit across. . .

Memories of a Brisbane childhood also include, in this sequence, the sense of History and (to quote Wodehouse) “its little brother”, Change. The former doesn’t appear in propria persona as the war and the fear of a Japanese invasion that were the reality of the time in which these memories were made but instead disguised as folk tale in “The Wolf at the Door” and as a weather metaphor in “The Brisbane Line”. The latter is the subject of “Fifth Column” which is interested in the fact that the major changes that this period heralded came from within – hence the title – rather than as a result of a Japanese threat. Two later poems in An Open Book are also memory pieces: “Old Pop” is a fairly straightforward portrait which is tied together in its final sentence – “My own story, if / I had one, still in the offing” – by punning on that wonderful final word, a nautical term which now has a more general application, and “Kite”, a memory of being coached by his father in how to fly a kite, an activity full of metaphorical richnesses.

Perhaps the last word on the significance of memory is to be found in another of the “Kinderszenen” poems, “Deception Bay”, a title Malouf has used before, apparently unable to resist the implications of this simple place-name which, like “offing”, begins in a harmless and practical nautical sense and then develops wider metaphorical possibilities. Here, the bay is the setting for a complex symbolic set piece which concludes by speaking of “the Ever / Now of recollection”. But this poem is, like “Binomial”, a poem of doubles: a boy, standing in the bay at noon (interestingly standing on one leg, like the boy of “Odd Man Out”) holds back from throwing a pebble which would break up the reflected image provided by the water and destroy the image of “a self, then another / lighter, more enlightened // self in reflection”.

It goes without saying that, in Malouf’s universe, the self, whose formation, development and interactions are explored in these poems, is a doubled phenomenon and that anything singular about it, as in “Odd Man Out”, is unusual. This doubling permeates many of the themes beginning with the most obvious paradox that, in order to write about a society, a writer has to cut him- or herself off from it for extended periods: he or she must, in other words, be simultaneously two people, an insider and an outsider, “a part” and “apart” – to use a pun exploited in the book’s title poem. Every writer, though rarely with Malouf’s depth of insight, has a “real” self which is counterbalanced by a dream self, or a “day” self and a “night” self. And all readers experience both a literary world and a real world, something explored in “Empty Page” where a Brisbane child’s experience of snow can only come through the reading of a literature dealing with another world. But instead of making a predictable point about the way a colonial culture imposes on the young an image of a world which is that of the imperial centre, Malouf’s poem rejoices in the disjunction between the white of snow and the green of a subtropical Brisbane and allows snow to be an introduction not only to the otherworld of literature but also to the world of writing with its existentially challenging white pages:

A world leaf-green in all
seasons. Snow
fell only in bedtime stories, without

sound or scent or colour, and so
lightly in every tense as to belong
permanently to a sky,

since it was never
in view, that could only be imagined,
with its own arrivals and successions

of breath. After the inklings
and enticements of now and here, I thought
of snow and where it lay,

the nil on nil of its eternal
silence, as vacancy, its white the printless
white of

a page not yet arrived at. If not nowhere,
then where? And if not never,
when?

And doubling extends to the self’s perception of the world. “The Double Gift” is probably an important poem here, difficult as it is, in that it describes the doubling of our experience of “plain household objects” which make a gift of themselves but also the gift of the experience of understanding ourselves. “Asleep at the Wheel” describes how part of the mind takes in the vast rush of impressions but another part, simultaneously asleep and alert, takes in “the leaf long dead mid-fall / suspended // in a web the fox’s / eye as it glances up from / the kill”. And it is just such another part of the mind which, in Malouf’s poems, has to be trained to perceive the usually imperceptible, especially the visitations that are made into the world. This is a theme that stretches as far back as “Bicycle” the title poem of Malouf’s first full collection (and which is, in poetic mode, very different to these more recent poems), where a bicycle left in a flat becomes a messenger from another world. “House and Hearth” and “A Tavola” are poems about these homely visitors. In the former the gods are the ordinary domestic appliances (I think) which accompany us through life as guides:

. . . . . 
Mute reminders of what it is that we are part of

they prefer, like kindred stars, to light
our steps and keep their distance.

The hearth is imaginary, they are not. Only
too close to the hard facts

of inner and outer weather, the discordancies of heart
and hand, the mess and muddle we mischief into,

to be more than the necessary 
agents of resort and replenishment. . . 

In “A Tavola” the contrast between the two modes of perception is made when the relaxed appearance of an angel who “drifts in, idles a moment / then passes” during the meal is juxtaposed with the arrival of news from the outside world which disturbs like an ambush or a gunshot.

Perhaps the best place to look at this kind of doubling is “Understood” whose title punningly suggests both comprehension and invisibility. The central metaphor is the migratory bird which has a double existence, “their bodies / teasingly in two / minds as in two places”. These birds, then, mimic what the properly perceiving human (of “Asleep at the Wheel”, say,) does but they also act as messengers of the otherworld themselves;

. . . . . 
       The trick, to tune
our ear, beyond what passes
for silence, to what is new

-born or newly arrived out of the air, and sits
polishing its colours, the angel-sheen of
its wings, out of sight within.

Welcome, we say, time for you
to speak, dear pilgrim
self and not quite stranger. You have news. . .

An Open Book is, of course, a “late” work and the coming twilight inevitably casts its shadows before in a few of these poems. Interestingly, these future prospects evoke literary references. “Windows II” begins by describing windows as things that place limits on the raw worldliness of the world which our “edgy / ungrounded second nature” has trouble dealing with, but finishes with a room at sunset in which, echoing Goethe’s “mehr licht”, there is the comfort of “light, light, more / light as night comes on”. In “Late Poem” the morning cup of coffee is also a taking into oneself of a dark liquid which symbolises the greater dark and so the act is “a practice / run for the big sleep”. And “A Knee Bent to Longevity” begins

A knee bent
to longevity. Remnant
days haunted by footsteps
in a house of empty doorways.

The rest is never
silent, or never quite. Some
tag-end of the stubbornly
personal-unresolved,

resistant to tense
or closure, hangs on
and quickens into
a new generation . . .

and makes the very Maloufian point that the self isn’t an isolated phenomenon but one which is everywhere connected to both past and future and the inhabitants of those realms. Late in life the poet’s gaze moves away from “constellations, far-off / hilltop villages / folded in travel-maps” and focusses on the final day that “the calendar at last / finds time for”. But the self is joined by the unfinished and unresolved elements of existence which, I think, are here imagined to be a younger group, perhaps two or three generations down the track, “demanding / their jot of the blessèd dole”.

I’ve spoken about An Open Book in rather thematic terms, possibly because that is what first suggests itself when one re-enters the Maloufian universe. I should point out that these are poems with a very distinctive style. As I have said they are compressed without being gestural and small without being slight. They are highly responsive not so much to the tactility of words as to the multiple accidents that seem to accompany them and their use, and which always invite into the poem unexpected meanings. Hence the engagement with punning and the continuing pleasure in the way that an unexpected enjambment can alter meaning completely: in “Understood”, which I have already quoted, what we first read as an address to a pilgrim turns out to be, at the beginning of the next line, an address to the “pilgrim self”, a noun having been transformed into an adjective. In “Odd Man Out” the description of the solitary child as “never lonely” is radically altered in the next line by the word “enough”. (It’s such a common mechanism in these three books that one worries that it may become nothing more than an authorial habit.) And there is also the movement of the poems. In contrast to the remorseless discourse (of, admittedly, widely different origins) that makes up so much of Australian poetry, Malouf’s poems move by very carefully placed phrases and breaths. It’s tone of humility, inclusiveness, sensitivity and respect has led to its being called “European” but that can only ever be an imprecise term. Whatever its allegiances, it’s a wonderful poetry by a great poet at the height of his powers: one wants it to continue in this vein for as long as possible.

A. Frances Johnson: Rendition for Harp & Kalashnikov

Glebe: Puncher and Wattmann, 2017, 86pp.

This new book by A. Frances Johnson has the same neat three-part structure as her second. But whereas The Wind-up Birdman of Moorabool Street was divided into past, present and future (with the future significantly coming first), Rendition for Harp & Kalashnikov is built around three homophonic puns: Soar, Sore and Saw. And although the new book has some significant differences of emphasis, it clearly comes from the same stable. It begins as did The Wind-up Birdman of Moorabool Street, for example, with poems about the kind of grotesque interpenetration of what should be different orders of existence, focussing on the present development and future possibilities of drone technology, especially that part of the technology which eschews crude flying- and guided-bombs in favour of a birdlike mechanism with only minimal effect on the environment it’s exploring. Understandably these poems don’t pass up the opportunity to criticise the murderous American use of drones in Afghanistan and Pakistan – the last of the poems about mechanical birds, “Soar II: String That Holds the Sky”, focusses on the moving testimony of the son and grandchildren of a woman killed by a drone strike in Pakistan – but poetry, being what it is, responds better to free-ranging imaginative possibilities than it does to moral outrage. As a result the best of these drone poems seem to me to be those which focus on the ambivalent status of these UAVs themselves. “Microaviary” from The Wind-up Birdman of Moorabool Street, for example, concluded with a poem, “Hummingbird versus Raven”, in which both “birds” abandoned their military destinies and pursued their own lives, the Raven heading for Africa and the Hummingbird, in Bavaria, “attempting to build a nest out of nails in the forest of Odin”.

“Hummingbird versus Raven” is thus a poem that wants to explore surreal possibilities rather than dwell on technological and ethical issues. The same could be said of “Love Song” from this new book:

. . . . . 
This technological pianissimo is a subtle achievement.
But for scientists, flawed “hear and avoid” mechanisms are dead giveaways.
There can be no stealth without concealment of song.
Some days a vagueness of pitch confuses the young corporal on headsets.
When his birds do not return, he can still hear them over the wire,
over the shush of white noise, mimicking the harmonics
of ancient Urdu love songs.

The drone of “Birds”, in contrast, goes about its murderous task “never fooled / by sugared Persian love songs”. Many of these poems are interested in song in the same way as these two. The former begins, “Bastard variations in form and song”, referring not only to the mechanical construction of an imitation bird but also to the principle of variation in music. And the book’s second poem, “Hummingbird”, overtly draws poetry into its imaginative ambit:

Target accuracy of poems
as with fixed-wing UAVs
varies wildly.
Only the remote operator
reads intention like a book.
This is his bastard ghazal.
Unlike the poet,
he won’t discuss payload,
precise and imprecise hovering,
the true arc
of his birds avian stunts.
That’s how the poem began
and ended, looking for trajectory,
for onscreen radiance,
explosions in quiet rooms.

It’s very much part of what makes Johnson an interesting poet that what looks like an opportunity for a fairly straightforward moral condemnation of the way technology, admittedly impressively, takes the natural world and recreates it as a destructive force should turn out to be interlaced with so many metaphors about the writing of poetry that it may well be a statement of ars poetica. It’s especially interested in the nature of authorial intention and control, questions which are always interesting in the consideration of any art but especially poetry. Poems go out into the world where whatever it is that they are trying to do – their “payload” – can be missed, misunderstood or distorted by readers. In the end, though, like the drones’ handlers, poets are hoping to make occasional “hits”, “explosions in quiet rooms”. It’s a theme – or perhaps one should say, “a conjunction with interesting imaginative possibilities” – that is taken up overtly in “Unmanned Aerial Vehicle versus Poem” and, again, it’s the question of authorial control over interpretation that interests Johnson: “the poem is less reliable / in open space, but more flexible / than fixed wing models // favouring the single reading”.

The rest of these “Soar” poems are devoted to either oppression or elevation in one form or another. The prose-poem, “The Problem of Russian Novels in the Desert”, is a portrait of Bashar al-Assad, working by bringing the very un-Syrian world of Russian fiction into conjunction with the portrait of a tyrant. It’s not a surreal conjunction since Russia supports the Syrian regime and part of the poem’s point is probably that this support is as inexplicable as the importation of Russian novels into the middle-east. At another, more surreal, level Syria is imagined to be undergoing the kind of climate-change that other poems interest themselves in. But here it is a matter of unseasonal, smothering snow. Conceivably this is designed to be a symbol of the importation of things Russian – if you want the arms, you’ll also have to take the weather and the literature – but that might make the poem more logically explicable than it wants to be. But, at any rate, it is a “soaring” poem because in it Assad dreams of flying:

. . . . . Forget about reading, I implore you! Oblomov, Karamazov, Raskolnikov are no use any more. I now regard time with a gull’s cold eye, cosying up to avian metaphors, though I can barely tell the difference between kites and drones. My blood seems poikilothermic now, much like that of the ibis, last survivor at the edge of the lake. But still I cannot fly. Expectation of transfiguration, flight, you see, remains strong . . .

It ties the poem in with the opening bird poems as well as making a nice pun on “flight”.

The ecological catastrophe imagined in “The Problem of Russian Novels in the Desert”, takes the form of a rise in sea levels as a result of human-induced climate-change. The sea levels hardly “soar” but they rise sinisterly enough. “Ultima Thule: Swimming Lessons” is a kind of semi-comic version of the incipient Noah’s flood and, in contrast, “Sea Level” is a more straightforward though complex meditation on “the salt order that threatens” (for someone who lives on a sand island in a fishing village a couple of metres above sea level, this is especially wince-inducing). But the poem isn’t a simple tract about climate change: its “you” wants to learn something about the alternative way of ordering reality that the oceanic represents, to get beyond the world of containment and domestication of the liquid:

. . . . . 
You’ve learnt the lessons of containment: skyscrapers and houses, banks and zoos.
In the city, people press their hands against glass and feel the pulsing tremor of curtain walls.

You are like them; this is part and parcel of your day job, listening to life moving through
encryption. Knowing that, in the end, all your resolutions will melt.

On the way back from the coast you notice cavernous shops selling light fittings,
acres and acres of lights, a confusion of Bethlehems. 

In the distance the city skyline glows with penthoused unbelief.
You shift in closer now, you have come back – strong, certain as tides.

As I read it, we are back, here, in the world of the mechanical birds and their metaphoric possibilities about the nature of poetry: a salt, liquid order requires, after all, a different sort of poetry, one less about the containment of experience in a neat work with a single meaning and more about fluid poetic possibilities. (The poems which follow are about soaring in the sense of mountain climbing and the last of them, “Australian Awe”, concludes with a wonderful imagined piece of outrage – “What’s wrong with you? / What did art ever do to you?” – which gets its effect by joining the conventional reading of a cliché with another, more significant one.)

The middle section of Rendition for Harp & Kalashnikov is, as its title, “Sore”, suggests, about pain, specifically the grief of loss. The initial poems take up the loss of the poet’s father, an obsessive and unassuagably painful theme that can be traced back to Johnson’s first book, significantly titled The Pallbearer’s Garden. The later poems deal with the loss of a sister-in-law to cancer. Like all good elegies these poems have at least half an eye on what they are doing in the same way that, when we cry in grief, we can also stand outside of ourselves and see ourselves weeping. This, I think, is why the first poems are grouped together as ”anti-elegies” and the first of these says quite overtly,

. . . . . 
Poetry always cherry-picks memory
for its own ends; yet that’s a
medicated narcissism for some.
Earnest elegies are often rejected
by dogs and children. Listen to them howl.
Voting for life outside of ritual.
I’m on your side; I’m with the hounds 
and the kids. I won’t let elegy
make you over into a bad oil painting,
don grief’s cloth pantomime . . .

The later poems of both groups are kept animated by their surprising perspectives and tactics so although there are a lot of repetitive elements – the sister-in-law’s chemotherapy wig, for example – these still look like occasional poems rather than a set cold-bloodedly exploiting a rich thematic stream.

The title of the third section, “Saw” suggests that the poems it contains will focus of reality as seen by a poet rather than on the quirky and imaginative conjunctions that the future technologies have to offer. Again, the approach is not quite what one might expect, it is more experimental than unashamedly chosiste. The first poem, “Laverton: First Star”, recapitulates the idea of transfigured soaring. Asleep by the side of the road, the poet imagines taking out a ladder from her purse and climbing up to “rest my cheek / against a globe of star”. But the project doesn’t work: you can climb Yeats’s ladder but you can’t get rid of it and so you are stuck with the world and its griefs, making poetry from it:

. . . . . 
I wasn’t blessed with that kind of luck.
She’s astronomically challenged, the dry gods
whispered as I fell. They’d have me work
a different genre, jobbing live words 
instead of dead stars . . .

The poem that gives its title to the section is not about the act of seeing at all but rather is a comic poem about the absurdities of the theory wars as experienced in the disciplines of history. With no central authority surveying past realities, there is nobody to write a history of history: “all our dreamscapes, our facts / and gyres of feeling / shrank into a strange Babel”. And the last poem, “Pilgrims” is something of an oddity as well. It details a trip to Rome – surely the embodiment of a central authority trying to stand outside of the unyielding late twentieth-century calls for the displacement of all such authorities – and makes a lot of play with this so that the driver’s grip on the wheel is “canonical” while the passenger controls, with “looser faith”, the digital maps. But at the end of the poem (and book)

. . . . . 
She exits the car before he can pull up.
The Ascension Giftshop’s
a good place to park, she says,
not looking back,
running towards love.

One wants to read it as a tart comment on the vulgarity of Rome’s pilgrim route – a vulgarity that must have existed since the city was set up as the senior city of the faith – but, ultimately, it is a joke about ascending, the image in this book for what the mechanical birds do, what the mountain-climbing anthropologist does in “High-Altitude Archeologist”, and what the poet wants to do by the side of the road at Laverton.

Michael Aiken: Satan Repentant

Crawley, WA: UWA Publishing, 2018, 140pp.

This is a really unusual and fascinating book, a kind of micro Paradise Lost but with a brilliant twist that deepens the poetry and our response to it. More of that later but initially it is worth noting that Michael Aiken’s first book, A Vicious Example, which has a high degree of focus on observing parts of Sydney, seems so different to this cosmic narrative that no easily observable continuities exist, although they must be there since both books, after all, have their origins in the same poet and the same sensibility. Continuities might, in fact, be obvious to the poet though hidden from readers. Satan Repentant is a re-imagining of the events immediately after Satan’s expulsion from heaven after his unsuccessful rebellion. Instead of “rolling in the fiery gulf, / confounded though immortal”, in this version he undergoes a rehabilitation, negotiating with God and contenting himself with being reborn, re-incarnated as a human being. His position as leader in Hell is taken by Beelzebub (Lord of the Flies) who transforms into a creature not entirely unlike some medieval versions of Satan himself: a kind of pig-god (reading this book, I can’t help thinking that this is a little unfair to pigs) multi-legged, inclined to spewing out all kinds of corrupt liquids. Re-enacting the opening of Job, Beelzebub persuades God to allow him free access to the human version of Satan. Satan’s uncomfortable prospects are multiplied when two of the archangels, on their own initiative, contrive to attack him as well on the principle that if God relents and allows Satan back into heaven then their own futures, as his erstwhile enemies, won’t be too promising either.

It’s a delight for once to be in the position of reviewers of prose fiction who have to suggest the direction of a book’s plot without giving away crucial details about how it progresses. It isn’t something that poetry critics are usually faced with but I won’t say more of the development of the plot beyond the fact that it has a suitably apocalyptic ending – reminding us that the Earth on which these contests take place is really only a provisional trialling ground for human-beings. At the end it’s become an eviscerated battlefield with small groups of humans eking out an existence, hiding from the monsters, both heavenly and infernal, who roam the place. God has been replaced by Jesus who is himself a kind of ethical monster (since his perfectionism is essentially unhuman) and who, in the final pages, unmakes all of creation.

Satan Repentant, in thinking about alternative representations of the cosmic goings on suggested in the Old Testament, is a new version of what is really an old tradition. The books of the Jewish bible themselves continuously modify the conception of their god so that he can be a local, ill-tempered Canaanite deity, a guardian of – and refuge for – his special group, a player in regional conflicts, and, eventually, a cosmic figure. And since the Old Testament is produced by continuous editings, re-assemblings and rewritings, these opposed representations don’t develop consistently through the chronological panorama of the history but are likely to be found in bewildering conjunctions. And the process continues beyond the end of the canonical texts into, for example, the pseudepigraphical writings of the inter-testament and early Christian period. The revaluations of the nature of the divine beings continue on through the gnostics for whom the creator of the world (Blake’s Nobodaddy) is an unattractive minor deity. And, speaking of Blake, there is Emmanuel Swedenborg who seems to have been a visionary pioneer establishing that the borders between the divine, infernal and human worlds are much more easily crossed than conventional theology suggested. As a more recent incarnation of this fluid thought about religious material there is Jung’s Answer to Job with its memorable portrait of the God of Job as an “unreflective” phenomenon, “not human but in certain respects, less than human”.

Michael Aiken I’m sure knows more of this “history of God” than I do, but the central text from which Satan Repentant springs is Milton’s poem. It is announced even in the title which shares the same solemn inversion as Paradise Lost (I’ve always been disappointed that Milton rejected the title of his earlier drafting, Adam Unparadised, though that shares the same structure). Conceived as a kind of compressed mini-epic, Satan Repentant has five books, half the number of the first edition of Milton’s poem, and all the books are prefaced by a prose “argument”, as they are in Paradise Lost. Of course, to choose Paradise Lost as a starting point is to choose a text which has, running through both poem and its reception, a fundamental instability in the portrayal of Satan: not only is he the most charismatic character, he is also the most sympathetic and the one who clearly stirs Milton’s poetic juices in defiance of his protestant theology. Many readers take refuge in the vague generalisation that bad is easier to portray than good but that simply displaces the issue without solving it. In the eyes of those who see Milton (as Blake did) as being “of the devil’s party without knowing it”, Satan Repentant will be a development of Milton’s poem rather than a modern, humanist answer to it. At any rate, Satan’s repentance, request for forgiveness and decision to live out a human life, and the celestial shenanigans that result from this, forms a perfectly respectable plot line (in the sense of being logically sustainable) and the complex twists and turns of the plot – as for example, the disappearance of God, replaced by his son masquerading as him in the final book – ring true in their fictional universe.

Plot is one thing, poetry is another. The very idea of Satan Repentant poses more problems of technique and language than it ever would of narrative. Should it be written as a pastiche of Miltonic style? Can it perhaps distort that style to produce something contemporary, as Blake does? Aiken seems to have made two choices here. The first is to avoid the steady, even, narrative style of the conventional epic and replace it by shorter sections of narrative built around crucial moments. Poetic narrative always falls somewhere between epic evenness and dramatic compression – a distinction made in the great opening chapter of Auerbach’s Mimesis where a section of Genesis is contrasted to a section of The Odyssey – and Satan Repentant opts for the dramatic end of the spectrum.

The language is a bigger problem. Aiken’s solution is a clever one because Satan Repentant is written in a kind of distorted English with slight Miltonic overtones. I think it is designed to sound like the dialect of a forgotten tribe of speakers of English, an unknown regional variant. Or perhaps of someone who has never spoken English but knows Paradise Lost by heart (unlikely as that would be). Take the opening of the Argument of Book III as an example:

Perpetually distressed by half-seen visions of empyreans and devils, Satan-youth seeks to clear his mind by investigation to religious knowledge. Beelzebub frustrated by failure to torment Satan releases unseemly, uncollegiate things from the abyss to roam and hunt him. . .

It may not be a solution which pleases everyone but I like it, as far as it goes. It is possible to analyse features of it: prepositions, for example, are sometimes simply omitted, especially in infinitive constructions – “You seek / destroy an immortal . . .”, “thirteen year old Satan / convinced himself / not be afraid . . .”, “Satan gave attention a gnat . . .”, – and words are often used with new, though related meanings, which would normatively be inappropriate. The word, “empyrean”, for example, which in standard English means the heavens or the habitation of the deity, is used regularly throughout Satan Repentant to refer to one of the residents of heaven, a synonym, in other words, for angel. “Cognate” is used in one passage when “cognisant” would normally be used. It’s an odd, distancing effect which I like. At its most extreme, though, it can be more grotesque than distancing as here in a section in which Beelzebub speaks to God:

. . . . .
Beelzebub sent spearing
little rodent skulls, motile
with gristle, beheaded on the face
of great serpent snakes
of bone and mud,
stinking pestilent things,
one word each to speak to God
knowing any creature of Hell likely expire
the moment they reach the creator.
God too declined encounter
such children of ablated Beelzebub
and his corporation, despatching words
alone encoiled in energising light
to bolt and meet and melt those same
verbal vermin
as each word out mouthed came.

This takes the idiom to an extreme but I suppose it can always be supported by the argument that here grotesque content is matched by a maximum distortion of language.

Of course, like almost all invented languages, the idiom of Satan Repentant is going to be a nonce-solution. It will work for this poem because it solves the language problems that the poem’s conception generates. But it isn’t going to work for any other poem by Aiken or anybody else – unless, like Milton, he decides to produce a sequel. Even the really successful created idioms, like those (choosing at random) of Burgess’s Clockwork Orange, Hoban’s Riddley Walker and Paul Kingsnorth’s The Wake (where events of the mid-eleventh century in England are narrated in an idiom with substantial amounts of Old English vocabulary) have use-by dates and though, in the case of Hoban’s novel, for example, one might desperately want its wonderful idiom to continue, it isn’t going to happen. The weird language of Satan Repentant works in its way but there is always the reservation that it won’t leave any sort of imprint on future Australian or English-language poetry.

As I’ve described it so far, Satan Repentant will seem no more than a successful exercise in an odd but interesting mode. In fact it is much more than that and exerts a much stronger hold on the reader than any such exercise would do. This is because of its second book which describes Satan’s experiences as a human child growing up to be aware of the heavenly and demonic presences around him, and learning how to cope with them. It contains a wonderful twist which enables us to read the whole work “inside-out” as it were. Instead of being a work about cosmic battles and powerplays in which, for a brief period, we follow the life of a human being, we can momentarily read Satan Repentant as a portrait of a delusional or schizoid child, a potential poet, whose monsters under the bed are real monsters. We meet this child in the first poem of this second book which begins, “He tore the caul to an alien world, seeing / unseen things”. One of these unseen things is a demon-possessed tree:

. . . . . 
“I know you” the roaming nine year old stares
at the face of a tree, eyes and human mouth impressed in
bark and knots, watching if he should pass.
“Don’t make pretence of innocence on my account,
monster. You are an informer of some awful world
come to watch and whisper in my ear.” The timber
creature scowled out pitted hollow eyes, mouth atrophied
in dessicate sea air, moving still; slowly, crawling skin
a year in turning, but always those eyes watching, overlooking
the play-place of the child Satan-no-longer-Satan.
In later years he scoured the tree with the blade
of a boot knife
and made the demon bleed.

A brilliant portrait of a terrifying psychosis. And it isn’t only trees, beds, mirrors and windows which harbour monsters. Later, a close friend is revealed to be a demon in disguise and, when met several years later, is killed at the instigation of Beelzebub who is present to slip a knife into Satan’s hand at the crucial moment. It reads very like the explanations of people who have committed crimes under the influence of “voices”. What should have been merely a pub altercation becomes a murder caused by others:

 . . . . . 
In that fit of rage
Lucifer left ajar the door
Beelzebub stept through, handed
the knife his grasp; the combatant,
abusive braggart postured by invisible infernals
opposite along the bar,
pushed back and both are stuck
but only one now rises . . .

A simple spat weakens the ability to hold the evil voices at bay and the result is murder.

The demons of the cosmically-scaled Miltonic world, like those of contemporary science-fiction comic-films, are never really frightening but those that come from within (like the demons of Bergman’s The Hour of the Wolf) are genuinely terrifying. The most magical thing about Satan Repentant is that it provides both perspectives and if, as readers, we can hold both in our minds at the same time we finish up with a really powerful, disturbing and brilliant work.

Jennifer Harrison: Anywhy

North Fitzroy: Black Pepper, 2018, 78pp.

Jennifer Harrison’s excellent new book continues the evolution of her complex and challenging vision, challenging because an unusual set of perspectives is brought to bear on conventional subjects such as personal illness, grief and the planet’s prospects for the future. And it isn’t just a matter of her scientific background: throughout the earlier books there were poems documenting and exploring a continuing fascination with something as abstruse as commedia dell’arte. Here there are batches of poems exploring aspects of photography and a set of animal poems which read almost as a catalogue of the different ways in which a subject can appear in a poem.

Interestingly, Anywhy begins with two poems which are, in their own different ways, about creativity. “Provence” finds her attending a protest march by artists in the French city complaining about actor’s wages – “I wave the flag I’m given”. The second stanza introduces an Australian two-cent coin with its iconic frill-necked lizard and its defensively erect quills. In a sense, the significance of the juxtaposition is clear: an Australian, in a foreign environment, still reacts to a sense of threat in a distinctively Australian way – “What trepidation / catches inside me somewhere primitive / and old . . .” But it’s a feature of Harrison’s poetry that the contexts in which poems are embedded – the interests and obsessions – spin the meanings out far beyond their obvious surfaces. The march of the French protestors – the theatrical who protest over the comparatively minor issue of more equitable wages theatrically as well as good-naturedly (“the grand square laughing now, bright with pique”) – is a reminder of Harrison’s extensive interest in the theatre of the commedia dell’arte. And just as there is a counterbalance here with things Australian, so there is in her earlier poetry which, as well as celebrating the complexities of the Mediterranean tradition, also celebrates contemporary street theatre, strolling musicians and even a figure from her past, the gypsy Moss Wickum, capable of sleight-of-hand tricks and of throwing “shadows / on a fibro wall: a rabbit, a parakeet, a giraffe”. And then, in “Provence”, there is the sinister night:

. . . . . 
                           here the scent
of the night-to-be hovers over art
guile, music-work and theatre poverty . . .

In other words – as I read it – the dark future reveals itself even in such a comparatively benevolent setting. The devil can smile.

“Fungi”, which follows, is quite a different kind of poem. Instead of working by seizing on the revealing symbolic connections between events – being at a protest and accidentally finding a two-cent coin in one’s pocket – it works by turning over the symbolic possibilities of mushrooms and the way they can act as symbols of poetry itself, digesting experience but producing something strong if vulnerable. It’s a symbol that’s been worked over many times and Harrison can only make the poem interesting by bringing fresh complexities, fresh issues to the table. She does this in a number of ways (the use of the word “fugue”, which can be traced as both a theme and a structuring principle in her earlier poetry, is immediately interesting) but the conclusion seems to me especially notable. Though “Fungi” is very different to “Provence”, it shares the same interest in art in the face of the bleak possibilities of the future:

. . . . . 
Night pins my species

to essence, to tasks
of the sleeping word

and like a rough leaf
released by autum

I settle into 
presence, the desk now

impractically
a diminution . . .

There is no ending
to shadow, to the

nature that explains
us to the deep earth

and earth to our past - 
our present poison.

I think the sense of these last lines is that our shadows in the present symbolise what we are to the earth (a black stain) and that the shadows that the Industrial Revolution has cast, two centuries ahead, have become “our present poison”.

I’ve said that these first two poems are about creativity, even if creativity in a threatened environment. We can extend that to three if we include the epigraph to the entire book, a passage from Peter Porter’s difficult poem (almost all Porter poems are “difficult”), “Meanwhile”:

. . . Meanwhile we lie down with words,
shaped into silence or thronging
to accuse. Our only health
is to be moved by movers, hearing
in stark quiet the order to conduct
the once-living through our lives.

This at least strikes a more positive note about the significance of poetry and its demand – if read properly – that we should change our lives or, at least, offer a sort of inventory of them to the creative geniuses of the past. But it’s shadowed by the bleak world that Porter’s poetry usually inhabits.

The unending shadow is an important issue in “Nine Doors: A Curriculum of Rune Work”, an extended piece which, perhaps humorously, is organised as a course of nine doors opening onto issues of the present. (Why this should be “Rune Work” I’m not sure, but as an amateur scholar of Old Norse, I’m always intrigued by the uses and misuses of the word “runes” in contemporary discourse). It certainly has the sense of – to adapt Les Murray – nine points for an imperilled planet. At any rate, the first poem of the sequence, dedicated to Jil Meagher, is about the conventional dangers of “the night” in any city – as the fifth poem says, “where the town begins night begins”. Other poems focus not on human violence but on ecological catastrophe. There is entirely personal grief in many of the poems of Anywhy and the third of this series is about how the dead call to us:

from safe suburbs they are calling	from seas where heroes
oar in parallel	from boats that sail safely past the wailing danger
the Sirens are calling

from the darkness said to brood within an epic’s reedy falter
from the lore of lies	and rocky sighs of legend
the Sirens are calling . . .

(this makes a nice pun on the German water sprite and counterpart to the Greek Sirens, the Lorelei). But there is also here a positive note I think since the poem speaks of a song “that calls me back to myself”, an internal equivalent of the song of the Sirens. Whether this “song” is creativity in general or some specific mantra, I’m not sure, but I still read it as a positive comment and thus connect it to the last of these nine poems which is about “my son”. Here, at least, is a male presence in a world in which, other poems tell us, father and brother have died. He is also someone who will experience whatever the future brings more intensely than the poet since the future will belong to him and anyone else of his age group:

. . . . . 
and when we pass each other		a small mysterious smile
don’t come too close	it says	I am Orion	the hunter	the king
the first iron of art

Such umbered voice	such trouble-free deep
human		I hear him calling sometimes
but not for me in his sleep

It’s difficult to be confident about the tone here. It could be read negatively as a portrait of someone who may become a hard man for a hard age. But I think, rather, that there is a sense of satisfaction in having brought up someone who is now, inevitably, living his own life and who seems capable, if anybody is, of surviving the future. And this sense of optimism, balancing the messages of the dark, seems to be the burden of the book’s final poem, “The Tent” (again, an image which suggests, if only remotely, a tradition of circus performance). The poem recounts sleeping under a tent and – recalling the words of “Fungi”, “the desk now // impractically / a diminution” – speaks of an ability from childhood to make oneself smaller so that “when the noise of the world // overruns the camp / I am safely camouflaged”. But at night – that ubiquitous time/metaphor/metonym –

. . . . . 
when clothes

lie fallow
and audiences drift away

I see the soaring dirty lid
of canvas open

and the stars arranged
in a show unparalleled

This balance between dark and light is one of the recurring themes of Anywhy and is reflected in the structures of the poems themselves. On the surface, one of the cosmically bleakest poems, “Grand Final”, does have intimations of hope and it is followed by “Naos of the Decades” of which the same could be said. The former makes its point by radical shifts of perspective: it begins with the couple passing time in an airport while a television in the background is showing what must be a Rugby Union grand final. But “grand final” in this poem also means the end of things from an apocalyptic point of view and the poem quickly shifts into a wider perspective by a modulation dependent on the birds at the airport which have been replaced by aeroplanes – mechanical birds:

. . . . . 
Long before birds knew their own names
anywhen	asterisk	skyscar

there existed black space, dark matter
the first stars flaming into being . . .

When the poem revisits the couple at the airport they are now fully allegorised so that the departure lounge is a “Grand Final waiting room” where the human race awaits its fate, “sipping cold beers // flipping iPhones to silent”. The poem seems to suggest that the final destination is not necessarily the dark, just somewhere completely unknown, “somewhere we didn’t realise we wanted to go”. “We trust the wind will carry us”, it says – perhaps an allusion to Kiarostami’s film – but wherever, it will carry us forward. “Naos of the Decades” is a poem about personal grief – the loss of father and brother – built around one of the finds from the Nile Delta, a block of granite recording the division of the year into ten-day periods, each begun by a cleansing from evil:

. . . . . 
Each rising was thought to eliminate evil: an antidotal
astrology drowned beside the Royal Decree of Sais

the Black Queen, the Hapi Colossus, ibis mummies . . . 
No single epitaph here, all loss is silence, antiquity

and inside memory a shard of granite remains . . .
Grief does not belong to my century, my mouth . . .

It does not float to the sea’s surface, or rise unbidden
from sea or silt . . . But today it is mine: my relic, my find

Not a conclusion where one feels entirely comfortable about the tone. In my tentative reading, this is a poem about searching for “an epitaph”, something solid and lasting which either “contains” the loved one or provokes memories in the reader. The Naos Calendar contains no such individual epitaphs but stands for something solid (and benevolent) in the memory, a personal relic.

Personal suffering, rather than personal grief, is the subject of “The Exchange, Blackwood Village”, a complex poem about the author’s experience of cancer (documented in the 1999 volume, Dear B). As in “Grand Final” the scene is set with birds, a group of species which in this book, especially in “The Inner Life of Birds”, represents a more immediate response to reality than humans can manage as well as being symbolic harbingers. The brush with Death leaves something inside that can’t be completely got rid of – as cancer can never be entirely defeated:

. . . . . 
Death found my measure in its pill of greed
and I carry the taste inside like a baby, never to birth

more a memory to protect, a shape almost precious . . .

The poem’s real interest – and what makes it more interesting than a conventional recording of illness and trauma – is in the nature of the exchange made between poet and death. The “taste inside” is a kind of gift of nothingness and the central question is: what is required in exchange? It’s not a simple poem and the conclusion is complex at several levels:

For nothing, more than nothing . . . For birds, sky . . .
For a clock, more than time . . . For anywhere, anywhy.

In each case the offered gift in exchange must outweigh the original gift, as the sky is greater than the sum total of birds and all the possible explanations (the “anywhy’s”) must outweigh all the possible places. Since the poem says, at an earlier point, “I’ve given back to nothing // less than I’ve borrowed”, this might well suggest that, in the future, some larger price may have to be paid to keep the correct balance: in that case this becomes a bleaker poem than it initially seems.

Meaning in these poems is extremely sophisticated, as one might expect, and the questions they ask and the possibilities they explore are unusual and challenging. Anywhy is in no way a simple book but its complexities are tonal too. Many of my readings of these fine poems revolve around trying to get an accurate sense of tone and that is often a more problematic activity than devoting oneself to meaning. I might have misread the tone of many pieces but there is little doubt that overall one of the dynamic drivers of these poems is the interaction between dark and light. Not quite in the Bruce Beaver sense of simultaneously celebrating and mourning, more in a Jennifer Harrison sense of viewing the future with optimism and despair.

Kristen Lang: SkinNotes; The Weight of Light

SkinNotes, North Hobart, Walleah Press, 2017, 116pp.
The Weight of Light, Parkville: Five Islands Press, 2017, 90pp.

Kristen Lang is an unusual poet in that her first two full-length books have appeared in the same year. For an outsider it’s difficult to know what the relationship between them is: it could be that SkinNotes contains poems that are earlier than those of The Weight of Light or it might be that a large group of existing poems of varying ages was simply subdivided into two manuscripts, perhaps along generally thematic lines. Whatever the case there are powerful continuities between the books just as there are significant differences.

The poems of SkinNotes are organised into clear thematic groups. “Blood Harmonies”, the first section, is made up of poems which all devote themselves to the issue of genetic connections within the family, a specific site for looking at the body/mind distinction that is so much a part of both books and which I’ll have something to say about later on. It’s opening poem, “The Knit”, is as clear as can be but is worth quoting because it introduces ideas, approaches and even words which will reappear throughout these two books:

How to unpack the fibres so entangled
in each small knot of thought that falls between us
that they belong, in the end, to none of us, webbed
under words, across rooms, between years.
You do not arrive in me. As I arrived.
You have been here from the beginning, your hands
in the measure of my own, your inflections
in the muscle of my tongue. And much
has changed. Time
shifting the play as well as our bodies. But still,
you can never be all the others. We are older now,
and the days, stacked and skewed,
merging with each other, carry us
in their hold of what we know – stepping away
we are still inside each other. Meaning only
this. The knit and fray in the honeycomb
of our cells. The touch
we cannot choose to extinguish.

I think this is a fine poem though it is nowhere as ambitious as many of those in The Weight of Light. The material (our genetic debt to our parents) is quite conventional and a topos of contemporary poetry, and the language consistently at an elevated imaginative level (a kind of “upper-middle-style”). But we can detect beneath it a poetic mind which is rather different to the ones that usually produce this sort of poem in that it seems to operate under the pressure of thought – to be more “philosophical” to put it crudely. The emphasis is rather on the mind and its thoughts than on the body: there are no references to eye-colour or nose-shape here, no cosy affirmations of continuity. And in focussing on thought it is able to speak of something that belongs, in the end, “to none of us”, a kind of genetic version of cyberspace. This raises the issue – to be explored in other poems – of absence and leaving, and the way these might need to be redefined.

The second section of SkinNotes, transparently titled “The Fragile Mind”, deals with the mind by focussing on it at moments of vulnerability and extremis. Although some of the poems are clearly personal, enough of them seem to refer to the experiences of others to prevent this being a confessional zone. In fact the other unnamed men and women who form the cast make this more of an anatomy of disfunction rather than a harping on personal dis-ease. And not only are the characters varied, the metaphors are as well. The first poem, “Glass” uses drought as the correlative of a woman’s inner state but the poem’s end concentrates on the frustration of her friends at their inability to break this drought:

. . . . .
We tell her none of us 
are angels, all of us moving stones
to quench the need for water.
. . . . 
And we wait. And we forget. In the vines
of our own weather.

At other points the mind is a small house, the land of black dogs, a cliff face, and, in “Mild Amnesia” a set of cogwheels into which a spanner has been dropped. The failure of mind to connect “properly” to the outside world is put most schematically in the two towns of “Seasonal”:

The bridge between the blue,
thrown-together, flood-prone city of the mind
and the red city, somewhere outside the mind,
is down . . .

This section is also noteworthy for “Fish”, a poem that introduces both a recurring symbol – the fish – and recurring themes – that of the interpenetration of different existences and the issue of visitations. The fish, swimming inside its element, appears twelve times out of the underwater shadows to the poet but has nothing to say despite her pleading. This poem, unlike others about fish, emphasises the pain of both the silence and the impossibility of any kind of interpenetration between mind and outer world – “And with this he has gone. / Filled with the river, and cold, / I am suddenly weeping” – accounting for its placement in the second rather than third section of SkinNotes.

The title of the third section, “Being Here” suggests that this might be a compendium of pieces about social, even political, life – commentaries on the everyday world. And, in the last few poems (which include “Five Justifications for Environmentalism”) there is some evidence for this; though even they are as far from commentary pieces as one could imagine. “Being Here” is taken in its rather richer, philosophical sense and it is no accident that the first poem is about whether or not angelic presences are “here”. Just as there were encounters with non-communicating but visiting fish, so here, in “Horse”, the yearning for intimations of the transcendent is butted up against the solid physicality of a horse in a field:

. . . . . 
                                                                    The presence
or absence of angels – how their songs
dissipate in the slanting gaze of our search and we cannot
guess what we would know of them.
The horse pushes the softness of her nose
into our hips and hands
for the carrot we cannot offer and did not
think to bring to her, then moves away . . .

This can be read in two rather different ways. Firstly, that those searching for visitations fail to communicate with the beings of the world (fish, cows, horses) who would, themselves, prove to be visitors if some kind of interpenetration of the species were possible. And secondly, that the horse represents the humans, dumbly seeking a gift (a carrot) that the visitors haven’t thought to provide.

Another poem, “On Being in the Ocean” – with a nicely ambiguous title whereby “being”, first read as a participle, can also be a noun – reminds us that being here is going, inevitably, to depend on the relationship between body and mind:

The sea’s blue rolls its rough-tongued abrasion
through your hair, into your skin, floating you in its torn
fringe of sky. Stay, says the mind, until the waves
enter every cell and the body is wide, wide in the salt swell,
drifting into the weather.

But the eyes – reaching into the air – catch again on the shoreline.
And the limbs say they remember, striding
through the waves for their rope-heavy vision of the land – their
chance: small paths uncurling in the gaps left
between the dunes, the roadworks, and the houses.

Irrelevant as it probably is, this seems to me another poem deriving however tangentially from Slessor, affirming his place as a kind of progenitor of Australian poetry in the last hundred years. The number of poems recalling “The Night-ride” is enormous and this is one of many which, consciously or not, allude to “Out of Time” though I suspect that Tasmanian waters are a lot less conducive to underwater meditation than those of the Pacific near Sydney. It’s also important to register that the summons of the sea here isn’t towards an experience in a bubble out of time but a call to a kind of dissolution and expansion that will come from an element penetrating the body completely: perhaps, in the long run, it’s more Paul Dombey than Kenneth Slessor.

The final section, “The Heart” seems reserved for more personal poems and perhaps even traces the path of the end of one relationship and the beginning of another, more permanent one. But one wouldn’t want to imply that there is anything simply confessional about these. “Clowning the Trust” imagines a clown balancing “a small book on the art of living” on top of a pole while riding around the circus on a unicycle. On top of the book is a glass sphere holding the remote possibility that the relationship between two lovers might be successful. In other words it’s a fully developed, surreal scenario, as is the first poem of this group, “To Say I Believe in You”, and “Dylan and Picasso” where the music of Bob Dylan accompanies the discovery of three Picassos each of which describes a progressively deeper exploration of sex: a sea to sink into; a nude, simultaneously man and woman; and finally a set of cubist views of a landscape – “a dozen / ways through and the ways / revealing gaps, places / on the rumpled page / no-one has been to”. One poem, “Nathan and the Sparkle of Chains” stands out as being about people other than the poet but it is possible that the situation – lovers sharing a drug-induced high – may be nothing more than a symbol for sex generally.

I’ve worked through the four sections of SkinNotes descriptively and in the order in which they are arranged because it’s the kind of book whose organisation suggests to you that it wants to be read that way. The Weight of Light is a quite different sort of book and it’s possible to approach it rather more freely. There are stylistic developments that need to be registered and, since so much of the book is an exploration and extension of images that appear in SkinNotes, there is a lot that needs to be said about stones, paths, in- and ex-halation, ascents, fish, fibres and a whole lot else.

To begin with stylistic matters, The Weight of Light has poems which make the generally discursive manner of most of the poems in SkinNotes more pronounced so that they have a developed essayistic quality or a very formal narrative quality. “Twister” is an example of the former, imagining that Descartes’ ideas of vortices in ether-filled space is a more accurate rendition of the state of someone’s psychic state. It’s a poem about dissolution and expansion, the desire to have “star birth / at his fingers, quasars at his tongue, intergalactic tide marks / on his arms” while being harnessed to such quotidian items as the city and his dog. But I want to emphasise the essayistic tone which makes the poem as much a tour through the history of the science of cosmology as about the problem of an individual reconciling the expansion of the self with the ordinary. The first stanza will show what I mean:

The French after Newton found themselves
still in the swirling sway of the night sky’s
ether, where dear Descartes had placed them. This thing
called gravity – an invisible tug – too absurd. Their giant,
outer-space tornado sweeping the known planets
through the constellations – this, they could feel. . .

We meet the narrative counterpart of this in “Snow After Fire (Parsons Track)”, a poem worth looking at in some detail as it contains many of the images that recur in both these books. It begins:

We arrive on the plateau, climbing from the walls of rock, the coloured
          gums, the mountain shrubs,
      to where the only thing not blackened by the long summer’s fires,
          perched in the Rorschach

of receding snow, is the sign, the naming that compels us surviving
          through the heat’s choke and crackle. So we learn
     we have entered what our hearts have read since the beginning -
          the forest we have scaled, the hazy

sky, the chill, the day itself – yet here it is, this boundary, the sign
          telling us all we have crossed
     into the Heritage of the World, the old planks looking new
          in this ransacked terrain.

Every leaf has gone, each blackened branch windswept
          free of dust, smooth, almost polished – ink-drawn,
     weighing nothing. Stone after stone . . .

and so on in this stately way for two and a half pages. Ultimately the climb – one of many in these two books – has an allegorical point signalled by the phrase, deliberately surprising in its context, “the falling in love”. To put it crudely, the desolated landscape preceding an emergence out into unburned heights, is a symbol of life before love. It a bit obvious but it’s a subtler poem than that makes it sound. The burned landscape is an abstracted, black and white one which shows the shape of the underlying stone better. The descent finds the couple meeting the descendants of those who first cut the track, suggesting generations and the sense of life “spilling us forward” which in turn reminds us of the repeated image in these two books of the path which is erased behind (“the stillness of the path / once we have gone” as an earlier poem says) – there is only one way and that is forward.

These long-breathed, discursive poems are in complete contrast to a set of a dozen or so, spread throughout the book, which try to operate more allusively. At their most extreme they look like a series of haiku, loosely connected to a central subject. You can see that what is happening is an attempt to loosen the power of (prose) logical, discursive movement and allow some suggestion in. Perhaps it comes about from a dissatisfaction with the surreal scenarios of some of the poems of the first book. These stretch the imaginative possibilities but Lang may have felt that she had exhausted what they had to offer. At any rate, “Between Arrivals” will serve as an example:

in the forest
over stones and roots – the way
emerging behind us
unknown

until it lands – each
footfall
at the fence -
breaking out / breaking
in

the light
reaching us where we stand – we keep
standing . . . the new light
    arriving
        arriving

at the beach
trace-lines – beetle, crab, petrel – the wind
lifting the sand

we run – by chance a dragonfly
older than all of us drops
into the sky beside us – the same air

we are using
we keep pace – not
knowing
where we are going

mid-step -
between
arrivals

It’s a tricky form to carry off because it can look precious in contrast to the discursive poems which, at worst, always look important. But these poems in The Weight of Light are buttressed by the way in which their themes are present in other poems. “Arrivals”, for example, is clearly about life as a forward-moving process, as it is in “Snow After Fire (Parsons Track)” and those poems like “The Cloud Years” and “The Conductor Leaves Behind” which are about the progressive shaping of the self. “The way / emerging behind us” is the path that only becomes a path once the bodies have moved on and each step is one which is taken into the unknown. In a sense this aligns with the first poem of the book, “The Letter”, which is a poem about poetry in which the poem travels to an address that can’t be specified – it is posted “To Whom It May Concern” to “her neighbours – /across the road, across the country, // on the other side of the world” and is responded to in a similar way.

As I said initially, it isn’t possible for an outsider to be confident of the relationship between these two books which have appeared so unusually closely together. (By way of contrast the two books which I have reviewed previously on this site were each separated from their predecessors by ten years!) Each of Lang’s two books mentions in its biography a self-published chapbook of 2008 called Let Me Show You a Ripple but I haven’t had a chance to see it. It’s possible it might hold the key to understanding whether the poems of SkinNotes and The Weight of Light were written contemporaneously and then divided into two manuscripts or whether The Weight of Light contains poems written after the other. Based on the explorative quality of The Weight of Light when it comes to manner as well as the way its imagery is based on the poems of SkinNotes, my guess would be the latter. At any rate Kristen Lang is a terrific addition to the cast of Australian poets, someone in whose poems we can feel the pressure of complex thought and who is craft-sophisticated enough to explore the best ways of making poems out of embodying these ideas.

Philip Neilsen: Wildlife of Berlin

Crawley, WA: UWA Publishing, 2018, 107pp.

Many of the themes of Neilsen’s excellent Without an Alibi get revisited in this new book, some ten years on. Above all there is the repeated invocation of the natural world as simultaneously a place of danger and a place of imaginative freedom. It is also a world in danger as it is vulnerable to the various processes of reduction: these include obvious things like poisoning and clearing but also the subtler processes of being turned into museum and media subjects. You get some sense of this in the first poem of Wildlife of Berlin, “Marienplatz – Munich” which makes a nice link with the poems of the previous book as well as introducing the sort of material which will figure in this present one. It belongs to a Neilsenian genre that might be called “Recollections of experiences with ex-lovers overseas”. The poet recalls a Munich visit and being lectured to by his partner who tells him that both possessions and regrets are ridiculous. The environment is packed with possessions that humans have taken from the natural world:

. . . . . 
At the Museum of Hunting the stairwells
are studded with antlers and heads, the floors
patrolled by brown bears, wolves and a lynx,
their Waldgeist stolen by some taxidermist . . .

And that last line, invoking the Germanic world of dark forests and the spirits of dark forests (and also, in a gentler vein, the “wild woods” of The Wind in the Willows), shifts the poem into the intense world of “fairy tale”, which derives from the same culture:

That night we rock the lacy bed
with ferocious intent and Frau Mettler,
morning in her hair, shakes a fat finger at
our blue eyed impertinence
but gives us gingerbread when we leave . . .

Though the poem goes on to meditate on the issue of love and leaving – “when lovers leave it seems unnatural” – it finishes with an image of the natural world at its most unnatural when council cranes remove tubs of flowers at night to prevent them being stolen by others who don’t believe in the notion of theft. It’s a complex, hard-working poem bridging the world of Without an Alibi and Wildlife in Berlin and it is followed by the book’s title poem. (By this time we have had enough exposure to the word “wild” in Neilsen to appreciate that “wildlife” is not only a connotation-free synonym for “animals” but a phrase made up of “wild” and “life”.) The poem contrasts the fate of women in Berlin during the Russian advance of 1945 with a contemporary television documentary on wild animals in the city. The result is that the documentary is made to look smug though the exact reason for this isn’t entirely clear. The poem seems to want to be read as saying that contemporary German culture is interested only in the minor arcana of urban life and ignores the horrors which seventy years ago reduced its population to the status of wild animals, and there is good reason for doing so since the turning point of the poem is in the quoted line, “the authorities turn a blind eye to Berliners feeding bread to the swans”.

This first section has another three poems “about” animals where, as in the second section, largely devoted to birds, there is such a variety of treatment that the poems avoid becoming stereotyped. The first of them, “Hotel Paris”, for example, is about Parisian experiences which ensure that you can never entirely “enjoy home comforts again” but uses the idea of fabulously dressed women pickpockets as giraffes. These three poems are followed by four which are re-imaginings of the experiences of literary characters. It isn’t my favourite genre and since the first three deal with women – Anna Karenina, Lady Chatterley and Sleeping Beauty – there is a yet further temptation to slide into cliché, seeing them as victims or plucky fighters for equality. The best of them I think is the last, “Literary Walking”, in which Dickens, Wordsworth and Woolf are imagined to meet up on their walks and share a picnic. The cynic in me thinks that this meeting between the remorselessly theatrical, the remorselessly self-obsessed and the remorselessly snobbish wouldn’t end at all well, but in Neilsen’s poem it does because writers have one thing in common – critics

. . . . .
They discuss pickpockets, bellowing cattle
and critics, a pebble like a fox’s eye,
downhill swoop and slow ascension,
the complicated dignity of supple boots,
the necessary hardening of the feet, the skin.

With the last five of this first section we enter on more interesting and less predictable poems since they are all, more or less about death, a subject less likely to attract simplistic, predictable contemporary responses. One doesn’t have to read poems like “Thanatophobia” as overtly personal, even confessional, to know that the issue of fear of death is a feature of Neilsen’s poetry. It’s beginning

There’s nothing wrong with you the psychiatrist
reassures me: no synapses in a train wreck,
no morbid angels of rumination.
The CBT approach would be to visit a morgue,
but you’re not afraid of dead bodies, just being one . . .

makes it seem like a gloss on Woody Allen’s famous comment, “I’m not afraid of death. I just don’t want to be there when it happens”. This group is marked, as is often the case in Neilsen’s poetry, by variety: they seem like distinct poems that have fallen together in the ordering of the selection rather than been a consistent mining of a theme. And they benefit from that. “Thanatophobia” is the only one of them that is presented in the first person, others are about a “hole-in-the-heart” operation suffered by his wife as a child, about a symbolic life-cycle, about a suicide and about those who want to fight fatal diseases with various kinds of non-medical approaches.

As I’ve said, it’s the variety which is interesting here, rather than the consistent themes. The variety makes it difficult to see the nature of the poet’s involvement in these themes, to get a simple, viable sense of his poetic personality. That’s not a bad thing of course and one thing it does is prevent Neilsen ever being reducible to a simple thematic core since that would omit too much of what makes these good poems. And this notion of a group which isn’t a group applies to the second, or “bird” section of Wildlife in Berlin. “Crow”, the first poem, is tricky to read because, for all its sharpness, we don’t know whether to identify the “you” as the poet, the reader or the poet’s favourite enemy,

Crows are clever.
They use sticks as tools,
speak non-idiomatic French,
start but do not finish cryptic crosswords.
Crows were the first to wear black to book launches,
to peck at wine while avoiding a rival.
. . . . . 
Nothing will ever be black and white again.
Here comes the pain, so bite on it,
the crow in your veins.
You’re not going anywhere alone.

“Snowy Owl”, “Auspices” and “Pied Currawong” are, though very different, built on the theme of humanity’s poor chances of future survival whereas “Tawny Frogmouth” is an exploration of the way in which fitting in, aligning oneself to one’s social reality, results in transformation rather than merely a conscious disguise and reduces the powers to hunt and attract a mate – “So intent on blending in, / camouflage too perfect, or too rough, / a heart and lung of twigs”. In “Noisy Miner” we are back in the world of “Death and how to deal with it”. The eponymous bird is good at dying, responding to the death of its fellows and at killing. It imagines that its best approach to death (symbolised here in the cat watching the birds from under the grevillea bush) is aggression:

. . . . . 
                   Colonisation is its pulse.

It looks into a rain puddle,
pecks at the yellow eyes and beak,
trusts in belligerence to bully death,
the hunched fur, over there under grevillea.

“The New England Honeyeater” is a comic poem describing the fantasies of the early botanist who first encountered it and the final of these bird poems, “Red-Capped Robin – Long Pocket, Indooroopilly” is really a failed love-affair poem that uses the bird as a symbol.

The third section begins with a group of poems that are about professional people being in places where they shouldn’t be: “A University Bureaucrat Plans a Garden” – a parody of managerialist cant – “A Philosopher in the Brothel” – a chance to bring thought and non-thought (in the form of sex) together – “The Scientist at his Mother’s Grave” – a chance for son and dead mother to continue their spirited arguments, and “A Lawyer at the Funeral” – a chance to explore the opposition between a calm analysis and the “insincerity and mixed motives” of the relatives. By the time we get to “Unity Valkyrie Mitford at the Osteria” we have an historical portrait of a person who seems to be in a very odd situation: an Englishwoman infatuated with Hitler and determined to prevent war between Germany and England. How personally driven is this exploration of people out of their place? It’s hard to tell but it’s reflected in one of the book’s epigraphs, Elizabeth Bishop’s “I was made at right angles to the world and I see it so” and is perhaps the underlying theme behind the final poem of the group, “The Erl-King Reconsiders his Purpose”, where Goethe’s Erlking, damaged himself, decides that rather than abducting children’s souls, he will make a career move “from psychopath to psychopomp” devoting his attentions to “those who gossip and muck-rake”. Perhaps it’s all a baroquely varied expression of a core situation: of being a poet in a university. And “The University Makes a Poem” is about that very subject though it turns out to be a more complex poem than its title suggests. It begins with the issue of academics complaining, as they always do in all faculties, that their administrative and teaching requirements (the former especially since they involve responding to coded demands of mere administrators) prevent them from doing their real work:

We creative writing academics keep saying
I must find time. Submit an ARC application
and a short story is snuffed out,
supervise enough PhDs and a novel bites the dust.

The university gives us core business,
performance indicators. There is no arguing with this.
The efficient campus echoes with crow calls,
a student seen reading Proust on the quadrangle lawn
is hailed as a guru. . .

This is, of course, a little Proust joke though, I’m ashamed to say, I didn’t see it in the first few readings. Proust’s great work is On the Search For Lost Time and so the student reading Proust could be said to be somebody who has found time, unlike his or her teachers who keep saying that they must find more of it. It’s the young who teach the old, or perhaps, the memories that the old have of being young that can still provide a guiding light:

And yet it is the young who leave us clues.
Rooms still imagine themselves as thinking spaces,
classes still have epiphanies which come
and pass, well-lit, like a night train.
A tutorial becomes a bird of paradise.

The great writers worked in banks, toiled as labourers,
fought fascism. Even the privileged were worn down
by river stones of despair.
The world won’t miss our foregone scribbles.
The academy stutters, and produces a poem.

I’m assuming that the way to read the last line is as saying that the poem we have just read is the one that the stuttering academy has produced. As such it’s a version of what might be called the “Dejection: An Ode”-syndrome where a complaint that depression inhibits poetry is expressed as a poem.

The fourth section begins with two poems about death but I think that the dominant motif of this section is one of perspective on times past – something that begins to take over one’s approach to reality as one approaches seventy. So the significance of the location of “Guitar” and “Noosa Beach” is, perhaps, that they are about the experiences of the past. “Sunset at Brisbane Airport”, “Chrissy Amphlett and You” and “The Intervention of Wolves”, each of which marks its times carefully and brings the past and present (or, at least, the near-present) together might be more typical of this section. As would “Where Were You When” whose title tells us that it’s going to be about moments in time in the past and whose conclusion – “pointless as a thousand year sleep” – suggests that these moments need to be see in a larger time-perspective.
The final section intersperses some very interesting, personal-relationship poems – especially “Men of a Certain Age”, which answers Bronwyn Lea’s “Women of a Certain Age” and may have a lot of interesting guilts in the dream that the men awake from – with straight-out satires on such eminently satirisable subjects as texting, Hollywood genre films, daytime television and Nordic noir. I’ve never thought that this satirical mode, well-done as it is, is Neilsen’s strength. Perhaps this is because the author’s stake is unclear. When something is as silly as texting or a generic thriller we tend not to ask how and why the author is embroiled in this. And yet the complexity of Neilsen’s position behind or within his poems, the indeterminate nature of his poetic personality, is one of the things that makes his poems both challenging an rewarding. I said in my review of Without an Alibi on this site that Neilsen was an under-appreciated figure in Australian poetry and that his work deserves to be better known. I think that Wildlife of Berlin confirms this judgement. Of the two most recent VLAs (Very Large Anthologies), Australian Poetry Since 1788 allots him two poems, one of which I have always thought of as very ordinary and the second of which is exactly the satirical sort that I think is the weakest of the many arrows in his quiver. Contemporary Australian Poetry omits him altogether. These are things that should be rectified in the future.

Judith Bishop: Interval

St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2018, 76pp.

Judith Bishop’s second book is as brilliant and daunting as her first, Event, now more than ten years old. The voice of Interval is familiar from that first book, as are the general structures and assumptions of the poems but there are a number of developments, the most important of which, at the thematic level, are probably contained in the first section of the book which is devoted to poems about the experience of motherhood and parenting. At any rate, Interval, like Event, makes a lot of demands of the reader. Complex ideas are explored in complex poems and the range of interests very deliberately covers the spectrum from the atomic to the cosmos with humans and their distinctive experiences placed between. An additional difficulty lies in the way that the themes are interwoven. Although individual poems have the requisite stand-alone quality, thematically they are likely to tie in with any number of others. As a result, a critic isn’t going to be sure which is the best thread to tug first. Yielding to the structure of the book itself, I’ll start at the beginning with the poems about children.

Since these poems are just as challenging as any of the others, I don’t want to give the impression that in some way Bishop is abandoning complicated material (such as the story of Cortes and his mistress/interpreter Marina which ran throughout Event) in favour of simple, homespun material. But there is a kind of groundedness about the poems of the first section of Interval which affects how we go on to read the later parts – it may, in other words, be more important for the reader than the poet. And there is still a strong sense of thematic consistency since many of the themes of Event are present in these opening poems. One of the dominant images of that book was of birds, appearing as various forms of visitation in various situations. And one of the ways we think about children is as a special kind of visitation. Two of these first poems deal with the death of children and one of them, “Poem for a Little Girl”, ends with a bird image:

She has woken, your love, in the house of your heart.
Oh, now she is laughing, saying Look! Ma! Pa!
I’m a bird – I’m sunlight – I am everywhere you are.

The second, “Snow”, is based on the famous (in poets’ terms) death of Mallarme’s son, Anatole, and the interest here is in the image of colour and its opposite, whiteness, embodied in snow. At first one thinks back to the poem, “Interval”, from Event, in which snow is an expression of the silence of death. But in that poem snow does have a kind of transmutative power – “you alone / shiver / sun / into diamonds” – and the same is present in this poem where lights, when reflected in snow, develop different colorations, the snow crystals, presumably, acting as individual prisms. Unexpectedly it is the living who are without colour, “restored / to black and white, / our shadows stamp our exile from the dead”. And it’s possible that this not-untypically complex poem might be further complicated by an allusion to Joyce (perhaps prepared by the word “exile”) and the conclusion of his best-known story.

These poems of pregnancy, birth and parenting seem to move in many directions. One is an interest in mind, in matter and their embryonic beginnings. “14 Weeks” speaks of the foetus, beginning to move in its own universe within the mother as a “small philosopher, / materialist of mine” and the following poem, “Arrival” (conceivably alluding to the science fiction short story and its recent film both of which look at the arrival of aliens from an essentially linguistic point of view), has as a refrain the lines “Where the mind comes from, / where it goes”.
If childbirth is an arrival – and it’s worth bearing in mind how much of Event was concerned with visitation – it is also an opening out. Many of the poems from the second section of this book are associated with the idea of opening and it’s something of a surprise to find, in the middle of a first section generally concerned with children, a poem called “Openings” though, as it turns out, the child as a beginner in the complex world of conceptualisation and interaction is an important part of the way these poems want to approach the issue.

“Openings” opens with an image of the field as a place where an incoming signal alerts a response in the mind:

. . . . . 
Something alights
in the meadow of vision.
Shimmering,
electric,
each datum’s serene
in its dance of arrival from the world - 
each met by the sprightly
pas de deux of the brain,
holiest union,
whose coda unfolds
in the body’s
archipelagos of darkening
roads,
where the nerve
bulb flashes
and winks out.

It’s a cognitive psychologist’s view of the interaction between mind and world and, despite the overtones of materialism, it seems happy to see the process in the light of an image-dense poetry. The other four parts of “Openings” investigate different issues: the second part – “Loveliness and horror pass through / the open gate” – focusses on exactly that: our inability to determine what enters us when we are open. It is perhaps relevant to the way in which those earlier poems in celebration of childbirth were counterbalanced by two poems recording deaths. The third part – “Does the tree return her greeting / when the child says hello?” – is about the way in which categories exist in the mind even when the object they refer to is imaginary:

. . . . . 
Then call the tree
by its name:
like the unicorn,
it steps into your mind
and will remain.

The fourth and fifth parts recapitulate the second and third. The former tells the story of a woman knocking at a door looking for her brother who hasn’t been returning phone calls. When the door is opened, the news is bad. And the latter is interested in a child’s perception of reflection whereby the mirror image (of a duck taking off or a willow trailing leaves in water) has as much “realness” as the objects themselves.

The word “openings” has here a primary sense of “doorways” and “the making of doorways” but it has, of course, a secondary meaning of “beginnings” and it would be surprising if the themes of this poem were not present in poems later in the book so that it acts as an initial broaching of some of the subjects. “Thinking Things into Existence” from the third section of Interval, takes up – as its title suggests – the issue dealt with in the second part of “Openings”. Here the imagined which is threatening to become real is that of the human race finding some superior home elsewhere in the galaxy. And if “Thinking Things into Existence” takes up this plan to leave as a conceptual issue, an interesting poem, “Unearthed”, from the second section, looks at the idea of home and humanness as themes in themselves. The macro-issue of the evolution of humans, “and they may be / a different kind of us; // half-clockwork, / far evolved” – is imaged in terms of a child’s development whereby its longing for the maternal “home” is something that will, eventually, pass:

One day, the baby
will be free of such a need.

One day, they will wonder at
the lawn and all we made of it –

recalling, touched or puzzled, how it
framed our early lives, this minor

passage in the history of play.

Much of the material I have covered so far gets explored in the four-part poem that concludes the third section. “Testament”, its title, suggests that this is going to have a base at least in a thought-out position rather than being built around exploring possibilities. (To be frank, given its tone, “Testament” might better have been called “Essay”, which would imply in its original meaning the notion of an attempt to make a coherent statement about a phenomenon.) The first section, “Conquest”, discusses (and given the poem’s tone, this is not an inappropriate word) the issue of the future – “a / howling of the not- / yet in the is” – for an organism with conquest in its genes. It recalls poems like “Thinking Things into Existence”, “Openings”, “Control” and “In the Somme”, but it also deals with issues of perspective: including mapping, abstraction, stylisation and reductionism, especially when it moves from the macro-outer world of human life on this planet in this galaxy in this universe to the inner world:

. . . . . 
Dragons, no less, in the interior
reductions to the
more and more refined cartographies
of cells and nanograms -
                                            and home

is where the body is at home,
no less the mind . . .

It reminds us that there are a number of poems in this book whose focus is the map (“The New Maps Keep a Weather Eye” and “Rising Tides”, for example) or the stylised, diagrammatised portrayal of physical realities such as one finds in graphs (“Control”). The second part of “Testament” is about perspective in that it wants to understand the human scale in terms of the surrounding scales which range from the near infinite of the universe, cosmologically described, to the atomic:

. . . . . 
– I look out across the new:
it is possible to film
a set of molecules that dance;
it is possible to hear
the awkward chirp of waves emerging
from the hatcheries of space . . .

The third part of the poem deals with the idea of limiting one’s perspective to the human scale, though this is compromised by the fact that the borders of the body – the skin – are not absolute and that the elements of the responding body and mind continually cross this border. And the final part speculates about the possibilities that might occur in an evolutionary future (though these developments might be technologically derived). “Testament” has so many of the issues of Interval in it that it is tempting to see it as a central poem. But its mode – assertion, speculation and generalisation – is too essayistic, too early eighteenth century to be satisfying, at least to me. I have more faith in the lyric mode, operating more openly, more intuitively and more likely to make connections outside of the parameters of strict logic. And I think the best of Bishop’s poems work this way too.

The notion of “home” for example, dealt with in “Testament”, is explored differently in “Home” the first poem of the final section of Interval:

Be our heart’s north,
daybreak in our daughters’
breath, be the radiance
that listens
as we gather for the singing
of the wood . . .

Admittedly, this is a poem that deals with the issue at an emotional level – as a centring phenomenon in the girls’ lives – rather than at an intellectual one but, in an odd way, “Home” is a more complex poem than “Testament”.

And all the complicated material about openings, explored in the poems I have spoken about so far, is expressed beautifully in one of the four stanzas of a potent, associative and disjunctive poem called “Miniatures”:

. . . . . 
Laid are the eggs, and the traps, and the plans.
One is closed, until broken by urgency and life.
One is open – and then -
One is closure, with haunted dreams of opening . . .

This brief look at Bishop’s use of different “modes of discourse” – a not entirely accurate description of the difference between lyric and more discursive poetry – leads me to look at another unusual aspect of the poems in this book. This is a technical matter and involves the use of a kind of verbal repetition with variation. I can quote an example from the marvellous opening poem, “Aubade”, (memorable for its wonderful materialist view of erotic love – “Love, the shape-shifter, / is on the move / again: starry, her neural / and her chemical mess . . .” – which in seven words speaks of the double perspective of the cosmic and the microscopic) – which goes on to describe the ache of love as “a lovely quarry / to be quarried in the body”. I suppose, technically, it’s just a pun on the two meanings of “quarry” but other examples (and there are many) involve a distortion of the first word so that it seems to suggest the second. When “14 Weeks” describes the climate of the womb it speaks of a place “where the skeins of inner sun / are a sunset through the skin” so that “skeins” and “skin” are connected. The opening of “Testament” works the “weather”/”whether” homonym and also allows “how” to suggest “howling”:

A queer excitement fills the throat – call it
imminence, or a season’s
                                   change, but
weather’s not what rises and 
                            balloons this day, not
whether – rather how, and what a 
howling of the not-
yet in the is . . .

and later in the same poem “mind” suggests “mining”.

The most extreme and complicated of these moves occurs in “In the Somme” a meditation on the relationship of mind and body. The third stanza runs:

Flesh, unknown to body, is the shibboleth
by which the mind discriminates its own;
self, in body’s mouth, is only flesh in anagram.
Mind abhors the power of the dumb.

Perhaps its fitting that, with such a subject, the poem should sound so like something out of the Metaphysical poets, but even contemporary minds get some sort of pleasure in teasing it out. “Flesh” is only an anagram of “self” if you replace the “sh” with a “s” and this is what the traditional test of the “shibboleth” (the word is introduced in the first line) involved. Those who know their Old Testaments will know the story of the quarrel between the Gileadites and the Ephraimites in the twelfth chapter of Judges. Each man looking for passage across the Jordan after a defeat was made to say the word for an ear of corn, “shibboleth”. Since Ephraimites couldn’t pronounce the “sh” – presumably for dialectal reasons – they could be weeded out and butchered.

All of the examples of this odd technique come to a sort of climax in the last lines of the last poem of Interval, “As If”:

. . . . .
so staggered by the light
we stagger brightened through the sun

to try toward, to ward, to world –
to word this muteness, so

It’s not a technique that occurs, as far as I can see, in the poems of Event though the poem “Interval” there does allow the word “mantle” to follow a couple of lines after “diamantes”. The issue is whether it’s a kind of “grace-note” technique, like a sophisticated version of end-rhyme or whether it’s a generative technique of the sort one is likely to find in a more surreal poetry than Bishop’s. The answer – as all of those who want to support the use of rhyme on the grounds that, irrational as this chiming is, it does generate new imaginative possibilities – might be that it is both.

Andrew Taylor: Impossible Preludes: Poems 2008-2014

Witchcliffe, WA: Margaret River Press, 2016, 86pp.

Andrew Taylor can be a hard poet to write about. Although he has never seemed especially prolific (in contrast, say, to John Kinsella, who contributes a brief introduction to this new book) his cumulated work is very substantial – another two books will see it cross the thousand page barrier. It’s also very consistent without being at all the same and a reviewer, aiming for any kind of conspectus, will be torn between the opposed tasks of mapping out changes of manner and documenting the recurrent themes that give his work a strong sense of unity. There are changes of mode but they are not really radical. If we compare the title poem of his first book with the title poem of this new one (a cheap tactic, I know, but one which can have some value):

The Cool Change

We say: After a hot day the cool change
is like a fresh shower and the spirit stands
renewed and alert despite the summer thunder.
Despite the summer thunder and despite
the jagged fulgurations of dry rage
over the Brighton Yacht Club and beyond
the enclosed alerted small boat anchorage,
despite the ominous clashings in the trees,
after a hot day and a sea like slate
the cool change comes like mother with light skirts
sweeping the torpid gulls from their malaise.
Like mother with cool drinks the cool change gathers
families out of the tea-tree and the water,
moving with her urgency among hampers
caressing, hurrying, to her mysterious ends . . .
The cool change sweeps us back into Sunday night,
the long drive home, the children to be fed,
bathed, put to bed. It makes us parents again.
Later we think of the sullen sea, the obtuse
and adolescent arrogance of the sun,
the dominant zero, pointless, tyrannous.

and

Impossible Preludes

A leaf floating up
memory drifting along a line
of music
whump of bass from a car
beside you at the lights
goldfish –
                         have you ever
tried to count the shifting
innumerability
of goldfish?
                              dimples
of light across a river
that phonecall
you never made
or received

all impossible
all possible
all preludes

True, the subject matter here is very different but that is just a matter of accident: I might have matched “The Cool Change” with “Two Dates” or “How Much Better Can It Get?” from Impossible Preludes, just as I might have matched “Impossible Preludes” with “Exemplary Poem” or “A Vision of Myself in the Window” from The Cool Change. But, stylistically and conceptually there are marked differences. “The Cool Change” obviously sees itself as a free-standing poem, an object where enough is going on internally – by way of echo, repetition and extension – for it to have a strong presence as a thing despite its apparently lightweight material, material that resists a reader’s search to allegorise it into something more challenging and profound than parenthood and weather. The heavyweight language of the last two lines is definitely a conventional way to achieve some sort of climax. I used to read this poem (before I knew how sensitive Taylor is to ambient conditions like weather) thinking that perhaps it was a kind of critique of the “well-made” poem (as Waiting for Godot can be read as a critique of the well-made play) where the content is trivialised or evacuated but the form remains predictably the same.

By the time we reach “Impossible Preludes” (more than forty years later) we can see a more gestural quality. The gestures are not images but ideas, ideas, in this case, about what might instigate the writing of a poem. Though this poem has its own elegant shape (a list, the last item of which contains mutually exclusive possibilities followed by three propositions about the contents of the list which share the mutually exclusive structure of the final item) it suggests intellectual reverie rather than the sturdy, stand-alone quality of poems like “The Cool Change” or “Developing a Wife”. You feel that, as a reader, you are not so much being presented with an object as lured into a universe of speculation involving paradox and unresolvability. If there is an overall change in the mode of Taylor’s poetry over the years, I think it has been the rise of such poems at the expense of sturdy, well-made pieces like “The Cool Change”.

A love of paradox and paradoxical meditation, taken as a theme rather than a structural method, has probably always been a component of Taylor’s poetic sensibility. The much anthologised “Developing a Wife” is quite straightforward but it rejoices in the way the metaphor of photographic developing endlessly draws towards itself images of violence (“he held her face two inches under the water”) and of domestic “education” (so that developing might mean “changing to suit” or, more likely, “changing oneself to match an existing wifely personality”). There is nothing paradoxical in the nub of the poem which is, after all, about nothing more than the now archaic technique of developing a photograph, but paradoxes are suggested by the metaphors. One of the most potent pieces of Impossible Preludes works in this way and recalls that earlier poem: “Dark Employments” deals with interactions between the dreamer and the characters of his dreams but it does so under the metaphor of business meetings, the “clandestine meetings in the small hours”.

One of Taylor’s central paradoxes is the idea of absence as a presence. It’s not anything new and is a topos beloved of composers but absence is a powerful presence in Taylor’s work at an emotional level. Early in his career there are three books which move away from notions of a stand-alone poem in different ways as though experimenting with possibilities. These are The Invention of Fire (a kind of psychodrama where the poems are fragmentary expressions of the inner self), Parabolas (a series of prose poems, very much focussed on paradox and elegant meditation) and The Crystal Absences, The Trout. This last book is a series of meditations marking off the days to the lover’s return. It is, in other words, generated out of absence.

In Impossible Preludes we have “Shells” whose complex structure – “as complex and better designed / than a legal system . . .” – speak of “oceans lost to their memory”. And a series of poems lamenting the death, during the poet’s absence, of a loved cat, Maxi (a companion piece to the early poem, “The Old Colonist”, which celebrated the passing of an earlier cat) finishes up by moving beyond grieving to think about how we might carry favourite ghosts with us:

It’s fine having a cat
but having a cat haunt you
is something else. Maxi’s ghost
waits at the back door as we bundle in
at 2 a.m. from Frankfurt
three years now and I greet him
with the ghost of a grin
an ethereal hug. Can I
shift him with us when we move
to Sydney? After all
he’s silent and weighs nothing.
I could take him as hand baggage
or – more to the point – heart baggage.

It’s all more complex than the light surface might lead us to think: a loved ghost is an absence that is a powerful presence even if it is just a cat. One of Taylor’s gifts (and markers of style) is to be serious but never portentous. The title of this group of poems – “The Maxi Poems” – is designed to recall Olson’s Maximus Poems a sequence which, whatever can be said about its virtues and vices, is extremely self-important.

The force of absence is, in a way, recorded in a number of poems in the book which deal with writing. “Lament for the Makars” (another allusion-by-title, this time to Dunbar’s great poem about the deaths of his contemporary poets) is a mildly comic piece about the way, as we age, the number of “predeceased / contemporaries” rises. The dead are all categorised and given – Dante-like – fitting afterlives: I like the fate of the Rationalists who are “undoubtedly / scrutinising the bill” in their “immaculately designed / resort (their last)”. But the poem finishes with the poet: “I’ll be forever revising / that poem, you know, the one / I said I’d read to you / when it was finished” suggesting not only an inevitable incompleteness but, further, an inability of poetry to make a final comprehensive judgement on experience. Perhaps this is not so much an absence as an incompleteness and endless chasing after the powers to express a changing reality. Impossible Preludes carries an introductory poem, “Writing”, which begins by describing the act as “tracing a spider’s footprints / across a web” and concludes by saying that writing is “leaving oneself behind / as a spider does // as it spins its web”. Given this is the case, perhaps the best introduction to Impossible Preludes might be the “The Impossible Poem”, last poem of The Unhaunting, Taylor’s previous book:

There are only two poems -
the one you write
and the one always undoing
your words

and as you get older
that impossible poem
stretches its fingers toward you
and you can – maybe – just

feel what it might be -
as Adam might have felt it
when God leaned across the Sistine ceiling
toward his touch

or as a cat waking
on warm stones reminds you
or as alone
in a language you don’t understand.

you know a stranger’s smile
is a word even or a phrase.

Here poetry’s ultimate inability to “grasp” the world is configured as the existence of a kind of anti-poem that matches each existing poem and whose presence becomes slightly more detectable as we age. The fact that the poem refers to cats and to the Sistine Chapel (which an early poem associates with spiders) is a sign that several of Taylor’s distinguishing topics have accreted here. Just as a poem here has an antipoem, so in “This is the Empty Page” from Impossible Preludes, every printed page has an anti-page that, if looked at correctly, peeps out behind the various words that are trying to conceal it:

. . . . . 
I’ve tried to disguise it 
with writing 
my printer hums and buzzes 
across it
but if you look closely
you’ll see the empty page
peering out at you
from behind the letters

In a way, here, we are being returned to the paradox of the doorway that one of the prose poems in Parabolas deals with: “Because a doorway is nothing, this fact is often disguised by tremendous decoration. For example, the portals of Chartres, or the Sphinx couching around the tiny doorway in its breast”.

There are also other poems here which, if not necessarily invoking the presence/absence paradox, also want to speak about poetry and perception. One of the recurring motifs of Taylor’s poetry is swimming. It is the basis of many poems about growing up in southern Australia but it is also always likely to touch on issues that relate to poetry. Swimmers (and kayakers) move on the surface of an element which has a lot of things going on underneath. In “Beginnings” the canoeist watches a dolphin explode out of the depths through masses of ordinary rubbish which it feeds on in a way which, you feel, is designed to refer to a certain kind of experience-hungry poet. Taylor modestly contrasts this with himself:

. . . . . 
                      While I
skimming the surface in my kayak
might have brought a glint of query
even pity, to its inquisitive eye.

I don’t think we should take the self-deprecating tone too literally here. In the following poem, “The Sea Eagle”, the observing animal is the opposite – “aloof and interested / he charts my splashy transit / from the high branch of his / detachment”. Two poems, “River” and “Where the Track Ends” focus on these watery issues. The former speaks of the kayak’s inscribing patterns on the “universe’s mirror” and the latter is a symbolic scene of poet and lover arriving by track to the “almost / limitless expansion of sea” – expansion of consciousness, of course, as much as physical dimensions. Intriguingly the partner is described as a “river / person” while the poet belongs to the sea: “I / scanned for rips, stripped off / my clothes, carefully / walked to the surf and plunged in”. Again any hint of ecstatic symbolic triumphalism is undercut by that little word, “carefully”.

One theme which has developed in its own way as Taylor’s life has gone on is that of our perspectives on our own lives. What appear at the time as moments of trauma – separations, divorces, deaths of friends, of parents – get fitted into a retrospectively viewed pattern. Taylor writes well about this. He clearly enjoys the paradox that what seems at the time, when looking forward, to be host of possible directions becomes, when looking back, the only path that could have brought you to the state you are in now:

There are many paths 
through a childhood that offers
when you look back
only the one you took. 
. . . . . 
That’s where you find
if you’re not too traumatised
there was no other way
inexorably to you.

One of the poems about childhood, “Vanishing Species 3”, exploits, structurally, the same sort of tensions that animate poems like “Developing a Wife” and “Dark Employments”. It begins, “I went back to my old school” and, by the time it begins to speak of talking to “my old teachers” we begin to start doing those calculations of age that the elderly always do. Since Taylor was born in 1940 his youngest teachers must have been born in the teens of the twentieth century and that would make them etc etc. The poem quickly resolves this:

. . . . . 
                   others
had died or retired to their own
pastures or coasts. But they had not
vanished.

I remember Gunner Owen
I remember Chesty Bond . . .

It’s not that the teachers were entirely icons of popular culture which can always outlive the normal lifespan of a real person, it’s that these and the actual teachers “Mr Ingwersen who heroically / tried to teach me French” are present absences in the poet’s mind.

As I said at the beginning, Taylor can quite hard to describe as a poet. Some features are not difficult to talk about: the love of certain paradoxes, for example, and the way the poems are anchored in an entirely distinctive Taylorian(?) world of homely realities (made up of weather, cats, spiders as well as more complex experiences such as a double life lived on two continents). But I always feel that the deepest, most essential component of his poetic personality – made open as it seems to be to readers – somehow resists really accurate description.

Jane Williams: Parts of the Main

Port Adelaide: Ginninderra Press, 2017, 106pp.

Jane Williams is one of those poets whose work becomes progressively more engaging and interesting as years, and books, pass. There isn’t much in her first book, Outside Temple Boundaries, that prepares you for how good Parts of the Main is, but then twenty years is a reasonably long time in a writing career. As poetry, these poems are not especially ambitious or experimental – by which I mean that, a few lines in, you know, at least generally, where you are, even if you hope that the direction the poem travels will not be predictable. In poetry’s house of many mansions these belong in the wing kept aside for calm, free verse meditations usually hung on some item of personal experience. But they do have threads of obsession that animate and unify them. And the most important of these is an interest in other parts of our lives, other directions our lives might have taken, those times we can be creatively lost, and how we can gain any sort of perspective on this thing called “our lives”. One could choose poems almost at random to explore this but “Elsewhere” from late in the book’s first section might do for a start:

there’s an emptiness to evenings like this
a loneliness that can stare down buildings

reshape everything even bitumen even intent
until leaving becomes the next natural step

in the evolution of a life couched in waiting
for the rules for the impetus for the lights to change

for the mottled blue longing of the sky to shift
and the road out of town fixed as it is to turn left

to turn right and lead somewhere else.

This is a fairly abstract poem and one might contrast it with something like “First Morning in Venice” where the poet listens to the story of a fellow tourist who, having been lost in Venice’s labyrinthine alleyways is rescued by an old man who returns her through “a succession of frescoes, / across a fifteenth-century plaza, / somehow threading three floors / of hospital corridors”. Thinking about the mesmerizingly complex city around her, the poet describes it as designed “to waylay us from whatever task, / whatever path it is we think we’re on”. You could place those poems of Parts of the Main which deal with alternative lives (or alternatives within our lives) on a spectrum between these two poems, between generalised meditation and specific anecdote.

Take a poem like “Doppelgangers”, for example, the first poem of the second part of Parts of the Main. It begins:

They’re out there somewhere
making the moves we dream for them;
shining second-chance moves.

One, with an eye for detail
shifts boundaries incrementally.
Another, prescient, chooses to lean
this way not that into a changing climate.

A propagandist becomes a poet
becomes a man and everyone gets it -
really, everyone understands . . .

Here the alternatives in our lives are imagined as inhabitants of a parallel (and perhaps contiguous) universe. But the poem is conceived ethically in that the alternatives are morally superior second chances which mean that the characters will not to be funnelled down a bad pathway. So the first of them (in the first two lines of the second stanza) doesn’t tie him- or herself to an inflexible set of principles; the second makes different decisions in that crucial moment when the values of a culture can be felt to change. The third is the most interesting because it contrasts choices made between being a poet and being an activist. As a result (in my reading anyway) poetry is positioned as a way in which issues are raised without the inevitable one-eyedness of the activist: it’s one of the roles for poetry (and the creative arts generally) that I’ve always wanted to endorse.

As the Venice poem reminds us, travel is a good, practical way to have our preconceptions altered, our planned journeys turned aside. The book’s second poem, “Everything About Us”, has a title whose ambiguity nicely expresses the centrifugal and centripetal approaches to the self. It details the experience of living in a Muslim country during Ramadhan where everything seems to define the visitor as foreign but the visitor experiences, almost by osmosis, some kind of redefinition:

. . . . .  But labels are blankets we hide under, revealing selective truths by torchlight. Empty beer bottles replicate like drones on the laminate bench top, then stop. We moderate. Abstain. Our bodies thank us. A new ethos sidles up to the old one, we let parts of it in – no more or less than we need . . . . .

This poem finishes with an affirmation of those experiences which transcend their cultural inflection, in this case, a mother kisses her boy goodbye at the gates to his school. In the next poem a woman has a “slight stroke” in a restaurant and her husband, after organising the ambulance, turns “to the comfort of a single sauce-drenched / spring roll”. This might have been easy to criticise in terms of basic human self-centred greed but the poem sees the gesture as a grasping of the familiar in a moment of crisis: the “simple affirmation, / the vivifying sweet and sour of its call”. Two poems embody the intense experience that these abrupt meetings with otherness can provide. In “Pembantu Rumah (Maid)”, the poet worries (in a way that is nicely conveyed by verbal repetitions in the text) that she doesn’t engage with her housemaid – who seems a self-effacing domestic fitting. When she eventually asks her name, the weather abruptly changes, bringing the relief of rain. And “The Newlywed” (another nicely ambiguous title) sees the heady experience of being alien from the perspective of another character, as both poet and a recently married Asian woman stand alongside each other waiting to visit the Eiffel Tower.

The poems of the final section of the book detail a period spent in the Slovak city of Sturovo, on the Danube and connected to neighbouring Hungary by a bridge – always a potent source of symbolism. The final long poem, “Days of Leaving – Notes to Self”, acts as a kind of summary of these poems about unpredictable changes of direction when it says, as one of the notes to self, “be open to getting lost – / it could be part of the story / that sustains you / when nothing else will”.

Unpredictable changes to the pattern of one’s life make, as I’ve said, for a lot of thematic consistency in the book but any reader would want to know how this applies at the level of the poems themselves. The theme almost demands that the poems which express it should not be poems running along familiar tracks with familiar conclusions but poems which work by taking unexpected turns. There are plenty of these and I’ll look at them in detail in a moment but first one would want to look at some of those poems whose shape is familiar. “Dog Beach”, for example, is superficially a semi-comic piece about a beach where all breeds of dog can be found:

not its official name
but for the sake of preserving
certain dignities
(which my dog loving friend
assures me they have, along with
neuroses, borrowed hopes . . .)

it seems to me this day
they’re all here on Dog Beach:
the black, the white, the brindle,
the ghosts of packs past,
of untenable future breeds,

expressions not so alien
from our own –

sidekick Labs
clumsy with love, 
fretful Dachshunds,
lap leaping Shih Tzus
Pick me! Pick me!
Dalmatians shifting stance
between goofy and gallant . . .

The fact that I’ve had to quote a minor, if successful, poem at such length is a clue to its structure: it keeps its head above water by being a long imaginative list conveyed in long syntactic structures. This sounds very like the method we associate with Bruce Dawe and the fact that poem is about dogs is likely to recall something like Dawe’s “Dogs in the Morning Light”. Interestingly this is a poem whose conclusion is about familiar comforts – “who among us hasn’t desired / when at a loss for words, / the simple salience / of a tail to wag . . .” – rather than challenging escapades on unfamiliar paths. “The Day the Earth Moved” is another Daweish piece, a long single sentence describing an experience of the unfamiliar (or defamiliarising) in which a woman’s laugh (on a busy intersection on a Monday morning) suddenly makes her seem something more than human – “not woman, but merwoman / gone AWOL, caught out / slipping partially back into form”. It’s a poem that works by framing something uncanny in solid, assertive, straightforward poetic utterance. As does “Show and Tell” where the appearance of an eagle makes a cast of tourists put down their cameras in recognition that this particular incarnation of the real is “unshowable, untellable” and is only insulted by the cameras and their owners’ “compulsion to frame / the endless, abridged versions of us . . .”

But, as I’ve said, a poetry interested in unexpected turns in our lives really has to be capable of unexpected turns itself and a number of the poems of Parts of the Main rise to this. “Swallowing the Sky”, for example, is about how a poem forms itself at the same moment (and with the same randomness) that a cloud forms itself into the shape of a dog: it begins to dissolve at the moment of formation:

. . . . . 
Such fine points of ears,
legs built for speed, for the hunt,
tail set to thump nothing into being,
open jawed, tasting life on the hop.
Yet even as the poem takes shape,
its inevitable dissolve has begun:
a quiver in the back legs then the front . . .

The structure has that pleasing paradox of being an assertive poem about the failure of a poem. Something similar lies behind “This Complicated Inner Life” which sets out to be a poem celebrating an ambitious creative conception – “you’re thinking novel; big picture work of substance you have outlines whole drafts the scaffolding for the building . . . “ – until the pathway laid out turns into doubt-ridden quicksand. But whereas “Swallowing the Sky” ended in dissolution, this poem ends in some sort of surprising affirmation, perhaps that major works operate by accretion rather than by grand conception. The symbol used at the end is the group of ants found on the breakfast bench at the end of the night’s creative highs and lows: “you notice as if for the first time the ants on the bench mandibles raised in unison the way they cooperate to navigate that single crumb homeward more than slaves to the hive mind more than marks on the page”. “My Mother Asks Me to Write a Butterfly Poem” is, perhaps, the counterpart to “Swallowing the Sky” and “This Complicated Inner Life” in that it begins with the poet feeling she should remind her mother that you can’t write poems on commission but then, unexpectedly, she finds that the poem comes, replete with the inevitable metaphors of cocoons and transformation:

. . . . . 
So I start as we all must
alone and not alone
cocooned in the dark,
blank stare, blank slate
and wait and wait
until finally I get it
(how did she know I would?);
this is why we’re here,
all of us artists,
our singular job
to emerge, take flight,
disconnect the dots,
recolour the world.

I like “all of us artists” with its ambiguity of “all of us who are artists” or “all of us are artists” just as I like the way “disconnect the dots” expresses the sense of defamiliarizing that this book emphasises. But perhaps the most extreme case of a poem’s structure matching its theme of unusual pathways is “Proof of Existence”, one of the prose poems, which begins with the poet a bit depressed, wanting to be alone, going on a walk:

. . . . . I want all the possibilities, all the privileges of this spring day to myself – whatever hidden truths a walk in the park might reveal, loosed from the obligations, the diversions of technology and time. I take the delirious risk of leaving my phone at home, and soon my mind is drifting then spinning past identity . . .

A few lines later she is in the Amazon rain forest, where natives are looking up at a research plane which is taking photos of them. In the next sentence she has become one of these natives, “we tilt our masked faces to the cloudless sky as the giant metal bird passes overhead . . . “ – a fine example of a poem stepping out in unpredictable but ultimately satisfying directions.

Surprise, unpredictability and the uncanny that results from defamiliarizing tend to be a fraction cerebral – perhaps it’s no accident that so many of them appear in prose poems, a form suited to conveying the twists that the mind enjoys. One of the best poems in Parts of the Main shows that they can have a powerful emotional charge. “Days of Blue and Banter” begins with “a routine walk” in Ireland which is interrupted by a chance encounter with a neighbour. Unpredictably and embarrassingly a set of social clichés prompts a rush of words “rising unbidden / from the untold depth of you”:

. . . . . 
When you worry that you’ve said to much,
it’s the old man who gently closes the divide;
six sisters who never knew how to speak
to each other or anyone
about anything that mattered.
No blue bright enough to keep them buoyed.
How they’re all, each one dead now,
from the cancer. No more to say. So you talk,
he implores, you talk away . . .

The old man’s final words are imperative rather than indicative (“Go ahead and talk . . .” rather than “So we talk . . .) and his assumption is the old (perhaps to-be-expected) one that silence is a self-repression that grows cancerous, but this doesn’t lessen the emotional impact that the unexpected – the sudden upwelling of confessions made to a chance acquaintance – has here.

Rereadings II: Norman Talbot: Son of a Female Universe

Fivedock, NSW: South Head Press, 1971, 73pp.

(This review is the second in a annual series of rereadings of works which have been important to me but which, for one reason or another, I have never written about.)

Son of a Female Universe is the central panel of the triptych that makes up the first phase of Norman Talbot’s poetic career. The others are Poems for a Female Universe (1968) and Find the Lady: a Female Universe Rides Again (1977) – the titles containing a kind of whimsical humour that few poets would allow into something as significant as the titles of their books. The acknowledgements pages of each of these three books refers to the E.C. Gregory Memorial Poetry Award given to Talbot in 1965. This award, sponsored by the English Society of Authors has some decidedly impressive alumni. In 1965 (the award’s fifth year) Talbot shared it with John Fuller, Derek Mahon and Michael Longley, and in the following year Seamus Heaney was one of the recipients. The acknowledgements of this award are significant because they claim that the three books were planned together and that many of the poems date from the same period.

Each of the three books has a detached prefatory poem. The first begins with an extended villanelle whose title, “Self-Justifying Apostrophe”, gives a fair sense of its content (it is dedicated to “the Reader”) and the last begins with “A Year & a Day in her Landscape”, dedicated to Australia and being very much a poem about the country and the exiles who make up her population. It might be a gloss on Lawson’s “Middleton’s Rouseabout” except that the success is not marked materially but poetically:

. . . . . 
Some lucky hick or greenhorn
will beat peers and pierglasses,
hit Her town in his riddling frame,
waltz Her waste of There in thentime.
We’re as near eternity as usual

& Hers no more tangled a now couch.

It’s a cryptic conclusion (fitting for someone with a “riddling frame”) and gives some sort of insight into some of the features of Talbot’s distinctive poetry, but it’s not too difficult if read carefully.

I can’t say that about the opening poem of Son of a Female Universe which I have known, admired and puzzled over since the book first appeared forty-six years ago. I’ll quote it in full:

Ring of Red Gold Away:
                                                  to the language

The other lovers were lost in Mirkwood - 
          not that the trees cared,
          ravens, leafstrown marshes there -
the swangirls, ringmaids were away . . .

The black brow glimmered in Wolfdale,
          glowered. Salt rimed his cheek
          & loveshot eye still looked
for the goldring girl he used to lay.

                    The shortswords crept down Mirkwood - 
                              fortytwo – each of them
                              had strode autumn to autumn
                    to take one ring away.

                    The free man hunted in Mirkwood
                              when the two dark brothers came.
                              He was out, the halls were dumb
                    & they took one red ring away.

                    Their fortytwo hid in Wolfdale -
                              he counted his hallrings right
                              through the peopled night.
                    One ring of red gold was away.

                    Hatred took them down Mirkwood -
                              tortured him by this strange thing - 
                              out of ten thousand rings
                    took that red ring away.

                    Her ring, who had flown over Mirkwood.
                              He dreamt of her all his sleep
                              woke with shackles on his feet -
                    his wits with one red ring away.

                                        Winter is icelocked in Wolfdale.
                                                  Hamstrung, he limps into his fate -
                                                  smithgod, avenger, absolute,
                                         with one red gold ring to pay:

                                         a hundred miles from Mirkwood
                                                  & years beyond, he wheels the sky
                                                  man no more, but only
                                         one ring of red gold away.

A reader isn’t going to make much sense of this – which is elliptical in the ballad tradition – unless he or she knows the poem that lies behind it: what the theories of intertextuality call the hypotext. It is Völundarkviða, the “Lay of Volund” (I’ll spare readers Old Norse spellings from here on and normalise everything), the story of a “god” better known in English as Weyland the Smith. The “Lay of Volund” is one of the greatest of the poems of the Elder or Poetic Edda, a collection – the only collection – of Old Norse poems most of which were written before the turn of the first millennium of the common era. Part of the magic of this poem is that, unlike those built around the Volsung or Baldur legends, it is the only one of its kind. It’s a small window that looks into a complex landscape where we are never confident that we would be able to walk surefootedly.

To summarise the story: three brothers living in the forest called Mirkwood come across three swan maidens who have temporarily put aside their plumage and are acting as mortal women. Each of the three brothers takes one as a bride but after seven years the women get restless – either their animal nature or a divine nature (they are often thought to be Valkyries) asserts itself. In the ninth year they leave. Two of the brothers go off to search for them but the third, Volund, remains behind trusting that his wife, Hervor, will return. The eddic style is just as elliptical as the ballad style and, like all Old Norse literature, demands that the reader think about the situation and “read between the lines”. Why should Volund be so trusting? The answer, probably, is that, unlike his brothers he is a smith (an occupation which, in the Iron Age is always surrounded with intimations of magic) and has made a ring which will, in some way, bind Hervor to him. While waiting for Hervor he makes another seven hundred rings and stores them by threading them on rope. Nidud, the king of a nearby country, hearing that Volund is alone in Wolfdale and that he is out hunting sends warriors who enter his hall and take the one, crucial ring away. Volund returns, counts his rings and, seeing that one is missing, thinks that Hervor must have returned and claimed her ring. He falls into a daze and wakes to find himself fettered by the warriors and a prisoner of Nidud who, at the prompting of his wife, has him hamstrung (an operation performed by cutting the tendons behind the knees) and taken to an island where he is forced to work at a forge making swords and precious metalwork for the king. Again, reading between the lines, it seems that the ring, now owned by Nidud, is what causes Volund’s strange, otherwise unexplained trancelike state and is also what gives Nidud a binding power over him as his smith. Nidud gives the ring to his daughter Bodvild and himself wears one of Volund’s swords. The crippled Volund works at his forge meditating a revenge which, in true Germanic heroic tradition, is going to be very bloody.

His opportunity occurs when Nidud’s two sons, driven by greed, arrive secretly on the island to see Volund’s wealth for themselves. He shows them one of his caskets of gems and offers it to them on the condition that they come back the next day having told no-one where they were going. When they return he cuts off their heads, makes goblets out of their skulls (which he presents to Nidud), gems out of their eyes (which he gives to Nidud’s wife – who is always, interestingly, unnamed) and a brooch out of their teeth (which he gives to Bodvild). He buries their bodies under his forge, an act which seems symbolically significant but whose meaning is only conjectural. No-one at the court knows what is behind these gifts: Nidud knows only that his sons are missing. Next, Bodvild comes to Volund in secret because her ring has been damaged and only he can repair it. He gets Bodvild drunk and rapes her making her pregnant. She flees. (It is hard not to make a connection between Bodvild being in a kind of helpless stupor and Volund’s being in a daze before his capture in Wolfdale – the ring has a role of some sort to play and now, of course, has been transferred to Volund.) In one of those miraculous disjunctions that you can get in this elliptical style, Volund suddenly launches himself into the air and flies to Nidud’s court. How he can fly is never explained and since for most readers the connections with Daedalus, another imprisoned artificer, are so strong, it’s hard not to imagine some sort of winged apparatus. This, in miniature, is perhaps a case of another text wrongly influencing our reading. It’s most likely that listeners to this poem in the ninth century (or whenever) would have connected the ability to fly with the swan shapes of the women at the beginning and assumed that Volund has learned something of the secret of shapeshifting from his wife and sisters-in-law.

The end of the poem is spectacular in the literal sense. Nidud asks Volund, who is hovering just out of arrow range, what has happened to his sons. Volund makes Nidud swear an oath – “By ship’s-keel, by shield’s rim / By stallion’s shoulder, by steel’s edge” – that no-one will harm Volund’s wife bringing up her child in the hall. Nidud agrees and is told the fate of his sons. Volund flies off and the poem finishes with Nidud asking his daughter if the story of her rape is true. She confirms it: “Against his wiles I had no wit to struggle / Against his will I did not want to struggle”. In Patricia Terry’s Poems of the Vikings, an otherwise excellent set of translations of the poems of the Poetic Edda, she comments in a note, “Volund’s courtesy to Bodvild is remarkable; he hardly seemed to think of her as his ‘wife’. One is also surprised to find, at the end of the poem, that Nidud apparently honours this oath.” This seems to me an excellent example of a critic not reading carefully enough between the lines. In my reading, the impregnation of Bodvild, not the rape itself, is the climax of Volund’s revenge. He is called an elf (in fact “king of the elves”) probably since elves were associated with magic creations. So Bodvild’s child will be part elf, part conventional human. Elves and humans aren’t exactly different species but they are certainly to be seen as strongly opposed variants. I think Volund is putting into Nidud’s court a creature who will eventually grow up to destroy his grandfather and thus avenge his father. This is not an uncommon trope in medieval heroic literature and examples can be found as far afield as Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh (interestingly, written not much later than the “Lay of Volund”) where it is, for example, the basis of the Sohrab and Rostam story. Of course Volund has to ensure that Nidud doesn’t foresee this and kill Bodvild while she is pregnant. Hence the carefully phrased but strictly binding oath. It’s a trick of the sort that occurs in other eddic poems. Nidud thinks that Volund’s reference to “my wife” refers to Hervor whom he has no interest in at all. But, of course, it refers to Bodvild and so Nidud is forced to protect the very child that will grow up to kill him – a fitting climax to a great narrative poem.

As is often the case with a hypotext, uncovering its identity solves a lot of the problems of the work under consideration but it also creates a lot of new ones. At the most general level there is the issue of whether the power of the original is somehow tapped into by the later text. Can this happen? If the answer is yes then it’s an admission that at least some of the strength of a poem lies in its core content rather than any of its specific, poetic incarnations. Even more crudely, does the reader use the later text as merely a nostalgic way of remembering the power of the original: so an early twentieth century classical scholar, coming across Joyce’s Ulysses, might barely see that text and look straight through it to The Odyssey.

At the textual level there is a lot that needs saying about “Ring of Red Gold Away”. Firstly there is the issue of the dedication – “to the language” – which I have never been able to understand. In an interview with Alan Lawson in a 1975 issue of Makar, Talbot says of it, “The one [ie the introductory poem] in the second book is dedicated to the language: there’s no mention of me in it at all. It’s a narrative but it’s the verbal textures, the sounds, that are intriguing”: an explanation that doesn’t really explain anything. Secondly, “Ring of Red Gold Away” is not a pastiche of eddic style but is closer to the border ballads. Having said that, it needs to be pointed out that there are a lot of narrative similarities between the eddic poems and the ballads, especially in the way they configure the narrative, focussing on the moments of high drama and leaving out much of what comes between. But the ballads are formally done in simple rhyming patterns, a long way from the alliterative metres of the heroic poems. “Ring of Red Gold Away” isn’t exactly a copy of the ballad style (Coleridge’s “Ancient Mariner” is a much closer imitation of that style) but it is in quatrains (the middle lines are half-rhymes) with some added structural complexities: the first line of each stanza includes one of two place names arranged in an interesting pattern, all the last lines are either a variation of “one ring away” or rhyme with “away”, and so on. Weirdly enough, the result recalls, if anything, the villanelle which is the first poem of the first book, “Self-Justifying Apostrophe” – the counterpart to “Ring of Red Gold Away” – because both share the need to alter syntax so that repeated lines can be sustained. It’s a standard skill of villanelle writers and in Talbot’s earlier poem the line “I am your business & (like truth) I must / be told” is continually modified so that “like”, for example, can go from being a preposition to a verb: “you must be shown / I am your business & like truth. I must . . .” The climax of “Ring of Red Gold Away” involves moving “away” from meaning “gone” to measuring a distance so that Volund is one ring of red gold “away” from being human.

Another issue raised by comparing this poem to its original is the matter of numbers. Why do the seven hundred rings become the even more unlikely ten thousand and why are the unspecified number of warriors sent out by Nidud made specifically “fortytwo”, a number used twice? There can’t be a practical writerly reason for this since the second appearance in the line “Their fortytwo hid in Wolfdale” could perfectly easily be replaced by “The warriors hid in Wolfdale”. What is the meaning of the lines “The free man hunted in Mirkwood / when the two dark brothers came”? Nidud’s sons are not, as far as I can tell, part of the initial attack on Volund, although they could be imagined to be, a tactic which would introduce them into the narrative at an early stage. Of course any reference to two brothers early in the narrative makes one think of Volund’s two brothers off searching for their lost wives. It’s possible that some sort of Freudian, dream-like reading might be intended whereby Nidud’s two sons become conflated with Volund’s brothers and the act of killing them is part of some family psychodrama, the real issue being between the two who actively search for their wives and the one who trusts to magic to summon her. Actually this kind of reading, which I introduced in mockery, has a certain appeal. Why not see Bodvild in terms of Hervor: both wives of Volund? Why not see “fortytwo” as six times the magical number, seven? But at this point we begin to lose touch with what the author’s intentions might have been.

And, as usual, the best guide to authorial intentions when it comes to meaning are the author’s other poems. Each of the first three books contains a section of “Tristan” poems exploring the great, perhaps the central, myth of the later middle ages. These poems look at parts of the story from different points of view and are a kind of free-flowing inhabiting of a legend. I suspect that “Ring of Red Gold Away” might best be interpreted in a similar way. This would make the poem out essentially to be about love and loss, just as the Tristan narrative is. The ring is a kind of equivalent to the love-potion of Tristan and Isolde, giving love but also controlling by determining the lovers’ fates. Volund, without his beloved Hervor, is prey to the viciousnesses of the world (the family and court of Nidud) and his only escape is to rise above the human by transforming himself not into a swan but into a god. What in the “Lay of Volund” is a triumphal achievement of revenge – the great heroic desire – is, in “Ring of Red Gold Away”, a sad failure. Hence the word, “hamstrung”, is used not to describe Volund’s situation at his lowest ebb before his revenge, but his situation at the end: “Hamstrung, he limps into his fate – / smithgod, avenger, absolute, / with one red gold ring to pay”.

This lengthy attempt at analysis makes a convenient segue to the central section of Son of a Female Universe, “Tristan in the Distance”, a group of seven poems deriving from the legend of Tristan and Isolde. Generally these poems see the love from the male perspective not, as Talbot noted a number of times, in any sort of assertion of male pre-eminence, but as a matter of perspective. Since he is male, his conception of love will involve the potential expansion of the female into a cosmic principle. For a female poet, the position might be reversed. At any rate, Isolde can be expanded into the conventional threefold incarnation of mother, lover and hag, she can be the principle of the sea and, at its most extreme, the universe itself: hence here in these three books, it is a female universe. In the first of the Tristan poems, “He Drinks to Isolde on the Liner”, from Poems for a Female Universe, these multiple levels of the female are all compressed. At its most basic it might refer to the drinking of the potion on the boat ferrying the couple from Ireland to Cornwall; at another level it might well refer to the poet and his wife being ferried from England to Australia and having a celebratory scotch; but at all points the wider expansion of Isolde into the sea itself is present:

“Your eyes drink darkly in the ebb of stars
(the compliant scotch & I are not immune). 
This harmony - & then the tune untunes,
your voice clouds over – oh, you go too far
when you spread out your black hair like a storm
& wind puts down the lights along the bar! . . .”

That first line cleverly exploits a syntactic ambiguity: depending on whether the verb is “drink” or “drink in” it can be read as saying that Isolde (ie her eyes) drink the potion on the deck of the ship, under the ebbing stars, or that she imbibes the stars themselves, thus nicely embodying her dual existence as earthly woman and as cosmic principle.

Intriguingly Four Zoas of Australia, published in 1992 and really representing a later stage of Talbot’s poetic output, has a valedictory Tristan section called, fittingly, “Tristan’s Last Voyage”. Here only the expanded Isolde is present. Each of the ten poems is set on a different beach in Newcastle, “this castled City”, and the prologue finds Tristan, in age, on the wrong side of the world “this Mundane Egg”, begging for a message from his lover/muse/goddess. She responds in the following poems, but only in her incarnation as the sea: “I love her sway, her sweep of tide, / her foamwhite laugh, her breaker-ride”.

In general, the relation between Son of a Female Universe and its predecessor is that the later book should be a little less ego-centred than the earlier. Many of the Poems for a Female Universe present a theatrical, intense, male self, balanced by various degrees of irony and throwaway humour. Son of A Female Universe, aiming to be a little less male-lover-focussed, has in its Tristan section (significantly called “Tristan in the Distance”) poems that are, essentially, about the three Isoldes that the legend, remarkably, contains for, apart from the Isolde who is Tristan’s true love and fellow-drinker of the potion, there is her mother, also called Isolde and an Isolde of the White Hands whom Tristan marries (though the marriage is not consummated) while estranged from his real Isolde. There are two poems about Isolde’s mother, presiding at the moment when Tristan is cured and unmasked as the killer of Morold, her brother, when the sliver of steel embedded in his thigh is matched against the corresponding broken edge of Morold’s sword. Both poems are written in an individual, highly complex, ballad-like form that has something in common with “Ring of Red Gold Away”, especially in its repetitions:

. . . . . 
                    Isolde’s mother, old for her brother,
                    healed through her magic her daughter’s lover.
                    Hating with one mind, ached with another –

The steel chip clanked into the basin. She
fitted the little delta to the edge
of the marred sword. The aching gap

          in her spoke steeply to these ironies.
          The whole sword lifted in her hollow hand:
          His pale cock sleeping on his sleeping thigh.

                    Isolde’s mother, lacking her brother,
                    healed with magic her daughter’s future lover.
                    Past tears at one mind, future at the other.

“A Poem About 3 True Lovers” works away at the complicated issue of the relationship between Tristan and his two Isolde-lovers (Isolde of Ireland and Isolde of Brittany). It is the central poem of this little group and the only one which is not a dramatic monologue. As such it raises the issues of this complicated narrative and discusses them from what is almost a philologist’s perspective:

. . . . . 
They explain it variously,
blaming her famous hands,
politics, more love potions - 
nobody understands –

but he gave Isolde the love
already given
(the only lover in the history of earth
to be so riven!)
. . . . . 
They knew he would go back
to his true orient,
that love would not hold
that lived on love’s impediment –

yes, leaving out the wilder rumours
& transposing a few vows
we can see what must have happened
as well as such an old version allows –

but why were they both Isoldes?
What ironies rule over
the many deaths & many reputations
of the ambidextrous lover . . .? 

Finally there are three poems about the jealousy felt by Isolde (of Ireland) towards her rival. And, true to form of an Irish princess, no holds are barred. The second poem is in the form of a spell which will drive Isolde of Brittany to the far north where she will be withered and abraded to almost nothing, “pale as your nailclip / small a jerking inchmite’s hip / cold & dry & nothing left”. The most relevant to the approach I have been taking to Talbot’s Tristan poems is perhaps the first of these where Isolde’s hectic fantasies about Tristan’s life with the second Isolde produce an image of the woman spreading white wings over the man (an extension of her name, “Isolde of the White Hands”:

. . . . . 
Her white strokes fluttering over
gloating steeply on

his coast . . . my old printing . . .

Here Isolde herself uses the image of sea and land for woman and man.

The other poems of Son of a Female Universe are separated into two groups. The first of them contains some of Talbot’s most appealing poems, partly, perhaps, because they are free of the hectic love-myth of Tristan and Isolde and partly because they tend to focus on poetry itself. The first of them, “Reading My Poetry” deliberately presents a new, de-centred conception of the self in that it has three parts in which the section about the self – the middle part – is the shortest and presents the poet as no more than a neutral figure – “I pour & feel no lighter / pour & pour & get no warmer” – between the more extended sections devoted to the audience and to the words of the poems. Many of these poems invoke silence as the ground of poetry itself and a number – “Quaker Meeting”, “Silence” – specifically refer to Talbot’s Quaker origins. A particularly complex one is “Retreat with Ghosts” which (I think) records a decision to abandon the silent world, probably of a dream, inhabited by loving creatures and objects and return to the daylight world as a writer (or “righter” – the poem is full of puns). It probably has its conception in any of the myths in which a man visits the underworld (in search of mermaids, fairy queens, the dead, elixirs of immortality) and finds that readjusting to the overworld is very difficult:

What mind of love
will I need for this slideways
journey back from silence?
. . . . . 
Out in the sunlight a small country
lies between the ground & the top of the grass,
between the sun’s clangour & the damp reach.

In the lucid water fish have learned
how to design themselves. As in a sleep
my face wavers downwards. I return.

& return righting. I was a lie
to myself to founder in their worlds
though they loved me & were glad. . .

The last poem of this first section, “Steppingstones, Linton-in-Craven”, is a complex but essentially traditional piece (what might be called a set-piece, symbolic landscape poem). But it’s also an explicit poem-poem – the stepping-stones over the river symbolise Talbot’s poems, their upper side dry and turned to the sun but the underside bearing the damp of the underworld of dreams and of the home of the ghosts of “Retreat with Ghosts”. The stepping-stones are made to parallel the inscribed gravestones of the nearby church and the river is both the flow of reality and the process of thoughts through the brain:

. . . . . 
The rainstones will whiten in the sun
to a dry heart with a wet heart under.
Always the streams halfcircle
in their currents & break
round the tongueslidden side.

Between stones & grass I write
buried in flow & resisting.
A stone is two stones
a clingweed darkness & a leaping light.
From poem to poem there is nothing to hold.

The subtitle of the third section, “One of My Changes of Garments”, is taken from Whitman and alerts us to the fact that these poems will neither be about the self, or the self refracted through the Tristan myth but will be explorations of quite different personalities. Of course the quote from Whitman – “I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, / I myself become the wounded person” – tells us that these will not be poems of simple, external observation: empathy will be involved. Mind you there is not much empathy – more a sort of repelled analysis – in poems like “American Fragments” – an anthology of portraits in itself – “’Those Little, Nameless, Unremembered Acts’” – a portrait of the commandant of Auschwitz and his hobby of making wooden models, and “The Anarchist’s Villanelle” – “’You just don’t think that can break the bars / having once used your prosperous idioms – / you don’t know I can step upon the stars . . .” Many of the poems are clouded by the backdrop of the violence of the war in Vietnam and there are those, like “Alabama by Radio” and “To Muhammed Ali” which engage the American trauma of black-white relations but my favourite among them, “A Poem for Guy-Fawkes’-Night”, is entirely English in its setting (the tower of Durham Cathedral) and its concerns. Again, in a symbolic scene, the children look upwards to follow the fireworks while their fathers mine below ground:

. . . . . 
Over the village fires the light
of rockets bursting dazzles the smooth sky
& tilts kids’ faces – just for a moment – high.
Their downshift fathers bend beneath the night

& patiently hew eighty feet below the path.
Lungs like pavements lift, check, slide,
& the sons watch flares & bright rockets ride
the alien air like strokes of faith,

drive for a moment up at the old night.
The boys sign up like this each Guy-Fawkes’-Day
until they go down, grown-up, the only way
out of the reach of light.

In a sense it’s more conventional than most of Talbot’s poetry but the context of the other poems of the book prevents it being seen as no more than a comment on the fate of the industrial workers in an English mining town because a poem like the earlier “Retreat with Ghosts” focussed on the way poems must have a dry upper surface and a moist, earth-impregnated lower one. Crossing this with “A Poem for Guy-Fawkes’-Night” complicates the issue of the over- and under-world a little and there may well be a touch of regret and even guilt in Talbot’s comment early in the poem that the poet’s point of view (from the Cathedral tower) is “high up and safe”.

Norman Talbot died in 2004 aged sixty-seven. He has never been well-served by Australian literary history and appears in very few anthologies. You can find him in Shapcott’s Australian Poetry Now, Les Murray’s The New Oxford Book of Australian Verse (where he is represented by a single shrewdly chosen but atypical poem), and John Kinsella’s Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry. But you won’t find him in anthologies like the Mead and Tranter The Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry or the Lehmann and Gray Australian Poetry Since 1788. I think that is a shame: his poetic output already looks more worth the keeping than those of many poets who are widely anthologised. It may have something to do with his origins as an English poet though mixed origins don’t usually damage reputations in Australia. He is a vivid and frequent presence in Gwen Harwood’s letters (collected in Greg Kratzmann’s A Steady Storm Of Correspondence) which shows that at least one slightly older contemporary had a lot of respect for him both as man and poet.

Kate Middleton: Passage

Artarmon: Giramondo, 2017, 117pp.

Kate Middleton’s first book, Fire Season, contained, spread throughout the book, a group of poems built out of the biographies of Hollywood actresses interwoven with other, often personal, material. As a group these poems tend to progress towards more self-conscious “essays” so that Doris Day becomes part of an essay on purity, Judy Garland an essay on absence, and Clara Bow an essay on erasure. I begin with these not to tease out their meanings but to show that the model of poems in a particular mode spread throughout a book – which is how this new book, Passage, is constructed – is something that is present from the beginning. A writer should always avoid contemporary critical cant but this does seem a case where the word, “braiding”, is unavoidable. You can apply it to the methods of the construction of individual poems like the actress ones, or even, in the case of Middleton’s second book, Ephemeral Waters, to a single, hundred page poem which follows the course of the Colorado River and thus mimics the interlaced flow of the water.

Passage twines together both modal and thematic threads. There are, for example, a series of centos spaced throughout the book and also a series of “erasures” – a mode which, technically, can be said to make a poem by erasing slabs of an existing text but which more accurately makes a poem by selecting words and phrases always in the order in which they appear in the original. Centos always seem to me to be more work than the results are worth and erasures rarely produce anything compelling though they have the advantage over centos that, whereas centos really almost always endorse their original, erasures can have a complex relationship to their parent text, summarising and compressing but also critiquing and distorting. Although the centos of Passage derive from a number of texts (works by Mark Strand, Eliot Weinberger, Roland Barthes and James Schuyler but also non-fictional, “scientific” texts) the erasures are an extended engagement with a single book, S.P.B. Mais’s This Unknown Island, a 1933 collection of avuncular travel pieces devoted to various sites in England, Wales and Scotland.

I’m very taken with the poems that result from this. The titles allow themselves to operate at the level of syllables so that Mais’s “North Wales: Anglesey and the Mountains” becomes “Nor Angle In”, for example, and “Lancashire: Pendle and the Trough of Bowland” becomes “Ash and Rough”. But this degree of freedom doesn’t extend to the body of the poems: there only words and phrases are selected. And the selecting is very sparse: it takes a hundred and seventy words at the opening of “Haworth: The Bronte Country” to produce the first sentence of the erasure, “Haw Count”: “Have you ever played a hillsman away from bleak, brooding freedom?” Although it’s difficult to generalise entirely confidently, the poems usually convey the atmospherics of place that the essays focus on but do so in compressed and sometimes distorting ways. “Peat Lea” is derived from “The Peak District: Grouse-Moors and Lead Mines” an interesting essay on Derbyshire which first situates that county metonymically (and horizontally) as “a sort of Lilliput England, enshrined in the very heart of England, with all England’s most characteristic beauties reproduced in miniature . . .” and then gets to work with the image of descent (here into ancient and still operating lead mines) as a journey back into the past. Much of this is preserved in Middleton’s poem:

Think of home. The home of your ancestors. Of sun
and a child’s alphabet. A Lilliput of words and meadows.
          Blast it with dynamite.

Quarry the veneer of candour, misleading not in size
but symmetry. Say “starving”. Mean “cold”. Our ancestors
                     - blue, vast – have been lost.

But underfoot the telegraph wires can be revived
if they keep to the open moor.

.  . . . .
                   Put on a cap. Bend down. Descend
through solid, wet rock; distant light. A black hole above.
               An odd smell everywhere. Surface.

          ( - This business of separation is
a lantern guaranteed not to fail.)

It’s hard to determine Middleton’s exact stake in this entire process. At one extreme you can imagine her setting out to retrace Mais’s book by visiting all its carefully mapped sites and for all I know she might have done so. At any rate it must be significant that this chapter on Derbyshire – its delights and its mines – includes a reference to a gorge called Middleton Dale. It’s also worth noting that, unlike the series of poems which derive from the TV Science Fiction series, Fringe, this series of erasures appears in Passage in exactly the same order as they appear in Mais’s book. This begins to make the idea of interlacing vertiginously complicated. The erasures look not so much like a coloured thread that emerges into the surface of the material at intervals so much as a set of pieces spliced into a film. There is a big difference between splicing and weaving but “spliced” is a word which occurs in one of the more conventionally produced poems, “Lighthouse, Cape Otway”, where the lighthouse on the Great Ocean Road is imagined to be a scar sealing the “gash made by human / loss” and its light “spliced a safe path / through the shipwreck coast, a line through // slur of water, jag of rock . . .”

It’s hard to know whether the six poems based on the series, Fringe, should be categorised modally or thematically. Perhaps the correct answer is both since, modally, they operate as glosses on their television originals, momentarily inhabiting that world. They are often intense compressions of telling images of a sort that is not uncommon in poems that have their origins in films (David McCooey’s Kubrick sequence comes to mind as do Carmen Leigh Keates’s poems deriving from Tarkovsky and Bergman). But they also exploit the series’ premise about alternate realities and the perspective this gives on both personality and place. This presumably accounts for the fact that the ordering of these poems doesn’t match that of the series. They begin with a poem based on a late episode in which the central character doesn’t know whether she is in her own reality or “over there”:

Before memory takes the graft, the stasis of the past

the real past – if there is real anymore – plays like the engine

of a fear whose source is lost . . .

a reminder that the overall pattern of the interweavings of this book is one not simply concerned with passage as a movement between places (a poem in Middleton’s first book began with the dangerously quotable line, “I want to find a poetry of place and object”) or passages of text that give rise to the centos and erasures but also with the passage of time. And one of the interests in time is the way in which speculative fictions, located in the past, create alternative realities (alternative, at least when judged by the way history has turned out). So a cento, “Dispatches from Earth”, based on the imaginary Sir John Mandeville’s book of equally imaginary travels (widely accepted as accurate in the late middle ages) presents it as a kind of work of science fiction. There are also a series of charms spread throughout Passage which probably should be categorised modally since that have that instructional, imperative quality of actions with magical properties, and there are also a number of poems based on paintings which might form their own group or might be associated with the science-fiction poems.

Then, finally, there are the lyric poems which occupy something like a third of the book and which sound like poems written by the author of the poems of Fire Season. There are personal poems, a number of which are about separation which is, after all, a kind of dislocation in space. One of these, “Intercontinental”, is quite positive in tone:

. . . . . 
Yet

     we walk a common metre
     weigh a common kilogram

make of day and night (my
day, your night)
an Esperanto

but reveals in its opening how Middleton’s voice in this lyric mode, along with that of many English language poets, has problems with the complications of the way English uses articles to mark degrees of specificity:

Now sunlight gores the day
invites
autopsy of shadows
makes unlikely myth
of night . . .

“Day” is preceded by a definite article but not “night”. Although this choice makes for better rhythms you feel that the sense demands indefinite articles before “autopsy” and “myth” and a parallel definite article before “night”. It’s a difficult problem for poets to negotiate and English often demands a precision of specificity that a writer doesn’t want or need. It isn’t a problem in other poetries, and you can imagine an English-language poet wishing he or she had been born in China or Japan.

Others of these poems in the lyric mode engage with the themes of the book as a whole. “The Queen’s Ocean” is about Marie Antoinette’s interest in the voyages of Cook and focusses on the way the texts allow her imaginatively to enter a world far from her prison – by creating an ocean she had never seen. And the title poem derives from a news report of the opening of the Northwest Passage for the first time in a century now warming has melted the ice. It contrasts Franklin’s frozen expedition (the north as a site of heroic discovery and failure) with the phenomenon of bowhead whales from the Atlantic and the Pacific meeting up for the first time. There is also a strong interest in two sorts of text: Franklin’s final document is contrasted with the documents the whales bring with them, “the jade, the slate, the ivory / sharps / lodged in blubber . . . / that could not ply through // a full half-metre of chub”, messages of a kind from the whalers of the nineteenth century.

The most important (and most difficult) of these poems in the lyric mode is the first, which stands outside the book’s divisions (Past, Present, Future and again Future). Significantly it is called “Lyric” and, in beginning with a line from Dan Beachy-Quick’s A Whaler’s Dictionary – itself a book very much concerned with words and worlds – perhaps forms some sort of bridge to the book’s text-derived centos and erasures.

The whale by the whale’s own light
                    The song by song’s own mesh of I
of we: the zoomorph of lion, man
                    and gentle coo of lullaby

Voice – I, we – dissects this sea
                    and whale carves history from the bone
lions pace the den of sleep
                    and explorer’s ship moors upon

the whaler’s coast          Voices torn,
                    pieced, re-sewn           In lion light,
in whale song, in sleep that follows
                    lullaby, in wakening of lyric night

song stages history’s long speech
                    reads whaler’s voyage, lion’s maw
Opens field of ancient voice
                                        Folds its origami:          Form

That’s quite a formidable portal to a complex book and it gives the impression of having been written last to touch on some of the book’s images (one of the painting poems is based on Ruben’s drawing of a lion). Though unintended, it prepares us for the awkwardness with articles – “in wakening of lyric night”, “opens field of ancient voice” – but it also makes a strong statement about the way in which voice animates an ocean of meaning providing focus, form, and map to what is otherwise an incomprehensible field. In other words, I read this as a powerful assertion of a humanist position whereby it is the human element, discovered in texts and released from them by a process of tearing, piecing and resewing that is paramount. A poetry obsessed by place will also be a poetry obsessed by inhabitants. Most interesting is that, apart from the notion of patchwork resewing, “Lyric” doesn’t speak in terms of weaving or interlacing. Its two terms for the relationships that make up form are “mesh” and “origami”. The former might be an image suggesting woven cloth (though it more likely connects to a net, perhaps even a conceptual net) but the latter is one in which complex folds make up a work of art. In Beachy-Quick’s book, the line “The whale by the whale’s own light” refers to the irony that a book about whales is read under the illumination provided by the oil of whales but in “Lyric” the emphasis seems to be that each creature provides the conceptual net through which it must be seen. “Lyric”, with its intriguing difficulties, is a reminder that Passage is a sophisticated and challenging book looking at the act of being in a place and also the act of writing from a kaleidoscope of interwoven points of view – if kaleidoscopes can be interwoven, that is.

Fay Zwicky: The Collected Poems of Fay Zwicky, Edited and Introduced by Lucy Dougan and Tim Dolin

Crawley, WA: UWA Publishing, 2017, 388pp.

There is a minor but delicate problem with this book that arises right at the beginning and is reflected in the heading of this review: how should it be titled. Released, according to its publisher’s website, days before Zwicky’s death, The Collected Poems of Fay Zwicky, edited by Lucy Dougan and Tim Dolin, has a distinctly posthumous sound to it, rather like a scholarly edition of a classic author – The Collected Poems of Kenneth Slessor, for example. Marvellous as Zwicky’s poetry can be – and I have always felt that her intense ethical engagement with the world coupled with a very tough, intelligent and humorous scepticism about virtually everything including herself, has made her one of the Australian poets who speaks most sympathetically to me – it isn’t yet that of an established classic and the title might be criticised as an attempt to smuggle her in immediately after her death. It is, in the long run, a minor issue but one feels for the publisher and editors who must have pondered long and hard over the title.

Poetic careers are made up of a combination of stable, unchanging elements and developments over time. Your view of poetry (and, probably, life generally) will influence which of these mean more to you. Zwicky is a good case in point. The two most important of the ever-presents that I find in her work are an ethical concern with “care” and a bracing, sceptical intelligence directed equally towards the outer world and her own, inner life. The first of these is a complex phenomenon. I have written about it briefly in a review of Zwicky’s Picnic on this site (where I endorsed Ivor Indyk’s excellent article on the ethical dimensions of Zwicky’s poetry, an endorsement I would like to take the opportunity to repeat). My interest was in the extent to which this derived from cultural perspectives: in Zwicky’s case an underlying Jewishness. As for many people in the twentieth century who were born into a secular middle-class environment, discovering Jewish roots among forebears was not an exciting adventure into origins but an enquiry into certain aspects of one’s intellectual set-up and, simultaneously, an attempt to define how one related to one of the great persecuted ethnicities of that century. Zwicky herself in the essay “Border Crossings” – included by the editors in this book – acknowledges Job as the central image of this tradition in contrast to Prometheus who stands for the opposed, Greek, tradition. In an essay in The Lyre in the Pawnshop she describes this inherited worldview as:

a whole way of being at home in the world that is best described by the word “reverence” which accords life meaning in terms of debt to something. One is what one owes, what one acknowledges as rightful obligation, what one feels about the taking of responsibility for oneself and for others.

This is a stance which underlies almost all the poems of her collected work. It seems as close as we can come to Zwicky’s essential poetic character though it isn’t without complexities and paradoxes especially when put in a volatile proximity to the second of these stable elements, an intellectual scepticism.

“Rightful obligation” takes the form of the imperative of care and it’s a theme that produces some of Zwicky’s best poetry. Mrs Noah, from the sequence “Ark Voices”, is a figure whose outlines have become steadily more solid and imposing as the years have passed since the sequence was first collected in Kaddish in 1982 – and that is not something that one could say has happened to many of the mouthpiece characters of Australian poetry in the last half-century. As in the other poems in this sequence, Mrs Noah speaks directly to God (“sir”) and her tone is one of complaint. Her burden, unlike that of her husband – “a large sweet soul and incorruptible” – whose actions are marked by an unquestioning dedication to the commands of God, is exactly that of “care”. Her task is to keep the entire animal world safe while the little ark floats above the results of the greatest holocaust in legendary history, afloat on God’s “watery negative”. Care is more than a matter of keeping bodies together like a good nurse – “Yes, / I’m just about to lance the horse’s leg” – because it leads to an involvement in whatever it was that caused the need for care. Mrs Noah, unlike her husband, is engaged in an ethical argument with God (as Job was, if only fleetingly) and, more important, is the one who hears the call of those beyond her care:

                  The speckled pigeon
and the tawny owl have drawn me to the edge.
The drowned folk call to me:
Deliver us from harm!

Deliver, sir, deliver them
and all of us . . .

I’d never thought about these last lines too much on earlier readings of this poem, being distracted by the importance of the idea of the drowned calling the living. I think that the prayer for deliverance is supposed to be seen, on the surface(!), as applying to the inhabitants of the ark, but its proximity to the drowned makes it a prayer for them as well, impossible as “deliverance” is in a religion without a transformative afterlife.

Mrs Noah’s voice and concerns ripple throughout Zwicky’s work. Interestingly they can be heard in an earlier poem from her first book, Isaac Babel’s Fiddle, a poem in which the poet and her husband arrive at Urbana in the US mid-west in the middle of a dark December and in the middle of a fungus plague which has destroyed the town’s elms:

. . . . . 
People keep saying how normal it all is. They have seen
Disease, the day all the elms in Urbana died overnight:
Stretched beside my husband I have been found unfit
For saying what kind of place is this to bring
Children to when what I really mean is I am frightened
By the smell, the corruption of death, the shouting
Tides of my death specifically, an old woman fallen
Out of space, unready.
                                          Flooded, I shake in the dark. My hands,
Encrusted with apple-scab, lame the stride of his dream . . .

Just as Mrs Noah’s cosmic cares don’t stop her from including her husband among those who must be at least reckoned with, so here the speaker worries that she hampers the “stride” of her husband’s professional ambitions. And then there is “The Gatekeeper’s Wife”, the title sequence of Zwicky’s 1997 volume. This is a series of brief poems, framed in a kind of Roethkian invented myth of the self whose details we never fully learn. But the speaker herself, mourning her lost husband, lays out a version of this ethics of care:

When a man died
My ancestors lit a candle.
It guaranteed eternal memory.

Severed from my ancestors
I light a candle for you
Every night inside a clay house.
Memory is only half the story.

And, late in the sequence, she speaks of herself as “Maimed by compassion”.

Care also produces a sequence of poems about caring for the dying. They make up a substantial component of the third section of Ask Me, beginning with “Hospice Training”, an intellectual’s protest against the demeaning necessity to master the cliched language of health administrators, keeping its dignity by a lightly buried Shakespearian allusion – “I’m feeling murderous, / listening to the air explode / before their words put out the light”. It concludes with a story about a father, the iconic figure of all of these elegies:

. . . . .
When Lucia, Joyce’s agonised daughter
heard about her father’s death, she said:
“What is he doing under the ground, that idiot?
When will he decide to come out?
He’s watching us all the time.”

That doesn’t sound insane to me.
If you were ever a writer’s child
you’d know the terror of the word
from the mouth of a primary carer.

They put her in,
these masters of language,
breakers of the whys and hows of a tale,
deciders of your fitness for the road,
who tell you how to mourn
and how to die . . .

“Hospice Training” is followed by a number of examples of caring for the dying, all recounted unsentimentally, often humorously and with a sharp-eyed observation of both patient and self as though interacting with the dying were a crucial way of obtaining information about what it is like to be a human being.

And all such interactions of course produce what one might think of as proto-elegies with the subjects in death’s waiting room. Zwicky’s elegies – seen in the light of a collected poems to be not just an occasional genre but something fundamental to her whole poetry deriving from the idea of care, care for the memory and the name – are probably something that should be looked into with more critical devotion than I can afford here. The starting point is, inevitably, her poem, “Kaddish”, an elegy in memory of her father (though it isn’t the first: there is a conventional elegy for the painter Ries Mulder in Isaac Babel’s Fiddle and a number of the other poems in that book hover around the genre of memorial). Later elegies are often memorials to fellow poets including those for Vincent Buckley, Hart-Smith and James Legasse. (Other memorials are not necessarily elegies, of course, and there are a couple of them which venture into the comic: one, for the English poet, Charles Causley, is imagined as an ocker phone call from the bush, another, for Ted Hughes, mimics that poet’s Crow poems and “Finding Focus” is dedicated to Vivian Smith, a coeval and fellow wartime Argonaut.) Of all the elegies, the one that has stayed with me most is, paradoxically, the least specific. “The Young Men” is an elegy for all those who died before any kind of fulfilling achievement, most likely “in their country’s wars”. They come “with shattered skulls, intestines trailing / in the sand . . .” and they are examples of the “drowned folk” who call to the living. Their message is that the life which the living poet lives – of “book and candle, / night light burning infantile, shoes tucked / beneath” – has long since lost the power to repel the call of the dead:

“. . . . . 
silence lasts forever. Listen, while you can,
to unseen saplings somewhere falling.”
Young men, you dear young men, I’m listening.

“Kaddish” is a large scale, almost operatic piece and, I think, shouldn’t be seen as representing the core of Zwicky’s elegiac mode. It’s subject – the father – does, of course, belong to the elegiac core since the relationship between poet and good man is here strongest. It’s operatic not only in its slightly baroque ambitions towards grandeur but also in the way it accommodates other voices than the poet/daughter’s. It also accommodates other modes apart from the solemn especially when it moves into nursery rhyme. There is also a colouring of folk-tale when Zwicky sees herself as the eldest of three daughters, the wicked one accompanied by the wise one and the simple one. I suspect that musical analogies lie behind its structure and not the model of the Jewish prayer for the dead and, if I could pursue this line of enquiry, I’d look first at the late Beethoven quartets, invoked in a later poem, “Pie in the Sky”, which is a humorous experiment, responding to the imperative, “Only connect”.

(It is worth noting that one of the later, uncollected poems that Dougan and Dolin have included marks a painful closing of the circle of the issues of caring. In “In Rehab” the poet gets the fatal diagnosis, at dusk, from a black man, Dr Kiberu, “geriatric oncologist supremo” who wishes he had better news. At the very end, the endless ethical complexities of caring get dissolved when one is in the position where one can only be the recipient of care. Zwicky’s recorded response is interesting: “Being well brought up I thanked him warmly, / My mother would have been so proud”.)

Revisiting “Kaddish” I’m struck by its epigraph – “Lord of the divided, heal!” – which has stayed oddly memorable. This may be because it looks like a slight modification of something completely and uninterestingly conventional – “Lord of divided Israel, hail!” – but more likely because the idea of dividedness is so important in Zwicky’s poetry. Again, in the conventional sense, there are those in exile (productive or paralysed) divided from their homelands but there is also the sense of division within the family (accorded a central status here), division between husband and wife and, especially, division between a daughter and her father who dies, away from her, on a sea voyage, thus preventing the daughter from making final apologies and accommodations. In a sense a later poem from the hospice series, “Afloat”, is a kind of addendum to “Kaddish”, celebrating love of father from the adutlt perspective of parenthood:

. . . . . 
Each day I waited for the toy-box
called an Austin
to rumble down the street
between the elms towards a
grey-green Melbourne sea,
jumping the running board
to ride that little strip of freedom
called “our drive” before our mother
collared us to silence:
“Be quiet. Don’t disturb your father.”

Would it disturb you now
to know I know what duty let you in for?
Or to tell you how, each day,
I wait that day’s-end glimpse
of the whispering sea?

In “Kaddish” – as well as in many of the poems from Isaac Babel’s Fiddle – we meet the frustrations of guilt which is a kind of dark counterpart to the imperative of caring. Zwicky’s father, an admired and sympathetic doctor, is a carer and his daughter, rebellious in an entirely conventional teen-aged way, can only feel later (and perhaps at the time) that she is ungrateful, a “wicked”, child. “Isaac Babel’s Fiddle Reaches the Indian Ocean” describes how Babel, destined for life in a performing troupe, and given violin and money by his impoverished father, suddenly decides on a different career and throws the violin onto Odessa’s sandbar. Zwicky responds to this as a parallel to her own decision to abandon life as Julia Rosefield with a possible career as a concert pianist and become, instead, Mrs Fay Zwicky. As the poem says, “whose voice / Did you obey that day you / Sounded out the waterfront?” and though it’s imperative to obey this call, it doesn’t lessen the guilt produced by a decision that puts the maker at odds with, even in exile from, the family.

Guilt is often comically connected with the values of Jewish culture, probably internalised from a history of prophets and writers finding that the only possible explanation for the god of the universe’s inability to protect his people from a range of real-world threats beginning with the Canaanites and progressing on through the Assyrians must lie in the faults of those people themselves. But whatever its status, it’s a wonderful antidote to any poet’s tendency to inflate themselves into a lyrical ego. Zwicky’s sense of self, though it is one of the themes that adds nuances as this book progresses, is always wry and simultaneously sharp and humble. The first poem of her first book is a two-part piece which puts together a poem written as an undergraduate celebrating, in the mildly hieratic tone of that time, a youthful love affair – “made / One and still divided in burning clarity of / Self . . .” – with a sharp critique of the same poem written twenty years later: an example of re-evaluation in visible action. And in the book’s second poem she is happy to characterise herself (among much else that is equally self-critical) as “fraught with quibble and / Linguistic tic, pernickety ironic nit-picking / Academic.”

This defining and understanding of the self, especially its intellectual dimension, is another of the continuous themes in Zwicky’s work. It’s intimately related to the experience of other cultures and again, now we have all of the poems together, it’s extraordinary how what had always seemed to be incidental in the individual books, now seems so coherent and important. Zwicky has always said that it was the literature of the United States which made poetry possible for her in what is really a wasteland: “The concerns of Australian literature have always appeared essentially solitary, inward-turning, never outer-directed, the babble of speech masking a dumb void . . .” and her first poems of visiting are, significantly, about America. (A poem like “Memorial Day & Tornado” from Isaac Babel’s Fiddle, which seemed fairly incidental when first read, now looks like an early essay at dealing with the theme of memorialising. It concludes with a list of – to an Australian – bizarre American names – “Bagby Bobowski Clabaugh Coonz . . .” – arranged cruciform fashion.) Other books include poems of visits to other cultures including Indonesia, India and China, cultures infinitely removed from the Levantine culture of reverence that is the basis of Zwicky’s sense of herself. Zwicky acknowledges as much in the first of the poems about the Somnapura temple which is devoted to the elephant-headed god, Ganesh:

. . . . . 
A light shaft strikes the stone,
mints spry slumped corpulent Ganesh,
elephant-crowned runt
of jealous Siva,
the enormous first parent –

Grant, O Lord, we beseech Thee
won’t do here –

It’s not an environment in which the intimate, pleading arguments of “Ark Voices” or the ambitious anthology of voices and modes in “Kaddish” make any sense at all. The Indian poems are balanced in Ask Me by a suite of poems based on a visit to China – in 1988 this was perhaps more of voyage into the unknown than it would be thirty years later. The opening poem revolves about defining the poet’s self in terms of the Chinese system of animal totems:

. . . . . 
I am a Rooster.
Honest, frank, obliging, difficult
to live with.
Spot on, so far. What’s this?
Vain? Despotic? Prickly about criticism?
Perhaps there’s nothing in it
after all . . .

It’s impressive how un-European these visits are (one thinks of Zwicky’s familiarity with Indonesia) and how, at the same time, they avoid the obvious pitfalls of “travel-writing” and, just as this Collected lets us see these “poems of foreignness” as a recurring mode, so it also suggests how close to the core of Zwicky’s poetry her narrative sequences are. “A Tale of the Great Smokies” from Ask Me, a long set of narratives that I have never felt entirely comfortable with, uses the trick of overlaying The Odyssey on a contemporary rural story and “The Terracotta Army at Xi’an” from Picnic is, like “Ark Voices”, one of those sequences which explores individuals whose personalities refract a core situation. That core is the presence of the first emperor, Quinshihuang, the builder of the wall and the burner of books. The last of the portraits is of the Potter and in its portrayal of the meeting of warlord and artist it not only visits a well-worn theme but probably also provides a disguised portrait of Zwicky the poet at the same time as recalling the voice of Mrs Noah:

. . . . .
                    Remember to stay calm.
Or, as our saying goes,
“Hide your broken arms in your sleeves.”
Who am I to pit the hollow of my skull
against tyrannic arsenals, soft body parts
afloat with sewer rats, heaped skulls,
atrocities of conquest? . . .

The particular branch of a concern with the self which might be called a concern with the poetic self is the issue that one can trace developing across Zwicky’s career as it’s captured in this book. Whereas the culture of reverence and memory, with its inevitable outcomes of caring and guilt, is a kind of ground base, inflected by different events at different times but remaining essentially essential, Zwicky’s interest in what is involved in the act of making poetry is one that develops throughout her career, beginning with the satirical portraits of a performing poet at the end of Kaddish and including the calmly introspective meditation at the end of “Makassar, 1956” where a detailed account of her “flight” from family and career is concluded by a section detailing her interest in the way in which an image, encountered at what is really one of life’s crisis-points, can wait for a half-century to become a poem. She sees, on her first morning, a wedding procession and later, three heavily-veiled women:

. . . . . 
My heart stood open like a door – the bride looked
very nervous sitting, eyes downcast, beside her thin
proud groom in a little cart bringing up the rear.
As it jolted past us in the warm rain, I felt a poem
Starting to take shape under the reedy rhythms of the band.
It settled on my heart for nearly fifty years . . .

The move from initial comments about poetry and its engagement with an empty landscape to an interest in the mysterious inner workings of creativity can be traced across the entire book in poems like “Orpheus”, “Poems and Things”, “What Fills”, “Groundswell for Ginsberg”, “Close-Up”, “Hokusai on the Shore” and “The Ivy Visitant”, a symbolic set-piece in which a praying mantis, shaken out of the ivy onto the poet’s arm, becomes a vehicle for the poem itself, “something planted speechless / in the dark, waiting out its season”. In the late poems, there is no interest in large generalisations – something at odds with Zwicky’s habitual cast of intellect – but a kind of forensic fascination. About half way we come across a poem like “The Caller”, a brilliant set-piece devoted to the statue at the Art Gallery of Western Australia which, in its stance of “wordless patience”, expresses for Zwicky something of her own fate:

. . . . . 
Prompt me, brother. What is required of me,
long failed, who once craved silence
stillness timelessness? Obedient and rebellious
to what end? . . .

It seems just a fraction over-intense for this poet and one might explain this by saying that it deliberately mimics (or takes the opportunity to mimic) the statue’s over-the-top, expressionist conception. But it too is concerned with creative origins – “It can’t be / forced but, like the sparrow’s fall, will come” – and thus asks to be measured against “Genesis” the second-last poem of her last book. “Genesis” includes a bathetic rehearsal of all the possible sources for her own poetry, asking “what’s it going to be” this time:

. . . . .
Will it be one more bulletin from the zone
of dread? Another bleat of unbelonging?
Or some grim soot-faced riff on the long-dead,
the incantatory singsong of nostalgia - 
serial murders, violated wombs, decay
the foot-in-mouth neuralgia of our days? . . .

It may be that this list is no more than a list of the sources of bad poems by others but it’s hard not to see a phrase like “riff on the long-dead” as referring to the poems of the responsibility for the memory of the dead that have been part of Zwicky’s remit. And if the bathetic tone of “Genesis” wasn’t enough to convince us that Zwicky’s view of the mystery of poetic creativity is not going to be surrounded by clouds of elevated but obfuscating glory, there is the poem that follows it in Picnic, and, in a sense, the one that says goodbye. It’s a comic treatment of an invitation to read her poems “in a garden / somewhere in the city of / light” and the way in which a poet’s inevitable fantasies of “lovers lounging, children rapt / drowsy grandmothers, a hermit / or two, an emperor awake to / prophetic nightingales and / clusters of attentive courtiers / hanging on your every word” are punctuated by the dismissive comments of “a flat-vowelled crow”. No room for wish-fulfillment here, either in the stony wastes of Western Australia or in the bracing climate of Zwicky’s intellectual temperament.

Shastra Deo: The Agonist; Charlotte Guest: Soap

The Agonist, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2017, 87pp.
Soap, Canberra: Recent Work Press, 2017, 46pp.

Shastra Deo’s poems seem to inhabit the same symbolic space. This makes The Agonist recall something like Galway Kinnell’s Book of Nightmares (though there may be much more recent and current examples outside the scope of my reading) despite the fact that the tone of the poems is much different. But you feel that there is a continuous symbolic landscape that the poems inhabit even though different poems occupy different parts of that landscape. Generally, the poems, as the title suggests, are about conflicts but these conflicts are never the clash of immovable objects or positions. An even more important principle in the mini-mythology Deo has created is that conflicts involve interpenetrations: these are poems where the border lines between one individual and another, or between an individual and the world are, if clearly defined, important sites of definition, mapping and change. Though many of the poems explore relationships between individuals, these are often people who have some sort of stake with each other, as lovers, brothers, parents and children.

In “The Bering Sea”, which is probably as good an introduction to the poems of this book as any, two siblings – the speaker and the speaker’s brother – make a kind of imaginary angled journey across America from the coast off Alaska, through Minnesota and Tennessee to Florida – from cold to warmth – one stanza per location:

Brother, do you remember the Bering Sea,
where we promised to go home again?
You caught rock greenling and I slid the knife
into their bellies – bird-egg blue, like your eyes at noon.
Brother, what a match we were: you,
the stolid fisherman’s son, and me,
a fisher of men.
. . . . . 

I will confess, brother, that
that night I dreamed of taking a knife
to your belly, the hidden machinations
of your body spilling past your palms,
the smell of it hot and rich like venison.

Brother, this is how I remember the end of the Bering Sea:
melted ice in overturned glasses, blood on my hands.
Far down the beach there was soft breath and silence
and the sound of your leaving.

That final reference to leaving touches on a recurring theme in this book but the dream of gutting also stands out as one form of the obsession these poems have with the insides of the body. One of the strengths of this poetry, it seems to me, is that the physical, inner world is taken as literally as the outer, even to the extent of including anatomical drawings in the pages of the book itself. Whereas poetry is happy to invoke the insides of the body it usually does this at a fairly generalised level as the world of hearts, kidneys, livers and lungs. Deo’s voyages under the skin are replete with all the precise technical language one could imagine. This turns the body’s interior into the known, precisely mapped world which holds its own in the conflict with the outer body of shape and skin and with the mistier realms of the inner – emotional and intellectual – life which poetry so often wants to make more specific.

In “Anatomy of Being”, a clever alphabet poem, each of the precisely delineated sections of the body is mapped as the home of a more abstract sensation – “. . . the worry forcibly exhaled by the / pyramidalis muscle; the panic placed, / quietly, in the quadrangular membrane. / Rumination held, always, in the / stomach, in its roils and rugae . . .”. And something similar happens in the book’s final poem, “Salt, Sugar” – whose title derives from the joke involved in saying “Pass me the salt, sugar”:

. . .  . .
          They didn’t stop searching until they found the sorrow,
tucked away in your thoracic viscera, the longing
distilled in the pedicle of your liver, hunger
hidden in the mitral valve of your heart . . .

And since the insides match the outsides in terms of precision it is no surprise that insides should be harnessed in the search for meaning. This is the reason for the numerous references to the various kinds of augury. What is, to most readers, a bizarre offshoot of humankind’s endless search for an ability to understand the processes of events is, in this book, something to be treated seriously, not for its lurid evocations of a magical world but as part of the way the interior is as compelling as the exterior. “Anatomy of Being” concludes “Each / zygapophysis interlocked, the process of prophecy in reverse”. That is: what holds the components of the body together fights against the processes of dismemberment which can lead to divination. “Concerning Divination” devotes itself to the issue of prediction through the flight and song of birds before concluding with the figure of Prometheus and describing his personal vulture as a haruspex

who grew weary of sectioning his liver
day after day, only to uncover
the same omen, regrown
and promptly forgotten.

I’ve focussed on this recurring image of ways of uncovering meaning from an investigation of the inside of a body but it is worth pointing out that Deo’s poems are also interested in the skin – the barrier between inner and outer. The skin too has its system of meaning most obviously in the still-surviving myths of palmistry. “Little Fists” begins by saying “The map – /made of tendons and bone shards / -written in your little fists / unfurled and vanished / when you took my hand” and “Knife Edge”, which is a good example of the principle of interpenetration (“I think I was thinking / skin should not separate us”) finishes with the blood welling up from a partner’s cut wrist “drowning / the fate lines / etched in my palm”. Finally, “Haven”, which I think is to be imagined as describing a couple faced with a post-apocalyptic nuclear winter (although that might, conceivably, be no more than an over-the-top metaphor for the decline of a perfectly conventional domestic relationship) ends with the woman describing the man’s back – “And his back, freckled / with oracular precision, the site / of more soothsaying than the stars above”.

The central section of The Agonist is highly organised and made up of a number of units – the life of a soldier, a boxer’s son, some found poems from the first line index of The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry and three three-part dream poems defining words which turn out to be important in various places in the book. These “units” (a clumsy word) are allowed to interpenetrate in a way the recalls, deliberately or not, the wider theme of interpenetration. Again the emphasis is on insides and borders. The poems of the boxer’s son revolve around mangled hands and split skin. When he attacks a friend “the skin / stretched over my knuckles / split” and, thinking that his hands are split to the bone, he goes to a hospital where a nurse attends to his hands:

. . . . . 
That night I unclenched my fists
and held my hands up to the light.
I looked for the fortune in my upturned palm
but it could not tell me
how I would die.

The whole of this second section is prefaced by another, free-standing poem about boxing, “Cutman”, where the attentions of the assistant responsible for looking after cuts in the ring slide into a sexual embrace and then into dismemberment, interpenetration and finally into a kind of transposition of personality. Just as “Cutman”, related to the poems about the boxer’s son, prefaces this section, so “Tenebrae”, related to the story of the soldier, concludes it. At first the soldier’s tale seems like one of psychological rather than physical wounds but there is a good deal of the former as well when one of the poems describes a wartime attack that results in a dislocated shoulder and then goes on to describe – in the sort of precise detail I’ve been commenting on – the operation that will repair it:

You were awake when they sawed
through your humerus, popped the bone
out of the glenoid cavity, but
you could not speak. They shaved away
the coracoid process, coated the clavicle and scapula
with precious metals . . .

The final section of The Agonist includes two sequences: one a set of responses to an old text of the scouting movement, Scout Tests and How to Pass Them, and the other responses to a number of cards from the Major Arcana of the Tarot pack. In each case a set of themes seems to be reworked, almost like musical variations and the fact that they are highly organised and, at the same time, fragmentary, might point to some features in Deo’s imaginative personality. There is a high degree of fluency here together with what renaissance rhetoricians called copiousness of invention..

Charlotte Guest’s Soap contains poems, she tells us in an Afterword, written between the ages of nineteen and twenty-five and are thus a kind of document of achieving maturity. It goes on to say “While this is a book about selfhood, I hope it is not overly self-involved” and this tentativeness might be highlighted in the title with its suggestion of soap-opera. What makes it a striking first book is the way individual poems are stand-alone pieces with their own dynamic and their own stance towards the world so that feeling comfortable with one poem doesn’t mean that the next will immediately make sense. It’s also a very slim book, suggesting that it has resisted the impulse to mine late adolescence and early adulthood for material which can be transmuted into a series of poems all of which work in a similar way. This kind of book always appeals to me: its slimness isn’t a product of a constipated poetic imagination but one that produces poems not shaped by the same discursive pattern.

The diffidence about recounting personal change can be seen in “Hush, Memory” (an approachably conventional poem but possibly the best in the book) whose title is a nice variation on the title of Nabokov’s great autobiographical work. It’s about expectations and inevitable disappointments:

The lodgings at the end of girlhood
are not as advertised. I had not expected
these island features, or the grass
to whip. I wasn’t told hard rubbish
would run all month. Our doors are
red; our mirrors done over with breath.

It seems I have forgotten all I learnt
at Revolution School, and instead glide
past Neptune Pools in a car I do not own . . .

as well as recollections of a friend who “disappeared” – “Some of us didn’t make it to the lodgings / at the end of girlhood”. Modally it is entirely different from the next poem, “Baskets”, which is a comic dream poem set in a supermarket and it is certainly very different to pieces like “Picnic at the Rock” and “Hey Preacher” which are surreal prose pieces. “Hush, Memory” is balanced by a later poem, “Autobiographical Fragment” (whose title might allude to any number of texts) in which memories of celebrating a friend’s eighteenth birthday – with a ceremony involving burying a symbolic doll – are set against watching a birthday party in an opposite apartment: seeing in the “nearly-women and nearly-men” the next generation going through the same processes. The epitaph to Soap, Fay Zwicky’s “Is anyone ever ready for who exactly they are?” perfectly catches the sense of the unpredictable developments into selfhood that these poems deal with.

The virtues of both these books are, in a way, equivocal. If one wanted to be hostile to The Agonist, one could say that the effortless mining of an idea to produce series that could be almost infinitely extendable is nothing more than facility and facility ultimately is a marker of a certain superficiality. If one wanted to be hostile to Soap, one could say that the slimness of the book – the product of many years’ activity – is a sign of a sluggish creativity. I don’t think either of these objections are valid but it is difficult to judge on the basis of a single book by each author and we will have to wait until each writer has produced three or four books before being at all confident that the more positive judgement – that The Agonist is marked by a powerful poetic imagination and Soap by a system of high standards which result in poems quite unlike each other – is the correct one. In any case it is interesting to find two first books which operate in roughly the same area of subject matter and which show such opposed ways as to how the poetic faculty operates.

Alan Wearne: These Things Are Real and as editor: With the Youngsters

These Things Are Real, Artarmon: Giramondo, 2017, 126pp.
With the Youngsters: Group Sestinas and Group Villanelles, Flinders Lane, Vic.: Grand Parade Poets, 2017, 90pp.

Here are two books which, put together, show Wearne in three of his most important poetic roles: as maker of the best verse narratives Australia has produced, and as satirist and as teacher. Perhaps this final role should be modified slightly since With the Youngsters is not a book about how to go about teaching the writing of poetry at university level but rather an anthology of what students and their teacher have, over the years, produced when faced with the task of writing something collectively in two of the most demanding fixed forms. If anything, then, it might be more accurate to speak of Wearne in his little-commented-on role of explorer of fixed poetic forms. The big verse-narratives – The Nightmarkets and The Lovemakers – never seem happy to operate entirely in Wearne’s distinctive blank verse and are always ready to rise to the challenge of one of the available forms.

At any rate, of the three roles the one I value most is the verse narrative. Wearne’s two earlier extended narratives are made up of monologues and third person narratives but in the case of The Nightmarkets these are extended pieces. The Lovemakers is rather more complex narratively speaking and interweaves an immense number of shorter narratives into an enormously complex whole documenting postwar Melbourne and Sydney and exploring the relationship between sex and politics, the media and drug cultures: a kind of postwar Australian Comédie Humaine. The shorter narratives in Wearne’s previous book, Prepare the Cabin for Landing, and the five that make up the first section of this book can be seen as either distillations of the longer ones or as examples of the kind of stories which could, imaginably, be woven into something ambitious and thematically wide-ranging, like The Lovemakers.

In These Things Are Real, the five narratives make up a section the size of a conventional book and though the satires, grouped together as “The Sarsaparilla Writer’s Centre”, run to fifty pages, it’s hard not to see them as little more than a light addendum to the book’s narrative core. I’ll have more to say about “The Sarsaparilla Writer’s Centre” later, but, for the moment, I want to focus on the first part of the book which is where Wearne’s genius is to be found. Though they are in no way interlinked, they do have thematic and structural resonances. Two, for example, could be said to be about varieties of violence – domestic and drug-culture – while another two explore the way individuals born in one cultural environment are forced, as they age, to accommodate newer times and the judgements those times pass on the culture of the past: a pregnant theme which Wearne deals with brilliantly.

And then there is “They Came to Moorabbin”, which is placed first. I think it is the subtlest of them and contains a relationship (between Keith and Nance) which is very complex and quite challenging. The characters are born in the twenties (and thus presumably belong to Wearne’s parents’ generation) and inherit the postwar boom years. It’s a period we have met in The Nightmarkets when the narrative steps back from the immediate issue of politics and prostitution and looks at the parents of the politician, Jack McTaggart, in a long monologue in which his mother, Elise, recalls her life with his father, John, one of Menzies’ postwar, ex-military ministers. One way of looking at “They Came to Moorabbin” might be in the light of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier which is built on the relationships between two couples who form a friendship after bumping into each other at a spa: it’s just that in “They Came to Moorabbin”, one of the four is already dead. Iris, an AWAS cypher clerk, marries Keith, a soldier opinionated enough to have extensive, but ultimately limited plans for their postwar future. At Half-Moon Bay, a decade or so after the end of the war, she runs into Nance, whom she had known in the war, who married a major later to become a diplomat after the war (serving in Wellington, Edinburgh and then Cape Town). When he discovered he was dying, he bought a house for his future widow and four children in Moorabbin – Mars as Nance calls it. The core of the poem explores the relationships between Nance and Iris and Keith (and, to a lesser but still significant extent, between Nance and her dead husband). Keith constantly breezes in to Nance’s place doing her tax for her. He seems an embodiment of Australian littleness and the poem suggests that he perfectly represents one aspect of his period while Tony (the diplomat) represents a more ambitious, disciplined, outwardly focussed component of fifties Australia. At any rate it’s a non-love affair and when Nance breaks with Keith it is over his treatment of Iris who bears the brunt of his opinionated whining. Ultimately she isn’t prepared to sacrifice her friendship and stands by Iris in a kind of unspoken woman-to-woman loyalty. Intriguingly, the poem doesn’t stop at the moment that the relationship breaks down (though it is more a slow drifting apart than a melodramatic “scene”) but continues into the future. I don’t think that Wearne often does this: usually the future is suggested at the conclusion of his narratives, a vista, good or bad, predicated on the characters he has been dealing with. The end of “They Came to Moorabbin” is especially bleak: Iris dies, Keith absconds with “some ageing bowling club girlfriend / nobody guessed he had” and we last see Nance, a chain-smoker and drinker “tubed-up for emphysema, a granny in a granny flat, / out the back of her daughter’s”.

Since Keith’s treatment of Iris is a kind of low-level sniping that can conceivably be put under the umbrella of domestic violence, there is a thematic connection between “They Came to Moorabbin” and “Anger Management: A South Coast Tale” which chronicles the relationship between a single mother and an itinerant busker, a “burly, stubbly muso in his thirties”. Whereas the anticipated affair between Nance and Keith never happens, here the anticipated violent outbursts do and, as a result, this is a less subtle poem but still a ruthlessly forensic one:

This could’ve worked except he’s sick 
and stupid. Once is a shock,
twice you’re a failure, but three times
that’s a pattern and three times mate,
matey, sport and Sonny Jim you’re out . . .

“Mixed Business” where violence might be seen as a context seems like an addendum to the world of drug dealing which forms such an important part of The Lovemakers. Its central character is an ex-teacher with a habit and a divorce, living alone on a pension. His dealer, together with his pack, all of whom might be described in terms from Wearne’s earlier “The Vanity of Australian Wishes” as “lulus”, murders a thirteen-year old junior pusher and the central character, together with Bob, a friend from his teaching days, goes to witness the sentencing. The structure of the piece is designed to place the protagonist in between the two visions of the future that his world seems to offer him: a solid, trustworthy sobriety (the kind of person who “never let his parents down”) that part of him wants to access and the incipiently insane world of the user become pusher. Interestingly, whereas the other four narratives cover an extended period of time, so that we can watch the character’s developments or the developing relationship between their character and the rapidly changing one of their society, “Mixed Business” is compressed into three years. It could be because the drug user’s world simply operates at a more frenetic pace or it could be because this is a poem that wants to portray a pendulum-like stasis.

The other two narratives, “Memoirs of a Ceb” and “Waitin’ for the Viet Cong” are portraits of two characters, a man and a woman, both of whom are gay. The first focusses on the character’s love life while the second focusses on the character’s activist history, shaken apart by an affair with a French girl, begun at school age and leading to her rejection when, rather like the central character of Christina Stead’s For Love Alone, she makes a pilgrimage to Europe to renew the relationship only to be snubbed by someone who has changed with the times:

. . . . . 
                            Shy, arrogant girls,
hadn’t we kept each other’s photographs
“Moi sur Les Barricades”, “Me and my Collective”?
Maybe. But what hers had hardly shown
was all the ground she’d filled, she’d travelled,
which wasn’t I knew mere breasts and a boyfriend.
Much worse she couldn’t, wouldn’t announce
Don’t you understand, we’re hardly like that now!
. . . . . 
     Then catching this right-through-me look of hers
I knew what she was seeing Here’s that Australiene again
(some place like that) a pest from my past . . .

Eventually she is rescued from pneumonia by the very forces of middle-class parental conservatism and care that her activism is opposed to. Wearne has a history of being fairly gentle with the activists he portrays and there is something more than merely contemptible about this character who finds that, though she feels free to reject whom she wants, she still has to suffer rejection herself. Times and activist targets change (she moves from a leftist anti-imperialist position to a feminist one as she ages) but so does love: it isn’t the central out-of-time experience that she took it for.

“Memoirs of a Ceb” follows the life of conventional character, Peter, from his adolescence – where he has his “Brokeback Mountain” moment – to a stable adult career (as engineer) and a stable adult relationship with Cameron. Interestingly the meaning of the acronym (a member of the Church of England Boy’s Association) is only explained late in the poem and thus acts as a kind of nagging reminder to the reader that we are dealing with different tempores and different mores. Also interestingly, Wearne chooses to take his narrative, which is structured as a row of decade spaced glimpses, into the near present (2006) when Cameron is waiting to die in a hospice. I think the reason for this is that Peter’s broad perspective on his own life is that it isn’t the discovery of his homosexuality which is the core event of his life but the framing, accepting and accommodating of this. And this is done when, as an adolescent, he meets another member of the congregation, a doctor, who recommends him to a counsellor he knows:

     “I’m Bev,” she announced. “I gather Bob Dalzeil
said how you would never change
and why should you?” Bob told correct . . .

The initial meeting with Dalzeil is brilliantly done – Peter finds him dancing in a conga-line of little kids on his daughter’s eighth birthday – and reminds us how good a conventional story-teller Wearne is, but the point of the entire poem, I think, is that the meeting with Dalziel is more important than the meeting with the first lover (a bodgie met on an “Outreach” mission). When, at the end, a friend asks what would have happened if he hadn’t gone, he says, “I’d have got married, had children, cruised / and spent a life sensing there was something . . . incorrect”.

One feature which “Memoirs of a Ceb” and “Waitin’ for the Viet Cong” share is the incorporation of some verse in Wearne’s comic mode. In the former it is the acerbic Cameron who at a holiday house with mutual friends disappears to produce a set of couplets about lesbian Catholic schoolgirls. More importantly, “Waitin’ for the Viet Cong” concludes with a comic piece –

. . . . . 
Some played Dylan, some played Ochs,
     And others Cheech and Chong.
Whilst some just played at (said their folks)
     Waitin’ for the Viet Cong . . . 

It’s a very odd thing to do but is probably a healthy antidote to my tendency to see these narratives as luminous, extremely subtle portraits of people defined by time and place. It’s a kind of sophisticated doggerel – if that’s a tenable oxymoron – and it may be an important feature of Wearne’s style, telling us that there are other ways of looking at this material. It’s worth remembering that something similar happens near the end of The Lovemakers where the otherwise very serious relationship between Neil and Barb finishes up as a set of quatrains full of excruciating rhymes on “Tullamarine”.

This makes a serendipitous segues to the second part of the These Things Are Real, “The Sarsaparilla Writers Centre”, because the satirical pieces there are full of “sophisticated doggerel”. As its title suggests the targets are mainly fellow poets though there are political (and religious) attacks later on. There are also some very genial ballades: one addressed to Alan Gould and celebrating the Christian name they share and another celebrating Chris Wallace-Crabbe’s reaching his eightieth year. And there are also some wonderful, gently satirical prose dreams: I especially like the one in which Alvaro de Campos (speaking with a Scots accent) claims that Pessoa is one of his heteronyms rather than the reverse: “Since he has spent time in Glasgow I ask him his opinion of Robbie Burns. I am told that Burns too is one of his heteronyms”.

Someday someone will write about the satirical element in Wearne’s poetry, beginning, perhaps, with especially important ones like “The Vanity of Australian Wishes”. It’s a complicated issue. The conventional definition – that satire is the ridiculing of human vices and follies – is fine as far as it goes but it forces us to ask: who decides whether something is a vice or a failing to be pitied? What right does a poet have to set him- or herself up as a judge of such matters and whom does the poet represent? This is a twenty-first century Australian question, perhaps, rather than second century Roman or eighteenth century English or French one. Under this spotlight, the least equivocal vices and follies are those which contain some inherent contradiction – such as hypocrisy – since there the failing is independent of any viewer’s judgement: it’s a mathematical issue rather than a morally determined one. But even hypocrisy could, conceivably, be judged more sympathetically as a frightened, willed blindness.

There is a very interesting essay by David Foster on satire which, though I’m not sure I agree with it, has stayed in the back of my mind since I first read it in his collection Studs and Nogs more than a dozen years ago. He divides satirists up into two classes: the “toothless” – those “willing to wound yet afraid to strike” – and the “biting” who, in Foster’s terms, are the true satirists, the desperate wounded fighters. Fair enough, but the intriguing element is the recognition that the latter are damaged and that the satire arises out of a personal wound. It’s an interesting position because, in a single step, it renders the question, “What gives anyone the right to set themselves up as an arbiter of acceptable behaviour?” irrelevant. It establishes, for the writer, a stake in the issue.

Wearne, in the light of this essay, wouldn’t appear to be a satirist at all. Partly because there’s often a kind of loving intimacy, born of curiosity, between him and his more extreme characters taken from the media, sporting and drug worlds (there’s not much room for curiosity in Foster’s sense of an extreme satirist) and partly because many of the poems in “The Sarsaparilla Writers Centre” come into the category of sharp epigrams (Martial gets excluded from being a satirist in Foster’s classification). But one couplet might well come out of the kind of wounded outrage that Foster requires. A couplet about the 1987 Victorian Premier’s Prize for poetry says: “What you see is what you get: / Runner-up to Lily Brett”.

Whatever distress may or may not be hidden behind Wearne’s satires, With the Youngsters is a celebration, a celebration of collective verse-making. It collects twenty-three sestinas and twenty-two villanelles made by writing students mainly at the University of Wollongong as part of Wearne’s poetry classes. Wearne’s “Afterword” describes how the sestina exercise was set up. Each student provides three words, the words are collected and then an outsider is roped in to draw six of them from a bag. This six, in the order drawn, will form the last words of the first stanza. The remaining stanzas can have their last words laid out in the correct sestina pattern and then each sub-group within the class is given the task of writing one stanza. It sounds a lot of fun, especially as the emphasis is on playing with and bending the rules: none of the resulting poems are at all solemn accomplishments.

One’s immediate impression is that Wearne’s method of eliciting the final words – “From you I’ll have a colour, a piece of fruit and something associated with your home . . . from you a verb ending in ing, a movie star and an adverb . . .” – isn’t designed to make a difficult form any easier. Pound, speaking as a war-hungry Bertran de Born in “Sestina: Altaforte”, could choose “peace”, “music”, “clash”, “opposing”, “crimson” and “rejoicing” which doesn’t pose any insuperable problems, but you feel sorry for the class that were stuck with “taa”, “inoculate”, “seventeen”, “wallowing”, “reckon” and “Nazism or for those who got “Bryan Cranston”, “eating”, “bracelet”, “android”, “starry night” and “blimp”. Still, presumably the difficulty is part of the fun. You get an interesting result in a poem like “Marilyn Sestina” where five of the words chosen are reasonably easy to accommodate into what might have been a perfectly conventional poem (“Monroe”, “jumper”, “blues”, “net” and “Rio Bravo”) but one, “water polo”, is extremely resistant and brings a necessary surreal touch to the finished poem.

The villanelle exercise is a little different but allows students to choose lines from other student poems which they think might survive the constant repetitions of that form. I think the results are not quite as satisfying as the sestina exercises. It may be that I’m prejudiced against the villanelle with its oh-so-obvious syntactic variations to accommodate its repetitions but I think it’s a little more significant than this. The villanelle has always seemed a closed form. Its repeated lines are separated by a single line at the beginning but appear together at the end. This gives a sense of it spiralling inwards towards its conclusion. It’s good in that it always provides a sense of an ending but limiting in that it always feels the same. The sestina, despite its rigid rules, seems much more open: it spins out into meanings but always touches base with the form at the beginning of each stanza which has to repeat the word at the end of the previous stanza (surely the most difficult issue of both these forms is to bring that off without drawing attention to it). To lapse into metaphor for a moment: if a villanelle is like a (usually blunt) arrowhead, the sestina is like an unpredictable balloon, ready to set off in unusual directions and only held back by its six repeated words which come together to make a kind of provisional knot in the final three line stanza.

At any rate, With the Youngsters is the kind of book that will be important when criticism finally begins to come to grips with the issues involved in the professional teaching of the act of writing poetry at tertiary level. It is a tribute (or a slightly quirky monument) to Wearne’s impressive achievements in the field. But it also has a profounder connection with Wearne’s own poetry because he has always been an explorer of fixed forms. There are Meredithian sonnets and syllabic count poems in The Nightmarkets and both sestinas and villanelles in The Lovemakers. The villanelles are brilliant in that book because they are spoken by a defence counsel and thus the dramatic situation supports the repetitive nature of the form. The sestinas in the “Making the World Revolve” section of The Lovemakers are brilliant and brilliantly daring in the way they play with the form: dividing it in half, assigning the final three lines to be the opening of a new poem, and so on.

With the Youngsters and both sections of These Things Are Real are prefaced by a large number of quotations. The result isn’t pompous since many of these are whimsical but my favourite is the comment made by Shostakovich to his (then) student, the serialist Sofia Gubaidulina, at his retirement party: “I wish you to continue on your mistaken path”. It would be a good motto to have inscribed on buildings where Creative Writing is taught.

John Kinsella: On the Outskirts

St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2017, 123pp.

For readers daunted by the sheer size of John Kinsella’s poetic output (not to mention the at-least-superficially unappetising “experimental” books, beginning with Syzygy and finishing up with the recent publication of a three volume collected Graphology series) this new volume probably provides a welcoming introduction. If you want to get exposed to the hyperactive Kinsella poetic world, On the Outskirts (together with the earlier Jam Tree Gully) can be recommended as a good place to start. Most of the distinctive Kinsella obsessions are there but the poems themselves work in ways that will be familiar to most readers of contemporary poetry.

The title itself is suggestive given the degree to which Kinsella’s attention has been devoted to a block of land in Western Australia, at first five acres below Mt Bakewell (Walwalinj) and later a plot at Jam Tree Gully. The poems of this new book derive from a period spent in Tübingen and some are set in the south west of Ireland. It’s tempting to think of the title as a humorous inversion of the Australian cultural cringe whereby what was once one of the centres of Western intellectual culture, the home of Hölderlin among many others, is reduced to being an outpost of Western Australia. Actually the situation is considerably more complex than that and readers of Kinsella’s other books will remember that the interaction between being ”at home” and being “away” is a complex one. Being in Europe, as he says in one of the prose pieces that make up Auto, “will only make me look closer at what’s here. The further you move away, the closer you get.” And many of the early poems of Firebreaks, which is something of a lengthy addendum to Jam Tree Gully, explore a sense of exile in England. The third poem of On the Outskirts, which begins “I can only be here – there’s nowhere else / I can be at present”, is an extended meditation on what belonging and inhabiting mean, especially in the case of imaginative inhabiting:

I am not of here and a few months (un)mapping
won’t make it so. But I am building a mental
picture, a lyrical self winding out into histories

I can’t grasp, don’t want to mark me. They have.
It’s not contained. I was here when a child
playing medieval knights with the boy

from primary school with “gigantism”.
And at other times. I am temporary
in the wheatbelt . . .

That “(un)mapping” recurs in a later poem in which, walking through rural Ireland and being met by vaguely suspicious locals, he comments, “Been in the village on & off // for three years now . . . . . I am back to fit it all together, this bits ‘n’ pieces (un)belonging”.

One feature will prove unusual for beginners. Kinsella has a tendency to involve (in complex ways that I’ll speak about a little later) other texts at a conceptual level. Divine Comedy: Journeys Through a Regional Geography (a 2008 book also published by the University of Queensland Press) worked its way through Dante, re-arranging the order of the three books as it dealt with life in the West Australian wheatbelt. The New Arcadia “took off” from Sidney’s text and Jam Tree Gully from Thoreau. On the Outskirts begins each poem with a reference not to the Commedia itself but to Blake’s set of illustrations made in preparation for a series of engravings and uncompleted at his death. As you get to know the poems better, it’s natural to explore the interaction between poem and its illustration.

I’ll begin by looking at a poem that appears about a third of the way through the book. It is set, like most of the poems here, in Germany, and deals with the Swabian Fasnet processions. Its illustration is of Blake’s sketch of Dante and Virgil, in Canto XX of Inferno, looking down at the pit of the false prophets and soothsayers whose bodies are twisted at the neck so that they can only look backwards. This is one of Dante’s ironic punishments where the mechanism of retribution says to these sinners: “As you spent your lives thinking you could look ahead, so in Hell you’ll always look backwards”:

Witches with heads on their backs
fixating on those marching behind,
luring them on up into the Old Town.

Old Wehrmacht helmets with horns,
skin-greaves and hooves, the fools
march without giving way. The guilds

ply their trades. When the Duke
banned “pagan mischief” he held back
an outburst that has students festooned

with fox furs, heads lolling, to band
together and shout-sing, “Sieg Heil”.
That’s what’s frightening. Not the witches.
. . . . .
 
I saw Manto with green hair. She was gasping
for air, her Geiger counter in the red. Those clustered
around her hooted and shouted, driven to a frenzy

by her example of a good time. The fate of a war prize.
Sealed in a room I can hear their ranting. For the fools,
those outside the club are aliens, even enemies.

Malevolence always knows this future. But the sheer
pleasure of letting loose, of indulging fat beneath skins,
brings a smile to children’s faces. Who begrudges?

Many cigar-ends smoulder on the snow-melt streets.
Visitors feel they are having an authentic Swabian experience.
This is culture. The bells can be deafening on Sunday.
              Look forward, not back?

The Fasnet processions are one of those Carnival/Lords of Misrule events that occur in many cultures. It’s an immensely complex subject (about which I’m fairly ignorant) because what seems like a basic impulse – that an underclass is best controlled by giving it a brief time as the dominant culture – is inflected by the almost infinite complexities of difference in cultures. Thus the Mardi Gras processions clearly derive from a period in which slaves mount their own parody of their masters, electing their own temporary rulers or kings. In Hawaii the year was divided into periods ruled by the God of War and then the God of Peace – no mere week of inversion here but several months. In Europe it is often a period devoted not to slaves but to fools. The Fasnet seems to be a mix of fools and other, slightly sinister social outcasts like witches and demons.

Whereas Kinsella’s ethical stance is usually very clear, not to say insistent, it is possible to read the tone of this poem in a number of different ways. The most obvious is as one of criticism: in these celebrations everything ugly and destructive is brought shamelessly to the surface where an outsider, someone “sealed in a room”, can see it for what it is. In a German city there is the additional issue that the horror of Nazism was exactly such an emergence of dark forces writ large on a political level. So chanting “Sieg Heil” is far more frightening than anything witches can do and the procession is a kind of wish-fulfilment of malevolence itself – “Malevolence always knows this future”. The poem says “Who begrudges?” when speaking of visitors seeing an echt Swabian cultural event and locals letting their hair down, and you can feel that the poet is one of those who do begrudge, seeing the tolerant response – kids big and small having fun – as lazy and inherently dangerous. And what are we to make of the question in the final line? It could be saying that such a procession looks back to the dark past when they should be looking forward to a world hopefully dominated by the sort of intelligent resistance that Kinsella approves of. It could be asking Germans to embrace the environmental issues of the future.

Some of my sense that the tone is a little more complex than simple disapprobation might arise because, as a reader, I’m inclined to view things like this a bit more benevolently. If humanity’s dark side is always present in every individual – and Kinsella’s poetry often frankly acknowledges this, seeing in the brainless animal-shooting hoons of rural Western Australia contemporary incarnations of himself as a young man – taking this dark side for a walk and giving it an airing is one way of controlling it to some extent. This is the “pressure-valve” theory and is surely justified when one looks at the origins and functions of these ceremonies on a global scale and thinks of the fate of the Spartans, for example, who never granted their helots such a festival, choosing periodic increases of repression instead. In this view there is almost something comforting in the cries of “Sieg Heil” because the pressure valve theory means that individuals are encouraged to shout obscenities and shouting out a Nazi salute rather than a sexual obscenity means that you register it as the ultimate transgression – and that must be a good of some kind, even if a very limited one.

Perhaps I’m being too optimistic about the subject of this poem but the issue of past, present and future is a crucial one in On the Outskirts and one shouldn’t pass over lightly the references to Manto in this particular poem. In Inferno, Virgil expatiates at some length about the prophetess, Manto, because she is the founder of the town in which he was born – Mantua having been built over her bones. But there is something odd and interesting about Dante’s guide, master and inspiration deriving his origins from a town built on the bones of a liar and, significantly, the account Virgil gives of the origins of Mantua in The Aeneid is not the same as the account he gives in Inferno. It may be drawing a long bow to see this theme of deceitful origins as being part of this Fasnet poem but the theme of the link between past and present as one of conversion is present. And, at the very least, the inclusion of Manto raises the issue of one’s home, something perpetually in Kinsella’s sights.

Before leaving this poem it is worthwhile looking at some of its structural features since they are typical of many of the poems in this book. It begins and ends with the idea of looking back: the “witches with heads on their backs” are, presumably, people done up in costumes which have either two heads – one pointing forward and one back – or only one, backward facing one. In a sense “looking back” becomes the generative core of the poem. In another poem which begins with the fact that bats refused to return to the attic of a castle once it had been “renovated” and introduces the issue of asylum seekers, the key term is “welcome” (the last line is “All Gods welcome!”). In the poem based on the illustration to Canto XXIX which deals with both a nuclear plant but also with Kinsella’s own work – “I cannot write what I was going to write / without this leaking in” – these last two words are the core; and a very complex poem late in the book begins with the Tübingen town clock and ends with an elderly homeless woman bedding down for the night near the church and looking at her watch. This poem is notable for a particularly striking transition. In speaking of horologues and clocks, Kinsella recalls time spent in the clock section of the British museum – Rooms 38 and 39 – and then shifts to lines 38 and 39 in the relevant canto of Paradiso which describe how Peter, by faith, was able to walk over water. The poem deals with this sudden (and, to a reader, illogical shift) by saying “I can hear the sea in a clock. The stroke of small / waves on sharp rocks”.

The point of these examples is that there is a lot of unifying of complex material going on. These poems are shapely and elegant, not adjectives that you would expect to use in discussing Kinsella’s poetry. And on the subject of Kinsella’s poems as poetic objects, it is worthwhile noting that almost all of them work at the same speed, at a steady allegro. Surprisingly this occurs even in those reasonably rare poems which are in set forms. Whereas we might expect these forms (sestinas, villanelles, triolets and, more recently, penillions – an improvised form deriving from Welsh) to impose their own pace, they too are swept up in the same intense assertive briskness.

For first time readers of Kinsella’s work, this method of basing the poems on Blake’s illustrations to Dante will seem odd and illogical. Since the poems of Divine Comedy: Journeys Through a Regional Geography took their cue from Dante’s actual text, using Blake’s illustrations seems like a kind of addendum or incremental modulation. You could imagine them asking: What next? Poems based on critics’ comments about Blake’s work? Or poems based on the work of artists influenced by Blake? The fact is that the process is a little more logical than this. In the first place, Kinsella’s books, going back to Night Parrots of 1989, have always been interested in using art as a jumping-off point (though that crude adjective obscures a lot of very complex imaginative activity). Initially it is the paintings of Arthur Boyd but by the time of his third book, Full Fathom Five, there is a sequence of poems related to photographs by Muybridge and Max Dupain and to paintings by Jackson Pollock. Art and text get to be connected in Kinsella’s imagination in powerful ways: you feel that the boundary between the visual and the verbal is much more porous than it is in the brains of those of us who are less “creative”. In a similar way, Blake’s art and poems have always been present. There is an interesting poem in Night Parrots called “Dissertation on a Flea” which is bookended by quotations from The Book of Urizen. Blake, I think, stands for the idea of the infinite powers of the imagination: as an influence he encourages poets not to think of careful deployments of imagery prompted by intuition or logic, but to begin with the idea that all images are possible, in fact anything the mind can create is a usable poetic possibility. Kinsella’s imagination – as his poetry demonstrates – is enormous, even hyperactive, and the process of linking intense personal experience with texts that are, to most readers, entirely unrelated, makes perfect sense given the set-up of his way of thinking. I would be inclined to think of these links as metaphoric and distinguish them from the metonymic links to Thoreau in Jam Tree Gully. There the connections are logical since Thoreau is also writing a diary-like documentation of his life on the land. But it may be that a more sophisticated approach to tropes is needed. In Kinsella’s Divine Comedy individual poems are often called “distractions” of Dante’s work (presumably in the earlier sense of “drawn awry”) and once in On the Outskirts, the word “template” is used. Here the poem titles speak of being “on”, “in” or “and” a particular illustration, though one is “through” and the final poem is “with a glimmer of Blake’s illustration to Dante’s Paradise, Canto 31”.

On the Outskirts is able to progress through its Blake-inflected Dante in the correct order of canticles. Divine Comedy was forced to alter the order and begin with Purgatorio, not only because the plot of land focussed on was under a mountain and Purgatory is a mountain in Dante but also – presumably – because an ecstatic, paradisal conclusion would have been quite out of keeping with the book’s generally pessimistic account of Mt Bakewell and its inhabitants and visitors. The serendipitous connection in Germany derives from the war-time resistance movement of Hans and Sophie Scholl, a perfectly aryan brother and sister who refused to turn their gaze away from the persecution of Jews and yet practiced non-violent resistance. These, true icons for the present, are commemorated in Tübingen’s Scholl-Sibling-Square where – the epigraph to the poem tells us – two fountains which had been removed by the Nazis to facilitate their mass rallies were remade and re-installed in 1999. The name of the Scholl’s resistance movement was “The White Rose”, perfect for the conclusion of Dante, and the poem begins with the dry fountains, covered in snow, recalling white roses:

The fountains are dry. But then late snow falls on them
and they briefly turn into white roses. Brother and sister fountains.
Resurrected. Students buzz around, checking their phones,

comparing marks, joking about Ordnung society
they will graduate into . . .

This isn’t the last poem in the book. There are three “epilogues” and, lest we be too upbeat about the future, the final poem is a translation of Jakob van Hoddis’s marvellously mad envisioning of apocalypse, “Weltende” (“The World’s End”). Hoddis himself (whose real name was Hans Davidsohn) was a Jew who developed serious psychiatric problems and so had no chance in Nazi Germany: he died in Sobibor.

It’s conventional to distinguish, as Kinsella himself has done, between, on the one hand, the bulk of his work, and on the other his “experimental” poetry, included in books like Syzygy, Erratum / Frame(d) and Graphology. I have to say that I find this second group, with its language orientation, unengaging and I will leave any comment about them for another time when I can revisit them (all critics know that you learn as much by looking carefully at what you dislike as you do by investigating your likes). There is a case to be made that Kinsella’s truest experiments are in the area of how to get his specific land and his specific responses to it into poetry. The early books, while still bearing the imprint of Kinsella’s potent imaginative leaps, tend to mine it for its extremity as though this was a guarantor of authenticity. But successfully getting place, whether it is the Wheatbelt, a German city or an Irish coastal town, into poetry as well as it is done in On the Outskirts is the fruit of a long career of increasingly successful experiments.

Shevaun Cooley: Homing

Artarmon: Giramondo, 2017, 108pp.

At an initial glance, almost everything about Shevaun Cooley’s first book, Homing, suggests the programmatic. It’s so highly organised, from its division into two locations (each introduced by its co-ordinates) to its poem titles (all derived from the poems of R.S Thomas) that it is hard not to expect it to be rationalised as something like “a series of studies in the phenomenon of being at, and getting, home”. The problem with a “series of studies” is that it suggests poems being written to fill out a frame rather than being written because they have to be. It also suggests a project that can be justified in an application for a grant or admission into a Creative Writing degree. And usually the core of the program, the area of interest, is quite specific and thus slightly simplified, perhaps even conceived extra-poetically. It’s a relief to find that Homing is actually a much more difficult book than it looks on the surface. My sense, though it is no more than a reader’s guess, is that the programmatic element arrived at a fairly late stage as a way of giving the book a sense of unity. The poems, taken in themselves, are, in other words, a little more open and resistant to simplification than one might initially think.

But, to explore the programmatic elements a little further. The book comprises two main sections with a group of three ghazals with nicely alliterative titles (“Grain”, “Ground”, “Grasp”) dividing them. Each of the two main sections is introduced by the geographical co-ordinates of a location which turns out – after a little, not-too-difficult detective work on Google Earth – to be an islands. Each of these is off a fairly remote coast, one in the southern and the other in the northern hemisphere. The first is the island of St Alouarn off the south-western coast of Western Australia and the second the island of Bardsey (probably early English or Old Norse for “the island of Bard” rather than anything to do with poets, Welsh or English) known in Welsh as Ynys Elli (The Island of the Tidal-Race). I think we are supposed to imagine these islands as sites for an imaginary lighthouse or homing beacon because they don’t figure very strongly in the poems themselves although the areas which are jumping-off points for the islands (the area inland from Cape Leeuwin in south-west Western Australia, and Snowdonia and the Llyn Peninsula in Wales) are the places in which many of the poems are set.

Having said this, it’s worth pointing out that there is one poem in each section which deals with travelling to that section’s emblematic island. In “There is an island there is no going to”, the sun has set behind hills in the west but out to sea, St Alouarn’s Island (its name, as exotic as that of its northern hemisphere counterpart, derives from its eighteenth century French discoverer) remains brightly sunlit. Any temptation to see this as some kind of epiphanic moment of illumination, though, is stoutly resisted:

. . . . . 
I mean – a wingspan of darkness has come in
over this corner of land. But the island stays alight, out
to the south-east. A deep-buried ember that never gutters entirely,
it flares up like the bronchial longing I can’t shift
from my chest.

It means – it’s maybe a curse. Island’s full
of rabbits and snakes, old Sam Griffith said, when I asked
what he’d found there. It’s too hard to make landfall.
You have to go to the side you’ve never seen. It’s best in a flat-
bottomed scow, but no-one can make the crossing
in one of those . . .

So the desire to arrive here is as much a curse as anything and the island’s grotty ecology reflects its unbenevolent nature. Of course it could be that the homing instinct is itself a curse, something capable of turning an innocent island into somewhere maleficent. It’s also, interestingly, unreachable – if you can cross you can’t land: if you can land you can’t cross. In the northern hemisphere (in the later poem, “Ran with a dark current”), things are a little more promising. There is still a preoccupation with how you approach sacred ground:

. . . . .
                Monks who came here first ghosted
the currents in boats of ox-hide. They knew a deep keel is
more quickly grasped, and dragged . . .

but there is a strong suggestion that something sacred in the island (the graves of the monks, for example, which provide the island’s alternative name “Island of 20,000 Saints”) makes it a place that promises something intangible but powerful:

. . . . .
                             You think you could stay here
and lose the names of everything, even yourself – and the price

would be to find the deepest intimacy with something
you couldn’t speak. Just lichens under hand. The mumbled
bee, the hushed sea, the seal’s melancholic howl coursing

the channel . . .

Although the visit is a short one (“But you won’t stay”), it’s still a poem with some degree of optimism: “We’ll / likely have a good summer, says the skipper. You can tell, / when the kittiwake dares to nest so low in the cliffs.”

Another programmatic element is the way in which each of the poems’ titles is derived from a different poem by R.S. Thomas. As I’ve said, my suspicion is that this was something done “after the fact” – that is, the book isn’t a rather over-planned exercise in writing poems with provided titles as take-off points but is a collection of poems whose original titles have been discarded and replaced by something that has, at least, some sort of unifying effect. Thomas may be the iconic modern anglophone poet of Wales but his poetry is a long way distant from Shevaun Cooley’s. An unnervingly eccentric man, even by the more relaxed standards applied to poets and other creative types, he was an Anglican minister for the whole of his working life, servicing minor parishes in rural Wales. His poetry moves from celebrating (in a very bleak register) the glum members of his flock to bleak poems of meditation on his absent god. Later in life a degree of Welsh nationalism emerged and he attacked both “the machine” of modern life and the hordes of post-war English visitors who ruined the Welsh economy by outbidding the locals and buying up incredibly cheap (by English financial; standards) houses as holiday homes. (As someone who spent his childhood holidays in Snowdonia in the 1950s, I always get a twinge of guilt when I read these poems, but I console myself with the fact that my parents were nearly as poor as Thomas’s Welsh and that our holidays were spent in tents on camping grounds rather than in comfortable second homes.)

My initial sense is that Cooley’s poems don’t have a profoundly important engagement with Thomas’s: he is, in other words, a fellow-traveller or iconic mentor rather than a generative principle. The first of the poems I’ve looked at, “There is an island there is no going to” takes its title from “Pilgrimages” the first poem of Thomas’s 1981 collection, Between Here and Now. Thomas’s poem recounts a trip to Bardsey (he was briefly chairman of the island’s council in 1978-9) and contrasts the modern, metaphorical pilgrims with those of the medieval past (for whom three pilgrimages to Bardsey was the equivalent of a pilgrimage to Rome). It’s opening lines focus, like Cooley’s two poems, on the kinds of boats one might use to land on the island –

There is an island there is no going
to but in a small boat the way
the saints went, travelling the gallery
of the frightened faces of
the long-drowned –

but taking her title as the entire first line and ignoring the enjambed “to but in a small boat” gives her a perfect title for the paradox of the attempt to land on St Alouarn’s Island. Another poem, “About mountains it is useless to argue” derives its title from Thomas’s poem, “Alpine”, but rather as in the case of the previous poem, it plays with the title’s meaning so that “about” is taken to mean “in the presence of” as well as “on the subject of” (the same play is made with the same word, “about” in “Trees are about you”). At any rate, while “Alpine” is a fairly frosty short poem about doing things half-heartedly, Cooley’s poem is about the tension between the arguing of a bickering couple and the geological perspectives of the Welsh mountains:

. . . . . 
                  As we too could rest,
and no longer bicker – but the clefts

and corries were sluiced by glaciers
in a thousand-centuries hurry, and we

can’t bear to think it, can’t even watch
the clock hand ratchet through another minute.

Finally in this random sampling of titles, one might look at “I was no tree walking” which takes its title from the first line of Thomas’s “A Thicket in LLeyn”. Thomas’s poem is a meditation that occurs while pursuing his hobby of bird watching. It concludes with the injunction to himself that, since the mind in meditation always migrates (like the birds it has been observing) it should take as its navigational markers the “spray from the fountain / of the imagination”. Cooley’s poem puts together Hölderlin (and his woodworking host during his madness) with David Nash’s sculpted wooden boulder which – in a more than relevant art experiment – was released over a waterfall and allowed to “home” in its own way, having its progress documented: when it disappears it is, as its creator says, not lost but “just / somewhere else”. True, it also includes material about the poet’s own seeking for a right way which will produce poetry when “your body becomes a tuning fork” and this does accord with the last part of Thomas’s poem. But, all in all, I have the sense, as I have said, that these poems (at least the ones I have looked at) don’t engage really intimately with Thomas’s work. I might well be wrong though, and it would be an interesting critical task (for someone with patience and time) to put each of Cooley’s poems next to the Thomas poem from which it draws its title and to try to describe what the exact relationship is.

Despite all my concerns about whether this is a planned book or one whose poems have arisen and then been subjected to varied attempts to unify it, this remains a complex book about the subject of its title: “homing”. It is a book whose poems concentrate on currents and flow – in water and in the sky. And between these two is the surface of the world: the key word in the poems may well be “grain” which is the current of matter inside timber as well as a word used, in its adjectival form, to describe light. It’s also important to go “with the grain” rather than against it – a direction that produces nothing but profitless exhaustion.

Also inhabiting the surface of the world are the animals, and there is a strong interest in animal life and the way animals – blackbirds, petrel, deer, foxes, weasels, false killer whales (but blessedly not pigeons) – navigate their way through their own lives according to patterns that other species like humans find difficult to sense. Two poems deal with the famous beaching of a large number of false killer whales on Flinders Beach in 1986. Cooley begins with an attempt to see the beaching from the lead whale’s point of view:

To be the first of them:
coming up from the twilit plain,
upswelling to the shallows – the draft
of your keel growing less; to rise

though you don’t yet
know why, hauling in on the bitter
end until you hit air hard as granite,
the concrete winter light;

to be beneaped then, and bent;
for the first time to feel the utter weight
of yourself . . .

For the whales, the elements are inverted so that air and light are hard as concrete and granite. The poem’s last stanza repeats the interest in being “the first of them” but switches species to consider the first of the humans who came across the whales. The concern of one species for another is celebrated in the second poem about the beachings, “I have let her ashes down in me like an anchor”. Here, one of the rescuers is reaching the end their life and the act of saving the whales is remembered, but the poem is really about the history of using whales as a source of oil:

. . . . . 
Your father used to light
lamps on the bridges over the Swan River,
whistling quietly as he set the wicks
to burning. Even then, they used
natural gas.

We had forgotten
almost entirely how the bodies
we soothed to stillness on the shore
held a secret of
combustibility –

And they didn’t burn, or light up
our tired faces, but were ushered
back out to sea.

Although, superficially the switch from animal derived oils to natural gas can be celebrated as an improvement, I think the real point here is made metaphorically: we shouldn’t expect animals to be the source of our spiritual illumination, providers of epiphanies when we cross the path of a fox or deer. In fact the poems which mention foxes and a weasel, tend to focus on the fiery redness of the animals (the deer in “I have no name for today but itself” may well be a red deer too). The weasel of a fine poem, “In the hushed meadows the weasel” is nothing more than a brief flaring of the world, “less / than a reddish passing, some deadly surprise / that sinuates sometimes through each of us”. The fox, encountered on the road in the first of the five sections that make up “Meadows empty of him, animal eyes, impersonal as glass” detects (as I read it) the “predatory” desire of the poet to make it part of herself, to reduce it to a powerful personal experience, and intuiting that “my knowing of it will be the worst / of all deaths” it “skips / sideways / from the path”.

The poems of this book seem to be saying that a simple model of epiphanic illumination, inspired by the animals of the natural world or by momentary configurations of light and current is inadequate. What the poems propose, I think, is that we should go through life as purposefully as possible, looking for markers that might help us in our ad hoc navigation. This is certainly the tone of the first poem of the book. Its title – “Without catching a thing I was not far from the truth” – is particularly revealing after a few readings. The poem is an extended description of an Easter road trip (Easter being another marker of the conventional transcendent and something that raises the suspicion that this might have been conceived as a mini-Commedia) and allows plenty of the poet’s affective life in – there is a lot of bickering to counter the implicitly symbolic movements through landscape (both across plains but also climbing up into mountains). It’s also a poem haunted by death and the realisation that “I write poems for dead / friends. This seems now to be some kind / of terrible error”. I take this, together with the later realisation that in the abundant roadkill “death / rides the edges” of the road to be a fear that the navigational markers the poet is trying to read might be either wrong ones or ones which will have some impact on the lives of her friends. At any rate, the idea of being sensitive to intimations not of immortality but of the knowledge that a chosen path is a correct one, is clearly spelled out in the description of the road at the end of the poem:

Back to driving this road. It is dead
straight, but undulating. Ahead

the bitumen is interrupted
by patches of uncorrupted light.

Brief moments when we’re caught
in the light, then as quickly, we’re out

of it . . .

It may be a “dead” straight road but it’s not without signals.

Luke Fischer: A Personal History of Vision

Crawley, WA: UWA Publishing, 2017, 100pp.

The first section of this, Luke Fischer’s second book, is called “Retrospect” and begins, significantly, with a poem in which the author looks backwards.

The setting is a gallery and the object seen is a head of Zeus:
Turning to see
if you’ve missed anything
in a quiet room in the gallery,
you’re startled by a marble head . . .

But what follows is not so much a description of the head (although it is that) as an unusual move in which the head seems to expand to suitably cosmic dimensions:

His locks are swirling cumulus; the curls
of his beard, entangled waves
whisked by winds. The dome of his skull,
the perfect ceiling above the clouds
from where he looks down at this tumult.
His wide cheeks hold the atmosphere.
Slightly unsealed, his lips are pregnant
with the pre-storm stillness, electrified air;
while his eyes sharpen on a toy ship
rocking unawares – in an instant
sundered.

Disoriented, as ever, at the beginning of a new book of poetry, the reader (well, this reader) isn’t entirely sure what kind of shift has happened here. Either the head has expanded to fulfil the requirements of the god which it portrays or the poet’s imagination has expanded – liberated or prompted by the statue – into a more cosmic perspective. It’s ultimately a matter of whether the power driving the expansion is divine or human. At any rate, this idea of retrospect as a physical turning backwards is complemented by poems which exploit the word in its more usual, temporal aspect. In “Rain and Memories”, for example, the rain prompts a series of memories of childhood including one in which, interestingly, learning about the various Norse gods enables those gods momentarily to enter the contemporary world and wreak havoc in a schoolground,

. . . . . 
and one recess, as though a stormcloud had migrated

from the legend into our minds, we all turned
on each other, wrestled, threw stones -
girls and boys were injured, in tears.

Not spirits whom one wants to invoke casually, any more than one does Zeus. And later in the book, memories recur which are not of childhood experiences like this but of lost friends and mentors – elegies in other words, another kind of retrospection.

A Personal History of Vision could be read as something of an anatomy of seeing, a mode perhaps fitting for a Rilke scholar. There is a fascination, for example, with what is sensed at the edge of vision. A poem about the “Annunciation” of Fra Angelico focusses on the odd sight lines of angel and Madonna commenting that “Her vision reaches beyond the normal boundary / of the human mind”. And though this seems merely one of the portals towards transcendence, other poems in the book worry about the balances involved here. Much is contained in the idea of “double vision” which can be taken to mean the simultaneous apprehension of both the mundane and non-mundane (ranging from metaphoric and symbolic to divine) aspects of any phenomenon but which comes out as a little more complex in a poem with that title. Here various different experiences of double vision are recorded: the poet’s wife and a friend, met in a local café, are suddenly Isis and Osiris, weighers of the soul; a new environment has an odd familiarity; an unreligious self finds intimations of the divine; tiny petals twirl like dervishes and seem to mimic galaxies; and a poetry reading merges with an initiation into one of the ancient Greek mystery cults. Whatever the exact pathology of this kind of seeing – it seems related to synaesthesia where normally separated paths of interpretation get connected somehow – these are experienced as welcome “openings-out”: “Though you’re unable to explain / these double visions, in the long interims / the world feels confined”.

“Double Vision” in followed in the book by “The Novice” which emphasises the fragmentary nature of these moments of double seeing, calling them “Luminous fragments, crumbs / from the gods” a description which seems to accede to the idea that revelation from above is what makes it all work rather than the active achievement of a kind of seeing on the part of the observer. And later on there is a poem, “In Wait”, which is a kind of wry gloss on Rilke’s first “Duino Elegy”:

We know that if the great poem comes
it will come like an eagle riding a gale
while the gulls, sparrows, finches
hide in whatever shelter they can find . . .

finishing with the author’s failed attempts to get much more than fragments of the great moment of revelation:

            For days, perhaps years,
we’ll return to the manuscript
held in a desk’s top drawer.
This thought comes to light -
it’s been lingering in my shadow
for some time – as I sit at the end 
of a jetty on a quiet lake, put
down a book, and a few ducks
approach, expecting crumbs.

That is, the ducks expect crumbs from the poet as the poet expects crumbs from the angels of inspiration.

The issue of seeing, in the poems of A Personal History of Vision, isn’t completely exhausted by topics like retrospectivity, seeing beyond boundaries, and experiencing moments of double insight. Many of the poems, for example, are about “seeing” landscape, and the landscapes seen range from the mountains of the European Alps – home of the German sublime – to the homelier vistas of Australian beaches. The former group are interesting because they seem to require a different sort of focus to that even gaze into the middle distance that Australians are supposed to have bred into them. And in the spectacular scenery of the mountains above Lac Leman (in “Translation” and “Horizon of the Alps (K)”) where there is a kind of double vision in that the mountains are reflected in the lake, a quite different sort of vision is required. In the former, there is a drive towards interpretation which imagines the skyline to be a seismograph – “I follow the grooves / like the needle of a phonograph, / attempting to translate / feeling’s contours”. In the second, which begins with the remark that the mountains are “Always at the boundary of vision, of thought / even when we look the other way”, a series of metaphors are thrown at them in an attempt to define their unyielding solidity, almost by accretion:

. . . . . 
Frozen tsunamis, primeval modernists
their abstraction rises above the lake and
its scattered sails – white chips in blue paint - 
above the foothills’ sprawl of villages, the tangle
of forests and human lives, above emotion.

Resembling a heterodox order of monks
great mathematicians . . . 
. . . . .
Still epics, skeletons of mythic creatures, crystal skulls
pure forms, the moral law, metalogic, consonants
isolated from vowels . . .

The metaphors here move in a number of directions. One – the idea that the mountains are figurations of the stones that make them up, leads towards a poem like “Stones” from later in the book which derives a lot of its ideas (as the notes explain) from Heidegger’s meditation on stones – objects which when broken open reveal nothing. Thus the mountains are stones writ large. The second – that the mountains are like pure abstractions – leads towards a poem like “Power Tower” where the power lines are held up by a kind of abstract human being: “A man of steel, / with its head and arms / it holds up thirteen power lines”. This particular abstraction has, unlike the non-communicating mountains of the Alps, a sinister quality though, recalling a stormy Sumerian mythology:

. . . . . 
Perfect copies, bodybuilders posing for a mirror,
their iron fists suspend the weight of wires,
whose arcs, inverted rainbows, have harnessed
lightning. Up close, the clenched hands resemble
bulls’ testicles – hunting trophies
won from Adad.

And then there are the birds, an irresistible subject in a poetry that tends to focus upwards towards the sky and the mountains, rather than parallel to the ground (in a focus on the social activity of humans). Birds were a major subject in Fischer’s first book and they appear here, inhabitants of the middle heights: the crowd at the beach in “Sunday” simply never sees the goshawk which hovers high above them. And birds have intimations of the divine, not least because they seem, if looked at with “double vision”, to be prefigurings, or metaphors, of angels – the beings which mediate between the upper, divine world and the lower depths of the ordinary. So it’s probably no coincidence that in “Annunciation” the archangel tasked with delivering the good news has “parrot-feathered wings” or that the Christ child in “Madonna of the Goldfinch”, looking as he does not at John the Baptist but “past his appearance / into another space”, should have this interaction take place over a goldfinch.

All of this description thus far probably makes Fischer look like a poet obsessed by a group of essentially philosophical issues, especially those relating to how we apprehend the world (seeing) and what the relationship is between the divine and the mundane: is the former, as in a materialist perspective, simply an illusion of the latter or is there really a realm of the numinous, experienced by human beings. But there are other issues, perhaps homelier ones, in these varied poems. There is a mild confessional element, for example. A poem like “Deadwood” focusses on the subject of depression or those depressive episodes in which whatever in the past sparked the much sought-for sense of an expansion of the world, no longer works. Remembered moments of excitement – ie magical moments in which it seems a god or angel has “pressed its deep blue seed / into my mind” – when seen in retrospect, “fail to convince”, leading to the obvious question “How is it possible / in this infinitely varied world, / this multi-dimensional universe / to accrue deposits of apathy?” The poem, “I”, focusses on the upright figure which becomes no longer a figure of the self-confident self guided by its own star but rather “a charred post / in a vast waste.”

Other poems deal with early experiences of loss which mean that “Darkness / found a home / in me” an experience which, if we accept the existence of a divine plane, might be accommodated in the mystics’ idea of a dark night of the soul. “In the Mouth of the Shark”, which takes its title from a geographical metaphor (the shark’s mouth in question is the “jaw of sandstone between Bondi and Tamarama”) lists a succession of dead friends and mentors. And “Matthew and the Angel”, a response to Rembrandt’s painting, which looks as though it will be a celebration of the inspiring spirit that hovers just outside of the corner of our vision, turns out, in its conclusion, to be a poem about lack of inspiration – “All this I felt I knew. // Now I write / to address the absence.” There is an intriguing poem, “Breakdown”, ostensibly about a train becoming “detached from the grid” and coming to a halt inside a conifer forest. I read this as a poem about not being able to move – in one’s writing or one’s life – but there is a hint of promise in the way the sun manages to illuminate small patches on the floor of the forest.

But under this personal bleakness, there is also a strong current of interest in macro-suffering. Those poems that address mistreatment of refugees, victims (“the ravaged / whose screams are punctured by bullets”) and so on (as far as Mother Earth herself) don’t seem really satisfactory to me but this may be simply because the task is so much more difficult – for complex reasons. By far the best of them – because it adopts a mode which is satisfactorily oblique – is, I think, “After the Storm”. It has a quite complex scena in which the poet investigates the fringes of a recent storm. Metaphorically we read this storm as the Second World War and a reference to Anselm Kiefer famous, together with Ingeborg Bachmann, for insisting that the memory of that war be continuously brought before modern Germans only too happy to consign it to the past, leads readers to think that the opening clause “Sheltered, we glimpsed / a fringe of the storm” is about Australia’s status as a lucky peripheral player in the vast event. A poem in Paths of Flight and “Banksia Spikes” in this book, both invoke the poet’s grandfather, a holocaust survivor, who “knew darkness / far better than me”.

Finally, there is “Why I Write”, appearing late in the book and, as a “poem-poem”, occupying much the same position as “Poem” does in Paths of Flight. It’s always tempting to read a poem like this as the centre of the book since it seems to address almost all of the issues that the other poems of the book raise. Structurally it’s a set of negations – “I don’t write to modulate my griefs . . . Nor do I write for recognition . . . Nor is it bibliophilia . . .” – and it goes on to address the issues I’ve raised here specifically:

I don’t write for revelation,
though poetry has opened rooms
in the mansion of world-mind
and led me closer to the hearth
than philosophy has.
. . . . . 
I don’t write to foster the art
of double vision – to sense
the divinity in the morning gleam
on granite cliffs, whispers of the dead
in the fall of snow, the epiphany
in a stranger’s friendly glance,
the way a gull floating on a thermal
becomes the singular word for grace.

I don’t write to ease my conscience,
redress the past, though in moments
of recollection, the broken soil of pain
(as if time were a hidden gardener)
is transfigured into a bed of snowdrops,
roses of sublimation . . .

There are two things (at least) one needs to say about this poem. The first is that poems such as this, in which a poet analyses what he or she is doing, might well come out of the analytical/critical part of their minds rather than the poetic/creative. They may represent no more than a writers’ day-time brooding over the issues that their night-time work seems to raise – in their own practice and in the context of poetry generally. Secondly, this is a skilfully constructed piece simultaneously denying and then qualifying, built on the pattern of “I do not . . . though”. In other words, the function is to raise the very issues that it goes on to reject as the purpose behind the poems. At any rate, the final stanza, as one would expect, is outright assertion: “I write for the expansion of the present . . .” and, as far as a writer and reader are in control of these things, this seems an eminently admirable ambition.

Amanda Joy: Snake Like Charms

Crawley, WA: UWA Publishing, 2017, 117pp.

It’s probably significant that this review is appearing the day after a Victorian mother’s photograph of her two-year-old daughter which accidentally captured a very large and nasty looking brown snake sliding past the girl’s feet appeared in substantial numbers of digitised news media at home and abroad. There are snakes everywhere in Amanda Joy’s excellent Snake Like Charms – a first book full of poems celebrating or recording such accidental meetings – and I won’t be the first critic to warn those readers who are sent into fits of the heebie-jeebies by the very idea of snakes that this may be a book they need to leave on the shelf. The poems work through all the possible significances they might have: they are there as nasty surprises, venomous threats to children, fellow-parents, Medusa’s famous locks and benevolent incarnations of the great Rainbow Serpent. Almost all the poems are intriguing and they range in complexity from fairly simple accounts of meetings (“Brown Snake, North Lake”) to challenging poems like the book’s first, “Almost Pause / Pareidolia”.

In fact, it’s the variety of approaches and kinds of poems that are an important part of the success of this book. There is an archetypical first book of poems in which a range of styles is a result of an author’s not being entirely sure what his or her true voice is though being, at the same time, quite sure that all the poems are, in their own way, “successful”. If this sounds more like a literary critic’s imagination than a practical reality, I can think of several first books which match this description. In a world where many first books come out of Creative Writing degree dissertations and thus have the unity of an argued-for project, variety might not be sign of weakness but rather of a realisation that one’s central material can be approached in a number of ways. And, on this subject, I might as well voice a fear about this kind of book, good as Snake Like Charms is: which is that one isn’t at all sure how its author can progress from here. Are there more snake poems? – probably not. Is there a unified experience as important as the snake meetings and which can be explored in all its ramifications? – probably not.

Generic doubts aside, the snakes of Snake Like Charms are usually recorded in interactions with the author in some way: they are not abstract principles (though a long and difficult sequence, “Medusa and the Taxonomic Vandal”, might be an exception here). “Gwardar Means Go the Long Way Round” has a title which derives from the literal meaning of the native name for the Western Brown snake – described chillingly in Wikipedia as “a species of very fast, highly venomous elapid snake“ – and it describes on of these accidental, usually abrupt, meetings:

. . . . . 
             I lost my footing and slid
with a barrage of rocks

in a confusion of vision and pain
kaleidoscopic flashes of what may have been
a gwardar, in panic knotting itself as
though attacked from all sides

Somehow I stopped
No sign left of any creature but myself
all torn clothes and shredded knees

In a conspiracy of senses, fragments
of snake have swallowed every other
memory of that day.

The last stanza thickens the mix a little in the same way in which the end of Judith Wright’s “The Killer” (quoted as one of the epigraphs to Snake Like Charms) suddenly opens up new complexities in what otherwise seems no more than the description of a snake-killing. A lot is happening in those last three lines in Joy’s poem. The shocking meeting obliterates all other memories (though the poem does begin with memories of a group of boys and a kookaburra, these are ancillary to the meeting with the snake) but because the perception was so fragmentary and confused, the memory is equally fragmented. But the fragmentation of snakes (their bodies, not the memories of them) is a recurring image of this book. “Quetzalcoatl” is a complex meditation on the relationship between birds and snakes but it begins with the observation, “Fossils of snakes almost never retain the skull / Bones grown for expansion stretch apart one last / time and go to ground, evade being bagged / numbered and lost again.” And “The Tiger Snake Talisman” is about a single vertebra used as a talisman:

. . . . . 
Gateway of dark tunnel waiting
to call out a dormant echo
not banished but still

an uncertain distance
from my silence

as though the snake in Judith Wright’s poem had an afterlife inside the poet in which it could speak back as part of the poet’s self. Snakes are, I suppose, because of their bodies’ construction and shape, eminently segmentable, fragmentable animals. But it isn’t only the snake which is fragmented at the end of “Gwardar” it’s memories themselves and this is a book interested in memory, language and the visual and the way in which these categories can inter-relate.

The complex first poem, “Almost Pause / Pareidolia”, is, as the last word tells us, about our tendency to misread things visually, to see patterns, shapes and resemblances which aren’t there: a man’s face on Mars or Jesus of Nazareth in the clouds, or, for that matter, his mother in a slice of pizza. So the sea slug is no more a hare than the dugong is a mermaid. But, of course, poetic language exploits technically inappropriate resemblances (between girlfriends and roses, for example) to widen its expressive power. The last part of the poem moves into the world of language and also, almost inevitably, into that of snakes:

                                    Language hesitates
to enter the concealed strand of vertebrae beneath
a dark lick of scales, uncoiling across blackened remains

of balga, racing as snake into our shared vision. Our
hands extensors and abductors gripping themselves
riven in resistance, the words “beyond regeneration”

heard again in a stand of sheoaks. We can follow
the blood red trail of uneaten zamia nuts out
of scalded wetlands. Mining mountains no longer

unmoved, even this verse cannibalises itself
remembering the feast to come. Like, when I
use the word “eternity”, when what I mean to say, is “water”.

It’s not a conclusion that I feel comfortable in providing a reading for but I can recognise many of the things it seems to be saying about language and the way they mirror what the first part of the poem says about our visual apprehension of the world. And then, of course, there is the inevitable snake. It cannot speak or be spoken for but it can be metaphorically described (as a “concealed strand of vertebrae beneath / a dark lick of scales”) and the snake, as so often in this book, is, of all animals, the one that may seem at first to be a visual misreading of reality: “Could what we just saw have been a snake?”

This concern with the information of the senses and the pre-existing templates for rapid interpretation (“Married to what / we intuit as signatures . . .”) persists. In “On Warmth” the rigid interpretive frame of syntax is removed by sitting far enough away from a speaker so that the words themselves are only vaguely apprehended in the total experience of the act of communication. The metaphor for this alternative kind of interpretation is the bee swarm which contains a map in a “hive’s song of wings”:

. . . . . 
The sun throbs behind my lobes. I am too far for
your words, just outside their reach, I imagine
skeins, some transparent consonants, stretching
towards me,

divest of their meaning, I could touch them, just
the sensation of an S whistled through the abacus
of your teeth, resting on my fingertips. I spread
my hands upwards

on my knees to catch them, the mathematics of
your sound. Later in bed, when you ask me what
I thought, I touch your lips, lean forward to push
my tongue into your mouth.
Into the swarm.

Alongside the world of the snake (and bees too, I suppose) is the affective life of the author. It’s rarely the central issue of poems and I think this is another of the book’s successes: the author’s complex relationship to both the natural world and the social world of human interaction – intimate or otherwise – is always present colouring each of the poems but never being dominant. There is something about the current situation of the world and its arts that means that poetry as bildungsroman or even livre compose seems inappropriately self-obsessed. The external world suddenly seems to need as much exploring as the inner world, especially when that external world is the snake-filled landscape of north-western Australia. But behind the personal elements of the poems in this book is a shadowy suggestion that alchemical imagery may be being used as a framing device. Poems called “Nigredo”, “Rubedo” and “Albedo” are warning enough that we are entering the territory of the Magnum Opus, but I don’t think that, in the poems as they are, they are used as an extended structural device. In the first of these three poems, the emphasis is on black as the colour of the snake’s “base matter”, its “blood-black” scats “jewelled / with tiny bones”, and in the last of them – a strong poem to my mind – the focus is on the white object which recalls to the observer the bleached debris of an earlier life:

. . . . .
To me it exhaled pale silt
and swamp rushes, unearthed chert
a calenture, also

in lingering base
note as I brushed
it to my cheek, the bleached thread
my grandfather repaired
his last nets with.

This is from the fourth part of Snake Like Charms which begins with a number of poems about paintings. Although this might be dismissed as merely fashionable, their interest is legitimate in the context of this book because almost all the artworks contain snakes in one form or another and, perhaps more importantly, because they are, in a way, extensions of that first poem which explored how we process visual clues or, to put it more memorably, as Amanda Joy does, “how often we graze / our hulls on rocks of clear vision”. The two drawings by Cornelia Parker are Rorschach (ie freely interpretable) shapes, the first made from snake venom the second from antivenene. “The Gigantomachy Pediment of the Old Temple of Athena Polias” – a celebration of the fragments of statuary from the original temple on the Acropolis destroyed in the Persian invasion – is not a mere gloss on the magnificent (and terrifying) image of Athena holding out her aegis towards an enemy with snakes looped through circles in the hem but a complex response in its own right:

Another dead language, revived tongue first
into battle, head bowed, snake drooped
through each loop of aegis, the latent
flare of muscled effigy

(Exhume the awe, the lifting chorus
of breathlessness and dig the words in)

Eyes, empty as stone, lidded by stone
Unswayable, what’s left of a foot stepped
warily in her path, leaving a world of giants
unguarded, black air towering above

I read this as emphasising that the “dead language” of this art and its conception of the gods and their war with the giants reproduces the situation in which visual clues can play us false, but I suspect that it’s a more complex piece than that suggests and seems also to want to speak of the act of uncovering old foundations. This section also contains “Atlas Moth”, not an artwork as such but an animal that looks suspiciously like one when its wings are opened, and “Caduceus” in which the twinned snake symbol of Hermes in his function as messenger and leader of traders is, by a misprision of the medical profession in which they grazed their hulls on the rocks of clear vision, converted into a symbol for Aesculapius the Healer.

Towards the end of the book is “Your Ground”, another snake confrontation poem in which an upreared snake matches the pose of the shocked observer. The poem talks about the experience (“The luminous trance stays / for more than months / (you still can’t remember / standing”) and the way different people – a psychologist, an elder from Broome – interpret it for the author. But the author stumbles on a different reading:

Then one morning you get it - 
                That paired wisdom
                   your bodies made

                              Snake says
                                     Be still
                 Stand your ground
           It’s the only protection
                                    we have

It’s an attractive and simple message and one fears that it’s a passage which readers (and reviewers) will highlight and remember. But it is, at bottom, just a piece of advice about living one’s life. I think it’s a long way from the kind of knowledge that the interactions with the other snakes of the book provide. Individuals of a species nearly as alien to us as William James’s octopus, they have profounder messages in those poems where the poet is tempted to try to move across the uncrossable boundary that separates species.

Kevin Brophy: This Is What Gives Us Time

np: GloriaSMH Press, 2016, 80pp.

Kevin Brophy’s This Is What Gives Us Time together with David Musgrave’s Anatomy of Voice are the first two productions of a new press, GloriaSMH – a name which derives from the wartime Parisian resistance group and thus, like Puncher & Wattmann, conceals a Beckett allusion (and the morse code for GSMH makes a very satisfying logo). This Is What Gives Us Time is, to me, the most satisfying of Brophy’s books since Mr Wittgenstein’s Lion. His contribution to Radar, a book shared with Nathan Curnow, was a set of prose poems which had a decidedly abstract ring (as prose poems often do) and Walking, from 2013, has always seemed to me to have a slightly unfocussed quality. The overall shape of Brophy’s poetry, despite its unchanging interests and values, seems to be a move away from documenting life in a Melbourne suburb towards elegant abstraction. A few poems are no sort of evidence, of course, but a comparison of the first lines of Brophy’s first book, Replies to the Questionnaire on Love, with the first lines of this new book will give some idea of what I mean:

In my street
there are fig trees and grape vines in back yards
and stone lions guarding front gates . . .

and

Fountains work hard to be joyous for us. Look how they 
                                                                   keep their mouths open.

Of course all of this oversimplifies badly. There are poems of great local precision in This Is What Gives Us Time just as there are lines like “Now in its fifth year, / my plant learns to take / on the details, all the business / of being a tree” in Replies to the Questionnaire on Love but the feeling that this is a poetry moving from the specific towards exploring the more abstract remains.

What anchors This Is What Gives Us Time and is one of the reasons for the favourable impact it makes is, I think, the fact that all its speculative, imaginative flights are anchored firmly in a place. It was written, the book itself tells us, during a six month residency at the Whiting studio in Rome. To be entirely accurate, the book doesn’t say how many of the poems were written there but almost all of them have a Roman background. As a result, familiar themes from Brophy’s other books are given both a twist and an extension by their Mediterranean setting. There is something imaginatively satisfying, for example, in considering the general issue of the all-round potential for sheer destruction that humans possess in the context of a city which for nearly two millennia has pillaged its own ruins for new building material so that people actually stand metres above the past and in kaleidoscopic creations from the material of the past. This appears in the book’s fine second poem, “Elena!”, for example, whose refrain – “We are building the ruins” – is both a statement of this fact and a perverse image of destruction. It is

. . . . . 
left for latecomers to imagine

what might have been said
from a second-storey window
on a Sunday morning late in April

when a woman called from the street
Elena! Elena! -
to her friend above.
. . . . .
Elena, leaning over her red geranium
on her window sill calls back down to her friend
in a voice that carries all that will be ruined.

And, of course, as Italy is geologically far more active place than Australia, the possibilities of a purely natural destruction are also everpresent: as “A Name For It” says, “I read of volcanoes and earthquakes coming”. The poem, “Rabbit” is devoted to this more general view of the mechanisms of history:

. . . . . 
The fat black rabbit knows each crack and hole
a poet or hermit might creep in.
It knows who pilfered the bronze and the marble,
what the earthquake said when it shoved its shoulder
under the deepest rocks it could uncover . . .

Another reason why This Is What Gives Us Time seems so satisfying is, I think, that Brophy has moved towards responding to the challenge that each poem should satisfy as a unique conception rather than, as with so much contemporary poetry, being cut and pasted from an endless conversation between the poet and his experiences of the world. One of my favourites among the earlier poems, “Up There” (from the 2002 volume, Portrait in Skin) describes fixing a leak on a fellow poet’s roof. The strength of the poem comes from the symbolic possibilities of its narrative situation – two poets dealing with a flaw in the universe perched between the earth and the sky, etc etc – in verse which is kicked along by a lively metaphoric language:

On top of your house I could see the universe
still needs a carpenter for your tin roof 
where the nails pop like toast
and tin buckles worse than wet carpet.
My shoes were scuffed red with the roof’s patient rust
and we were leaning to the east. . .

But, fine as this poem is, it doesn’t attempt anything unusual at the level of discourse. If it’s compared to a poem like “A Visit to the Convent of the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary” in the current volume, you can see the effort to do something distinctive at this level:

If the chapel is white, and the nuns have their founder
Put away in a side room, in her own sarcophagus,
If their seven martyrs are on the wall prepared to die,
And the chapel door is open to people from the street . . .

And so on through a total of twenty-five conditional clauses that have us yearning for a simple consequence clause.

The book’s first poem, “The Drowned World”, is about one of the most important recurring images in the book, that of water. It appears, at first, to be a set of discontinuous propositions:

. . . . . There is something unstable in water, a life under
                         ground then this spilling of light.
The surface of the mind is permeable under the swirling
                      suggestion of water.
If fountains are only truly happy in summer, why do we
                      leave them out in winter?
There is something ridiculous about water, its mindless
                   falling and welling . . .

and there is even an uncomfortable narrative thread that emerges every so often – “She was drowning, her face was upturned. Someone / lifted her clear of the water . . .” – as well as a personal element – “My first thought is to swim across it. The water invites / me in to its liquid mind”. At first it seems like a mix of these elements – imaginative proposition, narrative, lyric – that strains any conventional notion of unity. But the poem’s structure is, at heart, mimetic: what looks like a mix is really a braiding, taking its shape from the way water flows like (to use another image from the poem) a rope. And the formal quality is emphasised by the poem’s visual layout in which turnovers regularly decrease and then increase.

A number of other poems are built on the model of a list, something that, though common, still has a certain frisson because the mechanical nature of a list is so far from people’s conventional expectations of an imaginative mode like poetry. “Numbering”, “What We Know”, “A Life In Fifty Moves”, “Negatives Not to Live By” and “Sightings” are all built around this principle though each retains a distinctive character. What they share, though, is a sense of accounting – accounting for one’s values about life, one’s experiences of life, even for the fact that one’s life is being spent in Rome. At a profound level this is probably prompted by the unfamiliar setting but at a more trivial level it relates to the fact that anyone having been provided with a grant to spend half-a-year in Rome is going to have to, in the end, provide a written account, justifying the investment of the money. I think this lies behind both the structure and humour of “A Brief Report”:

I failed to sleep last night. I failed to find the dreams
that would take me safe from one day into the next.

I failed to be brave, afraid of the train, its snout of steel
pushing out of the dark into the station at San Pietro,

its sides towering over me blue and white and dark with night.
It hissed, cracked open, impatient, warm as a belly inside.

I was shaken as it took me; it was like some fallen angel breaking
its teeth on a language too new and too earthly to speak.

I have opened the door to the day without faith in its miracle,
I will cough up the night from my lungs, the city will breathe

and I will see across on the opposite hillside a man on a balcony
move among his plants, touching them, sprinkling them, nodding.

This parodies a formal accounting, moving straight to the world of dreams rather than that of mundane realities, but its linear structure is retained. Thematically, the threatening, apocalyptic world of dreams is contrasted with the homely world in which a neighbour can be seem watering his plants. It’s a kind of restatement of “Elena!” (which has a circular, repetitive structure) in which the warm world of the human (in co-operation, perhaps, with the world of geraniums and other domestic plants) stands out against ever-present and ever-irrupting forces of destruction.

“Sightings” and “How We Made It Through a Whole Day (Again)” are also linear, list poems with a ghazal-like disjunctiveness. The former is a list of two-line experiences:

. . . . . 
A man with a red string around his bare ankle and masses of hennaed hair under a
Straw hat sits next to me on the train, trimming his nails and talking of sunglasses.

The new cordless phone has instructions in Italian on how to set it to another
Language. It rings in English now but still speaks to me in Italian . . .

and the latter, closer to a diary, accounts for the events of a single day from early morning to night when

. . . . . 
         electric haloes on the heads of saints
burn prayers into the sizzling air, dissolving all complaints.

Their holy marble gestures are more eloquent than words:
we could never say what they have not already heard.

Finally, there are two poems of protest which, unlike the rest of the book are “set” outside of Italy. The first concerns the executions of Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran at the end of April, 2015 (ie within this book’s time-frame) in Indonesia and the second, “From The Book of Examples”, about Australia’s notorious treatment of asylum-seekers. In a sense it is public poems like this that demand most of a poet since they must be conceptualised in an imaginative way that prevents them being only one step up from an outraged rant. It’s something that the poems of Bruce Dawe did brilliantly (configuring the execution of Ronald Ryan as a marriage, for example) and I’m not sure Australian poets have done it quite as well since. If neither of these achieves that level of conceptual daring, they are, nonetheless, successful public poems. The former, “Somewhere They Are Executing Young Men”, circles back to the Indonesian president himself, imagining that the crime, “like all crime in his country, / Will be paid for in time” and it’s a reminder that by concentrating on the way the poems of this book are conceived I have bypassed a more traditional look at thematic obsessions.

Time (as the book’s title indicates) is certainly one of them and most of the poems in the first part of the book allude to it in one way or another. In “Hours” it is both a gift and something that can be escaped:

. . . . . 
Minutes fill the hour and go, gone as snowflakes.
A micro-second in a photograph could stand for years
of these hours.

I time my walking by them, then lie down with an hour
by lake, mountain, window, ruin.
Two dozen at a time they’re thrown our way. . .

And this strange fluidity applies to water, introduced so expansively in the first poem. In the book we meet water in the guise of underground, confined black fluidity, lakes, oceans, rivers (or, rather, the river, carrying its cargo of rubbish and dirt through the city) and fountains. In some forms it can represent the world of phenomena, the world of the dream-generating unconscious, the oblivion of death, and time itself. As the book’s second last poem says, “What is the ocean if it is not a god?”

Antigone Kefala: Fragments

Artarmon: Giramondo, 2016, 82pp.

One of the things about Antigone Kefala’s fifth book of poetry (her first, The Alien, was published all of forty-three years ago) that stays in the corner of your mind as you read it, is the title. Nothing could seem less fragmentary than these elegantly shaped lyric poems which are marked out by their self-contained unity. The fact that four of the poems carry a “II” after their titles and that there is no equivalent “I” in the book leaves the reader with the impression that the poems of this volume might have been chosen from a much larger corpus of work and so, in a sense, the entire book might be said to be no more than fragments of that larger work. And then, of course, there is the possibility that with increasing age – one of the themes of the poems – one might well want to find some fragments to shore against your ruins. But I think the issue is a bit more complex than that and that perhaps the answer lies in one of Kefala’s most important (and compulsively readable) works, her Sydney Journals, where excerpted journals record daily life in Sydney and on travels.

These prose pieces, like the poems of Fragments, have their own lovely shapes but they are clearly fragmentary. They are month by month selections grouped into ten journals. They tend to omit names so that we don’t have the usual voyeuristic pleasure of diaries: seeing what the writer says about people we know – or know of. A group travelling or, more likely, going out to dinner is usually just “we” and visiting artists are ”the Canadian writer” or just “she” as in the entry for February in Journal X: “She was back in Australia for the ceremony. She still looked at Australian society with affection and contempt, like the young . . . . . When she spoke about someone she disliked, her entire face collapsed, but her eyes dark and very warm, thinking from inside, trying to come to some balance.” It’s not so much that these pieces are fragmentary because they are selected from fuller accounts; they are fragmentary because they reject any attempt to totalise the experience, instead paring away everything, like identifying names, that seems inessential. Perhaps – and it may be the same with the poems of Fragments – they convey what can be conveyed.

They share with the poems a sensitivity to weather and, especially, to light so that you feel that Kefala’s first look must always be upward, towards the sky. Countless journal entries begin with something like “Raining and a slight wind. The trees moving as if shaking themselves under water” or “Stormy night. Brisk walk to the Opera House. Sydney wet and beautiful in the night, full of golden lights, the sea”. Even dreams, an important part of these journals, are described in terms of the light:

I was falling in and out of sleep, dreaming of Mother in the backyard putting clothes on the line, talking. I helping, making myself useful. The light on the clothes, brilliant white, peaceful, full of a live element, like the light for the last few days – luminous.

So when we get to a poem like the second poem of Fragments, “Letter II”:

The light today
clean as if made of bones
dried by a desert wind
fell in the distance on the roofs
and I remembered you.
Nothing will bring you back
only this light
falling so innocently
yet so self-contained
in an unbearable indifference.

it’s hard not to be reminded of the Journals and to begin to speculate how many of the poems had their origins in notes made in the Journals and omitted in the final, edited version.

There is also the fact that Kefala’s poetry has gradually become sparer as time has gone on – perhaps more Greek, if that isn’t too crude a cultural generalisation – and there seems less an attempt to build something larger out of dreams. It’s tempting to compare these poems with the first poem of The Alien, “Holidays in the Country”, a complex and extended piece with a touch of narrative. It could be read as a reasonably realistic account of a child overhearing her parents at a country retreat speaking enigmatically of a neighbour or servant, Katke. This latter gives an account of the well which, if you jump into it, will bring you into a kind of otherworld “where hills and trees / are of the purest gold, where glass birds sing”. It’s possible the child misunderstands Katka’s speaking of an imaginary journey to the antipodes – New Zealand or Australia. Thanks to Kefala’s many illuminating autobiographical accounts we now know the basic facts of her early life well enough and we might think that the whole poem was a dream perhaps provoked by talk of emigrating. I used to find this readerly uncertainty about the very core of the poem to be unsettling, and thought it was the result of the fact that this was a different writer writing out of a different tradition where the border line between reality, dream and myth might not be as razor sharp as it is likely to be under the fierce Australian sun. Now, I’m a bit more comfortable with the experience and am inclined to appeal to a reader’s modification of Keats: we should be able to live in a poem and let it breathe without the irritable search for certainties. At any rate, compared with the poems of Fragments and, to a lesser extent, European Notebook (a significant title) “Holidays in the Country” is comparatively expansive.

There is another, more overt, way in which the Journals prepare the reader for Fragments: in the occasional comments made about the poetic process itself – or, at least, in Kefala’s practice. There is an early passage which, brief as it is, opens up a large debate about literary expansiveness versus literary spareness (at its extreme: minimalism):

Discussing with I. the idea of size in literature. I felt that it has something to do with the physical space of the country, as in America too, people trying to cover it by inflating all things – oversized cars, buildings, novels, instead of concentrating them as in populated countries . . .

And there is a shrewd description of a fortunately unnamed poet at a reading:

The young man reading before me had a rough voice, a de rigueur voice developed in pubs, which they are giving us in literature too and think that this makes them Australian. A sort of inner brutality now that masks pretentiousness, an energy that never questions itself, a battering of language with no sense of its fragility, the beautiful energy, the dynamics that can be released when well used.

When Kefala speaks of her own writing it is in terms of paradoxical wrestlings with language:

Writing – constantly trying to recapture the living element at the beginning of the experience, an elusive element that has to be re-created constantly by discovered means that will bring it out. A process which seems far removed from the experience itself, grounded in the medium.

Finally, one can recognize in the Journals, situations that will re-appear in the poems of Fragments. It’s not possible to tell whether the situations are the same since, understandably, the poems omit all markers of identity and the Journals themselves, as I have said, are often deliberately vague. So the pungent little poem about the death of a neighbour –

On Monday, she said
they took her away
on Tuesday
the dog was put down
on Wednesday
the furniture went . . .

might or might not be about the Mrs Crawford of the Journals: “the small utility carrying away Mrs Crawford’s meagre furniture . . . It seemed such an impoverished ending, sad and vulnerable”. And the dying figure of another poem, “Anniversaries”

Faster and faster you were sinking
pushed gently by those unseen hands
the disinheriting
who took away relentlessly the gifts . . .

might or might not be the figure on the second page of the Journals: “Little is visible on his face, yet they say he is dying”. On the other hand there is not much doubt that “Metro Cellist” –

The faint sound travelled
from the centre
through the tiled tombs
the pores of the concrete
rode boldly through the doors,
we were floating on sound.
The earth was singing,
singing in an exuberance
of youth.

is based on an experience in the Paris Metro documented in the Journals:

He was young, almost an adolescent, with black eyes and hair, the score was open in front of him, and he was drawing these long, full tones. Bach was reverberating in the closed space. And as I came up on the platform, the sound was coming through the pores of the concrete, through the openings, as if the earth was singing.

Of course, all of this searching for a book’s origins, methods, and resonances rather takes one’s attention away from the matter at hand, Fragments itself. The poems are collected into five parts on what seems, generally, to be thematic principles. One wouldn’t want to be too definite about this since the first section, which one might want to think of as poems about the way the past (and figures from the past) imposes itself on the present in memories, dreams and sudden irruptions (“This return / the past attacking / unexpectedly / in the familiar streets”) also contains what looks to be a straightforward character portrait where the second stanza provides an expressionist comment on the first:

She was smoking
stirring her coffee
giving me her news.
A detached observer
presenting a life
unconnected to her
that left her
indifferent.
Through the glass
the sea green with the wind
and the seagulls
icy white with red eyes
shrieking above the beach.

“Variation on a Theme II” in which, in reality or dream, someone plays an ancient instrument, touches on a less personal conception of the past – though one that you meet in Kefala’s comments about writing – that art and language come out of the far past of an individual culture. It’s a chthonic approach where the sounds made by the instrument are

close to the truth of bodies
a truth that went beyond
the skin, the bones, the nerves
to some dark soil
that he found by touch
to feel the beat
release it of all bonds.

The poems of the second section are, generally, poems about meetings with places and, in pieces like “The Bay” and “Summer at Derveni” we get a chance to see Kefala’s impressive ability to “capture” the atmosphere – the “weather” – of a place, as well giving a precise visual rendition. Take the former of these, for example:

Green sea
fermenting into waves
laced with white foam.
Along the empty quay
abandoned houses.

Three divers
near the boat house
strange amphibious creatures
with black rubber skins
wrestling the waves
climbing the rocks
in the apocalyptic sunset
that left
gold orange strands
on the dark waters.

I think this is rather wonderful. It’s an example of one of the things that poetry can do. And although one wouldn’t want to live in a culture which thought that this is all that poetry can or should do, there is something exhilarating about a poem that does it as well as this.

The central section of Fragments is unremittingly about loss and is, interestingly, made up of poems that are a little unlike the style of the other sections. They might be said to be more like Kefala’s poems in her earlier books, tending to expand an experience (by taking it into a compressed sequence) rather than paring it down in the manner of the Journal entries. Again one wouldn’t want to be too schematic about this: the section contains, after all, only a three poem sequence, a two poem sequence, and two small poems.

The fourth section is intriguing because it seems to want to expand the imaginative resources of the poetry by moving into almost surreal territories of idols and rituals. Though the poems share the same spare quality of the poems of the first two sections, they have precious little connection to the world of the Journals. There seems a distinctly European quality about some of them: “Sacred Idols”, for example,

They watch us from inside
in silence
anxious too
trying to sustain
their brittle images
worn thin by our hands
constantly greedy
for some tangible proof.

or “The Furniture of Generations” where the objects of the title rest

at ease and self-sufficient
as if since the beginning
they had dreamt themselves
exactly as they were . . .

There is also, in this section, a poem, “Diviner II”, which recalls one of the poems of European Notebook. Both concern a totemic creative figure in touch with the wellsprings that lie under the ground and both refer to a fire-ravaged above-ground:

Traveller from a rocky country
scorched by a great fire
the shredded trees
black veils moving in the wind
full of distant echoes
that only you could hear.

Obsessed with the great depths
could not find other measures
watching the waters in the evening
you traced the way
a great forgetfulness.

It’s possible of course that this may be another portrait of a contemporary or even of a figure from the past but the imaginative approach – surreal, suggestive, totemic – is a lot different to the capturing method of poems like the ones of earlier sections.

Or, for that matter, those of the last section which is largely composed of portraits. Sometimes these are portraits of friends – “Patricia” – and sometimes, as in “Public Figure” or “Committee Member”, of figures seen only from a distance. Often they are spare, compressed portraits of people reduced in some way – by age or incapacity. The final portrait is the cellist in the Metro which I have already spoken about: it seems fitting that a book which is concerned so much about loss and ageing should conclude with an unnamed creative (or expressive) figure, perhaps an avatar of the diviner, capable of harmonising the body and the instrument with the depths of the earth so that the earth itself “was singing, / singing in an exuberance / of youth”.

Rereadings I: Rodney Hall: Terra Incognita

Sydney: Macmillan, 1996, 211pp.

(This review is the first of what I hope to make an annual event: a rereading of a text which is important to me but which, for one reason or another, I have never written about.)

Terra Incognita is the first of three novels grouped under the general title of The Island in the Mind and published twenty years ago. More importantly it is the first of a series of seven novels devoted, at least on the surface, to tracing the history of a small part of the south coast of New South Wales called Yandilli in the books but recognisable as the area around Bermagui and Tilba. But, as with Marquez’s Macondo in his Hundred Years of Solitude, the single small location stands as a symbol for the nation it is part of and so the heptalogy presents a view of Australia’s history up to the Second World War. And it is a view which begins more than a century before the arrival of the “first fleet”: like the Americas, Australia is a country that could be said to have been invented before it was discovered. The novels themselves, as one would expect, have complex interrelationships. They also have a complex order of composition (not entirely unlike the Star Wars saga), beginning with Captivity Captive, the sixth, so that the order of writing (and publishing) is: 6, 4, 5, 1, 2, 3, 7. Terra Incognita concerns itself with the earliest phase of Australian history beginning with the writing of an opera in a small and unidentifiable European country in the middle of the seventeenth century.

For all its historical and cultural obsessions, Hall’s imagination has always seemed to me to be essentially a dramatic one. And at the heart of all drama is not understanding but conflict. It would be an understatement to say that the seven novels are rife with conflict: at every point conflict between individuals is the core of what is happening (at least on the plot level). You would have to look hard in these novels to find examples of contented marriages, placid childhoods or bland mentorships – there is almost always, even if suppressed, a crackle of conflict. And the key conflict is not between historical or cultural enemies (representatives of nations or religions or classes) but between closely bonded individuals. As such, the central conflict might be called rivalry. At its best rivalry is not a destructive relationship but an opportunity to raise the bar. You can see this in a poem from the mid-sixties, “The Two of Them Are Rivals”:

The two of them are rivals
both attempt the chute of wind,
forcing their climb with flattened hair
toward some exploration of success.
And yet they stay together:
not quarrelling (as most outsiders would expect
as hydra-headed third men definitely hope)
but edging upward with each other’s help
already dangerously above the city . . .

But, of course, it isn’t always so mutually supportive and one is likely to find Hall’s characters locked in a psychic struggle for supremacy.

The closer the characters are together (think of the large family in Captivity Captive, or the de facto family of the female followers of Muley Moloch in The Grisly Wife) the more intense the friction. A crucial moment in the relationship of father and son (both, interestingly, sharing the same name: Richard Godolphin) in the third novel, Lord Hermaphrodite, occurs when, imprisoned in Kishangarh, each tries to prise open a shuttered window. Needless to say, the younger succeeds where the elder fails. In Hall’s universe this isn’t a simple, mildly oedipal triumph to be acknowledged wryly, but rather a rearrangement of the entire relationship:

The shutter gradually screeched open. Daylight flooded in through a barred window. We faced one another.

Our whole lives were before us at that moment: justices and injustices through the years, protections and beatings, playfulness and puzzlement, trust, treachery, disobedience, love, buried contentments and raw fears. Dear uncle, whatever your plans for the future, never again send a son with his father. Together, neither of them can be relied on. Indeed families are a microcosm of the world’s horrors – loving families no less than families forever embroiled in jealous quarrels. After nineteen years of affection Richard and I had reached a difficult moment, never mind that it may have seemed so slight a thing. And we both knew it.

And closeness reaches its highest point in the case of identical twins. One of Hall’s best poem-sequences is “Romulus and Remus” from the late sixties. It explores a relationship so close that it could be called schizophrenic: one twin almost thinks for the other and the rivalry is almost between two halves of the same self. At any rate, it is Romulus who triumphs, killing his brother who has jumped across the wall he is building: “Death to anyone / who dares to clear my battlements; / we murder those who try / to make our vision small”. All of the novels in the heptalogy, despite their focus on the complex history of Australia as a nation, have this underlying value: a hatred of those “who try to make our vision small” and a commitment to “imagining the unimaginable and searching for something new”.

There is a final issue to be thought about when it comes to the question of rivalry. The Second Bridegroom (the fourth novel) contains a passage in which the narrator explains the myth of the two bridegrooms, supposedly derived from an Irish translation of a commentary on the Thebaid of Statius:

Going back to the most ancient times before history there was a Goddess who took two bridegrooms each year – have you heard of her? – one for the winter and one for the summer. Each had the task of killing the husband who had lain with her for the six months before him. This idea could still be found, so the commentary said, under the skin of the Thebaid of Statius, enemies in pairs and friends in pairs. A warrior having a lion’s mane, with a warrior whose bushy boar bristles rise like a horror of white-shrike wings when with wild angry terror he seizes his enemy.

In the Celtic tradition, lacking lions and boars, these totemic animals have been transferred to a horse’s mane for the summer bridegroom and goat’s thighs for the winter bridegroom and the legend is imagined to have survived in the horse-mating feast in spring and the goat-mating feast in autumn. As we will see, rival bridegrooms (metaphorically and literally) are common in the seven novels and it raises an important issue that I’m not really able to resolve: is this myth the generative foundation of all of the novels (and other parts of Hall’s work as well) or is it simply a mythic version of the central theme of rivalry? I can think of arguments in both directions.

The dramatic cast of Hall’s imagination makes itself felt in the narrative method as well. All of these books are monologues and the narrating character usually has a very distinctive (ie dramatically “rounded”) voice. The central books of each group of three are narrated by women, as is the last book. Hearing them read, or reading them aloud, is likely to transform how readers relate to them, opening up vistas unseen to those for whom reading fiction is a matter of quickly processing words in order to follow plot. Some of the voices are easier to grasp than others and Terra Incognita is narrated by an excitable young man whose voice is easy to recognise. In contrast, the narrator of the third volume, a middle-aged man who, almost without his knowing, is engaged in a process which will expand his vision, is far less vocally distinct. And I’ve always had problems with the breathless (post-tuberculosis) disjointed narration of Catherine Byrne, the narrator of The Grisly Wife. But the consistency of the speaking voice is what makes all of the seven novels unified wholes.

The second issue is the relationship of the narrators to the action. I think Hall is always excited by the dramatic irony whereby what is really significant is not necessarily what is being conveyed by the narrator, and in fact it sometimes must be seen through the obfuscating screen of the narrator’s excited tale. There are dangers in this method because many readers will feel a constriction of their readerly freedom: there is a response to the events that they must see and one where the author has been there before them laying down a trail of clues. It can feel like a bit of an examination of one’s credentials as a reader where the author has a sheet with the correct answers. But seeing the central events obliquely, as it were, can be justified on other grounds than its success in producing a theatrical coup. When Isabella Manin, now guardian of Aurangzeb’s treasures, meets the Goldophins, she tells the story of the planned execution of a Christian by the Moghul emperor so that he can make a point to some visiting ambassadors of the East India Company:

“Have you ever thought how the sacrificial beast might feel, facing the grandeur of death, sir? The rarest privilege is to find death’s meaning. Most do not, I suspect. Most are probably more muddled than elated and cannot make much sense of the ceremony. Perhaps being too close to the centre to see any coherence, even. For anyone who wishes to understand, it is important not to be right at the centre.”

Obviously this can be read in terms of the relationship between the centre of an empire and it’s outlying provinces, but I’m content to read it also as a justification of Hall’s oblique narrative methods.

There is an important exception to this technique of having a narrator who looks towards the crucial events but can only see part of them. That is Captivity Captive where the narrator, Pat, is intimately connected with the three murders that the novel centres around (it is a solution to the “Gatton Mystery” and it stays very close to the known events but shifts the location to southern New South Wales). I think it’s fair to say that, unlike the other narrators in the series, Pat knows everything and has witnessed almost all the important things. Given that the solution to the mystery is not presented until the climax of the novel, this makes for a lot of challenges for the author. As a result, readers will be inclined to think either that the narrative has a lot of uneasinesses in it (to whom could Pat be imagined to tell the events in the order and with the elisions and emphases he does?) or that it is a narrative tour de force (a bit like The Murder of Roger Ackroyd but in a very superior mode). I’m inclined to lean towards the latter but the characterisation of Pat and the way he moves towards revealing the events of the night of the murders is a complex issue well beyond the ambit of this review.

The narrator of Terra Incognita is, as I have said, an excitable young man in a permanent state of excitement. I’m not sure exactly how Hall wants us to feel about him and it may be that his creator is a lot more critical than I am. He is marked out by his self-confidence and his tendency to misinterpret things. But given the complexity of the court world of which he is a part, this doesn’t seem a terrible failing. Although there is a lot of humour at his expense, especially in the business of his seduction of his sister-in-law, Adelaide, he is no Emma Woodhouse. True he fathers an illegitimate child but then he has the decency to visit the mother and offer her his protection, and he is also granted an extraordinary vision – a single sentence two-pages long – of the world spinning out from a single baby to the farthest reaches of the known and the unknown. True, he remains a mere observer when a blind old woman drowns when the ice covering the river breaks up, but he does help her would-be rescuer. True he allows himself to be drawn, Waverly-style, into dangerous court factions, but he loves his king and his older brother and tries to put nation and family first. One could go on multiplying examples like this where readers would probably want to feel free enough to make their own ethical judgements about him.

In the conflicts and rivalries in which he is involved and which we know best because he is the narrator, he is typical of all the characters in the book – with the possible exception of the Venetian theatre architect, Tranquilli (whose name might be a clue). Everyone is involved in serial conflicts and rivalries, usually resolving themselves into threesomes as two strive to win a third. The most important (though readers have to see this – I’m not sure the narrator does) is between Scarron, the king and the queen. If there is a central figure – though it distorts the novel to try to shoehorn it into the kind of fiction that has a central character – it is Orlande Scarron. He is the only one of all the cast of this court who we will meet again in the later novels. We learn that he is a prodigy of very humble origins who (as an extra during a hunt) befriended the king while he was a mere prince visiting a French court. A request to be given the boy is refused (how scandalous such a request might be and what its implications might be is never followed up, either because the narrator is not interested enough to find out or because it falls outside his remit). The boy turns up a couple of years later as a flute player in a visiting orchestra, is recognised by the king and made into his court composer. The two are very close, discussing all issues privately and hunting together as a lone pair. At almost the same time as his befriending of Scarron, an English queen is found for the king. The fact that she remains barren and that her husband prefers to spend his time intimately with his concert-master leads to the obvious implication that the king is homosexual. Some readers have seen the fact that the narrator never seems aware of this to be part of the comedy of the ignorant narrator but I think the real issue is that the sexual side of this threesome is very secondary to the power-relationships: at courts sexuality is very fluid and essentially a tool to be shaped and manipulated.

It doesn’t take any great readerly skill to realise that the relationship between king, queen and Scarron is a weird distortion of the two bridegrooms myth. Instead of the two men competing for the hand of the queen (at least for six months), here the queen and Scarron compete for the love of the king. And just as one of the rivals must always lose and be occluded, so here the queen loses. Throughout the book she is a sick, fretful, mildly delusional and pallid creature (the last of these probably a reflection of the fact that she is at the mercy of doctors keen to order enemas and bleedings). As she weakens, so Scarron thrives to the point where he becomes a kind of übermensch, Hall’s visionary artist-hero.

There are other variations of the two bridegrooms theme. The narrator decides that he must seduce his sister-in-law, a representative of the faction centred around the Lord Treasurer to whom the narrator is opposed. As such the younger brother supplants his rival, the older brother. But there is, as I have said, a good deal of comedy about this deriving from the fact that the narrator seems quite unaware that his sister-in-law has, off-stage so to speak, come to the same conclusion: the seduction turns out to be remarkably easy because the seducer is really the seduced. In another triangle, the king has an odd sexual quirk whereby he wants to visit the narrator’s lover, Marie, immediately after their love-making with everything left as it was when the narrator finished. This could be read a number of ways, but I see it as the king usurping his younger “rival” by sliding into his position. At the level of court mechanisms it is a bizarre but intriguing way for messages to be sent to the king since the narrator knows that anything he says in confidence to Marie will be immediately passed on to the king.

The most spectacular example of the two bridegrooms theme in Terra Incognita, though, involves the arrival of Louis XIV of France on a visit made early in his reign (the events of this book are set in 1661 – 2). The fate of the kingdom is in the balance as court factions argue between a future role as a small, expanding, imperial power or as a financial supplier and guarantor of greater powers, a “neutral exchequer” as Adelaide calls it. The novel goes into these issues at some depth, reminding the reader that the conflicts at the macro level are not just a setting for those at a more intimate one. The narrator, indeed, has a long passage in which he positions his country as one of the third rank, parallel to states such as Belgium or Switzerland. The narrator’s state hopes to make an alliance with the French by being one of the first to invite him on an official visit and Scarron’s opera, by being in a mode much loved by the French but outdoing them at every level, is to be one of the most winning of gestures. Initially it is only part of the celebration (together with a military tattoo and fireworks) but because Louis’ arrival takes place in driving rain, all hopes of a treaty depend on the opera alone. Between Louis and the king, under the guise of the surface requirements of a courtly visit, there are immediate tensions:

The monarchs greeted each other gravely but, I thought, with a touch of unlooked-for strain. They were much the same height, wearing full wigs and the ermine robes appropriate for such an occasion. Their likeness was remarkable but scarcely surprising given the Habsburg connection. Louis carried himself well, showing notable assurance for a man of twenty-three. Yet there was something, in their exchange of civilities, which gave me the firm sense that they took an instantaneous, perhaps faint, but nonetheless ineradicable, dislike to each other.

During the performance of the opera, the queen appears and is made a great fuss of by Louis who offers her his seat and spends a good deal of time raising her spirits, “He conversed exclusively with the queen, showing her the handsomest gallantry, even bringing colour to her cheeks so that one glimpsed, now and again, kindlings of her former beauty”. In fact, of course, at a metaphorical level he is wooing her. And not just as an individual, because he is also making the point that a connection with England is more important to him than a connection with the little country he is visiting. All of this is done with tremendous brio on the novelist’s part. The arrival of Louis and his accompanying troops is a brilliant climax, though I will have more to say about the book’s structural dynamics later. Louis’ soldiers displace the local army and there is some fear amongst the locals that they have been invaded. It is a terrible blow to hopes and pretensions: as the narrator says later,

Bitterly I saw the truth of it, there in the blue salon. Our political future is to fight for room at the trough among a swarm of piggy little kingdoms and principalities, each insatiably engrossed in a scramble for scraps and favours, each tyrannized by the dictatorship of feverish ambitions. The great powers are above all that . . . . . So, no doubt, when France received our invitation she accepted it – not for the sake of raising us to the rank of ally, but for the opportunity of putting us in our place.

The political humiliation is part of the occlusion of one king by another – again the rivalry exists at both political and psychic levels. After the meeting, the narrator and his brother attend the king in his disrobing where he is, again both literally and symbolically, stripped naked. But he is, also, rerobed:

Clean underwear was brought and the king’s nakedness covered. . . . . For no reason he smiled. Was it the emergency inspiring him with fresh courage? He struck me as tragically radiant. His mouth had changed – a subtle unevenness, the slightest shadow, who knows? – whatever it was, his curving lips confirmed my suspicion. A new man emerged. No longer the monarch whom these same valets had dressed that morning. How this might affect me or Marie I could not guess. But I caught a glimpse of his grief.

Finally in this extended discussion of the most important of the triangles, there is the fact, never mentioned in the novel, that Louis is the Sun King, arriving as a visitor in autumn to symbolically depose its king. He is, in the language of the opening of “Romulus and Remus”, the “sunbrother”. And both the kings at the end the opera, when art has the power of engaging its audience by letting them join in the final dances, appear as rustic goatherds. The question arises as to whether the intense power of these episodes arises because the author has tapped into an energy-providing universal myth. But it’s a question I’ve never been able to even begin to answer and I suspect that it requires too many disputable assumptions even to be begun.

One of the pleasures of Hall’s oblique narrative method is that we never hear the final words spoken between Scarron and the king, though we are told that the composer was never seen in court again. We do, however, get to see a final scene between Scarron and his erstwhile rival, the queen. It forms the last chapter of the book and is full of pithy but extremely enigmatic dialogue. We have to wait until halfway through the third novel for Scarron’s judgement on the king, conveyed (thoroughly obliquely) by an old poet accompanying a Danish embassy who recounts his meeting with Scarron:

He drew me aside. “I once loved a prince,” he confessed privately, “who, when he became king, no longer quite deserved that love. He was not evil, nor even bad. He lost his radiance. For political reasons he chose to play the doubter. Then he grew to be a doubter. Doubt was the fashion at the time. But he had no need of fashion. He could have remained aloof and chosen to go on earning his crown . . .”

Though it may be drawing a long bow (a thirty-five years’ long bow in fact) and prove nothing more than consistency, this recalls a poem in Hall’s first book, Penniless Till Doomsday, which compares two Velasquez portraits of Philip IV:

. . . . . 
Unshaken, untried,
you once stood in your finery
hardly a king.
Now discreet in your clothing
you sit king entire -
and yet man incomplete.

Terra Incognita is keen to separate the processes of creativity from the processes of the court – ie politics. And one of the ways in which this is done is by the comparison between the hectic rivalries that dominate the latter and the relationship between Scarron and his theatre architect, Tranquilli, where there is no question of rivalry. Two professionals, both geniuses in their own fields, co-operate to get the work done. Scarron is in fact rather prickly in these scenes, impatiently working through the architect’s plans to see what solutions he has proposed. No doubt it is all idealised but these scenes have great power, taking us as close as possible to the processes of creation since each of the creators has to work in co-operation and thus feel their way into the ideas of the other. The fact that this relationship is the only one of its kind – and entirely unlike those of the court – gives it the right degree of highlighting.

The opera itself is dealt with at some length in the novel and there is no doubt that Hall is invested enough in it to imagine it in all its details. Importantly it changes as the events of the novel’s plot develop. In the beginning, for Scarron, its subject – The Enchanted Island – is an attempt to visualise what lies beyond the reaches of the known and the conventional but, as the events surrounding Louis’ visit develop, it becomes more and more an attack on imperial expansion. By the time of its first performance, it has begun to seem a dangerous attack on French policy and risks offending the visitor. But since the visitor has offended his hosts (by supplanting their king) it becomes interpretable to the viewers in the court as a warning against France’s imperial designs on them! Tranquilli’s part is not to be underestimated. Hall furnishes us with a lengthy description of his creation of clouds (by thin wooden lathes attached to spindles inside white cloth) enough to convince us that the opera satisfies all the requirements of a theatrical mind: it will shock and stun and then later reorient the minds and emotions of its viewers.

In fact the mechanisms of the opera seem to be contrasted to the theatrical spectacles of empire which are assemblages of the grotesque, ostensibly for scientific purposes. In the second novel, Isabella Manin finds the Australian aboriginal man, Yuramiru, in a collection of freaks for which her father acts as a dealer. In a sad irony – reminding us that Empires are all the same whether of east or west, she finds herself curating a similar collection in the court of Aurangzeb. In Terra Incognita, the initial, “feeling-out”, interview between the Lord Treasurer and the narrator, takes place in the court’s “Cabinet of Art” where, among the collection, are bottles of dead babies:

He reached among the clutter of wax pots, surgical instruments on trays and boxes of talc to pick up another of these fine large jars. He held it out towards me. This baby was tinier still, a newborn boy with washed hair, eyelashes and translucent ears. As the Lord Treasurer turned the glass in his hands the manikin drifted around like a compass in oil. “Little monkey,” he swore crossly, “won’t face me.” No matter how he rotated its death chamber that child – eyes wide open – confronted me instead. Confronted me with the unblinking perfection of an arrested moment not of death but life.

We can allegorise this out in many ways – the tug of the need to react to events as a human being rather than as a politician reaches the narrator through this child and later his own child – and it has a profoundly comical as well as grotesque element. But, at another level, it is a representative of the kinds of collections made by the scientific outreach of the imperial venture. In Australia (and North America) in the nineteenth century, this appeared as the bizarre need to measure the skulls of native people and the interest which the Ottoman sultan, the pope and the Venetian merchants have in Yuramiru in the second novel, The Lonely Traveller By Night, is exactly this kind of interest in its nascent form.

Finally, I want to say something about the dynamic structure of Terra Incognita, surely one of the main reasons for its success. It will come as no surprise that one wants to speak of this in musical terms because I am convinced that that was how it was conceived. The endless rivalries which I have described are cycled through in a way that makes one think of a fugue (though it could also, I suppose, be seen as a theme and variations). It is also quite possible that the entire novel is conceived as the first (allegro) movement of a seven part musical piece and I have always wondered whether there is any structural significance for the novels as a sequence in the fact that seven is the number of notes on the heptatonic scale. Significantly the first novel describes the writing of an opera and the last (The Day We Had Hitler Home) describes the central character’s being present at a performance of Webern’s Six Pieces for Orchestra in a hall in Munich in 1919, a piece which, she feels, has in it intimations of the future.

Seen as an entity in itself, Terra Incognita has a spectacular opening describing the complex procedures (which the narrator as a recently promoted Gentleman of the Bed Chamber is involved in) for bringing the food from kitchen to dining rooms to serve the king and lesser members of the court. The narrator is required to oversee the complex procedures for poison-tasting and is happy to tell us just how miserable the feasting process is for the rest of the court who, according to protocols, cannot begin any course until the king has finished it. This has the dynamic quality of an overture and it is no accident that, as the tension ramps up towards Louis’ visit, court protocols are introduced again as the equally complex procedures for people arriving to stay at court are described: as with the feasting, there are many uncomfortable and unhappy members of the court. The whole book is clearly allegro in tempo and the beginning of this process will give some idea of the energies of narration which have been building:

Although the daylight was only just fading, flares outside already sputtered and brightened. Boys ran helter-skelter with lanterns to guide the rain-shiny coaches rolling in. Tired horses snorted steam while grooms darted among them repeating the names they were to announce and shouting directions to the drivers. Pale powdered faces, blurred behind streaming window-glass peered out at the palace through distortions of rain. Rain swept down and swept on down out of a glowering sky to cascade across the vehicle hoods and splash carpets of crystal coronets among the horse hooves.

And so it continues, not just mere fine writing (of the kind that always seems pleased with its own sensitivity) but fine writing whose pace and material is determined by the structure of the book so that this set of arrivals is merely a dynamic preparation for the arrival of the Sun king himself. If the ordinary local visitors provoke prose as good as this, we might ask, what will the visiting king, replete with the mythical trappings of the usurping bridegroom, produce. In other words, Terra Incognita is a musical book. Or, perhaps, it is an operatic book. It is full of the intertwinings and sudden, theatrical (in the best sense) surprises – rather like Scarron’s opera.

Since my concern is Australian poetry, I don’t keep any sort of watching brief over Australian prose fiction but clearly twenty years is a long time in the publishing of literary fiction and readers’ tastes are easily influenced by exposure and publicity machines. But if there are many books half as good as Terra Incognita published in the last twenty years then Australian fiction must be in radiantly good health.
.

Carmen Leigh Keates: Meteorites

Geelong: Whitmore Press, 2016, 49pp.

I have to begin this review with a declaration of interest. Most of the poems in this book I have seen in earlier incarnations when I myself was in an earlier incarnation as an academic and Carmen Keates was a doctoral student for whom I shared responsibilities with Bronwyn Lea. I don’t think I have had an intimate, editorial relationship like that with any of the other poems which have turned up during the ten years of this site’s existence. I realise that I might be accused of having a sort of foster-parent’s fond regard for these poems but, as someone said, there are two kinds of hometown referees: those who shamelessly favour the home side and those who treat its players harshly out of fear that they might seem to be playing favourites. I like to think that I belong to the second group. At any rate, many of these poems are pared down and so much improved from the early versions that I saw as to be almost unrecognizable.

Having said that, I also want to say that this is a really striking first book announcing an important talent with the ability to engage with issues and perspectives far from the habitual ambits of most readers. It’s something we always look for in poetry: a sign of a unique voice which we hope is good enough to engage us and take us with it on a journey we might otherwise never have made. And the journey of the poems of Meteorites is a complex one touching base with the films of Tarkovsky, Bergman and Kurosawa, dreams, family history and travels in Scandinavia. And the mode of journeying is distinctive: these poems do not operate by smooth, lyrical graces but rather by sudden juxtapositions and detours.

Two examples will demonstrate this nicely. The book’s third poem, “Gålrum Gravfält”, is based on the author’s surprise discovery of one of the great Bronze Age sites on the Swedish Baltic island of Gotland. We know from other poems that Keates is riding a bicycle on a longish journey from Ljugarn to Nãrsholmen in order to visit the site where Tarkovsky’s last film, The Sacrifice, was shot in 1986. (To the north of Gotland is Bergman’s island, Fårö, where, three years after Keates’s bicycle ride, the annual Bergman Week festival would celebrate the film’s thirtieth anniversary):

. . . . . 
                                     Today I bike for six hours
in an upright sickbed inside a fever-dream
where a Baltic Sea island creates a road to move me
in an unwitnessed procession past actual milestones.

I’m on my way to somewhere else but pull in
where I see a sign saying something here is historical . . . 

In other words we meet the “seven boat-shaped graves” – one of which has a “motherly juniper over it” – as a distraction on what is really a pilgrimage, usually the most end-focussed of journeys. And the pilgrimage itself is undertaken in a mildly bathetic way, riding a humble bicycle while “incredibly ill” from a long flight. All of this makes the sudden appearance of the graves of the site not so much a distraction, a turning at right angles to one’s road to explore another world, but rather a kind of ambush staged by another reality. And, as I’ve said, this is mirrored in the structure of the poem itself since what might have been a solemn meditation on the unreachable minds of the Bronze Age builders of these stone boats is interrupted by an account of a story told in Helsinki by an art historian about his deaf grandfather.

In the book’s title poem, a long meditation on the great scenes towards the end of Tarkovsky’s Stalker where the three protagonists are in The Zone, there is a similarly shocking irruption derived from an anthology of Eskimo poems edited by Tom Lowenstein:

The Eskimo Uvavnuk
has a poem in which she tells
how she was hit by a meteorite
and as a result was made a shaman.

Uvavnuk waves her arms towards
the bad fortune and spirits, crying,
Away with it! Away with it!
We should all try this in our homes . . .

I don’t want to be seen as hammering a simple point but this is a poetry whose structure and methods of development and movement follow one of its central themes: the irruption of other worlds, other ways of perceiving, other “levels” of reality into a life. The journeys of this book are never likely to be merely the movement from one country to another or one culture to another.

As we might expect, gateways (“portals” in contemporary argot) are going to bear a lot of examination. In “On the Border Between the Parishes of Garda and Lau” (a poem, incidentally, which alternates between scenes set in an art gallery in Brisbane and scenes on Gotland at a site near Gålrum) we follow a pathway which is both into a forest and back in time into the Bronze Age. Although gateways can be crossable in both directions, in this one “Hoof prints go in- / to the forest, yet none come back out” and the forest has an absorptive quality, sucking even sound out of reality. This is a feature of the most potent “portal” in the book, the well that Writer sits on the lip of at the end of Stalker in “Meteorites”. As the poem describes it, the scene begins with Writer being resurrected, rising from “a death pose”, though the interest is really in the way he has been “elsewhere”:

. . . 
This place has killed him first
then released him and for a moment
he has been elsewhere –

like the owl that disappears
in that jump-cut
on those low, indoor horizons
over artificial dunes
of soft and dangerous dust . . .

Just as The Zone in Stalker is capable of making life (and owls) disappear, so it is also capable of rendering a well bottomless by making a stone thrown into it go “elsewhere” at a stage of its descent. The well is thus “a mouth that does not speak / but only swallows, / like outer space” – a more intense version of the forest that exists in the liminal space between the two Gotland parishes.

Although “Meteorites” finishes by pointing out that we always say that Earth was struck by meteorites, never the other way around, there are cases here of two-way portals. In the book’s first poem, “At the Bergman Museum”, the author rides away from a storm building up over the Baltic:

The lightning is concerned with a secret
affair far off in the unlit Baltic.
Only the rain comes home.

Tracking down the road, my bicycle, my eye,
past the Viking huts with their weird antennae,
I am riding a lightning conductor away
from a museum about a recluse . . .

The poem wants to explore the allegorical possibilities of a fraught situation: perhaps the pursuing cloud is Bergman himself, haunting his admirers like an avenging angel. But the poem finishes by considering the possibility of a two-way interaction between inspiration and masterwork:

                         For if Ingmar’s films broke

into his dreams and, as he said, sat at the base
of his soul, maturing comfortably like mighty cheeses,
perhaps now he haunts the work right back . . .

The final image of the final poem of the book, a poem about Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia, is, perhaps fittingly, about a gateway, in this case the strange gateway of memory whereby we can move into the past (when we remember) but the past can, often in dreams, move into our present. “Memory”, the poem says “is a demon that walks / like a soldier from a tunnel”. I think this image probably derives from the dream in Kurosawa’s Dreams in which a soldier is confronted by all his comrades killed in the war emerging from a sinister tunnel. Interestingly, the first one to emerge from the tunnel is a suicide dog, complete with explosives, a reminder of the dog in Nostalghia who in the previous poem, “Domenico’s Dog”, “stalks / the perimeter of Gorchakov’s sleep / as though there were a fence there he / finds a hole in”.

The dominant issue of the poems I have looked at so far is the way the various levels of reality and “foreign-ness” that we live within and which live within us can be activated and explored and, when we have no control over them, accommodated. The poetic problem – which I think Keates handles with great success – is how to keep such poems unified and coherent. But the poems of Meteorites have other interests too. “Cloud on Mount Wellington”, a poem about a much homelier totemic site than those of far-off Gotland, has a decided interest in the interrelationship between perspective and creativity. It juxtaposes a tourist’s trip up the mountain (with the bus driver/guide’s comments inserted in a dry demotic) with a dream about the elements of a novel seen from above; that is, seen from the physical position of a mountain top:

. . . . . 
Last year I dreamed I saw the plan
for some wunderkind’s novel laid out
on the floor of a warehouse. Chalk outlines
of different continents and Scandinavian coasts
were drawn on the bitumen. Regions demarcated.
Artefacts grouped on blue tarps.
Everything was meant to be

viewed from above. . .

The result (as I read it) is a description of what happens when an artwork “works”, when the bell, the forging of which occupies a very long stretch of Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev, actually rings:

This writer was revealing
something he knew to be right
but its elements had to first be
arranged properly, tended,
for it to manifest at all.

What he was preparing to reveal
would as much be disclosed to himself
as it would be shown to others . . .

There are a lot of complex things happening in the poem (the obsession with cloud and condensation, for example, which appears in many of the poems relating to the Tarkovsky films) and it would be oversimplifying to see this as a “poem-poem”, one engaging with its own method and the principles that lie behind the other poems of the book, but that is undoubtedly part of what it is doing.

Although reality and dream interact in “Cloud on Mt Wellington” it’s tempting to group it, in this book, as one of a series of domestic poems, a series which would include “One Broken Knife”, “Burning Train”, “I Bought My Father an Axe”, “I Remember Two Lines Upon Waking” and “Leaking Through”. Though the basic situations are far from those of Andrei Rublev or Nostalghia, the way the poems work and what they want to explore are not dissimilar. In “One Broken Knife” and “I Bought My Father an Axe” we are in the world of totemic objects, no less dangerous for having been (or being in the process of becoming) domesticated. And the poems, though domesticated and having none of the glamour of Gorchakov’s Italy or Rublev’s Russia, have their own, rather wonderful weirdness. In the second of them, the poet, having got her gift home, puts it on the kitchen table:

. . . . . 
I put a bow on it. My axe. I tried to introduce myself more,
just until I handed it on. I had this feeling it wouldn’t come when called,
somehow, not just yet. No trust. I wondered, Is any axe new? . . .

It’s strange, distinctive and as far from cliché as it is possible to be.

“Burning Train” and “I Remember Two Lines Upon Waking” are dream poems, the former an especially powerful vision of passengers inside a passing train who barely register that it is on fire. But this dream is interspersed with memories from childhood and, especially, with the misunderstandings of childhood that create yet another reality:

. . . . . 
As a child I remember Dad calling
the electricity company to report
that on the pole outside our house
the transformer was humming.

To me at four, these words meant war
was coming, and I packed
my baby doll’s clothes in a suitcase
and waited in that living room
to hear the tanks come down the road,
cracking our bitumen . . .

And “Leaking Through” recounts hearing (perhaps at the edge of sleep) a woman’s shout and deciding that it belongs to another world which is “leaking through” – not all interactions between worlds need to involve wide open portals that can be crossed in either direction.

Of course, separating the poems of this book into those about Gotland, those about family and those about film obscures the fact that their interests and methods are remarkably similar. There are two newer poems though, “The Bandit Without Mifune” and “Smoke Talk” (the former alluding to Kurosawa’s Rashomon and the latter to Bergman’s Persona) that seem more like poetic meditations in that they don’t have the startling juxtapositions and alterations to a different mode of reality that the other, earlier poems have. Whether this heralds a new method is something that only a second book will reveal, but for the moment it’s enough that we should content ourselves with the remarkable poems of this remarkable book.

Peter Boyle: Ghostspeaking

Newtown: Vagabond, 2016, 370pp.

The simplest way to describe this remarkable book would be to say that Peter Boyle has invented eleven, mainly Spanish-speaking, twentieth and twenty-first century poets and made a fictional anthology which is a selection of his English translations of their imagined work. Beyond that it’s rather difficult to describe it accurately. One could look to Boyle’s Apocrypha published in 2009, another work of great ambition and sophistication, for comparisons and contrasts. There we were given an anthology of imagined lost texts delineating a version of our own world but, whereas the focus of Ghostspeaking is fairly tight (the dominant language is Spanish, the oldest of the poets born just before the turn of the twentieth century and the youngest in 1965), Apocrypha ranges over a vast expanse of human history – nearly two thousand years – actual and fictive.

And Ghostspeaking isn’t entirely an anthology – there is a lot of novelistic activity going on inside it as well: the lives of the eleven imaginary poets are sketched in and their relationships and interactions with the author brought to light in a way that makes you think of an author’s professional journal/diary with translations appended. And at another level, Ghostspeaking could be described as an extension of the well-known genre of what might be called “the text-based uncanny”. It is full of the markers of this genre including mysterious manuscripts appearing in the post or being discovered hidden away in a barn. There is even a gramophone recording, found among business papers. In keeping with this genre, identity seems compromised at all points. Lazlo Thalassa an “eccentric Mexican poet of mixed Bulgarian and Turkish origins”, for example, who initially claims his work is itself a translation of a manuscript written in Persian on the shores of Lake Ohrid by a “heretic refugee from Urbino” turns out to be Miguel Todorov, a research scientist specialising in plate tectonics and significantly sharing a surname with the scholar known for his work on the fantastic (or uncanny) as a genre. This is an extreme case (the Argentinian Elena Navronskaya Blanco is, in contrast, biographically positively demure) but the overriding sense is of identity as a kind of vertiginous labyrinth among people who are at the behest of “forces larger” than themselves. It extends to the author himself who at one stage receives a letter addressed to Peter Doyle and, in another, is mistaken for the late actor of the same name: his response to this (in a footnote to a passage dealing with his translation of Lazlo Thalassa) is important for the ideas that lie behind Ghostspeaking:

I remember, several years back, a friend sent me a link to a blog where a young woman had just published one of my poems and one of her friends had posted: “I’ve always loved Peter Boyle. Everybody Loves Raymond is my favourite programme. I never knew he wrote poetry.” I wanted to write to say I am not Peter Boyle the American actor, but was I sure? By then he had been dead several years but he seemed much more alive than me. Perhaps in some way I was him, lingering on under his name, slowly acquiring his face now he was gone. Perhaps I had always been his amanuensis. How can anyone know that someone else isn’t writing them? And I thought: maybe all the dead have the same name.

Although the idea of ghost-speaking is a complex one in this book (involving, especially the idea of “ghosting”) this would be a case, literally, of a ghost speaking.

This generic element in Ghostspeaking (there is a similar though much less significant element in Apocrypha) seems to me the least interesting part of the book but this may derive only from my sense that it is a tired, creaky old genre. At any rate, during my first reading of the book I fought against it, dreaming of a purer (or perhaps merely more extreme) version of the book: a faux traditional anthology with only brief biographies of these poets introducing selections of their work and omitting the poets’ dealings with the anthologist altogether – as one would in a conventional anthology. But you can see why it was never possible: the editor would have had to create a rational for the inclusion of these, and only these, eleven poets and one can’t imagine how this could have been done. In Ghostspeaking they select themselves by their various involvements with Peter Boyle.

One could approach Ghostspeaking from quite a different angle and see it as, at heart, a collection of poems by Peter Boyle which, of course, in a sense it is. This would lead one to explore the relationship between the eleven poets and their creator. Are they genuine heteronyms in the Pessoan sense or simply masks that allow Boyle to extend his range? I’ll leave the answer to the first part of that question to experts but my sense is that are not true heteronyms. They are not speaking parts of the poet’s unconscious which simply emerge as fully fledged individual poets. I think Pessoa somewhere invokes the idea of a class of “semi-heteronyms” and that might turn out to be the best description of these eleven.

On the surface it is the poems of Ricardo Bousoño that most seem to resemble those of Peter Boyle from collections such as The Blue Cloud of Crying, What the Painter Saw in Our Faces and The Museum of Space. This might explain why he appears first in the book and also last – thanks to a collection of poems imagined to be written (and translated) later in a newer, simpler style. From an included interview we learn that Bousoño is Argentinian by birth, gay, and, fundamentally a non-political poet. He is also in a permanent state of exile – symbolic of artists generally. He fled from Argentina to Brazil after the military coup of the mid-seventies and lived in São Paulo before moving to Spain and thence to Mexico. Boyle, as all readers know, is a passionate verse-ethicist concerned with the cruelties and viciousnesses of the world. Bousoño is somebody who has lived in places where injustice and oppression are far more overt than they are in, say, Australia. But he has never taken the route of becoming a political poet, like Neruda. This is both an unconscious choice – the political poems to be written from exile in Brazil simply never occur, despite his efforts – and a conscious one: “I didn’t want those bastards to think they’d captured my psyche for the rest of my life. I didn’t want to give them that satisfaction”. Speaking of Juan Gelman (whose son and daughter-in-law were “disappeared” in Argentina’s dirty war) he says: “I respect Juan Gelman of course, there’s no need to say it, for all he does, though seventy percent of his poetry is I think pretty slight, one-dimensional or very thin . . . I could never sit down and write poems of witness”.

You can see the relevance of Bousoño to his creator here: how does one deal with the miseries of the world when one’s location and experience prevent one speaking as a witness. And what would being a witness do to the poetry anyway. Poetry of documentation has the problem that it puts the recording of injustice (and other acts of evil) before poetry itself. Ethically this is probably quite defensible. But poetry is a despotic force itself and is quite likely to ensure that such poetry remains “thin”.

The poems by Bousoño in his section begin with a breakthrough poem, “House Arrest in São Paulo” working the idea that the place of exile is a kind of house arrest. The mode is what I would call Latin American surrealism though my knowledge of this literature beyond the inevitable figures of Neruda, Vallejo and Borges is so lamentably weak that I only have the vaguest general impression. But, for me, it’s a poetry where the demands of “the real” are loosened to the point where revealing and valuable imaginative gestures are made and allowed to determine the direction of the poem. And so in “House Arrest in São Paulo” the image of living in a coffin runs through the poem and becomes a symbol of the inevitable destiny of the poet. In the ninth section we meet another trope of this kind of verse, the figure whom the poet moves towards who is, in reality, his future self:

He is waving to me
 from the farthest room
 at the end of innumerable corridors:
 the ghost I will become.

Nothing
 in the history of the universe
 has so tenderly familiar
 a face.

But, as one might expect of a breakthrough poem, it contains its poet’s obsessions even if in embryonic form. It focusses on exile: “Once the nomads have entered you / there’s no way of going back, / no way to slow the chaos in the blood” and on the ubiquity of evil in a world where “We are all torturers now”: “Say this only: / what happened elsewhere / speaks now because / there is no elsewhere”. Flight from oppression and the ubiquity of evil turn up in later poems like “I Do Not Trust That Word ‘Oxygen’” and “Freiheit”: “Just by breathing and accidentally / opening your eyes you see them, / Prussian outposts” a reference to the fact that Argentina proved a happy home from home for Nazis fleeing Germany after the war.

Bousoño’s final poem, “Threads”, imagined to be written in a “late”, pared down style retains the themes of the earlier poems but is mainly obsessed by the desire to prevent the world being “disappeared”. To this end it uses the unusual device of long, thin lines (usually no more than a word or two to each), in a way reminiscent of Ken Taylor’s “At Valentines” which, coincidentally, dealt with rather the same issue. But the lines are imagined as threads, appearing in three columns per page, creating the impression of threads which might be plaited to hold on to what is likely to be lost. The poem is quite explicit about it:

. . . . .
 these small photos
 hunched
 and swaying
 at the piano
 (another of
 my tribe who
 got away)
 my lover
 the pianist
 clinging
 against
 invisible
 hurricanes
 as on the
 raft of
 his life
 a plaited band of
 string
 at his wrist
 . . . . .
 these sounds
 I utter
 threads we
 weave to lay
 hold of
 the past
 the sounds
 are
 the last threads
 holding things
 after they have
 vanished
 after the
 nameless ones
 smash the china cups
 shred the photos
 empty our apartments . . .

I dwell on this at some length not only because it is the book’s final poem but because the word “threads” forms a sort of motif running through works by other poets included and if we were to adopt the tactic of reading Ghostspeaking simply as a book of poems by Peter Boyle then it would be an image whose significance would need to be explored in detail.

Threads certainly figure in the selection of poems by Antonio Almeida. If Bousoño is a poet of translocation, Almeida is a poet of visitations. Though these two things can be related (one thinks of Rilke’s endless travels awaiting inspiration) Almeida and Bousoño are entirely different animals with, one suspects, an entirely different set of possibilities for Boyle. Almeida’s poems and fragment of autobiography are tightly enmeshed as part of a narrative conception built around complexly interlocked frames. The overall tone is overtly of the uncanny. Boyle, even before his career as a poet has begun, suffering his own inability to begin to write, stops off in Rome and is met at the airport by a woman who knows to look out for someone of his age, his inherited Irishness and his limp. She takes him to her father whose poems he will translate. Almeida himself, in his autobiographical sketch, describes his own inability to talk as a child and his meeting with Rilke in Ronda (where his father works in the hotel where Rilke will come to stay). Later in life Almeida meets up with Antonio Machado, who shares a railway carriage, at the point where the events described in Machado’s “Iris de la Noche” occur. Later in Uruguay, a refugee from the Spanish Civil War, in a state of entire despair after the death of his wife (as well, you feel, as the accumulated miseries of the world described in “The Time of Weeping”) he meets up with a mysterious prophetic visitant (perhaps one of Rilke’s angels) who re-establishes his identity and warns him to leave the country when the violence begins and so Almeida is able to flee to Rome with his daughter and her two children. In Italy he publishes a small book of poems. In Ghostspeaking all of this takes place in reverse. We meet the poems before we meet the autobiographical material that makes sense of them (or better, provides a context for them). Boyle’s meeting with him and his daughter in Rome comes at the end. To complicate these matters in an interesting way, the ”translations” of Almeida’s poems are dated and they are translated in exactly the reverse order to their appearance (presumably in the order in which they appear in the Spanish-Italian edition published twenty years after his death).

As a compressed exercise in uncanny fiction this is brilliantly done and it may only be my lack of interest in that genre that makes me undervalue this component of Almeida’s story. But the poems themselves are rather marvellous and the way in which the autobiographical details illuminate the individual poems is exciting. Since Almeida is a quiet figure whose life is never going to be explored in detail by literary biographers, the only facts we have are those briefly recounted in the autobiographical sketch. So it’s a matter of putting a prose text next to a poetic one. The little twelve-poem selection has at its centre a café poem in which a long mirror doubles everything; the first poem is called “Waiting” and the last “Conversation While Waiting”.

Staying with the question of what these created poets have to offer Boyle, their creator, there is the case of Lazlo Thalassa (Miguel Todorov) whose poems are flamboyant, often grotesque and, stylistically far from the poems of, say, Almeida or Federico Silva which retain, despite their celebration of the possibilities of an unrestricted imagination, just a touch of distinctive orotund solemnity. Thalassa’s long poem Of Fate and Other Inconveniences shares the preoccupations of much of the poetry of Ghostspeaking but allows itself to be written as a kind of faux newspaper-headline summary of the parlous state of things (“Public opinion managers replace counsellors and statesmen. Meanwhile plague and war remake the earth”) followed by a more conventionally toned but equally grotesque poem. Number ten (of thirty) for example:

(Meetings by night on mountain passes. Cinqueterra’s journey to the Eastern Marches interrupted by rival film crews. Fortinbras and the Afterlife Investment Fund move west.)

Sent back from Parinirvana he sees:
 the golden pulse of the sun spinning
 wildly like a potter’s wheel, dry
 salt-crusted earth and a sagging
 banyan hung with voodoo dolls.

Later Thalassa translations include a tour-de-force describing the arrival of the god of love in seventeenth century Venice (coinciding with the invention of opera) and a monologue by Prince Myshkin, imagined to have been translated to Mexico City (“on the sidewalk the blare of a city / workmen demolishing whole blocks of humanity / gourd-carvers knife-grinders hat-hawkers taxi cabs fruit stalls”) accompanied by a letter from a guilt-ridden Dostoevsky to his own fictional creation apologising for having dragged him from Switzerland to enter his novel at that remarkable and justly celebrated opening of Idiot:

. . . . .
 Maybe every life is like mine.
 Maybe every life has so much guilt
 it outstrips us,
 a shame so large
 there can never be room for the saying.
 Maybe that is why we have ghosts,
 those detached portions of uncontainable guilt
 that go on trying to speak . . .

In other words, these are themes familiar from the book but in a very different mode. One suspects Boyle is exploiting the tonal possibilities opened up by what is called the Latin-American neo-baroque here: he is, after all, a translator of José Kozer.

In this respect, a final poet worth looking at briefly is Ernesto Ray because his poetry is of a deeply different kind to the others. Imagined as a popular Puerto-Rican singer-songwriter in New York in the 1980s he abandons popular music for a much harder road. When his partner begins to die of cancer he produces the poems of his only, posthumous book, which are designed to be spells: that is poetry of the most ancient, performative kind. Ghostspeaking includes parts of the preface to his book:

Magic is not easy. Spells are not made casually, don’t happen just because we want them to happen . . . . . What pleases people immediately, what can be understood immediately, is incapable of casting the deep resonances that make poetry happen. The language of a poem-spell needs to be more wrought than that. One-dimensional poetry, linear poetry that can be pounded out at a New York rap club, that thrills the youngsters or fits neatly into the thematic units of educators and academics, none of that can work any more. Not for me at least. Not for what I need now.

The resulting poems are not at all what one might expect from a poetics built on the idea of magic: they never name the sick woman, for a start and are oblique in other, surprising ways (most of them are about other women, for example). The final poem is, if not a spell, then at least a prayer built around a homely pair of coloured sandals:

. . . . .
 although this dark world grabs at you
 you have stepped
 onto the soles of an altered shining
 that these simple swirls of colour may
 spiral up your legs into your inmost
 core of being . . .

Although each of these eleven poets represents a figure Boyle can inhabit and exploit (perhaps Dostoevsky’s letter to Myshkin should be read as an apology made by Boyle to his poetic creations) I can’t help but feel that Roy’s comments about poetry (“I don’t want audiences drawing me back into well-worn stories of who we are, what we suffer. Identity isn’t magic. The poet magicians weren’t hung up about the dividing lines between their people and other people” and so on) are close to Boyle’s own. But that would be something that was very difficult to prove.

David McCooey: Star Struck

Crawley, WA: UWA Publishing, 2016, 90pp.

This new book of David McCooey’s is written in the aftermath of a heart attack – what is now called a “cardiac event”. Massive singular experiences like this must pose major issues for a poet. If you’re committed to charting the patterns of your life then this is going to make a dramatic centrepiece, comparable to divorce, birth of children and so on. But not many poets, nowadays, are committed to a poetry of open documentation. In the case of a recent book by Joel Deane, Year of the Wasp, written in the aftermath of a stroke which affects the speech centres and thus is, perhaps, more profoundly sinister for a poet, the option of a kind of symbolic self-myth is taken up. McCooey is never given to this degree of flamboyancy but, like all those wanting to chart the odd things that happen in our inner lives, he can hardly avoid the repercussions of such a major event. You would have to be a poet from the extreme end of the spectrum, clinging to Eliot’s theory of a necessary impersonality on the part of the poet, to ignore it altogether.

Most of the poems dealing with the physical event are corralled in an opening section called “Documents”, a title that can, just conceivably, be read as a verb rather than a noun so that this section “documents” the event. But all of these pieces are genuine poems, standing on their own two feet rather than appearing as wodges of information justified by the greater project of documenting-the-traumatic. The first of them, “Habit”, sets the tone by avoiding any overt reference to the illness. It is “about” the poet’s son reading a book on Ancient Egypt and its culture of death and rituals of burial. At the end, the boy makes his own playhouse equivalent of what is really a tomb:

. . . . .
In the morning, dressed in his gaudy pyjamas,
he builds with his mother a room-sized construction
out of chairs, cushions, and blankets,
filled with unblinking stuffed toys and plastic jewels.
They are playing tomb raiders. You are invited in.
In your sacerdotal dressing gown, you get on
your hands and knees to enter the labyrinth.
You are shown the bewitching everyday things
that have been set aside for the afterlife.

The stylistic markers of McCooey’s poetry are here, especially the quiet domestic tone and the preference for second person pronouns over first. But the issue touched on – what objects would you choose to accompany you into the afterlife if you were blessed (or cursed) by a religion that made that possible – is a fascinating one. On a comparative cultural level we know that at various periods and in various cultures people have taken slaves, horses, food, jewellery, weapons, pet dogs and a host of other items. It’s rather like the question of what one would save if one’s house suddenly erupted in flames: although it seems a simple issue it uncovers immense complexities of personal and cultural values. And, as the later poems documenting more of McCooey’s experience will make plain, this afterlife that the poem concludes with, will be life after recovery from the heart attack. It’s odd to think that an Egyptian pharaoh, met in the Egyptian equivalent of paradise, would have seen his decline and (probably painful) death as we might see a successfully recovered-from heart attack. “Habit”, like other poems in this book, is also marked by that sensitivity to harmonies and resonances that marks out this kind of poetry. I used to think of this as a method of accretion whereby a central theme attracts to itself images and, more significantly, entire events. It makes a poem unified and structurally strong while, at the same time, widening out its significances. An example here is the mention of the homely fact that the son’s bath towel is made out of Egyptian cotton. It’s a potent and oblique introduction to the poems of illness and threatened death, and has a decidedly sinister reference to the god Anubis, “presider of the weighing of the heart”.

As for the other “cardiac” poems, they are, as one would expect, habitually oblique. In fact you feel that the extreme experience, in McCooey’s case, heightens existing responses rather than wrenching him off track into a completely new dimension. McCooey’s poetry is always highly sensitive to ambient sound for example. One of the first poems of his first book, Blister Pack, is “Signal-to-Noise Ratio” which begins, “The refrigerator keeps in time with cool darkness. / A video records, though the screen is blank. / Even the stereo cannot be silent”, documenting the almost inaudible but nevertheless present sounds of the world expressing itself, perhaps even the background hum of the universe itself. In the cardiac ward poems of this new book, there seems a similar sensitivity to the background noises of the hospital. “Music for Hospitals” is a clear documentation of this:

i)
Sunday morning.
The sound of church bells;
a patient answers her phone.

ii)
Nurses recalibrating equipment:
“Four, five, six become
seven, eight, nine . . . . .

only to conclude with the arrival of the specialist with his silent students looking like “graduates / from The Village of the Damned”: a shift to the visual (film) and silence. And when the final poems of this section want to document the weird sense of being given, by surgery, a new life which is, paradoxically, much the same as the old life, the conclusion goes back to the ambient noise of existence:

Delivered by green-clad
medical staff to this place,

you enter the realm
of the second-person singular,

a new you
to ghost the old,

the one on the other side
of a recalibrated life:

a body lying in
a bed, alive to

the homespun sounds of
each unprecedented sunrise.

It’s not a confronting world of blaring sirens and brightly lit theatres but a continuation of life with some earlier elements redefined and emphasised. As well as ambient sound, there is a continuing sensitivity to the metaphorical component of language use, especially the double meanings produced by the endless multiplication of dead metaphor. The first poem of Blister Pack was called “Occupations” not because it was about careers but because it was about where people chose to live. Something similar happens here in the title of the poem, “Callings”, which is not about vocations but about painful telephone calls. Similarly the phrase “one way or another” in the poem of that name begins as a promise of information about the date of the surgery – “’We’ll be in touch / each Wednesday / to let you know / one way or another’” – but the phrase itself begins to seem mysterious or even sinister. What meant, in context, “whether it’s a yes or no for surgery this week”, seems to move to meaning “by one path or another” and thus “in one direction or another”. And so the next stanza slides into a common McCooey binary of the inside as opposed to the outside:

And so your future
waits, somewhere
outside, while you
sit inside and re-read

Muriel Spark . . .

And the poem follows this through since after weeks of high-stress anticipation – “your nervous system / a shivering horse within you” – the poem says: “But everything can wait, / one way or another, / as you discovered in earlier / visits to the cardiology ward.” We expect this kind of linguistic sensitivity in poets, of course, but it’s worth noting that in McCooey’s poetry it isn’t connected to a high level of metaphoric intensity (we’re a long way from Hart Crane here) and actually, in an odd way, seems connected to the sensitivity to ambient noise. It’s as though each of these little alternative meanings (“way”, “callings”, “occupations” and so on) represented a sort of hum at the linguistic level, matching the hum of sunrises and refrigerators at night.

If the first section is dominated by noises, the second, “Available Light”, focusses on the visual, though that title, of course, also has sinister connotations for a person with a life-threatening illness. The first poem is a collection of titles of early photographs and taps into – at least for one reader – the disconcerting effects of these early images: they are simultaneously fascinating and, though visual documents, weirdly unreal: they make us seem voyeurs, looking into what should be an unrecorded past in the way that contemporary snapshots almost never do. But the emphasis of almost all of the poems of this section is visual representation shorn of emotive interpretation. Sometimes it is highly precise and imaginatively verbal “capturing”: the poem, “Available Light” includes, among other images, “a low-slung cat” which “crosses / the photographic dusk” and “the science-fiction lighting / of deserted 7-Elevens”. In other cases – “Scenes From a Marriage”, for instance – we get an absolutely denotative, verbally flat representation:

A man and a woman
walking on a beach.

Their small child runs
across the hard, wet sand
of the intertidal zone,
from one parent to the other.

A strange dog barks
at the waves, or the wind,
or at nothing.

Now the child – unrelenting - 
is wanting to be carried.

The car park in the distance;
a scattering of vehicles
in a cold, unsentimental light.

This is not entirely unlike “Three Hysterical Short Stories”, especially the brilliant second “story” where a car, parked across the road, becomes, for no real reason, progressively sinister. One has the sense in poems such as these that it is types of visual representation that are being explored rather than types of poem – rather as in the “The Art of Happiness” sequence in Blister Pack. Something the same happens, though by different mechanisms, in “The Doll’s House” (another poem whose title alludes to a Nordic masterpiece). Here both house and its occupants are described as though they were living people and the description of the dolls gives some access to the personalities of the inhabitants, so that the father, for example,

sits in front of the television,
     with his fixed smile.
If you look closely,
     you will see he does not view the screen.
Instead he is gazing off into the middle distance . . .

“Whaling Station Redux” is a rejection of an earlier poem, “Whaling Station” from Outside – “What trash, that poem of mine about the whaling station / we visited in Albany in the primitive 1970s . . .” The rejection is ethical not poetic (the earlier poem is, as far as I can judge, a perfectly good poem as poem, certainly as good as its counterpart) but the occasion is visual. It is built around the poet’s father’s slides of the visit (as perhaps the original poem was – it describes brother and father taking of photographs – though if it was, this is converted in the poem itself to the recording of a memory) and finishes with the difficult issue of how to explain what happens in whaling stations to a small child.

Interestingly, the second last poem, “Letter to Ken Bolton” – an accretive, interlaced poem like “Habit” – visual in that it is set in a power outage, documents, with fitting epistolary casualness, the experience of playing a recorded “performance” of “The Waste Land” and relishes the interpretive intensity: “Shaw made “The Waste Land” strangely sexy; the / Cockneys in ”˜A Game of Chess’ funny and tragic”. All this at the expense of Eliot’s own reading which is described as “adenoidal”. It’s unexpected that in this section of rather bleached visuals something baroquely verbal should be preferred – but perhaps for McCooey quiet obliqueness may only go so far.

Fittingly the last poem in this section dominated by the visual is devoted to darkness – the absence of “available light”. It’s a dramatic monologue finishing:

. . . . . 
                    Night after
 
night you dream of me. One day
you will wake up for good,

and there I will be, at last.
Your new and endless climate.

Don’t look at me; I don’t compose
any kindertotenlieder.

There is the same weighing of cliches that I commented on before in the phrase “for good” but the last lines are a little tricky. My tentative reading is that darkness is saying that the poet need not fear that his writing about death in the poems of this book will precipitate the death of his child (as Mahler’s setting of the “Kindertotenlieder” – “Songs on the Death of Children” – was supposed by his wife, Alma, to have, in some way, precipitated the death of their own older daughter, “Putzi”). But it’s a very tentative reading.

The last two sections of Star Struck don’t, to my mind, have quite the compelling qualities of the first two. The third section comprises eighteen dramatic monologues relating to the “music industry”: speakers include the secretary of the Beatles, the photographer Patrick Lichfield at the Jaggers’ wedding, an Elvis fan – “reaching back, / until I find that boy in a Tupelo shotgun shack”, a Stevie Nicks fan, and so on. Much of my difficulty in responding to this section probably derives from the fact that popular music has nothing like the powerful hold on my memories and emotions that it does for McCooey and so I can’t really intuit the significance of the poems for the poet empathically. The series is called “Pastorals” ensuring that we read it under the rubric of the pastoral and its contemporary incarnations and ironies. The last poem is a brilliant one, being spoken by a monkey waiting to be used (by “the tailless ones”) as an experimental subject. It’s a nightmare anti-pastoral, wonderfully controlled:

. . . . . 
My metal cage is hard, like
the light and noise of this birthplace.

The quiet sounds of night are our food;
our food is a trick, as if we didn’t know.

In the night of night that the big ones
call dream, I see green, endless.

But that sweet retreat does not last;
each sunrise delivers me to this world.

The day/night dichotomy invoked here continues into the two shortish narratives of the final section, both being nocturnal stories. Both are, in a way, about the interpenetration of reality and unreality: one accomplishes this by the juxtaposition of a hoax call at a school camp and the other by the uncanny movement of objects in a widower’s house. It’s as though the night world had a reality not quite the same as that of the day and when the two get mixed, strange things occur. All in all I prefer McCooey’s lyric poems to his monologues and narratives but you want good poets to explore and extend their range as much as possible.

Nathan Curnow: The Apocalypse Awards

Nth Melbourne: Arcadia, 2016, 63pp.

One thinks of Nathan Curnow – based on his previous books as far as the recent The Right Wrong Notes (which is really a kind of miniature selected poems) – as a fairly familiar kind of biographical poet expanding the inner life by exploring the social and family worlds: he writes touchingly though unsentimentally, for example, about his children and thus, by implication, about his own experiences of fatherhood, one of those inner-life expanding events available to many. There isn’t much there that would prepare us for this new book, The Apocalypse Awards, where the subject is the end of the world and the mode, fitting for such a grotesque imaginative scenario, is largely surrealist. On first reading it seems like a momentary aberration, perhaps an attempt to escape an image of himself as a poet which seems too limitedly cosy and has just a suggestion of being a pre-conceived project. Its nearest relation might be an earlier book, The Ghost Poetry Project, in which suites of poems were written about ten supposedly haunted places in Australia. But the grotesque, violent and imagined territory of the haunted is hardly as intense as the apocalyptic and, on top of that, was marked by absences: no ghosts appeared. Readers were left to guess at the poet’s stake in the experience and in the same way a reader has to guess at his stake in the fifty-two poems of The Apocalypse Awards. What makes the question worthwhile is the way the poems develop with successive rereadings: fake projects usually look inviting but rarely sustain interest. These poems, especially those in the first and middle sections, have a pleasing habit of staying in the consciousness and flowering there, grotesque images and all, and that rarely happens unless they derive from the deeper layers of authorial creativity.

A clue for readers might lie in the two epigraphs to The Apocalypse Awards. The first is attributed to Kafka (though I had never previously seen it) and points out that the so-called Last Judgement is actually “a court in permanent session”. The second is from the Neil Gaiman graphic novel, Signal to Noise (also something I’ve never read), in which a character says, “There’s no big apocalypse. Just an endless procession of little ones”. This invites us to read the poems as extreme projections of what might be a more subtle internal state. If I suggest that a candidate for an internal state which expresses itself in apocalyptic imagery is clinical depression, this comes from the fact that the only parallel work I know is Lars von Trier’s Melancholia.

Anyway, on – as they say – to the poems. The book is in three parts, made up of two lengthy collections with a single long poem, “The Lullaby Pregnancies”, separating them. The poems of the first section are rather narrative in cast, often dealing with imagined preparations for the end of the world, and are often faintly comical and quite grotesque. The poems of the final section are collections of nightmare images, much more surreal in method, and often dream-driven. The central poem, “The Lullaby Pregnancies”, connects with the end of the first section in which the causes of the apocalypse are put down to over-breeding on the part of humans – “no one blames a tree in its final season / for blossom that outdoes itself / the world remembering what it once did best / before giving up all together . . .” It’s a really nightmarish and violent scenario made palatable, oddly enough, by its surrealist cast which seems to put the entire poem in a bracket and marks it as an extreme byway of the creative imagination. The five poems of “The Lullaby Pregnancies” rather enact the movement of the book as a whole, beginning with a reasonably comic recreation of the way humans with their industries and their fads react to something and gradually becoming more disassociatedly surreal. We begin with “Team Love” who hand out pregnancy test kits for all:

Team Love will arrive with pregnancy tests
requiring compulsory participation
introducing the term “lullaby pregnancies” -
this implausible wave of conceptions
it came before locusts and deep image colour
world’s end – a cinematographer’s dream
when all I ever did was touch myself
to recorded whale music
PREGNOW - PREGWOW in a large envelope
10x Urine Collection Cups
a pregnancy pack with 25 strips . . .

We are in the middle of an apocalypse which is, in a sense, the inversion of those narratives (like Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale) where the end of the world occurs through sterility. But, as I have said, the faintly comical government agencies quickly become sinister and almost unimaginably violent (except, of course, that it is imaginable):

we’re blaming the midwives hunting them
they’re stripped and dunked to one hundred
we set traps – a woman full-term on a platform
every new-born baby another riot
they armed themselves so we spread more lies
we hang placentas in trees for the morning . . .

In the final poem we leave the expecting mother about to give birth and about to seal the hatch of a bunker where she and her new-born child – “I’ve a sharp boiled knife the cleanest towel / the gas lamp I’ll hiss along with“ – will die together when the food runs out.

This five-part poem is a hinge between the two longer sections. As I’ve said, the first section is made up of poems which investigate grotesque responses – on the part of governments and individuals – to the oncoming apocalypse. In the first poem, “The Last Day”, we are briefly introduced to jargonised responses from religions – it is called “The Great Migration”; the media – sedatives are provided free by a weekend newspaper; and individuals (always the more interesting and moving) – “there will be a club gluing model planes / quietly in the candlelight after curfew”. One of the things that makes this a poem which stays in the memory is its painful conclusion:

the voices of trembling children singing
louder children louder like rehearsed

I’m not sure where in Curnow’s experiences of fatherhood this image came from but it rings wonderfully true and reminds us that the earlier poems of parenthood such as “Bath Towel Wings”, the second poem of his first book, No Other Life But This, have a darker side that balances the cuteness:

Embracing herself in bath-towel wings,
corners clutched with tight, pink fists,
she waits for pyjamas in the centre of the room,
warmly dripping what is left of the bath.
I don’t want to die, she says, and if I could waive
death somehow, waive it like a day at school . . .

The other poems from the first part of The Apocalypse Awards go on to explore the sorts of imaginative possibilities that “The Last Day” introduces. There will have to be, as the book’s title confirms, a Hollywood-style Awards Night, for example, technically irrelevant but “some kind of ritual at least”:

. . . . . 
Should we celebrate? Yes! Now more than ever!
and that’s when the host pulls out
the winner is Tango Defeats Depression
thanking God becomes a bigger joke
the orchestra is ready to drown on cue . . .

In “Death Duty” – “we are all on it / getting promoted every day / constantly filling the vacancies” – we meet “the only industry in perfect health”; “Duel” records the pre-suicide moments of a couple who have spent their entire relationship fighting; “At Tender Touch” the closing down of a brothel; and “Christians” the altogether calmer, professionalised approach – they “break into small groups to share / Kingdom Rule – What It Means For Your Super.” But other poems record more insane scenarios which have more poetic promise perhaps. There is an outbreak of Houdini-like escapology – “the last global craze” – and “The Angel” describes a bizarre ritual in which people, often in organised groups, line up to kick the angel of destruction in the groin. Again it is the comic bizarrenesses of human group behaviour that stimulates Curnow as he imagines single mothers, boy scouts (hoping “for a last-minute badge”), and Cancan girls all lining up at the free-throw line of a basketball court, waiting for their turn.

Perhaps the best of these comic-horror scenarios is “Seances” which proposes not, as one might expect, a simple increase in spiritualist activity but a situation in which there are so many dead to send messages that the Ouija boards get out of control and go on banging out their messages despite the desperate attempts of the users to stop them:

. . . . . 
some wrap it in blankets and stash it in a drawer
some submerge it in a tropical fish tank
an anonymous narrator dictates War and Peace
and the back story of the Cheshire Cat
something is spelling quality mince matters
perhaps a butcher with undying remorse
this last parlour game this after-life rhythm
a constant tapping of fees and charges
Rosabelle-answer-tell-pray – believe believe believe
over and over from beneath the house
wedged in a locker at the Ever Fit gym
abandoned in a food court at an empty mall . . .

From “Back Paddock” on, the poems are not so much explorations of responses to the Apocalypse as descriptions of extreme activities which require a generalised apocalyptic atmosphere to occur. The message being, I assume, that this kind of behaviour is becoming more and more the norm as groups of Americans plan for life in a post atomic-war age. “Library” gives the best description of this imagined world as “a mix of The Road and World War Z / plus A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”. In this poem a group barricade themselves inside a library and set off searching for How to Take Hostages for Dummies. In “Legoland” the world is taken over by lego simulacra of reality and in “Meteorite” someone who finds a landed, smoking meteor – surely the most harmless of visitors from outer space – finishes up taking it into the chicken coop where he reads it “Gilgamesh and Ozymandias”. And, finally, there is a description in “Botanicals” of people strapping flower bulbs to the backs of their heads so that, when they die, their bodies will nourish the plant. Grotesque but, in it’s odd way, rather moving.

The poems of the book’s final section are surrealist pieces organised so that they begin with poems that “make sense” in the apocalyptic environment of the rest of the book but which gradually become more extreme. How much they are based on dreams – that regular provider of meaningful but incomprehensible images – it’s hard to say though “Dreamliner” and “Bear Forest” both tempt the reader to interpret boat and forest as symbols of dream. The first poem, “Red Shawl Flapping”, seems entirely coherent:

there are not enough flowers and the wolves close in
a baby wakes in an empty house
a splash upon the doorstep and a red shawl flapping
but nobody heard the shot
strands upon the spade that remains unhidden
a plot of earth beneath the pines
the moon comes chanting at the broken gate
the rope puzzles remain unsolved
cicadas sizzling above a war of wheat
sparrows revel in the dirt-bath dust
a television turning the milk upon the bench
toward a slow bold hunter’s nose
and the baby the chanting a red shawl flapping
on the grim slack whip of the line
a racket of carriages passing in the distance
everything gets dragged outside.

Clearly we are here in an environment which is part crime-scene, part Brothers Grimm. The images are laid down bluntly (rather like the “racket of carriages” of the poem) but they get a kind of incantatory effect by their repetitive structures, an effect supported by the use of the slightly archaic and formal “upon” rather than the more demotic “on”. The repeated phrase, “red shawl flapping”, prepares for the later poems where there is a much more intense repetition of important statements.

By the time we get to poems like “Excluding Guns and Ammo”, “Confession” and “Ravine” we are a long way from coherence and in a nightmare surrealist world whose images are consistent in that they share the apocalyptic atmosphere of the rest of the book. But if there is no humane “cuteness” there is also no palpable emotional commitment. As such, there may be a therapeutic function in the sequence or there may be an adjusting of poetic reputation on the poet’s part but, either way, it’s hard to see the poems of this final section as representing a road one would want Curnow to travel too far down. A poem from the middle of the final section, “Ex”, seems to want to be read as symbolising the dream images as a circus (a symbol that goes at least as far back as Rimbaud and perhaps further). I read it (somewhat nervously) as a critique of the keeper by his ex-wife: both of them being components of the creating consciousness, one providing the material the other keeping some kind of control. But when she says, at the beginning, “the keeper is living in a fantasy / dream sequences are for losers these days / my job is to keep the talent tight / in the circumspect light of the compound” there’s a statement there about dream-images that might be true for the poems of this final section.

Peter Rose: The Subject of Feeling

Crawley, WA: UWA Publishing, 2015, 78pp.

One of the best descriptions of Peter Rose’s poetry is to be found on the blurb (not normally a site of good descriptions) of his third book, Donatello in Wangaratta, which, after mentioning intelligence and a delight in language, speaks of “a heightened awareness of life’s surprising gifts and irredeemable losses, a contemporary and cosmopolitan sensibility”. Of course there is no causal relationship between the two parts of this description but both are, in their own way, true and serve as a good way of describing this new book.

To begin with the second part: one of the things that marks out Rose’s poetry as so distinctive is that, while it explores a complex and intense inner life, it’s a life which is lived in the context of an urbane, cosmopolitan, professionally literary outer life. Everyone’s inner life has, of course, an outer life as a sort of vehicle or protective shell – we are all, after all, situated somewhere in our lives, in a job, an age group, a country – but Peter Rose’s outer life of the activities of a major literary editor, the inevitable visits to the opera or a gallery or a book launch, hours spent at mind-numbing proofreading etc, isn’t really like the outer life of any other Australian poet. It has been said that it feels rather English but this is only because such a professional life is more likely to occur in England where publishers and non-academic intellectuals are rather thicker on the ground. Rose’s national identity (or perhaps, Victorian identity) is, anyway, impeccable since he grew up in a rural town the son of one of Australian Rules Football’s greats.

My feeling about the slight strangeness of the milieu in which the experiences of these poems occur is that it tells us more about other Australian poets than it tells us about Rose. It’s surprisingly odd to read a poet with, apparently, absolutely no interest in landscape, for example, and it’s a reminder of how important landscape, and the various ways its significances can be configured, is to Australian poets. Even Slessor, whom one might look to as a similar literary intellectual, equally a man of the city, has poems about landscape and at least one about the cosmos even if those poems make the point that those things are alien and disconcerting. One might look to Peter Porter but Porter’s exterior life was spent in England and though he happily speaks of “the permanently upright city where / speech is nature and plants conceive in pots” there is a lot of confrontation with landscape and alien geographies in Porter’s poems. And then there is the fact that Porter’s and Rose’s poems seem so entirely different that you feel that the comparisons were made out of ambience rather than poetics.

Then there are “life’s surprising gifts and irredeemable losses”. In Rose’s poetry the former can derive from art but they are usually amatory. He writes brilliantly of the revelations of falling in love even though the experience probably contains the seeds of its failure. There is a poem, “Cheap Editions”, in his first book, The House of Vitriol, which describes those intense moments of literary discovery that happen in one’s late teens. First St John of the Cross encountered in “one of those nasty American editions, / putrid spores and tight-arsed spine” and then Camus’ outsider introduced at “one of those ill-lit parties” turns the world of the saintly doctor upsidedown. But the poem finishes: “Then I met someone, for the first time. / Contentment, voluptuousness, blasted forever”. In other words (as I read it) the early literary passions are essentially trivial and self-indulgent in the face of a real, if temporary passion. Rose has always done this really well: the title poem of Donatello in Wangaratta is about the revelation the child experiences when he sees a print of Donatello’s David.

The failures and losses the world imposes are always present of course. “Sentence” from Rattus Rattus, imagines the self as a kind of Roman victim waiting for the senate’s decree and, probably, the method of execution. As the poems progress, the failures of love become less about love and more about memory, a memory which fixes certain scenes, dates and anniversaries. Thus “Bait”, from The Catullan Rag, begins:

It was one of your last visits.
My memory is sharp, even clinical,
gives interviews like a criminal . . .

Much of this comes together emblematically in the first poem of The Subject of Feeling, “Impromptu”. (Actually, technically, it’s the second poem since the volume is prefixed by “Twenty Questions” an answer to Donald Justice’s poem of the same name. Interestingly the first poem of Rose’s first book, comprises twenty reasons for failure and “Notionalism” in The Catullan Rag is a list of twenty kinds of notion.)

Moments ago, back from the library
and the noisy, populous park
(that shrill of infantocracy),
I was entering our building when
a magpie swooped – taut dart of surprise.
. . . . . 
Well, I was beyond cavilling,
too full of the poem that Donald Justice
had absently enjoined me to pen,
the poem that might lead somewhere
or fail to ascend. Four flights up,
our terrace doors open to summer,
you were playing an Impromptu
by Schubert (very carefully),
arpeggios audible on the street,
if the street cared to attend.
I stood there listening,
mindful of the magpie
and his fierce, nesting, arrowy urge.

There’s stable love, intimacy and music in the upper floors here and they are approached by a poet with his head full of a poem that might or might not work (described in terms of leading somewhere and ascending). And yet the whole thing is framed by a dangerous magpie. I take this to symbolise the darker side of the world and its treasures. It’s tempting, momentarily, to try to be a bit more precise – the magpie is ferocious because it is protecting its nest but poet and partner have no young; or the magpie comes from the natural world into this urban world of flats and music that deliberately excludes it – but in the end, I’ll stay with the slightly more general interpretation.

The “irredeemable losses” that the world imposes are not only amatory ones, of course. There is a trauma at the heart of this inner life and it is one that is continually revisited not to probe a sore tooth but to explore memory: Rose’s brother, Rob, became a quadriplegic after a car accident and died comparatively young. Rose’s much admired memoir, The Rose Boys, details these events but they have always been part of his poetry going back as far as “I Recognise My Brother in a Dream” from The House of Vitriol. In The Subject of Feeling the second section is devoted to poems which are memories of family and the long poem, “Tiles”, which seems, at first, to be about his mother’s experience of eight months in hospital with rheumatic fever and no visitors quickly becomes a story about Robert, in hospital, staying sane by trying to count the tiles in the ceiling of the ward.

As I’ve said, you feel that, as Rose ages, memory itself becomes the subject of the poems rather than the event which is memorialised – something that occurs in Tony Judt’s brilliant memoir (equally devoted to trauma), The Memory Chalet. And movement is involved here in interesting ways. Sometimes you feel the poet move towards memory but, at other times, memory moves towards him. That’s the reason, I think, why “Late Autograph” stays in the mind: Rose is signing copies of The Rose Boys when he sees, in the queue approaching him, an old flame from his adolescent past. What to write? In the end, words fail to solve the problem and the friend gets “something fond and anodyne” but though words fail, memory doesn’t and we are left with a sharply focussed image from the past:

. . . . . 
                                       And then,
transcending those wraiths of reality,
you were standing in front of me again
brazen amid a horde of admirers -
naked, panting, grazed down one side,
towel over your shoulder, teasing me,
calling me nicknames, sweet, aromatic.

If we stand back from this poem a little we can see a situation in which the trigger of a memory moves towards the poet through the mechanism of a queue. Another, “Dux”, which involves meeting with an older woman poet, also is set in a queue though here the queue symbolises a procession of poets slowly getting older but always retaining the same relative positioning. It has a wonderfully oblique opening (a bit like the first sentence of A Passage to India) – “I always remembered her, / if I remembered her at all, / which was not very often, say once a year . . .” But it is really about another issue of memory: though our memories may be clinically clear and we may be confident as to what the actors of those memories mean to us, we cannot be equally clear about what we mean to them in their own memories. Memory, as an important early poem, “The Wound”, suggests unfortunately inclines towards solipsism and here the older poet says “cordial things about a past / more apparent to her, more vivid, tangible”.

The quote from the cover of Donatello in Wangaratta which I’ve used to structure these observations so far, also has a comment about Rose’s “delight in language”. It’s an interesting issue and one remembers another early poem about his brother which says:

You never understood my lexical craze
but I could spend eternity hunting for a
long beautiful word for addicts of anniversaries.
There must be a name for it, a need. . .

In Rose’s previous books I’d always felt that part of the structure of individual poems involved a certain linguistic tension. Many of them seemed to have one unusual or unusually-used word which, you felt, was a way of tightening the poem’s cross-braces or, perhaps, of suggesting the existence of a more complex lexicon that might produce a poetry that is more precise but less comprehensible. I haven’t spent any time on this issue here because I have a sense that it’s not as consistent a feature of the poems of this new book than it might have been in the past. But one poem demonstrates it nicely. “The Vendramin Family” is about Titian’s famous painting:

And why the shocked awe on the staircase
leading nowhere but infinity?
Tell us now, earnest youth
in the second row, mouth open
in something like mystification - 
the idiot as inspirado?
Listless we shelter in the gallery,
the gallery as reliquary -
wet from the London rain,
shaken by wonted sirens,
half-expecting catastrophe
in a handsome guise. Who knows
which way the wind blows,
why the candles lean fondly to the west.

The final section of The Subject of Feeling is a twenty-five poem addition to Rose’s “Catullan Rag” a series imagined to be in the style of Catullus. I think the function of these poems is to allow the poet to let his hair down a little and enter a reasonably scabrous version of literary life, its petty hatreds, viciousnesses and loves, without causing insult to anyone in particular. Thus:

Give up, Catullus. Bury your umbrage and head for the bush.
Warty Suffenus has just got an OAM,
Postumia a Pulitzer for her comic sequel to Moby-Dick.
Wither away, Catullus. Why don’t you just die?

The first thing to say about this enjoyable series is, I suppose, that they tap into only part of Catullus: the epigrams. I don’t want to appear like a picky pedant here, but I love the poetry of Catullus as much as Rose does and I can’t help but feel that someone who went from Rose’s poems to those of Catullus would get quite a shock at how much more they are than mere literary scabrousness – imagine coming up against any of the poems from numbers sixty-one to sixty-four. And even the epigrams almost always sustain themselves not by the shock of their coarseness but by their complex (though witty) structures. It’s also worth pointing out that these poems might now be seen as part of a genre: there are versions of Martial (who I think might be more like Rose’s Catullus than Catullus is) by Peter Porter and Laurie Duggan, David Malouf’s continuing series of modernisations of Horace, some imagined poems of Catullus by David Brooks and Geoffrey Lehmann’s rather wonderful imagined poems of Nero. Someone, one day, will write a long and involved essay about this and what it might mean in Australian poetry.

The second thing to say about the poetry of Catullus vis-a-vis that of Rose is that the former is marked by two traumatic experiences, represented by the two lines of Catullus which have passed into the language. The first (“vivamus mea Lesbia atque amemus” – “Lesbia let us live and love”) introduces Catullus’ experience of the agonies and ecstasies of true love and the second (“atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale” – “and so, forever, brother, hello and goodbye”) the untimely loss of his brother whose grave, in the Troad, he is able to visit only in passing. None of Rose’s poems about his brother, Robert, have any connection with his “Catullus” poems, and chronology argues against it, but still it is hard to suppress the idea that a hidden link of loss between the two poets has somehow suggested the idea of inhabiting Catullus’ voice.

Rae Desmond Jones: A Caterpillar On a Leaf

Glebe: Puncher & Wattman, 2016, 57pp.

Published in 2013, Rae Desmond Jones’s selected poems, It Comes From All Directions revealled a poetic career of two halves with a twenty-seven year gap between. The first part was marked by poems of a gritty immersion in the world of the inner city streets often producing disturbing monologues. The poems of the latter part were committed to exploring a host of new directions. This new book develops out of this exploration. In form it focusses on one of those possibilities – it is made up of fifty ghazals – and seems to be aiming for a new and deeper kind of lyricism, lyricism always having been an element of Jones’s work despite the fact that many of the earlier poems wanted to extend the range of language in poetry by including the scabrous.

To look at the formal issue first, the ghazal – really a classical Persian form though with Arabic origins – has made fleeting appearances in Australian poetry, first (as far as I know) in the later work of Judith Wright. Essentially it is made up of a series of “couplets” whose second lines, in the classical form, all rhyme (often multisyllabically) or share the same final word. In the latter case the effect is very like the rhetorical scheme of epistrophe. Ghazals can be unified lyric meditations but they can also be a series of disjunctive end-stopped propositions, a serial set of brilliant detonations. In the poetry of Persia’s greatest poet, Hafez, this is taken to an extreme so that the act of reading the poem is to discover the hidden string on which propositions are threaded. I hope I won’t seem to be drawing attention too much away from Jones’s book if I give my beginner’s literal translation of one of Hafez’s most famous poems by way of example:

If that Turk of Shiraz would take my heart into her hand,
For her Indian mole I would give Bokhara and Samarqand.

Bring, O winebearer, the remains of the wine which is not found in heaven
But by the waters of the Rokhnabad and the flower gardens of the Mosalla.

Alas for these saucy gipsy girls who disturb towns with their 'skill',
They have taken peace from my heart as Turks steal booty from a table.

I know of that ability to daily grow in beauty which Joseph possessed,
How love drew Zuleikha out through the curtain of chastity.

The beauty of our lover does not need our incomplete love.
What does the beauty of her face need of make-up, or eye-liner! 

You spoke harshly to me and I rejoiced, thank God you spoke well,
A bitter answer is suited to sweet ruby lips.

Listen to my advice, my dear, the advice of a wise old man
Which the happy young hold dearer than life itself.

Tell fables of musicians and wine and seek less the secrets of Time
For none have solved or will solve these riddles by wisdom.

You have sung the song and threaded the pearl, come and sing sweetly, Hafez,
Over whose poem the heavens have poured the splendour of the Pleiades

.
(The name or, more precisely, the nickname, of the poet in the last couplet is a convention and the sex of the “Turk” in the opening is indeterminate and a male should, if anything, probably be preferred. For contemporary Australians that probably disorients the reading of the poem more than it would have for the fourteenth-century contemporaries of Hafez. The exquisitely beautiful fourth couplet refers to the story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife who, in the Islamic tradition, is called Zuleikha.)

It’s a poem worth reading in the utterly different place and time which we inhabit because it gives some sense of the lyric possibilities that the ghazal brings into Australian poetry with it. Above all, the sharp, self-contained utterances prevent that extended discursiveness which the conventional English language lyric is given to. Not that there is anything wrong with that per se – indeed one of the pleasures of the conventional lyric is the way the utterance falls into syntax through the length of the poem – but the ghazal offers new possibilities to poets. It also makes readers approach the poem differently, not so much translating as constructing the “meaning”.

Jones’s fifty ghazals vary in their adherence to this model. None of them try to copy Persian rhymes, which is probably a good thing, but some stay quite close to the spirit of the form. Of all of them, the first probably stays closest. It is dedicated to “the beloved on the last night” and thus immediately alludes to the idea of the absent beloved, a classic trope in the mystical tradition of Persian poetry where the desire for union with an absent God supplies the power of the verse; it also has the traditional symbols of roses and the moon.

in the dark a woman knits across the table,
          her needles click softly & tenderly.

the smell of roses are rich & sweet,
          the pulsing blood of moving air.

the old pepper tree shudders & whispers,
          the full moon spills silver into my hands.

shadow, what do you know?
          the sinistral mirror smiles along its crack.

the sparkling stars peck at the clouds,
          an angel breathes down my back.

there is no one else in all there is
          & our world is alone in its wick of light.

Despite its traditional appearance, I think this is best described as a poem of celebration and perspective. And as such it is well-positioned to introduce the other poems of the book. The small world “alone in its wick of light” might be the domestic universe of the poet and his beloved, looking out onto a backyard of rose bushes and single pepper tree, but it might also be the world of the whole human race seen in the perspective of the cosmos (the stars) and the divine (the angel).

The rapid alterations of perspective from the individual to the cosmic are one of the features of this book. In a fine poem – which produces the book’s title – each of the first three couplets oscillates between the intimate and minuscule act of writing and a larger perspective which in the first is introduced by juxtaposition, in the second by metaphor and in the third by a dead metaphor which is resuscitated by the first two:

my pen drips dark blue ink,
          hungry rivers break their banks.

deep clefts of my making
          are as distant as the Moon,

words which slide & fail
          the depth of my adoration . . .

In another poem a lamp, seen in a photograph, is “an iridescent expanding universe”, and almost the whole of a late poem imagines the connection between an individual’s desire and the “coupling, birthing, fire” of the whole universe: the last couplet “now a dying body snatches / at the light” plays on the way the word “body” is used of planets and stars (heavenly bodies) and also of the solitary human being. It’s a moot point whether these plays with perspective are encouraged or in some way contained within the formal possibilities of the ghazal but it may be no coincidence that Judith Wright’s ghazals also dealt with cosmic themes (albeit slightly different ones) and the situation of the infinitesimally small but significant human individual.

That first poem also asks “shadow, what do you know?” an introduction to the repeated images of alter egos, inner twins and other selves that runs through this book. A brilliant poem (No VI) describes a girl seen in passing in a mirror’s reflection. It might have been a portrait in Jones’s earlier style but the real interest is in the way she belongs in the mirror world. But instead of being less substantial because of this, she actually has more presence. The poem finishes

         what causes her to hate me?

she is no body to me as i walk on,
          hand in hand with the dead.

Sometimes the other figure is death itself (not an unusual preoccupation for a poet born as long ago as 1941 and now living “in a time of winnowing”) either named as such – “death was such good fun – / booze, drugs & poetry. // how did i avoid you? / so Byronic, so good looking!” – or embodied in an unknown lover “although I have never seen your face / you are near me. // so close . . .” Another internal figure “that thing that is not me” is an embodiment of the individual’s less desirable traits and, in the fortieth poem, a sinister character standing at the entrance to the poet’s street is surely another internal self which has been objectified:

. . . . .
our street rolls out behind him,
          a long tongue of forever.

he hasn’t shaved for a week:
          what questions does he ask?

the whites of his eyes,
          no moon, the darkness.

Whatever the exact perspective, the end of the first ghazal seems to me to want to celebrate our world which is “alone in its wick of light”. It’s a reminder that at the heart of Jones’s poetry there has always been a great love of live as it is conventionally lived, a love for the “fun of life, the sheer / tragic bullshit of it”. The fourth poem, lacking any cosmic perspectives and focussing entirely on a suburban backyard, has an almost Maloufian finish:

leaves mulch my concrete pathway:
          somewhere in the roof there is a rat.

after this year’s winter storms
          the gutters & downpipes block & overflow.

a rough pyramid of sandstone could make a wall
          if i would dig a deep neat trench.

citrus trees produce sweet fruit,
          small oranges, fat grapefruit, oozing lemons.

as we sleep Eden grows around us,
          weeds & bright coloured singing birds.

Of course, celebration only makes sense to us if it is framed by the darker elements of life which stand against it and there is a good deal of poetry in this book which engages that darker element. There are those young who are always potential jihadists in one cause or another driven by lust and money:

what are the dreams of boys?
          a burning itch between the legs,

galleons loaded down with silver
          in a rising storm.

waves of dopamine – images
          of naked houris dancing . . .

In this poem (No XLIV), though, there is a sense of the author identifying with this analysis of the forces impacting on the young because the poem goes on to adulthood (the time of “babies & nappies, sleepless nights” before finishing with a personal plea:

          lord or demon of my brain,

if you exist here or beyond the stars,
          make me indifferent, brave & wise.

There is a poem (No XXIV) about the way our foreign policy and minerals exportation are connected, done as a set of almost comic historical metaphors:

air force 1 hits the tarmac
          as huns bang politely against the gates.

. . . . .

our Roman armies may march North through deserts
          where riches bleed beneath the earth.

bulldozers scrape empty the guts of time,
          they dig our fortune & our grave.

And another poem (No XXII) is, if I read it correctly, an attack on Australia’s media monopoly:

. . . . .
 
announcements are distributed
          on yellow paper from corners.

we are unused to speech since
          your tongue stopped our mouths.

through broken sewers under sunken roads
          our waste returns,

we have created you in our image:
          all of this belongs to us.

But, despite contemporary media and contemporary terrorism, despite the fact that we recognise inside ourselves alter egos that are often disturbing, and despite the fact that the human world inside its domestic garden or its little “wick of light” is rendered infinitesimal in the perspective of the cosmos, this seems, essentially, a positive and affirming book. For poets it is poetry itself which is usually invoked as one of the most valuable of humanity’s positive resources, an expression of the human drive towards creativity rather than self-aggrandisement. Interestingly it is a line rarely taken in A Caterpillar on a Leaf but the final poem is an exception here. Perhaps it marks a way of responding to the “the sheer / tragic bullshit” of life:

my seed pushes beneath the earth
          unable to break the crust.

still i do what i want to want,
          dipping into the stunted bag of “i can”.

an old eagle watches from the rock
          thinking “what is meaning? did i create it?”

always that girl with long red hair
          scrapes a drum with a furry stick.

there are lots of them have gone that way -
          i will follow them soon enough.

If creativity is one of the best ways in which human beings respond to a positive perception of life out of their stunted bags of “i can”, we can count the fifty experiments in ghazal form contained in this book as a development of new ways in which the lyrical-poetic branch of creativity can move forward.

Liam Ferney: Content

Santa[sic] Lucia: Hunter Contemporary Australian Poets, 2016, 87pp.

This impressive and engaging collection continues in the vein of Liam Ferney’s previous book, Boom. We experience the same immersion in the complex allusions, codes and structures of contemporary popular culture while at the same time registering a kind of distance from it. For a temperamentally late-adopting, island-dwelling recluse like myself it all constitutes a bit of an education and I’m aware of the irony that it is the technology which usually disseminates this culture that also makes it possible, by reading Boom and Content with your Google page ready for action, to make sense of the references. I now know at least the basic information about subjects like John Hughes, Insane Wolf, The Gentleman’s Jolly; I even know what a fixie and a noseflip is.

Ferney is often seen as the kind of poet we go to for an experience of cultural immediacy, an immersion in the ever-changing world of fads, fashions and acronyms. Although his work is very different to that of, say, Pam Brown, Laurie Duggan and the ever-influential John Forbes, it can, clumsily, be pigeonholed as belonging to an approach to existence which won’t accept that poetry’s essential interest is in the deep, personal experiences (birth, love, death and things in between) which are inflected, but never radically altered, by whatever cultural milieu (or, for that matter, language) the poet happens to have been born into. The life experiences, in other words, which don’t have brand names. But pigeonholing like this always seems to finish up obscuring more than it reveals. Ferney’s poetry has its own issues, tensions and dynamics, and they need to be looked at.

It seems to me that it’s a poetry pulled in three directions and it’s the pull that tensions the best of the poems. The first is towards immersion. Contemporary and “popular” culture provides almost all of the references, habitually in Ferney’s poetry, in a web of similes: where else could familiarity be likened to “the Freo Doctor / pushing DK through the final overs of a WACA belter” or a poem’s shapely conclusion be likened to “Senna’s // deadly speed”? Take “National History”, for example:

The port haze wheezes on the harbour
& the oil tanker of regret
              Demtel demo’s dugongs
when the propellers fire up &
              someone’s fiance flees
for the fertile fjord of shittheyjustmadeup.

Fisheyed noseflips & manual pads
might’ve powered an early nineties
              skinny board tech sesh,
but post-millennial they smell fear.
              Time to resurrect your boombox;
go Jamie Thomas rawlarge / Iron Maiden style.

It’s in two balanced parts, the first is devoted to the present and the second to the past. The present is made up of related maritime images: typical of Ferney’s references he uses a neologism from commercial television – “Demtel demo’s” – for “slices-up”. The second stanza is built on decade-specific fads like skateboarding. The recommendation, surely ironic, is to retreat to the end of the last millennium, the time of skateboards, Iron Maiden and ghettoblasters.

And it’s no accident that this should be a poem which is, in a larger sense, about time (or Time), that great subject of Australian poetry in the immediate pre- and post-war periods, now long disappeared into the past. Here time is conceived as cultural time, its markers being changes in fashion. To be immersed in contemporary culture is, in other words, to experience a situation which is far from that of a kind of timeless continuous present. It is, on the contrary, to be obsessed by time because one is surrounded by rapidly changing markers of the passage of time. We can see something of this in a poem called “Date Night” where the protagonist (a bit like Woody Allen in Play It Again, Sam) tries on – immerses himself in – the cool postures of post war cinema finding out that, for it to work, you have to be equipped with a scriptwriter completely in tune with the rapidly changing tastes of the audience:

. . . . . 
And these things don’t ever
come good. Not unless
you’ve got a scriptwriter
blessed with a golden Remington
and an almanac detailing
exactly what next month’s
popcorn guzzlers want
in the Friday night makeout slot.
And even if I was still there at the end
                                  the Forties were all over
and the Fifties were yet to begin.

This poem is preceded in Content by “. . . of the Dead” another poem which is, in its way, about immersion. The poem attaches itself to Shaun of the Dead a film which asks to be read as a funny, profoundly hostile and canny critique of aspects of contemporary popular culture while being made in one of that culture’s topical genres. Here the speaker is a member of the inevitable living dead, shuffling along, waiting

while the eye-patched holdouts broadcast

in some Krushchev-era bunker
it happened so quickly: no d-day all Dunkirk

This is a sort of immersion that introduces a second drive within Ferney’s poetry: that of a desire to find a position in the contemporary world from which to critique that world. In my reading of “ . . . of the Dead” the poem piggy-backs the film’s comment – dangerous to endorse too overtly – that the “public” are no more than living dead, mindless absorbers of the material foisted on them by the controllers of cultural life. In other words it belongs to that element of Ferney which is aggressively positioned against the stuff that bombards our existence. If that means turning him into a contemporary Savonarola there is the evidence of an earlier poem from the book, “Fal0 delle vanita ”, which suggests that it’s a comparison he may have pursued himself though, despite the fact that the poem has plenty of references to rapid changes of taste (“Our dictionary is out-of-date. / The word coined by last autumn’s meme / highlighting its redundancy”), it is also, I think, an attempt at a personal poem and there is never much use for the personal in the pronouncements of Savonarolas.

At any rate there is a great deal of the judgemental in Ferney’s poetry and this is an area where the poetry gets put under a lot of pressure. Immersion in the contemporary always has a kind of poetic life because of the sheer novelty of previously unheard brand names and inventive hipster argot. But judgment is pulled towards the familiar tones of parents and Old Testament prophets. And there are plenty of quotable examples in Content: “Lonesome Death” begins with “We have been unable / to master // the ethics of war”, “Mugabe” contains the lines “We have traded greatness for convenience, / our atrocities are those of acquiescence” and the book’s first poem says openly “Isn’t it enough that we have already / diminished ourselves?” Of course it’s possible that this tone is to be imagined as being in quote marks, a repetition and brief, theatrical inhabiting of a common tone. It’s even possible to defend it as being ironized: part of the contemporary “system” is a space given to cliched and impotent attacks on that system. But I think that would be drawing far too long a bow. Instead, it might be better to acknowledge that there is a Savonarola lurking inside Ferney and that the anger animates many of the poems while at the same time producing a lot of poetic challenges.

Evidence for this might include the fact that the first and last poems of Content – the frames or bookends – are overtly angry poems. “When God Dies” takes on Queensland’s appalling public media:

So let’s get this straight:

               we don’t do state funerals -

but what we do do
                is tabloid extravaganzas starring Valmae Beck? . . .

The poem imagines a film built out of filmland aliases (George Eastman, “Polanski, / an Alan Smithee stand in / for Joe D’Amato”) in which Godard’s Anna Karina “Goes under the axe blade in this / sub B-Grade faux-Bergman B&W shocker”. All of this is a complex take on the mechanisms of B-Grade culture but the poem finishes in the poet’s own voice (though the initial metaphor comes from the B-Grade examples of a different genre):

& I stick to my guns
because the newspapers in this town
                               only report reliably
on gossip, slander & opinion.

The final poem, “The Comments”, whose title must be derived from the usually bigoted and often delusional comments that readers add in the space under journalists’ accounts (as a devoted follower of the EPL and a reader online of English sports journalists’ analyses of its matches, haud inexpertus loquor) is an openly angry piece which does summarise much of the book’s material:

Forget everything you know.
Or don’t: haunt
your secularism,

& define yourself by
the memes you like.
Abandon all coherence

as long as you balance
that marble between
outrage & having

no skin in the game.
We have never
had so much data,

so many stages
to rehearse the sound &
the fury & that’s why

my poems let me say
what Insanity Wolf won’t.
Nice Guy Greg

tells you It’s all Brady
Bunch in the end - 
but it’s not

It’s Ted Bundy rampaging
through a Florida dormitory.
Marcia, Marcia, massacre.

Even a tree branch
mince’s meat.
Don’t look surprised -

you fucking deserved it.

That’s quite a tour de force and, like all such, takes a lot of risks. Again, although it could be surrounded by all sorts of protective shells (it’s ironized, it’s a dramatic monologue, etc), I think it is the purest expression in Content of the Savonarola side of Ferney and, significantly, that is the one he wants to leave readers with. It also reminds us that he wants the title of the book to be stressed on the first not the second syllable. And, poetically, it seems a success to me, not least because its mode is so difficult in poetic terms, far more difficult than to invent a poetry driven by immersion in the contemporary.

If immersion and anger are two components of Ferney’s poetry, the third is the autobiographical. They come together in those poems which see him in his role as a public affairs consultant irritated by the difference between real reporting and “press release journalism”. You get a sense of it in the second poem of the book, “Monsoon Season”:

. . . . . 
instead there are crickets & cigarette filters
even though I quit smoking before Christmas
& I never learnt to play the guitar

& if there’s no time for an obituary
stick to a hot issues brief
to cut through the Boss’s clutter

& make sure the hagiography is on message ready
to be spliced up for some news director’s jollies

so when the cycle rolls over in the morning
the frumpy bloggers know exactly where you stand

Although in conventional lyric poetry (built on the idea, as I have said, of “universal” experiences) autobiography is a normal mode, in poetry such as Ferney’s, it is something poetically difficult to do well. As anger is. Forbes is a model here though one is never sure whether the brief glimpses of feelings and personal experience which his poems contain are strong spots or weak ones. Connected to the autobiographical is poetry itself since the most significant part of a poet’s life is his or her poetry. There is a strong tendency in Forbes (and in Ferney) for poetry as an art to be one solid “universal” phenomenon that can act as an anchor point in a world-view which is usually anxious to show that such anchors are a mere chimera. Forbes’s “Sydney Harbour Considered as a Matisse”, listing the features of contemporary life, “girls reduced to tears just once, blokes in // sports cars fuming, their parasite careers . . .”, ends memorably

Can art be good enough to save all this,

plus perfume of frangipani blooms
crushed on sandstone piers? Maybe just.

And you feel the same drive in Ferney’s poetry. “Old Physics” begins with a description of the way quantum mechanics (“the chancers // played dice / at the deity’s funeral”) replaced the previous model, interestingly metaphorised as “carvery classics, // dim sims, Chiko rolls, // potato scallops and / chips gold as glory”. But the poem’s real interest is in how any physics can be used to describe poetry, though the metaphor used for poetry itself is one derived from mechanics:

How do you use
physics to explain

a poem?
A hardly measurable

deceleration into a corner
the slingshot setup

for a home straight
with all of Senna’s

deadly speed . . .

To me all of these issues: immersion, judgement and autobiography (with a poet’s art being one of its crucial components) are riddled with interesting problems. It’s fascinating to see Ferney navigating between them as well as making a high percentage of satisfying poems in the process of doing so. One of Ferney’s poems in Boom had a fine description of its author as “a sceptical astronaut”: “Two Zone Weekly” from Content finishes with a description of the poet and a fellow passenger on a city council bus (the latter reading a “phonebook-thick teen vampire love novel): “we are both of us shucking oysters / diving blindly for pearls”.

Anthony Lawrence: Headwaters

Sydney: Pitt Street Poetry, 2016, 77pp.

“Murmuration”, the second poem of Anthony Lawrence’s new book, is a meditation on the way flights of birds form and unform shapes with what seems like practised ease. The collective noun for a flock of starlings, a “murmuration”, derives from the sound the flocks make. The word itself is Latin and much of the poem is devoted to examining the similarity of the birds in both Australian and Italian (Roman) contexts: the sound they make, the poem says, is the same as the sound of rain “falling over the Pantheon / or through miles of telegraph poles / on the Monaro Plain”. The poem moves towards conclusion as the birds settle down to roost in both locations: the separate worlds of “columns and skylines” and “remnant stands of box iron-bark”:

and where the sky pours down
               like madder lake
                              into the roosting dark
sturnis vulgaris preens feathers
scaled with metal highlights
buffed into song
               and who could not be moved
                              aside from themselves for this.

There is a lot about language here, about English’s dual heritage of Latin and Germanic (it’s no coincidence that the first word used for the birds is “starlings” and the second is “sturnis vulgaris”) but the poem is as equally interested in the sound of the words as it is in their history. It is even possible that the last two lines – bringing the poem home to the effect of its scene on a viewer – might invoke the Greek word “ekstasis” (our “ecstasy”) whose original meaning “out of place” describes the way we can be moved out of ourselves by something (it is the origin of our phrase “beside myself” used to describe the effects of anger).

So, I think, one of the many things that “Murmuration” wants to say is that words have both a history and a presence. It may even be that Lawrence wants to say that uncovering the etymology of words is a scientific activity whereas responding to the presence, their sound and appearance, is a poetic activity. Certainly the whole of twentieth century linguistics is built on the notion that the word’s relationship to what it refers to is arbitrary but, perhaps, the poetic imagination with its tendency towards porous boundaries (as in synaesthesia) is capable of fighting against such rigid separations.

But “Murmuration” is also about the shapes that the birds make and thus introduces an issue that emerges in other poems in the book. “Bogong Moths”, for example, includes a delphic proposition in the middle of a memorable description of other shapes produced by animals:

. . . . .
          as children on farms, we had learned
                      from migrations
and infestations, that form is a mirror for disorder
that the brown shag pile carpet
a drought had unrolled from silo to kitchen
                               had been made of mice
so numerous and fast they moved as one, a ground-
swell of need, that locusts in swarm make patterns
in the air if you lie under them
                               and let your eyes
lose focus to see congested flight break away
from the linear lines hunger draws tight
across the land . . .

I’ve been puzzling over the implications of “form is a mirror for disorder” since my first reading of this book. Perhaps it means that all apparent disorder can be shown to have shape if viewed from a different perspective. In this case location is important and Lawrence is very clear in “Murmuration” that the starlings are seen from below, here by an observer who (in another challenging proposition) is in a position that

could imply supplication
or simply the attitude of someone
at ease with how grace can be
         divisive or calming . . .

The animals themselves (the starlings, mice and locusts) are driven by straightforward needs but, like the formula whereby endless iteration produces an infinitely complex (and in the case of fractals, an incredibly beautiful) result, the patterns they make, when seen from a perspective far enough away to be able to embrace the whole, are examples of intricate unstable forms. And if form can be a mirror of disorder then, as another poem, “Connective Tissue”, says, “disorder // can be the tradesman’s entrance / to mindfulness”.

I emphasise this issue of form, chaos and perspective because it’s part of Lawrence’s complex poetics that I have never really thought about before. I’d always blandly assumed that the startling precision of his images derives from an intense focus on the thing described so that, in the wonderful first poem of his previous book, the oysters on the rocks of the harbour are described as being like “ceramic fuse plates // sparking and shorting-out in the wash” or, in “Paper Wasps” from this new book, the nest is described as being “like a graphite sketch of a shower rose”. Both of these are close to a Hopkins-like precision and, when meshed in a poetry marked by a strong onward syntactic push they have something like the same effect that they have in the poetry of Bruce Beaver (a poet who is both like and very unlike Lawrence) where they have a throwaway quality so that the verse seems to say, “I’ve more important things to do than wallow in precise ”˜capturing’ of parts of the natural world”.

So the poems of Headwaters make one want to look at formal aspects in Lawrence’s poetry, not in the predictable sense of metre, quantity and rhyme scheme but in the sense of the shape of a poem. Starlings may form beautiful and apparently spontaneous shapes but so do poems. The book’s third poem, “Ode to a Whistling Kite”, is worth looking at in detail from this point of view:

I heard you before you appeared. You were hunting
the margins of all things estuarine, tracking the wind-
abbreviated signature of your song.
Descriptions of flight and sound should begin

with how these tidal encampments are home
to three other raptors, and naming them summons
the vowel-driven variousness of your calls:
Osprey, Brahminy Kite, white-bellied sea eagle.

Now I’ll attest to having seen you circle and stall
over the shallows, where mullet were so many
when they turned, the water was lit as though
by bars of polished chrome, and you dropped

to settle in a mangrove, still as the bird below you
in rippling imitation. Often, spur-wing plovers
will fly out to intercept you, the word trespass
broken down into volleys of avian abuse.

Sometimes, if the sky has been reduced to rain
the colour of marsh grass, you will be elsewhere
on the nest you have been shaping and repairing
each year like a busted wicker basket

on a grand scale, or inland, attending a fire
to overrun whatever escapes the flames.
You work the flats for live fish, and turn to carrion
out of season. I turn to you when I need reminding

that wonder and amazement are only a glance away
and that gulls might seem common – that rowdy
beach crowd in white rags craning necks for food - 
yet their beaks and legs are beautiful.

One needs to be reminded of this in full to get some sense of its strange and exciting shape. To begin with, one might see how it seems marked by continuous indirection. Far from focussing obsessively on the thing itself – the highly concentrated, ”mindful” gaze that, allied to a poet’s hyper-expressive language, is supposed to fix the object under view – the poem moves to other matters at every opportunity. It is obviously ecologically correct to say, as the poem does, that you can’t describe an animal properly without describing the animal’s environment as well, but here the poem seems to want to bring in the kite’s fellow raptors just as it wants to bring in the plovers which try to drive it off. It seems entirely deliberate that the poem should conclude not with the bird which is its subject but, first, with an account of how the bird’s effect on the narrator is to remind him that “wonder and amazement are only a glance away” and, second, with seagulls, whose legs and beaks are also beautiful.

This poem so deliberately flaunts the conventions of description, turning away from its subject whenever it can and even refusing that subject a final appearance by letting in a scruffy competitor for attention, that it leads you to wonder what the idea behind it is. It certainly makes for a fascinating shape because the strong onward, enjambed drive of the verse, characteristic of Lawrence, is always deflected from its target. Conceivably the twists and turning asides of the poem reflect, in a mimetic way, the twists and turns of the bird in flight. Also the poem might, like the bird, be hunting on “the margins of all things estuarine”. It could be saying (as it does in passing in the beginning) that you define an animal not by a careful, bird-watcher’s checklist of size, colour, call, habits etc but by locating it in its environment and observing the parts of the natural world which impinge on it, but I think the idea is a little wider than this and is rather about observation, imagination and language in poetry in general. The idea, after all, almost reflects the methods of the French Symbolists whereby the inexpressible is “expressed” by the symbols that surround it; it is also the governing idea behind “negative theology”.
“Ode to a Whistling Kite” makes me think back to the last two poems of the animal section of Lawrence’s previous book, Signal Flare, “Cattle Egret” and “Sightings”, especially the former in which the egrets, “attending stock” become “central // and peripheral” much as the kite does in his own poem. “Cattle Egret” deliberately contrasts the practice of consulting “a text / on wetlands birds // or a guide / to animal husbandry” in favour of “observing // in diffuse, patient ways”. In both cases the result of such observation is an effect on the poet himself, either a reminder that “wonder and amazement are only a glance away” or the experience of having been where “things are companionable / and alive // with possibilities”. And, as in “Ode to a Whistling Kite”, there is a strong emphasis on sound, not in the sense of the bird’s call but in the sense of the consonants and vowels of the animal’s names.
The form of “Ode to a Whistling Kite” is related to that of another Headwaters poem, “Giant Dragonfly”. Here the drive towards finding one of these insects in the hinterland mountains is what gives the poem its relentless forward dimension, but even at the beginning the search is thrown aside by the appearance of other items in the landscape:

In the Nightcap Ranges, in needle-point installations
of light on the rainforest floor, a windfall
of quandong berries
                                 give blue shade a darker hue
and upside down on a palm fringe lit with red beads
a wompoo pigeon is dispersing seeds with a call 
like a mistake: whoops, whoops . . .

All the sounds heard are not the expected one of the dragonfly in flight (“something akin to a low, insistent drone / as when a model aeroplane comes in”) but that of Friar birds, and the quest gets temporarily transferred to the various mimicries of the lyre-bird. Eventually the poem moves away from searching for an insect to the poet himself searching for some kind of identity or peace. Interestingly this too has a language dimension when the word “endanger” is taken apart to make an imperative “end anger”: not something that can be done logically since there is no etymological connection between “danger” and “anger”, but something that works on a non-logical plane. The poem finishes with its searcher “either asleep, or mapping / the area for giant dragonflies” thus, formally, bringing it back to its opening subject while at the same time announcing that that subject has not been found. It also, conceivably, ties the end with the poem’s first line in that the sleep is occurring in the memorably named “Nightcap Ranges”.

Something of this kind of “form through negatives” occurs in a long and difficult poem, “Connective Tissue”, whose title suggests, as does that of a later poem, “Bloodlines”, that the interest is in connections rather than disjunctions. “Connective Tissue” is punctuated by concretised metaphors based on experiences which the poet claims not to have had: the opening lines are a good example:

I have not paused at the summit
of a building or leaned
from the rail of a bridge, waiting

for the wind to turn, and to then
base-jump into the whistling night
my chute thrown clear to open

like an ink bloom in the wake
of the lit canopy of a cuttlefish
but I have stood beside you

as good news came through
the radio-active test site
your body had been . . .

Although the poem is really about connections between the speaker and his past, between the speaker and his partner, one of the things that I think this opening (indeed the whole structure of the poem) wants to say is that an experience can be inhabited imaginatively even though its only function is as a metaphor. The vision is just as intense as in the contemplation of the “real situation” of a medical outcome: witness the memorable comparison of a parachute to the ink bloom behind the canopy of a cuttlefish. In “Giant Dragonfly” the plants and birds which the poem focusses on in the absence of the central insect are realised just as intensely.

These matters of poem-shape, vision, metaphor and language are very complicated and I have the feeling that I should reread all of Lawrence’s previous work to feel comfortable with any of the generalisations. But then, really major poets need to be reread constantly. Certainly many of the other poems of Headwaters can be tied to these issues. “In Extremis” is an unusual poem in that it is ostensibly about an historical figure, Douglas Mawson, but its real interest is in the way Mawson, in a near-fatal situation, finds that his mind creates apparitions or, to put it more relevantly, breaks down the barriers between reality and imagined reality:

. . . . . 
In the late night flare and burn of the Aurora Australis
he finds the arc of a distress signal. In displacements of ice
breaking bone and rifle shots . . .

And, in extremis, he thinks about the origins of his name (we aren’t told whether he thinks of himself as “the son of the gut” or “the son of the sea-mew”), another example of the issue of language hovering alongside perception and imagination. (I’m not sure how relevant it is but it’s difficult not to read this poem alongside Michael Dransfield’s “Bum’s Rush” where the cave in the ice also encourages hallucinations but where the extreme situation is a result of drugs.)

And then there are others. “Loss” is a little poem about forgetfulness and the guilt of forgetting where one’s father’s ashes are – not so much a poem with a perspective from the negative as a poem about something that breaks the connecting tissues. And in “Lies” the lies are imagined to take on a physical form which makes a metaphor concrete – “Saying I had to attend a meeting / when a friend was breaking down / turned my voice into a baling hook / in the wall of a disused wool store . . .” “Paper Wasps”, apparently simply about being stung by wasps might really be about how the fiercely accurate visual sense (the nest, as I’ve quoted before, looks like a drawing of a shower rose) is replaced for a moment in the face of intense pain before reasserting itself in a final image of the wasps’ nest as being like a snow dome with the wasps as snowflakes trailing “live wires”.

It’s a complex and magnificent poetry able to activate our own imaginations in response. The poems’ shapes, which I’ve concentrated on here, are always interesting and challenging, and as a result Lawrence’s poems are never a wodge of imaginative discourse dumped onto the page. At the same time, the strong drive of the verse always means that the aesthetic beauties are never merely effete or self-congratulatory. For those new to this poetry, Headwaters makes an excellent introduction to Lawrence and there is the additional benefit that it comes in such an attractive package. I know I have said this before but it is worth repeating that the poetry series from Pitt Street Poets sets very high standards in book design: these things have certainly improved since I was the publisher of a small press a quarter of a century ago.

Jennifer Maiden: The Fox Petition

Artarmon: Giramondo, 2015, 64pp.

Jennifer Maiden’s The Fox Petition is perhaps best seen as part of a rolling project to engage contemporary political and social issues, a project that has been developing since early in her career but especially since Friendly Fire published in 2005. It sets itself an ambitious goal since the disjunct between poetry and the greater public world is a wide one indeed and the latter will take a lot of convincing that the armaments that poetry and its distinctive poetic logic can bring to bear have anything of value to contribute. Significantly, all of the books since Friendly Fire have appeared under the Giramondo imprint, a sign of a publisher being in tune with the direction a particular poet has taken. The accompanying publicity suggests that this might become an annual event, a continuous engagement with the contemporary. I hope this is what occurs since Maiden’s work shows ways in which poetry and an individual analytical process can say something about public life and its dramatis personae. And the ways this showing is done are not fixed but subtly altering and developing.

The Fox Petition demonstrates this latter point even in its title. The essential metaphors of Maiden’s other books, revealed in their titles, are military (her first book was called Tactics) and the post Friendly Fire sequence of titles that I have been speaking of all have titles suggesting military matters: Pirate Rain, Liquid Nitrogen, Drones and Phantoms. The interaction of metaphors of conflict with human dramas both at the personal level and at the social is one of the fascinating features of Maiden’s earlier poetry. When she begins to develop the poetic methods that allow her to write so well about international affairs, those affairs are dominated, anyway, by issues of war beginning with the first invasion of Iraq. This latest volume, fitting for the time in which the poems were written, is rather more interested in issues of migration, of the crossing of various borders from the national down to the personal. The major focus of her hostility moves from things like US politics in the Bush and Obama periods to Australian governmental biosecurity units. As always Maiden shows that wonderful alertness to synchronicities and metaphors which we hope to find in poetries and so the fox of the title appears as an innocent, rather beautiful animal threatened by government operatives as a noxious pest, as a ghost in Asian folklore, as the name of Murdoch’s egregious US network, and as the name of the great eighteenth century Whig statesman, Charles Fox. Nor is this interesting concatenation dreamed up for this book alone: some of them appear in a group of poems from Friendly Fire called “Foxfall”.

You can reread Maiden’s entire output watching how this current mode has slowly evolved. “Mandela in New York” and “Janet Powell Poem” from the 1993 volume, Acoustic Shadow, are early examples of a clever reading of a public individual’s inner personality based on media-transmitted images. By the time of The Fox Petition we have, in “Orchards”, a very subtle analysis of two politically opposed figures, Melissa Parke and Julie Bishop based not on their opposed political positions but on their clothes and the way these reflect both origins and reactions. The poem’s epigraph points out that Parke’s parents owned an apple farm in Western Australia and Bishop’s a cherry farm in South Australia:

When she met the Christians Bishop had arrested
for protesting detention of refugees, Parke
wore a coat like apple blossom: pink,
white and green, translucently. Bishop
on the day the Bali two were transferred
to the death island wore a dress
the colour of cherry blossom, dark pink,
looked gaunt with anxiety. Politics
will pierce you with its empathy, if you
practise it successfully. Apple flowers
spread raggedly and openly, breeze
dapples through them. Cherry blossom
reblooms so densely, brilliantly, that we
plant temples to ensure its resurrection.

One could imagine using this wonderful poem as an introduction to some ideas about the way in which lyricality emerges (and is developed and transformed) in Maiden’s poetry. Here the colours of the women’s dresses are themselves staples of the lyrical tradition, and there is also the fortuitous chiming of the appearances, the odd – decidedly “poetic” – interest in such out-of-the-way facts as the women’s origins, and a poem in Liquid Nitrogen which moves from a description of the way in which a frozen magnet can float to statements such as “Lyricism / is about positioning”. But I’ll leave this complex issue for some future opportunity.

Friendly Fire introduced the idea of a character waking up in an exotic location in each of the first six poems devoted to the adventures of George Jeffreys and Clare Collins. This series is continued in all the succeeding books including this latest one. They are a couple we first meet in Maiden’s second published novel, Play with Knives, a disturbing genre work built on the relationship between these two characters at the point where George is a probation officer and Clare – who murdered three other children when a child herself – is coming up for parole after years of being institutionalised. Maiden tells us in the introduction to the first poems of the sequence in Friendly Fire that George and Clare were resurrected from both Play with Knives and an unpublished continuation, Complicity or The Blood Judge, as a way of entering the traumatic events of what we now call “September 11”: “The two could clearly do New York and in the process, with the freedom of fiction, the horror-inhibited portions of my mind might speak . . . . . I have always agreed with Freud that the imagination is bisexual. It seems to me that you achieve a clearer view if you let the two sides talk to each other. Hence George and Clare”.

The first poems (the ones in Friendly Fire) concentrate on the psychology and situations of players like George W Bush and Condoleeza Rice and the analysis is compelling. By the sixth poem we have what is, I think, the first of the imaginary encounters which grow to dominate later: George Jeffreys meets Saddam Hussein in the ashes of a bombed Baghdad restaurant and the pair discuss both Bush and Saddam’s activities from an ethical standpoint. There are two George Jeffreys poems in The Fox Petition. The first is devoted to a discussion (held while the couple and two friends are on holiday in Wollongong) about the Charlie Hebdo killings and the deaths of dozens of animals in a fire in a boarding kennel in Adelaide. But the surprising thread through this poem is the idea of holiday – the animals were being boarded while the owners were on vacation, as was one of the staff. This transmutes into a discussion of delegation and guilt. As Clare says:

                                            “Every time
some child dies on a school trip, some
of the other parents defend the school, even
sometimes it’s parents themselves. Any 
institution seems more powerful than
human love or loss.” George said, “But it’s just
what you said: the guilt of careless
delegation. And blurring of ego with
any perpetrator . . .”

If you’re coming to Maiden’s poetry for the first time you are quite likely to think of this as rather clunky and put it down to a generalised difficulty that poetry has when dealing with the exposition of abstract ideas especially in a duologue (“Ah, but you say to counter that . . .”) But the fact is that this rather arch but intellectually unrestrained dialogue goes back as far as George’s first interview with Clare at the beginning of Play with Knives and is really better seen as part of Maiden’s distinctive style. The second of the Jeffreys poems is an extended narrative (at over four hundred lines the most extended so far) in which George and Clare, on Kos, observe what is happening to Syrian refugees and become involved when one of these is recognised by their translator as a spy: some Mediterranean-mountainside, night-time shenanigans follow.

The Fox Petition also continues some of Maiden’s imaginary conversations where a contemporary figure speaks to what is usually an admired (and dead) mentor. Hillary Clinton continues her interactions with Eleanor Roosevelt (which began in Pirate Rain) and Tony Abbott continues talks with Queen Victoria which began in Drones and Phantoms. In Clinton’s case the issue revolves around her political “original sin” of voting for the invasion of Iraq and so there is a lot of opportunity for exploring how the “necessary violence” that any person of power with humane, liberal convictions will be involved in will affect their psychology and their morale. This is also explored in “The Possibility of Loss” where Obama speaks to a rather delphic Mahatma Gandhi. Obama is in the situation of having approved a raid in Yemen in which a hostage and a child were “collateral damage”. Maiden seems a lot less sympathetic to Obama (and, for that matter, to Hillary’s and Eleanor’s husbands who appear briefly in some of the poems devoted to this pair) than to some of the other figures she looks at – Bishop, for example – and the implication seems to be that these kind of figures are more deeply entwined in the system, using charm to paper over the various ethical compromises that they are continually forced to make.

The poems devoted to Tony Abbott’s conversations with Queen Victoria are a lot more fun. They meet first, in Drones and Phantoms, near the embers of a gum tree where Abbott has been doing a stint as a voluntary firefighter. His first reaction is one of relief “that she wasn’t Santamaria, Mannix / or Loyola, with all of whom he’d grown / deeply tired of conversation” and when she points out that the use of gunboats to drive back would-be migrants is something her husband would have seen as “extravagance of a similar nature / to that of real war” his reply is memorable: “But, Ma’am, inside me everything is war”. The two Victoria and Tony poems in The Fox Petition continue the issue of asylum seekers and thus harmonise with this book’s most pressing theme. The second of them, “The Famine Queen”, is as structurally complex as one of Maiden’s diary poems and plays with the importation of potatoes into Ireland, the resulting famine (which, really, occurred as a result of monoculture rather than importation since only one variety was brought in and thus there wasn’t enough of the immense genetic diversity present in the vegetable’s homeland) and then moving on to the issue of biosecurity:

. . . . . 
                    “The rumour 
that I gave them only five pounds is not
right: I gave a large amount: well over 
a hundred thousand in your currency from
my private fortune, but the toxic
and imported can be necessary, dear
Sir Anthony” – he loved the title so – “I
myself am fond of potatoes. Do you know,
they called me ”˜The Famine Queen’?” He jumped
to her defence, as usual: “Oh, Ma’am, no:
you are always the source of my nutrition.” She
added, “I see your Queensland Biosecurity has started
a 'military-style mission’ against South American
fire-ants, using remote sensors refined
from the US Military. Surely that would mean
rather a lot of money?” It was not just, he discerned,
of fire-ants she spoke: her words were often
dual citizens: knowing he was, knowing quite
painfully about his vanished home.

This might be a point at which one should ask how accurate and how valuable (not quite the same thing) Maiden’s analyses of contemporary macro-political events are. Can they apply poetic logic successfully? Or, to broaden the question slightly, can a poet’s analysis of the greater world ever again be penetrating and important. It’s a complex issue but it’s fair to say that it is hard to imagine this occurring at the moment or in the foreseeable future. It may well be that intellectual life has seen an irrevocable separation between the professional (political aide, speechwriter, journalist) and the amateur (the creative type). I’m not confident enough to pursue social generalisations like this, nor am I competent to pass judgement on the quality of Maiden’s comments about individual politicians and political events. But I am, at a general level, inclined to be sympathetic and the main reason for this is that her judgements rarely fit comfortably with the cliches of the day (what we would now, in an equally cliched way, call “narratives”). There is a refreshing awkwardness about her view of people that can only be valuably confronting. Julie Bishop, to a casual observer like myself, looks to be a hard-nosed professional politician and Hillary Clinton seems a deeply unattractive power-player despite the continual emphasis on her looks in the poems devoted to her conversations with Eleanor Roosevelt. The less someone follows the existing grand narratives – propositions like “Islam is essentially a medieval religion” or “ISIL is a reverse crusade” – the more attractive they seem to me. At one level, of course, this is saying no more than that a poet is free to focus on the individual datum and can avoid making large, gestural statements about societies. But it can be said, if nothing else, that poetic thought is an antidote to the non-thought of ideological grand narratives and, intellectually, I’d be on the poets’ side even if I weren’t as interested in poetry as I am. You’d like to see Maiden’s poetry set compulsorily on school courses because her poems show that it is possible for people to see clearly and think imaginatively and critically, free of imposed and casually accepted media cliches.

So I’m inclined to give Maiden a high level of tacit belief: I love the surprising ways in which she thinks about the people in power and I’m equally interested in her beliefs about issues like responses to trauma, blame, guilt, the issue of incarnation and disincarnation, and so on. At the same time, The Fox Petition makes contributions to Maiden’s evolving sense of what her poetry is doing and how it might develop. We are used to her “cluster poems” and “diary poems” and “x-woke-up-in-y poems” but this book allows for some interesting developments in the latter when Julie Bishop’s mentor turns out not to be a dead human but the Harvard School of Business and, though an earlier poem doubts whether a university department can wake up alongside a contemporary politician, in “Animism” that’s exactly what happens. But “Diary Poem: Uses of the Female Duet” probes the possibility of using a new kind of interaction between public figures. Not imaginary conversations but operatic duets, the simplest example of the operatic ensemble, that wonderful, still immensely relevant, form in which characters sing of their own obsessions while harmonising with those whose obsessions are quite different. It seems the only art form which can do this and Maiden’s appropriation of it has Tanya Plibersek speaking of her personal griefs while Julie Bishop pleads for the lives of the two drug runners in Bali. The form enables readers (as it does for listeners to opera) to focus on the conflict and differences between the characters and, almost simultaneously, on what they share. It is thus another way of avoiding the polarisation which contemporary narratives prefer (and which, for that matter, the western systems of justice and politics require) and so strikes a poetic blow in the right place. “Uses of the Female Duet” is a diary poem whose title declares its subject but it may well be that “Orchards” is the first real “duet” poem.

Brendan Ryan: Small Town Soundtrack

Santa[sic] Lucia: Hunter Contemporary Australian Poets, 2016, 91pp.

Brendan Ryan’s first book, the strikingly titled Why I Am Not a Farmer, mined the personal experiences of growing up in the West Victorian country north of Warrnambool on a dairy farm. In a sense, reasons for not being a farmer could be said to form the basis of most of the poems, an unlovely catalogue of hardness to humans and, more especially in this book, to animals: dehorning heifers, hauling calves out of cows, watching a bulldozer bury cows which have been burnt alive in a bushfire. It is what nowadays would be called anti-pastoral, a tradition in Australian writing which begins with the great Henry Lawson stories. But what is striking about this first book of Ryan’s, and the subsequent ones, is a lack of the polemical edge which is so much a part of this tradition: there is no sense, in other words, of a narky contempt of one writer for other writers and even for readers. In Lawson, this appears as a loathing of those writers peddling comfortable illusions about the rural life, in early Murray it is a contempt for cosy urban elites who see themselves as superior to those who work on the land with their “sparetime childhoods”. Calmer explorations of this world can be found in some of the poems of Geoff Page and in Gary Catalano’s first book, Remembering the Rural Life, as well as in the poetry of Philip Hodgins. In fact the last of these appears in an important poem in Ryan’s third book, Travelling Through the Family, important because Ryan here does his own positioning of himself within these rural poetic traditions.

“Philip Hodgins” is made out of two dreams about the late poet. In the first Hodgins is seen driving a tractor around the edges of a diminishing square. The process is like mowing but the tractor is harrowing instead, building up lines of dirt. Like a classic Freudian dream it is built on a verbal pun, here on the word “lines”:

. . . . . 
                                     The windrows of dirt
are stopping me from entering the paddock.
I want to ask him about his lines
yet sense that I will never get close to him.
He seems to be on a mission to work the paddock
to its own manic rhythm. I measure my distance,
windrows of dirt brush against me.

In the second dream Hodgins is pointing a shotgun at the poet demanding that he continue the former’s work, naming him, in other words, as an heir. It’s significant that one of the themes of Ryan’s work is the complicated ways in which farmers who have worked unremittingly all their lives have to take a wider view as they age and begin to make plans for some kind of transference of the property after their retirements (a hard step to take for most) or their deaths. Just as Ryan’s poems have, from that first book, tried to explain his reasons for leaving the farm, of not being a conventional heir, so this dream tries to explain the reasons for not taking up Hodgins’ metaphorical baton. It seems to be a matter of that polemical edge, of the directness and bluntness of statement. The second dream is worth quoting in full:

In another dream he is holding a shotgun at me
pointing it between my eyes. He is looking down the barrel.
He seems tired, resigned yet determined.
This is about the time I am writing my thesis
on his poetry. His rhythmic lines intersecting in my head,
His untimely death, direct nature of his address - 
There’s nothing in these dying days
consumes me and I live in two worlds,
grappling for an argument like a rock-climber
who has lost his footing, arms and legs flailing
for a ledge. He is looking down the barrel at me - 
Now it is up to you, to do this work
which confounds me. I am not up to
such direct statement. One of those moments
in a dream where I feel myself sweat,
wake soon after. A dream to burden the day - 
his words, that stare down the barrel.

Perhaps it’s a rejection of a kind of abruptness and directness that derives from certainties. Ryan, perhaps, feels much more equivocal about both farming and poetry. As a reader, one wants to go on speculatively and suggest that perhaps there is a kind of paralysed indecision at the heart of Ryan’s poetry. Though it poses the question of why he left, many times, and seems to continuously circle around issues of how we carry the past within us, how that influences how we act in the other lives we now lead as parents, as city-dwellers, the question never gets answered to the extent that it no longer needs to be asked. To return to the geometry of the first dream, the tractor doesn’t zero in on the last and central section of the paddock but instead circles continuously.

It’s true that the first book flirts with the possibility of mining his childhood experiences and producing a kind of rural version of confessionalism deriving from the weirdness of being one of a Catholic family of ten brothers and sisters working almost continuously on a dairy farm. As Murray says “I can tell you sparetime childhoods force-fed this / make solid cheese but often strangely veined”, and yet, as many critics have observed, you have to stand outside of yourself to get this sort of perspective: you have to have become somebody you weren’t before you realise that the earlier you has a marketable story. I think, again reading speculatively, that Ryan must have realised that there is a directness about the confessional/expose approach to writing about the rural life that didn’t answer to the way that the issues appeared in his own creative life where they act as a generative mechanism that rejects being reduced to certainties. I’m suggesting, in other words, that we might stop positioning Ryan within the complicated maps of poetic pastoralism and think of him, instead, as an obsessive poet, returning again and again to the issues that generate the poetry. The true binary for him might not be rural versus urban but childhood immersion in the immediate world versus adult disenfranchisement. If we take a single event that recurs a number of times in poems throughout the books – the time when his father worked in the knackery and brought the stink of dead animals back to the house in his car and on his clothes – we could say that what is important is not the specific nature of this trauma (fairly mild, on an international scale) but the very fact that it recurs, generates poems, and can’t be purged – a bit like Dickens’ very unrural experience of the blacking factory.

One way of looking at this new book, Small Town Soundtrack, is to see it as widening the way that this central obsession can be explored. It’s in four sections and though the first of these is called “Small Town Pastoral”, it is the title of the first poem, “Outsider Pastoral” which really establishes the key since the section is made up of poems about unease in different situations. That first poem, a little puzzling on first reading, turns out to be a strong piece in which the poet, an expert in the rules of community belonging, enters a pub and observes three regulars. Since the two men are described as possibly mountain men and the woman is expert enough as a hunter to make fun of city-based tourist hunters, the odds are that this is in upland territory. Readers of Ryan will know that his poems about the rural life take place in the “intimidating flatness” of Western Victoria with its occasional blisters of ex-volcanoes – “a moonscape of low-lying paddocks” as a later poem calls it. Although it’s never stated, you have a sense that the landscape in which this pub is set increases the sense of awkwardness that the poem wants to focus on:

. . . . .
One more pot and the glances will extend
into questions.
Where are you from? What are you doing?
Growing up in the country, I learned
there is a line running like a fuse
between here and away,
between the jokes accepted
and the contentions that hold sway.
Is it better to drink with the locals
or rest your foot on the rail bristling
with accusations?
. . . . .

It says something about the hypersensitivities of Ryan’s poetry that the atmosphere which in other, more clichéd poems (and hosts of genre novels), would be heavy with physical threat is marked only by an intense awkwardness. The poet is an expert on belonging and knows the general rules but even rural environments are self-contained. “Grounded Angels” tells the story (part of it repeated in another poem) of the man who buried his mother and then his wife two days later. When he buried his father, his ten year old son

stood in a lounge room
taking in the cousins, the silences
as if the person we had been thinking of

had quietly left the room.
Out of politeness, the boy grinned
as if it was a trick he could call upon.

Of all the images of unease, belonging and not belonging, this is one which stays with me: it’s an exquisitely awkward response on the part of the boy but it also makes sense. (This kind of poem goes back to a group in Why I Am Not a Farmer including the wonderful “Country Parents in Town”). In “Dairy Farmers at the Beach”, we meet father, mother and the children on a brief outing to the coast, another symbol of unease in an alien environment: “For they are an inland people / the beach is a type of joke not to be taken / as seriously as a basket of washing, / shifting the dry cows, or getting ready for Mass” and, in another poem, a man waiting while his wife buys underwear, “happy to be on the outside / as if entering between the bras / could instill a type of vertigo / a paddock he’s not used to”. But the setting is as likely to be urban as it is rural: we meet a single girl at school reading during recess and parents picking up kids. A spell of walking the dog (an activity where the sense of unease is mitigated by the fact that you are in the charge of an animal with its own, different sense of belonging) runs the poet up against an individual who is about as far from belonging as it is possible to be:

. . . . . 
I think of the old man who used to stop me:
I hate this area, I grew up in Geelong West.

The way he waited at the picket fence,
his discontent at 93.

Bare carport, blinds drawn
his liver brown brick veneer

caught in the creep of McMansions.
How did he wash up here?
. . . . .

If the first section is a set of variations on the theme of outsider unease, the second section, “Songs of the Clay Mound”, is built around the idea that, as people age, popular songs move from being something that sets the body dancing to nostalgic doorways into the past. “Where the Music Takes You” is made up of a list of destinations beyond such doorways and “The Music That’s In Us” says, “Songs from pubs and shops leave me ajar // the way snatches of Barry White in the supermarket / can hurl me sideways into a decade”. Songs are not only triggers of a return to an earlier personal world, they can also be portals to an alien world: “Across the Universe” is a fascinating meditation on the way in which John Lennon is part of the poet’s childhood life but he has no part in John Lennon’s life,

The local radio station hammered “Just Like Starting Over” while I squee-jeed the cow shit across the yard and into the drain hole. I often wondered if John Lennon could imagine this was happening. He was somebody I’d grown up with, taken for granted, like a cousin I once fought with . . . . . Central Park was in another universe.

The third section, “Towns of the Mount Noorat Football League”, looks initially like a clever way of organising a set of studies of the towns of the poet’s immediate childhood area. All told it’s a bleak picture of rural decline, “Pubs closed, churches sold, the store’s windows / exposing clumps of unopened mail, upturned / food display cabinets – the end of a town [Garvoc] / or the view of a former self”. But the notion of a Football League is more than just a structuring device because it points up the way in which Australian Rules football (and the same applies, presumably, for Rugby League in outback New South Wales) acts as a unifying agent. As someone devoted to “the round-ball code” I’ve probably been guilty, over the years, of looking down on these other, rather homely versions of football but it’s well to remember what a cohesive force they are, more cohesive than religion since religion has many divisive and combative sects but there is only one Aussie Rules. It’s celebrated in earlier poems like “Saturday Morning” and “Man on the Gate”, where it is “A small town’s investment in belief. / A community finding something to do” and where we meet the image of grounds where cars can park nose to the boundary.

Although the final section of Small Town Soundtrack is less tightly thematically organised than the preceding three, all of the poems chime with Ryan’s earlier poems. It’s true that “Cows in India” and “Shanti Shanti” are brief excursions into a sub-continental exotic but the observer brings, as ever, the paddocks of his own childhood with him: “The first time I saw cows in India / I wanted to round them up. // Yard them, milk them, close the gate / on a paddock, watch them nod along a cattle track. . .” There are poems like “At fifty” which attempt a slightly broader self-definition than those deriving from an obsession with locating the self: “I am still an old punk, / an Indian freak, a farmer’s son / besieged by superannuation, mortgages, infrastructure – / all the dead nouns lining up to be counted”. But perhaps the most intriguing is “Camellias” unusual in that is contains none of Ryan’s habitual tropes. Superficially it is about gardening but at heart, I think, it is a meditation about Ryan’s own poetry. He finds himself picking up some fallen camellias and placing them in a circle around a garden bed made up of salvias, Lamb’s Ears, Grevilleas and a single Manchurian Pear:

The contrast works and I realize it is one of the few
creative acts I have achieved this week -
placing fallen petals around the edge of a garden bed.
. . . 
I will come to notice the camellias in the coming week,
feel the kick as from a recently finished poem - 
something layered in doubt but flickering with surprise,
the way one snake story sheds its skin for another . . .

Not a straightforward allegory about what he thinks his poetry is made up of but it needs to be compared with a similar poem from Travelling Through the Family, “Self Portrait”. That poem speaks of walking ahead “into paddocks and more poems” of “half-succeeding in understanding / yet knowing my limits, self-doubt increasing with age / with rage”. Here the setting and metaphors are rural whereas in “Camellias” they are urban but, when speaking of poetry, they share a tentativeness as though Ryan’s central theme is something that can’t be dealt with definitively, can’t be exhausted.

π. ο.: Fitzroy: The Biography

Melbourne: Collective Effort Press, 2015, 740pp.

It is now nearly ten years since π. ο.’s remarkable 24 Hours appeared, seven hundred and forty pages of immersion in the physical environment of the Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy and the grungy side of its café culture. But also seven hundred and forty pages of immersion in the weird language of the place, Balkan and Greek versions of English that could be as difficult to penetrate as a passage from Finnegans Wake:

Wai yoo look mai kaartz?!
Eye look yoo “fayc” n - o yoo kaartz!
Tin . . . . .aa’ft - o? Tin aa’ft - o . . . . vrr - e??!
Giv him! GIV HIM!
Aa’k oos ti ley . . . ???!: GIV HIM!
Tha naym iz Aapostoli!
Aapostoli Kaangaar - oo (ggh – aamot - o)!
F’err - e m - e t - o pistoli!
Ggggggaam - o. tin. paaaaanaaayia s - oo!
Hoo . . .? Hoo ey’m?! HOO . . . .?!
N - o look HIM!: Hoo?!

This (at a card game) isn’t an unrepresentative passage, at least of the more hectic stretches of dialogue. And so 24 Hours, remorselessly realistic, clear-eyed and unsentimental about multicultural traditions in a Melbourne suburb is as much about an experience of language as of place. The sly warning on the cover, “Contains Language”, admitted as much. And in the latter parts of Fitzroy: The Biography we are in the same linguistic world:

. . . . . 
Bobbie (the house painter) at the Costa Azzura (in
Brunswick St) said: Tha layf thet taym (Fitzroi) woz “lonli”.
Tha MAYGRaaN, dai gon to EKSPRESSO to e’KS-chaynj
tha filling. (Thai g-o to playc th’aat AAXCEP dem)!
Pipol wit ewt-pipol k)))aaaaan living! Iz a H’yoomen instink.
Tha gerlz (ne’chyoo-raali), dai pik da MENZ! (Shi
kum, to yoo). Whair, YOO g-o? / EKSPRESSO!
Wun g-el kum . . .

It’s a brilliant evocation of an Australian dialect that we have all heard and the achievement should rightly be considered poetic – it is far more than a phonetic rendering – since language is poetry’s obsession and it’s an obsession that can range from the vocabulary of the highest of high styles down to this, the lowest of low styles.

Fitzroy: The Biography is a kind of counterpart to 24 Hours. It signals this by being almost exactly the same length. But the focus is historical so that instead of getting a snapshot of a single day we are introduced to a single suburb for the nearly two hundred years of its existence. The governing principle appears in a portrait of a fellow-student, Nonda Katsalides (“But, Nonda was / the coolest bloke in Fitzroy; he had a girlfriend (at / school): Notta – the sexiest girl alive . . .”) which finishes “’The people are the city’ Shakespeare said, and / I guess I’d agree, with that”. I don’t want to play the dreary pedant here but, of course, it is a tribunus plebs who says this in Coriolanus, not at all Shakespeare and not remotely a trustworthy character in Shakespeare’s eyes. Perhaps a better quote for π. ο.’s project might be from Aristophanes’ The Frogs: “I came down here for a poet so that the city might be saved.” At any rate the “biography” of Fitzroy is a catalogue of portraits of its inhabitants organised chronologically and it seems to be a suburb that, from the very beginning of its existence as a civic community rather than a tract of land, does need some saving. This is especially true of a period beginning in the late nineteenth century: “Vags, Pros & Drunks” and “Police: ///// pencillings” are both examples of a kind of compendium poem that collects fragments of a group of lives:

. . . . . 
On Saturday morning, a Gardener found the dead body of
a woman of about 35, lying under some bushes.
There were no marks of violence, and nothing to indicate
who she was. She died of cold, and exposure. (The weather
Friday night was particularly bitter). Christine Gilligan (with
a record of over 40 priors) was charged with vagrancy.
She had made a raid on the front garden, of Dr Howitt’s
residence (in Victoria Pde) and prior to that had created a row
in a fish’n’chip shop. She is the laziest vagrant in Fitzroy!
Herbert Brooks, is a nasty piece of work also . . .

Slowly the world of poverty moves into larrikinism – describable as poverty with a certain kind of violent style – and then eventually into the full-scale gang wars which have bubbled up inside Melbourne’s underclass to the present day. “Fitzroy Vendetta 1918” is a forty page, twenty-two poem section following the dealings of Squizzy Taylor with women (Dolly and Ida) and with other gangs in the area before he was killed by “Snowy” Cutmore (“Fitzroy was about the only Place in the World, that / could tolerate Snowy”). Not all the portraits are entirely bleak however: Fitzroy footballers like Haydn Bunton and Chicken Smallhorn are positive figures as is Pastor Doug Nicholls an aboriginal man who began as a Fitzroy footballer before becoming a minister and eventually governor of South Australia:

. . . . .
When Doug Nicholls died, they took
him back, to Cummeragunja (on the Murray).
Fitzroy would like to, salute him here
     /////////////////////
                 also!

Once postwar migration begins and the poet’s family arrive in Bonegilla from Greece on their way to an eventual life as café proprietors in Fitzroy, the book changes a little to become more autobiography than survey of a suburb’s history. But since the author and his family are so centrally positioned to document what is happening in the life of the suburb the change is more superficial than anything. There is a brilliant twenty-poem sequence, “The Flats” about the complex of events and processes that eventually lead to the demolition of the older, slum parts of the suburb:

. . . . . 
                        Some arsehole from
the Housing Commission, got into a light-blue Ford, armed
with a copy of Morgan’s Street Directory (and a blue-
pencil) and went out, looking for a slum to tear down.
He drove down Brunswick St, Gertrude St, Napier St, and
King William, and overnight (by virtue of Sec 56 of
the Local Government Act) our shop (and the 2 rooms we
lived in at the back, next to the toilet) were declared a Slum.
The dog, didn’t even have “the decency”, to get out of
his car, and have a look around. When the facts are few,
there are experts aplenty. He did the whole job, looking out
from the /// windscreen of his car, and everything
I knew thereafter, or could point to
          got demolished . . .

Fitzroy: The Biography has, as readers of the passages I have quoted will have noted, its own eccentric punctuation whereby every subject and its verb is separated from the rest of the clause by a comma and often subjects are even separated from their verbs by a comma. I’d thought initially that this may relate to the fact that this is very much a performance poem (or poems) as 24 Hours was and as most of the poems in Big Numbers: New and Selected Poems are. But it’s hard to see how these commas mark units of utterance in a performance: all that can be said is that it is a convention that is carried out completely consistently throughout the seven hundred and forty pages. As are some unusual spellings: “stomach” is always spelled “stomac” and “soccer” always “soccor” and so on.

The first four hundred and fifty pages of Fitzroy: The Biography might have been a slightly solemn collection brief lives, the sort of thing a local history group might produce if they were locked in a room with unlimited supplies of alcohol, were it not for the dominant and most interesting poetic technique of the book which is the continuous use of generalisations in between sections of narration. These generalisations usually seem random but they have a sly relevance and serve as a sort of sardonic groundbass underneath the lurid goings-on of the inhabitants of the suburb. Late in the book there are fascinating portraits of Bert Newton, E.W. Cole and, especially, Barry Jones who first became famous as a quiz contestant on a radio program called “Pick a Box” hosted by an American Bob Dwyer and his wife, Dolly. His poem, recounting a famous moment in the show’s history (from memory it was about Warren Hastings) where a contestant became more interesting than the compere, is a good example of these truisms at work:

          The human brain, weighs 5.4 kilos;
same as a bowling ball. The first public library
was opened in Warsaw, in 1747. I saw Barry Jones
on the steps of the City library; a beard, 
is a sign of wisdom. And in spite of bell, book, and candle
he seemed all too human. Hello Customers!
an owl’s eyes, make up 30% of its head.
Bob Dyer was born, in 1909 in Tennessee;
arrived in Australia ’37, played a Hillbilly (with
a ukulele) at the Tivoli, in Sydney. He was
a keen big-game fisherman. Began in radio, in 1948;
had his own quiz show, Pick A Box with Dolly (his
wife): The money, or the box? (an Australian-
wide *joke) – The box! / Come here Dolly! -
One day, Bob asked Barry Jones (one of
the Contestants) who the Governor-General of
India was?, and the answer came directed
in a language unexpected; the most common
letters of the English Alphabet, are R,S,T,L,N, and E.
France granted Laos sovereignty, in 1953.
There are 12, 634 butcher shops, in Great Britain.
An archipelago, is a long run in music.
Useless features, are just simply add-ons & whistles.
Potatoes go well, with almost everything. Prostrate means /
lying face down. – Bob Dyer, looked “fazed”.
The first victim of the electric chair, took 8 minutes to die.
The Adjudicator (George Black) was /// stumped!
Barry had muddied the waters, somewhat.
PS47 was a school for the “hard” of hearing.
The first pictures on Tv, were shots of “the heads
of dummies”. The sponsor was Colgate Palmolive.
All the contestants on the show had
to wear ( ) ( ) headphones (Trivia, is important).
Information Please, was the name of a Quiz show
in the United States, and as a kid, Barry Jones
would go by tram, to 3DB, and listen to
Professor Osborne, prattle on about . . . . everything.
Information needs, a context. In 985 AD, “25 ships” sailed
for Greenland. In 1924, John Poole underwent,
a total laryngectomy. – Customers!!!! I find myself in
a dilemma, Bob Dyer said. (Knowledge, is
a commodity). The contest, was “a No-brainer”!
Barry Jones, the schoolteacher (from
Dandenong), had come out “triumphant”.
China invaded Tibet, in 1950. The whole of
Australia, was clapping!
          ////////////////////////

This technique seems to come from a group of poems, beginning with “9/11”, at the end of π. ο.’s New and Selected Poems and we can see it fully developed here, especially in this brilliant poem about popular cultural phenomena, the way quiz shows treat knowledge and the historical and global contexts of the period. There is also a dose of humour so that “arpeggio” is confused with “archipelago” (there are a lot of these truisms that wouldn’t stand up to scrutiny) and the host’s “fazed” expression is connected to the first victim of the electric chair, and so on. The constant moving between narrative and generalisation also thickens the texture of the poetry itself and acts as a narrative-retarding device. You can imagine this working very well as a spoken text.

Fitzroy: The Biography, like its predecessor, is a tour de force even if its author, tongue in cheek, says it is. It is one of those works that extends an area in a national literature by replacing po-faced, realistic representations with over-the-top panache. The literature never looks quite the same afterwards. It will probably, in the future, get pigeonholed into discussions of migrant experience but really it belongs to the larger field of the documentation of specific urban areas and a specific way of life. This seems to be a Melburnian obsession. Bruce Dawe (significantly he is one of the portraits in this book) wrote brilliantly about the general experiences of the postwar period in the expanded outer suburbs of Melbourne in poems ranging in conception from “The Rock-Thrower” to “Homo Suburbiensis”, but Alan Wearne is usually considered to be the master of this field. In fact Wearne and π. ο. are very different poets: the former has an essentially dramatic imagination while the latter has a bent for accurate recording. At any rate Melbourne is a lucky city to have the culture of this single, bravura suburb recorded so intensely.

Philip Hammial: Asylum Nerves

Glebe: Puncher & Wattmann, 2014, 207pp.

Philip Hammial’s amazing poetic output now runs to something like twenty-five books since his first, Foot Falls & Notes, of 1976. Let’s say about a thousand poems, probably more. As a result of this sheer volume, together with features of his method, it might be more appropriate to think of Asylum Nerves as a sampler rather than a Selected. It doesn’t, after all, confine itself to collecting acknowledged successes and making them available in one volume to impecunious readers. What it does do is give new readers some sense of what it is like to tap into the verve, intensity, profundity and humour of Hammial’s work and encourage them to seek out the individual books on online sites like Abebooks.

It also contains an excellent introductory essay by Martin Langford, indispensable for orienting people unfamiliar with the poetry that crackles away inside the rest of the book. Langford begins by locating Hammial among the European surrealists which he himself has cited: “Breton, Eluard, Aragon, Peret, Desnos, Jacob, Michaux, Lereis, Soupault, Char, Ponge; Lorca, Jiminez, Alberti; Rilke, Trakl, Benn, Celan; Seferis, Ritsos, Elytis”. These aren’t proposed as models – few of them sound like Hammial – but as authors that someone like Hammial is going to be sympathetic to. Myself, I would add early Beckett (though I don’t think he is cited anywhere) to these: reading works like Murphy and Watt and experiencing their insanely logical and remorseless worlds would not be a bad introduction to some features of Hammial’s work, especially of the “narrative” poems.

Langford’s introduction also reprints an invaluable description of Hammial’s compositional methods, taken from an interview in Cordite. I’ll reproduce it here: it, too, is an essential document for a reader approaching the poetry:

As a non-Tibetan I find many of the Tibetan visualisations too alien and complex, so I make up my own, spontaneously, as I go. I’ve been assured by people in the tradition that my home handyperson approach is acceptable. One day, several years ago, sitting down to write, I found myself playing with the drop . . . heating it up, moving it up and down the channel. Suddenly, on one of its runs down, it kept going, right down to the base of my spine which I visualised as a well, circular and lined with stones, that was miles deep. As the drop plunged into the ink-black water it turned into a bucket. In my mind’s eye I used a rope on a pulley to haul the full bucket up, rapidly, rocket fast. It went soaring up through the channel, out through the top of my skull, the Aperture of Brahma, and up into the noonday sky. When it was about a mile high I had an impulse to use the still attached rope to jerk it to a stop. Of course the black water just kept going. It spread across the sky, turning into white sky-writing-like words as it went – a sentence, a line of poetry that I was able to write down before it faded. That’s amazing, I thought, I wonder if I can do it again. Down went the empty bucket, up came the full bucket, another sentence splashed across the sky. In about five minutes I had a thirty line poem.

One’s tempted to say that they don’t teach that in Introductory Creative Writing – but then again, for all I know, perhaps they do. At heart, it isn’t an especially radical creative model: most writers, even those whose sense of their work is built on a notion of craft, know that a lot of the stuff comes, often unbidden, from “somewhere else”. Hammial’s method is just a culture-specific way of accessing it and it could be argued that various oriental traditions such as Tibetan Buddhism, tribal shamanism etc are much better at doing it than any methods of the West. After all the bases of oriental mythology encourage the practice and they have had a couple of thousand years to develop these techniques. What is probably, in the long run, more important than the notion that poetry comes from another part of the brain is the drive towards immediacy, the belief that any sort of imposition of craft in the form of revision is the triumph of the logical part of the brain, a matter of being, in Graves’s words “ruled by the god Apollo’s golden mean”.

The central critical issue for Hammial’s poetry is: Where exactly is this bucket going and what is the nature of this stuff that it brings up? Could it be the sub-conscious, the pan-cultural unconscious, the pan-animal reptilian unconscious, past lives, divine commandments or just odd bits of nonsense hanging around inside the neural system of an individual’s brain? Langford argues that it’s a more primal experience of the madnesses of reality: “An important aspect of his project is the desire to re-enact the crazy energies we work so hard to disarm with familiarity and inattention. In some ways, he is a romantic of such energies: as if he thought the world, for all its terrors, should not be denied”. The fact that this is such an attractive framework in which to read Hammial’s poems doesn’t mean that it is correct nor does it disguise the fact that it is a big step which casually bypasses any number of competing psychological ideologies. But I’m happy to run with it for its heuristic value. It also enables Langford to speak of the poems as works which future audiences will find increasingly relevant:

If the point of poetry is to produce as many ways-of-being-in-the-world-through-language as possible, then Hammial’s unsettling and confronting ways are nothing if not distinctive, and, on that ground alone, worthy of attention. But these days, I suspect, there are few who are not quietly bewildered by the incomprehensibility of the world’s energies, and the absurdity and inappropriateness of so many of our behaviours: as an expression of such bewilderment – such subterranean astonishment – it is hard to believe that these poems will not find the wider audience that they deserve.

It’s a discomforting proposition that, as our response to the world is to find it more and more irrational and incomprehensible, we will find Hammial’s poetry more and more central, more real! But then perhaps something similar occurred in the case of the poetries of Smart and Blake and even Pessoa: as the world seemed more mad and personality less stable, their work seemed less mad, less unstable. Some evidence for Langford’s approach might lie in the autobiographical fact that Hammial, since his youthful days in the US Navy has been an indefatigable traveller, and a genuine traveller, no mere tourist. My own sense is not that such travel broadens the mind by adding exotic experiences but that it makes one resistant to the conventional – and often outrageous – stylised simplifications of other cultures. That it is, or can be, in other words an accumulation of millions of gritty, personally experienced data, all of which are likely to be difficult to fit into simplistic programmes and thus represent the basis of an attack on them – or, at least, a lack of commitment to them.

This is a long introduction to another revisiting of Philip Hammial’s poetry. When I reviewed Sugar Hits on this site more than eight years ago I tried to describe the poetry overall, rather than concentrating on a single book. Though I’m not at all sure, in retrospect, how accurate or valuable my typologies were, I don’t intend to revisit that “seen-as-a-whole” approach, and, as readers will know, I’m not about to exhaust myself looking for new idioms of praise. What I want to do is think about some of the new issues that this latest opportunity to reread Hammial at length has provoked. There are two main ones: issues of content and (no prize for guessing) issues of form.

The world that one enters in Hammial’s poems, the world that Langford sees as a real or at least “realler” experience of reality than the one we edit to make it comprehensible or bearable, is a distinctive one. It is driven by meaningless rules and rituals (perhaps the essence of a ritual is that it is the application of meaningless rules) and its atmosphere might be described as cruel but comic. The act of living is often figured as a journey on some kind of wonderfully grotesque vehicle (dog-carts, bicycles and boats figure largely here) or as a pilgrimage hemmed about with odd rituals and equivocal destinations. “Bicycle” from In the Year of Our Lord Slaughter’s Children (2003) is a (for Hammial) very straightforward example:

It’s my fifth birthday & I’m sitting on the present that Uncle Stan has just given me, a green Schwinn bicycle. He gives me a push & down I go, down the gentle slope in his back yard in Chicago that becomes a hill, an interminably long hill that, sixty years later, I’m still going down, the bicycle having become rusty & dilapidated but still capable of moving as fast as the wind. Fortunately the doors, front and back, of the houses I’m passing through are open and the corridors unobstructed, the people, my friends & relatives, in the rooms on either side of the corridors going about their business as though I don’t exist: Aunt Mary & Uncle John sitting at opposite ends of a long table, John’s prayer of thanksgiving going on & on while the roast beef gets cold; Aunt Jane having one of her fits in the kitchen while Uncle Max looks on helplessly; cousin Dan & his new bride, Eleanor, banging away on a hideaway bed while the radio newscaster tells us that Normandy has just been invaded – D-Day. Over a hundred houses & I’m still going, Uncle Stan passing away at the age of ninety-two, the war in Vietnam grinding to a halt, the Berlin wall torn down brick by brick as I roll by on the Schwinn wondering how the hill has managed to descend through seventy-two countries on five continents – a mystery I’ll never have time to fathom because there, at what appears to be the bottom of the hill, is an open grave, half a dozen people standing around it as though waiting for a hearse to arrive.

It’s a very simple but rather wonderful poem conveying both the hunger for experience (the number of countries Hammial has travelled to is carefully documented) and the usual incomprehension as to the overall pattern and even the overall meaning of an individual’s life. If one wanted to look for hidden generative puns (Riffaterre’s hypograms) one could imagine the two meanings of the word “career”. “Lost in the Amazon” from the next book, Swan Song, replaces the image of bicycling with that of rowing, but has a similar view of life even if the tone is more sardonic and comic:

The canoe of this admiral (who by some miracle has remained unharmed) is so full of arrows (at least a thousand) that it’s bound to sink at any moment, & of course, the no-longer-paddling & now saluting admiral is honour-bound to go down with it, a fitting end to a glorious career.

The 1985 volume, Vehicles, is, in a way, a celebration of bizarre events and bizarre metaphors conceived as modes of transport – in the case of the latter the poems probably exploit the technical term, “vehicle” associated with analyses of metaphorical language. “The Vehicle of Demented Canonization”, for example,

is not, as you might expect, the cannon in the circus, nor is it the net that always catches the human ball. The Vehicle of Demented Canonization is the toothless old lion who, though he’s heard it a thousand times, is still frightened half to death by the cannon’s roar.

The generative structure of this poem lies, as I read it, with choosing “demented” for its implications while the rest of us were concentrating on the possibilities of “canonization”.

The number of Hammial poems involving movement, vehicles, rides, weird means of propulsion, pilgrimages and so on is enormous. Another good example might be “Steps” a poem from Voodoo Realities not included in this selection:

Already, at five in the morning, the beggars
are here, assembled, one on each of the one hundred
stone steps. Where have we been? Where
are we going? And, more importantly, what
do we have for their bowls? – their bowls
of ivory, of amethyst, of silver & gold, of
porcelain filled with steaming mu-mus to slurp
to the metonymic thunk of Chinese truncheons
out on the Barkor, a pilgrim from Kham caught
with a photo of the Dalai Lama – Free Tibet. Fat
chance, the warlords in Beijing testing their rhino-
horn potency on giggling concubines. Tibet’s
not a priority. Nor is the rhino rotting
on the veld, Hong Kong pharmacists rolling
in money, alchemists with gold. Know
thyself, & drink this hemlock, a perfect compliment
to the steaming mu-mus, all the rage in the 60s, worn
in defiance – up yours with your mini-skirts/thigh-
high boots made for walking all over us as hot
to trot we’re prodded like cattle, like pilgrims
up these steps on our hands and knees, beggars laughing
at our progress. Bloody-kneed oafs, at the top
there’s a cliff, eunuchs waiting to push us over.

Although this poem develops into a fairly overt attack on the mistreatment of developing cultures by the developed – the Chinese are responsible for the near extinction of the rhinoceros, the Hippie invasion of Asia responsible for untold corruptions – the framing structure is that of a bizarre pilgrimage ritual in which the beggars (“one on each of a hundred steps” in a typically numerically sensitive organisation) possessed of fabulously rich begging bowls, laugh as they watch Westerners plunge to their deaths.

And, finally, in this quick sketch, there is “A Pilgrim’s Progress” a complex two-part piece which might be about mercantile behaviour, even meditation, but which, in my reading, is about poetry which attempts to please a market, or, at least, to spruce itself up enough to be able to appear in public and, on the other hand, poetry like Hammial’s. I think this is a recurring theme in Hammial’s work (see “Bytes” and “Hit Parade” – “. . . this poem //a perfect example of my perennial inability / to articulate some universal truth, a sad fact / that’s guaranteed to keep me in the ranks // of the also-ran until the day I die . . .”). Whatever the case, my interest in it at the moment is as another example of the obsession with movement and vehicles:

Who on a path that only to the market leads is but
a frilly man who once upon he thought he heard
the tinkle of a lost drummer

is not my concern.
Am only on this cart for my health.
Am only going thus for a gourmet’s song.

For glass on this path, & in the wayside beds
a bleeding host of questing men who barefoot
in a breach had thought to run and win. But patience

is mine, as it must be – this heavy cart with its limb
from limb load of a once magnificent ox that on
spindly legs a golden calf is pulling.

The inverted syntax here is more common in Hammial’s poetry than the comparatively straightforward poems I have quoted so far. And there is obviously a lot here which is drawn from the Buddhist image of ox-herding used as a meditation model intriguingly combined with the biblical image of the golden calf, a symbol of both greed and apostacy.

If mad journeys on impossible machines is one central image in Hammial’s work, the other is that of the asylum. They are related, of course, because the inmates of an asylum are bound to the obscure medical procedures which they do not understand and thus are in the same situation as those on the mysterious vehicles or mysterious pilgrimages. What is interesting is that the asylum images have an autobiographical base. You don’t have to have read widely in Hammial’s work to know that he worked as an orderly in the Athens State Hospital, a psychiatric facility in Ohio. His first book, Foot Falls & Notes, was, he tells us, prompted by the sudden desire to give each of the inmates he knew a voice and a poem:

Enclosed

are a few poems
in a few voices learned
while cooking in Athens
State Hospital, Athens, 
Ohio, built in
1868, with turrets
& gables &
doctors & 
nurses of that period.

And a number of the autobiographical (and very straightforward) prose poems of Travel describe experiences in this hospital, including one, “The Examination”, in which, temporarily in the violent ward, Hammial is examined by a man with all the outward appearances of a competent psychiatrist. Of course he is an inmate but one of his comments is that two of the actual doctors are “mad as March hares”. Hammial says, “And having dealt with these individuals, I agree wholeheartedly”. Although it is a cliche to speak of psychiatric inmates as doctors and vice versa, the pressure of an actual experience of an uncomfortable reality means that when such things appear in Hammial’s poetry they are intensely felt. “Marlene” from Wig Hat On (not included in Asylum Nerves) describes a willed erotic, communal fantasy:

. . . . . 
          What
I’ve just described is Ward 12 (the dirty ward)
& its fire-escape in ASH, Athens State Hospital,
where I worked for a year as an orderly in charge
of forty men who weren’t overly concerned
about their personal hygiene, the wonder-working
cabaret dancer from Berlin a figment of our collective
hallucination. As punctual as a Swiss watch, she
would suddenly appear in our midst every afternoon
at three when the last soap ended and the first
children’s program was about to begin, blow us
a sultry kiss & slink away, disappearing behind
a gossamer curtain that covered the scar
of a bricked-over door.
                       Inevitably
Harold would try to follow her, managing
three or four awkward steps before his chemical
straitjacket checked his progress like a pendulum
at the end of its stroke . . .

The hospital appears, transformed into an image of existential existence in poems like the significantly named “Saint Philip’s Infirmary”, in which everyone is the victim of ungraspable – but generally cruel – procedures of exploitation:

Are we here to save our lives? Big
should we beg? If we pay enough
can we crawl under? Do our keepers know what it’s like
to burn bare naked? With our persons
should they have their fun free? Are they & they
our destiny . . .
 . . . . .
          On hands & knees
do Arch of Submission. Or suffer
spurs, some egg on
a face you thought was yours.
. . . . . 
                                    Told, again,
what we already know: In us is folly
fully engaged for which, if we’re smart
& know the rules, we’ll kneel & do the praise
we’ve been trained to do by betters. And told,
again, lest we forget, how among the dead
of all the dead we are, by a mile, the most dead.
Flung like stones, all of us.

And “Asylum Nerves” from Sugar Hits, which give this volume its title, exploits a double image of life as an asylum which is, more or less, a torture chamber run by casual psychopaths:

Pretend more than ever
that you’re being nursed 
by a motorcycle mama
with a six-day beard and plenty of time
for a bad case of asylum nerves . . .
. . . . .
                                             How long 
can you last? – these incursions into the stuff
that makes you you; it’s surely
women’s business this, & it’s done
by men to music while ex-Ranger
Daniel Devine demonstrates his ”˜Nam pig-sticker
to the girls next door.
                                        How 
exciting, already bored with you,
your tormentors wander off to have a play
with that giggling entourage.
                                                  Your you,
it seems you can keep it, a mother’s milk
to soothe your nerves.

Journeys and asylums are, of course, only part of the repertoire of motifs that these poems are built on. A number of others could be included: family members, especially the mother figure; selves which shift personality, age and gender in the way they do in dreams; engines; Chinese boxes, eating and so on. But the sense remains that these are autobiographically related even though they are distorted and twisted. Martin Langford’s introduction quotes Hammial’s comment that “all of his poems are derived from some actual event” but leaves its implications unexplored.

An important poem for any reader trying to explore this autobiographical base and the way it relates to the striking poems it eventually contributes towards is “The Ritual of the Stick” from Just Desserts. It contains a footnote, “On January 2, 1991, in Radigon, Bihar State, India, Philip Hammial & his wife were viciously assaulted by seventeen members of the CPM”. The poem is made up of fifty-one discrete sentences though this reduced to fifty in the Asylum Nerves version by combining two (“viciously assaulted” in the footnote is also emended – to “savagely beaten”) and in the central part of the poem each of these contains the word “stick”, which, crudely mimetic as this analysis might seem, suggests a state in the middle of a beating in which the mind dully repeats something. It’s too complex a poem to look at in detail here but much about it is suggestive. For example Father and Mother recur as invoked characters: the poem begins “Tell us, Mother, for how much longer must we continue to hold ourselves up standing” and a later section includes both Father and an imaginary institution:

Stripped down, Father, to a bare essential.

Your pound, gentlemen, of flesh.

But, gentlemen, our generosity does have a limit.

Too long, Father, in Your Church of the Interminable Flagellation.

Is there in this, somewhere, a hallelujah?

Obviously, a passage to something, but to what?

Whether, Mother, to come or go? In one direction only; there’s no turning back . . .

The second issue is, as I foreshadowed, a matter of form. Hammial’s poems are, whatever their relationship to reality, the unconscious, or whatever, invariably shapely utterances as poems. Sometimes this is no more than the sardonic twist given to a narrative by a good raconteur as in the case of the admiral who went down with the ship of himself. We can see this in two prose poems from With One Skin Less. In “Wheels”, surely an allegory of Hammial’s approach to poetry, a man on wheels performs dazzling manoeuvres that disturb onlookers – some positively, some negatively. He is returned to his asylum and scheduled to have his wheels surgically removed. When this is done the result is a “man who stands on his own two feet”. In “A Drive with Dr. Plotz” an internee is taken in the psychiatrist’s specially designed machine into the woods so that his demons can be released. But when they arrive the internee is reluctant to abandon his tamed demons to the wild demons of the woods and the pair return having accumulated some of these new, wild demons, much to the distress of Dr Plotz: “Hopelessly snarled with the paraphernalia of madness – bits of glass & bottle caps & silver spoons – what will her colleagues say when they see it?”

Among more specifically poetic structures, the most common is circularity. Innumerable examples could be given but a representative one is “Books”, from Sugar Hits. Essentially “about” a culture’s treatment of outsiders, its central term is pharmakos – scapegoat:

As the only naked white man in our village
who could cook a book with a single match
it’s up to me (my lot in life)
to get the word out where it can be seen
for what it is – pharmakoi . . .

The central section of the poem is, as often in Hammial, an extended, highly energetic diversion into another sphere:

if you took all of the men by the hand
who have taken you by the leg & led them
up George Street to the intersection where
Rachael’s grandmother has set up her treadle-
driven Singer sewing machine, the train
of Rachael’s wedding dress hopelessly snarled 
in rush-hour traffic . . .

then, the poem says, you would have enough men to invade “six or seven of those no-name places” from where the refugees arrive, the

                             scapegoats who,
dressed to kill in St. Vini hand-me-downs,
in addition to seducing our wives & daughters
have taken our jobs as well, such as they were,
in my case a cooker of books.

Obviously other things are happening in this poem, apart from its shape: it begins with a series of slightly distorted metaphors, for example and concludes by making fun of the cliched rhetoric of those opposed to migration, and we might ask whether it’s poets or demagogues who cook the books. But the circular shape is entirely typical. Occasionally the circularity can be self-referential. “Of Tubs, Sailors & Inflation”, which begins, “Tub prices up. Rub / down. Which combination, up & down, makes it easy / for a body, any body, to get a proper break . . .”, concludes:

                                         Unlike
those sailors from the boat in your tub they can’t
be had for just a song such as this one that manages,
but just barely, to get back, the proverbial
tail-swallowing serpent, to its opening
statement – the rising price of tubs.

And “Invocation”, a poem from Drink From the Animal which is not included in this Selected, begins: “Invoke something, anything! – floating teacups / as at sea we take our tea . . .” and then goes on to recount an experience at the Iran/Afghanistan border and an imaginary stroll with Leon-Paul Fargue down a Parisian boulevard in 1928 before concluding:

                                Dressed to kill,
where are we going or, more to the point, where
is this poem going? Your guess 
as good as mine. Should we just give in,
call it a day? Or one last try – some transition
that will slip us back to the floating teacup image
& here we are (easy as pie), Leon-Paul & I at sea
as we take our tea, his new tome, Banalite,
the talk of the Dome.

And then there is what I call serial form. Here the poem is structured essentially as a list but its dynamic shape is likely to derive from the way the list is ordered. “Houses”, from Voodoo Realities is made up of seven imaginary alliterative houses – Gurdjieff’s Guthouse, Blavatsky’s Bughouse, Huxley’s Hexhouse etc – each of which has a colour, a rate per minute, an individual monk proprietor – “a monk / in combination”, “a monk / ticking”, “a monk / as string, thrummed” etc – what will be found there, and an exit to the next house. The poem’s dramatic shape is derived from the fact that the rent gets cheaper so that by the time we arrive at Reich’s Ribhouse its twenty-nine cents per minute:

                               Exit to:
                                           Reich’s
Ribhouse. White. Twenty-
nine. The proprietor: a monk
cancelled. Paper & pen, ready
to have the last say, the pen ever
so gently removed from your fingers
by a smiling nurse. It’s time
for bed. Sweet dreams.

In “Bridal Suite” a series of different occupations – bakers, circus hands, butchers, astronauts – carry the groom to the bride’s bed in neat, separate two-line stanzas: in each case the occupation affects the way the bridegroom is presented. Finally he is carried by poets, “THE WORD MADE FLESH tattooed on my chest”.

There are other shaping devices used in these poems that could be analysed. Especially important would be the usual surrealist one whereby puns (hidden or overt) generate meanings which take the poem into new direction. But the issue that matters here is the very fact of the poetic shape of Hammial’s writing. His description of the way in which the poems are made out of material dredged up in a bucket during a trance, splayed across the sky and then transcribed, would suggest that the results would be fragments, bleeding chunks, rather than the very well-made things they actually are. The only conclusion is that these often autobiographically-based works are fabricated, complete, in the unconscious and brought up, section by section, in the bucket.

Ultimately, whatever they are, however they are made, they live or die by their ability to engage and fascinate. There are few poets in Australia whose work is so consistently energised, challenging and enjoyable. Clearly the autobiographical element is part of this and it is worth pointing out that the prose poems of Travel are examples of non-surreal poetic methods, clinging closely to facts perhaps because some of those facts, especially those detailing a delinquent childhood in Detroit are so weird that no additional strangeness is needed. The last part of Wig Hat On contains half a dozen poems that are similarly openly autobiographical without the surreal expressive techniques. Some of these have very interesting and valuable information about Hammial’s sense of himself and his poetry:

A black & white photograph from 1949: yours truly
stripped to the waist, shoveling coal
into the boiler of the Tennessee, a steam tug
working the Sandusky, Ohio harbour. It immediately
brings to mind Eugene O’Neill’s “The Hairy Ape”
though any resemblance between the scrawny
twelve year old & a real stoker in the stokehole
of a tramp freighter is laughable, as is the one
between the twelve year old & the old man
writing this poem, licking his wounds
from yet another weekly brawl with his wife
of fifteen years . . .

It recalls Bruce Beaver’s As It Was a documenting, autobiographical volume that tries to get factual details down for the record without processing them through the usual channels of his poetry. There is a lot of information about Hammial in these poems but the self-description I like most is the one that comes at the end of “Mentors” from Wig Hat On:

I’ll have dinner with someone
who understands me, a no longer young man
who took to poetry
like a puppet to wood.

Simon West: The Ladder

Glebe: Puncher & Wattmann, 2015, 57pp.

The Ladder is Simon West’s third book (after First Names of 2006 and The Yellow Gum’s Conversion of 2011) and it gives readers an opportunity to see more of the complex world its lyrics inhabit and explore. West is a very sophisticated poet who can be seen – now that we have a hundred or so poems – as rather more resistant to schematic plotting than my review of his first book, published on this site, might have suggested. But while we always speak of the way poets develop through their first books perhaps we should also speak of the way that our own responses as readers of that poetry develop as well. In that first review I wrote of two elements: an obsession with the tactility of language and a fascination with the vertical axis which moves from the under-soil – the word “humus” kept appearing as a kind of talisman – to the surface of the earth and on to the celestial view, re-enacting Dante’s three zones.

The Ladder, as its title suggests, contains poems which do develop the second of these interests. In fact the book’s epigraph is taken from that moment at the end of Paradiso XXII when Dante and Beatrice are about to ascend to the eighth heaven, after Benedict’s discourse about Jacob’s ladder: “The little threshing-floor which makes us so fierce was all revealed to me from hills to river-mouths, as I circled with the eternal Twins. Then to the beauteous eyes I turned my eyes again”. (I’ve used the Singleton translation here and should point out that by rendering l’aiuola as “threshing-floor” rather than “little plot” it perpetuates what many feel to be an over-interpretive, liberty-taking translation. (If I sound knowledgeable about all of this it is entirely thanks to the resources of Google and Wikipedia!) This epigraph should be enough to alert us to the fact that vertical axes still operate at the basis of West’s poetic imagination. Of course the passage in Paradiso is about seeing our little world – the place of all merely human drives, including savagery – from the perspective of the cosmic and may be as much about perspectives as it is about those drives. It may, in other words, be a comparatively abstract view which reminds us that everything seen is seen from somewhere and thus fits in with a number of other poems (beginning with “Marnpi Rockhole by Mick Namarara Tjapaltjarri” in First Names) which are about point of view – or its lack.

At any rate, this passage from Paradiso is the basis for one of the poems of The Ladder, “Speckled World”. The narrator, like an Astronaut in the space-station, finds himself sailing over “deserts and the lights / of towns clustered against the dark”:

. . . . . 
                                               But then
I was taken with fear at the thought of drifting so far
I might lose the smell of soil on a frosty morning
when the sun refracts through dew on grass blades
and the tops of hills float in a layer of fog.
With longing I looked down on the speckled world
and knew my betrayal of Gravity could not last.
She would tug me back once more from this mad flight,
and I would return to plot my Res Gestae thus -
in my thirty-fifth year, after a long struggle,
I conquered my mistrust of life. . . .

Although it’s difficult for a reader to orient him- or herself in this poem – is it a rewriting of Dante’s experience (which occurs in the fiction of the Commedia at the age of thirty-five), a dream of the poet’s who is, coincidentally of the same age, or is the narrator neither Dante or the poet but a separate, invented character? – the general point is the same. Ascending into the heavens is one thing but the loss of the feeling of earth and its tactility – the smell of its rich humus – is intolerable. The narrator, as I read the poem, is going to focus on the horizontal dimension of this world and, indeed, many of the poems of The Ladder, despite its title, develop into discussions of the possibilities and protocols of this “speckled world” as well as what occurs when we break free, or at least half-free, from it.

The first poem, for example, “Roman Bridges”, concentrates on one of the defining features of the horizontal world: the way we move into, through and across it. The bridges, whose arches make a kind of leap, show that there is

           grace in holding gravity at bay
and a certain poise in being in between.
My ideal landscape has room for bridges and hills,
spires, birds and echoes: halfway things.

A later poem, “The Go-Between”, tells of a bridge in northern Italy built across a gorge by a devil in exchange for the soul of its first user. As often in these folktales the devil is tricked when a dog rushes over in pursuit of a bone. But you can see the schema of the thing and the way it appeals to West. The context of the poem is one with a vertical axis – it is about a demon pulling, or trying to pull, a member of the human world down into hell. But what is left is a horizontal bridge which, as the poem says, is a “marvellous / go-between” that leads the rest of us “somewhere else”.

It’s also chastening to see that this interest in way a bridge makes a kind of horizontal step into space is present in First Names too. A poem there, “Flight”, was about a couple arriving in a new country (“a change both of money and language”) at an entirely new kind of house (“all narrow stairs, and doors of different sizes”). Nothing really happens except that, “with a cry of joy you jumped / forward and ran a few paces ahead”. Taken on its own, in a first book, it was difficult to see what sustained this poem, apart from its desire to represent a brief, important moment in a relationship. Read alongside “Roman Bridges” it can be seen as one of those moments of horizontal leap into a new world, like the arches of the bridges:

. . . . .
                                      Elated
at last it seemed so easy to break
from that poise which had
borne the weight of times past.
And my heart jumped behind you, startled
at having to catch up, busy collecting
the slipstream of a new intent.

And there is a striking, autobiographical poem in The Yellow Gum’s Conversion, “Door-Sill” which is about a bare “slab of red gum” serving as a door step, a threshold between the inner world of the house and the outer world. Initially one read it – in a rather Maloufian way – as a poem about liminality, interested in the doorway between two worlds. Rereading it, one can see that it is the step forward, rather than the different worlds, which interests West:

It was a threshold we loved
to tilt ourselves on the rim of,
leaning forward on tiptoes,
after a poise
that seemed about to come
when top-heavy we pitched,
and were too quickly seeking
peace with gravity . . .

In The Ladder, “Nothing Ventured” – the title exploits the many ways of reading that phrase, as part of a cliche and as complete in itself – is about, as a child, crossing the wire fence into an empty field for the first time. Again, the emphasis is a little unpredictable in that the poem is interested in the way the mind and the body are engaged in this crucial step – rather as they were in “Flight”:

. . . . . 
Something came of nothing, though, when first
I leapt that fence alone. Giddy with lag,
my head raced to catch where my feet now stood. And did,
and was pledged, like saying to a mirror, here I am.

And a poem about Tintoretto’s weird “Miracle of St Mark” in which the saint, seen from behind and rather below, floats through the air, about to save a slave due to have his legs broken for worshipping the Christian god, is interested in the way in which this odd pose is a matter of capturing the moment before the miracle, the step (if one can make a step in mid-air) from which “Everything / set in motion must occur”.

One of the features of this “halfway world” whose landscape is made up of bridges, spires, echoes, mountains and rivers – but also doorsills and birds – is that it is a place where boundaries are less clear than is usually assumed. There is a halfway state in which, say, under the effects of fog, shapes lose their precision. A longish poem late in the book, “Chimera”, is about the patron goddess of this state who sounds a little like Spenser’s Mutabilitie:

. . . . . 
Eagle-eyed when she surveys the land
each leaf is lucent as in Vermeer,
and all at once softens to take its place
in a patchwork of colours by Klee.
It is thought she is the patron saint of nay-sayers,
and easily consumed by spite, but when at twilight
the trees unmoor in winter fog
and, in a panic, you reach out as if they could be held,
don’t despise her clown hooting from the bank. . .

And “The Perfection of Apollo”, about Ribera’s painting of the flaying of Marsyas, contains a stanza which, quoting Pico della Mirandola, claims an ethical virtue, deeply humanist, for the race of humans who live in the halfway world of continuous change:

. . . . .
          our dignity resides in having
no fixed seat and no form of our own,
in being placed halfway; not wholly mortal,
rather free to mould and make ourselves. . .

Another poem, with the faux Chinese title “Outside on a Warm Evening I Consider My Confused Ideas about Poetry. For Now I Offer This Brief Account” (a title that ensures all critics will return to it to read it carefully) revisits the same idea. It begins with something of an assault on the idea that poetry (together with the other arts) is a way of expanding our inner lives:

The poets of my youth spoke of dwelling
in themselves, as if they meant a secret
cavern of emotions where an essence
might be found purring like a cat. . .

It’s the defined stability of this model of the inner life which is being criticised though West doesn’t invoke the usual philosophical and psychological arguments of the last half-century. For him it seems more an issue of poetic temperament:

Too restless to abide, I’ve mostly lingered
round the threshold which the senses keep.
Outside there is so much to contemplate.
Some talk of depth and things as they are. Others
see layered surfaces alive with light. 
. . . . . 
In the poetry of mountains and waters
a path meanders through vast landscapes. Sometimes
it is hard to distinguish a man from a cloud or a tree . . . 

And it’s important to have not only the correct perceptual perspective but also the correct ethical protocols in this halfway landscape: “Here too, I imagine, before crossing a stream / it is wise to wash one’s hands and offer a prayer / while gazing into the flood”.

It’s a distinctive poetic perspective and West is a distinctive and, already, powerful presence in Australian poetry. My own perspectives on poetry are not much interested in national or ethnic distinctivenesses but one could imagine readers of First Names thinking that much that was distinctive about this new poet came from an acquired Italian component of his creativity. If so, well and good. But the second and third books have enough of Australia in them – especially at an autobiographical level – to make readers feel that this issue of Australianness, however murky and unhelpful the debates about it might generally be, is one of the issues raised by West’s poetry. There is a poem in The Ladder, “The Mallee Singer”, which is a tribute to Shaw Neilson. It’s not the sort of thing you would expect from this poet but the poem contrasts Shaw Neilson’s sensitivity – “you sought quieter weightings in your line / for the balm of green and flight of water birds, / for children in the sunlight in the spring” – with the louder, cruder music of his contemporary world, “Salvation drums, and blokes’ ballads / thudding over the black flats”. This aligns Shaw Neilson not just with sensitivity but with a sensitivity to the fluid boundaries of West’s halfway world where outlines are not so rigidly maintained as they are in Salvation Army hymns and in bush ballads.

The gum trees that begin to turn up in The Yellow Gum’s Conversion play an important role here and perhaps they do add a precision and specificity to what in First Names was inclined to be a generic “dark wood”. They are celebrated, in a way, in the first of twelve poems about Rome in which the author sees a gum tree among the Roman ilexes. The eucalypt has a particular quality that the poem wants to celebrate. Because, when we look at one we also look through its slim, falcate, downturned leaves, it is obviously very much a halfway tree:

Unreal city, still. By default. And then
the jolt of recognition hitting home - 
a gum broke the shade of holm oaks.
Its exhortation – remember, make known.

It was how light sifted through those swinging leaves - 
you looked at it and beyond it all in one.
. . . . . 
Intimate, drab and tragic, the branches curved
like Christ’s limbs in a deposition scene. . .

I think it is this odd quality of the gum that appeals to West – the poem doesn’t want to celebrate nostalgia. And after all, it’s a moot point how “Australian” the gum trees are nowadays. They are grown throughout South East Asia, for example, as a source of quick-growing hardwood impervious to local diseases and predators, and are common in North America and around the Mediterranean. I myself once saw a stand of them on the road between Kashan and Qom in Iran.

John Tranter: Heart Starter

Sydney: Puncher & Wattmann, 2015, 149pp.

The first fifty-six of the one hundred and one poems in John Tranter’s new book, Heart Starter, are “terminals”, poems which take another writer’s poem and, by retaining the words that end each of the lines, allow the poet to construct a new poem. It’s a form, as far as I know, developed by Tranter alone though it has its origins in a poem of John Ashbery’s which was based on the words ending the lines of Swinburne’s double sestina, “The Complaint of Lisa”. It is, as Brian Henry notes in an essay in The Salt Companion to John Tranter, a poetic form which is “vastly open to possibility”. Far from being a matter of proposing new patterns of rhyme or new stanza shapes or variations in syllabic requirements it can be as varied as the immense number of poems which it can take as a base. It is closest, if anything, to the sestina where an initial choice (which words will appear at the ends of the lines of the first stanza) generates a set of requirements for the final words of the rest of the poem. It thus oddly combines almost infinite freedom with what can be a mind-bendingly difficult formal requirement. Tranter’s Studio Moon had a number of examples but fifty-six poems is a more substantial sample when it comes to investigating the possibilities and implications.

Usually, in Tranter’s comments about his generative practices, there is a strong sense that the chosen method provides not a poem but a draft that might be made into a poem. You feel that the author here wants to take final responsibility – he must be satisfied that the poem “works” and the original poem for a terminal is thus merely a starting point. But the poems of Heart Starter re-establish the importance of the relationship between the original work – the source – and the terminally-derived new poem. You can see this foreshadowed in the two early terminals which were based on Arnold’s “Dover Beach”, a poem which seems to invite reworkings, perhaps because it is an almost canonical example of a certain kind of defeated response to the growing horrors of the modern world balanced by the precarious faith that to be true to one’s loved-one remains a value that an individual can espouse. As such, this poem remains as relevant and almost as often quoted as Yeats’s “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity” (who says that the poetry of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries doesn’t speak to our present twenty-first century condition?) Arnold is certainly a figure with whom Tranter has a complex (and generally hostile) relationship: “The Great Artist Reconsiders the Homeric Simile” from the 1979 volume, Dazed in the Ladies Lounge, makes fun of Arnold’s pastiche mini-epic “Sohrab and Rustum”. And the two terminals based on “Dover Beach” – “See Rover Reach” and “Grover Leach” – gain much of their interest by the way in which they assault the homogenous, even-toned, despairingly calm, language of the original. “Grover Leach” seems like a mad, slightly disjointed version of a poem by Edward Arlington Robinson or Edgar Lee Masters, and the opening lines of “See Rover Reach” proclaim sudden shifts in subject and register:

Something’s bothering the dog tonight -
the neighbour’s pig, maybe – it’s not fair
the way they feed that thing. Your hair, under the porch light,
it reminds me of Jenny, my long-ago one-night stand -
at least we thought it was a one-night stand – at Baffin Bay,
drinking vodka and pissing on the ice in the night air!
And then there was the time on the “Ocean Spray” -
some affair! – stranded miles from land . . .

Poems like these seem to suggest one of the strengths of the terminal. You take a canonical poem, scoop out most of the content and rewrite it in such a way as to bring it screaming into the disjointed world of modern fragmented and multi-layered discourse.

But, we can now see, there is much more potential in the terminal than this. And much of this potential derives from which poems are chosen as sources. All the terminals in Heart Starter derive from two canonical anthologies of American poetry. The first is Robert Pinsky’s The Best of the Best American Poetry of 2013 – an anthology selected from the twenty-five annual editions of The Best American Poetry series (and not to be confused with Harold Bloom’s Best of the Best American Poetry of 1998 which selected from, and celebrated, the first ten years). The second is The Open Door which collects one hundred poems over the one hundred year existence of what began as Harriet Monroe’s little magazine. This anthology begins with the high modernists – Pound, Eliot, Stevens, Yeats – and works its way through most of the major developments in American poetry up to the contemporary. Both source anthologies are, in other words, convincing snapshots of the major national poetry in English: one covering the last century, the other the last quarter of a century. So the very act of choosing them as sources for a set of terminals alerts one to the prospect that Tranter may be wanting to say something about American poetry or wanting to do something to it. If terminals are inherently hostile then the poems of Heart Starter are an attack on the American poetic century; if they are, instead, essentially polite hommages then the book is a genuflection in the same direction. It’s also just possible that they are hubristic acts of competition: show me your poem and I’ll rewrite it in a way that shows I’m a better poet. If this seems unlikely (or undignified) it’s worth remembering that the improvisation competitions in which the early Beethoven took part in Vienna were not dissimilar and that the most famous of these (with Daniel Steibelt) involved Beethoven’s taking his competitor’s music, turning it upside down and setting off with what became, later, the theme of the variations that make up the final movement of the Eroica Symphony. That’s a process not so dissimilar to what happens in a terminal. And, dauntingly, attack, homage and competition are only three of a large spectrum of responses.

Heart Starter begins with a terminal based on the first poem of the Pinsky anthology, Sherman Alexie’s “Terminal Nostalgia” (this anthology, like all the “Best of American Poetry” anthologies, is organised not chronologically but alphabetically by the author’s surname). Alexie’s poem (he “grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation” and his name sounds remarkably like an anagram of the sort that Tranter sometimes uses for titles or authors of his terminals) is a very funny representation of what the competitive nostalgic spirit (“Brisbane was a much better place when I was a kid!”) might look like from the perspective of a Native American:

The music of my youth was much better
Than the music of yours. So was the weather.

Before Columbus came, eagle feathers
Detached themselves for us. So did the weather.

During war, the country fought together
Against all evil. So did the weather . . .

These opening three of the poem’s sixteen couplets will show how daunting Tranter’s task is with this particular poem. “Terminal Nostalgia” is structured like one of the more intricate varieties of ghazal: each of the couplets finishes with the word “weather” and all the first lines of each beit are either a perfect or half-rhyme with that word. Tranter’s poem is a single verse paragraph, avoiding the refrain-like repetitions of “weather”, and thus has the additional difficulty of needing to make the appearance of the same word at the end of half the lines seem natural. I don’t think he entirely succeeds and Heart Starter opens with what is perhaps its weakest poem but you have to admire the way such a difficult formal task is taken on. The material of “Algernon Limattsia” (the title is an anagram of “Terminal Nostalgia”) is, understandably, not at all about nostalgia and doesn’t seem to engage in any apparent way (as critique, homage or competitor) with the parent poem: it’s about “the weather” in both literal and metaphoric sense – a common theme in Tranter’s poetry (“Voodoo”, “Dark Harvest”, “Storm Over Sydney” among many others). The attraction which ensured that this would not be one of the poems that Heart Starter omits (the fifty-six poems are chosen from two hundred originals) must surely be (apart from its being the first poem) the happy accident of its title, “Terminal Nostalgia”, which Tranter’s practice ensures that we read as “an affectionate regard for terminal poems” rather than “nostalgia taken to an extreme degree”.

The second poem – to continue programmatically for a moment – is based on Margaret Atwood’s “Bored”, a poem about the way childhood boredom, induced while assisting her father as he goes about various chores in Northern Quebec, leads to an acuity of vision unattainable as an adult – “Now I wouldn’t be bored / Now I would know too much. / Now I would know”. Tranter’s poem retains the boat-building of the original but – I think – converts it into a vehicle which will carry its builders to a new, exotic space:

. . . . . 
                    You pointed
at the ocean – look,
you said, it may seem boring, but under
the horizon there’s a much sunnier
place, an island full of coconuts, often
clangorous with birdsong,
even the natives get
excited at the birdsong – but to
get there we need a boat . . .

This may be allegorised out as a voyage to Cythera but it may also be the voyage into a new poetics that The Alphabet Murders of 1976 used as its overarching metaphor. If that is the case then the title “Robed with the Cloth of Gold” (the first word is an anagram of the title of Atwood’s poem) might suggest that the protagonists are burdened with a vatic notion of what poetry is and, awaiting something that will make the boat-building – the construction of the necessary poetry – inspired and easy, end up bored and stuck at the site of what they imagined would be their point of embarkation. If this reading works, then this poem shares with the first, a use of the terminal form to deal with an established Tranter theme rather than being a reaction to a source poem.

Terminals which set out to be critiques of some kind seem to be more common among those whose originals appear in Open Door. I assume that this is because the poems of that anthology cover an entire century and thus the kinds of poems and poetries that a contemporary might disapprove of are likely to be more common. Donald Justice’s “Men at Forty”, a poem from the mid-sixties by a poet born in the mid-twenties, is a wry and elegant observation on ageing with enough unexpected imagery – especially the idea that the slightly less solid ground men in early middle-age find themselves walking on is like a ship in an as-yet gentle swell:

Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.

At rest on a stair-landing
They feel it moving
Beneath them now like the deck of a ship,
Though the swell is gentle.

And deep in mirrors
They rediscover
The face of the boy . . .

And so on. It’s a fine poem of its kind, suggesting an origin in its author’s experience but generalising it out in a way that avoids cliche. But it is also a kind of poem whose calm, even, wry wisdom can be irritating to a certain kind of reader, as irritating as the same qualities in “Dover Beach”. Tranter’s poem, “Older than Forty” isn’t so much a full-on attack as a slight twisting, allowing a bit more madness, a bit more “verbal intemperance” into its fabric. In fact the entire emotional and intellectual shape of the poem – it’s response to a watershed and the way things are on the brink of sliding out of control very rapidly – is retained:

So now I’m one of these older men, older than forty,
men who move slowly and speak softly
and know who they are, but they may not be
quite who they think they are, as they think to

themselves when they pause on the stair-landing,
eyes flicking back and forth, lips moving.
Don’t they know every cabin on this ship?
Every plank? Their movements are gentle,

the[y] are surprised to find themselves in mirrors
looking old, looking older, hoping to rediscover - 
what was it now? That trick in boy scout lanyard tying
or some other knack, or that other secret

like, for example, how to be their own father.
In the shaving mirror they work at the lather
then shave, then pause – now
while the sun stands still they think of something

they meant to remember – some sound
or some tiny image which holds immense
importance – then they’re sliding down the slope
that ends in the green grassy backyard of all those houses.

Like its original it plays with the involvement of the author’s own experience, making the innocent question – “Is this a personal or impersonal poem?” – even more difficult to answer than usual. It reminds one also that one of Tranter’s earliest rewritings (and one of his best poems, one which poses the questions about the relationship of a rewriting to its original that I have been looking at here) is “Having Completed My Fortieth Year” from the 1988 collection Under Berlin. That poem rewrites a poem by Peter Porter and perhaps overcomes any scruples about the act of rewriting since the Porter poem is a response to Byron’s famous poem. Like “Older than Forty” it keeps very close to the structure of its original, letting only a few intimations of an out-of-control verbal intensity into the text. It can be read as a critique though, not of Porter’s poem but of his preparedness to move from Australia to England and become a feature of an English rather than Australian literary landscape.

Craig Arnold’s “Meditation on a Grapefruit” seems to have the even-toned meditative register of the Donald Justice poem and is “about” the moment in the day when infinite possibility gives way to the inevitable agitations. This hinge is occupied by a precise breakfast ritual which, empty of meaning in itself, is nevertheless crucially important. It finishes, as many poems do (Stevens’s “The Snow Man” is a good example), with a piece of subtle ambiguous syntax that opens up possibilities:

. . . . .
                    so sweet
                              a discipline
precisely pointless          a devout
involvement of the hands and senses
a pause          a little emptiness

each year harder to live within
each year harder to live without

Tranter’s version, “Meditation at Breakfast”, immediately seizes on the faux-Buddhist notion of meditation, its proper subjects and its creative possibilities, rewriting it as a rather manic interrogation of a potential neophyte conducted by member of a Meditation Centre:

You want to meditate on what? No, that’s not possible.
Maybe tomorrow, you can meditate on it, maybe the day
after tomorrow. You know, the angry way you
shout when you think you’re alone in the kitchen,
that’s not a good sign. Meditate on a basketball?
Are you serious? Come on, have a little breakfast
and cheer yourself up.
. . . . . 
Now Kevin, I think it’s time we talked a little about discipline.
You know here at the Meditation Centre we’re mainly devout
Buddhists or at least pantheists, having come to our senses
about the problem of meditating on the general emptiness
that people – Kevin? – people generally find within
themselves – Kevin? Are you listening? Within or maybe without . . .

It’s a very funny poem deliberately rupturing the meditative calm of “Meditation on a Grapefruit” so that, although a dramatic monologue replaces the “overheard eloquence” of the traditionally lyrical original, the voice and character of the speaker are unstable and very unexpected: the opposite of the bland paradoxes that either infuriate or impress westerners experiencing a meeting with oriental religious thought and practice. There’s an additional frisson in the very Australian name of the neophyte: it may have no especial significance but it’s hard not to think of both Kevin Hart the poet and Kevin Rudd the former Prime Minister.

As Tranter points out, the final words of the lines of the originals are only starting points and they are open to emendation. Formally the most free of these poems is “The Animals” in which Anne Carson’s “The Life of Towns”, a mini-anthology of thirty-two poems with a prose introduction (which has the same inconsistent and unstable speaking voice as many of Tranter’s poems) generates an eighty-four line poem. “Three Lemons”, based on Bukowski’s “Three Oranges”, is also very free in its opening two stanzas. The final poem can be read as a redirecting of the hatred of the original. In the Bukowski the target is the parent who reads the title of Prokofiev’s opera as saying that sex can be bought for no more than three oranges whereas the child had read the three oranges as a triple love-object. In the Tranter, the target is a father-figure poet/composer whose initial is either P (for Prokofiev) or B (for Bukowski) who has the capacity to take:

                                         . . . this heap of cheap ideas,
eating food, drinking drink, smoking, sex,
and in the blender of his art he turns it
into a handful of damned lemons!
 . . . . .
Now he’s dead, thank God, I listen to that
composer, what’s his name, I’m stuck
remembering his name, starts with
P, B, no . . . I have a real home now, I’m in
clover . . .

Again, this is a fairly manic dramatic monologue and the speaker’s criticism of Bukowski shouldn’t be taken as being endorsed by the author, but it’s hard not to read the poem as being critical of a certain “raw experience” tradition in American literature. At any rate, the freer the version, the less the engagement with the original can be seen as a conscious response – hostile or benevolent – to it. The original, in a free version of a terminal, becomes no more than a quarry to be mined in order to produce a poem that “works” – and, as I have said, this is what most of Tranter’s generative practices do.

The last part of Heart Starter is a collection of poems which demonstrate some other generative and structuring devices than the terminal. There are sonnets with various rhyme schemes (including that of the stanza form of Pushkin’s Evgeny Onegin) a number of which follow out Rimbaud’s ideas about the colour of vowels. There are a group of poems which Tranter calls “quintets” which work by choosing the first and last sentences of a novel and placing between them three other sentences. This sounds like Roussel’s method whereby the text of an entire novel is a way of working from the first sentence to the last (which is homophonically – and in other ways – derived from the first). But actually Tranter’s quintets are rather the opposite. Instead of fabricating smooth transitions so that the resulting short poems read as homogenous statements, the result is a very Tranterian poem which, rather than smoothing over the disjunctions, exploits them so that the slightly fractured speaking voice is in keeping with that of other poems. “Power”, derived from Greene’s The Power and the Glory, is a good example:

Mr Wilson went out to look for his gas cylinder,
into the blazing Spanish sun and the dust.
Anyone can tell you’re a man of education.
It was, of course, the end, but at the same time
you had to be prepared for everything,
even escape. “Bastards,” the man said,
and his hand lay wearily where it had got to,
over his heart; he imitated the prudish attitude
of a female statue, one hand over the breast
and one upon the stomach.
But the boy had already swung the door open
and put his lips to his hand
before the other could give himself a name.

“Four Variations on a Poem by Pam Brown” and “Variations and Reverse Mazurka” adopt different sorts of variation techniques and are thus an interesting way in which one of the staples of art-music can be brought into poetry. In Tranter’s work this goes back at least as far as the eight sonnets beginning “She turned off the radio and listened to the blues” which were published in the 1977 volume, Crying in Early Infancy (and which were the first poems of Tranter’s that I fell in love with).

The two poems that stand out in this final section, though, are “Manacles” and “Loxodrome”. Significantly there are no comments in the notes about the generative principles behind these poems. “Manacles” (presumably recalling Blake’s “mind-forged manacles”) begins as though it is going to be an assault on vatic notions of inspiration – “I was born with a silver ribbon in my hair, / a fizzing link to the aether that compels me to / listen to the sky babbling. . . ” and, though it moves on disjunctively to other topics, this issue continues to return. The second stanza begins “Sit and doodle, that’s how it’s done?” and the third stanza opens with the idea of there being a key to the barbarous sideshow of the universe:

write “We were born into the secrets of Gomorrah
Under the Sign of the Double Key” -
that is, lock slot metal type reversing mirror
nihil obstat, determined to learn it quick
under the humming sign
of the Great Reader above and behind
the edge of the observable universe . . .

In a sense it is a theme – “How Messages are Received” – with variations. And the variations occur at the verbal level as well: “nihil obstat” recalls “nil bullshit”; “Double Key” recalls the earlier “bar code key”; “bracket creep” recalls the earlier “bracket racket” and so on. “Loxodrome”, which looks as though it might be structured like “The Anaglyph” from the previous book, Starlight, actually feels more like “Ode to Col Joye” in that you have the sense that the poem is making itself and its own form as it progresses. It could be described as a set of variations on the idea of finding oneself in a place – almost all of the stanzas begin that way – and thus attempts a set of answers to the question “Where Am I?” posed literally and metaphorically. It also has a passage about connections that reveals something of Tranter’s engineer-like interest in the mechanisms not only of poetry but of the world itself:

. . . . . 
Refreshment break: Sir Francis Bacon and Charlie Parker
had one thing in common: they stopped for a chicken.
It killed Bacon, and at the start of Parker’s career
may have seemed a sign. Sigmund Freud and
Arthur Hugh Clough both applied for jobs in Australia,
and were knocked back. Then, when you think about it,
Clough and Cartier-Bresson had one thing in common:
they were the ambitious sons of rich cotton merchants . . .

“Loxodrome” also contains a good deal of autobiographical material deriving from place: listening to Ken Bolton at a conference, reading with John Forbes and Peter Schjeldahl at the Harold Park Hotel, for example. And this brings us to the question, common in thinking about the nature of Tranter’s poetry, of the degree to which it can be said to be abstract – ie concerned only with the processes of language and poetry. My own feeling about this (stated many times) looks like fence-sitting: Tranter’s poetry points in both directions and is simultaneously interested in forms and contents. The poems in this rich and completely engaging book are not exercises in any sense but genuine explorations and though they may mock conventional well-made poems and their understanding of our inner and outer lives (especially by allowing the speaking voice to fragment under the pressure of verbal intemperance) they have a lot that they want to convey. There is certainly an “abstract” side to Tranter’s poetic personality but there is a good deal of the expressionist as well.

Les Murray: Waiting for the Past

Collingwood: Black Inc., 2015, 78pp.

Among the many marvellous poems of Les Murray’s Waiting for the Past, there is one of special interest and significance called “I Wrote a Little Haiku”:

I wrote a little haiku
titled The Springfields:

Lead drips out of
a burning farm rail.
Their Civil War.

Critics didn’t like it,
said it was obscure
 
The title was the rifle
both American sides bore,
lead was its heavy bullet
the Minie, which tore

often wet with blood and sera
into the farmyard timbers
and forests of that era,
wood that, burnt even now,

might still re-melt and pour
out runs of silvery ichor
the size of wasted semen
it had annulled before.

There are a lot of interesting things happening here: firstly at the level of the poem itself. Because contemporary poetry can range in length it is possible actually to embed a poem within another one rather than merely allude to it. The fact that “The Springfields” is quoted (it appeared in Murray’s previous book, Taller When Prone) means that one poem is embedded in another in the same way, of course, that the lead bullets are embedded in the forests and farm rails of the battlefields of the American Civil War. The embedding is announced formally by having the first two lines in seven and five syllables respectively, thus preparing for the five, seven, five pattern of a traditional haiku and the pun on “bore” reveals a meditating, poetic mind whereby such connections rise to the surface. The poem thus belongs to that small but profoundly satisfying (for the reader) genre of unusual and thought-provoking mimeseis. Even mimesis can be said to “embed” meaning in the sense of enacting it and so “I Wrote a Little Haiku” turns out, at one level at least, to be about how meaning is embedded in a poem. To follow this line of thought allegorically, the suggestion might be that the “true” meaning of a poem is revealed (melted out as silvery ichor) only many years later (perhaps when a new, superior generation of critics of Australian poetry has arisen).

Contradicting this reading, slightly, is the undeniable fact that this is a poem which is not prepared to wait for the future but which wants to explain the meaning of the first poem now. Thus, structurally, it follows the old “Text – Gloss” form which is quite different to “Meaning hidden within and awaiting release” which is the one suggested by the poem’s content. The explanation that the larger poem gives is one which ties the event of the released metal of the bullets into Murray’s notion of war and the way in which war can be an assault on a generation of young men. In the case of the Civil War, where men from rural towns joined the same regiment, a particularly fierce encounter (the “Bloody Angle” or the “Peach Orchard) could deprive a community of an entire male generation. Thus the silvery ichor is not only meaning but also wasted semen. And, finally, one has to entertain the remote possibility that “I Wrote a Little Haiku” is a hoax poem, a mine embedded in a text, a deliberately dud poem designed to attract critics whose love of complex mimeticisms and lack of any sense of value will make them easy dupes: but that way paranoia lies!

It is also a poem which raises the complex issue of obscurity in poetry. Although obscurity ties in with the conscious riddling of many of Murray’s poems (an issue dealt with by Lisa Gorton in her review in the Sydney Review of Books), riddling is only one, fairly benevolent kind of obscurity. In the Indo-European poetic tradition, riddling arises out of the poet’s meditation on the connectedness (often through kennings and other sorts of metaphor) between things and, especially in the Germanic tradition, between things and their names. But, basically, riddles have only one answer and all power lies with the riddler. The riddle may be obscure but that is because the solver’s mind is not as attuned to reality and metaphor as is the riddler’s. In a way, “Yregami”, a poem from The Biplane Houses, shows how much Murray ponders these matters: there, metaphors are interestingly inverted, the tenor becoming the bearer (“A warm stocking caught among limbs / evokes a country road . . .” rather than the more conventional “a country road looks like a stocking”). The title, which sounds like an interesting Japanese art practice, is of course, the word “imagery” appropriately inverted: you have no freedom of interpretation here, you just have to “get it”.

But this is only one kind of obscurity. The sort of obscurity which emerges in “The Springfields” is the obscurity of disjunction. It could be argued that it’s endemic to a genre like haiku where, conventionally, two images are juxtaposed. The human mind, being what it is, always tries to grasp the connection between juxtaposed elements, even in more extreme cases where the method is entirely aleatory. But good poems of paired images often have solutions in commonly accepted cultural values: the images, that is, are two boats in the same ocean. In Murray’s original poem, the matrix from which the meaning of the juxtaposition arises is Murray’s own ideas about warfare and young men. If you’re au fait with these, the odds are that you will twig to the intended meaning.

My own desultory thoughts about obscurity in poetry are inclined to relate it to structure. Obscurity in ordinary language use – ranging from non-fictional prose like reports (and reviews) to genre fiction – is an infringement of what is really a mercantile relationship between writer and reader. And the fault is always likely to lie with the writer (though he or she might invoke the excuse that they didn’t realise that their readers were so dumb!). Obscurity in poetry differs because poetry is one of the limited areas of language use where there isn’t a mercantile relationship between writer and reader: if we buy books of poetry it is probably in the hope of having our own inner lives expanded or challenged but there are no guarantees anywhere on the book that allow us to return it, like a toaster, if it didn’t work. I’m inclined to think that there is at least one kind of obscurity in poetry that is a fault in a poem’s structure so that parts of it become subject to more stress than they can bear. An incomprehensible haiku is just two images that don’t relate and thus, structurally, the poem falls apart. Of course there are other kinds of obscurity: Yeats’s “Byzantium” is a magnificently integrated poem structurally, but the world of meaning in which it exists is so complex and alien that it might come from a different culture.

Finally in these thoughts about “I Wrote a Little Haiku”, one is forced, reluctantly in my case, to face questions of value. Is the larger poem a better poem than “The Springfields”? Does this question make any sense? It will be no surprise to readers who have put up with this analysis this far, that I think the longer poem is superior, essentially on structural grounds. The tie between the first two lines of “The Springfields” and the last is just a bit weak. What if the last line were replaced by “Medieval rhetoric” (admittedly seven syllables rather than five, but Murray’s has four) turning it, if it were to be embedded in a longer poem, into a short poem about how time and the application of the various methods of allegorical reading will gradually release the silvery meaning? Or even something like “Mahler’s faint hope” (four syllables) tying the meaning to the hope that in the future listeners or hearers will be born who understand the meaning?

As I’ve said, riddling and unexpected puzzles form an important part of Murray’s approach to his art and the poems of Waiting for the Past are full of them. Sometimes one feels that if one only knew Murray’s distinctive analysis of the world in more detail, these puzzles would solve themselves, but sometimes one isn’t so sure. In “Whale Sounding”, for example, we are treated to six lines of brilliant evocative description (“vertically diving, / thick roof tail / spilling salt rain . . .”) capped by “bubba dog down”. “The Backroad Collections” has a similar, if expanded, structure. Thirteen lines of brilliant, linguistically lush and celebrative description of the sort of second-hand clothes that can be found on the verandahs of country shops (“yellow bordure and buttony rib, / pouched swimsuits, cretonne ad lib / in front of blush-crimson sleeves”) is followed by a sort of “altogether elsewhere” moment:

and cattle who haven’t yet entered
any building wander, contented,
munching under their last trees

till a blowsy gold-ginger horizon
stacked up out of the day’s talk
glorifies and buries the sun.
A nude moon burns the newsprint version.

It’s tempting to see it, at first glance, as an extended haiku although it may well be that “The Fall of Rome” is its true structural original. It remains a challenging poem though. At first you think of it as being built out of its oppositions: a catalogue of outmoded fashions (“fashion” is always a loaded word in Murray) of dress is contrasted to the naked, wandering cattle. Basic farming culture, perhaps, juxtaposed with trivial cultural obsessions. But the description of the clothes is so linguistically celebratory that it is hard to see any negative judgements here. And what are these cattle doing? The fact that they haven’t yet entered any building and that the trees which they munch under are their “last” trees suggests that a particular building, an abattoir, awaits them in which case they are beef, not dairy, cattle. And what are we to make of the last four lines? Presumably the opposition of fashion and farming is transposed to an opposition between social trivia (talk which, ultimately, covers the sun) and the clear, monochromatic view of the moon. At any rate, there are resonances here with other poems from this collection: the idea of animals being naked – here not stated specifically but arising as part of the oppositions of the poem – appears in “Money and the Flying Horses” where stallions are described as “the nudest creatures alive”.

If “I Wrote a Little Haiku” redirects our reading of “The Springfields” towards the nature of war, there are plenty of poems in Waiting for the Past which take that subject up. “The Murders of Women” is a poem about domestic violence and, perhaps, also an attack on ignorant as well as ideologically driven interpretations of the phenomenon whereby:

. . . . . 
It brings the blue sergeants
to push down a head
still full of a war
that will feed the guess-writers.
One woman. Fifty-two women.

And then there are sectarian wars. “All of Half Way” is about leaving the Catholic south of Ireland for the Protestant north and “Persistence of the Reformation” tracks that historical phenomenon (“four hundred years of ship-spread / jihad at first called / the Thirty Years War”) down from sixteenth century Europe to the farms of rural Australia. This poem escapes the charge of being sectarian propaganda by its emphasis on the way in which decency tried to alleviate the worst of the problems – it’s a humanist poem at heart:

. . . . . 
while mutual help and space
and breach of cliché and face
here civilised the boundary fences
. . . . .
the local dead
still mostly lie in ranks
assigned them by denomination
though belief may say Ask Mum
and unpreached help
has long been the message.

But the subject of war, in its widest extent, also emerges in those poems which deal with the limiting of sexuality. “High Rise” is about the new, high rise cities of China (“Latest theory is, the billions / will slow their overbreeding // only when consuming in the sky . . . . . above all the only children”) and “Nuclear Family Bees” is a semi-allegorical account of the way in which native bees do not form self-protecting colonies (“pumped from a common womb”) but, instead, build “single wax houses” much more vulnerable to predators.

“Raising an Only Child” seems to connect with such poems but it is really one of those personal poems – like “Portrait of the Autist as a New World Driver” or “The Tune on Your Mind” – where Murray considers elements of his own personality as well as their origins. “Raising an Only Child” is actually a brilliant analysis not so much of an only child as of the phenomenon of an only child raised by parents who, themselves, come from multi-child families and thus “found you a mystery”:

. . . . . 
Expecting rejection, you tell
stories of yourself to the hills,
confused by your few instincts.

Employable only solo or top,
making friends from your own kind
is relief with blades in it
. . . . . 
Unable to flirt 
or credit most advances
you sit and mourn
links of your self-raising chain.

Murray belongs to that group of poets born before the Second World War and his personal overview of history is thus a long one. Many of these poems are about the past and many are about the changes that have taken place in the last three-quarters of a century. “Growth”, from which the book’s title (yet another puzzle) is taken, is based on the childhood experience of the death of an elderly neighbour, and “High Speed Trap Space”, though it might ultimately be an allegory about not swerving from the path of one’s faith, is based on an adolescent experience. And then there is “When Two Percent Were Students” (whose opening line, “Gorgeous expansion of life” is a good description of what readers might hope to get from poetry) which goes back to Murray’s days at university and implicitly contrasts the past with a present in which almost all young people are students of one kind or another. “Holland’s Nadir” recalls a visit paid to a Dutch submarine at the end of the war but moves, in its conclusion, to a wider statement about language and nations in the post-war period:

. . . . . 
The only ripostes still open
to them were torpedoes
and their throaty half-

American-sounding language.
Speaking a luckier one
we set off home then. Home

and all that word would mean
in the age of rebirthing nations
which would be my time.

Sometimes the personal component of these “historical” poems is reduced in favour of a more generalised interest in cultural history. “1960 Brought the Electric” is about the arrival of electricity in the country: though generally considered to be a miraculous thing, the artisanal skill of judging “whether boxwood / or mahogany baked longer / or hotter or better” in a wood-fired stove was lost as a result. And “Big Rabbit at the Verandah” details another war, that against the rabbit in the pre-myxomatosis years: it’s a cultural recollection spurred by the sight of a large “fleecy-chested and fawn” specimen sighted at the verandah. The way in which the change is embodied in the behaviour of working dogs, mentioned in this poem, is taken up in “Dog Skills” where what had in the past been “untrained mixed-breed biters / screamed at from the house” have morphed into surprisingly professional animals, going about their work with no fuss at all:

. . . . . 
Now new breeds and skill
silence the paddocks

a murmured vowel
brings collie and kelpie flying
along the road-cutting

till each makes its leap
of judgement into the tractor
tray, loose-tongued and smiling front.

Of course the expanded wealth of historical perspective that comes with age is counterbalanced by an increase in general physical decrepitude. A number of poems – including “English as a Second Language” and “The Plaster Eater” – refer to Murray’s wife, Valerie, his long partnership with her and the inevitable separations of hospital stays. The most moving poem in the book is “Last World Before the Stars” a vision of depression induced by separation which is imagined as standing on Pluto:

. . . . . 
looking off the short horizon,
the Sun a white daystar of squinch
glazing the ground like frozen twilight,

no life, no company, no nearness,
never a memory or a joke . . .

Future scholars will probably make much of the fact that this poem appears next to “Bird Signatures” which is in every sense positive, celebrating the beauties of the natural world and, even more, poetry’s ability to convey something of it. Being able to say that the “Tiny spinnakers / of blue wrens wag among waves / of uncut lawn grass” or that the cry of the Nankeen night heron is like a Japanese wood saw or an “Oz nail pulled out” – presumably reluctantly and by a claw hammer – is always something to place against the oncoming darker days.

Sarah Holland-Batt: The Hazards

St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2015, 93pp.

We’re sometimes told that second books are more important than first books in that the former often contain the multiple explorations of a poet’s early work – experiments in voice, style and subject which produce successful poems but which are not necessarily indications of a true, individual manner – whereas the latter give us some idea as to what a particular poet’s mature style is likely to be like. This isn’t always true of course; some poets find their distinctive way of thinking and writing in the first poem of their first book and all later developments spin out from there. Sarah Holland-Batt’s second book, the strikingly impressive The Hazards, is unusual in that it replicates the varied modes of her first book, Aria, almost exactly.

Rereading that first book, one can see that there are two basic modes: lament (for the failure of love affairs) and rhapsody, though a rhapsody that is rarely celebratory. Although The Hazards is a more substantial book, these two poles recur. The last section is almost entirely devoted to documenting the pain of amatory failure. Sometimes, as in “The Atlantic” (definitely an “unplumbed, salt, estranging sea”!), a grotesque image of the external world is wedged, Lowell-like, against the body of the poem which is essentially narrative:

Now you lord it in a blue-blood job
that will make you a millionaire by forty . . .
If only I could wait. Yesterday’s Times said
more body parts washed in at Oak Beach:
Long Island Sound’s serial killer
stalks his hunting grounds while we sleep. . . .

“The Invention of Ether” is another piece which is Lowellian in manner, setting and allusions. The Boston Common, the setting of “For the Union Dead”, also contains a statue celebrating the discovery of ether, the first widely used medical analgesic. But though the poem longs to tap into this pain-killing ability, the pain returns (“Like a hammer to the knee / it jerks in and out of focus, always throbbing”). This poem also finishes with segment from a different world:

Still, I cling to the sting
like the slobbering octopus
I failed to rescue
from boyish torturers
on a Sicilian beach:
hopelessly suctioned, unable to release.

And then there is “Via dell’Amore” – “Nothing will destroy the Ligurian Sea / or that sheltered spot where we sat / by Riomaggiore’s corrugated rocks / and ate a loaf and Spanish salami . . .) where the failure is expressed both directly (“Was that the end of love? / No money, in no month to swim, / we stayed until failure hit the rock”) and through a clever image: the via dell’amore of the title is a lover’s pathway between two Ligurian villages but in this poem there is no movement and the stationary lovers are stranded in one of the villages.

What I’ve called the rhapsodic mode in both these books probably now needs some more careful description in that it refers to poetic form than content. Rhapsody is usually one of the forms of celebration but, though there is celebration here, it is often quite equivocal. The method of these poems involves a repeated introductory phrase. “Of Germany”, which opens the book’s third section of poems, very loosely about place, is a series of prepositional phrases beginning with “of”: “. . . of Berlin / on a Monday afternoon, of love / and of Germany, of the scrawny Dalmatian / running free in the Englischer Garten . . .” “No End to Images” – “No end to grief, never any end to that . . .” – does something similar with “no end to” and “O California” is set of objects for the phrase “I want”. Although the word “rhapsody” suggests a lack of structure, it really refers to a lack of conventionally accepted structure: how the thing is organised and how it is going to make its way to a fitting conclusion is, if anything, thrown into sharper relief. In “O California” the shape of the poem seems to be the dark underside of the sub-tropical paradise which is suggested all the way through (so that a list of roads includes “the death roads”) and which blossoms at the conclusion when the syntax switches from “I want” to “won’t you”:

                                 I want my perfect teeth
preserved, California, my teeth buried
in the earth like a curse, California, and won’t you show me
where the bodies are kept, California,
won’t you show me, show me, show me.

Something similar happens in “Of Germany” where after a concluding series of “ofs” – “of vanity and perishable memory, / of the invisible cats sleeping indoors / and the longest nights” we meet “the beautiful cars / that go so suicidally fast.” A poem from earlier in the book, “Approaching Paradise”, is overtly about the dark and light sides of a tropical beach environment – “Praise the bloated body washed in” – but is structured by continuous and unpredictable appearances of the central word, “paradise”.

The Hazards includes another sort of Holland-Batt subgenre that we met in Aria: the poem of a Queensland girlhood. “The Orchid House” is about the grandfather’s orchids, “Tropic Rain” – conceivably categorisable as a rhapsodic poem – is about Queensland storms, “Botany” is not about the bay but about school classes on mushrooms and the mysterious messages they leave, and “A Scrap of Lace” is about a grandmother’s lacemaking. “The House on Stilts” – which acknowledges Malouf as its inspiration – is about the underside of a Queensland house, “that wedge of darkness / chocked beneath our weatherboard”. All these seem to parallel poems like “Cavendish Road”, “The Woodpile” and “The Sewing Room” from Aria.

This all poses the question of whether The Hazards is essentially a revisiting of the possibilities opened up by Aria, containing, perhaps, more accomplished and confident poems, or whether it branches out into any kind of new territory. The differences, slight at first, turn out to be significant. And the main difference is that the “art” references in Aria are usually literary (Marquez, Chekhov, Dante, Carver etc) or musical (Rachmaninov, Puccini, Beethoven) whereas those in The Hazards seem to come largely from the visual arts. These include references – as well as responses to – paintings by Ingres, Lucian Freud, Botticelli, Matisse and others.

I have the sense, not entirely logical or supportable, that these paintings take Holland-Batt into rather different thematic areas. They certainly seem to lead into new areas structurally. They emphasise, as the poems about text and music do not, the idea of the moment of entry since paintings are “entered” in a rather different fashion. “Interbellum”, which is based on Hopper’s “Summer Evening”, a painting showing a couple on a porch in a patch of light and excluding everything else by banishing it into darkness, emphasises all those things which occur outside the frame, outside of the “crate of light”:

Late April: forsythia
             grafts to green wood,
napalms into blossom ”“

simple yellow in the yard, earnest,
             pliant as youth.
Inside, buttered rooms

are cooling . . .

The way in which “Against Ingres” enters the painting is by moving from an accurate, remote description of the painting’s subject to an imaginative entry into her life (“The women / she oiled faithfully every morning / are distant as the cries of a peacock / in the sultan’s garden”) and from there to an imagined interaction between the subject and the painter:

I’m tired, I’m cold, I’m hungry.
Ingres, it’s late, it’s raining, the servants
and girls are dreaming in bed
of knives and birds that cry like wolves
and by now even you must know
what it means when a woman turns
her back on you.

“Primavera: The Graces” enters Botticelli’s landscape (“See, we move through the black wood / like gods through time . . . “) to make the point that the endless circularity of the seasons is the opposite of the fate of the human which only gets one go at living. It seems to match the painting with Stevens’s “Sunday Morning”, beginning with oranges and ending with birds:

. . . . .
                Only the birds hurtling
like flung stones know the truth:
it is in the tiny fandango
of their pulse, in the leaves scratching
them through the air, in their descent
which is short and unspectacular
and spills out of them like wine.
Fear it: your lives are short too.

One of the most striking poems of The Hazards” is “The Quattrocento as a Waltz” which is, perhaps, about leaving painting for music. The poem is structured as a semi-comic farewell (possibly recalling MacNeice’s “Bagpipe Music”) to a universe ruled by light in favour of a “real” world accompanied by the sound of music:

. . . . .
Open the window: outside is Italy.
A fat woman is arguing over artichokes,
someone is dying in a muddy corner,
there’s a violin groaning in the street.

Finally, there is “Beauty is a Ticket of Admission to All Spectacles” which seems the key text in these poems about paintings. It begins by listing a series of works – mainly paintings of violence – which “you do not want to enter” but finishes with one of those real life tableaux that we met in poems like “The Invention of Ether” and which may be a central part of Holland-Batt’s technical apparatus. Here she describes her father’s killing of a crow: the suggestion is that such autobiographical scenes are a good deal more difficult to “enter”. Whether this is a reference to the fact that entry is difficult for her audience who do not inhabit the same psychic landscape as the poet, or whether they are difficult for the writer to enter, either because they are emotionally raw or because they haven’t been pre-processed as “art”, I’m not sure. At any rate this poem stresses the significance of the act of entry just as, in its final lines, it stresses the importance of the eye, the organ of entry. There are eyes everywhere in these poems and they often attract the most pungent metaphorical language. The eye of the bird in “The Vulture” is “bubbled tar”, those of the eel in “Life Cycle of the Eel” are “flat as dishpans” and that of the bird in “The Macaw” is a “black bowl”.

The tone of almost all the poems of The Hazards is phenomenally self-confident, full of propositions (“Blue is not the colour of paradise”), injunctions (“Listen, I tell you: it is lonely / to scrape eyeless among the stars”) and descriptions of elevated personal experience (“Rain I have known like music, a tin oratorio . . .”) But what prevents this self-confidence from seeming overweening, even hubristic, is that you feel that at the core of the poems is the desire to annex new experience. Hence, if I try to force my method of always making an attempt to see underlying unities in a poet’s work, it could be said that the essential gesture at the core of Holland-Batt’s work so far is the “step into”. It’s perhaps for this reason that the poems relating to paintings, which, as I have said, represent worlds you can enter, take her work to profounder levels than in her first book.

Two early poems, “A Scrap of Lace” and “An Illustrated History of Settlement” may be interesting in this context. The first begins as a standard piece about childhood, speaking of a grandmother’s lace-making but makes a more interesting move than do most of these kinds of poems when the eye of poet tries to “enter” (I may be stretching my metaphor here) the world of the lace itself:

Sometimes I have lifted a piece
          of that lace up to the light
and tried to unwind it with my eye.
          I have never found an opening
in the lashes and loops of it,
          the cobwebbed knots . . .

The poem then opens into a “real” historical world of settlement Australia, describing a convict transported for stealing lace. Unlike the poems I’ve spoken of already, it isn’t a matter of jamming a grotesque reality (a “skunk moment”) onto the end of an interior poem. Here it is a genuine modulation, eased by the pun on “lashes” but not caused by it. “An Illustrated History of Settlement” is another ekphrastic piece which describes Fox’s painting of Cook’s arrival. Its method is the opposite of the work itself in which everything is designed to highlight the central figure. This poem wants to begin with the fringes and focus on them, only slowly working towards the centre:

. . . . .
And here in the foreground, a Rubenesque swell
of redcoats tumbling over the beach
like a flock of exotic birds.
Faces fat with apple-cheeked Englishness.
Thighs bulging in white breeches.

And a man in the centre with his arm outstretched – 
This is often where the eye enters.

And often leaves.

In terms of historical method this seems to express no more than the contemporary cliché that true history lies not in the great actors but in the ordinary, forgotten people. But the poem is saved from cliché by its deployment of a notion of entering which has been made more complexly resonant by occurring in so many other poems.

Eyes and entries. It makes one realise the importance a poem like “Galah’s Skull” where the poet finds a bird’s skull with a worm in one eyesocket which seems to want to root itself like a fern. The entire scene is a complex metaphor in which “one eye [is] rolled to the daylight moon / the other pressed down into the earth”. And then there is “The Vulture”, the first of a series of poems about animals. The vulture is the processing machine, the “Shaman of transfiguration”, the “afterlife of all things”. But what stays with me from this poem, which grows stronger the more you reread The Hazards, is the way he is introduced in the first line of the poem where he “leans out of himself / into morning”. I read this as the essential gesture of entering (the poem goes on at length to describe how he enters the dead bodies of animals) and thus I have grown to see him as perhaps the totemic beast of the poems of this fine collection.

John Hawke: Aurelia; Jillian Pattinson: Babel Fish

Aurelia (Carlton: Cordite Press, 2015), 41pp.
Babel Fish (Glebe: Puncher & Wattmann, 2014), 75pp.

Although, with the exception of one poem, “Lignent”, the poems of John Hawke’s first, long-awaited book, Aurelia, are similar in verbal style – they have a relaxed, sensuous long-breathed eloquence – what they are as poems in themselves varies widely. More than in most books one can sense a struggle between a desire for creative unity and a desire to explore possibilities. Some poems are dreams, others are portraits, the title poem is a kind of dream-vision which must be intended to recall Nerval’s Aurelia but which also has a touch of Shelley or even early Browning about it and two, “Mountain Train” and “The Night Air” can (with all the usual hermeneutic reservations taken on board) be read as straightforward portraits of the poet as a very young man.

Perhaps made uneasy by this appearance of a variety which might suggest lack of focus, Hawke includes a brief preface locating the poetry in the French theoretical landscape obsessed by the relationship between words and loss. To desire is to instigate a life of loss:

. . .  When Nerval writes that dreams are a second life, he not only refers to the dreams we experience in sleep, but also to the dreams that arise as a consequence of lost desires, dreams perhaps thwarted by chance: of lives once meant, but never lived . . . These lives often coexist with our own as lost alternatives, counter-experiences or impossible possibilities; they lie within the everyday like a subtext or a haunting . . .

I don’t want to sound too much of a Francophobe empiricist here, but this seems to be one of those large statements which evade the difficult and more precise question: in this case, what is a poet’s personal stake in a particular character or situation; why did this one rather than innumerable others get the creative act going and give it the energy to continue. It is a question that looms large (and is often avoided) in responses to the great monologues of Browning. If Dramatic Romances had had, as a preface, a general statement of this kind we wouldn’t really be greatly enlightened about masterpieces like “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came”.

At any rate, I like the mysterious varieties of Aurelia to the point of being tempted to ignore its author’s honestly offered help. The title poem is a recreation of the high Romantic mode, moving between reality and dream and back to dream-influenced reality. It details the arrival and loss of either a woman or creativity or Coleridge’s Joy or all three. Although she is a distilled and thus abstract phenomenon – “I first fell in love with Aurelia / in the face of that woman painted by Giovanni Bellini / with her serene yet introverted eyes . . .” – there is a fine, very un-abstract passage detailing the goddess’s arrival:

The presence arrives with the faintest percussion 
of bells approaching from a distance.
It hovers over this winter sea
and leaves no footfall on the sand.
I discover myself at last in its solitude,
contemplating the glitter in a midnight wave.
I feel a smothering weight:
. . . . .
                             Then, ever so faintly,
emanating from silence
like a figure outlined in smoke,
a shadow of sound that brushes the walls
with the softest presence - 
the footfall of her sigh in even night . . .

This calm extended blank verse style, here suggesting something of a pastiched updating of nineteenth century visionary narratives, is very much typical of the other poems of the book. At any rate, the arrival of the idealised loved one results in the achievement, or gift, of a vison of the universe in which “every ordinary phrase / is suddenly charged, the signals of daily life / transformed, and we enter that forest / of symbols where everything coincides”. The protagonist enters, in other words, the world of Baudelaire’s “Correspondances” though it is significant that the phrase “smothering weight” is borrowed from Coleridge’s great “Dejection: An Ode”.

The other poems of the book, with the exception of the two childhood poems I have already mentioned and “Early Spring” and “Emily Street”, seem more inclined to dwell in bleaker landscapes rather than the ecstatic world where all the objects are resonant and connectedly meaningful. Hawke is terrific at providing images of the normal processes of loss – the loss of objects and experiences rather than loved ones. They form the basis of the book’s first poem, “Reliquary”, and “What Was There” a poem about revisiting a childhood home in the country, moves out to consider the perspective of the spaces between the stars:

Behind the town Parnassus with its water-tower is outlined
by a crown of stars; there is a gap below the Southern Cross

darker than the night itself, an unfillable nothingness
into which all this will be drawn in time:

the rotting house, the detailed shadows in the children’s faces,
the scraps of old iron and broken chimney-bricks among the weeds . . .

There are two interesting poems about intellectuals who become frightening activists: Saint-Just (Robespierre’s supporter) and Avimael Guzman (a professor of philosophy who became the leader of the Maoist army of Peru called the Shining Path). In a sense they form a diptych, working away at similar themes. Saint-Just’s poem focusses entirely on the metaphorical landscape of a mountain top:

Climbing this hill you suddenly
can’t keep your breath, it has gone
with the breeze that lifts your arms
and catches you like that,
leaning away from the familiar road.
All that matters is your surrender
to the red wind . . .

The emphasis is on the nightmare attraction of perfect systems to intellectual activists whereby a world is constructed whose architecture matches the visions of their minds. In the case of Saint-Just, this triumph is inhabitable only by himself and comes at the cost of countless other lives. And he will be the lone inhabitant of this perfect world: if there are others they will be only versions of himself:

Then at last you have arrived
outside a landscape which could only belong to you,
the way the long grass hoists and sways
perfectly in tune with the colours of the season,
an architecture meshing precisely above you,
building you a home. And was that another
figure moving with you beyond that window,
cut from your own soft shape, 
quiet as a ripple in the swimming glass?

Of course, Saint-Just’s execution occurred quickly and unexpectedly and his courage and contempt on the scaffold is that of a man whose dying is a kind of triumph. Guzman has been in prison since the early nineties, something guaranteed to sap the self-confidence of even the purest ideologues. His poem, even longer than the title poem, is a detailed exploration of an ideologue’s inherent solipsism. It begins – and continues for much of its length – with the act of strangling a female peasant who had called him, entirely accurately, a fascist. Guzman inhabits the same metaphorical uplands as Saint-Just but in his case they are also real: the mountains of rural Peru:

. . . . . 
Because there is no longer any guilty internal world
your private thoughts lead you to a plain
where huge figures stand frozen, towers and monuments
shuttling messages into the air, light patterns
and gaudy over-obvious symbols . . .

The perfect world envisaged by the internal mental apparatuses of dogmatic intellectual activists is one in which only they and pale reflections of themselves can live. But at about this point the reader realises that there must be a connection between the world of infinitely meaningful symbols celebrated in “Aurelia” and this sterile solipsistic universe. Is the point simply that megalomaniac demagogues are failed artists or is there something sinister in all successful acts of artistic creation, the creator expressing him- or herself in a perfect and perfectly controlled universe?

Whatever Hawke’s feelings about this, these two poems might represent not so much as a venture into a public poetry so much as a bleaker and more depressed inflection of the ideas present in other poems. Two bleak personal poems show themselves obsessed by place and the abstract response to place – mapping. “Intersection” is about loss – “When lovers part for separate cities . . .” – and about the way in which the experience of loss is outside the normal processes of time. The “circle of dreams” continues while in the outside world “stories are resolving time, // endings are written, the long curtains / swing together”. As Proust says, we love not people but images and, when lovers part, there is no reason for these images to change. The physical location of the poem is Sydney’s Washaway Beach which looks out from the harbour and the poem begins with the geometrical observation that “two ferries cross / at the exact radius of the heads”. The obsession with mapping and geometry dominates the poem as, presumably, the speaker struggles to get his bearings. At the end, as I read it, we are left with a symbol of erosion – the tides washing away the beach – from which can be seen the circular motion of yachts rounding a buoy:

Washaway. When the tide rises the beach is drowned.
Here, at the centre of this dancing-ground
littered with leaves, and clawed by sharp banksia,
I search for circumference in the geometry of the gliding water

as a line of yachts circles the bell of the buoy.

Although there are no specific allusions it is hard not to place this “Intersection” alongside that great poem set in Sydney harbour which worries about time and the nature of loss and how to deal with it: Slessor’s “Five Bells”.

“The Point” – with its pointed title – is about the speaker’s making a trip to the point of land at Thirroul where Lawrence stayed during his visit to Australia. A temporary Aboriginal embassy has been set up and the narrator comes across the scene of a man lying in front of a bulldozer “protecting the invisible bones / of a forgotten ancestor”:

I did not stay long at this turning point:
there were no good omens to be discovered.
Without reflection or further thought, I started
the engine and took the road back into town.

These closing lines will give some clue about what makes this poem weirdly memorable. It is the unremitting bleakness of the narration which occasionally sounds like a parody of a dreary guide book, “The green strip of land projecting low from the bay / is signalled by the figures of four tall pines . . .” The verse moves on in this petty pace throughout the hundred or so lines of the entire poem. My reading of this is that it is a poem where depression (another word, like “point”, with a geographical second meaning), signalled in the sound and movement of the verse, extends to political action: the narrator is unable to intervene in any way and is left with only an image.

Finally, as examples of this bleaker world of most of these poems, there are “On Woodbridge Hill” and the final poem significantly called “Black Highway”. The former seems to be a dream poem in which, in the second part, the narrator shoots his father and flees. The poetry lights up at this moment:

The gun bucked in my hand, and somehow I felt the charge
smack his slow head, but I never went back there.
I was already running for the silver hills, as the moon
faded to water behind me, sinking into weedy darkness.
. . . . . 
A strange energy was growing in me, so that I knew
I need never stop running, and I could go on forever,
speeding across the surface of this white earth.

This seems like one of those rare moments when the impressions of a dream, far from being vague and inconsistent, are actually more intensely felt and remembered than the impressions of ordinary life. And something of this can be felt in “Black Highway” which leaves readers with a concluding image of a nightmare journey that is neverending:

. . . . . 
Together we climbed a black mountain
barefoot in the wind. A hard moon
shone naked, and even the stones
glared at us. That was the worst of it:
walking on and never waking.

Variety is an important issue in another first book, Jillian Pattinson’s Babel Fish which is divided into four parts, each with a recognisable emphasis. The first section is made up of poems about the natural world conceived with the widest perspective. The opening poem is a brilliant sonnet about the eruption of massive colony of the weird algae emiliania huxleyi:

Fifty billion Ehux algae converge at the surface
of the Southern Ocean, their brilliance a mirror,
a mayday, that might well be mistaken
for the second coming . . .

The view here is from space and the poem bypasses the human to move quickly down to the narrowest of perspectives: a lone algae inside the gut of a cuttlefish. Although most of the other poems of this section don’t really follow the lead of this poem, it sets both the tone and the material. The second section, about which I’ll say more later, is a seven part invention on a single photograph. The third section is high-powered abstraction in the Borgesian mode, full of poems about infinite libraries and imaginary books while the final section contains poems of the sort that are familiar to any reader of contemporary poetry: their perspective is narrow, local and ethical, and some are lyric poems describing personal experience (I rather like the one about sitting in an abandoned EH Holden as a child).

This division into four is a sensible move because it increases the ability of any poem to illuminate one in its immediate area. The book’s second poem, for example, following the miraculous algae bloom, is about the build-up of plastics in the “horse latitudes” in the South Pacific. Being placed next to “Communion” makes us see it as a ghastly negative image of the behaviour of the algae. But fighting against these processes of thematic division is the unified sensibility of the poet and so the compartments allow a lot of metaphorical water to pass through. The “social” poems of the final section, for example, often have a rather abstract edge as though the style of the third section had infiltrated them. “Emigre”, a poem that wants to speak about the difficulties of the economic immigrant is conceived as a semi-surreal drama:

. . . . . 
One morning, Ali fails to arrive
but Sam turns up on time, wearing
Ali’s suit. No one mentions it.
Named for his mother’s father, Jahan
arrives late: every other morning he fears
he’s lost his way; tries retracing his steps;
ends up confused; whispers a prayer
to any god who’s listening; sets out again.

And in the very conception of this poem we can see the sort of swirling that the environmental poems of the first section focus on. “Asylum (Gk.) sans (Fr.) Guano (Esp.)” appears in the first section because it is about the common Mynah, a bird that has been irritating Australians for a century and a half. But of course the poem is really about asylum seekers and thus might well have been slotted in the book’s final section.

Also in this first section of Babel Fish is a poem which is, as its title, “Oblique”, suggests, about poetic method, about how poetry comes at things:

Best not to come at the thing
head on – the glass is hard,
the wooden frame sturdy.

Instead, let your eyes follow
the flight path of the swamp hawk
at first light, or her ally,

the early morning shadow, leaning well aslant . . .

Fittingly it ends with thinking about how to end: “How then, to end a poem / about a bird you can’t quite name, / but sings beautifully?”

A number of the poems in the first section and one, “Nocturne”, in the final section, make an important move towards trying to evolve some sort of poetic style which will be more able to express the swirling interactions of the world. So we get continuously recurring though modified groupings as in the opening lines of “Nocturne”:

The cats. The crickets. The moon
speaking in tides. The caged bird,
wings fluttering against the dark.
The dark the cage the fluttering,
grace notes scratching an invisible
skin. The tidal echolalia, moon
turning and returning ocean
to coastline. The tide the moon
the ocean, the long slow haulage
of the stars . . .

I’m not sure how successful these sorts of poems are but I want to celebrate the attempt to stretch the rigid rules of syntax in such a way that sentence structure and subject are brought closer together. Conventional syntax tends to emphasise a human perspective and represents the movement of the mind whereby the agent is always privileged. It’s hard in English, without using endless passives, to get rid of the interpreting power of the poet’s consciousness and try to let the world speak for itself for once.

This focus on method brings me to the book’s second section by way of conclusion. Written to accompany an exhibition of photographs by the poet’s brother, it is seven responses to one of the photographs. This photograph of a line of six dead foxes and a single cat strung up on a fence is included in the book which means that we are spared the distracting problem of trying to recreate it from the poems themselves. The seven poems are unashamedly in the style of Hughes’s Crow poems – “Cocking his head one way / then another, Crow ponders / Death’s neat arrangement” – but conceptually they do their own thing, the seven poems all working around the number seven. What works here, I think, that makes me more impressed by these poems than I am by, say, “Nocturne”, is that structure and style are a specific solution to a specific problem. Perhaps that’s how all new styles in poetry begin.

Lucy Dougan: The Guardians

Artarmon: Giramondo, 2015, 76pp.

Lucy Dougan’s new book seems structured in a way that is designed to recall her previous Giramondo book, White Clay. That collection began with a letter from a friend that was clearly designed to alert us to the sort of angled perceptions that are at the base of her poetry when it speaks of “working quietly at the edges” and it concluded with a poem about a treasured letter from her sister “carried . . . for sixteen years”. The Guardians begins with a poem about the vertical chain of genetic history – one of the book’s obsessions – and concludes not with a letter from her sister but with a drawing from her the subject of which is the author herself. Both letter and drawing seem to be messages from another world. They come from the far side of the world but they come from a member of the poet’s genetic community. “A Picture from Julia” seems a message that relates to the poet’s illness, an ordeal which is the subject of a number of poems in the third section: “Now I need your Spring / as I never did when it was simply mine”. It’s a winter portrait but it looks to spring, something which Dougan expresses in an uncharacteristically “high” mode with perhaps a suggestion of Thomas’s “A Refusal to Mourn” or “After the Funeral”:

. . . . . 
If anyone should take this green off me
I will summon the harpies,
set all of Campania alight;
and not rest
until the white button daisies return
and your feet make
a path through the thaw.

Most of Dougan’s poems do not have this elevated tone and, in the case of The Guardians, though every poem is built around personal experience it never seems to be a confessional book seeing the experiences of the self as the sine qua non of poetry. Even when the experiences are as traumatic as cancer surgery there is nothing of the melodramatic in their treatment, nothing of the “poetic diary of one woman’s journey through pain”. There is something distinctive about this poet’s attitudes to life and the way life and an individual poem are related that makes her look towards framing perspectives both to shape the poems and speak of the meaning of experience. Take the first of the poems about cancer, a poem which provides the book’s title:

I could not bear the empyrean capped,
not after living so long under the ground.

You were away
when I found the lump.
You came back with a wooden duck
and a black toy dog.
In the thick of it
the duck would come to live
with the small plastic shepherd
and the stone our daughter found out in the river - 
its shape sat safe in my hands.
The piggy bank was another gift.
My friend said put a coin in it a day
and smash it when you need to buy the dress
for your daughter’s wedding.
But the dog – the dog was quite something.
Being stuffed, it said nothing.
In a dream it sat quietly by our own living dog
and she looked at me straight out of her old eyes and said
Go on – it’s OK to pick it up.

Admittedly the first two lines seem odd and what I take to be their meaning – “After having finally got to the stage (in life or, more likely, in poetry) where I could more fully express myself, finding I had a potentially fatal illness was especially unbearable” – doesn’t really account for the strange vocabulary: “empyrean”, “capped”. But the movement of the poem is away from the conventional “How do I feel about this?” towards a listing of the homely totemic animals which begin to assemble. The mysterious animal world which these little creatures stand for is an important part of the framing perspectives of the poems of this book which often recount how wild animals, especially dogs and foxes, stand at the hinge of different realities. But the structure of the poem is striking as well. It begins with the body, quickly moves to models, then to a model designed to look to the future but, unknowingly, highlighting that that future suddenly has to be questioned. Finally the poem, rather than conventionally bringing us back to the pressing issues of the flesh, moves into dream and imagined dog-speech. The constant rejection of the conventional in favour of the more interestingly enlightening perspective is matched in the unpredictable but rather satisfying shape of the poem.

“The Guardians” comes from the third section of the book devoted, fittingly, to the body. The first section focusses on what might be thought of as historical and genetic history. One of the major changes of perspective that happens in our lives happens at the moment when we go from seeing ourselves as self-contained experiencing objects (an illusion bizarrely fostered not only by genre fiction but even so-called “serious” fiction) to expressions of a long genetic history. It seems, superficially, restricting because it suggests some kind of determinism but it is, in actuality, liberating: we are part of a community structured vertically in time as well as one made up out of contemporary lovers, friends and neighbours. Having a slightly unusual genetic history (the poems of the earlier book, White Clay, establish Dougan as one of those people whose familial father is not her genetic father and she thus finds herself with an exotic “other” family in Naples, the subject of a number of interesting poems) must mean that you are more sensitive to the complexities of genes than most of us.

One of the images of genetic history is the vertically suspended chain and the book’s first poem is a version of this. It begins memorably by a poetic sleight of hand – “This is the house of her childhood. / It’s not standing anymore.” – which one could expand out into a tract of explicatory material about the status of reality in a poem, the opposition between remembered experience and the “real”, and so on. In the poem a trunk is dragged out from under the room in which the girl sleeps. In it, amongst other initially disappointing bric-a-brac (the value of objects can derive from their historical and familial context), is a linen face mask which both mother and daughter put on. But the mask was made by the mother’s grandmother:

That night she wondered
if there were more rooms
beneath the room under her bed.
How deep did they go down;
and if each of her mother’s mothers
stretching right back
had left a fearful face there
for her to try on?

When I first read this I worried about that word “fearful” but I think, on rereading it, that it exploits the ambiguity of the word (“fear-inducing” or “fear-expressing”?) deliberately though it never explains why the girl and her ancestresses should have fearful expressions.

Other poems in this first section explore genetic heritage or, as the last says, the vision of “genetics sparking magnetically / along the lines.” “Wayside” begins “My body wants / the long way back / just to find lost land” and deals with the desire to discover “the uncertain map / of family trees”. The central image though is not of a rigidly mapped line of descent but of randomly sown seeds sprouting in unexpected places after having been sown by some medieval farmer “jaunty in a book of days”. At the end of the poem we meet her “nipote” – the son of her half-sister – whose vision of familial descent is not so much seeds as fireworks:

And of my nipote,
a love child too,
who took me aside
and mimed at fireworks
with hands and eyes,
his fingers sprays.

We’re like this, you see,
all kaboom and splutter - 
who knows where we’ll fall . . .

What the body had wanted was “the dark of a city / when paths were lit / by shrines, by love . . .”

Running alongside these poems about genetic pathways are those which stress, if not so much the sideways vision of working from the edges, then at least the blurring of borders that this can produce. When her sister and the poet walk either side of a garden bed at the Villa Bruno in Naples, “we step outside all drawn rings”. And in “The Mice” a childhood site once more is revisited and the author finds:

            a man sitting
on a fold-out chair
just at the edge
of where it used to be wild 
. . . 
he seemed to be doing an imitation
of a man sitting in the sun
like me
the place was lost on him.

The second section, begun with a quotation from Geoff Dyer’s book on Tarkovsky’s Stalker, is about places and one of the poems, “The Old House”, makes a kind of connection with the first poem in the book in that it is about a girl revisiting a childhood home. This time the home still exists but has a new, welcoming but slightly sexually sinister owner. Significantly it is the girl’s dog, acting on scent-memory, which runs into the house first. In this sense the dog is not only more attuned to the paths of history but perhaps acts as a symbol of one of his human counterpart’s buried senses (there is a very significant dog who inhabits the zone in Stalker). But the dog is only one of the inhabitants of these spaces: the first poem of this section begins by describing an impossibly small attic hotel room in London but finishes with the jetlagged poet hearing the arrival of doves which coo “their own flight histories”. Louise Bourgeois’ giant spider introduces an exhibition at the Tate Modern and a visit to Kensal Green in search of Wilkie Collins’ grave discovers a fox, perfectly at home in the cemetery. Significantly, the poet follows the fox “in the hope that he will / show me what he knows / about the dead”. The poem of this group which stays most with me, though, is “The Foxes”, perhaps because it is less explanatory than the other poems and simply presents a visitation. Arriving back in London

We stood at the deep sash window
and beneath us
two foxes stared up.
Their gaze was not territorial
or neutral but simply there

as the grass was there, the trees
were there, and the cold summer furniture.
They did not hide their boredom
and crossed back over
into another evening.

But we stayed for a while
as if their candour held us to the spot
until lights started up
- those other unknown lives -
in the flats across.

There is, I suppose, only so much that even a poet can say about such visitations but you have to be able intuitively to understand them even before you can see them properly. Certainly foxes, rather than dogs and doves, seem the best symbols of this weird otherness of the animal world because, whenever I have seen one, I’ve been struck by the way they simply appear – as though they had always been there – and the way they go about their business, not looking at you, as though they didn’t see you whereas you know perfectly well that they know you are there and that they knew you were there before you knew that they were there! At any rate, they’re a wonderful introduction to the animal otherworld.

As I’ve said, the final section is made up of poems about the body and more than half of these “deal with” – a very equivocal cliched phrase – the experience of cancer. The last of these describes a “covert pilgrimage” to the ruins of St Catherine’s abbey in Dorsetshire, perhaps analogous to the nearby East Coker. Other experiences of the body focus on the way in which an experience can open a door. A poem about needlework – the labour (or art) of repair by hand – finishes with a memory of her mother’s Home Economics class; paintings bought by her father remind her that advice by the gallery owner about how to prepare instant coffee is something she has mysteriously taken into her own living practices; a poem about her daughter’s dance school modulates from a poem about dancing’s bump and grind to a poem about menarche and menopause, though without the Greek-based technical language – “the year that you start bleeding / and I stop”; and the second-last poem, “Dearest”, which seems a simple piece inspired perhaps by Mr Darcy’s declaration to Elizabeth, is actually a complex meditation about the way a single word can open “the door / to another century”.

At all levels Dougan reveals herself as a more challenging and more profound poet than the apparently simple personal tone of her poems may suggest. I think it might have taken her some while to reach this complex unassuming clarity – Memory Shell, her first book, clearly isn’t sure what moulds to pour pressing personal experience into and White Clay alternates between first and third person poems. The Guardians is made up of poems that always seem to be looking at the world – both outer and inner – anew and though this is an ability we want from poetry – which is, after all, the most successful destroyer of cliche – it’s rarer than you would think. A measure of the consistency with which the poems of The Guardians achieves this is the shock caused by a momentary lapse. In a poem called “Kenwood House” poet and partner find themselves looking at a stack of Jacobean portraits:

. . . . .
I ask you if we bumped into Donne
or Shakespeare or their wives
(especially their wives
I would want to meet)
could we all make sense . . .

This seems like a mere conventional contemporary piety to me. Though it’s true that a cultural historian interested in provincial England at the end of the Elizabethan period might get more out of Anne Hathaway than out of her husband, it’s hard to credit that a poet – of all people – would actually prefer to speak to Shakespeare’s wife when the writer himself was available!

Clive James: Poetry Notebook: 2006-2014

London: Picador, 2014, 234pp

I have long been an admirer of Clive James’s criticism. In the early 1970s a colleague used to circulate the airmail editions of The Observer – in a pre-digital age these were printed on tissue paper to save on postage – around the department and my 1974 edition of The Metropolitan Critic still has a frail excerpt from one of his television columns tucked in the back. It is a review of a number of programs including one called “The House on the Klong” and another about a program on American sexuality which describes the style of one of the “experts” – a Dr Bronfenbrenner – as involving “assembling tautologies at the rate of a small child getting dressed for school”. It will give readers some idea of the standard of James’s writing that this little masterpiece didn’t make the cut in the selections used in his three volumes of television criticism.

Good criticism, like James’s, can do many things. It can, at its best, re-energise flagging debates. It can aim to be an embodiment of “discrimination” – one of my least favourite words in both its opposed meanings. It can enthuse us about individual books and, with far less frequent success, make us despise them. It can save us reading books – not as contemptible an aim as it seems since criticism in the nineteenth century frequently had a digest mode where unappetisingly technical books were summarised at some length. For me James was an introduction to intelligent, humorous, non-academic criticism (as was Bernard Shaw’s voluminous writing on music). The best pieces in The Metropolitan Critic, such as the first piece on Edmund Wilson, were exactly about marking out what a critic of the highest calibre might hope to achieve. It also defends literary journalism against the claim that, compared with scholarly writing, it is just amateurish stuff:

. . . the answer is: it is easy to do badly and hard to do well; and that even at its worst it is not so dispensable as the average of academic writing; and that at its best it is the full complement to the academy’s best, the accuser of the academy’s average, and the necessary scourge of the academy’s worst.

Finally, one of the results of good criticism can be a re-energising of an individual reader and the setting of new, more ambitious goals. To go on speaking personally, the most influential part of The Metropolitan Critic for this critic was a small semi-comic piece about “the loneliness of the long-distance reader”. Since I’d already read Gibbon for the first time by then I may already have set out on this lonely path but James’s description of the problems is painfully accurate:

In the four years since I finished Motley’s Rise of the Dutch Republic I have been unable to meet (a) anyone who has read it, with whom to compare notes; and (b) anyone appropriately dissatisfied at not having read it. To compound the dissatisfaction, the only bit of the book I have succeeded in remembering is the bit about the little children crying in the streets – a line known even to people who think Motley is a theatrical costumier.

I read Motley because of this in the early eighties when I was baby-sitting my youngest daughter and I’ve always had, circulating among my reading projects, one or other of these very large books. And this is why, at present, thirty-five years later, I’m about four-fifths of the way through a patchwork of mixed translations of The Mahabharata with no real reward except the smug sense of knowing that I’ve done it. Certainly without anyone to compare notes with or who is in any way jealous of my achievement.

The big difference between the poetry reviews in early collections like The Metropolitan Critic and At the Pillars of Hercules and this Poetry Notebook: 2006-2014 is that the former seem to have been written as a critic and the latter as a practitioner. It makes a big difference, for better and worse, when you write about poets as a fellow poet. One of the many issues that the book touches on is whether good critics of poetry have to be poets themselves. One argument against this might be that a non-poet has the ability to look at different approaches to poetry fairly dispassionately whereas a poet has committed him or her self to one in particular. And a result of this might be that the shape of the ideal poet which slowly emerges through the mists of endless readings and evaluations looks very much like that of the critic.

At any rate James remains an electric writer to read. His prose is always marked by being grounded in argument and it pushes towards pithy and often hyperbolic statements as conclusions – one of my favourite of the early pieces, a review of a biography of Ford Madox Ford, finishes, “Always precisely wrong about his own character, Ford’s vaunting of his professionalism gives us the clue: he was the last amateur”. But another important part of James’s style (exploited to the full in the series of books beginning with Unreliable Memoirs) is comically treated autobiography. James as an undergraduate at the University of Sydney is so stylised a representation by now that the caricatured figure of the gormless, book- and experience-devouring student has become part of literature itself, no longer to be judged as an accurate or otherwise historical representation. There is a good deal of this James in Poetry Notebook often under the guise of comparing and contrasting his enthusiasms as a beginner with his responses late in life.

But to describe the book as being personally based might give the impression that it is in some way chattily unstructured. In fact it’s a surprisingly organised book. Whereas a collection of reviews is built on commissions that require the reader to come to grips with particular poets – to answer the questions that these poets raise – this book has at its heart a series of thoughts about poetry, poems and poets written for the Chicago magazine, Poetry. So it’s really set up as an roaming set of investigations by a poet into the nature of poetry. The issues that tend to recur in this book are issues important to James’s own sense of himself as a poet: memorability, whether a poem’s achievement is real or spurious, how memorable passages are connected, the role of rationality and comprehensibility, the significance of “craft”, and so on. Surrounding and obfuscating these crucial practitioner’s issues are the dark clouds emanating from the usual suspects: fake poets pushing their manifestos and friends (the post-poundians – “there will always be a residency for J.H. Prynne” – the Language poets, etc), pole-climbing academics with no commitment to literature (or knowledge of it) at all, Creative Writing schools and, worst of all, theorists.

The book is structured so that it searches first for some kind of core to poetry, an irreducible essence. This looks like a classical attempt to begin by definition and when James looks first at those amazing, memorable lines which make our hair stand up and mean that a particular poem is lodged forever in our minds, someone like myself is beginning to tot up exceptions before the sentence has finished. But a strength of Poetry Notebook is that it, too, searches for exceptions and manages to find them for almost every generalisation about poetry which it ventures. When, as reader, you think of an exception, James – like Verne’s Arne Saknussemm – has been there before you. But James is right to stress the importance of the line that seems to lodge in the soul, just as he is right to be leery of absolute generalisations. If you can’t write things that people either remember or want to remember (or you’ve evolved a theory that discourages doing this) then perhaps you should give it away. Furthermore, it is through such memorable moments that new readers get the injection that will ultimately keep them hooked on poetry. I learned from Poetry Notebook that Dryden called these “hits” – “These hits of words a true poet often finds, as I may say, without seeking: but he knows their value when he finds them, and is infinitely pleased” – and it’s an attractive thought that a word we associate with popular music might be the same one originally used for poetic successes arrived at in a quite different way. Every devoted reader of poetry has an anthology of such “hits”. If I arranged mine chronologically in the order I met them they would probably begin with Keats’s Ruth standing in tears “amid the alien corn” first read in High School. “Alien corn” is an extraordinary phrase and remarkably resistant to the inevitable process whereby known beauties become familiar and lose some of their shine. Some phrases of this kind become so influential that later writers can’t resist mining them for titles: almost every line of Macbeth’s “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” speech appears as a book title and I’ve always been surprised that “Alien Corn” hasn’t turned up as the title of a book about, say, food importation or, better, perhaps, the spread of American popular culture into other countries after the war.

James’s technique is to begin by thinking about these “hits” (his first is Hart Crane’s, “The seal’s wide spindrift gaze towards paradise”) and then move outwards to the next issue of how these are articulated into larger constructions and thus touch on important issues in the poetry in English for the last hundred or so years, especially the issue of the nature of free verse and whether rhyme and metricality are built into English poetry or are just randomly selected formal impositions. He is also interested in the issue of the extent to which such hits are consciously produced by the poet: Dryden says “without seeking” and an early essay by James on Randall Jarrell quotes him as saying that even a good poet “was a man who spent a lifetime standing in a storm and who could hope to be struck by lightning only half a dozen times at best”. But I’ve always felt that Keats knew that he could operate comfortably in an idiom in which lines phrases like “alien corn” were likely to appear.

My own interests would follow this issue of “hits” in different directions from those structural implications that James is inclined to take up. I’d like to press onto the point whereby recognition of such miracles is a sine qua non for serious readers of poetry. We all write as though these great lines were somehow self-evident. But what if different, equally qualified, equally intense readers of poetry had subtly different lists of “hits”? I’d like to see this explored in the hopes that focussing on differences rather than agreements might be the way out of the (to me) awful idea that there was a sort of ideal group of readers who had the discrimination to detect a “hit”. After all, it’s a fact in logic that we learn more about a set by looking at the awkward borders than if we look at a member from the very centre of the set: if you want to think about the characteristics of, say, “Australian Poet”, you’ll learn more by looking at someone like Peter Porter (how “Australian” is he?) or Patrick White (how poetic is his prose?) than by looking at Kenneth Slessor, born in the year of federation and a standard choice in any anthology.

This issue emerged when reading Poetry Notebook at the points where James quotes Empson’s “And now she cleans her teeth into the lake” and Auden’s “The earth turns over, our side feels the cold”. Empson I have, through various accidents, never read (mea culpa) but I know the Auden and I have to confess that neither of these do anything for me – they aren’t, in James’s refreshingly unpompous language, “killer-diller lines”. The Auden, though, is close enough to one of my own much-loved hits and, though it is not a single line but more what James calls “a stand-alone unity that insists on being heard entire, and threatens never to leave one’s memory”, I take the opportunity to indulge myself and quote it here:

She tells her love while half asleep,
     In the dark hours,
          With half-words whispered low:
As Earth stirs in her winter sleep
     And puts out grass and flowers
          Despite the snow,
          Despite the falling snow.

It’s by Robert Graves who is a poet you might expect James to engage with more fully (he was, after all, no sillier than Yeats and a better classical scholar than Frost) and whose poetry has a very high density of palpable hits. It’s not appropriate here to talk extensively about its glories but this little poem begins with a very ambivalent word “tells” and turns (like the earth) on another ambiguous word, “her”, (does it refer to the woman or the earth?) which functions as what the Japanese call, I think, kakekotoba – a pivot or hinge word. And then it finishes with a repetition (augmented to make a ravishing effect). I read somewhere that Old Norse poems spoken by the dead have a repeated final line (Gunnar’s magnificent poem, sung in his burial mound in Njal’s Saga, certainly does) and you feel that the effect of the repetition here comes from deeper sources than merely the desire for a lyric grace. And on this subject of omissions in a book dauntingly full of inclusions, it’s odd that Spenser is mentioned only (I think) once. Spenser is exactly the kind of poet I would have expected to appeal to James. He is a “poet’s poet” (to use a cliche), the kind of poet who might drop out of readerly interest for a century or so but whose flame is kept alive by poets. Milton called him his “original” and he was admired by the Romantics – especially Keats – and the Victorians. He is, simply, a great technician, and no better example could be chosen of a poet doing with consummate ease exactly what James wants his poetry to do: put complex ideas and complex syntax effortlessly into a challenging stanza form.

And still on the subject of omissions, readers looking for an engagement with contemporary doings in Australian poetry will find Poetry Notebook ”“ indeed all of James’s criticism – pretty unhelpful. He writes here about Hope, and McAuley’s “Because” but they are poems that he knew when he was a student in Sydney. In other words they are subsumed into his autobiography. He does speak briefly of Wright and Harwood and confirms the contemporary prejudice that the star of the latter has risen as that of the former has declined. A book by Les Murray is included in a set of commissioned reviews at the back but they were contemporaries at the University of Sydney. There is no engagement with Bruce Beaver or Bruce Dawe or David Malouf or Michael Dransfield (who was a conscious producer of hits) or any of a dozen other important names. The one exception is James’s admiration for the poems of Stephen Edgar. Poetry Notebook contains a good detailed analysis of an important Edgar poem, “Man on the Moon”. It’s a moot point whether one should say that Edgar’s poetry appeals to James simply because (like that of Wilbur and Larkin) it’s a variation of the kind of thing that James himself wants to do in his poetry or whether the proximity of their assumptions about poetry means that James is able to write especially sympathetically and incisively. Perhaps these aren’t mutually exclusive positions but I prefer to read poet-critics writing perceptively about the work of other poets whose work their ideas should mean they dislike (Jarrell on Stevens, for example) but which, for one reason or another, they find compelling. I’ll avoid these matters and focus on issues of difference, once again. James thinks that “Man on the Moon” has a single weak line: “The crescent moon, to quote myself, lies back . . .” He dislikes the way we are moved out of the self-contained unity of the poem by a reference to another Edgar poem:

But when a poem has successfully spent most of its time convincing us that it stands alone, it seems worse than a pity when it doesn’t. It seems like self-injury: a bad tattoo.

I’ve always thought (on first, second and subsequent readings) that this is the best line in the poem. To me it’s as though “Man on the Moon” works by continually shifting its material so as to give a different perspective on what it wants to say. An external reference is like a door opening in a smooth wall where you didn’t realise a door existed and the perspective it offers is exciting and rather shocking. I don’t think, at heart, that James and I have read the poem differently but perhaps my vulgar tastes prefer the madness of disorienting surprises. At any rate, as with the anthology of widely agreed-upon hits that turns out to have a more shifting membership than most critics allow, it’s the differences that are more interesting and revealing than the agreements.

Even a great critic like Jarrell who, early on, specialised in acid hatchet jobs, wrote better when he wrote in praise and celebration than when he wrote in condemnation. I think this is because the certainties which seem to lie at the heart of an act of critical “discrimination” are often only apparent certainties. I think that this is a result not of the way in which theories and practices of poetry are always open to corruption by the inevitable group of talentless illiterates who make up whatever the critic thinks are the dark forces surrounding him or her but rather of the kind of differences that I have mentioned – differences among people whose ideas about poetry are very similar. At any rate, one of the least successful chapters in Poetry Notebook is an attack on Ezra Pound. It’s a bit like Pope Stephen digging up Formosus’s body to put it on trial – it doesn’t do a dead man any further harm and it makes the participants look either silly or vindictive or both. There should be a literary dictat forbidding such pieces. James makes his characteristic gesture of absorbing it into his autobiography, saying, in effect: “When I was young I loved this stuff; now I see that it is flimflam. How could I have been so wrong?” I think the answer is simply that, like many, James has evolved a notion of poetry which brackets Pound off. Since the other great high modernists like Yeats and Eliot can still be fitted into this version of literary history we might ask why poor old Pound has to suffer. The answer is, surely, that in the Cantos he wanted to move beyond what he had done (the Troubadour style, the Cathay style, “Homage to Sextus Propertius” and “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly” – enough to ensure, if not immortality, then at least a long life of literary relevance) and make a modern epic. Of course the Cantos are a failure, how could they not be, but they never ask to be judged positively by the poetic tradition that will give us, via the poetry of Wilbur and Larkin, the poems of Clive James. But I deal with this at some length (trying to omit the fact that, if critics are to be judged by their ability to recognise contemporary genius – the mystical act of “discrimination” – then Pound, discoverer and unwavering supporter of Frost, Eliot and Joyce, has to be the finest critic in English poetry) because all of the ideas about poetry which lie at the heart of James’s criticism derive from the mode of the lyric. Classical poetic theory had no trouble distinguishing between the tragic mode and the dramatic but never incorporated the lyric into its analysis – that came centuries later. You could say that the approach of Poe (all poetry is lyric, epics are just marked out by having longer boring stretches between the only things that matter, the hits), ludicrous in its time and still ludicrous, has been allowed in through a side door and dressed to look respectable. James’s criticism of Milton for his tendency to shove extended classical references into Paradise Lost might well derive from this. If you think secondary epics are no good as a mode, then that’s fine (I might even agree), but you can’t criticise them for not being poems by Wilbur or Larkin.

These criticisms of Poetry Notebook: 2006-2014 are, of course, really flatteries since it’s a book that makes you think a fraction less vaguely about your own notions of poetry at every point at which you disagree with something that James has said. But there are other excellent things that should be celebrated overtly. James is, for a start, brilliant at discussing poems by people whose names you probably don’t even know – Samuel Menashe, for one. He is also good at poets who have been forgotten entirely. A brief discussion of Dunstan Thompson, beginning by quoting a stanza and imagining – and asking the reader to imagine – being forced to guess who the author might be (always a delicious exercise in literature as well as music) leads to a perceptive analysis of why he should be a forgotten man. I think the same could be said about Frederic Prokosch who gets a mention in Poetry Notebook as the author of one of those interesting poems which are easy to remember and very hard to understand. But in Prokosch’s case the answer is simpler than in the case of Thompson: he never recovered from one of Jarrell’s reviews! James mentions the possibility of an anthology of such poems and, though you feel he is teasing publishers for their conservatism and the need of big, recognisable names, I think it’s a terrific project.

And then there is a self-contained essay “Product Placement in Modern Poetry” that explores a topic which not only did I have no ideas about but which I had never thought of: when does poetry start including names, especially brand names? And why, in the past, has poetry with all its vaunted specificity shied away from brands? The issue enables him to discuss Cummings, Betjeman and Seidel as well as yet another poet I had never heard of, L.E. Sissman. And his answers are persuasive, I think. Beginning in America where the brands were part of the exhilaration of contemporary speech, their inclusion marked an increase in “the vocabulary of reality” a realisation that

the artificially generated language of here and now could be continuous with the everlasting. It didn’t guarantee the everlasting, and even today so keen-eyed a poet as Seamus Heaney will tell you everything about a plough except for the name of its manufacturer: but a reference system in the temporal present was no longer held to be the enemy of a poem’s bid for long life.

No wonder that one of James’s best and most moving poems begins with a first line that quotes an advertising phrase for a home “perm”.

A good book like this always sharpens your thoughts about the assumptions behind your own approach to the magic of poetry. For what it’s worth, my own approach is probably the inverse of James’s. Whereas he begins with the central phenomenon of the hit, the memorable, scalp-tightening and enduring phrase, I’m inclined to begin at the other, more abstract extreme. Seeing that poetry, or something like it, exists in all cultures at all times, I’m inclined to see it as “art language”, the language of a tribe used at its most effective and in its most powerful way. The issues that get aired in Poetry Notebook (and my reading of it) such as the tensions between, say, formal and free verse, the post-poundian tradition and the lyric tradition, between poetry and poems, between epic, dramatic and lyric and so on, are all very minor seen in the perspective of the possibilities contained in poetry as it is and has been practiced on the planet. I think the wider the perspective the better the critic: we should be able to match observable practices in our own poetic culture with things as disparate as Zulu praise poetry, the oriental lyric, the Arabic tradition etc etc. Of course, much in poetry – like English poetry’s hits – requires a profound immersion in the language and so our perspectives are, naturally, limited. But professional linguists suffer similar problems (though they are probably even better language learners than literary people) and yet they aren’t inhibited from making statements about language in general (the study of linguistic typology) and they certainly don’t think that English is a base point from which one will be able to say anything at all useful about language as a whole. I’d rather, in other words, that poetry critics behaved more like typologists when they wanted to speak generally about the nature of poetry and less like sophisticated grammarians of English. James is never limited to English poetry and is more polyglot and more widely-read than I am, but there is still a European perspective on poetry in his approach.

Laurie Duggan: Allotments and East & Under the Weather

Allotments (Bristol, UK: Shearsman, 2014), 70pp.
East & Under the Weather (Glebe: Puncher & Wattmann, 2014), 97pp.

These two books, published within a few months of each other, give readers the opportunity to look at Laurie Duggan’s career from both ends, so to speak. East & Under the Weather is a compilation, re-editing and enlargement of Duggan’s first book matched with a re-presentation of his second. Allotments, on the other hand, could be seen as a kind of English version of his “Blue Hills” sequence and is a showcase for his most recent work. You can see the point behind re-releasing East & Under the Weather: essentially, as Duggan notes in his introduction, the former was a first, small book, edited down from a lot of material while the second, though it contains a great deal of interesting poetry and foreshadows issues present in the later work, manages to obscure this by its eccentric presentation. Charitably Duggan blames himself for this: “I had been away when the page-proofs arrived. As a result a couple of sections lost their titles and looked like single poems. One section had been split into two with a short line taken to be a title . . .” Although some of these are tidied up in Duggan’s two selecteds, it’s nice to see the work entire since it does make claims for a coherence seemingly at odds with its laid-back, “odd-notes-from-different-places” mode.

It’s always seemed important – to me at least – that Duggan’s first book should have begun with the sequence called “East” since that establishes at least one version of what might be called a documentary mode in his work. The sequence looks east – from West Clayton towards Gippsland – but also towards family history. The second and third poems are an actual document: an excerpt from the Argus of 1912 detailing the State Treasurer’s visit to Gippsland. In an act of formal precision it’s a reproduction of twenty-eight lines of newsprint, thus forming two sonnets. A passage like this seems like a rehearsal for The Ash Range, Duggan’s most document-inspired and document-built work, and “East” thus seems, by being placed first, to stress the importance of this strand. The original version of the book introduced many more poems in modes that won’t be so important in later Duggan such as versions of Rimbaud, anagrams (in the style of Jonathan Williams), and a piece, “Parkville”, made up of lines from Chris Wallace-Crabbe. This new, expanded version, adds even more but, again, they are in modes that later developments show not to be Duggan’s strongest suit. “A Literary Life” is a group of sonnets playing with a jazz-like structure of repeated, modified and repositioned lines and “Crossroads” is one of those poems which combines the subject of personal history with bringing the writing of a poem up to the surface: “this cruel, / gentle collision wending through / semicolons . . .” It’s good to have this expanded, chronologically ordered version of East, but I don’t think that I would have become an admirer as quickly as I did if that had been the way in which I first met Duggan’s work.

The repackaged version of Under the Weather is, in contrast, an unqualified blessing re-establishing just how good a second book this was. Again, the documentary impulse is what sustains it but it is a documenting of personal life, often involving travel either to the north – to Armidale, the Sara River, etc – or to the south – Kangaroo Valley, Coalcliff, Dapto. One bleak poem (there is another one called “Spleen”) is positioned in a library, the site of part-time employment as well as the storage of texts like “Racine’s Mother Characters”. It’s a kind of limbo (one thinks of Borges in the National Public Library of Buenos Aires) sustained by marijuana and flickering contact with friends:

          George in London squatting in Charteris Rd.
plenty of Xopta – this the only Greek word to appear in
his letters
          Terry driving thru Cornwall, Wales, Scotland – “like
a ballroom dancer with a club foot”
          Alan, drunk in New York, phoning Scotty collect from
a booth
          John working as a clerk in Australia house -

                                      O Ganja
                                      preserver of us all
                                      one more time . . .

          & then the Library, Freya’s Day

                                        O Ganja
be with me in my (8) hours of need . . .

This self-portrait of a dope-smoking drifter with a shifting cohort of friends (presented in a shambling book design that makes the structure of the poems opaque) enables you to understand the irritation it caused a lot of the reviewers at the time of its original publication. But in retrospect the book as a whole sets up the contradictory components of the Duggan self that are going to be the basis of the best of the later work whereby Duggan appears simultaneously as a vague, often confused ring-in in a group (“Ken Wythes: what do you mean? / explain yourself? / Reply: um ah well”) and also as a very sharp-eyed observer with a penchant for revealing signs. Duggan’s introduction tells us that the harsh reception of this book lead him to the next stage of poems as formal satires and from there to the translations of Martial and to a series of translations generally. I don’t think these are Duggan at his best – perhaps because to be a good satirist the poet has to speak for community rather than for an odd, individual outlook, but The Ash Range and the developing series of “Blue Hills” poems kept the documenting impulse alive, though in quite different ways – the former being a stately representation of a specific place and the latter much more quirky and free opportunities to deal with the interaction of place, life and important themes in Duggan’s work such as the visual arts.

Although the times have changed, and hippyish camps have been replaced by solid English pubs, that paradoxical core of the poet as a sociable character and, at the same time, an outsider with a quirky, outsider’s perspective on things persists into Allotments. But to imply that Allotments is the spirit of the “Blue Hills” poems transferred from east coast Australia to south-east England obscures a number of differences between them. The most important of these is that the reader has a sense that the “Blue Hills” sequence is an act of poetic freedom, establishing an open space where a lot of disparate poetic activity can take place. If it has any structure it will be an “organic” one which emerges and changes as the sequence grows. In Allotments you get a hint of an imposed form in the way in which the hundred poems seem to cycle through a year’s worth of seasons. In this sense it may be half way between “Blue Hills” and Crab & Winkle, Duggan’s “warped Shepherd’s Calendar” of 2009. At any rate, one of the poems – Allotment 5 – uses (I think) a conference on the work of Charles Olson held at the University of Kent in 2010 to air the issue of the structure of long, assemblage poems and thus return to a theme that obsessed Pound and has obsessed the post-Poundian tradition. Duggan’s position amongst these giants is characteristically modest. In “Allotment 37” he says: “my work irrelevant as / an immense puzzle, lifelong” and “Allotment 5” concludes:

. . . . .
                                                                                such the fate
                                                                                of epic

the breath of a man
struggling for same

                                                           in the light of lecture rooms
                                                                               my writing

cuts corners, loses
the thread

                                                                     the notebook
                                                                     steers towards November

towards (including) disorder
(Olson’s final line: he’d lost the lot)

This final line invites us to read “plot” instead of “lot” and thus seems close to a fairly basic comment about twentieth century “epic” poetry. But it also reminds the reader that the book’s title, which seems, on the surface, to be an attempt to find a word as completely English as “Blue Hills” is Australian, also contains suggestions of “what we are allotted”, what is our fate, as well as “how are things to be allotted, ie placed?”. “Allotment 40” engages with this by developing a pun on the word “fault”:

radio at 4.00 am
news of an earthquake, the second
in a month on the Pacific fault
as in “whose”?
                                            things happen
they’re not punishment, we just
(Shinto) have to deal with them.

These formal issues aren’t likely to be our first impressions of Allotments, though. The regular settings in pubs (there are a dozen or so of these, most of them named, the names being yet another mysterious verbal sign) replace the camps and friend’s rented houses of Under the Weather as sites of the sociability. It is no accident that the first line of the first poem, “Live, at the local . . .” exploits the pun whereby the first meaning of “local” to a poet (experience of the immediate environment as opposed to the “universal”) is overlaid by the second – the pub. But, in Duggan, the immediate is always impregnated with complexities that make the experience awkward. The pub of the first poem, for example, contains a “brooding Irish accent” and an old door, leading “through to a French delicatessen, / bolted, probably, for decades”: no ethnic purity in these experiences of the local. At a pub called the William IV in Shoreditch (celebrated in “Allotment 4”) the awkwardness emerges verbally when the nervousness induced by waiting for an audience to arrive for his poetry reading produces a stream of semi-conscious verbal gags “I have books to sell (ha ha) / and pints to go before I weep”, “the one-eyed / spill fewer beers”. Although one wouldn’t want to claim iconic status for this minor poem documenting the preparation for a reading, it expresses the conjunction of sociable insideness and awkward outsideness perfectly.

The pub is also, often, a site of writing – one of the least sociable of acts. “Allotment 28” describes how this space is shared awkwardly with two others and finishes with a fine Rimbaud joke:

a dose of “the finger” (Bishop’s)
and the fire

someone else writes in this room, or types
on a notebook
                                   a poem
a report (or both)

it’s dead quiet on the street
where earlier in the day a Dutch truck
delivered flowers

a man with a black hat and cloak enters
(also with a folder)
                                                so the room has now three (3)
readers, writers, reporters

a season by the fire or
Un Saison d’Enfer

The pub can also operate symbolically to make a sharp political point as it does in “Allotment 17”:

again, waiting
(all lager, no ale)

light glimmer through drizzle
a gust from the east

someone reads La Peste
then talks of it in German

Cameron’s Britain is
dark shapes beyond double-glazing

an imaginary space
where imagination is redundant.

And then there are, finally, those poems which are almost entirely visual. They record the momentary experience visually (“virginia creeper / red on a far wall / under a rusted vent”). Although it’s natural to want to read a visual representation for symbolic value – one could spin pages of readings of poems like 53, “cygnets on the marsh / red fox in the forest” or 41, “a robin lands, curious / as I grub weeds” – I get the feeling that these poems want to remain in the aesthetic world of visual image or, to put it another way, Duggan wants a framework that will allow representations like this to stand alone. One of them, “Allotment 74” is just a breathtakingly beautiful visual representation of a sea view. It is allegorisable, certainly, as a statement about different zones of habitation, different levels of a picture plane, but that would somehow seem to miss the point:

long grass, gnats
to shoulder height,

the North Sea:
distant, cerulean, a pink strand

far side of the mud flats,
the racket of migrating birds.

There is, in other words, a great deal of variety in Allotments despite one’s sense that it wants to suggest a structuring framework. If it is driven by an odd contradiction in Duggan’s poetic self whereby he is simultaneously a socially accepted insider and a sharp-eyed outsider it can also extend to these beautifully done visual jottings which seem to be the product of a landscape painter manque. The poems of Allotments and Under the Weather can often seem easily-done, casual jottings but there is a complex pattern behind their conception and an extraordinary quality of poise about their execution. Both books remind us what a remarkable poet Duggan has become.

Evan Jones: Selected Poems

Wollongong: Grand Parade Poets, 2014, 208pp.

Evan Jones’s career has been a long one, beginning in the late fifties (his first book, Inside the Whale, was published in 1960) and continuing productively into the present (Heavens Above! appeared four years ago). It’s also one which raises a lot of interesting issues about how a poet should be represented in a late Selected Poems: but more of that later by way of a conclusion. At the broadest literary-historical level, Jones belongs to the second wave of “academic” poets after the generation of Hope and McAuley. The word, “academic”, really means only that they were able to find a financially secure home in University teaching rather than in journalism – as the pre-war poets had – but academic life meant that they probably found it easier to keep an eye on current developments in poetry overseas through conferences and journals as well as the kind of regular contact with equals that university life encourages. At the University of Melbourne, Jones was part of a group that we associate with Vincent Buckley and which includes figures like Chris Wallace-Crabbe, R.A. Simpson, Peter Steele and, the youngest, Andrew Taylor. Groups tend to want to clear a space for themselves and whereas Hope and McAuley weighed into the Angry Penguins group and the Jindyworobaks, the “Melbourne University Poets” found the poems of Douglas Stewart’s Bulletin to be lacking in intellect. Their influences seem to have been contemporary American poetry of the postwar period, generally of a highly formal cast.

The sense that one has of Evan Jones from this selection is likely to revolve around words like “wry”, “knowing” and “mildly defeatist”. With some reservations, these characteristics can be said to be there from the beginning. The best-known poem of Jones’s first book is “Noah’s Song”, a dramatic monologue that still puzzles and thus interests:

The animals are silent in the hold,
Only the lion coughing in the dark
As in my ageing arms once more I fold
My mistress and the mistress of the Ark.

That, the rain, and the lapping of the sea:
Too many years have brought me to this boat
Where days swim by with such monotony,
Days of the fox, the lion and the goat.

Her breathing and the slow beat of the clock
Accentuate the stillness of the room,
Whose walls and floor and ceiling seem to lock
Into a space as single as the tomb.

A single room set up against the night,
The hold of animals, and nothing more:
For any further world is out of sight - 
There are no people, and there is no shore.

True, time passes in unbroken peace:
To some, no doubt, this Ark would seem a haven.
But all that I can hope for is release.
Tomorrow I’ll send out the dove and raven.

If you have followed Australian poetry in the last thirty years or so, there is a good chance that this may be the only Evan Jones poem you will be familiar with. It was routinely anthologised, though a prickly comment about it in Hall and Shapcott’s influential anthology of 1968, New Impulses in Australian Poetry explaining that “the author restrained us” from including it doesn’t explain exactly why he did so. It is also a good example of those formal, quatrain poems of the fifties and sixties which I have spoken about elsewhere, often enough, on this site, and exploits rather than fights against the slightly attenuated, tired-and-yet-knowing air that these have – what else would Noah sound like? But it retains our interest not because of its skilful form but because of the questions it poses readers. Almost all worthwhile dramatic monologues bump up against a lyrical impulse so that we say: “Yes, that’s a fine recreation of a character from quattrocento Florence or Heian Japan (or wherever) but why did you do it? What’s your stake in the poem?” We can read “Noah’s Song” as a biblical dramatic monologue, something the consistent devotion to details seems to suggest we should do (though the ticking of the clock would be an anachronism) but we can also read it as a monologue by an elderly married and reclusive man using Noah as a kind of extended metaphor. And why is a poet not even thirty interested in the situation of an old man? Is he thinking of a friend, his father, grandfather or is he just prematurely middle-aged? The questions spin out along the dangerous but necessary path of biographical information.

Often interpretive advice comes from other poems and it’s no accident that both in this selection and in Inside the Whale “Noah’s Song” is followed by a dramatic monologue in which an elderly literary man, Samuel Johnson, looks at himself – an addresses himself with a fair amount of disgust – in the mirror. You could build, out of the interaction of these two poems an interpretation of “Noah’s Song” which saw it as a kind of pre-emptive vision of the later life of a comfortably set-up literary man gradually removed from engagement with the world to the four walls of his known room. As Johnson says to his face, at the end of the poem, “Nobody knows the paths you take to hell, / Except when we’re alone: I know too well”.

The issue that “Noah’s Song” raises – of incorporating the necessary component of a biographical impulse into any interpretation of the poem – is something that Jones thinks about and we have, as evidence, a poem, “Genre Painting”, from the 1984 book, Left at the Post. Here the first two stanzas describe a painting (probably from the nineteenth century) of a domestic scene containing a man and a woman. The poem’s mode is interpretive, entering into the scene before it is described:

“You know,” she seems sadly to be saying, “I never
mean what I say”; his head is bowed. They sit forever
in yellows deepening glumly through green to black
in front of a rain-swept window, her crimson frock
and the bowl of pink roses low in the right-hand corner,
subdued though they are, all that the gazer can garner
against the sheer gloom of a perfectly minor painting,
lachrymose, accomplished, faintly haunting.

Although it goes on to brush against the distinction between “high” and genre art – “Cezanne, El Greco, Breughel are far away” – the real interest at the end is in the painter’s stake in the picture:

                                       . . . nothing at all
prompts us to wonder or outrage. But walking away one small
question remains, as if for ever and ever: what belief
led to just such a dull meticulous rendering of grief?

The issue of how far to allegorise a poem in an autobiographical direction (so as to incorporate in any reading the author’s stake in the material) re-emerges in reading two poems from Jones’s second book, Understandings. “Boxing On” is, ostensibly, about an ageing boxer but since the phrase of the title is in more general use – where it means to continue some project in a mildly despairing way – we are tempted immediately to widen the significance away from mere pugilism:

When the bell rings you come out feeling wary,
Knowing yourself you lack that brilliant snap.
Things change: you’ve lost your old need to be lairy,
And when the opening comes you see a trap.

You’re mad with craft: even your slightest move
Has years of it, each step, each fainting lead
As smooth as when there’s weight behind the glove;
You box with shadows just to keep up speed . . . . .

It’s possibly a portrait of an ageing literary lion (as Johnson was in the earlier poem) arguing habitually but without any real conviction or the ability to land any serious punches. But that wonderful phrase, “mad with craft”, makes me – without any compelling evidence – want to read it as a poem aware that the obsessive craft-oriented formalism of the poetry of the fifties and early sixties (the sort that we associate, perhaps unfairly, with the Melbourne University poets) eventually becomes no more than a hollow reflex: you may be able (to switch metaphors) to construct cabinets full of concealed spaces with wood so beautifully handled that no-one can see the joins and hardly any pins or glue are needed but, in the end, all you have are cabinets – and poetry is much bigger than that.

And I’m tempted to read “Running War” in somewhat similar fashion. Superficially it deals with the opposition between guerrillas and a city-based garrison. The former are impossible to defeat because they are group of shifting membership and, in the long run, the holder of the citadel wishes he could fight in the same, unfair way, exploiting the lack of precisely defined territories and borders:

. . . . . 
Small squadrons of your uniform parade,
Clapping their heels, across a public square - 
All with the lucid order that has made
Almost an empire, almost; but elsewhere,

Those ragged volunteers that shift like mist
Across the broken ground of shifting war
Diced for their first disorders to enlist,
And fight to have less than they had before.

Rich in imbalance, your temptation grows
To change with the marauders on the hill:
To break their city to a waste of prose;
To ride without direction, and to kill.

All readers fear that, no matter how sincerely they are seeking the author’s stake, they may only be imposing their own obsessions when they allegorise meaning, but I’m convinced that this is a poem about conflicts between the formalists and the “free verse” poets of the sixties. While the former are huddled within a defensible city, the latter have no coherent position, are a loose confederation and will eventually win the running war by being in a position simply to ignore the walled city which will ultimately collapse under the weight of its own insignificance. Much of such a reading is going to derive from a tell-tale phrase like “waste of prose” but the clapping heels of the city soldiers does suggest metric feet. But even if this direction of reading is the right one, the poem’s actual “position” about the war is ambiguous: there is no evidence that the narrator’s attitude is the author’s.

Understandings concludes with a tour-de-force: a twenty-three page poem, “A Dream of Barricades” which is certainly not about poetry wars but about a “real” war, a revolution in an unnamed country seen from the perspective of a combatant who is there from the beginning. A protest grows into a standoff (“grows” suggests something organic but there is no doubt that sinister figures are, in contrast to the narrator, well ahead in understanding the possibilities of the situation) which grows into a firefight which grows into a bloody government response and so on all with a kind of nightmare logic. It represents a political element in Jones’s work which is consistent though not intrusive. It leads me to thoughts about the title of his first book. “Inside the Whale” is a phrase, familiar to most as the title of a review of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer (as well as of English poetry in the twenties and thirties) by George Orwell. Over the years at the back of my mind I’ve wondered whether this is the source of the title of Jones’s first book without ever having the energy to find out (by digging up early reviews, for example) whether or not this is the case. The trouble with being a critic remote from “the action” is that all such readings (as of “The Boxer” and “Running War”) are speculative but the advantage, of course, is that one’s readings are closer to those of Johnson’s “common reader”. At any rate, Orwell’s essay – which describes a literary/political position – sits resonantly alongside Jones’s poems. Whereas, Orwell says, the poets of the twenties turned to the ordered world of fascism (either literally, in Pound’s case, or through the Catholic church) and the writers of the thirties to the messianic world of communism, later writers like Miller avoided all ideology in the interests of experience: “In his books one gets right away from the ”˜political animal’ and back to a viewpoint not only individualistic but completely passive – the view-point of a man who believes the world-process to be outside his control and who, in any case hardly wishes to control it . . . . .Get inside the whale – or rather, admit that you are inside the whale (for you are, of course). Give yourself over to the world-process, stop fighting against it or pretending that you control it; simply accept it, endure it, record it.” Although Miller is a bit more assertively egocentric than Orwell makes out, this position, inflected by a kind of wry defeatism, might well be Jones’s response to the slightly hysterical cold-war activities in Melbourne documented in Vincent Buckley’s Cutting Green Hay.

The Melbourne University writers formed a group and poets’ relationships to groups are always interesting. They provide argument, an early audience and constructive engagement but a group identity seems alien to a writer’s personality: it’s no accident that Chris Wallace-Crabbe once described himself as “a compulsive non-joiner”. And all this happened so long ago that it’s difficult to find evidence for how the members of the group interacted. But, to an outsider, it does seem that almost all the members spent their maturity escaping from the poetry of Melbourne University in the early sixties. Of the two features that dominate one’s sense of Evan Jones from this selection – loyalty in friendship and a wry defeatism – there is a fair chance that the former derives from those university friendships. In Left at the Post more than half of the poems have dedications and “Drinking with Friends”, as well as being a celebration of friendship, also has a really appealing element of self-mockery in its first stanza:

We used to sit up until three or four
drinking whatever there was: the decor
was characteristically indiscriminate,
the company, those curious and articulate
about politics, art, psychology. It seemed
to me I stammered, others talked: I’m damned
if I can remember getting much of a hearing.
My friends remember me as domineering . . . . .

Recognitions finishes with a set of dedicated poems and a number are in the style of their dedicatee’s work: “For Peter Steele, S.J.”, for example, is a meditation about belief done in Steele’s involved syntax with alternate indented lines and “The Point” mimics R.A. Simpson’s way of letting the syntax of a long sentence fall through short lines. These certainly aren’t parodies and they aren’t entirely hommages: more likely wry engagements with old friends. Alex Skovron’s introduction to this selected poems does speak about the books but one is more likely to take from it a sense of the man as acquaintance and friend.

As to the “wry defeatism” it’s a complicated thing to describe. One could try to do it by comparison. The work of Geoff Page, for example, is wry but not really defeatist: it has a sharp quality that Jones’s work lacks. The best way to speak of it might be to point out that in Jones’s poems about children like “A Song to David” from Understandings and “To Catherine, aged 5 months” from Recognitions he almost instinctively moves towards the moment, many years in the future, when the child will leave : “What parents have to learn / is how to let their children go: / the learning might be hard and slow.”

This Selected Poems from Grand Parade Poets presents Jones extremely attractively but some complicated issues are involved. Some poets’ work seems, if not the same over a long career, then at least distinct and following a developmental path which a late selected poems can clearly trace. The poetry of Chris Wallace-Crabbe is a good example. But others whose work shows radical shifts and rejections – that of Buckley and Taylor, for example (to stay within the group that Evan Jones belongs to) – pose quite a problem. That important early poem which now seems unreadable: was it a bad poem or has poetic history taken a turn in the last half-century that has deposited it, temporarily, in a bin as a good example of what, at the moment, is considered to be a bad kind of poem? Jones’s first book, Inside the Whale, looked back at from a perspective of fifty-five years, focusses this nicely. It is selected from fairly ruthlessly in this selected and a whole facet of Jones’s career is thus unrepresented. “Noah’s Song”, “Dr Johnson to the Mirror” and “Sketches for a Death-Mask” are fine poems in 2015 as they were in 1960 but many of the other poems in that first book are hard to admire. “Lines at Nightfall”, for example, is an eighteen page terza rima meditation which begins:

Lady, in all sincerity I turn -
     Not in belief, and not with disbelief,
     But burning as the altar-candles burn,

A slow consuming, without joy or grief
     (Though in my heart remembering much of both) -
     And proffer you this poem. Should the thief

Who tore your ancient tapestry in wrath
     Make no small reparation; should the trees
     Which crown with blossom all their winter growth . . .

It was probably intended to sound like a cross between Wallace Stevens and Coleridge’s great ode but finishes up sounding more like Dornford Yates. If you read the whole of Inside the Whale after reading this selected, you will find it hard believe they are the productions of the same poet. It isn’t so much a matter of method, of formal obsessions, but rather that many of the poems aspire to a kind of chorale-like ecstatic stasis: far from any wry defeatism. Should a selected poems represent the whole range of an output that covers more than fifty years or should it select from the poems that present the best face for a contemporary audience? Perhaps the answer is to be found in the issue of how “high-profile” the poet is. In Jones’s case it is probably fair to say that he will be a scarcely known poet to most people picking up this book in the middle of the second decade of the twenty-first century and there would be little benefit in loyally including poems from a volume published fifty-five years ago that are so different from the overall image of a poet which the book is establishing. In these terms and with these qualifications, this Selected Poems is a fine introduction to the work of a long and fruitful, albeit slightly quirky, poetic career.

L.K. Holt: Keeps (with Patience, Mutiny and Man Wolf Man)

St Kilda: John Leonard Press, 2014, 162pp.

L.K. Holt’s Keeps – her third book – is saturated with images and themes drawn from the visual arts but it is more significant that it leaves one with the sense that something of the “art-object” lies behind the existence and construction of the poems themselves. Of course there’s plenty of the visual arts in her other two books, Man Wolf Man and Patience, Mutiny, including a series of “long” sonnets about Goya, spoken by his housekeeper/mistress, Leocadia, but it’s in no way as overwhelming as it is here. The result is interesting and not only thematically. Much contemporary poetry looks like slices of material from the upper end of a vast slab of communal discourse called perhaps “discussions” or “conversations” and so the sense of poems as individual, engineered, free-standing constructions can come as welcome relief. One of the benefits of the highly formal poetry of the postwar period was that it did create a sense of a poem as a thing, a construction existing with various degrees of comfort in the world. Those, fifty years ago, who disliked this kind of poetry – a poetry whose features the New Critics were inclined to devote a lot of attention to – wanted a poetry of process, of immersion in reality rather than extruded droppings. But the wheel turns and, earlyish in the twenty-first century, there seems a lot of value in the experience of a poem as an object, rather than one which sends us running to other poems for contexts of explication. And poetry like that of L.K. Holt, camped along the borders of the visual art-world, seems to encourage this. Indeed it’s a measure of the extant of this that a comparatively conventional, personal work like “Poem for Brigid” should stand out in Keeps as something of an oddity.

The poetry of Wallace Stevens is a reference point for explorations of the nature of the “reality” of a poem, a “supreme fiction”, and of the way in which it interacts with the world and so it’s perhaps no accident that one of the poems of Keeps, “The Indigo Banjo, or Methodologies for Outcomes”, plays with Stevens’s “The Blue Guitar” – a poem that uses a work of the visual arts as its starting point. Like most of Holt’s poems, “The Indigo Banjo” isn’t easy and the free-standing features I’ve spoken of tend to mean that feeling comfortable with one poem isn’t going to guarantee that you can deal with any of the others with any confidence. “The Indigo Banjo” is made up of six sections each of which seems to deal with a different issue involved in the creative act: it begins with a poem about various preparatory acts, situations and stances long before the act of making a poem, goes on to a poem about the way a phrase lodges in the mind as irritant before being “pushed / out of the nest . . . not as a bird but / disembodied wing / unbalancing the wind” and finishes with a final preparatory state, “the plunge / just before it is a poem or just / before the plunge”:

. . . . . 
          We bathed in a deep natural pool at the top of the falls,
we were in the air on a ledge of water,
where the car-keys sank to the bottom.
It was too narrow for head-first - 
she took my hand and I held her under
and she searched by toe, my muse,

and found them: the method
I will replicate here.

The third, fourth and fifth poems introduce a really important theme in this book: that of the hinge (of a diptych), or inner margin (of a text) or mid-point (of rope, film, time). In the third poem of “The Indigo Banjo” the ego is positioned at this hinge

of vestige and prospect,
of sermon and snowstorm,
of verdant-verged cliff and

brown churned ocean,
of vestige-and-prospect
and sermon-and-snowstorm,

of corner-cutting housewives
and the type that leave behind
“papers” . . .

It begins by dividing the past from the future (vestige from prospect) as well as raw experience (snowstorm) from experience processed as text (sermon) but then, really interestingly (as can happen with any binaries) unites opposed states so that they become one side of yet another binary (which is my rather clumsy attempt to explain what lies behind “vestige-and-prospect” and “sermon-and-snowstorm”). In the fourth poem, the apparently unmotivated decision to roll over in bed is explored and, interestingly in terms of the previous poem, produces “a little dicky dialectic . . . be / irresponsible medium / or own your accidents, god-provoke. / Or go to sleep. Or be the mother.” By the time we get to the fifth poem, “Soliloquy”, the first and fundamental question is about a hinged binary: “May I start twice / at once, from memory and sensation?”

Holt explores this notion of a hinge in many of the poems which reflect on perspective and the structure of paintings. In “The Etching” a representation of the five arches on a bridge, hung next to a window, seems like a frame through which the world outside is presented but, as with all doors the process can be reversed so that the viewer, the woman who lives in the room, can also be the object that the external world sees through the five arches. In “Last Outcome”, about resurrection and perhaps based on something like “The Cookham Resurrection”, it isn’t the theological complexities that come first but the position of the observer in time and place: “You must be one of them, if you’re here / to wonder”. The final section of the poem begins with a pun on “lying” but is really based on a pun on “plot”:

Whichever soul you are, you can’t keep lying

in full moulderment - 
studying the backs of your long gone eyelids

intricately dark,
the last plot of dark, the last plot

of who did what and what became of them - 
it’s quite time for eternity.

Although this makes the unexceptionable point that narrative needs to evolve in time and eternity is the end of narrative, it has important results in something like Dante’s Commedia – a recurring source of allusions in poems other than “Late Outcome” where the narrative of one’s crimes and virtues is replicated out of time in the afterlife. Finally, a series of poems taking off from works of Dane Lovett contains – as a kind of interloper – a poem devoted to the third panel of Uccello’s “Battle of San Romano”. The binary here is “a love of surface” and “one-point perspective”:

                                         Both claim each line
for its masculine cause or feminine upkeep.
Peace is surface decoration. Sex is a horse haunch
turned to face. War is a one-point perspective.
The problem with allegory, it longs
for a one-to-one with reality, a true romancing . . .

But although this seems a poem about perspective points which focus the world (like the arches in “The Etching”) there is another element. Holt sees, as we do in those trompe l’oeil Jesus-in-the-clouds illusions, a face in the right-hand part of the painting made out of elements of horses and knights: “It takes / for its eyes the slight openings / of soldiers’ helms, its red mandrill nose bridge / a length of painted lance, its bared teeth the bronze discs strung / along a horse’s browband”. “I see it”, she says, “because I’m averse / through tiredness, modernity, / to making any sense of the action” but it’s a face which is not amenable to allegorisation: it has presence but no meaning.

If viewing through perspectives can make a point into a hinge, there is also the issue of midpoints. Near the centre of the book is a poem, “Maas River Filmreel”, whose difficulites are perhaps increased by the fact that the actual film is something I’ve never seen, unlike the paintings of John Brack, Picasso, Goya, Dane Lovett, Uccello et al, which are easily available to readers with access to the internet. The film is of a scene in Rotterdam in 1948 and lasts for seven minutes and forty-six seconds. But the poem is about what happens at the halfway point when an old woman appears: “the fold / is where something collects” and it engages that disconcerting sensation that historical film creates of looking at past time in the present. It’s a challenging poem honourably working away at its own thematic obsession but its construction is what interests me at the moment. It is built out of two contrasting elements. The first is a reasonably clear retelling of the events of the film and the second is a free version of part of Inferno so that the old lady is imagined as descending into the circles of Hell. Thematically one can see the logic of this since Dante’s journey is, famously, made at the midpoint of his particular life straddling the turn of the fourteenth century. But you feel that the real value of this conjunction is the contrast of styles between the expository mode of “the fold / is where something collects” or “the river knows its midpoint / by the holding from mountain / to mouth of a constant thawthought” and the denser Dantesque pastiche of passages like “Crow/owl amalgams, moans like a gland leak”.

In other words – and I suppose it’s a minor, laboured point – there is an assemblage quality about many of these poems that seems to belong to the satisfactions of visual art rather than those of poetic discourse. If the thing has enough tensions to stand alone then it “works”. This isn’t to say that Holt’s poetry isn’t full of the usual suspects when it comes to poetic discourse: there are a lot of verbal jokes like “it’s quite time for eternity”. A poem about the statue of a crouching Aphrodite which raises issues that will now seem consistent in Holt’s poetry – a statue is frozen in time and yet the interpretation of the meaning of the statue is a cultural phenomenon in time – finishes with two puns in two lines: “There is a time which statues won’t stand for – / we should let them tire”. Holt’s style also involves a lot of neologisms or, at least, odd uses of language: “moulderment” from “Last Outcome”, already quoted, will serve as an example but there a many others. You feel that this is part of the visual-art approach: a rough but interesting surface. From the conventional standpoint of poetic rhetoric it is something that most editors would want removed but here it seems appropriate enough.

The last part of Keeps is an extended (sixteen page) poem based on Bresson’s marvellous film about the life of a donkey, Au Hasard Balthazar. The sequence is imagined as a kind of Greek tragedy with a poetic chorus accompanying the text, and the dynamics of the thing – which goes on innocently in chronological sequence, much like Bresson’s film – is built on the interaction between the elevated language of the elders and the basic poetry of the narrative. This recalls the interaction of the Dantesque and the denotative in “Maas River Filmreel”. When Balthazar’s mother “strikes him over the head with / a teat” just after his birth, the chorus spin off into elevated metaphysics:

be ahead of all partings,
as long gone already
like winter in spring;
. . . . . 
be – yet know
of its antipode,
nothing-source of your trembled ontology . . .

At the film’s great final scene of Balthazar’s death when the tinkling herd of sheep “parts gently round him”, the chorus celebrates the inevitable joining with the vast numbers of the already dead, those who inhabit Dante’s afterlife:

is death your ownmost, Balthazar?
if not: to all that carbon, all the done creatures
in the earth, unthinkable sums,
add yourself happily and cancel the count.

“Unthinkable sums” of all that carbon but designed to be thought about. Rereading this sequence it is one of the prefatory quotations which catches the eye: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick says: “It is possible to use one’s resources to assemble or repair the murderous part-objects into something like a whole. Once assembled to one’s own specifications, the more satisfying object is available to be identified with and to offer comfort”. Assembling parts into a whole of one’s own specifications seems like a perfect description of the poem-object direction the poems of this book want to take.

Does this relate to the book’s title – which doesn’t derive from any of the poems it contains? Possibly it does refer to the comfort that something stable made out of “murderous part-objects” can convey. It also suggests phrases like “playing for keeps”. But it may also derive from a poet’s sense that certain poems, as they are written, are “keepers”. The book in which Keeps appears also contains Holt’s previous books. It’s a nice idea – already essayed by the publisher (John Leonard Press) in the case of the three books of Petra White – and it enables earlier work to be kept in print – hopefully for keeps.

Mark Tredinnick: Bluewren Cantos

Sydney: Pitt St Poetry, 2013, 137pp.

This is Mark Tredinninck’s second book of poetry: he is probably better known for his superb memoir, The Blue Plateau, detailing the geology, history, ecology and people of parts of the Blue Mountains. Bluewren Cantos is in the same intense and engaging mode as his first book of poetry, Fire Diary (2010) and can make a claim to be the kind of poetry which might redefine a reader’s interest in the natural world and the way human beings relate to it. It’s a poetry which is simultaneously rhapsodic and highly intelligent and one of its impressive features is the way in which it balances a long-lined rhapsodic tone – the natural world is routinely described, sufi-fashion, as “the Beloved” – with a registering of reality which, if not exactly gritty, still has a wry perspective on the self and its predicaments.

A short poem from Fire Diary, “What I Fear”, is a good doorway through which to step into the Tredinnick world:

1
Is that I’ll die with the world unread
on my bedside table and you
                                                    a mystery beside me in my bed
and my own intended life an item too far down the list
                                                                                                 ever to have got done.

2
But today I wake at the moment of dawn and hear the world
catch her breath and see the crimson sun
                                                                         undone in the yawning elm,
and I feel my child’s sleeping breath,
                                                                  and I stop.

The drive behind this poem is the drive to understand: the fear is just that this might never happen. Understanding, for which almost all the poems strive, is a complex epistemological relationship between the self and others and the self and nature and in this poem the metaphor used is one of reading. It’s a metaphor shared by another, more complex Fire Diary poem, “Reading the Entrails” where, on election day – and political issues as well as broadacre social ones hover in the background of a number of poems – two hens are killed by a fox. Is this an “unhappy augury”?

. . . . . 
Well, it turns out the fox just got lucky
                                                                        and the chooks were just dead
and none of this was a metaphor for anything. It turns out
we didn’t put the fox back in charge of the chookhouse.
. . . . . 
It turns out this is just the way
                                                          the syntax of the real world runs,
implying one thing, meaning at once another. Meaning everything
ends, the good with the bad. The whole world, it turns out, is a metaphor,
and nature is a blind god’s prophecy. The hens were innocents; they were also
the regime and they were our better selves.
                                                         The last thing we have to lose.

This is a poetry, in other words, whose task is to work out both the general desirable relationship between humans and the world (a kind of ecological/ethical perspective) and the specifically intellectual relationship between the two. Poems – metaphorised as many things in these two books – are vehicles of this understanding. Metaphor has the function of relating the world to the self (the world is like a lover, a dream etc) and the self to the world (my self is like a landscape, a tree etc) but it also has the capacity to continuously shift the terms and produce, over an entire book, an ever-changing, kaleidoscopic view of the issues involved in understanding the world and what it means – if it can be said to “mean”. It’s this metaphor-induced instability of the sides of the relationship that leaves one with one of the distinctive impressions of Tredinnick’s poetry: that it is full of eloquent assertions on these issues but that none represents a finally arrived-at understanding – the search is a continuous one.

Bluewren Cantos is very much a book of birds – so much so that it might be thought of as “Tredinnick’s Book of Birds” – and the functions they play in the shifting relationship between the human and the natural world. Although the third section, “Stray Birds”, is ostensibly devoted to them, they play a crucial role in the other parts of the book as well: so much so that it might be handy to have a field guide to Australian birds alongside you as you read it! Often the descriptions are wonderfully accurate. Sandhill Cranes (a non-native bird encountered in North America), for example, “carry their legs / Behind them like music stands they never learned / To fold” and there are some acute observations of the mysterious stillnesses of kingfishers:

Nothing sits so still so long as
The bluest bird in the world. In pairs
They work their lives alone, one
On each bank of the same matrimonial
Stream . . .

Birds can act as “messengers of the gods” trafficking information between the two worlds as they do in an early poem, “A Day at Your Desk All Along the Shoalhaven” (“All day birdsong / Went off like stars going out or emails / Coming in, some of it spam, all of it pressing”). They can be visitants from the sacred as they are in the book’s first poem where they are described, rather wonderfully, as “harbingers of themselves, of all / Our selves, peeled pieces of eternity’s paint” or as they are in a later one, “Faith” where “Two gang gangs fly over, / Closing behind them the gate / I hadn’t heard them open between the worlds”. They can be incarnations of the gods in a sequence like “The Wombat Vedas” which, as its title suggests, rather playfully lets Hindu mythology and cosmology set the tone of the piece.

No matter what the theme of a poem, it’s likely that birds are going to appear in some symbolic form or other. In “Resistance”, a poem about how humans and the natural world resist the depredations of “dictators / and outcomes-oriented cabalists” by taking back the moment from “everyone who cannot begin to know / the beauty it bestows; / to return it to everyone who just might” we are told “this is why the gang gangs are up there, / Even now, running repairs on reality, / as if it were an old gramophone”. In “Sulphur-crested Sonnet” the tendency of cockatoos to fly theatrically towards their human observer before veering away sets the stage for the idea that “The world works best when it misses // Its mark” and in a fine, comparatively “stand-alone” poem, “Frogmouth on the Wire”, that mysterious bird, revealed by her silence and stillness amidst “a bedlam of possum / Croak and corella backchat” becomes the bearer of the absolutely other, the inexpressible:

She looks like that thing for which
There never was one name – love,
Truth, emptiness, grace – only
Form and metaphor.
                                 She burns
With her self. Half hunger, half
Ease; as ready for sleep as
For death. She is everything
The night is not; everything
It is . . .

And sometimes, though rarely, just as cigars are sometimes only cigars, so the birds are only birds.

Birds are only one component of an attempt to correctly read the world but they are the most memorable component. But, as “What I Fear” suggests, other people and our love for them is something that needs to be read correctly too. Though Bluewren Cantos reveals a self that communes with the natural world best in solitude (the book’s first section, “A River at Dusk” arises from a solitary spell at Bundanon on the Shoalhaven) there is a good deal about individual loved ones. In fact the strength of these poems about children, partners, parents and grandparent may lie not so much in their individual excellence but in the way in which they are so firmly grounded in actual people and thus provide something of a counterbalance to a style which often runs the risk of a certain rhapsodic cloudiness. One of the things about the prose work, The Blue Plateau, that makes it so successful is the way in which the larger perspectives of geology and history and the individual meditations about self, country and place are grounded by the actual speech patterns of the author’s local acquaintances. This isn’t available in poetry – I can’t imagine the stories of the Maxwells and the Commens being worked up into an Alan Wearne-like narrative, or even, for that matter, into a Les Murray-like verse narrative though the characters might find a friendly welcome in that poetic – and the ability of such poems as the portrait of the author’s grandfather, a hardline protestant minister discovering the pleasures (and horrors) of American-style jive preaching make a valuable counterweight. There is a fine poem about the birth of a daughter – alluding to Yeats’s great poem – and a particularly moving poem about the nature of fatherhood, dedicated to the author’s father on his eightieth birthday:

In the teeming and intimate foreground families are,
Fathers are for silence and distance, and there’s a lot
Of both to keep.
                        If a father does not sit to dinner, say,
His mind elsewhere, where will a child learn that love
Is a far-flung cosmos, growing farther by the second; that
There’s a whole universe of elsewhere, none of which
Lies closer than the father at your side?
                                                                 Fathers are for carrying
You beyond the present tense and moment. They are to family
What weather is to country – in it, not of it.
. . . . . 
Like most children, for whom what’s real is as young as they are,
I paid my father’s past too little attention until it was too late,
So that the life that made him, and made me, is a silence 
That’s going to have to keep.
. . . . . 
                                                                    A father’s job 
Is to keep his secrets, and in keeping them, tell you
Your own . . . 

It’s an eloquent and moving poem built out of generalities but based firmly on an individual (and, of course, based also on that “father/farther” homophonic pun).

The poems of Bluewren Cantos also have a lot to say about the poet’s own self and its growth – and, by extension, about all our selves. It is one of the things Tredinnick does particularly well and it’s part of the interaction between the natural world and the human worlds that the former should induce change and development in the latter. At one point, “The Burning House”, this has Buddhist colourings – “And let all you thought sheltered you fall to the ground. / Who you are, and always were, is what’s left of whoever walks out of there” – but at others, such as “Encrypted Sculpture”, they are simply well-observed aspects of how we live.

And finally – though it doesn’t figure as one of the fears in “What I Fear” there is the issue of death. Its significance in this book is highlighted by the fact that the first poem, “With Emily in the Garden”, is built around the news of a friend’s death and the final poem, “It Matters How We Go”, which includes a reference to the death of Seamus Heaney, is not only about how we walk the earth and how we might conceive of ourselves as it is about how we leave the world. And “how we leave the world” itself has, of course, the double meaning of the state it is in when we go and the way in which we die.

Bluewren Cantos is a most affecting book although it is not going to affect everybody. As I began by saying, it is one of those books which can make us experience the world more intensely simply by the recurring ways in which its poems celebrate our existence within the natural world. It’s that effect which helps to stave off potential problems. If parts can, when quoted out of context, occasionally sound like excerpts from a self-help book this is balanced by the sophistication of the poems which are always tense and alive as poems. My profoundest reservations – which are probably more specific to me than they would be to most readers – involve the cultural references which range from the Vedas, Upanishads and Bhagavad Gita of Hinduism, to Rumi, to the Buddha, to Japanese poets and so on – all the usual suspects, as they say. These aren’t vague or trivial references – I’m happy to believe that Tredinnick is deeply well read in all these works and that he might well want to mount the argument that there has been a religious response to the natural world which is probably coterminous with the human race itself and that he wants to tap into this response wherever possible. It’s just that they are so entirely conventional that they look like a cliche and references to them more like gestures than intellectual engagements. As I say, this might be a jaundiced response peculiar to me. Wordsworth – whose project wasn’t entirely dissimilar – made do without any such references and other poets (for example, Olson among his imaginary Mayans, Pound with his obscure medieval exemplars of good economic behaviour) have chosen specific, non-cliched cultures to draw sustenance from. A poem from Fire Diary contains a scene in which the poet’s daughter sitting in a yogic posture says to her brother,

Look at me, I’m praying, No
he says, having none of this
new age cant; you’re doing Kung-Fu.

I’m on the side of the boy here, and it’s comforting that Tredinnick knows how much the vague gestural cant of the new age needs to be avoided.

Rob Wilson: Free Will and the Clouds

Wollongong: Grand Parade Poets, 2014, 84pp.

One’s initial description of Free Will and the Clouds might be that it is made up of seventy-two poems in the surreal narrative/scenario mode. But that might be a dangerous pigeonholing since it suggests that surreal narrative is a consistent, predictable genre when in fact it is as various as any other. One of the issues of this mode, as with any poetic mode which eschews making a connection with its readers at the level of common human experience (so-called “humanist” lyrics, for example) is whether the resulting poems are in any sense engaging. Rob Wilson’s poems work for me at this level – where many don’t – though I might be hard-pressed to analyse why they make a connection with the reader. Wittiness might be one reason but I think that that turns out to be a symptom rather than a cause. If poems don’t connect first, what might be wittiness turns out to be mere smart-arsery.

Surreal poetry can often engage intellectually when it sends the reader in a search for its generative elements. We ask, almost instinctively, “What connects the disparate parts of this poem? Does it spin out of an underlying and often unspoken image or phrase – Riffaterre’s hypogram – and, if it does, along what axes does it spin?” Although such an intellectual engagement can be compelling, as compelling as the solution to a maths problem or a detective novel, it also begs a lot of questions. The most important of these is that it assumes that there is a generative unity that can be uncovered by really good readers and so the act of reading might run counter to the intentions of a really hard-line surrealist who wants his or her poems to be absolutely beyond the realm of something so trite as paraphrasable meaning. Or perhaps meaning may be there and may be there to be discovered but the meaning derives either from the reader or from the juxtaposition of elements. In this situation, any two lines chosen in the most aleatory way possible and run together will contain a meaning but it will not be an “intended” one in the sense of being intended by the author – though it is quite possible to argue that it derives from the cultural, or even linguistic, matrix from which the two lines are chosen.

This is, in other words, a complicated area with all kinds of difficulties for the reader – especially any reader who wants to write about the poems – and my introduction to this review is partly designed to build an admittedly porous defensive wall around what I have to say about these poems. The possible relationship between the writer of surreal texts and the texts themselves can span an entire spectrum from, at one end, “These come like dreams and like dreams I know they are meaningful and that I do not understand the meaning. As a reader, help me” to “What you call meaning and find as meaning in these poems is just a soft-centred readerly fantasy. My poems are successful abstract constructions which work ‘poetically’ without recourse to such fantasies”. A reader of poems in this mode has to try to intuit how their author is positioned when it comes to these issues. Readers have only the text whereas the author (and, probably, his or her friends) have the additional knowledge of what lies behind the poems, ranging from general theories to specific poetic positions and, even, complex generative schemes which could never be deduced by any but a hypothetically perfect reader and which can, like Roussel’s, be detonated later to the humiliation of incompetent readers. As “Save Our Souls” from Free Will and the Clouds says:

There are codes in everything.
If you look hard enough,
I’ll be sitting here
trying to make this joke I’ve been tinkering with . . .

One of the first things one can say about Free Will and the Clouds is that there is a lot of verbal activity driving the poems. This is a feature of surrealism but it is also a feature of fairly conventional, Freudian, dream analysis. The difference is that in the latter the function of the puns and slips is to cloak whereas in the former it is often to drive the poem as it develops in its own weird and unpredictable way: the best quick example of this might be John Forbes’s “Stalin’s Holidays” in which two lines – “Does form follow / function? Well after lunch we hear a speech . . .” – develop in this way. In Free Will and the Clouds there is a certain level of this sort of punning language: “The Speed of Gossip”, for example, begins “Few are satisfied with their lot in life / till someone turns their wife into Eritrea salt” thus connecting Lot’s wife of Genesis 19 with “lot” meaning “portion” – a not uncommon pun – and allowing the internal rhyme of “life” with “wife” to strengthen the connection. In “Tried to Go to Heaven” a boy’s yelling “Extra! Extra” generates the phrase “extraneous information”. The same poem speaks of “mouthy games of chess” which might be an example of that enjoyment of the sound (rather than meaning) of odd conjunctions: the next poem speaks of “a slouchy perch / on the side of a green hill”. Two lines from “Save Our Souls” – “Out at the heart farm, / vile waterways cackle over rocks” – have quite a few things going on at this level. To say that waterways cackle is the kind of image one might find in a fairly conventional lyric, interestingly contrasting a first word where soft continuants are dominant with a second where it’s all a matter of hard stops; to call the waterways “vile” is to allow mood to irrupt into the poem in a way that recalls many surreal lyrics; and to speak of a “heart farm” is to make a nice assonantal pairing within a thematically intriguing concept. Finally there are a few examples of deliberately playing not with double meanings of words but with double readings of syntax. “I Saw Esau” – whose title suggests verbal play – has as its first line, “All he was after was” with its ambiguous “after”. “Camera Farm Mishaps” has the clause, “Drag out the death / penalty box now we can all / share in the joy of the state . . .” where either “death” and “penalty” can be connected (and the box might be a place one can tick on a form) or “penalty” and “box” can be connected (and suddenly we’re in the world of very sinister football matches!) The same trick is played in the next poem, “Cobwebs on the Anvil”, which says, “Jack / in the box office will fill you in for half the original price”.

Some of these poems yield more easily to our “irritable search after meaning” than others and one is inclined to hang grimly onto these in one’s first few readings of the book. Take “November Tango”, for example:

He tiptoes everywhere these days
figuring they’re on their way by now.

All I could do was scream into the air
as the sky darkened with cloud.

A snowdrift.
A heavy overcoat and glasses
and a scarf buffeting the chin.
But on those cicada-hot birthdays,
you would spring to life,
hopping barefoot over
molten bitumen to catch the milkman.

The railway line
stretches in both directions.

People always think they can start again.
The suburbs,
the parks and dirty streams.

The title suggests one of the images of the poem, people skipping over hot roads in summer, and thus has the quality of phrases like “the toilet queue shuffle”, but it also uses two words from the Civil Aviation alphabet and thus represents NT (perhaps the Northern Territory?) At its heart I think it’s a poem about the circularity of the seasons as opposed to the illusion of linear development which encourages people to think “they can start again”. And it begins with an example of the kind of linguistic play I’ve already spoken of. In the first line we read “these days” as a minor, cliched adverbial phrase modifying “tiptoes” but it is also the referent of the “they” in the second line which, before we realise this, we will read as a sinister, if not paranoid, reference to unnamed individuals.

Among these more “approachable” poems is “Puberty Blacks” (whose title suggests that it is about an intensified version of puberty blues), “Dream Staggers” (whose title and some later, significant lines – “Now you are headed for that maze, / with the black dream staggers” – locates us in the images of dreams, their emotional potency and their problematic interpretations, “Vinegar and Brown Paper” (a comic/nightmare version of “Jack and Jill”), and “Look at the Camera!”:

I think I’m a window.

When that thought first occurred,
it sat comfortably with me.
“That’s it,” I said. “I’m done for,”
and squeezed the wood of the doorframe.

Individuals stand wide in the park
then move toward the fountain,
barely looking at each other.

Here’s the part of the poem where
I try to impress you
like the first time you
heard about ghosts.

I am slightly concerned that you are a camera
and that your memories sit coiled inside you
gelatine thick.

Like “November Tango” it’s a poem built on oppositions: the self as a window and the other’s self as a camera, the former transmitting reality undistorted as in the fourth wall of realist drama or the methods of realist prose and the latter brooding on experience before allowing it to hatch into something possibly monstrous. The poem’s oppositional structure is stressed by its symmetries: there are four- then three-line stanzas after the opening statement and the poem begins and ends with different metaphorical readings of the idea of sitting. At the same time the entire poem either develops or plays with or mocks the title of the play (and film) based on Isherwood’s novel. And yet another perspective might be the context of the poems seen in toto where images of cameras (and looking, recording and being seen) regularly recur, especially later in the book.

Perhaps the most conventionally surrealist poem (I’m aware that that can be seen as a paradox) is “The Battle and the War”:

Like closing a dead man’s eyes
is considered priceless,
the smoke outside your skin is directly related
to the fire in your gizzards.

Chess and physics.
My father is paying my sister to follow you around.
You’ve been dead for weeks and weeks
and nobody sang,
stood on a stool
or drafted a petition.

Sit around and listen to Chopin
and flip that fucking coin for once.

Whatever the overall “meaning” (and one can think of a few possibilities though they would need to incorporate the opposition of individual battle and larger war as well as that of chess versus physics), the structure of the poem is held together by the idea of a coin which is, at first, placed on a dead man’s eyes to pay the ferryman over the Styx, secondly, used to pay someone and thirdly used for determining chance.

Surreal scenarios or narratives thrive on disjunctions either, as I said at the beginning, to encourage the search for a unifying element or to try to thwart that search. From this point of view, Free Will and the Clouds isn’t especially forbidding. True, a poem like “He’s Just Gonna Do Nothin’” is a bit of a challenge as is “Everything He Owns”:

The room is old and will burn
to the ground minutes from now.

You and your dad on the side
of the highway with a big bag
of spuds,
Universal dyed black
into the hessian.

He stayed up all night shaving
the morning air of orange peel.
Currawongs whinge loudly from the gum.

The central stanza may be a memory (or photograph) and thus something the poet “owns” and the last conceivably might be also; but the first can hardly be. But then the desire to read the three elements as consistent is part of a reading’s inevitable search for meaning.

As often in surreal poems, the consistent element is one of tone and mood. Rereading Free Will and the Clouds is likely to leave you with a strong aftertaste of bitterness and distress combined with a jauntiness that is often expressed in the wonderful titles. Such a combination makes one think of the blues which often mix a lugubrious musical tone with some indications of personal resolve. “The Harpo Marx Blues” is a poem that expresses this well. The poet’s dog has run away, his “baby” has left him (though the next line mitigates the conventional misery of this by continuing “sitting at a train station”), he has dropped his watch and “dreamt of you again”. The last stanza makes a nice surprise by moving from lament to observation:

. . . . . 
mouth-blown free reed instruments
appeared in the United States, South America,
the United  Kingdom and in Europe
at roughly the same time.

In “Pet Idiot” we meet a psychic rupture that outlives the dream in which it appeared:

. . . . . 
Love poems? God only wrote war songs!
Sat in a tree young and thought up guns.

Doctor, the gash is still there
despite the dream clearly being over.

Something seems ruptured
I’m
          unable
                          to put a finger on it
like a Tennessee Williams illness. . . .

The very first poem of the book, “Moon on a Stick” finishes with “The part of your heartbeat will be played by / a smooth grey stone / high on a dark shelf” and a later poem, “Backyard with Marquee” has a very downbeat (if mildly humorous) conclusion:

. . . . . 
I read a book that said
the universe is simply a tunnel,
dark at either end.

There is a small museum,
behind the clock you pass on your way home.
You’re there, mislabelled
on a black shelf, struggling to move.

Ultimately the way most readers will get some sort of handle on this impressive (and, as I’ve said, very engaging) book will by reading it as the impressions of a mislabelled poet, struggling to move in a psychologically oppressive atmosphere. In the book’s last poem, a slightly untypical piece dedicated to the late Benjamin Frater, that poet’s afterlife is to be celebrated – “you’re Johnny Cash / living in a flat full of burned rubber, / singing underwater, / falling in love / with the Earth and its birdlife” – whereas the fate of those still alive and writing on the planet is a bit bleaker: “and I’m sitting in some room / in the world / trying to make sense of senselessness”.

Zenobia Frost: Salt and Bone; Phillip Gijindarraji Hall: Sweetened in Coals

Salt and Bone, North Hobart: Walleah, 2014, 63pp.
Sweetened in Coals, Port Adelaide: Ginninderra, 2014, 77pp.

Two likeable first books with completely different orientations: the one inner-suburban and concerned with the contemporary, the other set in places as far afield as the Blue Mountains, Gordonvale and Borroloola and, though dealing with the present, keeping an eye on the perspectives of geological time.

Much of Zenobia Frost’s Salt and Bone is concerned with the inner, older suburbs of Brisbane an area to which, as a long-time resident of Paddington and Auchenflower, I’m always attracted. It is the world of possums, VJ walls and apocalyptic summer storms. The book has a handsome cover: a line drawing by Bettina Marson of the steps and verandah of a “Queenslander”. But one wouldn’t want to give the impression that this is all the book is about, or its most important contribution or even where its best poems congregate. Salt and Bone is organised so that the poems about these suburbs are framed by poems which are quite different – though they reflect consistent interests. Also not all of the poems based in inner-suburban Brisbane are overtly about an attempt to “capture” the quality of suburbs like Toowong – they are a long way from Laurie Duggan’s poetic anthropology – but, in their detailing of personal experiences that take place there, capture it they do.

“Civic Duty”, dedicated to the Civic Video Store in the suburb of Rosalie, is about the phenomenon of video stores, something that already seems no more than a brief flicker in historical time, like sound cassettes and VHS:

. . . . .
But one day Civic Video
will close and on that day
there will be nothing:
neon-gone – a glowing
museum set piece.
Whatever killed the dinosaurs
is killing Civics. Already paleozoic,
Blockbuster never saw Rosalie
craft an ark of empty video cases . . .

The four poems of “Belonging Quartet” are exactly about the complex ways of “belonging” to a city, and begin with the tradition of housesitting, here in the older, stumped suburbs: “I lie in the clawfoot, / reading the ceiling’s pine calligraphy. // I eat, I sleep, I talk to possums / who won’t talk back”. And another poem, “This is the House”, while not specifically located in the inner suburbs – it might well be semi-rural – identifies these wonderful houses perfectly:

by a trellis with runner beans
ochre hens and guinea fowl
. . .
see shelves of books and post-it notes
that climb the walls like cubist vines . . .

“After Midnight: Toowong” is a classic piece of portraiture that will resonate with anyone who knows the suburb in summer:

The night’s swelter
cut with lemon myrtle,

we slink
between ibis-legged houses
and wakeful graveyard.

Possums troupe feats – wire
to teeming wire, with tails
                          inking the sky.

At night these dark hills
are waves to carry us. We belong

To the hour of the curlew -
to the blues of its determined song.

Of course, Toowong is the site of inner Brisbane’s major cemetery, a fact that helps to unite these suburb poems with the more morbid poems that introduce the book. I say morbid but the issue that needs examination is the extent to which the concern with graveyards, death and black magic is a lifestyle issue (and hence trivial) or an obsessive theme (and hence, for any poet, crucial).

It’s certainly a consistent theme and appears most openly in poems like “The Hobby” dedicated to a Russian whose particular obsession was exhuming bodies and taking them home as companions:

. . . . . 
my bevy, twenty-nine exotic birds
there’s barely room for me against my desk
there’s barely room anymore at home . . .

He is described as “a cemetery archaeologist” which might be no more than an attempt to dignify a very quirky fetish but which adds a consistent perspective to the poems which are in one way or another about death. The dead lie in cemeteries, they can be visited and they can also be uncovered: and they have secrets to tell. Two of the inhabitants of Toowong cemetery are the McKenzies a tragic couple of the twenties. When her husband was questioned by police over a suspected business scam, the wife suicided – sending a letter to the police before doing so. Later, the husband shot himself by her grave. The pair are celebrated in a two part poem, “The McKenzie Pair”, written in a three-line, unrhymed version of the pantoum. Less tragic but nonetheless quirkily powerful is the story told in “Cimetiere des Innocents, 1786” of the breakdown and closure of that famous Parisian cemetery, and the fate of the recently decomposing dead who had formed enough fat to be “carted off / to make pure soap”. In death, the poem says, there is an inversion of ranks “and thus a lord / may come to scrub / a floor or else / a peasant’s pants” and, it concludes, “the end of us / is slow and strange, / forgettable – / and wet”.

Others among these framing poems are not at all morbid and reflect other interests. “Auf Wiedersehen Spiegeltent”, for example, is about that strange, nineteenth century, magisterium-style object that appeals to the contemporary with its old-fashioned mirror-perspectives. It gets a suitably fragmented poem to celebrate its dismantlement. And the final poem celebrates the poet’s “Christian” name by being a monologue addressed by the historical Queen Zenobia to her great enemy – the Romans. In it she warns that it will be the sweet herbs and spices of the east which will both enliven and corrupt Roman blood. It’s hard not to think of this farewell piece as something of a “poem-poem”.

Phillip Gijindarraji Hall’s book, Sweetened in Coals, is made up of three sections and the best poems come at the beginning in the section called “Dwelling”. Unlike the words “Praise” and “Home” – titles and subjects of the other sections – “dwelling” is a participle as well as noun and thus simultaneously expresses a sense of process as well as a more static, abstract state. In fact the poems of this book are interestingly strung between the poles of process and state. The former are poems on the move, documenting a range of experience from canoeing in the Katherine River (the book’s second poem), following “Darwin’s Walk” in the Blue Mountains (in the first poem of the second section) to taking a group of students on a two-week hike from Katoomba to Mittagong (the second-last) and a group of children from “the Borroloola Mob” into “country” in “Concourse” (the final poem). One can imagine postcolonial theorists making a lot of this, contrasting a poetry of movement with a poetry of static vistas: the former in some sense indigenous (or at least in harmony with some of the Aboriginal song cycles) the latter the perspective of empire.

Hall’s poetry isn’t quite as schematic as this, however, and it does make some play out of the way in which, on bush-walks, sites with spectacular and revealing vistas appear. The interaction between land, native inhabitant, settler, cedar-getter and colonisers is a complex one resistant to simple moralising. In “Raising the Colours”, set in a school in Gordonvale, one of the students

              throws stones at fruit bats:
No Mr Phil, I’m not gammin,
they’re good to eat, kill cancer too.
Well, a migaloo in black country, Mr Phil’s pissed off . . .

and we can feel him wince in “Concourse” “pondering my eco spiel as they cut down / a three-metre cypress pine no mista, he burns bright / smokes them mozzies too . . . / you dig turtles with us mob / in ”˜im dry swamp”. But focussing on the abrasive moments of inter-cultural contact is always more honest and, ultimately rewarding, than rhapsodising.

One poem which explores some of the complexities of land, naming, possession and engagement is “Promised Land” about the Erskine River and the Erskine Gorge in the southern Blue Mountains. It begins with the kind of natural description Hall does well but as the poem progresses the names of the places inevitably mentioned build up a kind of momentum of alienness in that they are all biblical (Pisgah, Nebo Point, The Land of Gad) or classical (Attic Cave). To thicken the mix even more, Nebo Point and Pisgah Rock are described as being like “lammasu” – those Assyrian winged guardian statues – a further dimension of alienness which the poem itself is responsible for introducing. At any rate, you feel, the poem moves towards accommodating this growing complexity of cultures by speaking of the namers, the Warrigal Bushwalking Club of the thirties:

. . . . . 
Continuing down the yabby line,
          from creek junction to creek junction
The Erskine Gorge opens to a sandstone escarpment,
          its vast precipice consumed
By the water of this promised land
          taken by the Warrigals, land-lopers
Who came after the timber getters, and hauled
          packs and crafted mud maps intimately
Measured. Amidst the profusion of tracks and scats
          the Warrigals lived from their packs, surveying
Their wilderness – a canvas yearning pitched
          over the Dharug’s stone hearth glow.

The imported names – Mt Pisgah from which Moses sees the promised land – are, if you come to think of it, as alien to British culture as they are to indigenous Australian. And there is an irony that the first Anglo-Saxon explorers of this area take an Aboriginal name for a wild dog as the name of their club just as there is an irony that, before them, come one of the most ecologically destructive groups, the cedar fellers.

The process of continuous rewriting whose paradoxes are detailed here is called a palimpsest and this is the title of another, quite different poem that precedes “Promised Land”. Here, instead of the strange movement of following the land until the alien names alter the poem’s direction – which I think is how “Promised Land” works – we have a straightforward, contemporary Australian poem with a “position”:

. . . . . 
once bora grounds
- illuminated tors - 
their eminence now fractured
and made to bear transported gatherings:
Sturgiss, Nibelung, Donjon;
whilst the Budawang’s signature,
Dithol – woman’s breast - 
coyly named Pigeon House
from the Endeavour’s helm - 
a clear sailing,
white washed over
and over -
palimpsest.

It’s a poem which looks at Cook’s voyage with a vista-like perspective on the past. And, although there is a lot going on to keep the poem afloat – the settlement that Cook’s voyage heralds is a “white wash” – it seems to me a far less successful poem than “Promised Land” exactly because it is such a static piece, based on a worked-out understanding which it then exemplifies. “Promised Land” is a sinuous process because it gives the impression of discovering itself as it goes along.

Another poem worthy of a brief comment in this opening section is “Dystopian Empire” which records two old women fighting in Borroloola, to the amazement of gawking miners and grey nomads. What is odd about this poem is that it is written to recall Les Murray’s “An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow”, in which – students of Australian poetry will know – bypassers gather to stare at a man weeping in Martin Place. Murray’s fifth stanza: “Some will say, in the years to come, a halo / or force stood around him. There is no such thing. / Some will say they were shocked and would have stopped him / but they will not have been there . . .” becomes:

Some will say, in the years to come, that the young
blackfullas lit up their ganja, or sniffed,
at the spectacle; the expectant mums pissed
as coconuts fermenting in sand:
but that soapbox’s bent boss-eyed.

The poem finishes on a note of cultural conflict: of the ignorance of white outsiders of the influence of spirits amongst the dispossessed:

What do munanga know of salutarily singing Country?
Of the numinous mischievously stirring strife
amongst already sabotaged custodians whose kujika’s scorched?
Who will tearfully sing him, big business, with millad mob
in the dirt, pressing forwards, hoping for peace?

This makes sense but the question remains of why the thing is written over, Murray’s poem palimpsest-style. Is it a homage or a mocking comment that to experience the uncanny you just have to get out of Sydney’s Martin Place?

The poems of the second and third sections of Hall’s book don’t live up to the best of those of the opening one. The poems of “Praise” are inclined to be a little one-dimensional and those poems of the third section which are about his own rich domestic life are in a well-known conventional mode. It’s good that poetry can document the domestic component of our lives (and it should go on doing so) but it isn’t a mode which will excite other poets by its possibilities. That’s not to say that there aren’t many good pieces here. I have a soft spot for “This Creation” in the second section: it is a celebration of the way in which the activities of flying-foxes (mainly, I presume, shitting out the seeds of fruit they have eaten elsewhere) help to reseed the Daintree:

          I hear them at dusk,
                    those spectacled flying-foxes wheeling,
streaming into pockets of remaindered rainforest;
          an archipelago paradise
                                        where hardwoods are flowering
          with syrup, easing pollination, and musky
                              squabbling camps for those black
          leathered angels seeding
a Daintree, gallantly reclaiming
                                                        the Garden. 

“Black leathered angels” is a lovely image – though it might be said to be an Old Testament one, itself derived from Babylonian myth, and thus implying a whole history of cultural borrowings and seedings – and shows Hall at his best.

In Sweetened in Coals the methods and movements of the verse itself is varied in a way which might also reflect the opposition between static observation of vistas and movement. In the preliminary poem, “Carpentaria Running the Flag”, we get a full-scale rehearsal of precise observation fed into strongly tactile consonants and a very intense syntactic movement. At least we do in the beginning: the poem finishes by tailing off into limp abstractions:

Heat radiates off the back-broken
bullish escarpment where lost cities rise
as columns of silica crusted in iron
above pocketed zinc seams, gouged cattle plains
and salt flats; a back-country driven bony
even as floods flush north to the Gulf
and I cast bait, slipping past crocs and luring barra
on bloodied lines; a channelled
shimmering verdancy as those caught thrash
on sand before being parcelled in paperbark
and sweetened in coals amidst bunched
golden beard grass and cathedral mounds; the Savannah Way
a graded fence line vanishing into the rusted
landscape where a charged sphere percolates
                                                         Indigenous space.

Somehow this seems to encapsulate the strongest and weakest elements of the poetry. If “Dystopian Empire” recalled Les Murray, this recalls Anthony Lawrence. And it is hard not to feel that Lawrence is a better model for the “I move through the landscape” poems that Hall wants to write.

Bonny Cassidy: Final Theory

Artarmon: Giramondo, 2014, 81pp.

It’s tempting to connect Bonny Cassidy’s work with that of other poets trying to approach landscape, humans, and the interactions between the two in a generally post-poundian poetics. It’s a revisiting of an issue that, more than half a century ago, in another hemisphere, produced the poetics of the Black Mountain school. Two recent anthologies, one English, one Australian, are good showcases for such poets: Harriet Tarlo’s The Ground Aslant: An Anthology of Radical Landscape Poetry and Black Rider’s Outcrop: Radical Australian Poetry of Land. Both, in their titles, use the word “radical”, an adjective that might better be applied to the differences between the work of the poets included. But it’s part of the interest of this approach that, although there are major theoretical figures – John Kinsella comes to mind – there are no overarching aesthetic positions, and no individual with Charles Olson’s influence: just some assumptions and a spectrum of possibilities. Cassidy, too, though she makes a lot of connections with other contemporary poets in her work, seems very much her own poet with her own voice and her own avenues of approach to some of the vital issues. Final Theory is her second book. The first was Certain Fathoms which was preceded by a chapbook, Said to Be Standing.

One of the impulses behind the poetic context I’ve sketched in is the fear of an unproblematic, experiencing self at the heart of lyric poems leading, at its worst to a sort of bland “Georgianism”. Getting the conventional lyric self out of the poetry becomes an imperative, buttressed by later notions of the self as, psychologically, an illusion even, in a kind of no-holds-barred leftism, a “bourgeois fantasy”. It isn’t an issue I want to pursue beyond making the point that both sides of this divide rely strongly on fairly grotesque demonisations of the other. Fine poetry comes from all parts of the spectrum of post-poundian beliefs and, at the same time, a “conventional”, humanist lyricism works well especially when the self behind the poems is recognised as something complex and problematic. Bonny Cassidy’s first book, and the preceding chapbook, are, by her own admission (according to the accompanying publicity material for Final Theory), “exercises in removing the subjective lyric voice”. Final Theory seems to be an attempt to get the self back into the poetry by using different tactics.

Using the word “exercises” of the poems of Certain Fathoms may suggest something rather programmatic but there is a lot in that book to admire. Often the emphasis is visual and related to the graphic arts and it’s no accident that the book begins with a poem about botanical drawings. Sometimes poems later in the book have that frozen-in-time visual quality that recalls the Imagists – the first of Pound’s many attacks on the humanist lyric of his day. “Confidence”, for example:

A stalk of light arrives
to grasp the roof’s peak -

not a sigh from beneath, where a crowd
crosses the pale forum, snibbing purses.

The light folds itself up, a last ripple clears.

As often in the case of such poems, the situation is only sketched in and the result can be either that readers have the sensation of “take it or leave it” or the entire thing is too delphic to unravel. A set of fine imagist pieces about New Zealand significantly called “Autoptics” (which means simultaneously “seen by myself” and “seen from a car”) contains one, “Titirangi”, whose opening line presents quite a challenge:

Break, glass, daughter.
                                Kauri don’t shade.

The roundabout chosen by a finger slanting from the sky -
visitors go into the light

streets bend tighter and tighter -
lining up wheels with poles.

It’s a reminder that the book’s title can be read as a hermeneutic comment as well – the fathoming of poems can be as big an issue for readers as the fathoming of reality is for a poet. And then there is the self: the first poem, “Figure”, exploring the act of making botanical drawings, is very much about the complicated way such “scientific” drawings, mere “figures” in a text are personal: “First a thickness then / a happy signature. // I thought to go without”.

But deep down, in all her work, you feel that Cassidy is more obsessed with process than visual images frozen in time and their issues of interpretability and the implied self. The five-part “Range” seems something of a statement-poem. It contains a bird, its location in space and its location in time. Its method relates to the act of drawing (“Always begin with a bird, like ruling a line / that stretches into angles”) but through a series of puns the idea of a duck, a continuous ducking line, takes us into the range which is the bird’s environment and the subject of the poem and which is dealt with as though the task were to outline banks, slips, trees and sandstone without having a pencil leave the paper. The process here occurs in the natural world (“Night’s shadow settles in the carpet of the range”) but also in the creative world of the line.

One of the poems of Certain Fathoms, “En Abyme (Northland)”, is a stepping stone to the poems of Final Theory. It is set in the north of New Zealand and is dedicated to Tim, the partner and photographer of the poems of the first and third section of Final Theory. It’s about the self seen in terms of a relationship (in the major sections of the book the self is always twinned with another and rarely alone) and the way in which in such a situation talk is the essential interaction. Also a couple have a different perspective on their history to that of a solitary individual and this is how the poem begins: “Talk is breaking, breaking. In these minutes you / and I seem to be history without lineage”. By the end of the poem there is a move (I think) to geological time which (I think) is induced by the shift in perspective:

Before you leave again I hear you say, just once,
perhaps the vulture eats itself
and your words in delay finally settle into me, then you -
years away and oceans parting.

Of course, to be honest, this might be no more than a reference to being separated by the width of a sea. “En Abyme (Northland)” looks back to the poems of Certain Fathoms by its reference to the processes of visual arts (“There is no line to draw from there to here”) and by, as its title suggests, having three little imagist pieces embedded in the texture of the poem. The first of these is rather good, “We cross the flats that sign the Narrows. // A thumbnail church is lodged / under the cloud-marsh. As we hover past, / kauri bellow in the harbour” but I still think that the poem is a farewell to such methods.

In Final Theory the tactic is to plunge the poet and partner into a kind of tour of sites of change in New Zealand, Australia and Antarctica – the remnants of Gondwana. This is done in the two major sections of the book (the odd-numbered ones) and these sections are interspersed with a science-fiction-like tale of a girl born in the ocean. There is a touch of sci-fi in the “tour of the sites” section as well, adding a hint of genre narrative that prevents these poems being merely a po-faced expression of experiences at geologically and ecologically significant sites. At every point the tight personal perspective and the massively broader geological one are sandwiched together. A poem beginning with mining exploration which penetrates “layers staked on time’s dart like a Valentine” finishes “Above it all: / me in your apartment, shimmying / rocksteady.” That is: moving but trustably firm. Waking in a hotel (I think in New Zealand) to the sound of cars moves immediately to a description of the “acid sea” ballooning up. Thinking about life before they met moves immediately to an image of proto-life as “rafts of seed . . . flecks of pace” in “that other age of loneliness”. At all points the scale of human time is contrasted with the vast span of earth’s history, always a disorienting experience. It is also worth remembering that this is, in its own way, a love poem, but one in which the personal is not so much political as geological.

And the personal is not only singular but part of a relationship. Cassidy’s partner, a photographer, figures largely in these poems and one’s mind begins to circulate around the significance of the conjunction of a photographer and a poet especially a poet who seems to want to move away from frozen-in-time imagist pieces to some kind of mode able to deal with process. What is a photograph, a visually underdeveloped reader like myself is likely to ask, but a frozen moment? Perhaps it catches process but it hardly embodies it. Perhaps the poems of Final Theory deal with this but if they do it is at a level where it isn’t immediately apparent although one poem does describe a comical double-exposure:

Your finger squinting the aperture
and the flint of your lens raised

have imposed a double: lichen and hub cap
printed across one another

like two hands braced against the light, a herald for the
Anthropocene.

Not only is the self part of a relationship it is also doubled itself. At one point Cassidy looks into the rear view mirror of the car, searching “for a final perspective” but finds instead her own image, “my heartless twin; useless thing / pulsing behind the paper in my hands”. And in the next poem everything is doubled in a mirror behind the pair drinking in a motel: at this point a lot of complicated things happen visually. I’ve worked on the assumption that the twinning is the conventional one of artist and person, each watching the other slightly suspiciously. More may have been intended but if that’s the case I’ve missed the clues.

The even sections of Final Theory tell the story of a girl conceived in water and existing in water surrounded by a raft of plastic rubbish. It’s an elliptical, and hence cryptic, narrative. The girl – as far as I can tell – comes ashore, climbs a cliff, descends into a sinkhole, finds an entrance into the ocean, descends onto the abyssal plain where she sits in a wrecked Toyota that has finished up there, ascends to find herself in Antarctica on an iceberg, and is finally thrown ashore in a busy port. If this outline makes the entire narrative seem slightly silly, recalling Tolstoy’s summaries of Shakespeare and Wagner in What is Art, my excuse is that it takes quite a bit of work to get to. It’s a sequence that clearly wants to locate the current human world of mining, trade, manufacture, decay and waste within the wider perspective of geological processes which, in some ways, mimic them. Structurally its function in the book, highlighted by the way in which it is broken up into two parts and placed alongside the other narrative of a couple visiting various geologically and humanly active sites (also divided into two), seems to be to add a colouring of non-realism to the other narrative. It might also suggest that there are different kinds of narrative available to someone wanting to avoid any sort of conventional lyric poetry.

Whereas I warm to Cassidy’s project, I don’t think there can be much doubt that the sections devoted to the narrative of the ocean-girl are not as successful as those in which a poet and a photographer explore the geologically unstable world and its history. But this book is an attempt to do very difficult, admirable things. If there is a problem with Final Theory it is that it is probably an unrepeatable experiment and though it shows one way of solving a lot of the interesting issues that Cassidy’s work is engaged with, it doesn’t really shine a torch on an poetic road ahead. Will she attempt another, large-scale unified composition or revert to individual pieces? Somehow I think that the latter is more likely but we will have to wait for her next book to see.

Chris Wallace-Crabbe: My Feet Are Hungry

Sydney: Pitt St Poetry, 2014, 98pp.

This new volume of Chris Wallace-Crabbe’s in the handsome Pitt Street Poetry series is, according to the author’s biography accompanying the photograph inside the back cover, his twenty-fourth. It is also the second collection this year which can be said to mark a poet’s eightieth birthday. It’s a reminder to me that the generation which I think of as the one before me – those born in the thirties like David Malouf, Wallace-Crabbe, Evan Jones, Les Murray, Judith Rodriguez, Tom Shapcott and Rodney Hall – are now in what, a hundred years ago, would have seemed an almost impossibly advanced old age. Not only that but they are still creatively productive, spinning out inner lives in new and fruitfully unexpected directions. When I was young, Tolstoy always seemed a figure of titanic, superhuman old age but he died just after his eighty-second birthday and his creative years were really well behind him by then.

For most of his career, Wallace-Crabbe has been a poet of what might be called metaphysical immersion. The poems continually worry about the so-called “larger issues” – the “meaning of life, the universe and everything: the meaning of meaning” – but never in an abstracted sense. In an odd way Wallace-Crabbe can be put forward as a poet of life as a lived process, it’s just that for him living involves continuous ratiocination. It’s a case of a poetry not of “I do this, I do that: but more “I think this, I think that”. It’s tempting to see him in the light of Eliot’s characterisation of the Metaphysical poets (without accepting the accuracy of that description in literary-historical terms) as poets for whom ideas were sensuous experiences. It’s an essentially humanist perspective with precious little patience for the postmodernist perspectives of the late twentieth century. And just as the sense of immersion leads away from abstraction so too does the specificity of accent. Wallace-Crabbe always retains enough demotic Australian touches (“my slang aubade”) to keep the poems tensioned and to prevent a bland, mandarin tone from entering the poetry. This can, occasionally, have a fake naivete about it (“Fancy a boy from Victoria having these metaphysical issues”) but it’s usually done so skilfully that the poems are cross-braced by the tensions of linguistic register within them.

The first three poems of My Feet Are Hungry can be said to set out Wallace-Crabbe’s principal concerns and methods. The first, “After Bede”, is very brief:

Our lives are built upon unlikelihood,
their poignancy oddly fragile
at the best of times
like snow that falls softly
into a ravaging bushfire.

At heart it’s an expression of the bleak fact that all the immense complexities of our inner and outer lives eventually dissolve into nothing. A poem from the seventies, “Meditation with Memories”, speaks of our sense of our lives as a kind of collection of snaps, “Random and miniature its family-album, / Brilliant the slides but dim the prophecy” and “After Bede” focusses on the bleakness of the future, its steady and inevitable progression down towards darkness. As in so many of Wallace-Crabbe’s poems there is a fruitful tension between the scholarly reference – to Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People (although that isn’t, admittedly, too arcane a scholarly reference) – and an Australianness which is expressed overtly when the snowflake falls into a bushfire and covertly when the poem evokes the phrase “a snowflake’s chance in hell” but leaves it unexpressed.

The reference to Bede is worth exploring a little further, though, apart from its role as a creator of tonal tensions. The reference must be to one of the best known passages in Bede in which Northumbria is converted when its king takes advice from his egocentric high priest (Coifi) and a frustratingly unnamed councillor who, in a wonderful speech, describes pagan life as being like the brief moment in which a sparrow, flying through a hall – such as the one in which the meeting is taking place – experiences transitory warmth and security but flies out into a bleak unknown future. Christianity, says the councillor, offers the hope of a known and benevolent future after our lives and therefore is worth adopting. Any scholar of the early Germanic Middle Ages could, I’ve always thought, have stood up and refuted this by arguing that not only does the pagan world offer the possibility of kleos aphthiton (“imperishable fame”) but Christianity brings with it the unattractive possibility of eternal damnation: but no-one appears to make that case. At any rate, the reference to Bede reminds us that Wallace-Crabbe doesn’t always have a brutally materialistic view of death and dissolution. Just as Bede’s councillor stresses the hope of a bright, even if incomprehensible, world after death, so a wonderful poem from the 1990 volume, For Crying Out Loud, called “They”, holds out hopes:

Where have they gone? Somewhere ahead of us
in a meadow like the square root of minus one - 
infinite pastoral; pure interstice - 
where two objects can browse in the same space
and history leaves not even a snowflake’s print.
They have passed through darkness into a radiance
which we cannot know and they can’t comprehend
but which does not remember the griefs of our world.
The pain is cauterized,
                                          the atoms dispersed.
Body is no more body, nor is it soul.
They are now at one with a nearer face of the All.
Lamenting them, we weep for ourselves.

In a way the glow of this poem probably derives from its – in truth, unsupported – hopes, and it expresses the spirit of one of the squibs from The Amorous Cannibal: “Approving mystery / with all my heart / I practise disenchantment”. But it’s no accident that the image of the snowflake appears here. It appears also in a later poem in My Feet Are Hungry called “Snowfall”. True, in this poem the emphasis is not on the beautiful – though quickly dissolved – phenomenon of a human self, although the opening:

The white behaviour of snow looks
weirdly indecisive, maybe wayward;
yet its general drift keeps dawdling down,
friendly to gravity . . .

recalls snowflakes from poems past. The real subject of “Snowfall” turns out, I think, to be the fascinating issue of cultural borrowing – it’s no accident that it appears in a section of the book pretty much devoted to places and views. Snow somehow remains outside of the automatic responses of an Australian – it can’t “be there for us” as the poem’s final line says. But in this sense snow is only a single example of a colonial inheritance that includes folktales, books, art:

. . . . . 
One fragment sits on my overcoat shoulder,
then pisses off. The chilly roadscape
sends back whiteness and light
this Anglophone afternoon. But then
Snow White and the eponymous
goose long struck me as goofy, being
a son of dry gumleaves and gravel. . .

The second line has a demotic phrase and, while it mightn’t necessarily be the sole property of Australians, its use here in a complex meditation invokes the no-intellectual-nonsense stance that Australians like to think is Australian. Interestingly the poem’s next stanza begins “As a wee girl, my daughter declared / she’d have preferred to have it pink” thus using a Scots/New Zealand adjective. (This issue of cultural borrowings and the echoes they bring with them are the subject of “The Big Bad” a short poem making the point that Australian children dream of wolves, “sleek antetypes of anyone’s puppy dog”, though they aren’t part of the Australian environment.)

So much for snow. The second poem of My Feet Are Hungry, “And the Cross”, is a retelling of the gospel story in deliberately flat quatrains. The overall tone is bathetic:

. . . . . 
Three exotic astrologers
Had picked up good tidings, it appeared;
Out of the east they rode with their camels,
Each man sporting a different beard

And bringing presents for the baby,
Sweet-smelling frankincense and gold,
Also some other stuff called myrrh - 
Whatever it is, you’ll have to be told.

Shepherds guarding their flocks by night
Had seen a ruddy enormous star . . .

and, at first, you think it is just a matter of choosing the right tone for a post-enlightenment intellectual’s debunking of this important but unlikely narrative. But it isn’t really a debunking poem: it keeps its mind open, for example, as to the possibility of materialist and spiritual readings of the events – “A junction in eastern history, say, / Or transcendental epiphany”. I think this is a poem which needs to be read in the context of one of Wallace-Crabbe’s obsessive themes: the question of whether our lives have meaning and what on earth meaning in our lives would look like. “Stardust” from I’m Deadly Serious (1988) explores the issue

. . . . . 
But how could the universe have meaning?
Would the stars be patterned differently?
The seasons vanish, or come on faster?
Would there be an End?
Perhaps we wouldn’t require any sleep;
Maybe we’d no longer have to shit;
Or one radiant mathematics
Would show up trimly in everything . . . 

but one could choose any number of poems going back as far perhaps as “A Wintry Manifesto” from Wallace-Crabbe’s second book in which the death of Satan stands for the loss of a kind of Zoroastrian purpose and hence meaning in the universe. Admittedly “A Wintry Manifesto” finishes on the reasonably positive note that, lacking a cosmic order, we can, at least, focus on knowing “the piece of earth on which we stand”. At other times poetry makes an appearance as something which is a small patch of order in an either unordered or imperceptibly-ordered universe, “a drug that endures / Riding atop the bubbles of evanescence”. But ultimately, as “Eating the Future (I)” from The Amorous Cannibal says:

. . . . . 
The city that I thread through is a flower,
the clouds are escapades of cottonwool

which give aesthetic cuddles but we hurt,
knocked rotten by the blues of random power.

Without god the upshot turns out worse
but with his aid it cannot make much sense . . .

What is happening in “And the Cross”, I think, is an investigation into what a meaningful life would look like, a way of focussing on a problem concretely rather than abstractly. The life of Jesus of Nazareth is, conventionally in European Christianity, a life of cosmic significance, a turning point in the existence of the entire universe and so it must, even in miniature, express a meaning for the universe. Of course, as the poem suggests in its tone, what you get in a narrative of this life is something really weird. Not contemptibly myth-riddled, just weird even though it is “a story of absolute good”.

The third poem, “Fragrantly Here All Day”, is a complex piece that focusses – or, more correctly, spins out from – broad social issues, broad because they involve how humans are going to live on a planet where “Some processes just happen, willy-nilly. / Hungry millions come trudging into cities / faster than any asphalt can understand”. It’s about what might be called the “NIMBY paradox” a kind of modern mutation of the “tragedy of the commons”. We want a morally acceptable existence and are prepared to pay for it but only up to a point. Beyond that point coercion is necessary and coercion involves the application of force in a way that is morally unacceptable. It’s an insoluble problem that this poem doesn’t pretend to solve but what intrigues me is its emphasis on point of view and perspective since they are issues found in Wallace-Crabbe’s other books and they percolate through this new one. “Looking Down on Cambodia”, for example, from the 1993 book, Rungs of Time, points out that, from an aeroplane,

You can’t see the blood;
you can’t hear the dying
or mounded skulls rubbing faintly together . . .

and you see only the aesthetically attractive image of “a silver delta threading its liquid gush / beyond those matted islands”. Rungs of Time, has, as an epigraph, a statement by the English philosopher (and translator of Wittgenstein), Frank Ramsey: “My picture of the world is drawn in perspective, and not like a model to scale. The foreground is occupied by human beings and the stars are as small as threepenny bits . . .”. From a more abstract, scientific perspective there is the difference between physical description at the quantum level and at the human level – a barely comprehensible disjunction with an indistinct boundary. “Moments of Being” from My Feet Are Hungry has a short poem about this:

When I bump into the kitchen table
I am not kicking
galaxies of unseeables
in waves or in orbit
but grazing my shin.

The issues of “Fragrantly Here All Day” are really issues of perspective. Morality and its enforcement are, at the personal level, very different from morality at the macro level. At the latter level you are in the world of Plato’s unattractive republic in which poets are banned:

. . . . .
But what if we stand back from it awhile,
was the move I asked before, given
lucidity entailing prophecy somehow;
this calls for Plato’s bald philosopher kings
who’d have to make it all enforceable. . .

Even “Firestorm”, a poem eloquent about the horrors of the 2009 bushfires and the experience of violent extinction (which recalls the fate of the snowflake in “After Bede”), concludes with the dry comment that if you alter the point of view, the scene becomes very different:

Nature must lack the chivalry we could sniff
as brotherly tribute: something has turned out worse
with Plato’s cave become a blazing cliff;

pain is the knot-hole in our universe
and yet the black calligraphy of trees
can make this long view elegantly Chinese.

And “Remnants” shifts perspective in two directions. Beginning as one of many poems in this collection which are about moving house and renovating, it notes that the “odd little / wodges of blackish clay” that the restumpers leave behind will, seen from the perspective of the future, be the “future stuff / of archaeology – remnants / from this mobile phone age”. At the same time, from a natural perspective, the plum tree prepares for spring although, from a moral perspective, at the same time Baghdad is in flames. There is a comic poem, “The Shards of Then”, which actually attempts to describe what a future team of archeologists will make of Australia as they try to piece together scattered fragments:

. . . . . 
Let’s look at what we have;
                                               an early scribe called Clark
suggesting a culture of tautology,
as in their army settlement,
Townsville . . .

Finally, one of the late poems, “The Absent Self”, which might be included as a poem of extinction, of the “fears that I may cease to be”, might also be seen as essentially about perspective – in this case the perspective that occurs when one’s self is no longer the viewpoint:

What will the world do when I am completely gone,
without me to observe things, will it simply blow away
like the milky mist above midwinter footy grounds
just after breakfast,
. . . . .
The mystical survives. It is not bound by my life,
nor even dependent on quanta.
                                                         It merely expands
like the unseen, epiphanic ether
which we have already abolished.

The final section of My Feet Are Hungry is devoted to a translation of the twenty-eighth canto of Dante’s Purgatorio. It’s a well-made translation with a nicely balanced tone – flexible without any folksy touches – and done in unrhymed, three line stanzas. But since Wallace-Crabbe is not a serial translator – I think this is the only example in his published books of poetry – the crucial issue is not how good the translation is but why this passage was chosen. Canto XXVIII is that strange transitional moment where Dante leaves his poetic guides Virgil and Statius and comes under the guidance of Beatrice for the heavenly stage of his tour (he meets Beatrice in the next canto as part of what must be one of the weirdest processions the human imagination has ever concocted). Canto XXVIII finds Dante in the Earthly Paradise which a lady, Matilda, explains is the original garden of Eden and which, according to Dante’s botany, is a kind of genetic seedbank holding seeds of all the plants on earth and, under the pressure of the rotation of the mount of Purgatory, scattering them over the planet. Its appeal to Wallace-Crabbe might lie in the way this stanza is a farewell to fellow poets (there is an elegy for Seamus Heaney in My Feet Are Hungry) but I think it is more likely that he is extending a long held interest in the first garden. An early poem, “Genesis”, from The Emotions Are Not Skilled Workers speaks about the edenic myth and its special attractions:

. . . . . 
I hate the story and love it,
detesting death, a vast stupidity,
but glorying that Eden
could be smeared with, flashing with, energized
by the first colours of love . . .

Here it’s a site illuminated by love, the very first love, but it can also stand for the state of being ecstatically in reality, all irritable searching after meaning suspended, that turns up regularly in Wallace-Crabbe’s poetry.

A final possibility is that it may be an image of that longed-for afterlife where the inevitably descending snowflake of “After Bede”, representing all lost loved ones and things, swerves away at the last moment into the world described in “They”: “a meadow like the square root of minus one – / infinite pastoral”.

Judith Beveridge: Devadatta’s Poems

Artarmon: Giramondo, 2014, 65pp.

To someone picking the book up in a bookshop, Judith Beveridge’s Devadatta’s Poems is a set of forty-eight dramatic monologues spoken by the Buddha’s cousin, a disruptive and discordant voice in the years after the awakening when the membership and rules of the Buddha’s mendicant order, the sangha, are being worked out. Dedicated readers of Australian poetry will respond to it as what looks like part of an ongoing project by one of Australia’s great poets which begins with “The Buddha Cycle” at the end of Accidental Grace, published nearly twenty years ago, and continues in the long sequence “Between the Palace and the Bhodi Tree” in Wolf Notes, published just over ten years ago.

The relationships between these three works need a bit of teasing out and I don’t want to back myself into the familiar corner of being an outsider puzzling over literary issues that have a single, simple answer. My guess is that “The Buddha Cycle” is an early attempt to engage this material. It wants to deal with sanctity rather than, say, the idea of the Buddha as a model of poetic perception, and sanctity is a very difficult state to incarnate in poetry. The tactic Beveridge uses is to focus on its effects rather than its essence by dealing with the lives of a group of characters who are influenced by the Buddha. It works well and reminds me that Ashvaghosha’s very long poem, The Life of the Buddha, written a good six centuries after the event but an important document nevertheless, seems to flicker briefly into life in the tenth canto when the same tactic is used. The Buddha is about to enter Rajagriha:

Whoever was going by another way stood still,
whoever was standing on that road followed him,
whoever was going fast began to walk slowly,
whoever was seated sprang up, upon seeing him.

Some venerated him with folded hands,
some in honouring him bent down their heads,
some greeted him with affectionate words,
no one went by without worshipping him.

Those who were pompously dressed felt ashamed,
those chattering on the road fell silent upon seeing him.
No one had an improper thought,
as if they were in the presence of dharma in visible form.
                                 (trans. Patrick Olivelle, Clay Sanskrit Library edition)

The evidence that “The Buddha Cycle” is not to be seen as a failed, initial attempt to deal with this sort of material, sidetracked into trying to express sanctity rather than the acute awareness of a poet, is that the characters of “The Buddha Cycle” turn up briefly in one of the poems of this new book – “The Buddha at Uruvela” – where Devadatta is infuriated by the expressions on the faces of the cast from “The Buddha Cycle”:

. . . . . 
And look at Sunita, the street-sweeper, smiling
as if the Buddha has offered him a life above

the scorn of insects, a life of refinements
other than dust. Look how Suppaya, the corpse bearer,
beams, as if from now on he’ll make compassion
the stretcher for any – light or heavy – dispersal

of death. . .

The poem finishes with Devadatta’s perfectly reasonable protest that “what shackles them to suffering / is not desire . . . but the hard-set, / iron-fisted system of caste”.

And the reasonableness of this non-metaphysical (or, perhaps, non-conceptual/psychological) approach to human misery leads one to think about the issue of choosing Devadatta as the voice of these poems. He describes himself as someone continually plotting “backyard empires” and his position is, perhaps, best expressed topographically in “Vulture’s Peak” where he says that he rejects both the heights – from where you get a view of the valley – and the “small damp caves” recommended by the Buddha as a place where, alone, one can meditate on suffering “and its causes in desire”. His position, he says, is “on the level where the farm / women scythe and rick, scythe and rick, or pick // tithes of yellow samphire near the ponds”. Are his poems a kind of counter-text to “Between the Palace and the Bhodi Tree” spoken not out of incipient enlightenment but out of the profoundly human responses of love, jealousy and the desire for secular power? We are certainly more likely to relate to this as a position than we are to post-awakening sanctity, and the result is a lot of poems which crackle with the energy of frustration, disgust and envy. It’s possible, in other words, that Beveridge has chosen Devadatta because she wants to write poems which are, chronologically, a sequel to “Between the Palace and the Bhodi Tree” and she doesn’t want to be tied to the same speaker as in that sequence. This isn’t to adopt the view that the last forty-odd years of the Buddha’s life are seen in the literature as a period of bland, sanctified, otherworldly meditation: he seems to have had to spend a lot of time sorting out the rules for his mendicant order and solving disputes among members: all very this-worldly, even political activities.

At a slight tangent to the issue of Beveridge’s choice of speaker is the issue of why religious mythology felt the need to invent a figure like Devadatta anyway. We know that it invents female figures (even in Eastern versions of Buddhism) to counteract religions that tend to be stonily male-dominated but, for a less obvious reason, it often seems to invent figures who are inside the magical circle of close adherents but who are treacherous. I won’t be the only one to think of the strange role of Judas Iscariot plays in the gospels: somebody who is a betrayer though, as everybody says, it’s hard to work out why you would pay someone thirty pieces of silver to identify a well-known activist in public. Certainly such figures show the human (in its less desirable aspects) in fruitful close contact with the divine – or awakened – and give the latter a kind of traction to operate against. But there is something odd about the way such figures are not expelled: they are free to operate within the cohort of close followers as though their presence is necessary. I suspect students of cults and other social groupings know some of the answers to this but it’s really a sociological area in which I’m ignorant.

In the context of Judith Beveridge’s work, one is reminded, when thinking of the choice of Devadatta, of the importance she places on the idea of dissonance. The title of the book in which “Between the Palace and the Bhodi Tree” appears is Wolf Notes and a note in the book’s preliminary pages defines these as “a discordant or false vibration in a string due to a defect in structure or adjustment of the instrument”. The function of dissonance for Beveridge is a complicated question but it can be said, firstly, that it appears in different guises. There has always been, in her poetry, a sizeable component of what is now called the abject. Obviously the cast of “The Buddha Cycle” are a pretty abject lot but it isn’t just a matter of class or caste. In the extended sequence “Driftgrounds: Three Fisherman” from Storm and Honey, her previous book, readers and poet spend a fair amount of the time saturated in fish guts and blood (significantly the characters we meet apart from the central three, are fairly desperate outsiders). Wallowing in filth isn’t something we expect the Buddha himself to do and it may be significant that, when that is exactly what is recommended in “Between the Palace and the Bhodi Tree” – “To find the layers you must live in the litter, / live like the flea, the louse, the botfly; / don’t live by the flower, live by the fetor” – the speaker is not the Buddha but an overheard ascetic.

I think the function of this social and sensory embracing of the abject has a technical/poetic cause rather than being a matter of content. In other words it is not that Beveridge’s sensibility is especially drawn in this direction but rather that the abject sharpens the texture of the poems and gives them the tense, more vibrant structure that is such a wonderful feature of her poetry. Contemporary lyric poetry does, as one of its underlying dangers, have a slight tendency towards being bland: piercingly insightful and expressive, consciousness-expanding it may be but it does tend to be tonally uniform and elevated: the brilliant “Herons at Dusk” from Beveridge’s previous book is an example. The kind of dissonances I’ve spoken of briefly ensure that there is always a degree of tension at this level in Beveridge’s poems. Needless to say, a figure like Devadatta can embrace the expressive possibilities of the disgusting with brio, as he does in “Alms Round, Sarnath”:

. . . . . 
I want to tell Buddha to chew his rules about patience
and frugality into a sloppy cud. I want to hold my bowl out
as boldly as a symbol and clang it loudly with my spoon.

I want to tell these miserable, skinflint, pinch-fisted folk
to stop tossing us husks, rinds, cores, thorns, rats’ tails,
roosters’ claws and – oh! – so many stinking lepers’ thumbs!

A more interesting kind of dissonance is verbal. One of Beveridge’s poetic strengths is a love of tactile, expressive words and a fascination with unusual ones. One could cite endless examples but, to choose at random, the subject of the poem, “Rain”, from Storm and Honey, “drumbles” across awnings, gutters and windows in “gluteous loops”. The verbal extravagance of such words is justified because of their expressive capacity and their tactile reality. But Beveridge often wants to go beyond such justifiable poetic use of language, to be dissonant by being what one might call, linguistically inappropriate. There are always examples of a kind of linguistic excess expressed as tissues of synonyms or an obsessive tactility as in “Ground Swell”:

. . . . .
     So many mouths dressing the flax,
the scutch, quitch and barley, wheat and sesame;
                 so many mouths
                         in a chirl and chirm . . .

Les Murray in his poem, “Portrait of the Autist as a New World Driver” describes how being inside the closed world of a car encourages a poet to let language romp and produce phrases like “orotate parafundities”. This kind of punning distortion turns up in Beveridge’s work as do more conventional puns. The passage I have just quoted from “Alms Round: Sarnath” contains an unspoken homophone whereby “symbol” becomes “cymbal” and leads on to the idea of clanging and in “Riders” the word “carousel” becomes, two lines later, “carousal”; in “Rules” Devadatta dreams of getting the Buddha out of his “tidy squat” punning on a newish word for a run-down, inhabited building and the physical position of the chairless monks of the sangha. Puns and other sorts of verbal play are part of the linguistic texture of poems, of course, but when they are made deliberately groan-inducing they disrupt the niceties of tone and become part of the dissonances. Take, for example, “The Bone Artisan” from Wolf Notes:

. . . . . Wait till you see
what I can do with a humerus; how

a simple patella makes a dish (oh,
yes say it) – for paella. This store is
full of sacral talismans, knick-knacks

I nick every day from the knackery.
I love all the bijouterie you can make
from the spine. Shall I advertise?

          Backbone bric-a-brac
          for altars and shrines.

In “Rocks, Vultures Peak” from Devadatta’s Poems, this verbal indecorousness reaches (oh, yes say it) a peak when Devadatta attempts to kill the Buddha by rolling a rock down on him. I don’t know what the narrative tone of this story is wherever it appears in the Pali Canon – presumably it is a celebration of a divinely engineered escape – but to us it inevitably recalls Wily Coyote and the Roadrunner. And Beveridge’s poem reflects this by joyously abandoning any attempt at a po-faced historical dramatic monologue and having Devadatta imagine how the killing will be reported newspaper-headline style:

. . . . .
Ah, one day Siddhattha, I’ll pick the right spot,
I’ll pick the right rock and I won’t baulk the timing.
I know how the story will go: "Slipping schist kills
local altruist." "Leader of cult, brained by basalt."
"Religious moderate, crushed by conglomerate."

It’s significant – on this subject of dissonance – that, in Devadatta’s Poems, we are introduced to the idea of both protagonists playing the flute. The Buddha plays more beautifully and can use his pure tones to dispel grief but in “A Memory: Snake Charming, Kapilavatthu” Devadatta triumphantly recalls the Buddha’s puzzlement at not being able to persuade the snake to rise from its basket no matter how intensely he played. He didn’t know – as we and Devadatta (and watchers of QI) know – that the snake responds to the movement of the instrument, not the music:

. . . . .
He’d pipe until he was out of breath, baffled because
he always reached perfect notes, perfect pitch.

I swore I wouldn’t tell him it didn’t matter
if he played melodic notes, discordant notes, or no notes
at all, that just by swinging his flute-tip in the air
his snakes would rise like fluent rope . . .

This complex play with levels of accepted verbal usage which can be found throughout all of Beveridge’s books apart, perhaps, from the first, raises the issue of the extent to which the poems of this book, together with the extensive dramatic monologues of the other books, are to be seen in a dramatic context: after all, in drama it is differences in the voice which mark out characters, not a consistency of idiom wherein the tartly dissonant braces the elevated desire to capture and express individual creatures as well as the complex web of being in which they are all enmeshed. Are these poems in any sense dramatic or are the speakers merely mouthpieces whereby a poet can develop and explore a complex vision? I know this is setting the bar rather high but a great dramatic piece like the first part of Henry IV exhibits an amazing capacity for making each of the many characters speak in a distinctive personal idiom (and actually, in the case of Glendower, brings the issue of verbal excess into the themes of the play). Presumably this occurred because Shakespeare was working with and writing for an ensemble, knew who would play which role, and conceived the speeches with the actor’s existing voices in mind. Or conceivably a lot of subtle changes were made in rehearsal. I can’t detect that kind of dramatic individuation in Beveridge’s work. It’s true that Devadatta is a carefully thought-out character – Beveridge admits in her Introduction that she has taken a lot of liberties with the existing legends – and his poems could hardly appear in “Between the Palace and the Bhodi Tree” but that is because his situation as a grasping, frustrated rival is different, not because his voice is different. In Wolf Notes there is a longish sequence, “The Courtesan”, exploring a woman’s position and experiences. I’m not sure that she sounds very different to the Buddha of “Between the Palace and the Bhodi Tree” though her situation is entirely different:

. . . . . 
These ascetics with their vainglorious celibacy.
They come to my door with their alms bowls.
At first they have downcast eyes. I like to

play a game: I fill their bowls not with food - 
but with water’s mirror. When they see
my face reflected, then they thirst. And
,
as I turn to go, they beckon me, sated by
so much sun, begging me to stay, before
some icy penitence reseeds their ground. . .

It seems recognisably Beveridge’s voice – down to the little pun on “reseeds” which induces the word “recedes” in the context of the woman’s leaving – rather than that of an individualised character. Like the question of the function of “wolf notes”, it’s a tricky issue. If I had to guess – with the current state of my knowledge about Beveridge’s poetry – I’d lean towards the idea that all her characters are really mouthpieces, poets or potential poets which can be inhabited momentarily. They are chosen because of the potential of their situations. Devadatta is an ideal counterpart to his cousin and a way of introducing a tart and dissonant voice. Of course there may be subtle differences which make this a dramatic rather than lyrical work and the problem may merely be that, as a reader, I have a tin ear.

In worrying about these general issues, I realise that I haven’t said as much as I usually do – by way of description – about the poems themselves. It’s enough to say that they are – almost without exception – marvellous.

[As everybody knows the World Cup begins in June and I’m going to interrupt these reviews for a month. Watching six hours of football every day is inimical to reading poetry though not necessarily unrelated. True, football may lack poetry’s ability to expand our minds into unimaginable dimensions but great matches (Brazil vs Italy and West Germany vs France in 1982; Brazil vs Russia and Romania vs Argentina in 1994; etc etc) are as wonderful as great poems and I’ve always thought they should be “read” using some of the same skills. At any rate, I’ll post a new review on August 1st.]

Todd Turner: Woodsmoke

North Fitzroy: Black Pepper, 2014, 56pp.

Todd Turner’s first book is a very handsome object and an excellent collection of varied but essentially lyric poems. And, like all good lyrics, these poems are sensitive but tough and intelligent at the same time. Woodsmoke’s title poem is not only one of the best poems in the book but it is also important in helping readers make some sense of the other poems. The smoke of the title (significantly “woodsmoke” is compressed into a single, iconic word) is a kind of inversion of rain, another element which figures largely in the poems and is often associated with smoke. But the smoke is described in such a way that it isn’t simply the result of a natural process – the coal, timber or wet grass which is burning has its own history so that the smoke is that history making itself manifest:

It plumes from the fire’s red hearth,
sends up its flag of stored aeons
and multifarious resins in a surly

blue charred haze. Rain-cloud dark
and featherweight, it leaks from any
pooled heat or gone-to-ground tinder

along the craquelure of lost leaves,
rising tightly at first in a single plait
before shaking out its winter hair . . .

Not only is it the inverse of rain and an expression of the history of one of the earth’s forms of life, it is also described as “what // passes for benediction” and the end of the poem describes it as being “set / amid the downy blueprint of allegory”. History, grace and meaning are abstractions which bulk very large in Woodsmoke.

This title poem is so central and so strong that, initially, you wonder why it is the third poem in the book rather than the first. The answer may be that that would make the rest of the book seem no more than a programmatic extension of a single poem. But I’m inclined to see other possibilities in the arrangement of the first three poems. The first, “Shelling Peas”, is one of a group of poems which deal with family life in the poet’s past, with history in other words, the history of his family. It is an odd piece with a refrain – “Snap off the ends, tear open a strip, / split the hull and with a run of the thumb / rake the peas into the pot. Repeat.” – which stresses the repetitive nature of the activity. Its own “blueprint of allegory” might be no more than the conventional trope of the artist finding the valuable fruit inside the dry shell but I think the emphasis is rather on the poet’s use of his hands “intent / and nimble as a lace maker’s”. Turner is, in professional life, a maker of jewellery (I’m not sure of the correct noun for this art) and may want to stress at the outset that his engagement with the natural world is not always of the passive, meditative type of the title poem. “Shelling Peas” has a counterpart, late in the book, called “Apprentice”, about the jeweller’s trade and which focusses very much on the doings of the hands. “Apprentice” might – in its “blueprint of allegory” – be about making poems:

. . . . .
                          The last link in the chain, 
he combed through lost lemel for a glint.

Given tools, his hands were engaged
with implements of improbable need;
wedlocked in the grips of some dogged
perfection, jigged epiphanies, theorems

in the crux of being stubbornly made . . .

but I think the emphasis is on a profoundly manual engagement with the world.

Between “Shelling Peas” and “Woodsmoke” is “Heading West to Koorawatha” a formally organised lyric in two five line stanzas of diminishing line length which focusses on the visual (“the last of the light / falls onto the canola fields, and onto the hillsides / full of Paterson’s curse”) and introduces the speaker simply as observer at the end. My sense of the idea behind this opening is that the three poems canvas different ways of approaching the natural world and, by juxtaposition, critique each other. The second and third are compromised by the first because they don’t detail the writer’s physical interactions with the world. The third is compromised by the first and second because they make it seem wordily interpretive and densely packed with meditative meaning whereas the third compromises the first two by showing how, in their suggestiveness, they can be coyly gestural. And so on. None of this may have been intended but those three poems together, rather than “Woodsmoke” on its own, prepare us for most of what happens in this book.

Family history is the subject of many of the poems in the first half of the book and Turner is one of a number of recent poets to focus on (in Gary Catalano’s phrase) remembering the rural life. It’s not an easy thing to do well but there is a nice balance here between remembered sensations from a time of sensitivity and an appreciation of the way family members are both separate individuals and also parts of a genetic chain that includes the author. Thus a poem which begins with the father quickly modulates to an uncle’s memory of the grandfather – “could ride a wild horse to a standstill, // round penned horses all his life” – and imagines the grandfather looking sceptically at his sons before the poet, the most recent “link in the chain” (to continue the jewellery motif of “Apprentice”) looks at the fresh crops emerging year after year. There’s also a sensitivity here to responsibilities to previous generations and, perhaps, the thought that a man who has dedicated his life to poetry and making jewellery might appear an oddity, and even a disappointment, to the ancestors who produced him. It’s not an uncommon experience for Australian poets with a rural background since Australia is not, after all, one of those cultures where a family’s proudest achievement would be to produce a poet.

We meet the proto-poet in a number of these poems, perhaps most interestingly in “Lot” which seems, at first, to be a poem about growing plants at a domestic level (the title refers to both a rural address and a rural fate) but quickly turns into a poem about burning the refuse and thus generating woodsmoke:

. . . . . 
I can remember my mother jamming the rose

thorns and summer-end weeds in the fire
with the back end of a hoe, my brothers

and I spying into the flames, watching the cinders
spray up over the fence, while the uprooted

green stems crackled in the heat.
. . . 
When there was nothing to do, I’d kick off
a charred end of a branch from the fire bin

and draw circles or birds on the pavement. Other
times, I’d scratch my name in the dirt with a stick.

It makes the point, fairly subtly, that the first expressions of childish creativity, probably common to all, are here made with a fire-burned stick which, as the title poem pointed out, had released its history to the air.

As an isolated subject, benediction figures mainly in poems later in the book but one of these early poems is significantly called “A Penance”. It’s not an easy poem to speak confidently about as a reader but the early description of the situation – “I gathered pips from its / edges, back-burned and heaped smoke with / sodden leaves. I was given pods to split, straw / to pull and a grove of sticks to whittle a field” – is so impregnated with images that are significant in this book that one is forced to return to it and look at it carefully. It is about the processes of cutting out the dead wood and remains of the crop and burning it on granite outcrops (a word that one suddenly realises connects rocks with plants). But instead of allegorising this out into a statement about war – as Murray’s “A New England Farm, August 1914” does – it focusses on the ethical implications of tilling the land, calling it, somewhat mysteriously, “a reckoning”, and finishing up by making an offering:

                   Late harvest, when the wheat
bloomed, I made a wreath of roots and intricate
weeds, hung it with a nail on a deadwood tree.
I knelt beneath it shredding strips of sackcloth

and rough threaded jute that had stored the seed
of the harvest grain. The wind blew hard across
the furrows, and ash from the outcrops plumed
in the air. I stayed kneeling, and struck a match.

It’s a complex holocaust containing none of the scent of animal fats to appease hungry sky-gods but instead the remains of what needs to be destroyed so that new life can prosper. There are complicated responsibilities being negotiated here and perhaps it is significant that the last of the poems about family is devoted to an Aunt Leila whose house was incinerated in the Black Saturday bushfires.

At other places, benediction is approached more gesturally. “Nocturne” is a celebration of domestic bliss where, after putting his daughter to sleep, the poet makes her next day’s lunch and sees how the “servant moonlight falls faithfully / now, into the earthen pots”, and “A Gift” celebrates an ineffable moment of “stinging grace” when “everything that seemed distant / or unnoticed was drawn near”. “Grace” celebrates such moments but, instead of being open-ended, concludes by putting them in an ethical context:

There was something in the rain, in the way it fell.
Something in the way of the birds. And in
the way of the river. Something in the way it fell.
Something about how the river rose, and
about the stillness of the birds on the banks
in the rain
and about the way the air made it feel possible
to forgive -
and be forgiven.

Perhaps the poem that most intensely addresses these issues of history, the interrelation of life and death, and how we are engaged with both in an ethical sense, is the final poem of Woodsmoke, “Fieldwork”. There must be a glance at Seamus Heaney here though the title, like “woodsmoke”, is made into a single word whereas in Heaney the terms are separated, maximising the allegorical possibilities. The situation involves finding a dead magpie and burying it so that the natural processes of decay, reduction and at least some form of new life can occur:

. . . . .
I left her there to the hide beetles
and the flesh-boring burying beetles,
who would come to grapple through seed-cone,
stick and leaf, mud, and at last, by way
of orifice, would sheath her, nosh on her

ripe tissue and fleshy muck, before leaving
eggs in a crypt scraped under her remains.
Larvae would move into beetledom, into
the birthwing of the hutted carcass . . .

When he revisits the remains of the grave and finds a skull and a clump of feathers and wing we are provided with questions and an open-ended conclusion:

                        I know what the cycle
serves, but what is being served by 
the cycle? It’s arguable, I know – best
to just walk and fall in love with the field,
the beloved range of the ubiquitous grass.

It takes some work at first to prise two meanings out of what seems a simple repetition of meaning in both active and passive voices – what the cycle serves should be the same as what is being served by the cycle. One way is to split the meaning of the word “serve” so that the active means, “I know what the cycle does – it serves Life” and the passive means, “Why is the cycle as brutally cruel and wasteful as this? Why must life be built on death?” Ubiquitous grass may be one kind of benediction (and a painless provider, when burnt in the family incinerator, of woodsmoke) but this is a poetry that wants to pursue questions about how we are engaged in the natural world as much as it wants to celebrate the blessings that world provides. As “Shelling Peas” suggests, it will be a “hands-on” approach.

David Malouf: Earth Hour

St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2014, 86pp.

There is much in David Malouf’s new book, Earth Hour, which is continuous with Typewriter Music published seven years ago. The ambit of the poems, compared with large, middle period pieces like “Ode”, “Ode One”, “An Die Musik”, “Ode: Stravinsky’s Grave” or of a complex sequence like “A Little Panopticon”, is small and the mode is best described as lyrical rather than expansively meditative. Reading them we enter again that distinctively Maloufian world of hypersensitivity to the presence of alternative worlds within (and on the borders of) our own world and of readiness to celebrate the movement from one world to another in a universe where all the usual defining boundaries seem suddenly porous. Malouf always gives us the weird experience of feeling that the firmly-established boundaries which we use to navigate our way through life (social vs personal, logical vs irrational, human vs animal, day-world vs dream-world, etc etc) are actually not as stable as we would like to think they are. At the same time, the poetry doesn’t exploit this as a predictable position: one of the wonders of Malouf’s poetry is the way in which, no matter how well-acquainted we make ourselves with the vision it encapsulates and expresses, the individual poems are always little surprises, catching us out by revealling unexpected corners and consequences of that vision or with unexpected strategies for expressing it.

Take, for example, “Dog Park”, one of a sequence of eleven poems called “A Green Miscellany”. The “situation” is the homely one of taking one’s pet (and highly domesticated) dog for a walk in the park. Almost immediately we are made aware that Malouf’s interest is in the evolutionary development of the dog and of the growing relationship between ex-wolf and humans. Typically of Malouf the past is imagined as a ghost world interpenetrating the present so that the dogs, when they “heel and prance”, are “ghost-dancers on the feet of sleeping wolves”, sleeping because, in the Malouf world, these wolves of the past are dreaming their futures just as much as inhabitants of the present can dream or see their own pasts. The poem continues:

                    We have all come a long way
to get here, the memory
of meadow-shine a green
reminder of what we were, what they
were, how we have lived and learned from
each other, and who it was that emerged
as the namers and keepers. Long-sighted stargazers, herders

of space into viable chunks, moody diviners
of closeness and the degrees
of melancholy distance, with all
that ensued as entailment:
dog-tag, poop-scoop,
dog-whistle; the angel gate
of exile. Beginning with our own.

This is very much in keeping with the interests of recent Malouf and also with the tone which is full of jokey little enjambments (designed not so much to kick the movement of the verse along as to change the syntax and thus momentarily disorient and surprise the reader) and puns: it’s no accident that a poem about dogs speaks of what ensued as “entailment”. But there is also the habitual use of an inclusive “we”, here marking not only all of the human cultures since the Mesolithic but also all animal life. A poem which begins with entering a park concludes with a reference to leaving a park – the expulsion from Eden. We are in exile because we are, in Freud’s model of what civilisation costs us, immersed in a world of rules “dog-tag, poop-scoop / dog-whistle” that means that a past of immediate experience of the world is cut-off from us.

The first poem of this sequence is also about the past within the present. “Good Friday, Flying West” has, as its point of departure, the experience of travelling west from Australia by plane, usually over an extended night and through an extended, slow-motion dawn, towards Europe (one wonders how often this has made the list of distinctive Australian experiences, joining that iconic group that begins with lonely shepherding, moves on to mateship and thence to experiences of surf and improbably empty spaces):

    . . .  the pluck and flow of the planet takes us
back, half a day
or centuries; driftways

descend from Mt Ararat. Unrisen
ahead the dazzling dinning bee-hive cities.
Museums not yet open . . .

While it’s possible that the first line I have quoted is a nod to Auden’s “pluck and knock of the tide”, the whole poem is built on a very elegant and aesthetically satisfying sleight of hand whereby the journey west is also the journey back in time. The cities of Europe will gradually appear over the horizon, too early in their morning for the museums to be open. But seen as a journey back five thousand years or so, the first cities of Mesopotamia and, later, Europe, are still waiting to be built. It will take a long time and a long development of self-consciousness about their own existence through time for them to open their first museums. Eventually the poem (I think) concludes by moving back beyond what we now call the Anthropocene to a time when there were no humans to dream the future changes to clay that will make the very artefacts that might survive in a museum:

          . . . the pitcher swelling

in shadow on a shelf, the bowl
of wheatgrains on its altar still unbroken
Eocene clay, undreamed of in the earth.

Earth Hour is, as we would expect, full of visitors from other worlds such as the wolves and cities of the past. And many of the poems think a lot about the nature of visitation. In Malouf’s world there is a good deal of emphasis on the reciprocity of visitation: if you want to widen your perspectives by entering doors into other worlds, you must expect those worlds to send visitors to you through the same door. You won’t be unchanged. The book’s first poem, “Aquarius”, describes the moment when a “sovereign” day – through which we stroll as if we were immortal – suddenly induces a change in us so that we see that, alongside this world, is a “counterworld” of mortality and physicality which is just as wonderful:

                             . . . loved animal
forms, shy otherlings our bodies turn to
when we turn towards sleep; like us the backward
children of a green original anti
-Eden from which we’ve never been expelled.

The book’s next poem takes up the idea of visitation, focussing on some people’s sense of another world within this one – “Not all come to it / but some do, and serenely” – but goes on to focus on the spirits of such people after they have joined “the Grateful Dead”, and how their silence becomes a companionable presence which might be called an angel. The idea of a reverse world in “Aquarius”, as well as the spirits of the dead in “Radiance”, is taken up in Earth Hour’s third poem, “Retrospect”, where a memory of walking into Sevres many, many years ago, lagging behind a friend (one who has “the look of one already gone, already gone / too far into the forest”) is juxtaposed with a dream of seeing the same friend in a movie queue. But here the roles are reversed – or a mirror-image – and the poet is ahead of his friend. A later poem, “The Deluge”, is fascinated by the way in which urban floodwaters reflect the sky to produce a “universe / turned upside down and backwards, below / above, above, and far-off under / foot”. People ferrying goods and the trapped across the water seem like angels who have taken on “a second job as porters”.

“Seven Faces of the Die” introduces the notion of chance in what I think, is a departure in Malouf’s thinking. It appears as a theme in his most recent novel, Ransom, and is, perhaps, a response to his own feeling that the continuous processes of evolution and interpenetration of worlds might be a little too mechanistic and positivist. At any rate, it forms a significant part of the idea of visitation since visitations should have an element of numinous surprise. The third poem puts it best:

At hazard, whether or not
we know it and wherever
we go. Without it no
surprise, no enchantment.
There is law enough all about us
 . . .
                                        as giddy
happenstance leads us
this way into
a lost one’s arms, or that way
deeper into the maze.

Often in the poems of Earth Hour it is not so much a matter of sudden visitations which prove that the boundaries between worlds are porous – although there are plenty of those – so much as a distinctive and unusual perspective. In the poem, “A Green Miscellany”, food is seen as part of a continuous pattern whereby fruits and grains, developed over centuries of “mute Georgics”, spread to all corners of the world and even in Australia – about as far away from the original Mesopotamian Eden as it is possible to get – “orchard blossom out of Asia / melts on the tongue as flakes of cherry strudel; the New World crams / our mouths with kartoffelsalat.” It is, as the poem says, the opposite of diaspora because it makes the whole world a homeland, “Our Earthly Paradise”. It’s a Maloufian perspective: unusual but intellectually and emotionally irresistible. Significantly, the poem doesn’t stop there, happy with its repositioning of food, Nature, evolution and migration. The second part of the poem moves from the grand view to the intimate, prefaced by “Even New South Wales”, and considers practices in the suburbs of Sydney (named as re-creations if not of Eden then certainly of parts of London) where smart newly-weds remove the old gardens to replace them by “native” plantings and in doing so “unlock” another garden.

And perspective often involves angle of view as well as dimension. “The Worm’s-eye View” imagines the perspective of a bookworm (a literal, not metaphorical bookworm, though we might be being asked to explore the possibilities of the latter) chewing its way through a magisterial scholarly work making its own “thwart commentary on the sacred text”. “An Aside on the Sublime” and “Australia Day at Pennyroyal” both show the macro fitting comfortably with the micro. In the former the poet stands aside to allow a thrush to have centre stage, singing its song which is a kind of accompaniment to the bigger business going on as the sun makes its “descent into the dark / to bring back / tomorrow” and in the latter a chorus of tiny noises in the grass prepares for the arrival of night bringing in its wake:

. . . the satiny milk-white bridal
train of infinity. Or this dazzling

hand-fling and scruple
of it, the slow shower of the galaxies.

Angle of view and the juxtaposition of dimensions is a complex issue in Malouf but I’m content here to point out that both are examples of crossing of borders: the partitions that separate the perspective of the human from other angles and other sizes.

In retrospect, I think it is the complexity and shape of the poems rather than the consistency of the vision of reality which makes Malouf one of our greatest poets. There have been poets for whom, once one works out how they see the world, there isn’t really much else to do. Visionaries – and visionary poets – are often like this. Malouf, a poet at the deepest level, wants all the poems to be self-sustaining rather than expressions of a corner of a vision. Thus the previously mentioned “Radiance”, for example, which begins as a list of the different ways in which vision comes to people, moves on to deal with the way these people come to us after death; “Ladybird” begins by seeming to be a poem about visitations in the form of benevolent insects but the poem takes off from the nursery rhyme and finishes up being about playing with matches and nearly burning down one’s home. “Entreaty” which looks as though it will be a poem where the past (in the form of a small corner shop visited by the poet as a boy) will appear as a ghost in the present turns out, via the question that the old lady behind the counter asks of her young customers – “what’s your poison?”, to be a poem about how the poet has lived the next three quarters of a century blessedly free of the horrors that can be visited on humans young and old:

                   . . .  only now, a lifetime
later, [I] find my tongue:

If luck is with me
today, on my long walk home, may no
black cat cross my path, no sweet-talking stranger,
no thief, no mischief-maker,
no trafficker in last words waylay me.

Thinking about the sinuous and surprising shapes of the Malouf poems makes one want to unite content with form here and say that just as Malouf dissolves the usually firm boundaries to different levels of reality, encouraging porosity and visitation, so he also wants to dissolve the conventional shape of a poem whereby it should stick to its subject and get it out as clearly as it can, displaying a good, honest sense of unity. Malouf’s poetry always introduces “the situation” in subtle and oblique ways, making, in passing, most other Australian poems look very wordy, if not prosy. And the unexpected directions that individual poems take – which become, after several readings, perfectly expected, of course – parallel Malouf’s vision whereby things are never exactly as they seem on the surface. There is much more going on if you look and listen or, in our case, read carefully. Nothing, as the first poem of “Seven Faces of the Die” says “is mere or only”.

Anthony Lawrence: Signal Flare

Glebe: Puncher & Wattmann, 2013, 100pp.

The fact that Signal Flare is Anthony Lawrence’s fourteenth book of poems not only gives some idea of how productive a poet he is but also reminds readers that we don’t really have any excuse for being unfamiliar with his fierce and distinctive poetic world. It’s always bracing and mind- and body- expanding to lower yourself into that world again. I’m intrigued that this book’s cover describes it as extending the “lyrical work” that began with The Sleep of a Learning Man, suggesting that that book, his tenth, marks some kind of new development. I can’t see this myself, finding more continuities in Lawrence than departures. At least on a superficial rereading of his work it seems remarkably of a piece, exploring the same themes and developing the possibilities of his powerful poetic technique. It’s true that The Welfare of My Enemy, his previous book, is rather different in that it explores the single theme of disappearance and perhaps readers of Signal Flare need to be reminded of the way in which it reconnects to books like Bark and The Sleep of a Learning Man but it seems indisputable that Lawrence’s is a poetry of consistent obsessions and consistent exploratory methods.

One of the obsessions of Lawrence’s poetry is with extreme states, and a category of such states (which include a great deal ranging from loss to a passionate engagement with the objects and animals of the world) are those which lead to extreme actions. And one of these extreme actions is suicide. It is something we meet in his first book, Dreaming in Stone, in a piece called “Poem for John”, about someone who tried (and failed) to walk “out from his life” and in “John Berryman’s Death” where suicide is combined with the themes of addiction and poetry. Again, though the act is successful, Berryman, landing on the ground rather than the river, fails to step “out from his life” with style or dignity. At any rate, although one doesn’t want to claim continuities when more evidence is needed, it will come as no surprise that the first poem of the first of Signal Flare’s four sections is a lengthy and powerful threnody for a suicide. It’s written in Lawrence’s full high-style – as a threnody should be – and is a formally made thing: forty-nine stanzas of four lines. The long, winding sentences are shared with poets like Thomas (“A Refusal to Mourn”) and the harbour and ferry setting, together with the idea of “crossing” from life to death, recall Slessor’s “Five Bells” but this isn’t really like either of those poems, a reminder that “high-style” comes in more kinds than one might think. Much of its power derives from an incantatory quality in the syntax – heightened by supressing all stops apart from commas – crossed with the kind of brilliantly observed and “captured” incidental details that are a hallmark of Lawrence’s poetry:

. . . . . 
your faith not enough

to keep you from harm
from the end of harm
the Sydney rock oysters
like ceramic fuse plates

sparking and shorting-out in the wash
a ferry disengaging its drive shaft
as it broadsided waves
into the wharf, and then

you were gone, leaving
a pair of sandals unlaced on a stone
while below the hydraulic hiss . . .

This first section of Signal Flare is introduced by a quotation from August Kleinzahler – “And a moon is never so pretty as in a poisoned sky” – and is generally devoted to poems of distress based on loss of one kind or another: there is a second elegy, for example. But the drive of the poems is to make, and live, a life in the context of loss. And so “Nocturne”, focussing on love against the backdrop of a mechanically conceived body with its inevitable physical decline, still concludes positively, deploying a characteristic Lawrence fishing metaphor in an unusual way:

. . . . . 
                    and we leave the future to itself
          if not caring for a likely loss
of memory and skin
          then at least resigned
                    to the way love works
          in the deep and on the flats
sight-casting to shadows
          on the heart or lung . . .

And “Ripple” deals with the problem – of fundamental importance to any kind of poetry whose energy comes from distress – that overcoming the pain of loss is not actually an unmitigated good. It is typical of the never-cliched quality of Lawrence’s poetry that this is couched in two unusual metaphors so that healing “makes a local history from distance” and an unhealed wound means that “sayings like A rip is easy to read / are not meant to be commentaries on coastal conditions”. There is also a significant poem, “The Art of the Eye”, intriguingly positioned in this first section, which is about the extent to which we can trust the senses, those responses which “marry each other / to make of complexity a wild, accessible form”. It’s a sceptical poem: perhaps it celebrates the “art” of its title which is a skill based on such scepticism but perhaps its position here means we should read it as a lament for another kind of loss, the loss of an immediate and trustworthy response by the senses.

This first section – which I am, perhaps, following a little too mechanically – concludes with two poems , “Moth Orchid” and “Eating Mussels” which are celebrations and not, in any sense that I can see, poems of loss. They focus on two senses: the first is devoted to sound and the second to taste. They have that wonderful tactility which seems inborn in Lawrence’s work so that while the first has a strange quality of being simultaneously aerial and heavy, the second (beginning, “Out from the tidal lowering and raising / of a whitewater scrim over shore stones / rinsed by moonlight”) has a sharp, tangy, “brackish” quality.

The second section of Signal Flare – true to its epigraph, “A hen stares at nothing with one eye, / then picks it up” – could be seen as a collection of signatures, visions, appellations and gifts, all words which make up the titles of some of the poems. “Signatures” is a collection, or assemblage, of twenty-one brief, tight poems focussing on traces, sometimes scars, sometimes tracks, which are left in the physical world. The range of these traces is impressive, ranging from “The tannin marbling of dribble stains on your pillow / one of deep sleep’s autographs . . .” to “a fox / making its mark – / an infringement, a wet cough on baited ground”, and they are likely to involve the inner physical world as much as the outer. In a sense these brief poems could be said to belong to an important thread through Lawrence’s work: those poems which deal with the processes by which poetry is made. Although “Signatures” never speaks about poetry, it is tempting to see it as being concerned with the way in which the outer becomes part of the inner awaiting some kind of transformation into poetry.

This may be drawing a longish interpretive bow but there is no doubt that two other poems from this section, “Vision” and “The Pines”, are about the strange processes that make poems. The former, though it begins and ends with what animals see when they are in that nervous, vulnerable state of drinking is really about drinking whisky as a metaphor for processing the natural world into poetry in a state where “as any visionary worth / the length and duration of their gaze will confirm / the spells of darkness and tradition have begun . . .” “The Pines”, on the other hand, enters fully into the crucial issue of how precise observation can be squared with a poet’s imaginative apprehension which registers the wonder and draws other experience in to illuminating it. The poem begins with one of those brilliant observational passages which are simultaneously accurate and evocative – “The pines are dark, with a bleed of sea mist coming through / the brush-worked texture of the air . . .” – then moves on, interestingly, to a burial and finally settles into a meditation the first part of which I will quote at length here, because it is likely to figure in the future when the sluggish freight train of Australian poetry criticism gets moving in Lawrence’s direction:

And while I don’t always look for wonder
in what I see, as I know it’s often best to walk
to let that line of cloud be cloud
not the memory of what I saw in Naples -
Christ under a veil of Carrara marble – I understand
that observation can be just another word
for full immersion, or for skimming the tight skin
of a thought, that it’s transformative, or passive
and when I try to choose between
          taking the air and taking what I need
                    to use for later, for working the rhythms
of breath and blood flow into verse, I mostly fail
in my resolve to leave a scene alone
          knowing what a glance takes in
                    will be changing already as I think of it
the way coastal air unspools . . .

It’s rare for a poet to dwell so overtly on the issues that lie behind his or her craft and, though these are often passed off as difficult to define “spells of darkness and tradition”, write about them so lucidly, exploratively and essayistically.

In the third section of Signal Flare we are in the world of birds though there are also spiders, butterflies and rabbits. The after-effect of “The Pines” is so strong that one wants to read a poem like “Orb Spiders” as some kind of allegory for poets who “harvest blown pollen / which they keep in a sling below the sleeves / that house their fangs” and “What the Koel Wants” – a poem about cuckoos – as being about plagiarism, perhaps, or about the competitive relationship of one poet to another, or even the relationship of poet to publisher! Just as reading the earlier “Signatures” as being about poetic processes may have overstepped interpretive boundaries, so would these readings. But there is no doubt that the last two poems of this section, “Cattle Egret” and “Sightings” are, largely, about poetry.

The former focusses on the symbiotic relationship between bird and cattle, registering the way

     when one
creature moves on
another steps in

to consider or disregard
what stirs within
or rises from the grass . . .

A mild state of over-interpretive critical paranoia might tempt one to see this as about poets (slow-moving bovine creatures) and their parasitic critics but the complex interactions are described in this poem as benevolent and extending to the observer: “we leave // changed ourselves / having been where / things are companionable and alive // with possibilities”. Ultimately “Cattle Egret” seems to be about the drive to understand and interpret – to “consult a text / on wetlands birds // or a guide // to animal husbandry” – versus the way in which, by being engaged in a scene of interaction an observer can, himself, be changed by the enriched possibilities.

“Sightings”, on the other hand, is about authenticity and the complexities of both defining it and the role it plays in poetry. The poem begins with a highly symbolic scene – a rabbit on its hind legs in a Cootamundra wattle as though trying “to sample the last dregs / of light from the trees golden strings / or to investigate the sky / from a different perspective”. But since the scene was viewed from a car travelling at speed, the “authenticity” of the poet’s observation can be challenged. The poem settles into a dialogue about the real and the imagined and asks which of the two is the more expansive:

knowing, as you do, how I live
for the imagination, at the expense
you say, of the here and now
or the expanse, I say, in response
of each rare sighting and its afterglow
of each against-the-odds moment that intersects
with the commonplace . . .

an aesthetically insoluble issue which gets resolved, at the end of the poem, in “make-up sex”.

Although the first three sections of Signal Flare exhibit a clear thematic structure (even though the poems’ tones may be quite different) it’s less easy to be confident about how the final section, prefaced by an extract from Michael Donaghy’s “Haunts”, is organised. The opening poems are about fish, fishing and water but the rest involve personal crises. “Domestic Emergencies” is, like “Signatures”, a collage piece and is made up of short poems about problems “in the house”, ranging from an accident with a knife to relationship issues. There is a narrative poem about a saved suicide, another (comic, I think) about a Legionnaire’s Disease “scare”. And just as Signal Flare opened with a poem exploring the state of mind of a suicide, so it finishes with a poem, “Winging It”, exploring the state of a person with an incurable disease: “you can’t shake this sense / that it’s all about to be explained, if not forever / then for good”. Of all these poems, the one that most stays with me is the first, “Klaxon”. It’s worth quoting in full:

At the end of the breakwall I waited
for a tanker – some long labouring shadow
in from Singapore or Taiwan
its decks lit up like a townhouse
in the stacked, unballasted dark.

A maritime pilot had been choppered out
to take the wheel
five storeys over the swell.
The tugs had arrived
and were idling under gulls, smoke and spray.
When a tanker arrived
I could see the pilot’s face, pale and green
in the glow of instruments, his expression
intense and otherworldly.

I caught a crab and held it
as I’d once held the brooch of a Cooktown orchid – tenderly -
an offering to myself.

The crab was glazed and red
from the lamp of a marker buoy
and was changing in shape and colour.
It reminded me of the night
I saw crabs on the wharf at Circular Quay -
I was exhausted, and because my darling
had walked off from where we’d been, unhappily
they looked like spiders
laying snares at the base of a capstan.

When I released the crab it helmeted away
as the tanker sounded its horn
which went on and on
like my incorrect use of, and enduring love for
the word klaxon.

There’s a lot one would want to say about this poem. Of course, much is speculative but that’s the fate of criticism which is, after all, no more than intense and committed reading. The first thing to enjoy is the restless focus, not of the poet but of the poem itself: this isn’t going to be a poem unified by its object. The first line, introducing the protagonist in the scene, announces that it isn’t going to be a poem about oil tankers, despite the fact that their weird physicality, their fate (to move oil over water), their function in global economies etc, all make them lively candidates for a poet’s sharp vision or for allegorisation into various meanings. The existence of an “I” waiting at the end of a breakwall leads us to think – especially in Lawrence’s case – that behind the opening there will be a crisis of some kind, most likely “domestic”. So you feel that the poem’s move from quickly introducing the protagonist to speaking about the tanker and then moving to focus on a pilot’s face above the ships instruments (something which, like the vision of the rabbit in “Sightings”, seems hardly possible and more an imaginative expansion than an “I-was-there” piece of authenticity) is actually a shying away from emotional pain. And I think this is the essence of the poem’s magic. Structurally it looks at first like a set of unpredictable modulations, almost a challenge to the poem to hold them together into some kind of unity. But the unity is an expressive one. The way I read the poem is that its constant shifts – finishing with that memorable comment about misuse of the word “klaxon” – are the self’s protective shyings away from the pain at the centre.

Whether or not this is what “Klaxon” tries to do, it is hard not to register the complexity and sophistication of its form. Lawrence’s poems almost always have an exciting shape to them, beginning at an angle that makes us think ahead to the way in which the poem will play out its shape, something that is rarely predictable and which holds quite a few surprises. But “Klaxon” wouldn’t be the powerful poem that it is if its formal pleasures were not matched with the accuracy and physicality of its images. A labouring shadow in the unballasted dark is a sharp and accurate description which argues that it has come from a magical interaction of the world and the word. The poem which follows it, “The Trawler”, has, apart from an interesting and complex shape, a similar visual acuity, describing a trawler coming upriver as being “like an old shed / held together by wires and light / blue wood”. This visual intensity is only part of the compound intensities that make up Lawrence’s poetry, but it ensures that the poems like these fix themselves limpet-like in any reader’s mind.

Peter Boyle: Towns in the Great Desert: New and Selected Poems

Glebe: Puncher & Wattmann, 2013, 237pp.

Peter Boyle is one of the best and most fascinating of Australian poets not least because he is so unlike all of the others. His poetic origins – and continuing influences – lie mainly in the twentieth century poetry of the Romance languages, especially the distinctive surrealisms of the French and the Spanish and he has an abiding interest in the postcolonial poetries of the Caribbean and South America. Towns in the Great Desert is a new book with an appended selected poems. Though Boyle’s first book, Coming Home From the World, was published in 1994, the selected poems here is dated 1988 – 2009 and you feel that in 1988, the bicentennial year, one might have described Boyle’s work as profoundly, and interestingly, un-Australian. Things have changed in the last quarter of a century. The internet means that the default set of influences for a new poet is no longer necessarily the local. All poetries are available to everybody though, poetry being what it is, it is hard to think that the influence will be a profoundly shaping one unless the poet is (or makes him- or herself) fluent in the language of the original. Boyle’s biography suggests that his initial interests were linguistic and the new languages brought with them new poetries which animated his own poetic talents.

Towns in the Great Desert is a wonderful opportunity to immerse oneself, once more, in the Boyle world. For a critic though, it’s a very difficult world to describe since a surreal approach means that poems tend to set out on a voyage of their own rather than one in obedience to thematic imperatives that can be worked out by a bit of careful attention. I have often wondered whether the first poem of Boyle’s first book, and of the selected poems here, “From Instructions Given to the Royal Examiners in the State of Chi”, shouldn’t be read as a little parable about both Boyle’s writing principles and the readers’ experience of reading the poems. This poem is a set of ways of, in a sense, missing the point or, at least, the formally required point of evaluating the correctness or otherwise of the answers of a candidate for China’s imperial examinations to enter the bureaucracy. “Examine the candidate’s state of mind” it begins, going on through “Assess the longevity of his nails”, “Calculate . . . the expression of his face” until these swervings become more and more extreme:

Identify the direction of the wind
as it hurries the leaves of all the provinces
away from everything known,
brushing them with the fragrance
of unnamed creatures waiting to be born.
Remember for what purpose
you are setting down these dreams
under such limited starlight.
Remember the waves which are forcing you
further and further off all courses into the terrible wilderness of death.
Then forget all of yourself and all your hopes
and write your mark and comments in the correct space
for the perusal of a higher order.

Whether it’s a poetic credo or an “advice to my readers” this catalogue of indirections is about abandoning precise tasks and foci (beautifully conveyed by the phrase, “limited starlight”) in favour of an imaginative widening of focus even though the mechanism behind the widening appears illogical: what significance can the direction of the wind have to an examinee’s answers, after all? But it’s worth noting that the examiner doesn’t drift off into a set of solipsistic fantasies: the examination paper gets marked at the end of the poem.

It’s always dangerous to focus on the first poem of a poet’s selected poems – partly because it looks a lazy and obvious critical tactic – but thinking about Boyle’s poetry often leads me back to it. There are, of course, plenty of other poems which hint at Boyle’s poetic principles and methods. “Poet Visiting a High School” from the second collection, The Blue Cloud of Crying, speaks of writing poems in terms of extreme concentration and a concurrent loss of self:

. . . . . 
For a moment the room before her
is as empty as the sky is empty.
How to tell them
what their bodies crave most -
that look of selfless devastating attention -
is the listening and the seeing her mind gives
to absent things
. . . . .

We seem to be in the world of Simone Weill here but the poem finishes by speaking about almost technical matters: the way, for example, a metaphor, brought it to illuminate, can grow a life of its own, pulling the poem away from its intended theme:

and how to speak
of all she herself would call failure -
the poems where what was there seemed too obvious
too given
till an ungainly metaphor interposed itself
and the more she struggled
the more it grew
strangling all else . . .

It’s not entirely clear where the failure lies here – in the obvious “givennness” of the material the world has provided or the metaphor which, like Laocoon’s sea-serpent, rises up and strangles it – but the focus on imaginative expansion and the effect it has on writing poetry is clear.

There is also, from the next book, What the Painter Saw in Our Faces, a poem called “The Gardener”. Typically of Boyle, the way the poem approaches its issues – What is poetry? What is it worth? How does it relate to the real and unreal, the macro and micro, the external and internal? – involves an initially unexpected tactic. Where we might have expected a personal lyric – “I sit in the garden and think about poetry” – what we get is a monologue spoken by a spirit induced by poetry. She’s a muse figure but also a sympathetic fellow-practitioner, perhaps, or even a reader:

“You practise the silent art”, she said 
looking into the narrow garden where a bird
passed rapidly. “You move in isolation
from recognition or audience.
And what you place on the page
is mostly read by no one and
what you value in the way the words fall
or run together,
pointing outwards to the world
and inwards to a private reticence,
is something not explicable to others.
Your silent unwanted art draws me.
I have been dead long enough to hear
the cadences you hum under your breath at midnight . . .”

Finally, in this little sampling of Boyle poems which cast light on his principles and practices, there is a prose poem, “In Response to a Critic’s Call for Tighter Editing” from The Museum of Space. Its title tells us that it is going to be about reactions to his poetry which find it all too free: if imaginative transformations are encouraged because they replace the limited starlight by wider perspectives then what is to stop a poem simply spinning endlessly out of itself into infinite possibility? What kind of shaping process – form – can be imposed which is not a reductive imposition? What is interesting about this poem is that it doesn’t set out to justify Boyle’s poetry so much as to enact its principles:

A poet should be able to write outside of the human in all sorts of directions. The moon is one of them. Water that has just bubbled out of the earth is another. Of course they are distant cousins as intimately related as the wind and a sandgrain.

If I was the moon I couldn’t practise what I would say. I would have to be empty and desolate. Everything would happen by instinct like tides responding to my slow ballet. I would be ignorant as a worn shoe condemned to dance forever over subterranean waters. My cratered eyes would guide me through space and my children would say, Look, he comes from forever, he’s on his way to forever. He’s the one blind man whose walking stick is the glide of small fish over sand, the waterfall that flows simultaneously in both directions.

I think there’s a lot of comedy here underpinning the basic point that it should be possible, by empathy, to make oneself into something non-human. But structurally it also seems to me to be deliberately linear, rejecting the circularity that can give a sense of enclosed form. After the statement that, imaginatively, we can become something else the poet becomes the moon but instead of making a lyrical conclusion at that point (the kind of thing that says “I brood on the world beneath” only a lot better) we are hurried on to the moon’s “children” and finish up with a paradoxical metaphor that presents us settling comfortably.

Of the four poems I have chosen for this little anthology of poems about poetry – and I could have chosen excerpts from many of the other poems – only the first appears in the selection made in Towns in the Great Desert. But Boyle’s poetics are everywhere so apparent in the poems themselves that they don’t really need “poem-poems” to make them clear. The first principle of this practice is the drive to expand experience imaginatively by using the various tropes as a way not of defining with increasing precision but of bringing hitherto unconnected worlds of experience to bear on existence: as an early poem, “Robert Frost at Eighty”, says, “I think there are poems greater and stranger than any I have known. / I would like to find them”. The tension here will be with conventional notions of form because these usually, as I have said above, involve some kind of return to the beginning – with varying degrees of subtlety and sophistication – that produces a circularity that is pleasing to most poets and readers but not to Boyle. “Robert Frost at Eighty” – in one sense about a poet who can be described as an arch-formalist and, at the same time, as someone with a barely acknowledged surreal sensibility – is unequivocal about technique and form:

I have done with craft.
How can I front ghosts with cleverness,
the slick glide of paradox and rhyme
that transforms prejudice
to brittle gems of seeming wisdom . . .

And a poem from The Museum of Space, “Of Poetry”, connects the limited, descriptive function of metaphor with the world of politics and, inevitably, suffering:

Great poems are often extraordinarily simple.
They carry their openness
with both hands.
If there is a metaphor lounging in a doorway
they step briskly past.
The boom of generals
and presidents with their rhetoric manuals
will go on sowing the wind . . .

One way in which this expansive and expanding imaginative drive emerges in Boyle’s poems is in images of passages, cracks and doorways which open from a narrow and confined world into a larger one. In “On Reading Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Memoirs” a child on a sickbed, with only a single small window above him “constructs the universe” inside that narrow space: “I do not need the great game of having lived. / Fantasies wide as the Amazon / merge and spin in the river of clouds”. Similarly there are, as might be expected, poems that speak of journeys outward into larger perspectives. One of the most appealing of these is “Journeys” from What the Painter Saw in Our Faces in which the imagined voyage away from “every known formality: / work, income, house, family” takes place on a rickety local bus somewhere where everything is incomprehensible and mildly – though comically – dangerous:

. . . . . 
and seated beside me old women and their grandchildren
bumping along in the same bus,
speaking only village dialect I can’t recognise,
and smoking and flicking lighted cigarette stubs about
in back of the bus that rolls around with spilt petrol
and when I try in some patois of the islands
to warn “hati hati benzin”
they all break out giggling and toss
little sparklers at me
as we lurch forward,
the first stars above the coastline
winking at my elbow.

If doorways open onto wider imaginative worlds it makes some sense that Boyle’s poetry should so often be concerned with dimensions: not only the inner space of the mind and outer of the world but also the simple matter of the opposition between great and small. “Homage to Federico Mompou”, celebrating music’s great minusculist, begins “The holy city should have a name so small / there is almost none of it left to grace a grave with” and another homage – to Cesar Vallejo, an important poet for Boyle’s poetry – says “A poem or a life / ripples between such trivial and such portentous matter . . .”

If imaginative expansion is one pole of Boyle’s poetics, the other is an obsession with worldly suffering. In fact the first three books could be seen as a continuing, and rarely entirely successful, attempt to bring these two themes together. In Boyle’s world there is nothing of the self-obsessed cult of self-improvement or “self-realisation” and empowerment about the drive to widen the skies that we live under – it is essentially an ethical matter. But getting the dispossessed, the oppressed the tortured into the poetry poses a lot of questions. I know this to be true because Boyle’s first three books twist and turn in the heroic attempt to manage it. If the first poem of the first book, “From Instructions Given to the Royal Examiners in the State of Chi”, is, tonally, relaxedly surreal and elegantly inhabits an imagined reality, the second poem, “Never Again”, which takes its title from a report into the “Disappeared” of Argentina’s Dirty War, is about human suffering (in South America, Spain and Manilla) and the way, for example, that conquerors, the wealthy, evolve ways of growing “protective layers of moss / to block humanity out”. These two poems establish a kind of binary which is pursued throughout the first books.

But the suffering of “Never Again” is marred by its abstractness and its tendency to use individuals, when that strategy is possible, as symbols of mass suffering – something that seems inadequate and a diminution of the pain of the individual anyway. At various points in the first three books these portraits appear, notably in “On Sydney’s South-West Line” which details the lives of refugees who have made “the long journey / from Saigon or Bucharest or El Salvador” to finish up in Australia’s largest city. Perhaps the best expression of the difficulties and tensions between poetry and the theme of human misery is to be found in “Japanese Poet on the Train to Medellin” where a Japanese woman poet, about to visit the world of “the rapist and the murderer / and the crack dealer” wonders “what can her singing / bring to them?” The solution, at least of this poem, is that the poet:

. . . . .
will sit – she sees it now – on the bare floor
. . . 
and she will sing whatever she can sing
in the darkness of the single cell
obliterated by the light
in all the heat and all the misery and all the evil
that is our earth.

You can begin to see the problems involved here and the issues are far larger than the work of one poet. A preliminary sketch might look like this. The art which best expresses suffering seems to be born out of the suffering community – the blues of the deep south is a good example, as are the gypsy songs which inspired Lorca – though one wouldn’t want to be naively organicist about this. At any rate, Australian poetry (probably English language poetry generally) despite its variety is a poetry that seems comfortable with a sense of groundedness and “comment-from-the-sideline” when it comes to large social experiences. At its best, of course, it can be very good at the inner world, at registering the complex topographies of feeling but it doesn’t really have the tools to deal with suffering as a human phenomenon – perhaps the cultures have simple been too spoilt by the tides of history. The poetry of South America speaks beautifully about suffering, for example, but when you import that style it doesn’t mean that that ability will be imported as well – there is a kind of species barrier between Spanish language surrealism and the Germanic poetic world which ultimately cannot be crossed. And that suffering is, itself, complex – an anatomy of human suffering would have a lot of sub-sections. One of the things that makes the poetry of the first half of Boyle’s career so important is its attempt to solve some of these problems.

Perhaps the largest single attempt is the final poem of the third book. “What the Painter Saw in Our Faces” (substantial selections of which are included in the selected poems section of Towns in the Great Desert) begins with an iconic experience of suffering, one that recurs in Boyle’s poetry, of people being ejected from their homes and driven onto the road in a war:

The lightning in the sky
and everything taken from us.
The three days’ walk to the frontier,
the burning villages,
police coming suddenly to tell us to get out . . .

But the poem’s strategy is not to make an anthology of suffering, a description of “the undifferentiated scrapheap of loss” but to do something much more daring, something which runs the risk of seeming ridiculous. It imagines a minor painter in another galaxy some dozen years in the future, receiving light from earth (it’s taken a while to get the requisite distance across the universe) painting a still life not of the suffering but of the instant before the suffering begins – though there are “frontier villages already smoking”. This idea of the moment before catastrophe begins – in which the catastrophe is, in some sense, present – is embodied in Poussin’s painting of the moment before Eurydice is bitten by the snake (the painting forms the cover of the book). And the central question is:

What kind of animal are we?
The animal that wounds its own kind.
The animal that only loves through wounding.
 . . . . .
So we trade our life for a falsehood - 
so we line up people against a wall in the name of dead stone,
so we excise a lover
suddenly after breakfast because that’s what you do.

It’s a remarkable, major, poem and if it isn’t entirely successful that is because of the scale of its ambition and the difficulties it is trying to solve. One of these is the position of the observer, the poet: sometimes a sufferer in the nightmare, sometimes an outsider, sometimes the observer from outer space. But the inner world is always implicated in the outer world and so a description of suffering at the macro-level either induces or demands a matching inner state on the part of the poet. While it’s never possible to tell what parts of poems are “personal” in the sense of based on the poet’s actual experience and what parts are dramatic projections, one can say that the mode in which Boyle deals with interiority is essentially elegiac. The world inside the poet himself is never celebrated in an exuberant, Whitmanian way.

If there is a pattern to the books after these first three, it seems to be that the unresolvable paradoxes of the poetic portrayal of suffering are pushed to one side. Suffering remains a major – perhaps the major – theme but the way of “treating” it seems to have settled into a far more abstract mode – the mode of the poem about the examiners of Chi, rather than that of Sydney’s South-West Line. A good example might be the first poem included from The Museum of Space, a book which, in my mapping, marks the beginning of the second half of Boyle’s career. The “Parable of the Two Boxes” – the first, the smaller, holds “Self-righteous evil” and the latter, the larger, holds “A great emptiness” – is not reducible to the simple binary that its title suggests and I don’t want to devote a lot of space to trying to understand it here. But it is important to show that the issue of suffering and oppression hasn’t been abandoned and so statements such as that in the small box you can sometimes hear “the small clink of power” and that large box (full of earth and the cities which have bled into it and the glass and bones which have dissolved there) is the box of “what is done to us” are significant. As is the final couplet, “What can you do then? / Yes, what can you do?” wherein the first question is a genuine ethical one and the second question makes the mistake of reading the first as a mere rhetorical question of barely concerned helplessness.

The book after The Museum of Space is Apocrypha, a brilliant work – to my mind one of the pinnacles of recent Australian poetry – which I have written about previously on this site. Conceived as a kind of anthology of alternative literatures from the Homeric period into the middle ages (alternative because embodying the sort of imaginative expansions of experience which, as I’ve said, underlie Boyle’s poetics) it strikes a new balance between parabolic abstraction and the presentation of experience. It also contains more humour than most of Boyle’s earlier poetry especially in its descriptions of the United States under the name of Eusebius, a culture “renowned for its ferocious greed and the savage destruction it dealt to others”, where corporations take out rights to individual words and things like the present tense, and punish and enslave anyone “transgressing” those rights and which has, as its mantra, “Male me narrow, narrow, narrow.”

And so to the first half of Towns in the Great Desert, a completely new book, essentially Boyle’s sixth full book of poetry. This seems undeniably in the parabolic mode I’ve been describing. It’s made up of four sections and the first and last share something in common. The first section – which gives its name to the whole book – is a catalogue of eleven imagined towns, recalling perhaps, Calvino’s Invisible Cities. What strikes me about this sequence is its lack of the more obvious and available unifying structures, things like the frame narrative of the reports to the Great Khan that Calvino’s book deploys. In other words, we might say that Boyle’s imperative to imaginative expansion spins this sequence out in such a way and into such areas that it seems more like an anthology of dreams than a sequence. Even the Great Desert, which one might have expected to form a unifying location for the eleven cities, is inconsistent. In the first poem, for example, it is traversed by a frozen river while in the second it is next to the sea and the desert seems to be, in the manner of the ancient mariner, a wilderness of salt sea. Some of the poems announce themselves as dreams while others (the fourth and sixth, for example) are elegant inventions in the Calvino mode. The ninth poem describes a not too subtly disguised Las Vegas where “Hard-wired to adolescence, / at thirty the people of this town return / to being aged twelve”.

When the theme of suffering appears in this series it can do so in a surreal way – as in the first poem. Here one female character “wakes from a dream of pounding doors”, recalling the way in which the victims of ethnic cleansing are driven out in one of Boyle’s iconic images of suffering, and another woman “arrives with two children asleep in a matchbox”. In the fourth poem, the suffering of the poor appears in the kind of elegant, abstracted parable that – I’ve tried to argue – is the more common mode as Boyle’s poetry develops. The whole poem has the quality of the imagined worlds of Apocrypha: a town suspended (in the style of Swift’s Laputa) above the river bed is set up so that the rich occupy the best-positioned levels to “harvest potential raindrops”:

“In the Sleep of the Riverbed” is the book’s final section. Again, it has a very unpredictable strategy, imagining a riverbed (significantly not the river itself, the “vast mirror I ferry helpless / beyond the autumn sun”) altering its course to speak with the “raw shadow” of the ghost of Lorca. It’s an extended, nine-part poem and not at all straightforward. Its core image, the winding river, is a significant one in Boyle’s poetry where rivers seem to divide the world into two banks variously related to each other and, at the same time, provide a moving mirror in which the underwater reflection of the world in the air provides a dreamlike experience of a related world in water. The riverbed of this poem marks the sinuous border between the humanly occupied, cultivated plains and the stony, dry mountains. This isn’t the place to try to tease out some of this poem’s complexities – exactly where the speaker is the riverbed and where it is Lorca’s ghost would be one of the first issues a reader would bring to the poem – but I’m interested in its approach to the issue of suffering. We meet pain, almost as an abstraction, in the third section:

Pain begins its heavy surgical intervention
in the diseased bark of a sapling,
in the tortured frame of a cypress
compulsively vomiting green oxygen.
Pain continues its journey
as the fish hook snagged in the eye of the penis,
as the speck of blue and crimson glass
travelling the infinite hour
between night and dawn.
Pain inscribes its trajectory from
the roots of the oldest elm
to the bud of the opening flower
releasing its prayer to the sky.

And then, of course, there is Lorca himself – an iconic poetic victim of politically inspired brutality.

The twenty poems of the second section of Towns in the Great Desert would make an ideal introduction to the more positive side of Boyle’s poetry. “Calendulas” is a list of possible, extreme transformations organised (by a pun on the name of the flower in the title) according to stations of the calendar:

In winter I am an old man, naked and in socks,
sprinting through the birches of Scandinavia.

In spring I am a young girl watching wisteria blossom at the edge of a well:
dark water is breaking through fissures in the earth . . .

As the examples of transformation progress they become more extreme though they still obey laws of association. Just as Winter can be connected with an old man and Spring with a young girl so Easter Monday can associate with a sister rising from the grave and the Equinox with a fish holding a golden balance. The core of the poem, under its baroque examples, is the notion of the miracle of the humble plant flowering through cracks and thus this poem can serve as an example of that movement of the imagination up and outwards which is so important to Boyle’s poetry at all levels:

A crack in a vase,
a break in a wall
that opens on spinning silence,
a whirlwind of dust . . .

These poems provide many examples of such cracks. In “New Year, 2009”, for example, there is “a narrow break in the unending cloudbank” and “To a Day in October”, a poem framed as a set of prayers, asks the “darkening wall of a collapsing body” to “let light stream through every ragged chink”. Celebration of the experience of imaginative expansion is the keynote. There is a fine poem, “The Small Grey and Brown Birds That Recite the Lost Books of Dante”, which imagines that the birds of the Blue Mountains, little creatures with “diffident chittering” are actually carolling “their canticles of bliss upon this earth” a bliss that Dante was able to find only in his extra-worldly Paradise. Finally one would want to mention two other fine poems. “(an afternoon with you)” is an example of a surreal celebration of (presumably, based on the title) the erotic drive of which John Forbes’s “Rrose Selavy” is another example. The metaphors explode into the extreme so that the afternoon “unites reindeer into passionate prayer circles” and “humbles your average ninety-course banquet on the slopes of Mt Everest” but it also has the power to mess with dimensions since it “minimalises all maximalists / maximises all minimalists”. And then there is a two part prose poem, “Crow”, in which a phenomenon is explained in alternative ways. Someone surprising a group of crows hears not the mournful sound we associate with that bird but a rhapsodic birdsong (the poem puts it rather more elegantly). The issue is whether the crows have been surprised speaking their natural speech and the hearer has been granted the experience of hearing what the birds say when they think they are free of expectations about how they should sound or whether she has short-circuited an expectation in her brain that crows should be mournful and by cleansing the doors of perception has heard things as they actually are. It’s ultimately about the inside and the outside and is quite an epistemological and conceptual issue. It reminds one of the discussions of Heraclitus’ famous dictum that you can’t enter the same river twice which asks whether that is because the river has changed or because you have.

The third section of the book is another set of twenty poems, made up of ten night poems, “Nocturnes”, interspersed with ten other poems sharing similar themes. The nocturnes are all built around a dreamscape of a house in a valley at the edge of a lake and seem to exploit the different transformative possibilities of the situation: in the first, the view can be transformed into that of an Asian village – “stupas with their prayer flags, / the white rooftops where clothing / beats out its own life-story against / the freezing knives of the dark goddess”; in the second the strata of time can be breached so that “A young boy from a century ago stands there waiting for someone to turn up with a crate of beer”; in the third the house is imagined to enter the lake – and so on. But the theme of these poems is not so much transformation and imaginative extension so much as writing itself – “I write in darkness across illegible paper”, says the first poem – and the way in which the act of writing is involved in these processes: does it simply notate transformation, for example, or actively create it? The sixth nocturne seems to equate writing with a way of navigating through life while following the suggestions of the imagination:

. . . . . Walking tentatively on air, I travel with eyes closed, knowing how my pen (with some errors) travels the way of the dark, trusting in its free-fall, cut loose from light’s security and all ruled margins. Truly in the white flesh of the eucalypt’s bark I have come down to earth.

I’m not sure how confidently one can add this to the anthology of poems in which Boyle speaks of his practices and poetics but the idea of a pen travelling the ways of the dark and, in a sense, leading on its trusting author, is an attractive one. The dark, here, of course, is the fertile ground of dream which is a form of imaginative freeing and expansion, but it also, conventionally, suggests to readers the “darker” side of the world, the spectre of oppression and suffering and acts as a perhaps unintended reminder that, although the suffering world, in the later Boyle collections, is less awkwardly and insistently present, it is still there.

Sarah Day: Tempo

Glebe: Puncher & Wattmann, 2013, 74pp.

Since Sarah Day’s new volume shows an almost Roman interest in boundaries, it’s no surprise that its opening poem – about the founding of Alexandria – focusses on the equivocal moment when a flock of birds eats the flour used to mark out the new capital’s city limits and that its third poem – about Pompeii – concludes with the poet, enmeshed in temporal continuities, walking towards a modern farmer tilling a field, “He will not meet my eye / as I skirt his tilled boundary to the station”. Deploying the word “skirt” here might lead us to expect that gender may be going to play an important part in the issue of borders and their crossability or otherwise but Day’s poems are humanist in the broad sense of viewing humankind as a group rather than focussing on its quarrelsome divisions.

Tempo is, like all good books of lyric poetry, founded on a coherent and consistent view of things which finds expression and, sometimes exploration, in the poems. The same spirit and interests inform almost all the poems, radically different though they might be. If one tried to be specific about this underlying nexus of concerns one might isolate the following: borders and crossings, the dimensions of time, stasis and movement, the near and the far (an issue of perspective), and outline (abstraction) and substance. All of these, even the interest in time, express themselves as binaries and the structure and life of the poems (which are made with an apparent though light formal element) is almost always derived from the tensions of oppositions.

To return to the first poem, “El Iskandaria”, we can see that what it is interested in is the way in which the marking out of the city’s outline (an innocent enough thing in itself) is really an act of exclusion whereas the intellectual and mercantile glories of Alexandria (the home of the Library and the Septuagint, among much else) will come from the ships and ideas which flood in from outside:

. . . . . 
In the flurry of wing and hungry beak
though, the soothsayers saw no travesty
but a message in the darkened air
the future city would be blessed with plenty.

It makes one remember the importance of that originary Roman myth where the ill-fated Remus jumps over his brother’s walls but it also makes us think of our own country’s recent history. Living as we do in a state of media-inspired xenophobia and its obsession with secure borders, it’s hard not to believe that there is a sharp contemporary and local point to this poem. The issue of borders has a personal, or at least, familial, perspective in another poem, “Outsiders”, which focusses on the history of the poet’s family in Tasmania – “An immigrant family, / ours was a small island / on the island we had moved to”. This group of exiles sets about documenting difference (there must be a touch of “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl” when Day says “Childhood was a taxonomy / of binary difference. / The youngest, I grew up taking notes”) but is, perhaps, saved from complete xenophobia by the ability to alter perspective:

my father, scorned in the machine shop
for his white shirt and tie,
clung for dear life to his reference points,
gravitated to migrants like himself
and discovered, from this antipodean angle,
he had more than a little in common
with wartime Germans.

Although the issue of time in Tempo might be seen as a matter of a discrete theme, in a sense the movement from the past to the present is also an example of crossing borders. We need to be reminded that the past can be seen as irrecoverable in its essentials. “Anachronisms” is a set of examples of changes occurring in the small space of a single lifetime which remind us how different the past was when handwritten envelopes appeared in your letterbox and milk and newspapers were actually delivered to your door. The comfortable bringing of the past into the present, such as is found in popular “historical” fiction, is an act of appropriation full of dangerous potential misunderstandings. But sometimes the past, as in the dead bodies in “In Time, Pompeii”, thrusts itself at us, seeming to declare how “readable” and comprehensible it is. This is the subject of a fine poem, “Fayoum”, which is about the wonderful paintings accompanying the mummified bodies in Hellenistic Egypt two millennia ago. They seem so immediately realistic and relatable-to that, as the poem says, they are like “missives from another age” which make a sieve of time by slipping through into our present. The right attitude to the past, the poems seem to say, is one of balance: we should respect the border of unrecoverable difference while celebrating those odd moments in which these borders are breached.

Many of the poems of Tempo involve, in one way or another and at one level or another, the idea of movement versus stasis. “Northern Window” is a poem about the classic North/South opposition that Auden’s “Goodbye to the Mezzogiorno” explores so well. Amsterdam is seen in mid-winter and everything is chilled into a static composition. This includes even the pilgrims in the mosaic in the Rijksmuseum – though the poem, perhaps thankfully, doesn’t call this a “frieze”. The only thing moving is a crane which looks like a Christ figure with open arms. But “on the sill” – presumably of the poet’s room – is a Venezuelan statuette of Mary with her back to the window, “disturbed perhaps / by Anglo-Saxon interiority”, facing the Latin-American world of sunlight, movement but also – and it is the poem’s final word – “evanescence”. “River Fisher” uses this binary in a quite different way. Describing the experience of fishing by wading (I presume it’s about fly-fishing) the poem is interested in the flow of the river which is strong and remorseless as opposed to both its apparent surface stillness and the fact that there are pockets of still water inside the stream itself: “In flowing water, still ponds reside: / a trout, suspended in a boulder’s vacuum / might watch a line of bubbles / slip downstream like an elver”. There are a lot of allegorical possibilities here and it’s tempting to see it as an expression of the oppositions I have spoken about so far. Water, we are told, “resists an interloper” – that is, it resents having its borders crossed – but it is possible to see the still ponds as analogous to those moments when the flood of time (a very Slessorian image and obsession) allows a momentary connection with objects from the past such as the Fayoum portraits. One is tempted to do this because another poem, “Hay Load”, which is interested in the opposition between the flow of oncoming, speeding traffic and the stately progress of a carefully balanced truck of hay specifically says that the hay truck and its load are timeless and not only in the sense that people have always mown and moved grass.

A more complex and often puzzling interest in the poems of Tempo is the idea of outline. In my introduction I constructed it, in the interests of neatness, as an opposition between abstracted outline and filled out completeness. Whether this is accurate or not, it’s an issue that recurs so frequently in this book that it needs some consideration. It first appears in villanelle form, in the fifth poem, “Afterimage”. Since I’ve long ago fallen out of love with this repetitive verse form, I may be forgiven for finding “Afterimage” not really very clear. It seems to focus on negative images, rather than outlines, but clearly wants to make a case for the occasionally superior truthfulness of inversion, of the space between things. Less abstract is “Lightning in a Portuguese Garden” where a flash of lightning provides an image – again in a Slessorian way – “outside time”. The essence of this is, of course, that the portrait presented, having avoided the flux of process, has become, perhaps like a work of art, something that can “disclose more than day” – though if there is a pun there on the poet’s name, then perhaps I shouldn’t equate the lightning picture with art. At any rate, it’s an issue taken up in “Shadow Trees”, complete with reference to Plato in its epigraph, where the City Council (which “seems to have / a policy on chiaroscuro”) delivers shadow trees. Day thinks of the way in which her life of perception is focussed on such outlines:

. . . . . 
Some silhouettes I find I have
always been walking through
like numinous fig leaves on a sandstone wall;
the three-D geometry of banksia in the porch;
a winter oak projected on a public lawn,
twin ashes breathing intricate as lungs
across a busy street . . .

wondering whether this is a result of the fact that with age comes an increasing familiarity with the dead (“Like the dead, / They stand among us on the streets”) or whether it’s a matter of the quality of light becoming sharper (perhaps as a result of climate change).

That subject – climate change – is at the heart of another poem, “The New World Book of Detail”, but the context of the book’s complex oppositions makes it a much more sophisticated and difficult one than this simple thematic description suggests. Here the atlas (found on a beekeeper’s bureau) represents “a false blue present / of fixed littorals and politics”, that is it shows borders and outlines fixed for one time by one perspective. But the world is in constant flux, and climate, though it dominates the poem, may really be only one fairly obvious example of that flux. The bees are vulnerable to that change (spring has come so early that there seems to have been no winter) and the beekeeper will move them to higher altitudes in search of true winter. The bees are a model of the collective, immensely richly productive of the “collective energy which is sweet, aromatic order” and contrast with the beekeeper himself who is an individual. The drive of the poem seems to be to cross the perspective border of the generalised as opposed to the detailed so that although ”˜the language of wide-range weather systems / is mostly generality” yet “a taxonomy of the particular might emerge”.

Which leads me to the final issue: that of perspective, something which, in an earlier review, I wanted to make out was an essential component of Day’s lyricism. The second poem of Tempo, “New Year’s Eve” seems, on the surface, not much more than a celebration of continuities even if the larger context of the book shows that continuity is to be seen as something which is in opposition to borders. But the poem is just as much about perspective, the non-humancentric image of the cosmos which now enables us to imagine seeing ourselves from another vantage point in space and rethinking the borders and oppositions which seem so pressing from our own standpoint. There is a good poem about ageing called “Far and Near” which explores the way perspective ultimately implicates ethics. It begins simply enough with a first stanza that details the changes that acquiring a pair of reading glasses brings – a grey cat’s fur turns out, for example, to be full of colours – but, in the other two stanzas this moves from a matter of visual acuity to a far wider, ethical perspective. And it does it with a very striking, certainly surprising, shift:

. . . . . 
Somehow the distant has moved near:
the black-faced cuckoo shrike against the farthest tree;
once inaccessible lines of poetry. . .

Once the poem has made the movement out from a visual perspective to the act of reading poetry, a host of altered perspectives flood in (if hosts can flood):

I want to know how people thought and slept
and lived in Rome and China and Egypt
a hundred or two thousand years ago.
Sappho, Rousseau, Michelangelo,
stone-age men, before words, how did they see
it all? And television’s importunity
invites contemporary comparison -

the father sheltering his son from gun-
shot, old people ousted from their home:
they all become your uncles, parents, nieces,
or your cousins . . .

These empathic, ethical identifications are a result of altering perspectives but they can also be framed in terms of the crossing of the usual borders of opposition.

I hope that this rather remorseless search for underlying concerns and for generative oppositions doesn’t give the impression that Tempo is a programmatic book in any way. On first acquaintance it is likely to be the variety which makes an impression because this is a book made up of poems which are lists (“Anachronisms”), vignettes (“Hens at the Water Bowl”), celebrations (“Family Tree”, “Luck”), compressed and Delphic lyrics (“Rowan”), staged oppositions (“Plantation”) as well as essayistic pieces like “Far and Near” which always move more imaginatively and subtly than a review like this, for example, does. But it’s the underlying consistency – thematic and structural – that makes entering the world of Sarah Day’s poetry so satisfying. And its concerns, as I said in the beginning, are classically humanist. The best expression might be in “Tanker” a poem about the way in which a supertanker negotiates its own oppositions: the fresh water of the Tagus meets the salt Atlantic and produces monstrous waves which the ship rocks between. While it is tempting to read this situation as symbolising all of the oppositions which Day deploys in her poetry, it’s significant that the final statement is about the crew and the way they are dealing with this: “are they afraid, or are they playing cards / as the pendulum swings?”

B.R. Dionysius: Weranga

North Hobart: Walleah Press, 2013, 67pp.

Weranga – a town west of Dalby in Queensland – shows up on Google Earth but, interestingly, there are no accompanying photos. What it gets in B.R. Dionysius’ book is a sixty-seven sonnet sequence perhaps as a sort of compensation for being one of the few towns on earth which haven’t attracted the attention of photographically inclined tourists. But though the book takes its title from the town, its real subject is its author’s rural upbringing and you can’t help but feel that in a sense what is valuable about its material is that it is typical rather than uniquely of its region. To some extent it must stand for all rural, or at least semi-rural, boyhoods – it certainly chimes with mine spent on the outskirts of Bundaberg twenty years before that of Dionysus.

Weranga is Dionysius’ fifth book of poems, seventh if you count two chapbooks. The previous book, Bowra, is also titled after a place (a bird sanctuary in Western Queensland) and is also a collection of sonnets but the closest connection that Weranga makes is probably with Dionysius’ first book, Fatherlands, published in the first year of this millenium. This book also dealt with rural upbringings and its poems, like those of Weranga, circled around issues of fathering and fatherhood though the degree to which they embodied their author’s personal experience wasn’t always easily detectable and the first poem, “Wilhelmine Schluter at Fourteen”, dealing with first infatuations among migrant families and workers, was a dramatic monologue. Weranga is a lot more overtly personal.

Seen purely in terms of its content, its representation rural life, Weranga is a memorable book. In style it is the opposite of a realistic novel’s detailed but dry portrayal of rural upbringing using the full extent of the wide imaginative range that poetry can deploy as well as the capacities of a sonnet sequence to interweave motifs. There is also a marked difference in the authorial perspective: the early poems are full of a young boy’s immersion in the experience but in the later poems there is the more elegiac perspective of the adult who – now a father himself – comes back to revisit the places of his childhood. And the experiences of the author as a child are full of the conflict between a sensitive boy (“a soft boy who trained hard in the art of gentleness”) and a pretty tough environment. The early poems recreate a number of the mild traumas of sensitivity: night terrors, a fear of being asphyxiated in a dream of passing through a huge hour-glass and a fear of being left alone at night that persists even when he is of an age for his parents to drive into Toowoomba for a fortnightly dose of late-night shopping and leave him in charge of the chickens and the house. At the same time this is a place of brown snakes, trapdoor spiders, viciously territorial tomcats and thuggish children as well as those endemic threats of drought and flood which have always been part of the Australian rural tradition.

By the time we get to the later poems, beginning perhaps with “Firesale” (because it has a kind of wider perspective in response to the “three hundred lots of a life / Laid out on the trampled winter grass . . .” and including the last six poems which are poems of revisiting, we are in the world of the documentation of loss. A visit to where he played tennis in a couple of the earlier poems produces only a sight of “waving heads of grass” and wattle trees:

Some outbuildings survive where children drank Milo,
& the hooting of the train made hide & seek ethereal.
Who keeps the score on what rites are collectively lost?
Billabongs are revered, but not the Sunday tennis ghost.

I like this focus on the loss of unfashionable rituals rather than icons. The last poem focusses on the people themselves, explicitly at the expense of the land:

They’ve all gone the way of the Thessalians
Remembered for the landscapes they inhabited
More than the rhetoric they bled. Guardianships
Of the soil come & go; they are winter rains
That never sired . . .

In this respect, Weranga belongs to that tradition of recreation of rural experience which moves into a sort of pastoral lament. But it’s a genuine contribution rather than a merely genre performance. Like all experience, Dionysius’ life in Weranga/Dalby is simultaneously unique and typical.

So much for the content: there are also formal aspects to be looked at in the way the individual poems are organised and in the way the sequence itself is structured. It’s useful to look at the first two poems here. The first, “Minoan”, deals (I think) with the moment of his father’s meeting his mother and falling in love, the central ab origine moment that often preoccupies children having their own first thoughts about their lives. And “falling” is the operative word since the event takes place in the context of bull-riding at a rodeo: “He fell at Dayboro once, in / The fifties but won a different trophy . . .” The poem looks ahead to his father’s death by cancer, dealt with in later poems – “One day it was his own black bull that bucked & threw / Him, as darkness leapt over his body’s oracle . . . ” and, as the title suggests, the bull-leaping rituals of bronze-age Crete are co-opted to give perspective. All in all, it’s a complexly structured poem, not at all clear on the first couple of readings, and it’s a warning that the overall structure which it introduces won’t be a simple diaristic recording of major events in someone’s early life.

The second poem, “Moon”, is set at another important moment when his mother is pregnant. It is worth quoting in full as a representative of what Dionysius’ poems are like:

When the men came in for lunch, his mother
Switched on the television. As the Astor’s black
Faceplate warmed up, its inner tubes flaring like
Gas giants, she would carve the corn beef, piling
Layers of salty meat across moon-coloured plates,
The pinkish flesh steaming like a rim of sunrise.
As she eased herself into the tubular steel hull
Of the couch, her body, marooned by its own
Elliptical orbit, bent with spacesuit clumsiness.
As men stepped off their metal ladders, workboots
Scraping the dusty soil, the weightlessness of fatigue
Hit her. In the flicker of shadow, an invisible foot
Kicked out, brushing the spongy ground beneath;
Imprinting the new face growing in front of her.

There are so many connections here and they are done with what almost seems like a baroque relish in manic detail. Working men coming in for lunch at the time of the moon landing connect with the astronauts stepping off their ladder; the television’s inner workings are described in cosmic terms and his mother’s pregnancy is spoken of in terms of weightlessness while her couch’s steel frame is connected to the lunar module. Even the plates are moon-coloured. The moon landing context of the poet’s own growth in the womb produces the poem’s close when his own foot kicks out inside his mother, an act connected to the famous footprints in the lunar dust.

There are so many connections here that, if the poem failed (which I don’t think it does since I find it oddly memorable) it would be because it worked so hard to load every rift with ore that there was no room for poet, poem or reader to breathe. One of the things that helps its success is that, because it’s a sonnet, you can see all the metaphoric connections as being bracing inside a single limited structure. If this had been an open-ended poem, free to roam to any length it wished, the connections might have seemed more gratuitous and the result might have been a more bathetic one. In fact the different way in which metaphoric bridges like these are articulated in the poems becomes one of the main ways in which the poems play on variation in the sonnet form.

But not all of the poems are as strongly cross-braced as “Moon”. At the other end of the scale is a poem like “Scorpion” which describes his mother’s being stung by a scorpion. In a way the poem is structured as a contest between two metaphors for the event. The mother, at first, thinks she has “jagged / Her finger on a bit of lost tackle, / A fishing hook still impaled . . .” but when the source of the pain is revealed, the metaphor switches to that of a gun “there it / Sat, cocked black as a trigger . . . Its tail loaded like some primitive gun”. And then there is “Funeral” which is made up of a series of sentences beginning, “This is . . .” all of which say something about the way the memories of his father’s funeral are stored faultily: “This is where memory’s spool of film unwound”, “This one’s all fiction . . .” The structural climax is reached by the sudden shift to the figure of his father’s father. It’s a movement outside of the boy’s mind but the poem finishes back with the boy in the most satisfying way, like a “classical” sonata getting itself back to its home key only to find everything is slightly different:

                              This one’s about what the
Old father thought about burying his middle-
Aged boy, & where amidst all these relations
& anti-celebrations, was his little boy’s son?

And then there are the larger structural issues of a sonnet sequence. The first of these is variation: in fact early sequences in English like Spenser’s Amoretti and Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella play with formal variations as well as architectonic ones within the slightly obsessive repetitiveness that seems fitting for love poems. In Weranga you notice, first, that there really aren’t any tonal variations: almost all the poems, even those dealing with the most personal, buried experiences, come out in the relentless assertiveness that can be seen in “Moon”. We are a long way in this poetry from a free verse which responds to, and resonates with, subtle alterations in perception or sensation and one feels that it is a poetry that should be described as complex rather than subtle. The variations that stop the poems of Weranga being endlessly repetitive markers on the road through a rural childhood, adolescence and revisiting adulthood tend to come in the way in which the individual poems are built and the way they use their metaphoric connections both as bracing and as a way of building towards closure. There is also a lot of structuring going on at the macro level. There are many repeated motifs, for example. The references to space exploration in “Moon” recur regularly to the point where one might guess that the origins for the sequence might have been in a shorter sequence of poems like “Moon”, “Mighty Mouse”, “Skylab”, “Columbia”, “Challenger” and “Halley’s Comet” with a title something like “Space Exploration: My Role in its History”, but this is only one of a series of interwoven concerns.

I think Weranga is by some distance B.R. Dionysius’ best book. Both Fatherlands and Bacchanalia are, like many poets’ early books, uneven and full of poetic directions which don’t ultimately exploit their author’s strengths. Universal Andalusia is a lot of fun and taps into a talent for humour. It bills itself as a verse novel but is really a set of humorous travel poems documenting a voyage through Turkey, Greece, Spain and India undertaken by an overweight Australian channelling Alexander the Great and his no-nonsense wife (inevitably Roxanne) who is described as “an ex-kick boxer”. Bowra, like Weranga, is built out of sonnets and you can pick up many of the themes of Weranga there: the poems, for example, dealing with the death of seventeen miners at Box Flat in Ipswich in 1972 recall the boy’s fear of asphyxiation in the poems of Weranga, but there are simply too many poems in Bowra that seem misconceived: not least the ones in which the speaking voice is that of the Bremer River. Weranga avoids all these faults and seems to have worked best, so far, in harnessing the strengths of its author’s talents.

Liam Ferney: Boom

Wollongong: Grand Parade Poets, 2013, 82pp.

The best overall description of the central quality of Liam Ferney’s second book, Boom (his first, Popular Mechanics, was published in 2004) might well lie in the last sentence of this book’s “About the Author” note where it says, “His passion is life”. It would be hard to disagree based on the poems themselves. The tone of voice is intense, insistent and, on first acquaintance at least, gives the impression of very little tonal modulation, almost as though the poems were conceived with one eye firmly on how they would perform when read. But the energy that sustains them undoubtedly comes from the material, a passionate engagement with life itself. The issue, of course, is “Which life?” since we all live multiple lives: physical, social, cultural, intellectual, creative (let alone the issues when life is considered apart from the individual – evolution, biology, cosmic life).

One’s first impression is that the dominant kind of life which the poems of Boom are interested in is cultural life. They are enmeshed in popular culture in a series of different ways. It’s no accident that they begin in Korea during the 2002 World Cup (football) and finish on a train in China at the time of the Beijing Olympics of 2008 though, as I’ll explore later, there are other significances to this patterning. The way Ferney’s poems operate is always to bring cultural references into a poem by way of simile so that connections in cultural life are being continuously made and the ambit of the poem is being continuously opened to these aspects of the world. Ferney’s similes are a long way from the po-faced “explanation-theory” of traditional rhetoric and they serve to shake the poems out of the cosy set of references that the subjects might come with and into new, equally meaningful contexts.

This all sounds very abstract so some examples will make things clearer. “Push Kick Dreaming” is a poem from late in the book:

From Old St. to doorway
in a fug of hip hop and
hacked morning smoke.
The two goons fumbled
with a pane of oval glass.
Their half-furnished office,
as empty as the new divorcee’s
social coterie; and for an instant
I am Daewon Song meets
Jackie Chan chase cliche
360 flipping to manual
a miraculous obstacle
dodge before the tepid
consolation of burnt milk
in a tube station latte.

I think this is a rather marvellous little poem. It belongs to a small group in Boom which lean towards the lyric in that it captures a single moment in a fluid, fairly unified, three-sentence syntactic gesture. Often Ferney’s poems are staccato utterances but here there is a fair degree of elegance. And the poem, of course, celebrates a moment of elegance, of skilfully dodging two workmen suddenly struggling with a pane of glass. We might have expected that the poet would say that he had discovered something like his inner Dennis Bergkamp (or, more likely, his inner Zlatan Ibrahimovitch) but the comparison is with skateboarding and movie chases: both Asian. Against this, at the cultural, imaginative level, is the fact that the half-empty office for which the glass is destined is compared to the social circle of a newly divorced woman, all done in language whose connotations are French. The title is a martial arts manoeuvre in an Australian Aboriginal structure and the setting is London’s Liverpool St tube station. In other words, the poem is centrifugal at its core, closing down on a single revelatory (and suitably humble) experience while at the referential level opening out into a very wide set of imaginative references. At least, very wide on a cultural level.

All of this inclines a reader towards seeing Ferney’s poems as being essentially “about” cultural immersion. They are, in this view, not so much surrealist as realist representations of the processes of experience (ie of life) focussing on the way culture provides us with a set of references for experience and even how contemporary popular culture bombards us with such references at a pace and density that other centuries never knew. Another poem in which the similes connect us to popular culture is “AM”. It too might well be, at heart, an autobiographically based lyric dealing with a relationship’s breakdown though the evidence that this is the direction a reading should take is, characteristically, expressed as a popular song, “Breaking up is hard to do”. At the centre of the poem – a poet’s moment of lament for the limited way he has approached experience – we’re told, “i’ve tackled this world like a hapless defender / wrongfooted by chicka ferguson // his emerald raiders pomp”, an invocation of a definitively eighties footballer.

Also on the issue of similes and cultural reference there is the first poem in the book, “Think Act”:

Still a prima donna maradona soars
the hand of god seems as unlikely as hess
the sick swan descends sans plan and
it’s easy to get marooned behind the lines
say goodnight to itaewon’s bum fluff gis
tumble down hooker hill bright lights fried mandu
wankered in a cab through the window
the mantra of apartments and pork signs
across the han seoul is cyberpunk memories
in the fugitive drizzle a thoroughbred gallops
across the cabbie’s fake timber dash
. . . 
at home on the telly Korean newlyweds
roadtripping through the alice a eurobeat
skinny tie b-grade with ponytail
a getaway in a stolen souped-up xu-1
that was the eighties nobody stayed for the dailies

My reading of this – not entirely confident – is that the style of the Korea of Ferney’s time there (2002) is being seen as an embalmed version of the eighties in the western world. The Maradona reference is to the great footballer’s hand-balled goal in Argentina’s match against England in the Mexico World Cup of 1986, a metonymic symbol of the eighties on many possible levels. I’m not sure about the reference to “hess”. At all points before writing this I assumed it was a reference to Rudolph Hess who, famously, flew to England in 1941 to try to broker a peace between Germany and England. I had intended to go on to speak about the way in which the centripetal drive of the similes takes the poem out of its decade into the forties. Now I am nervous that everybody might start telling me that there was an eighties band called Hess or that it might be an acronym for a government department or industrial process (Ferney’s references are full of acronyms). On the other hand, Spandau Ballet – named after the prison where Hess served his life sentence – is, of course, a famous eighties band.

What intrigues me about this poem, and Boom in general, is its underlying autobiography or, rather, the nature of its underlying autobiography. These poems aren’t just about registering the experience of cultural immersion, they also want to stand outside the flood and observe and comment about what is happening. The comparison of Korea with the west in the eighties, for example, is an objective observation. It also has an autobiographical basis in that, because he was born in 1979, the eighties are the first decade that Ferney could be said to be a participant in. And so to say that contemporary Korea can give you a sense of what the eighties were like is also to say that by going there you can relive and evaluate your cultural past (as though someone like myself could experience the fifties with an adult’s intelligence and perception).

Compulsive simile-making (a key feature of the style) is a way of bringing popular culture to bear in these poems but it also has, inevitably, a throw-away quality – there simply isn’t time to explore exactly the relationship between, say, traffic chaos in Hong Kong and “half / tracked leggies // dispatched / to the / outfield”. Just as “Think Act” is built around a more detailed comparison, “Farewell Dick Whittington” is built on a comparison between the Pakistan cricketer Inzamam ul Haq (brilliantly described as “the Oliver Hardy Bradman”) and Ferney himself. It’s a comic comparison rather than an act of inflation. I read it to be, structurally, an expansion of a typically Ferney image, something like, “Ultimately a failure I return home like Inzamam ul Haq trudging back to the pavilion”, but it might also derive from the observation that these occurred at the same time, “Inzy and I take our bows: different stages, same week”.

Once you begin to look for it, you realise that this book is full of judgements about contemporary life that require something more distanced than the registration of immersion – of seeing your life, as one poem says, as “your own cinema verite soap opera”. The sequence “Millenium Redux Lite” is an example. And it has a conclusion in which Ferney is distanced to the point where he can observe and evaluate himself:

. . . . . 
who says the naughties cant be fun
just get the rules down:
it’s mob life
once you’re in the pocket
you  pay

i float off
into the universe
a sceptical astronaut
only ever in it for the uniform.

Obviously I am reading this fairly “straight” as having the same kind of reasonably uncomplicated presentation of the self as a lyrical poem like “Push Kick Dreaming”. There’s a fruitful tension between a poet’s judgement on the vapidity of the modern world, a time when “a million ipod headphones bloom” and the energising quality that comes from being as au fait with its rules, references and languages as Ferney is. This leads to a tone of excitement that is, simultaneously, contemptuous. Again, the move towards reading these poems more autobiographically leads one to think that the soured view of much of the contemporary cultural context is often a kind of imposition of personal disappointment. Things obviously go wrong in Korea, for example, and two poems, “Seoul Survivor” and “Expecting Turbulence” reflect this, the former beginning “my saison en enfer & get rich schemes / evaporate like colonial best intentions / or foraging all over town for vegemite”.

Some poems and poetic modes in Boom do force the reader to resist the temptation to read them in this conventionally “lyric” way. “The September Project”, “Andy Hardy goes to College” (a sestina), “That Thin Mercury Sound”, “Bad News for Good People” and “Frontier Lands” are a group of long poems which appear close to each other. Some of them have underlying fictional narratives. “Frontier Lands” is a collection of five poems which, though given the titles of recognisable Westerns, display a surreal mode that is hard to describe with any confidence. The second, for example, begins:

the trickster / form guide believer / takes counsel from his viziers /
born to circumstances king tide / no parade of elephants /
can ease the emptiness within / what is now amiss / that Caesar and his senate
must redress / scorned benefactors / the fourth string donkey work toiler /
the great unbequeathed / dazzle drunk on topaz mosaics . . . . .

The best I can do with poems like these is look for those processes of suggestion and transformation that many surrealist poems are obsessed by. Doing that you could see how “believer” might (just) suggest “vizier” (through some connotation of ancient history) which would in turn suggest “king” which would, in turn, produce “tide”, and so on. But it’s a reading practice I wouldn’t want to place much reliance on here. “That Thin Mercury Sound”, on the other hand, exploits grammatical ambiguities in a way that recalls John Forbes. In this poem almost every verb can be read as a noun so that the opening line, “after the fire escapes and the security guards”, invites, if only momentarily, a completely different reading to the obvious one.

But, for the rest of the book, the autobiographical element is very strong. The first poem, which I have already quoted from, is set in Korea and the last is set on a train in China in 2008. Significantly, the key fact is one of motion. In “Think Act” Ferney makes his observations about Korea from inside a taxi and in “K61: Beijing – Kunming” he is in motion in a train. The arc of narrative between these two poems is also the arc of his own life in the “noughties” and the final poem gives the places and dates of composition (“Hanam-si – West End – Brixton – Da Gindi: 2002-2008”) in a way which is conventional but here, especially meaningful. As in the first line of this poem. Whereas there is quite a complex variation in the book between first, second and third person stances (and a fuller analysis of how these poems are often simultaneously immersion and distanced judgement would have to come to grips with this), this last poem is a letter beginning, “dear paul: my itinerary is still being scripted”. A poem from Popular Mechanics concludes:

         i write in a flux
but to my justification

these things, like everything else,
happen very quickly.

A passion for life is a passion for a bewilderingly fast and fast-changing process.

Lisa Gorton: Hotel Hyperion

Artarmon: Giramondo, 2013, 50pp.

Lisa Gorton’s Hotel Hyperion is about as tightly organised as it is possible for a book of poetry to be. In a sense, with the exception of a couple of poems in the last section, the whole (small) book can be read as one long poem whereby what seem like the author’s obsessive themes are worked at from different angles in different sequences. To make the book even tighter, the movement from one sequence to the next enacts one of these obsessive themes: the way in which, Chinese box fashion, rooms open onto other rooms which are eventually seen to contain images of the first.

In the book’s first poem – part of a short sequence about the exhibition of artefacts from the Titanic – we meet a replica of the Titanic’s hull “half- / sailed out of the foyer wall”. I say “we” as though we were static observers in the poem but in fact the audience itself is moving, tickets in hand, into the fake ship. There is a lot of emblematic staging here, both in the exhibition and in the poem. The subject of the poem is those objects retrieved from the wreck of the ship, each now cocooned, museum-style, in a perspex case illuminated by a single light. But the poem’s interest is not so much in the objects themselves – ie as icons of a past time, or past tragedy or past culture – so much as in the way they serve to symbolise how items can be retrieved from the world of dream or the world of memory. It is as though they each are examples of Coleridge’s flower – dreamed of in a trip through Paradise – which, on waking, the dreamer finds in his hand. The emphasis is, in other words, on the movement from one world to another: past to present, dream to reality, memory to consciousness.

This initial sequence also lays out the crucial axes of the poems of this book. The ship’s fake hull “moves” horizontally into the room of the exhibition but the objects have been moved vertically up from the “solitude of the sea” (to quote Hardy’s great poem). In the last poem of this sequence there is a reference to rain, something shared by the concluding poems of the book’s other sequences:

It is raining as I leave  - 
long rain breaking itself onto the footpath,
breaking easily into the surface of itself
like a dream without emblems, an in-drawn shine.
Overhead, clouds build and ruin imaginary cities,
slow-mo historical epics with the sound down,
                         playing to no one.

Whatever this ultimately means – is the cloudworld the world of the larger, determined, processes of history? – for the moment I’m interested in the fact that this is an image on a vertical axis depicting the world in which we live as a fluid horizontal plane, intersected at right angles by water. Rather than being a world of grittily real and retrievable objects it seems a world of fluid and temporary formations, a “dream without emblems”. I’m always interested in how poets figure the way other worlds break into our own especially whether they come from beneath, above or from the side and there is a lot going on in the intersection of the horizontal and vertical in these poems. There are the staircases: the middle two poems of the sequence deal with the Titanic’s actual staircase under the water whose iron curlicues are mimicked by the festoons of sea growth which slowly accrete, but there is also a reconstructed staircase in one of the exhibition’s rooms. The latter is an oddly unreal reification, based on a photograph and, of course, leads nowhere though the poem suggests that it might lead to “the house of images”. On its landing is a clock stopped at the moment of the sinking, “that minute / history pours through”.

This first little sequence is a kind of vestibule for the book itself positioning us, if we read it carefully, in a kind of endless museum or exhibition which will contain objects stripped of context and drawn from worlds of dream, memory and perhaps others. The rooms housing these objects are themselves subject to irruptions (as in the case of the ship’s fake hull) but these will be on a horizontal axis. Above the museum is the world of macro-reality which rains its processes down.

The second sequence of Hyperion Hotel or, in the way the book is conceptualised, the second room which we enter, is a set of poems devoted to an eighteenth century device for determining (actually, for guessing) weather at sea: the storm glass. The idea behind this object is that external weather (air pressure or temperature or presence of lightning) acts in an unknown way on a solution sealed inside a glass jar to produce patterns of crystallisation which can be interpreted and thus provide some sort of forecast, especially important for shipping. Even by this stage of familiarising ourselves with Gorton’s interests, the significance of this machine is obvious. The storm glass is a kind of miniature site in which the external is captured, though the process by which the external erupts into the sealed world of the storm glass is unknown (much as, I suppose, the way reality enters dreams, and vice versa, is not understood, despite many, by now venerable, theories).

The first poems of this sequence describe the glass and answer the obvious question – what is the inside/outside to be allegorised as: reality and the poem, macro political life and the individual, the world and the soul, etc? – in a slightly surprising way by invoking ethical life. Thus the “clear spirit” develops a crystalline pattern that recalls “a Jamesian / treasury of scruples, or that more formal vaulting of remorse”; another poem speaks of “fantastical ambition”, “colours of obduracy” and “a structure of feeling / in place of thought”. Finally the sequence steps into a literal room:

A Storm Glass belongs to winter rooms,
to where a reader, like the picture of a reader,
comes to the last page and looks up -

Inside this room the weather makes patterns through the window, there is an antique clock in a glass dome (stopped, of course) and a child looking at a book containing reproductions of Mantegna’s “Triumph of Caesar” which serves, in Hotel Hyperion, as a recurring symbol of objects torn from their context and presented as in an exhibition and, because Mantegna’s paintings are in a sequence, they represent the way a continuous experience is reduced to a set of still images, to “animation stills”, as this poem says of the way a storm glass represents weather.

The title sequence is a piece of science fiction. It seems likely that part of the way this book is organised is as a set of refractions of its themes and it might well be intended that we are to see the Titanic exhibition as representing the way objects from the past are retrieved and displayed, the storm glass sequence as representing the way the present is continuously turned into crystal structures and the “Hotel Hyperion” as being about the way future objects become displayed. In a book as ferociously organised as this one, this wouldn’t be unexpected. There is another attractive structuring device in this third sequence as well because the first poem appeared in Gorton’s first book, Press Release, as one of three “Sci-Fi” poems. In other words, an item from a different context is injected into a new book and encouraged to develop its own sequence just as the undersea staircase in the Titanic accreted living festoons in keeping with the pattern of the original iron curlicues.

The series begins with a mother farewelling a child setting off, in hibernation, to begin a colony on Titan (the moon of Saturn whose name, interestingly, recalls that of another ill-fated ship which has already made an appearance). The story that develops quickly leaves this near-future narrative behind to leap centuries and focus on a collector of objects from failed colonising expeditions, such as the Titan one. The collector’s objects – which include the frozen ship of the Titan expedition, complete with its crew – are fated to appear, like everything in this book, in an exhibition, here in the sinisterly named “Futures Museum”. There is a great deal of emphasis on the sealed rooms in which the collector lives – the second poem begins with “In truth, the history of space travel / is a history of rooms” – and the way in which reality is transmitted through fake windows which are actually screens “fed from outboard cameras on delay” making reality (in an allusion to the lovers of Midsummer Night’s Dream) “my own, and not my own”. The final long poem of this sequence moves from the collector even farther into the future and focusses on a guard in the Futures Museum and performs that modulation present in the first two sequences of moving the poem into areas of memory and personal experience. The guard thinks of the objects on display as being like the “animated stills” that one sees when watching a train fly past on a level crossing and this connects with actual, remembered experience – “I am waiting at the crossing gate / in rain so soft it is an easing of the dark . . .” The second of the three sections of this poem moves from the guard watching a film of a rocket taking off, shown on a continuous loop, to the experiences of childhood itself, as though what was a gesture in the first poem becomes a definite movement in the second. He (or, more likely, she) speaks of the land around the crossing for trains as

                   . . . the dispossessed place -
along the side of the house, in the dusty underness
of a jasmine arch, wherever sour ground was
netted with dank weeds – where I called things mine
                   because they haunted me.

The entire sequence ends, Chinese box fashion, with an exhibit which is a diorama (“because out-of-date technology / endears lost futures to us”) of the Titan colony and includes a tiny figure of the Collector going about her business. She is carrying what will become a relic not of the settlement but of her own life: a snow-dome of a ship at sea.

With “Room and Bell”, a sequence of six prose poems, we enter, as Paul Hetherington notes in a review of this book in the Sydney Review of Books, the world of Bachelard’s influential Poetics of Space. The room, a site of childhood illness, has now been removed in a process of renovating but it can be recaptured if the speaker closes her eyes when walking into her mother’s house. The way childhood orientations form the co-ordinates of our later way of interpreting the world, forming an “architecture of memory”, is the basic text these poems explore but they work hard to integrate into themselves the obsessions of the object-collecting, context-investigating poems of the earlier parts. Thus the room is inhabited, as it was at the end of the storm glass sequence by someone reading a book and the collector’s snow-dome of the “Hotel Hyperion” sequence also reappears:

. . . . . I hear again the stream which ran once where now the garden is. That imaginary sound underran all my hours in that room just as, now, the memory of that room underruns alike my images of home and my desire to collect things closed in glass – For, holding a Snow Dome in my hand, watching the last glitter settle on its plastic ship and backdrop waves, I recover the experience of that hour when, folding down a corner of my book, I watched the leaf-shadows turning over on the ceiling and claimed as my own those freedoms founded on retreat.

The central issue here is whether the “Room and Bell” sequence is an autobiographical core which the three preceding sets of poems have refracted into different genres – respectively exhibition theory, exposition of a technological oddity, and science-fiction narrative – or whether it is simply another formation of this group of obsessive concerns and images.

I’m not sure what the answer to this is but the book’s final section might give some clues. This seems at first to be a group of refreshingly discrete poems but the themes of the earlier four sections do re-emerge. In “Freeways”, for example, we can see the interest in the child’s perception of spatial arrangements “I remember freeways, / from the back seat of my parent’s car”. In “Homesickness”, a poem about an English artist’s saturating an entire flat with copper sulphate solution so that all surfaces are impregnated and crystals grow over the entire “house” we can see not only the growths on the Titanic’s staircase but also that process of transformation that inevitably recalls “Full fathom five” from The Tempest (quotations from which introduce all of the sections of this book in yet another level of intense organisation). “The Triumph of Caesar”, the last poem in the book, allows Mantegna’s work (significantly a series, designed for a passageway, and focussing on objects of Caesar’s spoils on their way to a new context) which has recurred steadily throughout Hotel Hyperion, to have a poem of its own. And, first poem of this last section, “The Humanity of Abstract Painting” is a more compressed meditation on many of the images which the book develops elsewhere at length:

                              Afternoon rain on the windows,
bare rooms stilled with light – an idea of the house
                     that had always haunted your life in it,
          as if to say This is the machine of the present.
                    It reinvents experience as a daydream . . .

What, finally, is one to make of this intriguing book? One could point to it as an example of the way in which themes are likely, nowadays, to be treated in a poetic sequence rather than a single complex lyric. Cynics might see this trend as the result of poets’ producing longer poems to act as entries in the various poetry prizes but I like the way in which a group of obsessions can be approached, probed and incarnated from a series of perspectives. It seems a technique which has the virtue of retaining the complexity of the material while giving the reader a better chance of working out what it means to the poet. Yeats’s “Byzantium” is a wonderful work but it requires a lot of background information before it can begin to make any sense at all. Today it would be written as a series of related pieces about historical processes, the second Rome, rebirths, spiritualism, dolphins . . .

Another issue with Hotel Hyperion is the “readerly” experience. Not only are the poems so ferociously organised and so tightly held in position that it is a wonder they can breathe at all, but sometimes you feel that it is a wonder that the reader can breathe. I suppose this is the experience of all highly formal works of art: one part of one’s brain is registering the material and responding to it while another part is looking at its formal complexities. It is wonderful to explore the elegant complexities of the “Room and Bell” poems or to follow the complicated plot of the title sequence but the reader never has any doubt that this reading is a precisely defined quest. There isn’t much opportunity, as there is in some kinds of poetry, to relax and inhabit suggestive images and eventually reconfigure them inside one’s own experiences. Just as the “Hotel Hyperion” sequence ends with the Collector leaving a room, snow-dome in pocket, when you luxuriate in the complexities of a book like this, you know that, at the end, the author will have been there before you.

John Kinsella: The Jaguar’s Dream

Richmond, UK: Herla Publishing, 2012, 251pp.

The subtitle of this book is “Translations, Adaptations, Versions, Extrapolations, Interpolations, Afters, Takes and Departures” and, although it has a throwaway quality it isn’t a bad description of the contents since these represent almost the entire range of how poets respond to other texts, specifically those in foreign languages. Although it exemplifies the whole range of what the word “translation” can mean, the book itself has a strict chronological structure, beginning with Alkman 58 (from sometime in the seventh century BCE), working through poetry in the classical languages and then providing an anthology of European poetry from Villon to Celan and finishing with two poems by the Australian/Chinese poet, Ouyang Yu.

The major component in The Jaguar’s Dream is a “response” to the sixth book of the Aeneid. At forty-three poems and fifty-five pages it is a book-length work that could well have been published separately. It describes itself, in deliberately vulgar Hollywood-speak, as a “prequel” to Kinsella’s earlier response to Dante, Divine Comedy: Journeys Through a Regional Geography and works in a similar way to that strange book by choosing a base text and then writing poems set mainly in the West Australian wheatbelt which “respond” to moments in that text. Sometimes these moments are single lines, sometimes short passages and sometimes – in Divine Comedy – whole cantos and the word “respond” covers a multitude of things. The response to Aeneid VI is called a “version” while the three canticles of Divine Comedy are called “distractions”. It is an odd and intriguing procedure with just a touch of postmodern parody about it as though it simultaneously stressed the connection with high European culture while making the point that in contemporary Western Australia, on the brink of ecological disaster, this would need a good deal of rejigging. To take a couple of examples from the earlier book at random: the fate of Judas at the bottom of hell – being chewed by one of Satan’s three heads – produces a poem in which the narrative drive pauses for a portrait (in the best Dantesque way though without the magnificent drama whereby the characters speak for themselves). We meet the “nicest-kid-at-school” whose mother works in the abattoir:

. . . . . 
He is sensitive. He hangs
with the girls. He reads books.

He loves his mum. She is deft
with a knife. She cuts fat
for health. She is reliable.

First in line, she trims
the Judas sheep. This sheep
is killed recurrently.

Customers won’t know
they’re eating the pick
of the bunch. “My son

is keeping something back.
Boys at school give him
a hard time.” She doesn’t

cut herself as she thinks.
A leader among sheep. . . .

This poem about betrayal and cutting finishes with the abattoir cutting back the woman’s hours. Another, rather different, example comes from a conversion of one of the particularly abstruse theological/scientific passages of Paradiso (XIII: 97-101) into a “Canto of the Movers and Shakers”, a really interesting and complex piece that, although it contains portraits of the earthly equivalent of the movers of Dante’s primum mobile, contains a lot more:

The compunction of angels
to turn the spheres – sporty types,
or maybe engineers. Obsessive

compulsives. Hanging
about the flightpaths of jets,
turbulent in their wake . . .

Ripples of insects propelling
across a dam, the almost enclosed
world of a rainwater tank,

urge towards right-angled
triangles . . . sail, take-off . . . 
stress tensor, motion

without cause . . .trail
of knickers issuing
from the bachelors’ and spinsters’

ball – it’s seasonal.
Parthenogenesis. Zoology.
Komodo dragons:

travel goes with the job.
CEOs squabble over
the quantity of angels

it takes to counteract
the utility of insider
trading: ultrasound. They

pray in their own way:
Dick and Dora, their phantasmagoria,
Dr Frankenstein and The Team,

cleared by ethics committees.
Productivity. Making the fat lean.
New trees, new fruit, new contracts.

This is a really complex poem with a lot going on, only some of the details of which (the right-angled triangles, for example) derive from the Dante. Of course it remains, at heart, satirical.

There is a lot more that happens in Divine Comedy than these two sample passages suggest but I’ve never been sure that is very successful, though it is full of interesting positions, interesting poems and interesting relations between source text and poem. At times you are inclined to think to yourself, “What has Dante done to deserve this? Why not work through the Shakespeare canon? Or Milton?” The tension between Dante’s voyage through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven on the one hand and a series of poems about life in the Western Australian wheatbelt on the other are so acute that they often aren’t productive. The adjustments required, in other words, tend to stand out as much as the connections made: not least being the altering of the starting point so that the structure of Kinsella’s book begins with Purgatory, and then goes through Heaven then Hell. The central critical question for both it and the Virgil “version” seems to me to be whether the role of the base text is to generate poems (ungeneratable otherwise) or to structure and give some kind of shape to a host of poems built around life lived on the land (though in opposition – on ethical and ecological grounds – to most of the practices of the area).

But if Divine Comedy is, after a couple of readings, at best provisionally successful, the collection based on Aeneid VI seems, at least to me, something worth celebrating. Kinsella’s introduction to The Jaguar’s Dream, gives a clue as to why he has chosen Virgil and Dante instead of any other canonical text when he speaks of being “fascinated by different configurations of the worlds of the dead”. Virgil’s text is the true precursor to Dante and, when Dante makes him his guide through Hell and all of Purgatory up to the Earthly Paradise, he is acknowledging a debt greater than that of inheriting something that would eventually produce a “new sweet style”. The debt is to the author who – in Dante’s knowledge of poetry – was the first to present a detailed image of the afterlife in which an individual’s moral status in his or her life is reflected in the punishments after death. Book VI of Virgil is, in other words, a long way from the dreary, undifferentiated Hades that Odysseus visits in the Odyssey even though that visit may have been responsible for a belief, held by Virgil, that a necessary epic trope was its hero’s visit to the underworld. Virgil’s conclusion in which the dead Anchises reveals the future of Rome as far as the time of writing may also well be what gave Dante the license to let his characters predict so much of the “future” of Florence.

At any rate there seems less strain between the values of the source text and Kinsella’s poems here than in Divine Comedy. The poems roam quite widely as well and don’t seem to try to limit themselves to the experience of living on a particular block of land quite as much as those of Divine Comedy and the poems of the recent Jam Tree Gully do. The Sibyl’s cave can be one of the caves at Yanchep (as in “Crystal Cave”), it can also be those parts of the Nullarbor coast where the sea has undercut the cliffs to form blowholes inland and it can also be (in “Ellendale (Sibyl’s Behest)”) the pool at Ellendale near Geraldton: or at least, if it is not the place of the beginning of the descent, it is the place where the golden bough – here a “dream-leaf” clinging to a red river gum – is found. This last poem is followed by “Madura Pass Resolve” a fine, complex piece set at the point of transition on the Nullarbor from plains into upland country. I’ll quote it in full, long as it is, because it will give some sense of what the poems of this section feel like at their best and also because, set just before Aeneas enters the cave for his descent, it’s an important poem about art, thresholds and transitions.

Climbing to the tablelands,
mallee and limestone, shocks of snail shells
always empty, you feel like a period piece,
or evolution suddenly becoming interested
in this style, this “landscape” as artwork.
The few locals know it as a place of snakes,
and warn you of their bites and the heat.
But it’s the water place, where horses were bred
to ship out to India, mounts for imperial
cavalry, bore dragging water up in conquest.
The roadhouse and motel cling to their
swimming pool. A mockery or just survival?
Orb weaver spiders climbing the face
of the tableland are massive, surprised:
you might celebrate them, mesmerized
by the exquisitely swollen and grotesque.
But why, when air travels in tunnels from coast
further than the eye might wrest false horizons,
limestone conglomerate swirls, fractures
and rattling pods of myalls and the weary
desert oak. Transition never belonged to art,
and its style struggles and resists as long
as possible. Can we say it knows no other way?
There is no value of the Madura Pass present
overtly or even disguised in this rectangle,
but there is the moment blowholes are encountered:
a cool breath in the heat, the rustling of wild oats
influxed as they are at brief points of habitation
on these great canvases, a southerly riding the scarp
and countering blowhole exhalations at intervals,
caprices and interludes, subterranean and surface
air meeting to make sea a mirage inland, nostrils
in stone, navels and eyes emerging where tableland
and plain contest, confer, incline to incline, ice-
age sea-level shifts ocean floor distends. Gallery
is an old refrigerator, dumped sub-glistening
in bluebush and old colours, as much the heart
of Virgil’s after-deaths, underworld of surface,
pronunciation out of blowholes and declarations
of rusty iron, the brevity of visits, fencing that climbs
between states, harsh roots cleaving limestone,
making an old gearbox the trauma of travel
in long dry stretches (my father broke down here
in his utility, once); swallows crossing furtive
and cautious, secretive to us – “welcome welcome” -
we’d like to imagine they say. We’re here, taking photos,
relishing kinship and air and light in isolation,
though down on the highway great road trains
pass at high speed, intermittently, tickling galls
on the mallee, interstices of fixed eternity. Ownership
is not cartography, nor our lines to take.

It’s not an easy poem though it is written in a relaxed discursive way, probing at the issues which arise. If it reconfigures, or springs off from, a classic text, it is probably better to think in terms of Keats’s Grecian Urn than Vigil’s epic. The first third explores ways of relating to this transitional environment. The poet is inclined to see it visually as landscape as though it were a piece of art placed before his eyes. But the poem sketches in alternative perspectives: as a supplier of horses it is enmeshed in imperial histories (a perspective that would have pleased Edward Said) and as a habitat for the locals who turn out to be more interested in immediate environmental issues like the poisonous local snakes. A poet might use a narrow focus and celebrate the orb spiders but this is compromised by a wider perspective that registers that there are massive elements in play as air travels underground to emerge in blowholes. The middle third worries about how art deals with environment. When we are told that art is essentially conservative, clinging to its evolved style rather than registering a new way of looking, it’s difficult to know whether this is a comment about all arts or only the visual arts. It’s true that changes in all the arts – think of the appearance of Wordsworth’s “The Prelude”, for example – come suddenly and irrevocably and show us that a new way of looking arises (metaphorically from underground, through a blowhole) almost fully formed, and rendering past ways immediately out of date. At any rate, a collection of paintings (or an anthology?) the poem says, is a collection of dead ways of looking in much the same way that Virgil’s underworld is a collection of dead people. The rest of the poem is more problematical although it clearly wants to remind us that liminality is a state, the state the poet and family are in, standing at this transitional location, and that fixed styles are an inappropriate way of rendering such a state. I take this to be something of an apologia for what might, on the surface, seem a disorienting feature of this version of Virgil (as it is in Divine Comedy’s version of Dante), and that is the mixing of styles. Apart from an extended discursive poem, like “Madura Pass Resolve”, the poems based on Aeneid VI range from the haiku-like suggestiveness of “Gifts” (“Sprigs of rosemary; / A poem on wheat paper; / Viewed from your photo”) to an old-fashioned symbolic set-piece like “Zoo Ferry”.

If I had to guess about Kinsella’s thought processes here, I would say that the principle behind these “distractions” is continually to widen the poetic base, to prevent his poetry sinking into a monotone. The kind of radical ecology he wants to live must entail a danger of reducing his poetic voice to the registers of exhortation, anger and frustration. The distractions may well be a way to accommodate the processes of accretion and non-logical connection – the more deeply “poetic” in other words. I think that this is what is happening in another interesting poem, “Crystal Cave”:

I have been reading Aquatic Root Mat Community
of Caves of the Swan Coastal Plain, and The Crystal
Cave Crangonyctoid Interim Recovery Plan 2003-2008
by Val English, Edyta Jasinska and John Blyth
on behalf of the Aquatic Root Mat Community
of Caves of the Swan Coastal Plain; what lured
me to this was revisiting Crystal Cave at Yanchep
over the weekend and being traumatized by the glare
of extinction. I could twist this into a lyric, but line
length becomes the gauge of rendering, root hairs
sniffing out water deeper, deeper, until the ghost
flits, crosses over: the underworld is never truly
deeply under. There’s no mystery or intangible
extraction to illuminate an ontology. But personal
history is part of the stimulus to delve deep,
. . . . .

Those opening six lines have their own magic, and show once again that what should be drearily denotative scientific language has its own mad, poetic music – something Auden knew how to exploit. But the rest of this opening is very much about poetry’s desire to extend feelers searching for the nourishment of underlying meanings, especially the meanings buried in those personal experiences which seem, on the surface, to be contingent but always, with deeper analysis, reveal themselves to be strangely patterned. It’s long been known that Aeneas’s taking a golden bow down into the underworld can be read as a metaphor for a descent into levels of meaning that are profounder than those of the sunlit world above and “Crystal Cave” examines the implications of this opportunity.

Of the other poems in The Jaguar’s Dream there are a number which are “free” in the sense of ranging from the extremes of Aeneid VI to “variations”. Three poems based on phrases of Celan are compressed wheatbelt pieces which are suggested by their originals. The version of Mayakovsky’s “Cloud in Trousers” is a treatment of Kinsella’s earlier life in, as he nicely puts it, “the ecology of Mayakovsky’s poem” and the version of Apollinaire’s “Zone” shares with its original a hectic engagement with the cultural life of the moment but is really another wheatbelt poem. A number of poems are based on Villon’s “Jargon” poems but the freedom here seems licensed by the obscurity and marginality of the originals (are they even by Villon?) and, as the short introduction explains, “What has attracted me to Villon’s jargon poems is both this [the way they exploit the language of a subculture] and also the fact that the language is contestable now just as it was by those outside “the crew” back in Villon’s time”.

There are two translations from Rilke’s “Sonnets to Orpheus”: the first is a clear rendition of the fourth poem of the second book but the second is an interesting “extreme variation” of the first poem of the first book:

The cold front bands across materiality!
Oh Orpheus rages! The tree blows down and swipes an ear!
The silence of an eye. And that vacuum stuffed
with potential, played out over the year.

Only the edges of forests nurture birds
and beasts, hiding places compiled like follies;
those hanging-in-there go-getters courageous
though inward-looking, as each sallies

forth to let us know they’re there. Roars, shouts, tweets
held close to chests. A jolt to their hearts
impacts his building, a shower of notes

extracting darkness from greatest fears,
migrating into the anemometer’s cups -
Temple of Ear dulls with passing years.

The famous Rilkean original, probably a more difficult poem, might be translated (free of all graces) as something like: “A tree rose there. O pure transcendence! O Orpheus sings! O high tree in the ear. And everything was quiet. Yet in the silence there were new beginnings, beckonings and change. Animals from the stillness pressed out from the clear loosed forest from lair and nest; and then it happened that they were not so quiet out of cunning or out of fear, but out of listening. Growling, crying, uproar appeared small in their hearts. And where once there was scarcely a hut to receive this, a shelter [made] of darkest desires, with an entrance whose posts trembled, – there you created for them a temple of hearing.” (Much of the difficulty of this poem derives from its prepositions – there is enormous weight and ambiguity in simple words like “aus” and “im”. I used to think that it was simply a problem of my undergraduate level German and that native speakers would understand them completely, just as we understand the subtle differences between “in the corner”, “at the corner” and “on the corner”, but looking at the various translations made by sophisticated speakers of German leads me to think that the vagueness of the prepositions is part of the fabric of the poetry.) I’m not entirely sure what is going on in the Kinsella version. At one level it’s a wheatbelt poem about the birds that appear after the storm has passed; but you feel that it must also be a sour little allegory about minor poets, the plucky “go-getters”, who sally forth after a major poet, with their “Roars, shouts, tweets” – criticisms and outrage expressed over social media – held close to their chests.

This leaves me, in this survey of types of translation in The Jaguar’s Dream, with what should be the least problematic: the conventional, accurate verse translations. These actually form the bulk of the book and heavily favour French poetry. But conventional verse translations turn out to be the most troublesome because, whereas the various versions, take-offs, distractions, extrapolations and so on are judged by the creative result they produce, conventional verse translations are judged by a much more exacting standard: how much of the magic of the original they can convey?

I should say, straight away, that I don’t believe in verse translation of lyric poetry in the way it is done here or in the way it is done by almost all translators of poetry. Translating expository and even narrative prose is a different matter entirely and, though it has a lot of problems, they aren’t the ones that cripple the translation of lyric. Even translation of narrative poetry, such as the Homeric epics, has to face fewer problems. Worries about the validity of verse versions of lyric poems aren’t new, they appear in most prefaces to translation work. The usual comment is that though verse translation is unsatisfactory it is a necessary evil and has its uses. It can be argued, for example, that a verse version gives readers some sense that they have read a foreign language poem and thus it should be seen as a sort of crude introduction after which a reader might decide that he or she would like to explore a particular poem and then move on to finding a version of the original with a prose paraphrase and notes and thus begin a more satisfactory and intimate engagement with the poem. But the truth is that even good verse versions leave out so much of what would make you love a poem and go on to visit it in its own language (even, eventually, being so in love with it that you would try to learn the source language) that they hardly represent an introduction at all.

These depressing thoughts come from looking at translations of one of my favourite German poems, Hoelderlin’s “Hyperions Schicksalslied” (“Hyperion’s Song of Fate”), first encountered in school. On the surface it has everything going for it in terms of translatability: German is a language close to English; German culture is interwoven with English so the sentiments of the poem won’t be as alien as if it were translated from, say, an Australian Aboriginal language; Hoelderlin himself is an almost exact coeval of Wordsworth and so his Romanticism, different though it is, does relate to something we are familiar with; the structure and thematic layout of the poem (unlike that of Rilke’s sonnet) are very straightforward and the verse form is free with a mimetic conclusion that should be easy to approximate. The poem describes the world of the gods (“You wander up there in light . . .”) and then contrasts it to the situation of mortals (“But to us is given to have no place of rest . . .”). It is the wonderful conclusion that worries me:

Es schwinden, es fallen
     Die leidenden Menschen
          Blindlings von einer
               Stunde zur andern,
                   Wie Wasser von Klippe
                         Zu Klippe geworfen,
                              Jahr lang ins Ungewisse hinab.

Very roughly and unidiomatically: “They dwindle, they fall / – the suffering humans – / blindly from one / hour to another, / like water from cliff / to cliff thrown, / year-long [forever] into uncertainty down.” The problem is small but insoluble and relates to two minor features of German syntax. Firstly past participles like “geworfen” are placed finally and secondly the adverb “hinab” (at least I think it’s an adverb rather than part of a verb, “hinabwerfen”) can appear finally. That means that, as anyone can see, there is a wonderful mimetic sense of falling in the last lines and the passion and intensity of the utterance is expressed by this. I won’t go into a comparison of the various verse versions of this in English (although I do want to say something about the value of multiple versions later) but instead, working a fortiori, I will quote what is usually thought of as the best available translation: that of Michael Hamburger from the Penguin edition of Hoelderlin’s Selected Poems and Fragments:

But we are fated
     To find no foothold, no rest
         And suffering mortals
              dwindle and fall
                    Headlong from one
                         Hour to the next,
                              Hurled like water
                                   From ledge to ledge
                                       Downward for years to the vague abyss.

It’s sophisticated and accurate enough but, ultimately, inert, unlike the original which is alive and intense, so intense that you are likely to find yourself repeating it at odd times as though it were a popular tune. If I first came across “Hyperions Schicksalslied” in this translation I would form the opinion that the poem is a kind of dispassionate (perhaps, if anything, wry) comparison of the lives of the gods and mankind rather than an intense embodiment of the fate of the latter. I would probably shrug my shoulders, feel that I could now say I knew something about Hoelderlin’s poetry and pass comfortably onto the next, having no idea that I’d missed such a firecracker.

If minor facts of German word order can be so damaging, they are nothing compared to the formal complexities that most lyric poetries enjoy using not as graces (of secondary – and hence sacrificeable – importance to “meaning”) but as essential components of the expression, what makes the verse “live”. Since it is almost impossible to convey these formal structures, verse translations are almost always unrhymed and come with a sort of unspoken apology: “It isn’t like this in the original. Please imagine it in tightly rhymed quatrains”. Or in sonnet form, or whatever. This situation is made even worse by the fact that for the last half-century the dominant form in English language poetry has been American free verse and, as a result, tightly organised and complex poems like the sonnets of the nineteenth century French poets (many of which are translated in The Jaguar’s Dream) come out sounding like slightly exotic versions of American poems rather than the interestingly alien things they are. W.S Merwin’s book of selected translations seems to me a perfect example of this whereby poems ranging from Ancient Egyptian to contemporary European finish up sounding pretty much the same.

It’s an unconscious act of appropriation but it is appropriation nevertheless. At the risk of boring readers with another anecdote, I’ll return to Rilke’s “Sonnets to Orpheus” – like the French poems, highly formal and highly formally accomplished. I was reading them in translation with a friend a few years ago and suddenly realised that I knew the original (from either schooldays or undergraduate days) of at least the first four lines of one of them. Suddenly “Only he whose bright lyre / has sounded in shadows / may, looking onward, restore / his infinite praise” became “Nur wer die Leier schon hob / auch unter Schatten / darf das unendliche Lob / ahnend erstatten.” The difference is miraculous, showing that the tight rhymes are not graces but are built into the entire experience of a poem. Stephen Mitchell’s translation – again, much admired – turns Rilke into American free verse, something that it definitely isn’t. This is not to be read as an argument for various old-fashioned formalisms – I’m an admirer of the subtle possibilities and great achievements of American free verse – but you can’t turn a hieratic, rhymed quatrain into a piece of free verse without killing it.

And then there are the ethical issues involved in translation. Kinsella is, pleasingly, sensitive to these, saying in his introduction:

There is a politics to any “translation”, and I am fully aware that issues of appropriation and respect surround any text. Whatever I have done with the source texts I have done with such respect in mind.

You feel here that he is mainly concerned with the more radical transformations such as his “distractions” and “takes”, arguing that though they may appear to be based on a contempt for the originals, they actually aren’t. But it seems to me that such extreme treatment doesn’t require too much in the way of apology: Dante’s text is hardly compromised by the poems of Kinsella’s Divine Comedy nor Virgil’s by Kinsella’s version of Aeneid VI. The ethical dangers really arise in conventional verse translation which, outrageously, suggests that in some ways it stands in for – represents in a foreign language – the original. This certainly worries me far more, at any rate. If I have read, for example, Elaine Feinstein’s translations of Tsvetaeva, I still haven’t read Tsvetaeva and should never live under the illusion that I have. There is a solution to this particular conundrum: we should always print the original alongside any verse translation. This, of course, doubles the bulk of a book and increases costs by adding what, to a publisher, must look like no more than a stack of left-hand pages that nobody will ever read. And it presents a lot of extra difficulties in the case of languages with non-Latin scripts, like Chinese, Sanskrit, Urdu and Arabic, though it is possible to gloss the original presentation with a phonetic or even Latin version. But, despite these difficulties, printing originals does have the advantage of protecting a verse translation from the charge of fraudulent representation.

The ideal “translation”, strongly argued for in Stanley Burnshaw’s The Poem Itself – still a valuable book despite being more than half a century old – is not “verse translation” at all. It prints the original with a sentence by sentence English rendition (preferably in prose, in small type at the bottom of the page!). Perhaps this is no more than a higher, more forbidding stage of translation, suitable for those who are already converts. And perhaps those converts were made by reading conventional verse translations (though, as I’ve said, the inadequacy of verse translations means that they rarely make good introductions).

It is also possible that both technical and ethical issues are alleviated by multiple translations. Some texts, usually classics, have attracted so many attempts at translation that the sum of these might be said to “point towards” the original – rather in the way differential calculus points towards its solutions. I certainly have this feeling with biographies. A single biography is a very dangerous thing since its inaccuracies, prejudices and unconscious reflections of the obsessions of the age in which it was written, can be mistaken for the “truth”, whereas a host of conflicting accounts and interpretations of the life of someone famous could be argued to smooth away many of these partialities. Perhaps multiple translations may work the same way. I’m not sure, though I can remember a comparison of seven or eight English versions of the end of Pericles’ funeral oration from Thucydides (difficult and ambitious enough prose to be loosely thought of as “poetic”) which certainly, in bringing out the difficulties, gave some sense of the original that lay behind them.

Those who want to argue for the possibility that, at least in the right poet’s hands, verse translations can be successful, often point to Pound who provided brilliant translations of Chinese, Provencal, Latin and Old English poems. His translations are always alive as poems. But it is worth pointing out that his proselytising personality meant that the originals he chose were usually obscure and this licensed him to make radical choices in idiom. For his Chinese translations he invented an entirely new poetic mode of phrasing by sense unit. The results are magnificent and went on (with the translations of Arthur Waley) to become the default language for rendering oriental poetry in English but the poems would not have been recognisable to their authors if they had been translated back into Chinese. They work as poems and they also work as introductions, since many students of oriental languages must have begun their studies because of the translations of Pound and Waley, but I’m sure these students were surprised at the differences between their starting points and what actually awaited them when their competence meant that they could read Li Bai or Du Fu, for example.

And finally, before I stop beating at the battered head of verse translation, appropriation is not only an ethical issue in that we wrong the translated original. You could argue that it also does us harm in that it domesticates the foreign – to our loss. Although students of translation theory can no doubt speak of the delicate pas de deux whereby the self reaches out to the responding Other, I can’t help but feel that to read verse translations is to sit at home and invite foreign cultures to drop in and speak to us for a while in our own language. Ideally we should get up and travel abroad and meet the foreign on its own terms, relishing its alienness and the way it interacts with and conflicts with our verities and our image of ourselves. Lyric poetry is defended with the argument that it broadens our sense of ourselves, widens our psychic possibilities and enables us better to map the “rich territory” of our inner lives. How can this be done if we content ourselves with reading practices which inevitably filter out most of what is distinctive, alien and challenging about a poem in a foreign language?

Jean Kent: Travelling with the Wrong Phrasebooks

Sydney: Pitt St Poetry, 2012, 86pp.

Jean Kent’s Travelling with the Wrong Phrasebooks is an immensely likable collection, so likable that readers may miss some of its sophistication, thinking it no more than a set of poems about travels in France and Lithuania. It is actually a good deal more than that. Travel poetry, once it gets beyond the basic level of “I’ve written a poem about my trip to the Grand Canyon”, is usually about the self and the way in which aspects of the self, surprising even to the poet, are revealed when that self is faced by an experience of the alien. It is fine to have poems which come from a continual renewing of contact with some personal sacred ground but the self only develops (or “only reveals itself” – depending on your ideology) by moving into the unfamiliar. Even a poetry resolutely opposed to being based on a lyrically conceived self learns about (and expresses) the observing self when faced with an experience of the foreign: see, as an example, Laurie Duggan’s sequence, “Onati Notebook” from his The Pursuit of Happiness, reviewed on this site in May.

For the Jean Kent of Travelling with the Wrong Phrasebooks , travel is a linguistic experience as much as anything else and the poems harbour a lot of a poet’s deliberately bad cross-language puns: pain/pain, les Loups/loops, “Aah oui”/”Are we”, rues/ruse and many more. It is also, as its title suggests, an experience of linguistic dislocation. But linguistic dislocation isn’t simply a matter of being in a country and not speaking the language, what we might call the abrasion of travel at a domestic level. There are, for a start, more languages than spoken languages: the languages of the senses, of bodily movement, even the weird syntax of foreign customs – both informal and those formalised in laws and institutions. And, to complicate matters, just as a famous episode of Dr Who contains the observation that “A door, once opened, may be crossed in either direction” so travellers, instead of being passive victims of linguistic confusion, bring their own languages with them to disorient the natives. You get some sense of the complexities involved here in the book’s opening, a triptych called “’Le Weekend’ in Paris”, the first poem of which begins:

Sundays in Paris unsettle us with silence.
The grumble of traffic stays dream-distant,
an argument with air in a language
we apprehend with our senses, its light fur
the only foreignness against our skins
when we wake. With the curtains closed
we could be anywhere.
Doodling dialogues of slow shoes
under our windows; in the distance, bells. . . .

Significantly the title of this poem is a “borrowing” from English, much objected to by purists, and the fourth word of the poem, and thus of the book, is “unsettle” that odd word that simultaneously describes translocation and merely jangled nerves. The vision of Paris in the final poem of this group of three, “The Language of Light”, is one not of unsettling linguistic foreignness but of a city partly transformed by its visitors. And these visitors are traced back to grandparents who, as soldiers, passed through Paris in the First World War. Sitting on park chairs (significantly the poem says “we settle briefly / on these wrought-iron chairs”), Kent describes an experience whereby all visitors across languages and across times harmonise with the language of Paris itself:

. . . . . 
Poles and Italians, Australians and Africans,
small boys and motorised boats all blend into a buzz
swarming from under the acid-yellow horse-chestnut leaves
. . . . .
                                                  The light,
as it negotiates peace settlements
within this temporary country
of cold shoulders,
is speaking everyone’s ancestral tongue.

But if dislocation seems the immediate, primary experience of the poems of this book, the search for the sort of harmonies spoken of here is what gives them both drive and shape. It is no surprise, then, that the figure of Rilke (a great poet of harmonising) looms large and “Following Rilke to the Paris Zoo”, also a sequence of three poems, is probably the core of Travelling with the Wrong Phrasebooks. These are poems structured by a process which encourages the inclusion of the most disparate material and then shows that this can be harmonised into an aesthetic whole. I don’t want to bore readers but it is hard to explain how this works without looking briefly at the structures of the poems themselves.

“The Path of the Panther” begins with an epigraph from Rilke’s poem, setting up the expectation that the poem itself will begin with an expedition to the Jardin des Plantes. So the first pleasant dissonant shock is that it begins with the Penguin Book of German Verse, read in another country and in another time (this opening chimes with my own experience since I used this book as a school text myself, a few years before Jean Kent, and I too have kept my copy):

The margins of my Penguin Book of German Verse
are shadowy with beasts. There was no panther
in that schoolgirl text – I found him later, alone -
but still around each captured poem, voices snarl.
“Over all the hilltops,” Goethe promised “Ruh” -
. . . . .

The second dissonance allowed into the poem is the endless, mechanical annotations demanded of students and embarrassing to read forty years later. Metaphorically they are like the bars on the panther’s cage, although the teacher, whom we meet at greater length in other poems, “rose like a flamingo / from our flock of galahs”, dealing with Rilke’s “Liebes Lied” with its statement that everything that touches us (“alles, was uns anruehrt”) is material from which a single harmonious note can be drawn. The poem then goes on to deal not only with our inability to erase the past but with the way in which the past writes on us. The cover is:

a calligraphy as hypnotic and alien as the so-fashionable
white lace pantyhose I wore then. They disfigured my legs,
my mother said with shudders of distaste. They reminded her
of the ritual scarrings of primitive tribes. And why
would a young Queensland girl want to look like that?

No likelihood of that now, as middle-age inscribes
my thighs, slowing me into a macrame of veins no mini-skirt
could hope to happily skim. I have been written over 
as much as this book . . .
. . . . . 
I can only will the spaces of my world to widen
as I settle for such chaos, the bars of my bones growing shadow-light
round their own zoo of wild and gentle beasts.

All told, I think this is a rather wonderful poem. It also links up with other Australian poems. It has, for example, a touch of Gwen Harwood’s “Midwinter” about it in that it deals with a text from the past which turns up to speak to us in a future which that past could not have predicted. And, like the other poems in this sequence, there is a touch of the structure of Jennifer Maiden’s longer poems where the onward drive pulls more and more disparate items into the field of the poem, only to transform them into a surprising whole. And, at the end, it even recall’s Beaver’s image of his tortured self as a zoo in Letters to Live Poets. In “The Path of the Panther” the “whole” of the poem is summarised in the wish to entertain and finally harmonise the most widely disparate elements both in the outside world, in the world of the poem and in the inner world, her own internal zoo. The poem says you have to “settle for such chaos” but you also have to settle such chaos.

In the third poem of this group, “In the Jardin des Plantes”, we actually get to the home of Rilke’s panther. I presume, though I can’t be confident, that the roundabout path to the place itself in the three poems is yet another dissonance requiring to be absorbed and harmonised. It reminds me of the principle of the labyrinth whereby the harder our logical, meaning-seeking brains try to get us to the centre – in the labyrinth of reading and writing it becomes the central significance – the more we are thrown towards the outside. At any rate this poem makes a feature of its accretive structure. Once again the disparate worlds brought into the jardin involve youth, school and German lessons. When the poet is in the garden she sees children shouting “Les Loups! Les Loups!” when they see the models of wolves circling the hill. And this visual pun, of “looping”, is the primary motif of the poem. Memory “loops” over her and she recalls reading Anna Karenina under the desk at school. A Russian novel recalls Russian wolves and school recalls the pop group of the time, The Animals. The German teacher, the flamingo among galahs of the earlier poem, reappears. A victim of invasion, imprisonment and expulsion in the war – ultimate experiences of dislocation – she “encircles us / with futures doomed to rot”:

. . . . . 
A quarter of a century later, still I feel the sting
of her voice after she stops. Vibrated between
raw throated flowers and silvery circlings of wolves
. . . 
I almost forgive her for her love of sidling round us, hackling
our bare young necks between pigtails
with promises of suffering.

“O susses Lied! O sweet song!” Equivocal as history,
under Rilke’s bow her disparate voices chime.
. . . . .

Another sequence introduces, if not chaos then at least disjunctiveness, by being built around postcards from sunny Australia, sent by family and friends as if these “have suddenly become tourists in their own foreign land” reflected arches of the Pont Neuf or of Margaret Preston with Utrillo is often a motif drawn from the postcard. So a friend’s comment on seeing a black snake at home in Queensland echoes as an image for a snakelike queue for visas. In “Crocodiles in the Marais”, a card from Lake Macquarie with a picture of a crocodile moves the poem onto memories of the scaly skin of the Monstera Deliciosa which allegorises out into a statement about the frustrations of both living and reading with experiences that reveal themselves only at their own pace – like the slowly progressing, sweet semi-rotting of the Monstera fruit:

                                                       So much sweetness
in each fruit-salad phrase, no wonder we longed for our tongues
to be treated to whole poems, instantly. The monster, though,
was wiser. After the first ravishing: threats of razor blades.
When the skin resists, we learned, let it rest . . .

Now, in much longed-for Paris at an age when she should have a tough enough skin to be resistant to any stripping she finds herself ill with shingles, resulting in an intense surface pain in her neck. Confined to bed (“I imitate Proust”) she has a sense that the city has peeled her.

Though most of Travelling with the Wrong Phrasebooks is built around a stay in Paris – something that might be a strain for any readers who are mildly Francophobic – there is one section, the second, devoted to a visit to in-laws (“the family my father-in-law left fifty years ago”) in Lithuania. In these poems we meet the same linguistic sensitivity:

Ruta’s favourite word is “maybe”.
The dictionary on her lap
is heavy as another passenger
as she strokes and cossets it, dropping
the juicy apple crystals of Lithuanian
and hauling back the slow
chewing gum of English. . . .

but the historical realities of the country as it emerges from the Soviet Bloc, the traumatic translocations of the poet’s husband’s parents, the sinister remains of a past that is not spoken about, all mean that these poems are more straightforwardly built on content rather than the challenges of a harmonising form such as we meet in the Paris poems.

This excellent book is the first I have read from the publisher, Pitt Street Poetry, so it is an opportunity to say what a physical pleasure (as well – as will be obvious from what I have written – as an intellectual one) it was to read. The physical component of the pleasure derives from good typography on beautiful, cream paper. Travelling with the Wrong Phrasebooks does have some awkward page breaks but this isn’t a problem with the other two books – by John Foulcher and Luke Davies – that I have from the same publisher. Though screened titles for the poems themselves may not be to every poetry reader’s taste – they suggest graphic design rather than book design – these three small books set a standard in Australian poetry publishing.

Stephen Edgar: Eldershaw

Melbourne: Black Pepper, 2013, 109pp.

The title poem of Stephen Edgar’s Eldershaw is a three-part verse narrative which, nearly eighty pages long, makes up more than two-thirds of the book. The final twenty-five pages is a collection of poems described, on the back cover, as being “in Edgar’s more characteristic manner”. The narrative, “Eldershaw”, is a brilliant piece of “uncanny” fiction focussed on the Tasmanian home of the grandparents of the central character, Helen. She and her husband – a successful lawyer – rebuy it in the mid-fifties and, almost immediately, become prey to disturbing events the most affecting of which is finding their two little daughters dancing naked in the backyard singing, mysteriously, “Dep-pites! a-Darra-dan!”. Both partners end up behaving badly (certainly madly) and divorce messily. Helen later takes up with the much younger Luke whose family history forms the basis of the second part. Luke’s father is one of those victims of war (he flew Mosquitoes in raids over Germany) whose later life is a process of denial and almost self-willed deadness interspersed by eruptions of traumatic memory. The final section of “Eldershaw” deals with Luke’s responses to Helen’s death and records instances of the way her presence asserts itself: he finds a tape on which she had, unwittingly, recorded herself while drunk; he reads her extensive diaries; clearing out her things he finds, among her make-up, a tissue imprinted with her lipstick kiss; and, most importantly, wakes in the night with a clear vision of her sleeping alongside him only to find that she disappears the moment he tries to touch her.

Described like this, “Eldershaw” seems not much more than a melange of topoi from the genre of uncanny fiction, even down to alluding to the sinister and equivocal children of The Turn of the Screw and having a central character (in this case, Luke) who is resistant to any suggestion of the occult. But the whole poem works alarmingly well. Unlike a conventional genre piece, it is alive and convincing at every point, crackling with engagement and intensity. Working out why this should be the case is a tricky critical issue.

It can’t be put down to superlative narrative skills on Edgar’s part since there isn’t much in his seven earlier collections to prepare us for this movement into narrative. True, there is an early “Bluebeard’s Castle” and there is also “King Pepi’s Treasure” from the 1995 volume, Corrupted Treasures. Written in the same brisk blank verse as “Eldershaw”, this latter poem also visits the familiar landscapes of the uncanny in that it is a search for a missing text – in this case a Victorian short story referred to in the footnote of a scholarly book. The “rules of the labyrinth” apply: the harder the narrator searches using correct bibliographic procedures, the more the book in which the story appears recedes – even the British Library has mislaid it. Eventually, when all desire to find it has been leached away, the narrator stumbles on it in a secondhand bookshop in London only to find that the short story has been physically cut from the volume. Like much of the uncanny it can be read as an allegory of the search for textual meaning: so much is promised ultimately to be endlessly deferred, the text continually slipping out of reach. And there is much about “King Pepi’s Treasure” which is obsessed by text: the narrator as a child is fascinated by his first experience of cursive script – “the ‘running writing’ he could never catch” – and fills pages with imitation scripts which he hopes will, one day, have a meaning. After his father’s death, he reads, in a late letter, not an act of communication from the father but a textual substitute for emotions:

An offering of uninformative,
Embarrassed platitudes which gestured at
Some more remote sense of what might be said,
For which the act of writing in itself
Would have to be the formal substitute,
So touching, so profoundly not himself.
Just like the face presented by his coffin,
Expressionless, uncoloured . . .

If “King Pepi’s Treasure” could be about deferred textual meanings, we also learn enough about the central character’s love-life to see that desire, too, is about receding and ultimately unreachable goals: touching his lover’s body he is visited by the image of a babushka doll hiding ever smaller dolls within:

Continually deferring the embrace,
Continually receding from his hold
Towards the central space in the final doll
Still moulded by its absence in her shape.

There are other related readings as well. Perhaps this is not so much about text generally as about poetic text. Perhaps, even, bearing in mind the sceptical protagonist of “Eldershaw”, it is about the occult (or any religion which harnesses the miraculous) which continually leads would-be adepts on with promises of revelation only to present them in the end, when the curtains are finally whisked aside, with an empty temple.

Another reason for approaching “Eldershaw” by this roundabout path is that “King Pepi’s Treasure” connects with “The Secret Life of Books”, a “more characteristic” poem which immediately precedes it. It is a poem which turns text from being a controlled human tool into a dimension with its own agenda:

. . . . .
         The time comes when you pick one up,
You who scoff
At determinism, the selfish gene.
Why this one? Look already the blurb
Is drawing in
Some further text. The second paragraph

Calls for an atlas or a gazetteer;
That poem, spare
As a dead leaf’s skeleton, coaxes
Your lexicon. Through you they speak
As through the sexes
A script is passed that lovers never hear.

They have you. In the end they have written you,
By the intrusion
Of their account of the world, so when
You come to think, to tell, to do,
You’re caught between
Quotation marks, your heart’s beat an allusion.

I dwell on this at length because it encapsulates in a small ambit what might be one way of approaching Edgar’s work as a whole. In other words, there is an entire corpus of poems in Edgar’s previous books which stand in the same relationship to “Eldershaw” that “The Secret Life of Books” might be said to have to “King Pepi’s Treasure”.

We have met Luke’s father, for example, as early as Edgar’s first book, Queuing for the Mudd Club, published in 1985. “Dawn at Bateman’s Bay with Two Figures” is an early example of a characteristic shift in Edgar whereby reality is frozen or illuminated into art: that is – land becomes landscape. But the landscape here is an expressionist one, encapsulating the deadness of the relationship between father and son in an imagined painting of “Grey road and river, grey / Sky gumming the interstices of trees, / The buildings pasted flatly like screens . . .” When we are told:

                              Those fingers now are fused
Beyond prising. He’ll not be reached through them.
The rigours that made him are emptied and set
By. That expression is closed to appeal
And the closed eyes are focussed in a different
Light.
. . . . .

I’m not absolutely sure whether this is because the father is emotionally dead inside or actually, physically dead, but the fact that “Dawn at Bateman’s Bay with Two Figures” is followed immediately by “Patrimony: Four Poems on my Father’s Death” suggests that it may well be the latter. The first poem of Edgar’s second book, Ancient Music (1988) dwells on his father’s old 78s, accumulated before the war but never played after: “All secrets were quite safe / In our technology of silence”, it says, “He couldn’t speak to me, nor I / To him.”

Above all we have met Helen continually throughout Edgar’s poetry and a great number of the events of “Eldershaw” have found their way into earlier lyric expression. She is clearly based on Edgar’s late former partner, Ann Jennings, known to all readers of Australian poetry from Gwen Harwood’s much-loved “An Impromptu for Ann Jennings”. She is the dedicatee of the first book and the posthumous dedicatee of Edgar’s fifth book, Lost in the Foreground, published the year after her death in 2002. The first poems of the first book, “Beauty and the Beast”, “Boobook Owl” and “Home Comforts”, might well be about their life together but after 2002 she becomes increasingly the focus – at least the emotional focus – of Edgar’s poetry moving it from a set of elegantly formal meditations about art, life, time, the future, our genes (and so on) into a poetry which seems – to me at least – to be trying to deal with an oppressive and disturbing subject that continually demands consideration, rather like the house’s protests in “Eldershaw”. Lost in the Foreground concludes with a comparatively conventional elegy, “Elemental”:

The body’s graces which you graced
Are irretrievably effaced,
And all you were that now is not,
And will no more, resolves to what
These gathered memories can make
From shreds of pleasure and heartache.
The lines around your eyes and lips,
The gestures of your fingertips,
Those limbs that love moved and desire
Are disembodied now like fire.
 . . . . .

By the time of Other Summers (2006) she (or, more precisely, her absence) is a major recurring theme. There is an extended suite of ten disparate poems, “Consume My Heart Away”, which seems likely to derive from the same experience. At any rate, it is devoted to getting to grips with loss from different angles. It carries as an epigraph Francesca’s famous comment that there is nothing so bleak as recalling times of happiness in a time of woe, coupled with a comment from Durrell’s Justine: “I saw that pain itself was the only food for memory”. Two of these poems are especially fine. “History of the House” – again the title specifically recalls “Eldershaw” – deals with ghostly presences and the way that while the central character needs to be free of them in general (“Switch off the radio, / Enough of ghosts . . .”) he cannot be free of her, specifically (“She will not be denied. / The ghost of her is too much to ignore, / More stubborn to remain since she is gone”). “Man on the Moon” is a magnificent piece of poetic indirection where the sight of the moon recalls the experience of seeing the moon landing which itself moves, with the obsessive logic of love, to thinking about the way the lover was “in the world then and alive” and how love makes an accidental crossing of paths seem a destined meeting. The conclusion:

The crescent moon, to quote myself, lies back,
A radiotelescope propped to receive
The signals of the circling zodiac.
I send my thoughts up, wishing to believe

That they might strike the moon and be transferred
To where you are and find or join your own.
Don’t smile. I know the notion is absurd,
And everything I think, I think alone.

brings us back to Dante, I think, in recalling the circle of the moon in Paradiso. And there is also a wonderful ambiguity in that “Don’t smile” which might, in its defence, be addressed to the reader but, as we all know, is really addressed to the dead lover (since we never stop speaking to those we have truly loved) and thus is a neat and wry contradiction of the last line.

Visitations and memories continue. In “Her Smile” (from later in Other Summers) an old video is recovered showing her in “the years before you met / When you were not alive to her, / Nor she to you”, a story retold in “Eldershaw”. “2.00” from History of the Day (2009) tells the story of awaking to the sensation that she is lying next to him, the “visitation” with which “Eldershaw” concludes, and “Nocturnal” from the same book is based on the experience of hearing her voice accidentally recorded on tape. It also includes the story of Jenning’s being disturbed by a sinister presence not long after buying the house. This poem is thickened by the fact that the tape itself is a recording of Gwen Harwood, a dead friend of both Jennings and Edgar, reciting “Suburban Sonnet”. In other words it has a frame that doubles the experience of being visited by the voice of the dead. It’s the closest that these more conventional poems get to the world of “Eldershaw”:

. . . . . 
Who ever thought they would not hear the dead?
Who ever thought that they could quarantine
          Those who are not, who once had been?
          At that old station on North Head
                    Inmates still tread the boards,
Or something does; equipment there records
The voices in the dormitories and wards,
Although it’s years abandoned. Undeleted,
What happened is embedded and repeated,

Or so they say. And that would not faze you
Who always claimed events could not escape
          Their scenes, recorded as on tape
          In matter and played back anew
                    To anyone attuned
To that stored energy, that psychic wound.
You said you heard the presence which oppugned
Your trespass on its lasting sole occasion
In your lost house. I scarcely need persuasion,

So simple is this case. Here in the dark
I listen, tensing in distress, to each
          Uncertain fragment of your speech,
          Each desolate, half-drunk remark
                    You uttered unaware
That this cassette was running and would share
Far in the useless future your despair
With one who can do nothing but avow
You spoke from midnight, and it’s midnight now.

What does all this mean? It is hard to resist the conclusion that this life/love experience is so powerful that it has, cumulatively, put a lot of strain on Edgar’s usual poetic methods. In other words “Eldershaw” is not merely a successful narrative which mines personal experience to lift it above being a mere genre piece. Nor is it a sort of roman a  clef – the kind of fiction that gets its drive from coded references to a known story that is, in itself, for various reasons, unsayable. “Eldershaw” is, I think, an attempt to deal with a profound experience by exploiting poetry’s protean possibilities and constructing a verse narrative to both air and attempt to control the material. I think it is more successful than the “lyric/dramatic” poems – like “Nocturnal” – largely because it is a mode where complexity of expository detail, far from being the awkward drag it can be in a lyric poem (for how can any poet calculate how much contextual detail is necessary before an innocent reader can make sense of such a central and repeatedly visited experience?) forms the substance of the text. The main question about “Eldershaw” – which a reader cannot answer – is whether this is a final, freeingly successful engagement with this intense material or simply another approach, admittedly successful, from a new angle. Time – as they so often say will tell.

The advantage of having quoted “The Secret Life of Books” and “Nocturnal” at some length is that they give readers new to Edgar’s poetry some idea of what makes up his “characteristic manner”, a mode that dates back to the first poems of his first book. It is almost always stanzaic, usually intricately rhymed, and exploits a truly prodigious technique to make long sentences articulate themselves within the stanzas. There is rarely any end-stopping and the rhymes are almost always half-rhymes (I usually find myself rereading the first stanza with an eye to working out its rhyme scheme before I go on with an Edgar poem). Those who dislike it will claim that it is stodgy and old-fashioned but it seems to have served Edgar well and choices in poetry should be judged by the extent to which they enable a poet to do what he or she wants and needs to do, rather than by any abstract standard such as whether they are “in keeping with recent developments”. And getting the syntax of longish sentences into a predesigned stanzaic shape produces a distinctive quality of voice: the three stanzas I have quoted from “Nocturnal” will give some idea of how brilliantly Edgar does this. Another component of this voice is the presence of lexical density – there are quite a few words beyond most people’s competence. “Streeling”, “obtunded” and “stravaiging” occur within a few pages of each other in Edgar’s first book and “planish” turns up in one of the last poems of Eldershaw. Odd lexical items can create different effects. On the crudest level they can just be there to raise the level of the style so that the poem establishes and sustains a slightly hieratic quality. But they also have an estranging effect and in Edgar’s style they sometimes seem like (to risk mixing metaphors) little knots in the stately, brahmsian flow of the verse.

Apart from the fact that it isn’t in one of Edgar’s favoured six or eight line stanzas and is, rather, in syllable-counted couplets, the first poem of the sixteen that fill out Eldershaw, “Nothing But”, is in touch with Edgar obsessions that go back to some of his earliest poems. It begins with the sun illuminating a domestic coastal scene:

Like wind and spray, the first sun hits the coast
And paints it into being, strikes the face

Of the sleeper who awakes, in character,
Convinced she is herself and yesterday

Woke also in this room, who, rising, gazes
At waves like travellers in time which bring

Reports back from tomorrow. Even so,
How frail an artifice the pigface seems,

Streaming in purple down the quarry wall;
The empty laundromat, this Monday morning,

Its window like an exercise to render
Transparency from plain day, a collage

Of this and that . . . . .

The work of art which the woman sees through the laundromat window is one in which the objects of the day are revealed for what they are – “Nothing but this, nothing if not this” – rather as components of a painted scene with a predetermined meaning.

But this transmutation of reality into one kind of artwork or another is a theme (if that is the correct word) that seems to recur so commonly in Edgar’s earlier poetry that it is almost an obsession. Just as the poems of Gwen Harwood – another poet who moved to Tasmania – often touch base with the poetic equivalent of a primal scene (wandering at sunset on the edge of water, receptive to the otherworld of dream etc) so a scenario peculiar to Edgar is often repeated in which the poet is looking at the landscape of estuary and hills through a window. Probably there is a gull flying, either at random or pursuing goals quite different to the rest of the landscape. Some event of light then transmutes this scene into art with the window acting as a plane. “Ulysses Burning” (another Dante allusion) from Corrupted Treasures, expresses this perfectly:

This room is the darkened theatre. Through the glass
The white veranda frames the stage
Like a proscenium. Garden, street and beach,
River and mountain, layer on layer, reach
Out to the backdrop of the sky
Before which all must pass that has to pass.

The river with its diamond-crusted gloss;
A Petri dish of gel in which
A culture of the sun is flourishing.
On the mountain, which aspires to Monet, cling
Veiled glares, some squeegee smears of cloud.
. . . . .

And so on. In its own way it is a mode full of possibilities especially for dealing with endless variations on the opposition of life and art. (In “Nothing But” and another poem from Eldershaw, “Auspices”, you have the feeling that the later Edgar wants the result to be an art that will be more about things-in-themselves rather than, say, interpretable allegories.) But it is also a mode that suits Edgar’s style perfectly because this steady progression of sentences through stanzas has an oddly viscous effect which mimics the transitions that the poems deal with. It is a case of an odd music finding its theme perfectly. If I had to locate a word within the poetry that might act as a totem, I would choose “frieze” (with its homophonic second meaning as well).

“Nothing But” also recalls – in its notion that the waves bring reports from tomorrow – those earlier poems interested in the future. One of these, “In Search of Time to Come”, belongs to that large poetic genre devoted to how we can suddenly be exposed to other dimensions either by the destruction of what another early Edgar poem calls “that golden stock / Of certainties” or by being exposed to other orders of existence, such as animal consciousness. “In Search of Time to Come” describes an imagined prehistoric community in a cave, turned inward – “Always back / On itself” – rehearsing familiar tasks. Outside the sun is setting and the threat of the external dark is beginning to loom. The individuals feel that someone is out there but, as the poem concludes, what is out there is us, their genetic and cultural future.

Given time one could also write a great deal about the way that the past is dealt with. Often it emerges in poems that are about genetic determinism and this colours many of the poems about the father like, for example, “His Father’s Voice” from Where the Trees Were and those about the family. In fact poems about the family form an interesting counterpoint to the poems of loss about which I’ve spoken. In Other Summers there are three different versions of a poem called “Im Sommerwind” in which late adolescence is revisited. In each poem the scene is, essentially, frozen but the three versions look like three different snapshots. In the same book there is a wonderful piece, perhaps my favourite Edgar poem, “Eighth Heaven”, in which the poet wanders through a frozen image of his family home:

. . . . .
                              And there is my father

Standing in the lounge room, half-turned away.
I summon up some greeting and can feel
The words unbodied, though not a sound disturbs

The house’s depth. I walk in and am baffled
To find, however much I move about him,
That that one aspect is still turned to me,

Unmoving, a one-sided hologram.
. . . . .

I’m sure that much of the magic of this poem lies in the fact that so many of the Edgar themes are focussed in this bizarre scenario. The family is frozen in time in the same way that it is in memory and in photographs but it is a benevolent freezing into an enabling art rather than into the horrors of the later cantos of Inferno where the lack of movement symbolises a moral deadness. One of the most significant moments in “Eldershaw” occurs when Luke’s father, returned from the war, goes with his new wife on a delayed honeymoon in the country:

But some particulation of the light
Applied across, or rather through the miles
Between here and the faint blue hazy sky,
In which the sun, a smouldering orange disc
Behind a screen, was sinking gradually
As though the air resisted its decline.
How beautiful she thought it. “I don’t know,”
He said at last, “it all looks dead to me.”

What we get here – in compressed form – are the two different results of freezing (or “friezing”): the enabling beauties of art or deadness.

Many of the other poems at the end of Eldershaw reflect on the painful material that the long narrative deals with and are thus a part of the dynamic of how Edgar’s poetry is to deal with this issue. We are left with the book’s final poem, “Lost World”, which describes how a Tasmanian bushfire burns down a shed which contains a lover’s photograph in a gardener’s old jacket. The picture is lost but in a sense, the poem reminds us, much more was lost since the picture only captured one instant out of many instants:

A little earlier, or in a while,
And a quite other face or pose
Might have been taken than this shadowed smile,
Which no one may have seen except
These two, the nameless and the dead, or kept
The curling memory of. And now, who knows? . . .

All life is loss, even (or especially) life frozen into art. Narrative may be a solution but it, despite its commitment to a fuller depiction of process and change, is also only a sketch of reality. “Lost World” concludes with the hope that everything on earth (crushed fossils, drowned Minoan combs, experiences of love at its most intense) survives somewhere as a “print in space . . . coded like a chromosome / With lost millennia and multitudes” – but, at best, it’s a desperate and very faint hope.

Laurie Duggan: The Pursuit of Happiness; Leaving Here

The Pursuit of Happiness (Bristol, UK: Shearsman, 2012)
Leaving Here (Maleny: light-trap, 2012)

The final poem of Laurie Duggan’s new book is a long set of diary-like entries made while based at Griffith University (it’s called “The Nathan Papers”) and it concludes with Duggan’s arriving in Kent. This pivotal event took place in August, 2006, and produces the title of the second book under review, Leaving Here. Despite visits back to Australia, England has been Duggan’s home since then. Someone who seemed to have such an ability to see Australia whole and dispassionately looked as though he might be headed for a period of disorienting exile (often defined as the quintessential condition for a contemporary poet). It says a lot about Duggan’s poetics that this hasn’t occurred at all and the years since his leaving have been poetic anni mirabiles for him. His reputation is, justifiably, higher than it has ever been and all would expect him to be one of the first chosen in any anthology of post-war Australian poetry. His publishing output seems also to have blossomed: The Collected Blue Hills was published in Australia last year and a small volume of the first of their English equivalents, Allotments, has also been released; Shearsman Press, in England, have brought out a selected poems (Compared to What), a reissue of The Ash Range, the important Crab & Winkle, (reviewed on this site in February, 2010) and now this new collection, The Pursuit of Happiness. Reading Duggan’s weblog, Graveney Marsh, gives you some sense of the reasons for this comparatively smooth adjustment to England, beyond a new, supportive publisher. You get a sense of the vitality and openness of the Post-Poundians in England (Duggan has always been an admirer of Bunting and Roy Fisher); poets searching for a way in which to register the real – the actuality of landscape and cityscape as well as the complex social situations that the English have a reputation for being especially sensitive to. It seems, to an outsider looking at the blog, to be a “scene” full of fertile discussion and possibilities, far richer than one might meet in Australia.

The Pursuit of Happiness has, on its cover, a reproduction of a painting by Stella Bowen called Flight From Reason, showing the statue of a periwigged man of the Enlightenment among houses bombed-out in the Blitz. This, together with the book’s title, suggests that it will join in the critique of the “Age of Reason” and its projects. But, although this may underlie many of Duggan’s attitudes (especially towards all-embracing cultural and intellectual perspectives) you still feel that this is a poetry of detail and the frameworks of placing that detail. Significantly, it begins with a wonderful poem whose main aim seems to be to position the poet himself. “Letter to John Forbes” is Janus-faced in that it is, at its beginning, addressed back to Australia (and backwards in time) and, at its conclusion, forwards to something which will, in at least a small way, celebrate poetry: “the buses all head north / to Clapton Pond, / but I’m southbound / for The Cut, Southwark, // poetry, spotlit / on a tiny stage”. The opening of the poem is all about placement:

lit up in a window
with a burger & glass
of African chenin blanc

I’m reading the later Creeley
on Charing Cross Road

you, ten years back
in limbo (Melbourne)
of which you made the best

I inhabit an England
you mightn’t recognize
though you would have read
the fine print that led here . . .

We might, initially, think that the “fine print” of that last quoted line could refer to a personal knowledge of Duggan and the intimate details of those features of his situation which have meant that he has finished up in a London cafe. It may well do so, but it also refers to the cultural currents that have produced contemporary England. The more you are familiar with Duggan’s poetry which, though it does introduce the poet’s self, tends to do so in a casual way as though he were no more than an (admittedly important) detail among details, the more you are likely to see the second implications as the important ones (although later Creeley is very personal, it still resists making the history and experiences of the “lyric ego” central). At any rate, I prefer to keep both readings present especially, as I’ll explore later, because Duggan is present in The Pursuit of Happiness in ways that are untypical for him.

In a sense “Letter to John Forbes” could be described as an elegy, though it certainly isn’t in the “Lycidas”, “Adonais” mode. A more overt elegy is “Written in a Kentish Pub on Hearing of the Death of Jonathan Williams” but though it is more overtly an elegy it isn’t in any sense formulaic. The title itself (like the book’s title) has a deliberately archaic, almost eighteenth century, quality and the poem reflects how memories of Williams (an American from the south who lived in England) interact with the pub environment and with Duggan’s response to it: “this Thatcherite / province, its // councils / comprised of / Tory / stayputs // the idiots / of small business?”. It’s a poem that wants to know how an elegy for a friend might be made, asking “for J.W. / what?”. And at least part of the answer is to take those elements of Williams’s verbal playfulness that Duggan himself has responded to over the years and highlight them in the poem.

Duggan’s obsession with place isn’t entirely confined, in The Pursuit of Happiness, to the place where much happiness is usually sought – English pubs. “Oxenhope Revisited” – another very English title, this time sounding more Georgian than eighteenth century – is ten short views of Bronte territory; “Exeter Book” – a medieval title this time – is a poem devoted to Exeter and “The London Road” is devoted, I think, to his “home” town of Faversham, in Kent at the end of Watling Street. There are short poems about Granada (“Grenadines” – “Baroque is / ‘shock and awe’ // you see the virtues / of Rococo”), Milan and Cyprus (“Paphos”). What strikes me about these is how flexible Duggan’s sense of observation is. I probably have developed a tendency, over the years, to see it as composed of two elements. The first is a painterly registration of sights and lights – “the sun at an angle / manages the northern window”, “Darkness across the water, before which / lightning, hail against windows”, “after the Great Storm a broken crown / wild anemonies under the lip of the hill”, are examples though dozens of others could have been chosen. This kind of observation seems to be dominant in the two sets of “Angles” included in this book, all thirty-two of which a quick and accurate “views” though they are sometimes sociologically slanted.

The second component is a sensitivity to signs, especially those where, as I have said in other places, aspects of the world being observed are revealed. Thus the letter to John Forbes with which the book begins cannot help recording the shop sign, “BUDWEISER, / ENGLISH BREAKFAST / ‘OPEN’” and there is something satisfying about a dry-cleaning shop (in “Angles 4”) being called VOLTAIRE as there is of CHRIS HOLIDAY RENT A CAR in Paphos. But there are other elements. There is, for example, throughout Duggan’s work, an interest in verbal signs. “Looney Tunes” and “Bin Ends” in The Pursuit of Happiness are made up of these. Sometimes they are just puns – “Old Speckled Hen / (for old speckled men?)” – but in a poem like “An Italian Lake” the visual registration of the place which opens it and the tart social comment which derives from this and concludes it, bracket what would have to be called an “aural sign”. It’s odd the way sound appears in what would otherwise be a visual setpiece:

one side shaded
for months; the other
plentiful olives, a house
on a steep hillside.
this is “a speechless place”
says the guide: meaning
neither incomparable
nor unspeakable;
“sightless” perhaps;
a wall of shuttered villas
owned by footballers
and movie stars

This is only one example of the way in which the elements of Duggan’s poetry might be more varied than at first appears. It may be that the real energy in this poetry comes not from observation but from the placing of those in a poem. The tensions that make a Duggan poem “work” as some kind of aesthetic entity (I’m aware that this might beg questions) may well lie not only in the way observations are placed next to each other but also in the way different sorts of observations impinge on each other.

“Onati Notebook” is the only example in The Pursuit of Happiness of Duggan in his more extended “anthropological poetic” mode – “Milan” and “Paphos” are more compressed, condensed and allusive examples. And yet, at the same time, it still has its origins in personal diary-keeping and the author is very much a presence. In fact read singly, rather than as part of a set (including, say, “British Columbia Field Notes” from The Passenger), “Onati Notebook” is full of intimations of a tense, uncomfortable observer. The tour of Onati in the Spanish Pyrenees (Basque territory) is interrupted by “intermittent heavy rain” and the forced spells of interior living bring out doubts and fears, as in the second poem:

Coats dance on the coat rack
noises off from a billiard room

a rip in the table’s baize,
a warp towards one pocket.

“Poetry
is all you need to do”
says Pam

and, I guess,
“It’s my job”

Euskadian rhythms,
pinxto:

the mysteries
of 2009

Much of this discomfort can be put down to the experience of the signs of an alien culture, but Duggan has always thrived on the notation (and, sometimes, exploration) of such signs. My reading of the poem stresses that it is the unease that the poet has brought with him, rather than anything specific to Basque culture, which produces this tenseness:

. . . . .
My hands, the hands of a very old person,
rest on the arms of an ergonomic chair
(of Bauhaus design: Marcel Breuer?).

All this takes me away from what’s out there:
a black square (homage to Ad Reinhardt)
inflected by pointillisme

The end of “Onati Notebook” brings a lot of this together. It finishes not with any kind of summation of the culture but with the bewilderment of the poet. And this bewilderment is visual and linguistic (and, thus, aural):

Is it? could it be (the peak)?
Landurratzko Punta,
with Klabelinaitz (or Marizelaieta)
a little to the left?

the contours are about right

it would have to be
unpronounceable

right on the border of this province/region

Onatiko

It might be going too far to see “Onati Notebook” as being the closest Duggan’s poetics can take him to confessional poetry but it is consonant with the elegiac elements of the letter to John Forbes and the elegy for Jonathan Williams. The final sequence of The Pursuit of Happiness, “The Nathan Papers” is also full of an uneasy self. Since this is really a set of diary entries made in the period leading up to leaving Australia for England, this dis-ease might be understandable. On first reading it seems less consequential than the other poems of the book but rereadings alter this judgement. The first page, in particular, is one you would want to see in any selection of Duggan poems because it deals with so many of the issues crucial to his poetry. It begins with a view of the eucalypts – in which the Nathan campus is set – seen after rain. I think this is an iconic image for Australians. Winding paths full of the litter of stripped gumbark among the great trees themselves have always seemed symbolic of Australia, opposed to the carefully defined edges of European privet hedges. Needless to say, Duggan’s view is rather less essentialist than my own and he quickly moves a seemingly natural environment into a created one:

eucalyptus after rain, even this, trunks straight or sinuous, reminds of Sydney Long. art has made this environment, its pathways, marked, curve toward the dormitories
*
red mahogany (not “real” mahogany, just a variety of eucalypt). and in the low-lying areas stringybark and needlebark, the path goes up the ridge. underbrush. a side track revegetating
*
forest on a hill
small brush turkey with undeveloped tail
furiously running
the science of this?               mound building?
*
I never wanted to be a poet. not like some people want to be one now. it just happened. and then it was too late to do otherwise
*
the template is buried (or burned), the elsewhere to this this for which I function (among others) as an as if. “imagine that all these things you’ve been taught are meaningless”. or slide into pure consumerism

And so forth until the final section which is actually set in England. It’s a poem with a lot of important material in it, prompted by the imminent fact of leaving (“We will be leaving all this behind”) that brings a new perspective to landscapes and objects.

This tone of a distinctive, almost confessional air in some of the poems of The Pursuit of Happiness extends into Leaving Here, a beautiful, large format, thirty page, limited edition book produced by Light-trap press with a cover by Angela Gardner. There are three poems: “Thirty Pieces”, “One-Way Ticket” and “The London Road” – the latter also appearing in The Pursuit of Happiness. The outside poems are about locations – Brisbane and Faversham – and the central poem is, like “The Nathan Papers”, about the process of leaving, especially that of going through one’s property to see what should be kept. For a poet that means revisiting a lot of writing and documentation about writing:

what I have written
I have lost

what’s recorded
so much paper and celluloid

the 1974 of desire moves
through its lack of movement

a moment
a memento

amen
a memory stick

a stack
of disks

a pile
of maps . . .

Many of the parts of this poem detail objects and scenes (“circular paths / a wrought-iron gate . . . / distant apartments / pipes, wind-vanes / funnels // walking figures / backwash / along the rocks // old military medals / account books / chess pieces . . .”) in a way which Duggan’s poetry of place has made us familiar with. But, unusually in this poem, they are places and objects left behind and are thus imbued with an emotional burden that the other recorded items do not have.

The way the self appears in the poetic traditions to which Duggan adheres always seems problematic. This is largely because these traditions reject the possibility of the revelation of the self being the central act of poetry. In this they betray their origins both in time and place. But the self is always there, perhaps the more so the more it is hidden or suppressed, and in the case of these two books we feel are engaging with something new in Duggan’s now extensive output: a different, rather uneasy self.

Brook Emery: Collusion

St Kilda: John Leonard Press, 2012, 58pp.

Brook Emery’s previous book, the excellent Uncommon Light, explored with great subtlety and precision questions which are usually considered to be the provenance of philosophers of the mind: What is consciousness? How does it relate to the body? What is memory? And a host of other implicated issues: What is thought and how does it relate to meaning? It considered these by bringing to them a poet’s skill, an ability to speak about difficult-to-describe states in a tactile way (while always being aware of the paradoxes of “poetic” methods such as metaphor). The essential movement of the poetry is to undermine whatever solutions or certainties emerge as a result of meditation and when one thinks of Emery’s poetry and the way it is almost always “grounded” at the sea’s edge on the west coast of Australia, it is hard not to think in terms of the way sand shifts continuously beneath our feet, seeming to be both supporting and unstable. This position seems, at first, quite conventional for our time in that it rejects any transcendental ground of being and is highly sensitive to observed processes and interactions but I think it also rejects the Buddhism that might offer it a comfortable home since the virtues of those beliefs and practices are, after all, tied to a baroque theology involving vast imagined cycles of history and processes of rebirth. “That Beat Against the Cage” is a multipart poem from Uncommon Light that hammers away at such issues and its final stanza concludes on a note of dissatisfaction:

It’s untenable, this drifting that sees the world as drift.
The fantasy should ebb, become the half-recalled
calling of the sea, or else lifetimes will be spent meandering
self-consciously through the matter of the day,
shuttling back and forth as if transience
could be a domicile, fearful that to stray too far,
stay too long, is to change the story
for an understory, the agreed accepted world
for a thesis of perplexity: a conclusion there is 
no evidence to decide, or that the evidence
leads to thoughts the thought cannot sustain.

I’ve read this as a rejection of Buddhism but it might also be simply a rejection of a poetically convenient way of living in a liminal state, exploiting borders and uncertainties and using uncertainty as a stable ground on which to erect poetic structures full of the gestures that arise from certainty. At any rate, the poem seems to be saying that although uncertainty is a state, it isn’t one to feel comfortable about: transience can’t be a domicile.

But the book isn’t entirely about such matters: woven throughout Uncommon Light were a group of poems addressing a question that usually derives from the philosophical vectors of ethics and religion rather than from those of the nature of consciousness: what is the nature of evil and whence does it come? They weren’t the best poems in the book but their attempts to deal with the issue – significantly they were strongest when they dealt with the poet’s inability to deal with the issue! – were a welcome widening of perspective. This direction isn’t continued in Emery’s new book Collusion, but if it seems to abandon the question of evil it does have some poems about personal guilt.

Above all things, one’s first sense of Collusion is how organised a book it is, how little like a conventional collection of poems. If it keeps a narrower focus than Uncommon Light, it also experiments with a variety of tones, even of types of poems, and places them carefully. The first, last and central poems (they are all untitled) are done in epistolary style, addressed to K. At the moment we think of Kafka and start to explore the possibilities involved in writing to such a figure (or perhaps his protagonist), the middle poem carefully corrects our course:

. . . . . 
Dear K, I tire of the apparatus of my brain.
I fear that you (my interlocutor, my will,
my conscience) may also tire. The thoughts I think
have passed their use-by dates, are petals tossed
in Burnt Norton’s dusty wind. We could,
we probably do, lead many lives even as
an inoffensive clerk or as a monstrous insect
squirming on its back, feet and feelers wildly
seeking purchase on the air. We stand accused.
We answer allegations we make against ourselves.
                                        *
Someone finding this will think I’m corresponding
with Franz Kafka (it could be Kierkegaard
or Krazy Kat). I’m not that mad, and besides,
Kafka had too many problems of his own (migraines, boils,
constipation, tuberculosis, a certain paranoia). . . .

Although this invokes Eliot (twice) as well as Kafka, a book containing poems as imaginary letters, or letters to imaginary recipients (“corresponding” is an interesting pun) recalls the work of Bruce Beaver, especially his Letters to Live Poets, and reminds one that that poet, too, was an inhabitant of a Sydney beach surrounded by an environment which both thrust particulars at you while at the same time reminding you of their essential instability all in a sharp, crystal clear light. I can’t remember any earlier poems by Emery which are homages to Beaver but one of the groups of poems which are carefully interspersed throughout Collusion are clearly done in one of Beaver’s styles, probably that of the “Days” sequence of Odes and Days, the third of Beaver’s great central triptych of books. I’ll quote the first of them in full (it’s the fifth poem of Collusion):

It’s almost spring in our neglected hemisphere.
As yet no indication we’ve tilted far enough
to receive the annual, waited-for reward.
The sea and sky volley what there is of dusk
and a peevish wind plays nip and tuck
to irritate the waves. In its own good time
the sun will be here and the sea all aquamarine
as if, overnight, spirit could manifest as light
and just this startling colour. Then morning warmth,
leaves on imported trees, poems (God help us!),
and mothballs for our heavy winter clothes.
And are we lighter too. Do we deserve it?
No. But the punishing and forgiving world
will give it to us anyway and I’ll give thanks
though to whom or what it’s useless to inquire.

This is such a good approximation of a Beaver poem that it could actually be one and if I had had my Beaver collections at hand while writing this I would have nervously checked through them to make sure that it isn’t a quotation, perhaps from a late book like The Long Game. At any rate it catches the Beaver tone perfectly with its sudden unusual perspective (“our neglected hemisphere”), its sense of the world as a place to be lamented and celebrated, its tremendous drive that spills across into (and weirdly animates) a bathetic conclusion. The only thing that doesn’t seem Beaverish is the pun on “lighter” in the twelfth line. There are another six poems in this mode. If I had to guess the impetus behind them I would say that they experiment with inhabiting Beaver’s approach to living in the world. They temporarily eschew the elegant and subtle exploration of mind, thought and the real (and the balanced states of their inter-relationship) which mark most of the Emery poems, for an attitude of sudden brusque involvement resulting in a short, sharp lyric poem but one in which wider perspectives are included, not in a solemn, gestural way (as though a profundity were being offered, gift-wrapped, to the reader) but in a casual, tossed-off one.

There is another group of poems spaced through the book which identify themselves not only in that they are all ten lines long but in that all begin with ellipsis points and an indented first line – a clear indication that these are to be read as snapshots of process, though they might also be rescued fragments of one single long poem. The first two are memorable for their presentation of differing but equally symbolic scenes. In the first the author and (presumably) partner are placed between “the receding arcs of sea and sky” in front and “the green and terrible forest” behind. The two exist, of course, on the liminal sand (described here, with a nice example of that distinctive kind of pun which I think is called paronomasia, as “the intervening sleight of sand”) but they aren’t static: “our feet / lifted and set down, lifted and set down . . .”. In the second poem, examples of hard-nosed industry “three men in hardhats / and orange coveralls” on a bridge (already established in the book’s first poem as being in opposition to the flowing element beneath) are contrasted with a mannequin “forty feet below in a pink gown / and imitation pearls”.

The other poems of Collusion continue to recall Beaver in that they seem to be diary-like meditations, occasioned by living in the world: “All morning it’s been difficult to settle, difficult to harness / energy or purpose for all the things / I have to do.” Their distinctive movement is to be strung between relentless denial and tentative affirmation. A couple of them describe dreams and three, late in the book, deal with memories. One of these latter is prompted by a bicycle ride (and contains the clause “We can’t go back” which is surely an allusion to Beaver’s novel) another by an old photo and the third by recurrent domestic guilts induced by the humming monotony of an aeroplane flight. Compared with the issue of the monstrous evils explored in Uncommon Light, these guilts seem very minor: burying a younger brother up to his neck in the back yard, losing him at the Show, having a near disaster with his children in the surf. As the poem’s last stanza says: “This light-weight guilt is carried on the wind, along with doubt, / longing, nothing more than dust, clouds, rain, squall after squall, / as if wind intended to drag the whole Antarctic north . . .” But despite visits to the worlds of dream and guilt, these poems seem, essentially metaphysical in their obsessions.

One late poem works hard to describe a state of what might be called “significance”, experienced physically:

I almost understand this resonance, this hum
or echo which I can only picture as a frequency,
oscillations expanding and diminishing
from a single source. And the sometime static
which crackles and interrupts, which implies
another source, another thought or possibility. . . .

There is a central statement, “It’s not persistent but too here and now / to be dismissed as fleeting”, and then life returns to the commonplace – a grandchild sleeps in the back of the car and the poet reads Mark Strand. Fittingly, exactly as many stanzas are devoted to the everyday as to the definition of the barely describable state.

And this state, or something like it, is familiar from many of Emery’s poems. In one of them it appears at dawn in hypnagogic and liminal guise and demands consideration despite the cruder intrusion of early-morning sexual desire: “No. Not here. Not now. There’s so much to consider. The sequence of sounds, the unknowable and what it means, the time it takes // to cross an interval between two spots or states . . .” One of the best poems is an extended attempt at description culminating in metaphors deployed as expression of both difference and similarity:

. . . . . 
                                        My mind is silent too
and still. I can’t describe it. Not empty
like some vessel, not grey and wispy
like a fog: something more substantial,
not set and settled but curiously serene,
like breathing starlight . . .

Perhaps, ultimately, a metaphor like this final one is the most powerfully descriptive mode though it is hedged about with problems.

Above all, throughout Emery’s poetry and repeatedly here in Collusion, there is a refusal to locate in this state some kind of transcendental ground. There is also a refusal of the next level of stasis whereby the refusal to accept a transcendental ground becomes a ground in itself. There isn’t any celebration of uncertainty here, more a process of living attuned to what is happening as one’s mind engages the manifold dimensions of reality. As the first poem in the book says:

. . . . .
                                        The glimmerings are flecks of time.
          I can’t decide whether they are truly in the moment or
          moments out of time, essence or deviation from the path.
There’s no conclusion here, no resolution myth. Things rise up
          and fall away as if they never were, rise up again. I like the
          dancing light,
the scattered cloud, the river that lies potentially between its banks,
          the speeding train. I reach for them. They reach for me.

Alan Wearne: Prepare the Cabin for Landing

Artarmon: Giramondo, 2012, 106pp.

Despite the increasing frequency of narrative poems, the work of Alan Wearne is unmatched. Nobody has even begun to approach the complexity of his portraits of life in post-war Australia and this most recent book adds another group of poems to the overall corpus. If, on the surface, it appears to be something of a miscellany, a closer look shows it to have a lot of internal coherence about it, both thematic and tonal. For one thing many of the poems – and especially the longer sequences – gravitate around school years in Melbourne in the late fifties and sixties. The second section of the book, for example, is the thirty-five page sequence “Operation Hendrikson” which charts the life of one friend met accidentally after ten years: “And then, this warmish winter day in mid July, / here at the corner of Orchard Grove and Canterbury Road / (territory I haven’t really known since school) / Wearney invites me to his thirtieth”. It is intriguing to see the author making a guest appearance in what is really somebody else’s poem (it is a first person narrative) and I think this is the first time that this has happened in Wearne’s extensive body of narrative. All we really learn about him from this brief appearance, by the way, is that he is the author of a school paper felicitously titled “Proper Gander” and has, as one might expect, a watching brief being simultaneously one of the group but also distanced: “In our concert he plays the butler, / who sees it (and I mean it) all”. Hendrickson recounts his history which is also the history of a large number of other friends and aquaintances at school. The result is a set of pretty lurid portraits: Hendrickson himself is in care with a foster family (“that two that five percent in cottages and homes”) and is chiefly remembered for having an underage girlfriend when he was twenty and being charged with “carnival knowledge”. A row of other “characters” is described and what is known of their fates – revealled when Hendrickson runs across them again in the dozen years after school – filled in.

It isn’t a very optimistic canvas: several are dead, a semi-psychotic minister’s son is stacking trolleys, a Vietnam-vet lives in a haze of drugs. But though the result is a set of portraits and thus might look like an attempt to portray one generation in one suburb you feel that Wearne is driven by an interest in character rather than environment. The fundamental question is: What became of these people, how did they evolve within the parameters of the school personalities? rather than: What kind of world are these people part of? In narrative terms everything is dependent on chance, the occasional flashes produced by chance meetings of which the most important is the meeting, in 1978, with the poet who is prepared, finally, to act as a kind of biographer. Wearne’s monologue technique has evolved, over the years since poems like “Out Here” in his second book, into a less doughy, far more flexible instrument, attuned to fragmentariness and accidental illuminations of character. This is evident in The Lovemakers and continued in poems like “Operation Hendrickson”.

The Blackburn South of Wearne’s own childhood and those of so many of his characters forms, as I have said, the focus of this book. It is introduced in a quite surprising way in a rather wonderful first poem which sketches in the generation before, “A Portrait of Three Young High School Teachers”. This – as does the immensely sympathetic portrait of the Liberal Party matriarch, Elise McTaggart in The Nightmarkets – shows Wearne to be alert to older generations (just barely “older” in this case) and particularly to the world the women inhabit:

. . . . . 
And if like the nation this school seems
on better days almost miraculously do-it-yourself,
doubtless that's because who else is there to do it?
(Then, if you wish to appear old-fashioned
it's all like a "courtship", or what you're discovering re marriage.)

Whilst "This", waves forth your supercilious headmaster,
"all this is how we like our things round here . . ."
He reminds some of Raymond Huntley, pauses and nods
as he calls you by the collective "Mesdames"
and laughs, never at himself, only at his quips.

"Indeed," comes Ruth's later response, "how we like our things . . ."
"I'm sure we'll work around it," says Yvonne
. . . . .

The tone here is light and the conclusion is a tentatively optimistic one in which friendship forms the beginning of some sort of bulwark:

friendships can at least delay these dour, sour uncertainties
of annihilation and damnation, can't they?

They better. So, walking to their staffroom
Ruth, a young woman at her most formally informal
tells Frances, "A few folk are coming over
this Saturday. Yvonne and her fiance will be there.
You and your husband are very, very welcome."

This tonally delicate and yet precise poem is followed by “Dysfunction, North Carlton Style or, The Widow of Noosa” an example of Wearne working in his comic/crude mode: “Long-haired, even-featured, an absolute Ali / (is it any wonder she looked like MacGraw?). / On their sundeck each summer how Bob’s loins would rally / at the sight of his missus, spread out in the raw”. It is such a contrast to the first poem that it gets one thinking that perhaps this first of the book’s sections is organised in sonata form which in turn, of course, makes one want to read the entire book’s four parts in terms of the movements of a classical symphony. At any rate the third and fourth poems of the first section – which would be developments of the themes of the opening two poems – are “The God of Nope” and “‘All These Young Australianists . . .'” The former is a Wearne dramatic monologue about the Nugan Hand Bank scandal of the seventies though it is seen through the perspective of a young banker rather on the fringes of the affair (“One part vocation matching nine parts lurk”); the latter is a comic double monologue making fun of young academics at conferences overseas. The pattern isn’t perfect – it seems a long way from the poem about the teachers to the poem about the CIA’s money laundering, though Wearne’s interest in the way characters develop out of their schools, observed by the teachers of the previous generation, brings these two poems closer together than you might have thought initially – but the tone of the second and fourth poems is almost identical. “‘All These Young Australianists . . .'” exploits all the features of serious comic verse and you feel that the figure of Byron isn’t standing too far behind. This is especially true in the sort of poetic one-up-manship involved in the search for the most extreme of complex and bathetic rhymes and it climaxes in one most impressive stanza:

And though I call him Ted the Handful soon he was off delivering a paean
at some fortnight long colloquium on I believe Musil or Mahler;
whilst beside the Baltic or was it the Aegean,
I chanced upon these wonderful Finno-Ugrianists all dissecting the Kalevala!

According to the model of the classical symphony, the third section of the book would be its minuet and trio or its scherzo – at any rate, something lighter in tone. In Prepare the Cabin for Landing we get a return to the idea of basing poems on Australian songs, a process that produced many of the poems in the earlier The Australian Popular Songbook. These are all sonnets (including a Meredithian one) and come in various complex stanza divisions and rhymes. But they also relate to the poems of the first two sections. The first sonnet, for example, “Waiata Poi”, describes two young women, an Australian and a New Zealander who, immediately after the war, head to New Zealand by flying boat (“Let’s scoot across ‘the dutch'”) for a golfing and skiing holiday. It is hard not to think of the three teachers of the book’s first poem here, especially in the celebration of innocent friendship as something that can be counterposed to events at the macro level. The next sonnet is the monologue of a stoned, escort-accompanied businessman and, at least to some extent, is written in the crasser language of “Dysfunction, North Carlton Style . . .”. In other words the tonal juxtapositions here match those that can be found throughout the book, but especially in the first section. The themes match as well: in “Love is in the Air” a young woman, twenty-five years in the future looks at a photograph of her parents’ wedding, looks at our present, in fact, “Filled with our future, Red Bull and Champagne!“, and asks herself about the way in which she developed out of this. And the last of these sonnets, “My Home Among the Gum Trees” takes us back to the post-war period of the first sonnet and deals with the setting up of the Melbourne suburbs after the war from which Wearne (as well as Hendrickson) emerged. And just as the poet himself makes a guest appearance in “Operation Hendrickson” so here he is introduced at the end of the poem:

For later on the bus, seeing a copy of The Age or The Argus
          bordered in black, I'll be asking my mother "Why?"

Friday February 8 1952. "The King has died."

All of which prepares us for the book’s most ambitious and successful achievement, “The Vanity of Australian Wishes”, a thirty page reincarnation of Juvenal’s Tenth Satire with a nod to Johnson’s “The Vanity of Human Wishes”. (In a sense the second-last of the sonnets, “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda”, is also a preparation in that it deals with developments in a second-hand, image-ridden Australian nationalism that is going to figure largely in “The Vanity of Australian Wishes”.) Unlike the poems of Juvenal and Johnson, Wearne’s poem contains a good deal of personal involvement, a personal involvement which, I’ve been arguing, the other poems of the book prepare us for. It begins with two deaths occurring almost simultaneously: that of John Forbes and that of Alphonse Gangitano. The chiming between these deaths is more than one of time, however. Gangitano’s death is described as that of “an over / underachieving Lygon St lulu, / whose killing kick-started a decade plus / of Melbournian mayhem, and ultimately its mini-series” and it’s the second of these two results that engages Wearne’s anger since it shows images spawning a kind of cut-price reality:

                                                  O Gangitano!
So needing us to pretend you were our De Niro:
no mere gangster but the movie star who,
on those occasions when paid to,
pretends he is one (though when one imitates
the imitations just how many deluded layers
is that?).

And this, of course, is John Forbes aesthetic territory, especially in his notion that images only ever drain creative energy rather than fuel it. And the poem introduces Forbes’s description of the new discipline of Cultural Studies – often driven by an infantile desire to walk large on the stage of those images which they are analysing – as “The Kids in Black”.

The evil of images is a long way from the comparatively simple evils of the worlds of Juvenal and Johnson – “those grand distillers of bemused despair”. And Wearne introduces a framework metaphor that makes the distance greater. Whereas Johnson spoke for a god’s-eye view that surveyed mankind “from China to Peru”, Wearne imagines us all sitting on a long-haul commercial flight imagining what other passengers are travelling towards:

          And maybe when an aircraft seems to distil
not merely time and space but where you're heading
and what you're heading to, the novelty, the romance,
the deal, the con, the climax, the start of it,
and end of it . . .

And in this symbolic world, the poet is the plane’s captain who, at the end, will tell the cabin crew to prepare for landing.

Juvenal and Johnson are careful to anchor their critiques in real people or, at least, imagined individuals. Wearne adopts the same approach using, as an epigraph, Pope’s comment that “General satire in times of general vice has no force . . . and ’tis only by hunting one or two from the herd that any exampes can be made”. His individuals are an unlovely and occasionally interrelated group:

Diggah, a multi-substanced sportzstar, V'roomv'room
some ex-ex would be-would be supermodel,
Annabel-Kate this very former CEO turned opinion-piecer,
and Chad: that bankrupted motivational speaker poised
at the edge of the slammer. Plus big-noter, small-timer
. . . 
our very own self-proclaimed King o' th' Rooters
Ssssnowy! 

The case of the first of these is a compressed and, it turns out (given recent revelations of the intimate involvement of the underworld in sport), prophetic study of the interaction of sport and crime:

It's just (big just) the lowlife they're required to befriend:
sniffed, swilled or shot maaaaate maaaaate
isn't it understood, the only guys that can
flog you this are criminals? They never get it.

The way these individuals inhabit their world of day-time and “reality” television forms the bulk of the poem but they are all portraits with very specific interests to the poet. An important early section describes the way Wearne’s own Grade Five and Six teachers – “those edgy-wise suburban prophets Mrs Samson / and Mr Kavanagh” – could have organised their ten-year-olds into a cruelly revealling hierarchy:

first, those kids (who'll always have the jump on anybody)
with Smarties in their play-lunch/
then those who want to be them/
who want to be their friends/
who want to beat them up/
who want to beat up those who want to beat them up/
and then the very worst, the theorists, the ideologues,
those who urge the beatings, all the beatings.

It’s a bleak picture but, as in “Operation Hendricksen” the reader gets a strong impression of Wearne’s interests being in development and the way this is a hierarchy of potentialities that will blossom in its own grotesque way. Everything, in other words, spins out of our socialisation in school.

The poem ends, as do the Juvenal and Johnson, on as positive a note as the poet can manage. For Juvenal it was the limited wish (which we all might share) for “mens sana in corpore sano” – a healthy mind in a healthy body in old age. For Johnson, himself pathologically afraid of the judgement of God, the way for a person to avoid swimming “darkling down the current of his fate” was to “leave to heaven the measure and the choice”. For Wearne there is clearly a comfort in those passengers who are not part of the insubstantial world of image, status and celebrity. They can be seen in the group of

                          smart-suited women and men
heading in easy phalanx towards the departure lounge,
that kind of quietly anonymous professionalism
plenty still retain, set to neither con nor big-note
nor indulge . . .

Analysis, too, has its virtues and to be able to say of one’s unnattractive passengers “We may not be them but they are surely us” is some kind of achievement. And it’s an achievement of poets like Wearne but especially John Forbes for whom this entire poem can be read as a memorial. Analysers and debunkers of those desires which arise out of television images are to be valued: “Ehrt eure deutschen Meister” – “honour your local poets” – is always a recipe for sanity in a mad world.

Graeme Miles: Recurrence

St Kilda: John Leonard Press, 2012, 61pp.

This book gives us an opportunity for a second look at the challenging and sophisticated work of Graeme Miles, his first book, Phosphorescence, having been published in 2006. In one sense nothing has changed: he remains a powerful lyric poet – his poems almost always have enough self-confidence to stay upright as well as walk with their own gait – the exact nature of whose poetic sensibility is very difficult to grasp. The first poem of that first book, “Nest”, is an introduction to at least part of the Miles method:

The wasps are making a nest on the weight
of the wind-chime, deaf, I think, to its sound,
and undisturbed by its sometimes swaying
for no reason. They build a paper house
as a launching pad for violence in a calm. 

I’m thinking of a final call, when waiting,
feeling like the luggage is packed, the phone
will ring, be answered. The house will be locked
already and it’ll be time to go.

The problem for a reader isn’t so much of guessing the intended (and thus structuring) meaning so much as choosing between all the possible meanings since the poem is dense with allegorical possibilities. Somewhere in here is a kind of Frostian poem about the nests that creatures make, usually in inappropriate places, and how humans have to leave such havens. By a further Frostian shift, the “final call” can be read not as the language of airlines but as the final summons of death. The fact that the wasps build “paper” nests suggests that the whole poem might be read as an allegory involving poetry since a poetic career is, in a sense, a “paper house”. The first stanza is full of noise and movement – both of which the wasps are insensitive to – whereas the second stanza, though it is about a noise (the telephone) and a movement (the leaving) is, as a stanza, full of a kind of calm stasis. And that is reading the poem as though it were anonymous; Miles’s poems tend to be full of houses, places stayed in and places left, not to mention places revisited just as they are full of movement.

When I reviewed Phosphorescence on this site I clung rather desperately to an extended poem, “Circle and Line”, which looked as though it might provide some clues about its author’s views as to what poetry was doing. In retrospect I’m not sure that that was the correct procedure; one ought to able to work out such things by looking carefully at the poems. In Recurrence Miles has gone some way towards mapping at least a part of his poetic by dividing the poems into three sections: “Down”, “Across” and “Up”. It is in the first of these where the significance of the titular direction is least obvious. True, a poem like “Libations”, traces the downward path of water, milk, honey and wine – conscious or unconscious offerings – through the earth to the point where “the only way to go on forever / is to become as small as nothing at all” and “Mineral Veins” explores the way that, in sleep, the self gravitates downwards towards its natural home:

. . . . .
                             Then sleep
is only half-sleep. Better to turn down,
find you can breathe easily under a world’s weight
of earth, and that air was no more your element
than the endless vacancy it fades to.

Gravity, the prevailing god of downwards, is in fact celebrated in a poem of the same name. A large part of the expressive side of Miles’s worldview is made up of mythologies, especially Classical, Norse and Indian, and so it isn’t especially surprising that such a poet should begin with Hesiod’s locating of Heaven, Earth and the Underworld on a vertical axis and then work through the idea of the gravity of an extreme mass as a “Samadhi of space”. The conclusion of the poem also makes a distinctive move, slipping effortlessly from the macro-physical to the inside of the brain: “she’s all herself / fixing and destroying, like the colourless dot / at the beginning of migraine / that grows to swallow the world.”

Down is allegorised out in other ways too. In “The Problem of Other Minds” (the second poem of a fine sequence with the ambiguous title “Causes”) the movement downwards appears as a pit into which our life experiences are thrown. Again the shifts of this poem are distinctive. The initial image is an interesting one and you can imagine most poets being happy to explore it. Each of us carries a kind of black hole which is being continually stocked by our experiences as they sink into the past:

. . . . .
All the toys I could find
didn’t fill it up. My thin books just lined the bottom.
Put in my friends and they were small 
down there, craning their necks up
to see what I’d done to them.

Put in all the houses I’d lived in, so I wouldn’t
have to see them again, then left my grave
with a last house-load of furniture . . .

But this poem goes on to ask about the pits of others, especially those who have disappeared into the author’s own pit. It is, as its title says, really a poem about the inter-relationship of the experience of subjectivities; we are experiences for others as they are for us. Continually meditating on what we are to others – apart from our usual egoistic obsession with what we are to ourselves – shakes our sense of our own identity. After returning to his own pit (he hears it “slurp as something else fell in”) he sees flecks on the surface spelling out a message, “’What’s it like / to be you?’ And when you looked closer, / ‘Is it like anything?’”

The same sequence has a descent poem, “Forgetting to Laugh”, in which “When you’ve drunk the water to remember, / and the water to forget, they slide you down / into a dug-out cave”. What follows is a kind of cross between a Mithraic rebirth initiation, an MRI scan and the act of dreaming, followed by the everyday – but still mysterious – process of waking. What is typical here is the way in which mythical, allegorical and metaphorical meanings, distinctive to Miles’s cast of thought, are held in suspension.

The book’s final section (to proceed out of order) ought to be a simple inversion of the first but turns out to be rather different. Certainly, in Miles’s poetry, the view upwards doesn’t involve any simple-minded transcendence. When the eternal is considered, as in “Two Guesses at Immortality”, there is no superior, heavenly reality. The two possibilities are either a kind of eternal present containing all the past (“Everything is here and everyone. / You’re home once and for all / at the moment when it’s all new again.”) or a kind of Groundhog Day endless recurrence (“the one day repeats itself / with its long night to be slept through”.

In other poems, like “Dioscuri”, the emphasis is on the reciprocity between the upper and lower worlds though “Above, Below” contradicts the old relationship of as above so below to contrast the love of the immortals for mortals (“a gold-haired boy or girl . . . too squeamish to stay / for the squalid fact of your death”) for that of mortals for mortals – in this case parents for children:

But the ones who wait below
will only be as frightening as necessity,
quiet farmers keeping their kids
from the dangerous machines and the gun.

One of the metaphoric associations of downwards in the earlier poems is the idea of descent through the family line and so it is, in a kind of way, logical that a poem about the poet’s parents and grandparent should be associated with a look upwards. “Verandah” is a really fine poem, familiar from its appearance in John Leonard’s Young Poets: An Australian Anthology, and though verandahs – the quintessential Australian liminal space – might suggest movement across, there is a certain rightness in this poem’s appearing in the final, Up section. It is also, of course, an example of a modern version of a classical invocation, summoning mother and father out of the past into the present.

Ultimately the vision affirmed is a humanist one and two poems, “Shivery to Think of the Long Spaces” and “Ascesis” make this fairly clear. The former begins as a view upwards to the stars, recalling Pascal’s or perhaps Slessor’s poem’s fear of the spaces between the stars, spaces which have become even more mindboggling vast since the twentieth century’s development of cosmological measurement. The result of this perspective is described as “shivery while it’s measured / by this piece of skin” but the poem goes on to imagine a perspective beyond humanism where there is “object with no subject” where “the suns flame silently” in their death throes “and don’t return from their last / going under, don’t care to”.

The book’s final poem, “Ascesis”, seems to have an unequivocally humanist perspective as it mocks the results of labouring to be released upwards into the cosmos, free of the earthbinding sins of the body:

They let go,
lift clear of weather,
soil’s vapours
that tint the mind like plot.
. . . . .
             Free of conversation,
the long dispute of history, language
is crisp as salt, and with no air
to talk through their words are flawless,
discrete and unanswerable.

Both of these poems casually mention orbits and straight lines and one can’t help feeling that this interest derives from “Circle and Line” in Phosphorescence. Miles’s poetic world, as readers who have got this far will register, is a complex one.

A reader who expected the Up poems to be about transcendence might well come to the book’s middle section expecting poems of narrative and Ovidian transformation and, it is true, there is a lot of that to be found there. It begins with “Photis”, a suite of poems (also familiar from Leonard’s anthology) that form a narrative about an artist inclined to bring out animal shapes in the bodies of those who sit for portraits. A lover whose self-image is that of a hawk finds through the process of art that his totemic animal is, instead, the ass (for those of us who missed it, the book’s blurb points out an allusion here to Apuleius). When a baby is born – going through its own metamorphoses in the womb and then outside – it becomes an anthology of animals:

Your soft skin is full of animals. There are
fishes in the movement of your sucking cheeks, reptiles
in the glaze of your eyes overtired, the stillness of a kangaroo
when you watch light slide
over the ceiling . . . . .

And the artist’s work undergoes an equally profound metamorphosis, focussing on the world her child might live in rather than the animals under its skin: “she paints the night as a newsreel of frightening things, / waters above and below”.

“Ariadne on Naxos”, based on the version of the story found in Plutarch’s life of Theseus, focusses on the way an individual can transform into a complicated set of rituals; “Aggregore” revisits the idea of a child’s evolution in the womb; “At the End of the Seventies – Streets in Marmion” reproduces the way in which a beachscape is transformed when it is seen by moonlight; “Chennai” looks at the way individuals (or families) are always the centre of their own universe and carry their own gods and experiences with them in environments that are utterly different and a related poem, “Diminuendo”, imagines, from the distant location of India, all of the houses previously lived in since birth as a concertina opened out into one of those medieval maps.

This threefold division of the book is useful, but I cannot help feeling that it isn’t much more than a guide, uncovering only a small portion of what is in these poems and what animates them and gives them their integrity. If I had to focus on a single poem as an entrance into the poems of this book I would choose one from the first section, “Purusha”, which links the Norse proto-god Ymir with a similar figure from Indian mythology:

Ymir, who is Purusha, the Person, is sacrificed
but goes on. Its skin is cinematic, the light
breaks through it. Endless eyes watch it
sliding by. Its body is standing waves
frozen, and it crinkles with crystals of ice,
empties into the roaring absorption, the nuclear
introspection of suns. Its sound is the crowd
roaring in Geiger-counters, it goes on forever
and mostly is invisible.
                                         Moves down
and down is the static blur of sandgrains, the place
that barters crops for corpses.
                                                    Moves across
inventing plot, walks on or runs
forever in Zeno’s physics.
                                              Moves up
spies out the thinning, the spinning direction
of vertigo.
                  It’s promiscuous and virginal, celibate
and incestuous. It’s family at war with itself.
When a standing ape looks up it sees
air catch fire, water
thicken with mud, harden to land.
Objects are smashed in the slow riot
and the prickling of skin when reading a poem
is each pore expecting a bruise
to cover it. And the poems fit together
like a dry-stone wall, jagged edge
to edge, just making do.
Perhaps this should be thought of not as poem-as-key but as poem-as-digest (or, anatomy) since one can hear nearly all of the poems in Recurrence in this single work. The central section is a compressed explanation of the three directions and the over-riding image of the fate of Ymir (whose blood becomes the sea, whose skull becomes the sky and whose bones and teeth become rocks) as a sacrifice whose body goes on changing and expressing itself in the activities of the humans who live on and within him echoes throughout the book, down even to the poem about the child’s cutting his first teeth. Even the interest in light in the second and third lines recalls a number of poems.

Recurrence certainly complicates the world of Phosphorescence (itself complicated enough) and it would take a review longer than this to go back to that first book and reread it in the light of this second one. Eventually it will have to be done but I will leave that for the appearance of Miles’s third book – something that admirers like myself will hope happens quickly.

Lachlan Brown: Limited Cities

Artarmon: Giramondo, 2012, 87pp.

One’s first impression of this first book is that it is devoted to (in both senses of the phrase) its poet’s home suburb, Macquarie Fields, situated to the west of the Holsworthy Army Barracks in Sydney’s south-west. It begins with a diptych, a portrait of this suburb in spring and in autumn: the former is rhapsodic (“Give me corrugated iron & grinning billboards . . .”) but the latter darker as the stain of the 2005 Cronulla riots spreads into neighbouring suburbs. Significantly Brown concludes by asking about his own position as suburb-dweller, observer and poet, and he decides that he is “somewhere / in between” the “hooded kids” who throw rocks and the “members of the gated community . . . on the other side of the tracks” – the pun in this cliche is significant. “Twenty Sestets” is an attempted portrait of the place largely constructed out of fragmented character studies. Although many of these are rather unsuccessful – you feel that people are not the items that Brown’s poetry is most comfortable with – those which yield to an inbuilt pressure toward abstraction do succeed in making a kind of composite picture. Number 5, for example:

The lawnmowers are calling from suburb to suburb
and fences click in the heat, 
                                                                     as though the sun
were a meter, slowly ticking
                                                   through the earth's final minutes.

He stops and considers all this,
                                                          the grass-stained afternoon,
the air thick as engine oil,

a complaint of dirtbikes skidding across the reserve.

Though it is not as good a poem as its avatar, Dawe’s “Homo Suburbiensis”, you do get the sense that the distinctive life of the suburb, if entered into fully, can generate a distinctive kind of poem, attuned to unusual but telling elements. “Petrol Stations, or Nine Vouchers Without the Optimism” is another composite portrait, this time of an iconic suburban feature, and “Poem for a Film” is a five-part meditation on aspects of life in “this weatherboard valley / . . . six degrees from the // city.” I like the last of these which, set at noon when “the eucalypts / point their leaves toward hard ground”, deals with stasis and change:

                                            . . . it's like a gate

that's been welded shut because you know
we're not in Vaucluse or near some beach

where they film iconic Australian TV. You
know that within these cul-de-sacs you

have to earn any hint of breath or change. You
have to pay with sweat, with grease on

a two-stroke, with teeth set like wire cutters,
ready to meet the fenced-edge of the landscape. 

It doesn’t take any great critical insight to register this book’s desire to celebrate and explore one particular suburb, but I can’t stop being interested in Brown’s obsession with the railway that connects Macquarie Fields to central Sydney (via, amongst other stops, Sydenham, Revesby, Glenfield) – I don’t know if it is called the “City Limited” but if it isn’t, it should be. It seems, at the poetic level, a profounder and more valuable image. A sceptical reader might think that the rhythmic rocking of the train on its daily journey to the city and back is the place where the author’s meditating and writing gets done and thus this writing is predisposed to celebrate the train, but I think the importance of the train is more than this. It is valuable partly because it enables contrast (still the best rhetorical trope for defining something) but mostly because of its possibilities as a metaphor for life as a lived process (rather than where it is lived).

The process of contrast can be seen in “darling.city.friday.harbour” where the poet finds himself momentarily “citied” in an environment where the artificial replaces the natural (“cast brolgas gasp in their metallic / permanence”) in what ultimately becomes a perpetual and perpetualising loop symbolised in the city’s roadways. The central question, “What region is this?” is posed, punningly, in a DVD store where “recreations of immense television events / appear on shelves”. The secret of this world, whose mercantile imperatives hang over innocent suburbs like Macquarie Fields, is that “dumb permutations / engineer most details, like pokies / & genetics & search engines & / personalised plates on a fleet of / nissan skylines.” A later poem, “Evensong”, is essentially about this comparison, celebrating being “back in the suburbs at dusk”:

. . . . . 
Don't you know that winter means
passing houses during the family meal,
each hallway bathed in a television's blue?
Don't you know that we must live in the shadows
of great financial institutions? . . .

But the suburbs, with their expanses of low-level housing don’t obscure the night and the glories of the universe:

. . .  But this pinstriped night
where stars bleed into city lights,
where planes could be writing
the evening sky somehow,
here each constellation scaffolds the canopy,
allowing the universe to find its breath
in imperious and strange relations.

This is a loaded and slightly gestural comparison, placing city and suburb alongside each other, but in Brown’s poems there is more likely to be a focus on the act of transitioning from one to another: that is, the act of travelling by train with emphasis on departures and arrivals. I have a soft spot, among these train poems, for “Lullaby” though I would have to recognise that it is a poem that doesn’t exploit Brown’s distinctive perspective. In fact, in a way, it is yet another rewriting of Slessor’s “The Night-Ride”, focussing on contrasting the inner world of the train with the outer world of the dark, rather than concentrating on the termini. I think it is the only one of the poems to visualise the train in any way – here it is seen as “a string of lit / beads”. It emphasises the living human beings inside the train – the poet’s “companions” in the journey of life – all of whom are surrounded by a sinister cold darkness that has no interest in the human:

 . . . . .
          A palm is placed upon the 
glass, and the window speaks its warning.
There is a chill that threatens to pour into
all of life: your limbs, this carriage, the
tracks of steel that disappear behind us.
All of us know the evening is vast.
It stretches into the distance, claiming every
space that exists outside whispered words.
And now I must sink lower in my seat, and 
draw the sleeping world about my ears.

The train as an image of our human surroundings appears in the second of the “Twenty Sestets” in which a woman who “loves the commute” watches, together with her fellow-travellers, a boy spinning a plastic biro in his fingers. “And the universe is here”, the poem says as though “Lullaby”‘s sinister exterior had appeared inside. But, at least as I read it, it is the human universe, the counterpart or rival to the cosmos, which is present in the carriage and it is this which sustains her: “She tries to remain still, to focus, / but it won’t stop rocking, / the carriage, this world.”

Train journeys have a role to play in the larger, more abstracted sense of what this poetry is trying to do. Trains, after all, move horizontally and their imagery is that of a single plane. But this poetry is also interested in vertical perspectives: it is notable how often the suburbs are celebrated in terms of the sky above them whereas the buildings of the city seem to be engaged in an attempt to, if not blot out the sky, then at least to continuously frame it so that it appears within controlled and human dimensions. Sydney is not the only city in this book; there are a number of poems written about Paris, for example, and their tendency is to look upwards: “Numbering the Days” – a sequence of seven sestets counting down until returning home – speaks, for example, of lying on the grass in Place des Vosges, “where the rooftops frame / an empty blue canvas”. But, in abstract terms, the vertical is conventionally the axis from which intimations of the divine arrive, and this is an issue that I am not entirely confident about in Limited Cities: is there a transcendental perspective? how does it relate to the human and does it come from a God outside or from human beings living within their social context – huddled together on the brightly lit train of life, living in susburbs where the cosmos is more than a patch of sky framed by buildings? Answering this question is not made any easier when a poem with the important title of “Epiphany” – it is the sort of title which makes one seek it out immediately – turns out to be the slipperiest of all the poems and, though I’ve read it many times, I wouldn’t feel at all confident about making any sort of paraphrase.

More helpful might be the two sequences either side of a poem I have mentioned already, “Evensong”. They are called “Advent Poems” and “Lent Poems” respectively and have a Parisian setting. The latter group, in keeping with its title, seems inclined to focus of the mercantile and cultural aspects of the city but one turns to the former group to see if they contain any conception of a Christian transcendence and any conception of how this might be made manifest in the world. The results are suggestive even if they aren’t unequivocal – at least to my blunt reading abilities. Certainly there are examples of an almost continual disruption of surfaces, of contradictions one must “live within”: in an outer suburb “a burnt out apartment / becomes a gash of black against / a massive salvific block and as / you walk it flares again in mira- / culous afternoon light”, elsewhere a statue of the virgin “sits beneath a / spinning disco ball”. But surface contradictions are not the same as intimations of the divine or, even, intimations of the infernal: Antonioni’s Blowup treated the London of the 60s in exactly the same way and I don’t think it has any pretensions to a perspective involving transcendence. Perhaps the most suggestive of the sequence is the third in which one of two kids who are watching Piaf and Charles Dumont singing on TV “starts to echo / mon Dieu in a high-pitched / voice” and the poem ends with a reference to “all those in icy bus / shelters who stare into the dis- / tance awaiting an appearance”.

Despite my carping sense that something crucial might be being fudged or gestured towards or not developed fully here, there is a lot to admire in Limited Cities. I’m always attracted to intelligent rhapsodic celebration and the poems which are devoted to Macquarie Fields can have this quality. At the same time it would be unfair to see the book as in some way a study of the suburb and its inhabitants: that would make it look gestural in comparison to the poetry of Dawe and Wearne. I think the best way to read it is to see it as using the suburb-city axis as a kind of lyric focus or, at least, a framework for a lyric poetry. What happens, when you do that, is that you realise that there is something quite distinctive here and that Limited Cities announces a new, accomplished and confident voice.

Kevin Brophy and Nathan Curnow: Radar

North Hobart: Walleah Press, 2012, 115pp.

Most double-authored books of poetry have a contingent feel about them: two manuscripts, when edited down, are not long enough for a single volume and get yoked together, not necessarily by violence but not necessarily profitably either. Radar is distinguished by the fact that, no matter what the processes were which have produced this final result, there are interesting connections and oppositions between the two poets’ work and each makes a rather interesting background to the other. Kevin Brophy has a substantial publishing record – about which I have made comments in an earlier review – whereas Radar is Nathan Curnow’s third book if we include the thirty-two page No Other Life But This in Five Islands Press’s New Poets Series.

Curnow, whose fifty page collection appears first despite the order of the names on cover and title page, is probably best known for his The Ghost Poetry Project. In that book he writes seven or eight poems about the experience of staying overnight in each of ten of Australia’s most haunted locations: these include predictable places like Norfolk Island and Port Arthur but also a Cadillac hearse brought to retirement in Sydney from Pennsylvania and, perhaps more surprisingly, the Fremantle Arts Centre (which turns out to be a convict-built ex-lunatic asylum). On the surface Curnow’s first two books seem at odds. The title of the first, alone, suggests a perspective commitedly materialist with precious little tolerance of either religious views or the more downmarket otherworldly which appears in UFO sightings and experiences of the supernatural. And yet the obsession that seems to drive his verse revolves exactly around this issue of the status of the otherworlds that many people sense impinge on our more mundane experience of life. And this is approached with a pleasant openness that carefully avoids being naive or gullible on the one hand and closed-minded on the other: a sort of poetic equivalent of Louis Theroux.

The title of the first book, No Other Life But This, is so pointed that one goes to the title poem expecting a celebration of family life, perhaps – something that Curnow does well – or a polemic against various beliefs. The actual poem is rather a surprise:

The bird comes to ground at twilight,
thirsty for a drink. She hops across the grass,
staccato fashion, hops, stops, watches:
movement as a flash of fear. Caution
has a rhythm, she plays it precisely,
every two-legged jump potential take-off.
Eyes sharp, head tilting, her tiny, peanut brain
drawing angles into comprehension.

The children's containers are water collectors
that have littered the back lawn for days.
She springs to a lip, quizzes the threat,
surprises come with a puff of feathers.
Bowing to drink she considers again,
every twitch revealing her secret,
the hunch that fits inside her head:
there is no other life but this.

This takes a while to assimilate. On the one hand it could be an assertion that life is driven by instincts (especially fear-driven ones) rather than beliefs. It could be a celebration of the extraordinary grace of the natural world: a later poem, observing a baby daughter’s sliding off into sleep says, “Grace is found in such simple mechanics; / the way wings work a bird without it knowing”. But it might also be saying that there is “no other life” apart from the kind of open-minded attention to detail out of which the poem is constructed. However we read it, though, there is no lack of engagement with the problems of beliefs in the poems of this first book. The very first poem situates the author in conversation with a woman who has a child with a serious heart defect. The discussion revolves around “portals” – presumably a way in which more lurid notions of the supernatural are making their way into traditional Christian beliefs – and this, to any poet or reader of poetry, chimes with her son’s problem. In the second poem, a little daughter, wrapping herself in a bathtowel so that she seems to have angel’s wings, talks to her father about death:

. . . . . 
I tell her that I love her but she's heard it before.
She wants to know where we go after this.
She believes in Santa. I can't let her trust Jesus.
Yes, your heart stops working and your lungs.
I want to tell her that life gets busier
which means there is less time to worry. . . . . .

These two poems demonstrate that Curnow has discovered, early on, that the domestic is one of the best settings for the sorts of issues he wants to deal with, and he does write brilliantly about family life.

But the material of the visits to haunted sites in The Ghost Poetry Project is made from the uncanny. For this to work at all the poet has to have some degree of receptivity to the idea of haunting even though the the sum total of unnatural experiences attributed (by the eyes and ears of faith) amount to not much more than strange tappings and reported ghostly figures. (The cynic in me can’t help but feel that if the world of the “beyond” wants to make an impact that would be taken seriously it needs to do something radical at these sites – scare some people to death as in Ring, for example – just as those claiming to talk to God or to be incarnations of past lives need to tell us something about the cosmos or the past that we don’t already know.) The true impulse behind the book probably lies in the biographical note which says: “As a child Nathan Curnow suffered ‘night paralysis’ He could barely breathe due to an overwhelming sense of terror”. The “project”, lurid but trivial at first sight, is really an attempt to induce and thus cure (as an adult) the terrors of childhood. This is made clear in a group of poems, distributed among the visits, which deal with the mythical bunyip. Here his own childhood fears and those of one of his daughters are allayed by the mantra that “bunyips only eat avocadoes”. The final section of the introductory poem makes the aim of the project clear:

Because the night is an eight-ball eye of a cow,
dark as the sludge inside your bones, fear locking
your delicate limbs deep beneath a tent of blankets.
I am returning as if I conquered the Butcher, as if
he lost his grip at last, descending with language,
my only defence, the one shot to defuse myself.

Because the nights are long, I will find new words
to pluck the eyeball out, testing them like avocadoes,
light or a picture card of Jesus. Let us reach together,
touch the monster's face, decipher the walls of the cave.
I will be calling your name. Call back to me.
There is always space for courage.

Parenthood has many responsibilities but re-inducing and facing one’s own childhood terrors so that you can help a child overcome hers is an unusual and unusually difficult one. In the night-time experiences of the “haunted” places little important occurs beyond the experience of actually doing it and the poems make clear that in Curnow’s view hauntings begin inside our own brains and are then – in a phrase that makes one think again about the book’s apparently innocent title – projected into the outer world. The visit to Tasmania’s convict-built Richmond Bridge (where the ghosts of a vicious overseer, his dog, and an old man with a walking stick and straw boater, occasionally pushing a wheelbarrow, occasionally headless, have been seen) produces a moment of generalised scepticism in the poem “Introduced Species”:

Always these ghost stories of introduced species
a phantom dog, black cat, a spooky goat

Instead there should be tales of evil brush-turkeys
of posties swooped by ghoulish magpies

Sightings reflect the culture of the witness -
ghosts are no longer wearing chains

Mary only appears in Catholic countries . . . . .

At any rate, all this makes a kind of necessary introduction to Curnow’s poems in Radar. Here the aim, at least of the first poems, is to revisit not night-time childhood terrors but the experience of childhood itself. It takes place in Pinnaroo, a small town in South Australia near the Victorian border, and many of the poems focus on the parents – the father a minister in what seems like a pentecostal sect. The very first poem, “The Curtain”, has, as an epigraph, the address of the church in Pinnaroo on which the poem is based as an inviting Google Earth reference: I recommend following it. The poem itself justifies its pre-eminent position by being a complex meditation about the way in which we emerge from childhood into public life and the way in which the history of places can induce responses in us. In other words, I read this poem as a transition between the world of The Ghost Poetry Project – the internal horrors which make us receptive to suspicions of new, external horrors – and the world of being a public, performing writer who both exploits and exorcises these demons. At the conclusion of the poem, the curtain that the child is wrapped in (“I looked like a crimson bell, or a strange reminder / of my own breech birth . . .”) opens out:

I belonged to the boards, to the fabric that slipped
away from me once again, turning until it spread itself wide,
introducing me to the world. Who would be there?
What to say? A yearning I understood - the magic burn
of anticipation bound in faith, belief and trust - to convert
an audience, to be converted by the strength of a fallible dream,
hoping that what will be revealed is worthy
of the curtain opening.

Perhaps the perspective in these poems is that of revisiting the experience of one’s parents – something that is always prompted by the arrival of our own children. In “The Curtain”, Curnow discovers connections with his father the minister in his own need to perform and convert an audience. There is a fine poem, “Those Adamant Shapes”, that recognises the passed-on genetic material between the generations calling it, memorably, “the deep cargo that refuses to come unstuck”. And it seems fitting that the structure of Curnow’s contribution to Radar should be a movement from his parents to his children. There is an especially wonderful description of the moment when one of his daughters has an injection: “you turn away from your arm, the needle / coming, your shoulder bared for // the pinch, the plunge, a foreign wave tightens / the little face you held so bravely . . .” All parents will remember things like that and be glad they are so accurately and beautifully expressed.

If Nathan Curnow’s poems are committed to understanding the world we all know and inhabit – and thus have a sturdy, almost conventional poetic quality, deploying metaphors for their illuminative value, for example – Kevin Brophy’s contribution is a set of seventy prose poems. The prose poem is a much loved form in which the oppressive quality of the “real” can be left behind in favour of imaginative possibilities. It is the home of otherworlds. In Brophy’s poems we meet a family in which the busy father hires a replacement for himself and the replacement energises the wife and constructively puzzles the son; a man, newly dead, who remains suspicious that the odd place in which he finds himself is not really paradise; an Australian suburb in which the street-planting of scrubby natives eventually takes over, and re-australianises, houses and inhabitants; a man who decides to live a “less personal” more antlike life; a hole in the ground near the Fawkner Cemetery which grows by absorbing objects of guilt and so on. We also meet Robert O’Hara Burke whose attitude to life – as well as the events of that life – is so surreal that it only needs to be described objectively to seem like one of these otherworlds.

Why do this and run the risk of confirming ordinary innocent Australians in their suspicion that serious literature doesn’t engage with the pressing questions (about love-affairs, football teams or cars) that oppress them? The answer is usually that these sorts of meditations reveal the shape of the writer’s psyche rather as dreams might to those skilled enough to read them. It is as if, to borrow from Eliot’s Prufrock, “a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen”. Some of Brophy’s narrative prose poems, “The Secret Theatre of Home”, for example, do seem to have their origins in dreams but more derive from exploring metaphors. Take “On Reading Virginia Woolf’s Sentence, ”˜Undoubtedly there is a dullness in great books’”, for example:

If it is true that dullness is what distinguishes lasting literature from the “bleak shorthand” of contemporary writing, then dullness is the freight we readers also bring to books, mental half-realms where every stone has been turned, and every stone has been beaten into agreement that it is a stone, and every stone has vowed silence, every stone has agreed roundness or sharpness will be its predictable gift. Handle this stone, then, every day, and offer its dullness to the sky, sense its vigilance. This is the only way.

Here the poem deals with a fossilised metaphor – “no stone unturned” – which introduces the idea that the creativity of metaphor is very close to the dullness of cliché. The poem which follows begins with a cliché, “taking a pig to market”, and goes on to use the lively and observant pig on its unknowing way to slaughter as a metaphor for our own voyage through life. “Anxiety” plays with the mysterious metaphor of “falling” asleep whereby in dreams the sleeper “actually” falls into water and “Against Falling” (were these originally conceived as an alphabetically organised group?) has the writer scaling an almost impossible mountain called syntax. A really satisfying poem follows a woman returning home with a plastic canister containing her mother’s ashes. Her mother was a master (or mistress – it depends on how alive the metaphor is) of the cliché:

. . . . . Her mother’s birthmark on her left shoulder, the small tattoo of a lily on her ankle, and those retorts of hers, those reminders that education did not come her way, that money never drops from the sky, that men are to be managed not trusted, that women can never be friends, that televisions, like all other inventions, will one day be quaint forgotten things, these are all there in the canister, locked in, burned into ash so that not one word will ever escape again. She is sure her tired mother would be pleased to be silenced. Words, she used to say, are never enough.

Once we accept that this eloquent style of meditation and narrative, surreal in the sense of not being limited by the ordinary, everyday, “real” is a projection of the poet’s psyche we are left with the issue of how this psyche is structured. Here it’s a matter of choosing your ideology. We could emphasise dreams, language, metaphor, creativity or culture and then relate the others to the dominant one. I’m not an expert on this issue, but I recognise that in last century’s great students of the structure of the mind – Freud, Jung, Lacan et al – there is an overwhelming preoccupation with this. I’m not sure what Brophy feels are more essential elements than others but if I had to guess I would expect them to be the language features.

Which brings me to the book’s structure. As I said in the introduction, what makes Radar so interesting is its conjunction of the two kinds of poetry. True, they are not two kinds of poem by a single poet: but then that is not uncommon and always seems rather stagey. At the same time if they were “unconnected” poets they would just be representatives of two different approaches to dealing with the world in poetry. There is something finely tuned and right about the fact that the two poets have a mentor/student relationship as well as a friendship one. Radar’s unusually valuable blurb expresses the book’s structure and achievement perfectly: Curnow says to Brophy. “My poems are (seemingly) conscious, direct confessions and yours are unconscious waking dreams” and Brophy replies, “This world always senses another world. Maybe your poems rescue mine while mine throw a life line to yours”. “Unconscious waking dreams” is a fine description of the seventy prose poems though it opts for seeing the dream as the dominant feature in the structure of the poet’s creativity. I would have felt it truer to say that Brophy’s poems were inclined to live in the otherworld of language and its strange, expressive offshoot, metaphor.

Peter Steele: Braiding the Voices: Essays in Poetry

St Kilda: John Leonard Press, 2012, 310pp.

Although it is always an unhappy task to be looking at a posthumous book, it is also a pleasure, after focussing on books of poetry for the first six years of these reviews, to be able to review a book of criticism. In point of fact the proportions are about right: somewhere between fifty and seventy-five books of poetry are published annually in Australia but one could probably count the books of poetry criticism in the last six years on one hand. In a healthy literary culture, of course, poetry is always recognised as far more important than the criticism which accompanies it but you don’t want too great an imbalance lest critical instincts atrophy irrevocably. The fact that this is, in a sense, a memorial volume is a painful reminder that one of the always small company of good critics has left us and a source of good critical judgement has disappeared. But one still wants to congratulate the John Leonard Press for publishing a book which will have, at best, a small readership and, through the quality of their design and materials, making such a fine job of it. It’s also a book that looks as though it might have some kind of extended physical life: my copy of Steele’s earlier critical book, Expatriates, though, admittedly, getting on for thirty years old, has pages that look like frames from early acetate silent films. Braiding the Voices is a physical pleasure, as well as an intellectual pleasure, to read and if readers of these reviews were to buy, annually, one of the books reviewed, I would probably hope that it would be this one.

Peter Steele’s critical instincts are finely honed and I have always found that reading him is an introduction to admirable and often surprising insights. So I want to celebrate his work as that of an elder statesman of criticism. If Australian poetry critics often seem to me like a small, hungry, cold band of outcasts huddling around a fitful campfire in the middle of a great and partially derelict cathedral, then Steele would, in recent years, have been voted first choice when it came to portioning out the scraps of food. But being a respected elder statesman doesn’t mean that your method and interests are in any way representative. Those of you who follow up Steele’s book after reading this review won’t find many similarities in our methods though that can always be interpreted as evidence of a desirable polyvocality in the way Australian critics look at Australia’s poetry.

And that reveals one of the distinctive features of Braiding the Voices almost immediately: it doesn’t limit itself to discussing Australian poets. There are important essays on Peter Porter (whose poetry is the subject of a small book by Steele in the Oxford Authors series), Les Murray and Vincent Buckley but also on the poetry of Anthony Hecht and Seamus Heaney (Steele favourites). Perhaps the Australian poet most likely to appear is Steele himself but this is a result not of self-centredness or self-promotion but rather, as I’ll explore later, of the very genre of the book. At any rate, Steele in his criticism was no critical nationalist and it is interesting to look at the ambit of his interests. The first surprise is the extent to which he focusses on poets who are of his generation, or close to it: he is most comfortable with the poems of people like Heaney, Porter, Buckley and Hecht. Expatriates was focussed around individual poems by Hecht, Merwin, Wilbur and others born in the twenties as well as poets like Bishop and Moore from slightly earlier. I don’t think I have read anything by him which is about poets markedly younger than he is. These poets of his generation form a kind of community – an essential word in the Steele ethos – that he is very good at exploring. When his critical mind goes back in time, uncovering or claiming traditions, it tends to go on recognisable stepping stones: Hopkins, Smart, Swift, Herbert, Donne and Milton all figure regularly. In terms of what is called “secondary material”, Steele is very widely read and one is as likely to find references to contemporary social analysis as to the church fathers. Overall one gets the impression of a man at home in an immensely rich European tradition with those descended from the Greek Orthodox imperium, Russia and Greece, making occasional appearances. There is an essay on Dante in Braiding the Voices but, usually, Steele confines himself to English language literature.

The role of art is important in both his poetry and criticism. In one sense, it provides something that I want to argue might be lacking in Steele’s approach: an external yardstick. Two of the essays in Braiding the Voices are about art and poetry and the value of this exploration, you feel, is that the visual arts represent an otherness as against the verbal ones: they serve as a way of measuring the generalisations we make about poetry as well as revealing surprising new aspects of it. This seems to me an essential balance in criticism: it has to bring the outside to bear as well as evolving a vision which comes, internally, from an empathic response to the works being considered. On the other hand, it could be argued that the visual art which fascinates Steele is, by and large, an expression of European culture, with an emphasis on late medieval religious experience, and thus stands in for an area where the literary arts are weak. All of this is by way of observation rather than objection; the same could be said of the critical writing of Auden, a better critic than either Steele or myself. But I can’t help but feel – and it may be a personal rather than a true epistemological objection – that the very best criticism would also be familiar (and intimate) with a completely different culture, literature and language – Mandarin, say, or Hindi, or even Inuit – in order to see one’s own tradition from the outside. How else will we see it clearly? In other words it is a moot, and important, point whether Steele’s engagement with European culture is minutely and thus preciously informed and or just cosily intimate.

The feeling that Steele is happiest when he is most “at home” emphasises how communal his readings are. One of the features of this is a kind of intimacy and the virtues of intimacy – as well as its problems – are present in the style and structure of these essays, too. The tone, for example, is always intimate, often even avuncular but it doesn’t invite disagreement. In fact a reader is inclined to feel that disagreement would be, in some way, rudely disruptive. I’m not suggesting that Steele’s prose contains a suasive or controlling element, even in disguise, and his discussion of Murray’s poetry shows how well he understands that, under the relaxed intimacy of a poem like “The Quality of Sprawl”, there is a very unrelaxed desire to command both poem and reader. It is more that you get the sense that in his work, the placing of observations against their very opposite (either in debate with others or in internal debate with oneself) in order to determine which is more accurate is not the essential method of moving forward. Steele’s critical mind (as opposed to his poetic one) seems to work by generalisation, association and the exploration of subtle differences. The essential subject, I always feel, is not a single work, a single writer’s works, a generation’s poems, or a national or linguistic tradition, but poetry itself, dignified almost to the extent of being capitalised.

Structurally, Steele’s essays are of a piece with his style. His most common method is to explore a particular facet of this subject – Poetry – by looking at a number of poems (usually three or four) that illuminate this in some way. One of the finest essays in Braiding the Voices is “Still Moving: Variations on a Theme”, and it’s a good example of his method. It begins by looking at the issue of whether poetry is more concerned with the particular than with the general and then modulates (through speaking of “primordial questions”) to the contrast between “what might be called the Still One and the Moving Many”. The essay goes on to look at some poems – by P.J. Kavanagh, Deborah Randall (in her mid-forties an exception to my comment that Steele doesn’t deal with poets younger than himself) and Peter Porter – not as overt discussions of the issue but as sites where the issue is given “imaginative play”. The reading of Kavanagh’s “Autumn” (which is based on the situation of “Gawain and the Green Knight” but with a strong element of Browning’s “Childe Roland”) is a brilliant analysis of that poem’s “dramatic suspension”s and describes Kavanagh as a poet “of moments and situations waiting to discharge their often striking energies”. It is the kind of observation that comes from intimacies, intimacy with an individual poet’s work but also an intimacy with the subtler features to be found in poetry itself. The analysis of Deborah Randall’s “The Hare” begins by finding in the poem the double image of an animal which is all movement and must be described both as movement and as frozen movement “the palpable and the fugitive” and goes on to discuss the opposition in poetry between the spoken and the unspoken before finishing up with the Navajo’s Coyote which occupies several planes of reality at the same time.

The final poem discussed in the essay is an ekphrastic one, Peter Porter’s “The Lion of Antonello Da Messina” a more difficult poem and one which provokes a subtler analysis. Steele responds to Porter’s transmutations and by beginning with a discussion of this he develops the issue at the core of his essay into movement between states rather than simply stasis and movement. And that’s just the beginning. I’ll content myself with quoting a compressed version of what follows since trying to paraphrase it will probably produce only a wordier summary:

Whatever the theoretical fortunes of mimesis these days, Porter’s poetry is incessantly mimetic, insofar as energy itself is up for imitation. The disconcertment which some readers experience upon exposure to his work comes less, I think, from what they take, sometimes correctly, for esoterica, than from the leaps and plunges of Porter’s associative mind: it is as if the many hundreds of poems are tantamount to an advanced course in metaphorical intelligence. Canetti wrote that “A great many ideas want to remain like comets”; Porter’s ideas and images are more often than not comet-like, but “remain” does not seem to be the right word.

Not the right word in part because, in the midst of remarkable intellectual fertility, Porter is an impresario of loss. The medieval philosophical dictum, made over from Aristotle, that “the generation of one thing is the destruction of another”, has a kind of aching cogency in his imagination. One of his first instincts in the face of the given is to see that it can be taken away and probably will be. The predicament is handled, commonly, with a blend of unillusioned trenchancy and stoical finesse, but handled it is, pretty well unremittingly. . . . . The truly extraordinary thing is to see this combined with imaginative vitality, not by concession or exception, but as if that were the norm in such things. Every church or theatre in which Porter contemplates complexity, every field or bay, seems indeed to be part of the great Globe itself, an instant before evanescence: but at that terminal moment insight is profuse, association emphatic, and imaginative mobility heightened.

That is such good criticism, such a subtle teasing out of the intellectual fluidity of Porter’s poetry and its connection with what seems to cruder readers merely a morbid imagination, that – I’m ashamed to say – it makes me envious. Of course, one can console oneself with the observation that it’s going to be a pretty irritating essay for undergraduate readers who are looking for some help with essays of their own and who are not at all sure even who the speaker is in Porter’s poem: Steele tends to speak at what is – or should be – the level of his community.

Intimacy encourages, among other things, playfulness and Steele isn’t above enjoying the complex structures of his own essays which are often deliberate floutings of the academic template. In Expatriates, there is an essay on Robert Huff’s poem, “Blue”. It is an essay full of delightful, writerly jokes, beginning with the contrast between the four-letter title of the poem and the length of essay itself – some eight or nine thousand words. The short poem which forms the opening of the essay is itself a complex affair dealing with the Huff’s role in a bombing raid over Germany in the Second World War. It is so densely interwoven with allusions that the ethical issues underneath are obscured as they become made complex. The central figure is Faust whose pact with the Devil perhaps makes such high-tech warfare possible and the plane is, in a way, bringing this process back to its origins: “As though I had been turning through the stars / For ages on my way to Germany. / Down in the ashes that were Wittemberg / The blue flames cough up black geraniums.” And the entire poem – not only the inside of the bomber’s cockpit – is bathed in “blue”. It’s a poem that you would like to see teased out but Steele’s essay begins with a passage which I will quote:

Poetry is among other things language making a nuisance of itself. Some poets are applauded for their pellucidity, for giving tongue as though they were giving explanations; but even these poets are less likely to be delivering the goods than delivering the baby – things are off to a new start with them, and language is given the cross-hatching of the personal. The night comes when no man can work, but the words can play their way along quite as well then, better in fact. The marche militaire is a skater’s waltz in disguise, the uniform a camouflaged motley.

This is a nuisance for the preliterate, many of whom are not illiterate. Many indeed traffic much in books, cracking their codes, as they suppose, alembicating poetry into diurnal meanings: beyond the Hyades they find the Ephemerides. Of course such is not the Kingdom of Heaven, but they often suppose that it is, or at least that if that starry zone is not yet theirs for the having, they may sponsor, now, the Good, or the Good Life. Petulant moralists, soi-disant analysts, unfrocked legalists – these fragments of our usually fragmentary selves maraud around the poem, as around the arts at large, and proclaim with the tireless, heedless insistence of somnambulists what the poem means. “For every complex problem”, announces a poster, “there’s a simple solution. And it’s wrong.” The poet may forget his other words, but that one he knows.

Or knows after a fashion. It is in his hornbook, but only imperfectly in his heart. Bad company does odd things to our ideals, and we are in part all bad company to ourselves. There is a perverse streak in us which leads us to want to take wooden nickels, want to be snowed by the offer of Brooklyn Bridge. A human being is an angular thing, more like a question mark than an exclamation mark. . . . .

And so on for another twenty pages. It’s Steele at his most Delphic and inspissate. Most of it I don’t follow despite having reread it many times but I quote it to point out the extent that it is also a set of gags. Many of these derive from the method of obliqueness. There is a wonderful essay by Greg Dening, “Sharks that Walk on the Land: The Death Of Captain Cook” in which the reader has to face two pages of anthropological analysis (admittedly very lucid and not especially forbidding) until the curtain goes up, so to speak, and Captain Cook appears. Part of the fun of Steele’s essay is that the appearance of the poem itself is delayed for about fifteen hundred words and the first thousand words devoted to it are a long meditation on the colour blue. It has the same structure which underlies most of Steele’s essays (none in Braiding the Voices are as extreme as the essay on “Blue”) in that a poem is subsumed into a general theme which is then engaged obliquely. But the fact that the subject of the poem is a bombing raid (certainly not a “raid on the inarticulate” though that theme appears in the essay) and is treated in such a less than full frontal attack, is part of the joke, as is the fact that a poem with a four letter title is surrounded by such an extensive meditation. The fact that it begins with an attack on a certain kind of poetry analyst (with an asperity rare in Steele’s writing) is also something of a joke in the light of the poem under consideration. I’m sure there is a lot more subtle humour of this sort in this weird essay but it would take a lot of work to tease it out. At any rate my point is that Steele’s intimate, “at home” approach to criticism includes a playful element.

But, of course, Expatriates is not a series of scholarly analyses of poems: it is a set of meditations about poetry itself, roughly constellated about the idea of expatriation and exile. In a sense it is belletristic but it is also, obliquely perhaps, a challenge to scholarly analysis of poetry to match its quality and insight. Braiding the Voices is in a more recognisable mode: that of the collection of poet’s essays. Behind it (and often quoted) stand similar collections by people like Hollander, Jarrell, Merwin, Nemerov, Heaney, Auden and many others. In the absence, in Australia, of a strong tradition of literary journalism, it is a book genre that needs to be encouraged. As I said before, the genre is the reason that Steele and his own poems make so many appearances: in Expatriates he appears incognito as Michael Kent, the author of a sestina. Braiding the Voices concludes with six final poems. The first of these is set, sinisterly, in the oncology ward but you feel that rampant confessionalism was never going to be Steele’s way and so the final poems, about eating and proverbs, are about community.

Michelle Dicinoski: Electricity for Beginners

Melbourne: Clouds of Magellan, 2011, 50pp.

This book, together with Anthony Lynch’s excellent Night Train, comes from an imprint that I haven’t previously been familiar with but if someone new is entering poetry publishing in Australia then I wish them nothing but success. Both of them are first books and there is a lot to like about each, especially Electricity for Beginners which is likely to attract words like “charming”, “lively”, even, heaven forbid, “sparky”. In a sense they are all accurate: it must be one of the nicest of debut volumes and includes poems about youth, love, rural upbringing, urban young-adult life (Melbourne and Brisbane). But you would want to avoid being patronising. These poems are as tough-minded and intelligent as they are sensitive and winning. And the book itself is so tightly organised that it’s a moot point how best to open up a way of describing it. I’ll start by talking briefly about two extended “set piece” poems, “The City Gauge” and the significantly titled “Intimate not Monumental”. The former is set in a wooden house in Brisbane during the recent flood. As the waters rise at night, the poet and her partner are progressively cut off and, like everybody in that situation, pile their belongings ever higher to escape the rising waters:

.  . . . .
Why does the darkness make voices more likely
to win or break our hearts?

Soon it will be dawn, soon it will be
weirdly beautiful - the water a foot from the floorboards,
high-set verandahs kissing their reflections,
six-foot fences vanquished - and soon we'll realise
          we're trapped.

But for now, it's night, and there's just
the torchlight, and the radio voices
and the raising things up, the lifting that is like belief:
the best we can do
          but never high enough.

It is such a pregnant and suggestive experience that it is almost a kind of shell situation for a poet. As a result, it’s a poem type where a lot of themes, attitudes and interests are revealled, both conscious and unconscious. In Dicinoski’s version the piles of precious objects become “telling storeys of desire”, the loss of electricity to the house is balanced by an internal lighting up as “our nerves turn electric with news from the west” and the isolated being is not a poet driven to solipsism but a couple: this, like most of the poems in Electricity for Beginners, is, at heart, a poem of “we”. And speaking of “we”, this might be the right time to bring up this book’s exellent cover design. Covers of books of poetry (like football referees) are usually in what is called a “fail only” situation: if the cover is good we don’t notice it, if it is twee or inappropriate we do notice it. The cover of Electricity for Beginners has a wonderful photograph of two little girls in wellington boots, holding hands and standing on an insulated mat. The girl on the left has her other hand on a Wimshurst machine and the static electricity passing down and between the girls is starting to make their hair stand on end. It’s a perfect image for the book although it leads me to think that I should be able to answer the question, “Which of the two girls represents the poet?”

If  “The City Gauge” responds to a situation experienced by many at different times, “Intimate not Monumental”, certainly the most striking poem in the book, responds to one of those once-in-a-lifetime pieces of magic that the universe can grant us. The poet and partner are standing on the fourth storey of a city carpark looking down at a crowd watching a band. A girl throws confetti and the body heat of the crowd is enough to suspend the confetti in space:

. . . . . 
I know some things about gravity,
I know some things about bodies and heat
but I don't know this -
the confetti doesn't fall, but floats in space
in the air just beyond us.
Lit by streetlights or some
internal spark it's a star cluster
a confetti constellation
that hangs together for long fat seconds.
The crowd below points up
as we point down and grin
at this simple wonder, this one fixed thing:
a careless paper galaxy
a monumental fling.

There are some interesting connections and oppositions here. The crowd and the couple are separate with the galactic confetti floating between. The confetti, lit up as though by electricity, defies gravity but so, symbolically, do the couple. The body heat of the crowd is different to the body heat of the couple – and so on. Most important is the title which reminds us that this is a poem about love and people rather than about moments when the cosmos reveals itself. The book’s first poem, “Arterial”, focusses on the lover/world opposition. At night, in a Brisbane wooden house, everything moves either in response to the individual’s heartbeats, the settling of the house on the stumps, the vibrations of sex in a neighbouring room or even the vibrations of the “midnight trucks / that speed west two streets away”. The poet forms a kind of single self with her partner (it makes you think of the Symposium):

Beside me you sleep
moving only your breath, your blood,
your fierce heart. Beside me you sleep
as the dark house shifts around us.

Again, outer and inner electricities are invoked, as they are in “The City Gauge” and these consistent oppositions form the fabric of both the book and the poems. “Rounds” wouldn’t make much sense, or would at best seem superficial, if it wasn’t seen in the light of the other poems of the book. Poet and partner – “trivia savants” – earnestly “talk shit like it matters”. The list of facts moves towards “elite archers shoot between heartbeats” before the band strikes up and “we form a rowdy chorus / of toora loo rye, toora loo rye ayes”. The point is, I presume, that poet and partner inhabit a world of isolated intimacy (as they do in “The City Gauge”) as well as the raucously, crudely electric social world. In “the Heart of a Comet is Blacker than Tar” it is the people gathered to watch the comet, rather than the comet itself which interest the poet. Rather than being a messenger of the gods the comet’s splendours are merely reflections.

There are poems in which Dicinoski is shorn of her partner. Most of these involve earlier, life in rural Queensland and include “Turf” in which poet, brother, father and mother steal turf for their garden from a golf course on the coast. It’s a comic narrative but begins with a comment about her genetic inheritance, “Like my olive skin and my ring finger’s kink, / I got a knack for crazy schemes from him”. But the self at the heart of most of these poems is a double self, a tribute to love. It’s hard to forget “Prayer Flags” in which the “dafter butterflies” (a very beautiful adjective) mistake the flags for flowers while both the partner’s flags and the poet’s “tea-towels and undies” on the washing line are “a prayer and a flag”. And there is also “The Live Arts”, the book’s final poem, which recalls the great 1893 flood while describing the partner’s breathing

crazy but true, it sounds
               like anew, anew, anew
as though you're exhaling code
or gospel. . . .

There is so much to admire in Electricity for Beginners. It does that urban canniness well but is never mere gesture. The poems have their own complex understanding of their creator’s inner life and the oppositions that it is sensitive to are complex and generative. And finally, as all readers and reviewers of the book will recognise, they are full of that electricity that comes from the genuine as opposed to the posed or self-regarding. In a sense the heat might come somewhat from the compression of the focus. There are no poems here that are not wired in to personal experience: no poems about world events, no poems inspired by wide reading or even second and third hand anecdotes. In many ways that’s good: we’re spared lectures about the author’s understanding of public matters, for example. The important question is where Dicinoski might go next, because at some point, most of us feel, a good poet has to leave the known for the imaginatively apprehended.

A. Frances Johnson: The Wind-up Birdman of Moorabool Street

Glebe: Puncher & Wattmann, 2012, 80pp.

This second book by A. Frances Johnson (her first, The Pallbearer’s Garden, appeared in 2008) is as intricately designed as some of the strange mechanical birds with which it begins. Its three parts: “wind-up future”, “wind-up present” and “wind-up past” seem a more than satisfying way of grouping poems that are very different but which share the same voice and the same intellectual and ethical preoccupations. As its title suggests, it owes a lot to Murakami’s The Wind-up Bird Chronicle (a book I have never read but which I seem, by osmosis, to have accumulated a lot of knowledge about!) and one of the epigraphs “Why not write a poem about the wind-up bird?” seems almost to have been taken as a challenge.

And we meet wind-up birds immediately in “Microaviary”, the first poem of the first section. “Microaviary” is devoted to contemporary developments in the military science of unmanned surveillance and attack drones. In mode it hovers between the realistic and the surreal and thus nicely mimics the world of these technical developments where one is never sure where reality ends and dottiness begins: something which, come to think of it, is nicely in keeping with our attitudes towards the future generally. The whole sequence of poems ends up with a Raven drone gone AWOL through a computing glitch “attempting to build a nest out of nails in the forest of Odin”. It isn’t so much the military brutality that seems to worry Johnson (after all, drones, like “smart bombs”, can always be sold as a humanitarian development on the grounds that there is less “collateral damage”) or even the possibilities for unprecedentedly invasive urban surveillance but rather the perverse interaction with the natural world: the ethical issues are closer to those of Jurassic Park, in other words, than those of Avatar. But there is another theme running just underneath the surface of “Microaviary” and that is poetry itself. When the poet is struck by nostalgia for secret places which have been exposed by a world of surveillance drones, she includes in the list of what is lost a certain kind of poetry:

. . . . . 
Think of the kindness of dentists
in small, featureless rooms,
airports at 3am, half-remembered raves.
An old grief rises up:
in the absence of bird-egg blue, cubbyholes,
antiquated soaring lyrics
I must admire
new foxholes,
a terrifying ability to see.
. . . . .

This strikes me as an unusual and interesting development, the kind of thing that The Wind-up Birdman of Moorabool Street is full of. When a PR man speaks of “unmanned drones” we are told he speaks in “unmanned couplets” and the poet finds herself missing even the “soldiers with guns, / the rat-a-tat-tat of older kinds of verse”. Song, she says, “is not part of the technology”. The status of poetry in a future world is taken up in an important poem, “Listen Century”, whose title might just be an inversion of “Speak Memory”. It’s written in four line stanzas which often have bathetic rhymes (in the manner of early Eliot) and recreates the experience of students of poetry listening to recordings of the great poets of the twentieth century, “intoning the images / of their lost century / to the next lost one in kind”. What the old know is that the weightless horrors produced by the scientific developments of their age - mustard gas, fall-out, napalm (a list in precise chronological order) – require “heavy lyric states” as a kind of human response. Modern, virtual wars, full of unmanned (it’s a powerful and suggestive pun) drones don’t “recruit words” and thus we are left with the question of the function and status of poetry in the twenty-first century. The students’ experience of the great modernists is a virtual one:

Meanwhile we sit in heated halls
straight-backed, well-fed and watered in row G
surviving or awaiting aftermath
listening to poetry

“Coal and Water” is another poem operating in the future of ecological disaster and a set of metaphors run through it, including a number of allusions to poetry. It is also sensitive to the fact that water provides a number of metaphors for “development”: “Meanwhile the press’s compound eye / hallucinates a Chinese-invested coal station / mid-stream, when mid-stream is simply an illusion / of a liquid past / something the doctor asks you to save / in a bottle”. This relates to that odd experience whereby the reality that provides the metaphors has disappeared leaving only dead or dying metaphors whose origins are incomprehensible. But “Coal and Water” also wants to talk about the responsibilities and torments of a culture’s poets:

Some poets have forgotten
to ask what it is
they are burning in the grate
On a cold night I am one of them
- the coal-fired heart
the pathetic revenge of the powerless
bringing paper fuel to the table
to burn and burn again
Is that all that's left?
The restive recitals
the pained nostalgia for trees and rivers . . . .

The book’s middle section is devoted to the present and includes many poems from Johnson’s Whitmore chapbook, The Pallbearer’s Garden. The poems are more personal in that they are likely to derive from experiences such as personal loss and intimate guilt. But these things are all woven tightly together throughout the book merely showing a different face in different sections. The totemic birds are omnispresent –  hawks, galahs, cockatoos and blackbirds – but the poems that impress include “Pallbearer” where, at a family funeral, the poet, watching the male pallbearers lift the coffin, instinctively raises her own arm to share the load in a fine and believable reaction which symbolizes the preparedness to take on the sort of responsibilities which the book’s first section worries about. There is also the very beautiful “Fontanelle” which deserves quoting in full, partly because the complexities of the poem’s structure, which are luminously clear, take longer to explain in critical paraphrase than they do in the poem itself:

Not a complicated rhyme scheme like a villanelle
nor a beautiful rural city in France famous for armistice signing
Not a small fountain, nor a lyrically high bogan name
whose owner dreams of it
as her own distinctive line of underwear
A fontanelle is the gentling seal
between two halves of a newborn cranium
a membranous groove that accepts
a stroking or a crushing hand
The chance for either
before two hemispheres knit and fuse
Human hair seeks to camouflage it
in the most tender wars of concealment
(notice the onset of braids and curls and rigid hair parts)
And if this worlding is a form of closing
it is also an opening
The first wageless wager of the bones
that suddenly makes possible
complicated rhyme schemes
rural cities in France
the idea of peace and that which comes before
small fountains
lines of underwear
foolish and foolishly beautiful names
tender wars of concealment
stroking and crushing hands
the opening and closing of things

I’m not sure that this limpid lyricism is entirely natural to Johnson and I feel that she is more drawn to tense, complicated, wound-up poetic modes. But it doesn’t prevent “Fontanelle” lying close to her preoccupations, suggesting as it does a host of binaries contained by the closing hemispheres, including the human and the world, the inner and the outer, war and peace, and even the first world and the third.

There are no birds in “Fontanelle” but they have the last word in this section which finishes with “Moonlight, Rental Farm”. The poet, looking for something calming, steps out into a moonlit night, hoping that the estranging light provided by the moon might “calm and touch us equally”. This works up to a point but the blackbird intervenes:

Only the blackbird's call centre note
chastises, as if to say
moonlit semaphores
from behind clouds
look much the same as artillery
flash-dancing on the rim
of any tired century
That there is no bright or easy clemency
only waning signals that you and I live on . . . .

And, unsurprisingly, it is a bird which announces the final section of The Wind-up Birdman of Moorabool Street, when the Black Cockatoo is seen as a bird with a mythical past as a survivor of catastrophe, an animal which has demonstrated its tenacity by escaping extinction. Its message is a bleak one:

. . . . . 
Not for them to be the bird of Hope
to mourn the marshlands of Baghdad
A thousand seed-gutted cones bomb the dry earth
The stripped, cratered hills will be theirs
no matter how we foul them, no matter how we die.

Although this final section is devoted to the past, like the other sections it does not interpret its provenance in time in any predictable way. It does deal with a colonial past and a family past but it also deals with the mythical past (at least in the case of this opening, black cockatoo poem) and a geological past (including a poem about a letter from Darwin to Wallace which takes us into the world of the nineteenth century discovery the geological past in the sense at least of an evolutionary past). The twin themes are guilt and responsibility and you feel that the author will be very sympathetic to Judith Wright’s position since that poet was obsessed by her family’s mistreatment of native peoples, by ecological disasters and by the shadow of a new, nuclear, war. Wright provides one of the book’s two epigraphs and significantly she, together with her “shadow sister”, Oodgeroo, is invoked in a poem called “We are So Far South of ‘South of My Days'”. The distance spoken of in that poem is, superficially, geographical (the Wright poem dealt with New England) but has a number of symbolic possibilities, including, I think, “south” in the sense of “far worse off”. (The lines about Oodgeroo, “We are light years distant / from Noonucal fanning tinder phrases / in unseasonable island heat / to save blue-ringed Minjerribah / from the perfect orthodontal / bridge of progress” have a particular resonance since I write this review on the island only a few kilometres from what was once her home.) Guilt for the horrors of a colonial past is a complex phenomenon and I don’t think it makes for the best poetry in this book, though the poems that deal with it are as complex and many-faceted as the others. “Monument: To Isabella Dawson of Kangatong” celebrates a person and an act which are obviously close to the author’s heart: a white woman who insisted on erecting a monument in memory of the massacred aboriginal people of Victoria’s Western Districts. But even this poem concludes in a complex and elusive way, invoking the moon last met in “Moonlight, Rental Farm”:

. . . . . 
You stayed rocking there like a young ladies' metronome
until the moon, resentful of your pale grief
refused to loan its pitted light

And you saw that things were needlessly backwards
The moon told you so as it traded sides
eyeing your big skirts jealously
knowing that you could never wait the vandals out
for they were you, all of you

The poetic consciousness that lies behind The Wind-up Birdman of Moorabool Street is a complex one and shuttles between the personal and the macro. It isn’t at any level a simple or simplifying book and rarely falls into gesture instead wanting to understand the immensely complicated mechanisms that underlie pasts, presents and futures especially when the futures seem so bleak. At heart I think the perspective is an ethical one: what part do we have in this and how can we make amends – does “making amends” have any meaning? But there is also a poetic component in that so many of the poems concern themselves with the question of how poetry is engaged with these processes and how it might address them. As a result this is a complex book, intricate like the mechanical birds which figure so largely in it, and one which is challenging in the best sense.

Eileen Chong: Burning Rice; Mathew Abbott: Wild Inaudible; Vanessa Page: Feeding Paper Tigers; Carmen Leigh Keates: One Broken Knife

Eileen Chong: Burning Rice (Little Lonsdale St, Vic.: Australian Poetry Ltd, 2012), 40pp.
Mathew Abbott: Wild Inaudible (Little Lonsdale St, Vic.: Australian Poetry Ltd, 2012), 39pp.
Vanessa Page: Feeding Paper Tigers (Brisbane New Poets III: np, [2012])
Carmen Leigh Keates: One Broken Knife (Brisbane New Poets III: np, [2012]).

Among all the new poets emerging at the moment I’ve chosen these four though I might have looked at others and, in fact, hope to do so in later reviews. Unfortunately the last two of this group are represented by “micro-collections” of only a few poems and thus resist any confident description but the same can’t be said of Eileen Chong and Mathew Abbott. The saddle-stitched books of Australian Poetry’s New Voices series look minuscule but they have the standard dimensions of, say, a Penguin paperback and run to thirty-five pages or so of poetry. They are, in other words, roughly two-thirds of a conventional volume and are thus quite long enough to get some kind of provisional sense of how the creative part of a poet’s mind is working. Among the four poets you can detect two fairly conventional poetic approaches and two that are, in some respects at least, unusual.

Eileen Chong’s book is “conventional” to the point where, on initial acquaintance, you are likely to miss its virtues. It does look, at first, as though a Creative Writing supervisor had said to a prospective student, “Look: you’ve had an interesting life with an interesting background that will be exotic to Australian readers. Why not write a series of family poems? And then you can fill out the MS with some monologue poems where you enter the characters of women in Chinese history. It can’t fail.” The great virtue and charm of this book is that its poems go far beyond these expectations and grow on the reader – well, this reader at least – with each successive reading. I’m not sure that I can specify with any exactitude why this is the case but it is worth the effort to try. To begin with, there is a level of certainty about both tone and technique: if they seem, initially, unadventurous poems then they are also fully-achieved. Secondly, they never give a sense of being exploitative, of focussing on the gap between the perspective of the writer and that of the Australian reader to the point where it can be used for effect – especially for melodramatic effects. So the poetic cast of mind seems calmly inward-turned and explorative rather than showily dramatic even though the poems have conventionally dramatic shapes. “My Hakka Grandmother”, celebrating a Chinese ethnicity noted for its migrations, its extraordinary domestic architecture, its separate language, and the comparative freedom of its women, can stand as an example of this poetry:

If time could unwind for you
yet be still for me, we would run
through the fields, feet unbound
and pummelling the ground towards

the earth-house. I read about it once:
its architecture unique to the Hakka people
in Fujian. Dwellings like wedding rings
stacked and interlinked. You would lead me

through the building's single gate
and show me where you slept, above
the communal granary. It would smell
of rice husks, like your dark hair

in the mornings before we'd braid it
long and sleek. I would speak
in your tongue, but we would not need
words. The lines on my palms mirror

yours almost perfectly. I wonder where
our bloodline begins. We are guest people
without land or name, moving south and south,
wild birds seeking a place to call home.

Thematically, like so many poems of Burning Rice, it focusses on links, especially generational links. This poem is, in those terms, mildly disruptive in that it wants to shortcircuit the generations and let the poet live alongside the grandmother as a coeval. The poem is strengthened and held taut by a subtext of images deriving from the idea of lines so that time is imagined unwinding, feet are unbound and identity is expressed in matching lines of the palm. This sets up a nice conclusion whereby it is lines of blood – bloodlines – which have put the poet where she is today, Sydney. Contrasted with this are the circular images: of the Hakka houses joined like rings and the symbolic braiding of hair.

All of this is predictable enough and doesn’t account for more than a well-made, thoughtful and successful modern lyric poem but somehow the poems of Burning Rice are a lot more than this. Asian sensitivities to family history and the loyalties and respect within the generations of those families is a familiar enough trope in twenty-first century Australian poetry (there is also Miriam Wei Wei Lo’s 2004 book, Against Certain Capture) for there to be no especial frisson of exotic otherness and so the answers must lie elsewhere. Perhaps it’s a matter of the tension between the calm of the poems and the blandness they would fall into if they were not as structurally animated and woven together as they are. Somehow they have to be perfectly achieved not to be faux-oriental banalities and they are perfect of their kind (though one might quibble at the last five words of “My Hakka Grandmother”). I’m not expressing this at all well but I’ll resort to the defence that it is a complex issue.

There are also poems in Burning Rice which are, in terms of lyrical tactics and disposition, more ambitious than the calm quatrains of these family poems. The book’s first poem – as though to demonstrate that there is more to the author than well-made Austral-S.E Asian poetic pieties – is a surrealist love poem influenced by Joseph Pintauro: “. . . . . You’ll simmer a cauldron / of silver stars and I, I will weave / you stories from gossamer / and dew. Wait now – the cat’s / coughed an elf. Wake now.” And there are a group of poems in the middle of the book which deal with great personal pain and which evolve their own complex strategies for doing this. The best of these is “Chinese Ginseng” which fools us into thinking that it is a “memories of Singaporean life” poem activated by the smell of the ginseng before revealing that it is really about the inadequacies of the poet’s mother’s traditional medical suggestions in the face of an acute problem:

"Try ginseng," my mother says. "Must be Chinese,
not Korean or American." I remember the ginseng's
bulbous head, its desiccated torso, smaller roots

for arms and legs - bound with red string to cardboard backing,
displayed in boxes stacked for sale. Panacea, tonic, necessity.
The medicine man extols the virtues of each unique root,

then shaves the ginseng into slices so thin
I could melt them on my tongue. He weighs them
on a brass scale pinched between forefinger and thumb,

then wraps portions into paper packages. There is no point
in telling my mother what she doesn't want to hear: polycystic ovaries,
endometriosis, infertility. Instead, I just listen - I can almost taste

her soup: sweet dates and wolfberries, smoky angelica and lilybulb,
but above all, the unmistakable bitter-sweetness of Chinese ginseng.

That’s a sophisticated poem because its structure is evolved to deal with a personal issue whose pain is increased by the emphasis, in the other poems, on family links. Finally there is the second last poem of the book, “Lunch”, which adopts what one would think of (I’m on shaky and potentially ethnic-essentialist grounds here) as a very un-South-East Asian referential structure. The poet and friend go shopping after lunch:

. . . . .
Your basket is half-full. We are mirrored
in the glass-walled fridges when I tell you
about the time a man tried to pick me up

by telling me how much he liked
the way I shopped. "Like an animal,"
he'd breathed, "smelling and touching."
Put that in a poem, you said. I have.

I’m always attracted to this kind of elegant self-referentiality which I think (although I’m not at all sure about this) occurs first in Western poetry in the wonderful Catullus VI. One problem is that, having used this structure, you really can’t repeat it.

 

Mathew Abbott’s poetry is a different phenomenon and poses entirely different questions for the reader. Even at its most concretely visual – in a set of comparatively approachable poems devoted to the western states of the USA – you want to say that it remains highly abstract. But “abstract” is a dangerous word with many subtle colourings and one wouldn’t want to give the wrong idea. “California” is different to conventional poems of place because it doesn’t seem to separate its interests (what the place is and “means”) from its conception. It certainly isn’t one of those poems that begins with some poetically concrete description and then moves onto understandings in the back half of the poem. It seems to be a poem trying to embody, rather than stand outside of, the Romantic question of the relationship between observer and observed:

the field out there
is that expanse

hazed in glary
tired light

       the field
       gone to yellow
       at the endings

birds are out in it
and too much with us

the passing of our train
indistinct to them

              they know
      in the upwash
              finding shapes
                        to split the flow fields

the towns
have the sense
of being paraded

        the life in them
        stripped back
        to glint

               the turbines

        turn the head
        anemotropic

        hum the skull
        to juice the mind

     the field out there
     meets the field of the mind

at the horizontal

      the faked water
      of the heat
      the turbines cut

Here is a poem about the American state which is simultaneously the home of the “field theory” of postwar American poetry and the home of popular visual culture and an actual, non-metaphorical field is seen as a set of flickering images from the inside of a train carriage – as though the characters of a film were animated into observers. Although the idiom is difficult and its fractured quality foregoes the relaxed rhetorical sweep of philosophic meditation, it certainly has to be counted, at the very least, as an example of organic form!

Two poems of Wild Inaudible, perhaps the next most approachable after these “travel” poems, are list poems: “Twelve Surfaces” and “Ten Maladies”. Again, there is nothing new in this structure – it recalls Stevens, a poet who atttracts and explores the word “abstract” – but it is always an intriguing one. The individual examples cluster around the theme and lead us to wonder how exhaustive the catalogue is, whether they point towards a definition of the central term, what is the principle of ordering, and so on. The twelve surfaces of the former poem are: word, shrill, copper, bribery, kubrick, god, comedic, bad, gnomic, bug, doggy, and surface. There is no doubt about its reasons for beginning with the first, a call to reading, “look at this / word surface // gets you to look / at this word here” or for concluding with the last “surface surface is / all the way down surface”, which recalls the famous William James story and has its inevitable paradox, but I can’t proffer any reasons for the selection and ordering of the others: it might be thematic or aesthetic (in that it responds to internal juxtapositions which seem to “work well”) or it might be deliberately aleatory. At any event, it’s an engaging poem.

Other poems seem to focus on physicality, the status of our corporeal existence in the world. “Attenborough” concludes by speaking of the “wonky natural 2 / -step of the animal / human heart” while “Wetware” uses (I think) the physical situation of being caught in very heavy rain to play against the idea of the body as “wet”-ware (as opposed to “soft- ” or “hard-“). It is hard not to connect this with a later poem, “Rain”, which seems to be a meditation built around the linguistic phenomenon of our use of an impersonal verb (“it rains”) in this situation and to ask the question of what this “it” actually is, suggesting that it is, perhaps, the “rain” of events and experiences. At the same time, to read it in conjunction with “Wetware” is to invite the idea that it connects to our physical selves.

These rather ropey readings get even more provisional when Abbott takes as his subject liminal states of awareness. These seem often connected with poems about love and relationships so that the fine first poem, “Good Morning” is simultaneously about being next to a state of awakening and being next to the loved-one: 

 there's a plateau in the night
                  learnable in surfacing

          to wake is this one thing
          the arrival is peripheral

as i turn up
you move to speak

                   asleep
                   asleep to it
. . . . .

And the book’s final poem, “Cusp”, is, well, about cusps and rather beautifully and richly lyrically connects the loved-one with a liminal state that – though I can’t follow the philosophy of it exactly – is a highly significant one in terms of imaginative expressiveness:

i wake to the good
of the small of your back

                    heat at the skin's hand

          your breath
          is the fall
          of sleep in you

grace of arms
               and rift at heart

points of fact
               abstracting the line

the cusp of the world
curves at the touch of you

That is a very fine poem, very beautiful in structure, very intriguing in its meanings and in no way related to any existing formula. Wild Inaudible is a really impressive debut collection and, if I have made it out to be “difficult” intellectually, I should also point to the grace and attractiveness of individual poems. The New Voices format seems almost too humble for something as good as this.

 

The same, rather shaky distinction between a poet who explores and exploits conventional structures and one who seems, from the outset, to be doing things in his or her own way is re-enacted in miniature with the two poets of  Brisbane New Voices III. Vanessa Page’s poems tend to focus on emotional states: the first, “Five fifty-three am” is about happiness, and its structure – a set of rhapsodic metaphors (“It’s the morning rubbing the last of a dream from its eyes / as day-broken birds open their throats to the light”) – mimics the way the state lends itself to imaginative celebration rather than, say, sceptical analysis. A more common state in these poems is loss and separation from the loved-one. This seems a state more easily connected to exploration and one really fine poem, “Chrysalid”, does this within the metaphor established in the title:

This day is made for breaking.

I lie awake inside the shell of sleep.
Outside my window, agapanthus
heads invite deconstruction

There are only incidental details left.

I inhabit shadows like silk-sheen
resting my fingertips on your detritus . . . . .

The poems of Carmen Leigh Keates have an eerily individual quality which derives not so much from their subject matter – though that is often disturbing enough – as from their disjunctions. Some times these disjunctions are stylistic: in “Leaking Through” it seems as though the the world of dream (at least I think it’s a dream) dominates and the disjunctions are a mimetic way of conveying the weird logic of dreams. In “Out There By the Airport” which “tells the story” of the experiences of a Salvadorean hospital cleaner there is a disorienting and very unusual juxtaposition of direct and indirect speech.  But the title poem uses this technique in the most radical way. It begins with a domestic enough set of comments about the use of knives which modulates to:

It is the twin of a knife
found in the grave
of someone you used to be
in the fourth century.

before beginning the next stanza, even more radically:

Radio feels mysterious.
You walk about
listening with your eyes . . . . .

Disjunctions and unexpected movements such as this between the domestic, the sinister, and the analytical, give these poems a tremendous internal drive. It is not a rhetoric but a very distinctive way of exploring the different levels on which we live – domestic world, dream world and intellectual world – and their collisions and interactions. It’s full of possibilites and one wants to see a lot more of it.

Rosemary Dobson: Collected

St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2012, 358pp.

This will not be the only review of this book which points out that Rosemary Dobson’s first acknowledged volume, In a Convex Mirror, was published in 1944 and that her writing spans an extraordinary seventy years, indeed seventy-five if we include a volume, Poems, published when she was a schoolgirl at Frensham. Are there any living Australian poets whose careers are longer? This is not entirely a rhetorical question for reasons I will return to later, but the publication of this book should be registered as a celebration of extended creativity as well as a collecting of a lifetime’s poems. It is not a large output, seen in terms of bulk: three hundred and fifty pages over seventy years produces (according to my rudimentary mathematics) an average of five poems a year and, very generally, her books have appeared at about the rate of one per decade. I think it is fair to say that, although she would never have been seen as one of the dominant poets of any of these decades (specifying who was a dominant poet leads to some interesting calculations: the forties might have belonged to Slessor and Stewart, the fifties to Wright, the sixties to Hope and McAuley, the seventies to Dawe, the eighties to Murray and the “generation of ’68”, and so on) taken as a whole her work seems to grow ever stronger, a really significant landmark that should figure prominently in future anthologies and surveys.

She also poses some intriguing critical questions. As readers of these reviews will know, I am inclined to seek out consistently generative images and themes: the obsessions that underlie a poet’s work and which make that poet distinctive. In the case of Collected, David McCooey’s introduction has pretty well done this for me. He describes her, very accurately, as a poet of light and lucidity whose poems are also haunted by “visitations, apparitions, omens, annunciations, prophecies and premonitions”. Since he associates the light-filled quality of the poems with rationality, this balance between the rational and the half-understood visitations of something altogether different becomes a powerfully generative tension. I think this is a good basis for a description of Dobson in terms of what makes her consistent though I might cavil that it is not necessarily an opposition and that the lucidly rational always seeks out the worlds that lie outside its core interests, outside those places where it operates most comfortably. McCooey goes on to speak about Dobson’s obsession with the past (which would, in critical discussion of the period in which she began writing, have been seen as an obsession with time – or Time) and points out that there is another generative paradox here: the voices of the past represent loss and discontinuity but, at the same time, their memory and their reappearance in poems represents continuity – one of the continuities of poetry in which, as a poem of John Tranter’s pointed out, the miracle is not that we speak to the dead but that the dead speak to us.

Since McCooey has done so well what I usually try to do, there may be space to focus on something which I rarely emphasise but which the length of Dobson’s career suggests is necessary: the changes in her work, its organic evolution over such a long period. A long career suggests the value of this in the same way that, by analogy, the Greek language (and Dobson’s experience of Greece as a country and a literature is a crucial part of her evolution), as the living language for which we have the longest span of documents, almost forces us to think about those diachronic issues which were, for a time, unfashionable in linguistics.

The most obvious framing pattern in Dobson’s career derives from the fact that, as for many of the poets of her generation, she began in a formalist era and had to accommodate the rise and eventual triumph of free verse. It is true that formalist poetics are re-appearing but today these forms are treated in a rather more playful way as opportunities for experiment rather than as the cornerstone of poetic expressiveness. Poetry has probably always attracted people with formal interests but there is a large difference between this approach to form and that of the forties and fifties where there is a positive righteousness about what we would now see as a very limited corner of form: that which manifests itself in metre and rhyme. A.D. Hope’s The New Cratylus is a crucial text here though it was already out of date when it appeared in 1979 and was thus not so much a statement of a dominant ideology but rather a defence of a position whose time had already passed. It took a long while, in the late sixties and seventies, for free verse to emerge as a powerful set of possibilities in its own right rather than as some kind of reaction to the formalisms of poets like Hope and McAuley whereby, in their terms, poetry itself was undermined by a trivial and skilless formlessness, little more than ranting and opportunities for confessional display. In fact, as we now know (since it is almost an historical event) free verse, so-called, is a set of complex possibilities whereby the shape of a poem can do many things in relation to its themes, including – at the more complex end – inducing meaning through various resonances. Its problem – if that is the right word – is that it is very suited to an American poetic sensibility of open exploration and may have imported ways of thinking about poetry that don’t really suit the Australian temperament. It is a large question but the fact remains that Hope and McAuley, fine poets as they were, chose the narrower and more limited, less expressive path and, probably, made a mistake. Rereading their weird pronouncements about form always reminds me of Shaw’s example of the man who wrote proving, from first principles, that the Herzeleide motif of Parsifal wasn’t music.

I write at some length about this – though it is, heaven knows, a very large subject – partly to declare my own prejudices against those endless poems of tetrameter quatrains whose only music seems to lie in wry conclusions, suggesting both power (“I observe this and express it elegantly”) and helplessness (“What can I do about it?”). But I also want to set the scene in which Dobson’s first poems were written. You would have had to be a very powerful and disruptive voice in the forties to triumph over the formal prejudices of figures like Stewart and Slessor; and Dobson certainly wasn’t the type of personality to mount a campaign of that sort. Her first four books echo the modes and the themes of her time. Take the first poem or her first book, “In a Convex Mirror”:

See, in the circle, how we stand,
As pictured angels touching wings
Inflame a Dutch interior
Bespeaking birth, foretelling kings.

The room is still and brushed with dusk;
Shall we not disregard the clock
Or let alone be eloquent
The silence between tick and tock?

Shall we be fixed within the frame,
This breathing light to clear-cold glass
Until our images are selves
And words to wiser silence pass?

But ruined Rostov falls in flame,
Cities crumble and are gone,
Time's still waters deeply flow
Through Here and Now as Babylon.

And swirling through this little frame
Will rive the two of us apart,
Engulfing with unnumbered floods
The hidden spaces of the heart.

I have quoted this in full, not only because it is a good poem but because it exemplifies so much of its period. In form it is in those inevitable quatrains and, to modern ears, demonstrates one of its weaknesses in that the form is tolerant of inversions and awkward grammatical structures that free verse isn’t. We have, nowadays, to read the second stanza a few times to realise that its grammatical meaning is: “Shall we disregard the clock and allow the silence (that lives between the tick and the tock) to be the only eloquent thing?”. This occurs partly because “let” can be connected with “alone” in a couple of English idioms: “let him alone” and “no-one, let alone Peter”.

Thematically we are in the world of Time and timelessness. The couple are situated, framed and distorted, so that it seems as though they are in a painting and thus the poem is set up to contrast the timelessness of the visual arts with the flood of events going on outside. This is very much the Slessor world, the world of “Five Bells” and, especially, “Out of Time”; and we can hear, in “Through Here and Now as Babylon” not only Edward FitzGerald’s Omar Khayyam but also Slessor’s “Out of all reckoning, out of dark and light, / Over the edges of dead Nows and Heres . . .”. But Slessor’s poems are better (it’s no disgrace for a poet at the beginning of a long career not to write as well a Slessor!) because there is, in the best of them, a powerful tension between the formal control of language (in the verse form) and its desire to break from it by a kind of radical expressiveness of language itself, a desire to be incarnated: there is nothing in these early poems of Dobson that approximates the power of a single phrase like “foxed with air” or the fury that Slessor is able to feel and express at the gap between the worlds of timelessness and the world of reality, the glass panes that he wants to beat against. But what Dobson’s poem has to contribute is that delicate manouevre whereby the painting that the couple seem to be in, becomes a Dutch interior and they then become like angels, “Bespeaking birth, foretelling kings”. In this first poem is laid out a new, rich development of the themes of the time whereby moments of stillness are also moments of annunciation and of, to quote McCooey again, “visitations, apparitions, omens . . . prophecies and premonitions”. Significantly, also, the couple are visitors not the visited. In other words this poem inhabits both the poetic world of its time, flaws and all, and the distinctive Dobson-world that readers grow to love over the succeeding decades. Perhaps all poems do this but rarely as clearly. One final point: the suggestion of voices from without could be read as an assault on the music of this formal verse but it would take a lot of special pleading to do so: there is nothing especially “rational” about tetrameter quatrains that the irrationality of voices from the various beyonds threatens or holds a tense relationship with. In other words, I don’t think that the poem’s content makes a fruitful tension with its inherited form, as though a po-faced family, sitting in fixed, almost metrical, positions, actually fell off their chairs when visited by angels. I don’t see anything subversive here, rather a fascinating poetic development of a theme of its time, housed in the verse of its time.

It is very unlikely that “In a Convex Mirror” is the earliest poem of this first book to be written. I think that honour probably goes to “Cherry Picking” and “Australian Holiday, 1940”. These, too, are poems of their time but seem more in the Jindyworobak tradition. They aren’t of the same quality as the best of this first book and they are hidden away a little but I mention them because they too have visitations, though of a very different sort. Each of the poems has a relaxed, even bucolic frame done in pentameters with, in the middle, an irruption of tetrameter quatrains italicised to stress that the voice behind them comes from somewhere quite different. The interrupting voice in “Cherry Picking” worries about how we relate to the land (“Blistered by drought in strips of sandy cities, / We front a tide more terrible than ocean / And, like the ostrich, head in sand to danger . . .”) and sounds very like that 1930s hectoring tone that survives (ironically, it is true) in Hope’s “Australia”. The intruding voice in “Australian Holiday, 1940” (“Not death and darkness are our company / As others who untented warfare keep . . .”) wants to bring reminders of the war to the otherwise mindlessly happy holiday scene where “at the horizon / Pennons of smoke trail the unmindful steamer / And the clouds lie at invisible anchorage”.

At any rate, I think it is fair to say that Dobson’s first four books – nearly half her collected output – explore all the possibilities set up by “In a Convex Mirror”. Sometimes, as in the case of the fifteen poems which come at the beginning of Child with Cockatoo, this seems like a deliberate policy. “Paintings” concerns itself with the strange phenomenon of art-sound, the sound of the events of a painting:

Climate of stillness: though I hear
No sound that falls on mortal ear
Yet in the intricate, devised
Hearing of sight these waves that break
In thunder on the barren shore
Will foam and crash for evermore.
. . . . .

We already know from an earlier poem that this pregnant and peculiar soundlessness is to be associated with one of the central concepts in the Dobson world – that of “wonder”, the response to visitation – “Wonder is music heard in the heart, is voiceless: / Lazarus having conversed with angels was dumb . . .”.  “Commissioned Altar Piece” and “Commissioned Portrait” deal with the interaction between artist and the expectations of genre and commissioning patron, while “The Bystander”, “Detail from an Annunciation by Crivelli” and “The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian” are dramatic monologues (rather infected, like nearly all such, by the bluff pentameters of “My Last Duchess”) revolving around the paradoxes of the people who are the subjects of the paintings. The whole group finishes with the book’s title poem which describes a Verelst painting of a child, an earl’s daughter, who has been given a cockatoo to distract her from the boredom of sitting for the painting. But the cockatoo is a visitor from Terra Australis (it has got itself lost and landed on a passing boat to be, later, sold to the earl’s steward in a pub), well before the voyage of Dampier, let alone Cook. So he is a visitant, an annuciating angel who bears a distinctive message:

. . . . .
That sulphur-crested bird with great white wings,
The wise, harsh bird - as old and wise as Time
Whose well-dark eyes the wonder kept and closed.
. . . . .

He is a kind of messenger sent, before the event, to announce the discovery of Australia which – I like to think – is intended to be both a message from paradise and a radical widening of possibility in the lives of the inhabitants of that chilly island off the north-west coast of Europe. Just as “In a Convex Mirror” locates the author as angel rather than visited, so “Child with Cockatoo” locates Australians (though, perhaps, only the “dark men moving silently through trees”) as the dwellers in paradise. At any rate, this poem is cannily placed so that the self-contained works of art of the other poems open out into a pressing world of Time and reality: just as the bird heralds a greater world, so this poem suggests that there might be other subjects to speak of, as well as the nature of art and time. 

It is true that, beginning with the last poems of Child with Cockatoo and continuing through Cock Crow, there is the additional inflection of Dobson’s own experience of motherhood so that the annunciations of the painters have an especial, personal significance. But even here the poetry of the time – in this case, Wright’s Woman to Man – is on hand to provide a model so that we begin to get an element of paradox and riddling in the poems. Take, for instance, some lines from “To a Child”:

. . . . .
Before you were then you were mine,
Dark honey of my honeycomb.
I laboured patiently and long
To fashion out of flesh and bone
The form to keep you housed and home.
. . . . .

But the striking thing about these poems of child-bearing and -rearing is that they develop a new generative motif in Dobson’s work: that of journeying. Interestingly, we meet it first in one of the poems about painting. “Painter of Antwerp” imagines Pieter Breughel returning from his trip to Italy “with head full of slow wonder, pondering / On frescoes at Venice . . .”. Breughel, like Durer, is one of that great wave of Germanic artists moving southward into a “sunburnt otherwhere” to plunder its art (to use Auden’s description in “Goodbye to the Mezzogiorno”). Dobson’s poem has Breughel rejecting this mediterranean world of madonnas and annunciations in favour of the bluntly earthbound – she even reads his “Fall of Icarus” as being built on the allegory of the southern transcendent (Icarus) falling – but underneath this is the idea of a journey, undertaken in the name of one’s art, to a region of foreign forms and foreign themes. And this becomes an important motif in the poems about her three children. In “The Edge” she says,

Three times to the world's end I went,
Three times returned as one who brings
Tidings of light beyond the dark . . .

and the image is developed explicitly in “To Meet the Child”:

I await the signal for setting forth, the journey
To be taken alone across an unmapped country,
A land now tremulous with pain and mirage,
Now bright beyond the focus of my vision.

. . . . .

Then I shall look upon that face with knowledge
And eyes look back at mine with recognition,
And together we shall return to our own country
With word of wonders, by another way.

How does journeying tie in with the basic motifs of visitations and omens? In a sense it is both the antithesis and a development. A journey is the opposite of a visitation because it is seen from the perspective of the one doing the visiting. And the wonder comes from the visitor not the visited: I don’t think that anywhere Dobson explores the possibility that the angels who announce Mary’s pregnancy or who summon the three kings experience any sense of wonder at their trip into this world. In fact one of the earlier poems, “The Raising of the Dead”, specifically distinguishes angels from human beings like Lazarus as creatures who are “free to come and go” and thus are thoroughly familiar with our world. Journeys might also be said to be part of the poetic material of the forties and fifties since Stewart encouraged the writing of “voyager” poems. Their function was, I think, to explore the connections between present and past rather than suggest a move into new modes and, for the most part, his poets wrote their poems about explorations of the new world in very traditional forms. 

So the journey, which I see as the dominant image of her best work, is present in the earlier books but is arrived at by a radical alteration that makes one think of musical analogies. It will come as no surprise to those readers who have got this far that I am proposing a rather triumphalist narrative in Dobson’s growth as a poet whereby her best books begin with the fifth, Over the Frontier, published in 1978. Even the title suggests movement and reminds reader just how static, how frozen in time, the earlier titles are. And there are many journeys taken in these later books. In “Oracles for a Childhood Journey”, for example, Dobson recalls the advertising hoardings seen as a young child on her way to her school in Mittagong. The straightforward messages – “Out of the Blue Comes the Whitest Wash” – become, when seen fragmentarily, cryptic answers to posed questions:

. . . . .
All the way to Mittagong,
I asked of flying cloud and sky,
And shall I then write Poetry?
And whence shall come the words to me?
And whence the masks to speak them through?
Out of the Blue. Out of the Blue.

In “Reading Mandelstam” the journey is the one taken by that poet, metaphorically into the unknown and literally to his death in the east of Russia. Dobson, in the act of reading him, goes “as far as we could”. (It recalls an earlier poem, “The Cry” which begins “All day I walk in other worlds” and which may well be about the act of reading.) Perhaps the most abstruse journey is dealt with in the title poem of Over the Frontier which concerns itself with the non-existent and the journeys made across that border:

. . . . .
And the poem that exists
will never equal the poem that does not exist.
Trembling, it crosses the frontier at dawn
from non-being into being
carrying a small banner,
bearing a message,

bringing news of the poem that does not exist . . .

It is a philosophical realm rarely visited by Australian poets and, in an epigraph, acknowledges its debt to a poem by Zbigniew Herbert, but, read together with the journey-poems about childbirth, it develops a lovely specificity. From this period on, we also have journeys into Russian poetry, detailed by Lissant Bolton in an appendix to this volume. Together with David Campbell (does his career trace a similar pattern to the one that I am arguing for Dobson?) and a group of Russian speakers in Canberra, she read the poetry of Mandelstam as well as that of Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva “and a group of younger women poets”. These readings produce a set of  translation/imitations included in two volumes in 1975 and 1980.

Although I do not know Rosemary Dobson’s biography well, it is clear that there are literal journeys as well as metaphorical ones and the crucial one seems to be to Greece. There are wonderful poems about Greece, especially Crete, in Over the Frontier and the books after that. Many of them retain formal verse patterns and these continue to appear in her most recent work. The important “A Letter to Lydia” actually mimics the verse form of McAuley’s Quiros though the reason for this shows that by now she has adopted the more relaxed approach to forms that I have described as modern since it is done to celebrate the fact that this was a favourite poem of her friend as she explored Australian literature. But the most satisfying of the poems explore the dizzying possibilities of open verse. The first of these is “The Greek Vase”:

In the garden a Greek vase brimful
of leaves fallen from the grape-vine.
When the wind blows

the leaves spill out like an alphabet. Twisting
tendrils join the letters in phrases.
A sentence

is blown my way - some words perhaps dissevered
from the Iliad or the Odyssey
re-formed by hazard

of wind and season. Treading carefully
among sentences, lines, whole stanzas
on the paving

I think: or are they not inscriptions
for Musa and Erinna, friends of my childhood,
in a cryptic calligraphy.

Beautiful indeed were Musa and Erinna,
their epigraphs are composed in an unfamiliar language
and written in leaves by the wind.

“Beautiful indeed were Musa and Erinna” and profoundly beautiful is the poem that memorialises them. There is much that could be said about its lovely syntactic shape, about the way it deploys the techniques of free verse, especially its enjambments across line and stanza; indeed it is such a beautiful example of its kind that it feels as though Dobson were suddenly speaking in another language: her own. But I should also point out the continuities with Dobson’s previous work. This is a poem about equivocal messages (something that fits very comfortably with Greek culture, the home of the oracles of Delphi and Dodona) in a language not understood. One of the strengths of free verse is the way it can incarnate this feeling of a meaning which hovers just the other side of the simply paraphrasable and that is one of the subjects of this wonderful, never portentous, poem. It can also be seen as an example – perhaps inspired by Greek poetry – of the humanisation of Dobson’s world. The protocols and rhythms of friendship become crucial: appearances of the word “linen”, a synecdoche for all that is involved here, grows in frequency. Visitations, in the later poems, are likely to be sudden visits by friends (“Taken by Surprise”) or visits to friends (“The Good Host”, “The Friend”) rather than theological events. In fact one late poem, the second of “Two Silences” from Seeing and Believing, has, perhaps, the most beautiful expression of a visitation in all Dobson’s work:

When a child is born
Among the tribes of the Lushae
Its soul alights

On the careful shoulders
Of the parents, perches
On clothes and bodies.

For seven days the parents
Move as little as need be
Sit tight, very quiet.

And the soul, little bird,
Flutters first then settles
Seven nights, seven days.

If the dominant metaphor of the later books is journeying, the dominant theme is continuities. This can appear in poems (densely represented in Untold Lives) of record, annotating and recreating the lives of friends and acquaintances of the past. This is – as McCooey points out – a major part of her poetic activity. But the nature of continuity and its problems exist in the later poetry as a theme in itself. “Poems from Pausanias” is a particularly telling sequence celebrating Pausanias’s journey through Greece searching for the remains of classical sites and evidence of historical events. He is a kind of alter ego because, although not a poet, he is:

Receptive to the voices of the gods
sounding from rock or out of holy fire,
transmitting through the rivers or the springs
their enigmatic answers to desire.

.  . . . .

So late, so late. Yet we should name our need
and recognise the counsel that he brings -
and hand to ear in silence listen for
oracular voices in the water-springs.

This search for continuity is present in so much of Dobson’s thought that one would want to ask whether she is sensitive to continuities in the history of her own verse. The first of the Pausanias poems – from which I have just quoted – is in the everpresent tetrameter quatrains but it is followed by a poem of classical annunciation (the god speaks to Aischylos and tells him to write) which is in free verse. Since it ends in a powerful expression of wonder –

And he, the god, perhaps
Will speak to me in dream
As once to Aischylos.

Marvellous! Marvellous!

one can see why the measured, formal mode of the first poem is inappropriate. To thicken a little the sense that there might be some play here in the choice of forms, it is worth pointing out that Aischylos’ verse, when he writes at the behest of the god, is composed in “sweet, syllabic” and very regular, Greek verse.

 

The poem that asks to be considered in this light (of whether Dobson is keen to register changes and continuities in the development of her own poetic career) is “Knossos”, the third poem of Over the Frontier. It is worth quoting in full:

Impossible to build the palace again over our heads,
the painted roof-beams, the cisterns, the great granary,
impossible to think of people living simply,
going about their errands in the sunshine,
the king receiving supplicants in the throne-room.

In the empty courtyard by the fallen columns
it is possible, nevertheless, to feel continuance.
A cock crows in the valley, noonday
exhales resin, sunlight settles
almost like thin  golden beaten petals.

Settles about us like burning hammered petals,
falls on the hand or the cheek like burning metal,
so that one turns with hand to cheek, awaking
from noonday dreaming with an urgent question -
Is the impossible possible? What has happened?

Better that one should listen to the cock, be attentive
to the farmer calling his daughter from the vineyard
(Go back to the house, he says, go back my daughter),
listen to the cicada, rub a little
of the ancient Cretan dust between the fingers.

Do not disturb the gods, do not disturb them
asking urgent and impossible questions.
This is the birthplace of Zeus, home of the snake-charming
dangerous goddess. Remember here also
Icarus flying too close to the sun.

Historical continuances, the poem says at the beginning, can be established only through resonances but it finishes by counselling against expecting too much of the omens, prophecies and visitations, as though we should be content that the gods speak only occasionally and then obliquely. It is for us to listen attentively (like Pausanias) rather than expect unequvocal voices from beyond. But, having said that, it is hard to forget that, in this poem, the word “continuance” is followed by “a cock crows” and this recalls the title of Dobson’s preceding book. Similarly the final reference to Icarus recalls “Painter of Antwerp” (from her second book) a poem about a great artist who rejects the mediterranean world of apparently perpetual visitations by God and who represents this rejection, in Dobson’s reading, by painting “The Fall of Icarus”. It leads one to feel that Dobson is well aware of the shape of her own career, its evolutions and continuities.

 

 

Michael Sharkey: Another Fine Morning in Paradise

University of Melbourne: Five Islands Press, 2012, 100pp.

The best of the poems in this new book of Michael Sharkey’s follow the pattern of the best of those in his memorable The Sweeping Plain. They have a humorous engagement with Australia and with our visions of it though they often have a bitter edge. Sharkey’s project seems to be built on a desire to make poetry once more (or more satisfactorily) deal with life as a socially lived phenomenon. As I said in my review of The Sweeping Plain, there is precious little in the way of transcendental pieties in his view of things and this can pose structural problems for the poems. But part of the attractive quality of this poetry is that it looks for imaginative ways of solving such problems. In an odd kind of way – and one which would need a lot of careful qualification – he belongs to the nationalist tradition. Though this is now rather discredited for its broad assumptions and lack of theoretical sophistication, Sharkey’s poetry is an attempt to speak to many of the issues that obsessed the nationalists while inventing new models for ways to do it.

One of Sharkey’s methods, for example, is what might be called the metaphorised abstraction. The subject of “Anger” becomes a country whose cultural norms can be humorously delineated:

. . . . .
they speak of blowing up and throwing fits,
and talk of body parts that shift:

a rising gorge, a touchy dander;
when they travel, they use vehicles called dudgeons;
they keep pets, and say, “You’re getting on my goat.”
. . . . .

Similarly “The Good Life When It Happens”- a comparatively positive poem despite its emphasis on the rarity of those moments when the good life actually can be said to appear – imagines the good life as a person: “You changed address and blinked out / now and then in art and plays”. One of the last poems in the book, “Bad Poems”, takes this technique a little farther. On the surface it seems to imagine bad poems as a kind of environment where bad poems appear with the same sort or regularity as the poor do in our actual, non-metaphorised environment. But the fate of the poor seems to a reader a good deal more significant than the existence of bad poems and one suspects that the metaphor might be the reverse of what it initially appeared to be. This is, in other words, a poem about the world’s poor and the metaphor used for them is that they are everywhere, like bad poems. The poem finishes:

No use putting distance in between us:

they’re like landscape seen in glimpses
from a skybus ten miles high:

we know it’s ugly down below
where local colour is a body

in a minefield,
not the lilt of phatic chatter in the sky.

Whatever its intended subject and the complexities of its method, this seems an important poem in the universe of The Sweeping Plain and Another Fine Morning in Paradise, because it suggests that “phatic chatter in the sky” – an appeal to poetic verities of, if not transcendence then at least superiority – is a bad thing. And in doing so it touches on the book’s central theme.

The first (small) section of Another Fine Morning in Paradise is called “Times Out of Mind” and it is largely made up of “The Plain People of Paradise” which is really a set of sonnet-length comic attacks on notions of theological transcendence built around unanswerable questions. Why do saints like Giles have the specific departments they do? Who assigns them? Who keeps tabs on all the promise-prayers so that only the earned rewards are permitted? What kind of neighbourhood is paradise? And, more importantly, how do the dwellers above relate to the world below in which their behavior got them where they are now:

Why would those in Paradise give any thought to us?
Do they hang out to meet arrivals

with “Is Nana doing well?”
“Is my rat husband with the floozie?”

“Is my ex-wife with the creep?” And
“Who is managing the shop?”

Who cares aloft, if Uncle Russell’s
off his chump or Aunty Janna’s been promoted?
. . . . .

These preliminary assaults on transcendental visions are significant because you feel that Sharkey is irritated by a tendency to see Australia – the subject of “Life in Common” which forms the bulk of the book – in terms of being an earthly paradise. The companion piece to “The Plain People of Paradise” in this section is “The Custom of Cockaigne” a description of Armidale done in a similar style to the earlier set of poems although, interestingly, the poems all have an extra, fifteenth, line – as though earthly life were worth precisely one more line than heavenly life. Of course Cockaigne is not heaven but it is Arcadia – the nearest equivalent. At any rate, Sharkey’s view of this Australian earthly paradise is unremittingly bleak, a portrait of a feral social-and-even-ecological disaster:

There are some, deluded, who declare that life is better
anywhere beyond the boundary and

twelve villages that flutter on the edge
of being tits-up: “Who would miss us?” as they say.

Twenty-two kilometers of roadkill lie between us
and the next town: might be anywhere, and everywhere’s

too far from where we are. Some imagine life
could be much better if the people here

were not so dingo ugly, dumb and craven
as to make a vampire gag. But where would we be

if our doubles did not meet us cruising like them
for the stuff of dreams, some manna

never found inside the shopping cubes
we haunt? . . .

This is a long way from “South of My Days” and even “Niggers Leap” but one can see the point. By the standards of most of the world Armidale is an earthly paradise; but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t a place composed of the ugliest results of an entirely material view of life.

So Sharkey’s position seems to be simultaneously opposed to transcendental fantasies and to materialist excesses. This may be a false opposition, of course, in that the former is a vice of the way in which life is viewed – especially by poets – and the latter a vice of the way life is lived. The interaction between the two is perhaps the subject of an interesting poem, “Romantic and Modern”. It begins with a fairly predictable assertion that the Romantic poets, noted for their drive towards the transcendent, were creations of the material phenomena of their society:

How did they live before paper was all that remained?
What legacy freed them from toil?

Good, you would say, that the pater kicked off
and left coalmines and crest to young Byron,

that Wordsworth could find someone rattling, when shaken,
with cash . . .

but the poem goes on to think about the modern world, especially the modern Australian world:

Then, when the concept of leisure had not been invented,
words scattered like birds: freedom, equality,

brotherhood, all of that jazz born of reason and Angst:
easy, when beauty and truth were the top of the pops

in those fantasists’ Fairyland.
Here in the People’s Republic of No Problems,

fun is obligatory, words are for laughs,
and the only good angels are dumb.

Not all the poems about Australia are as interestingly divided as this one. Some are fairly straight comic pieces. “Heroes of Australia” describes those in the grips of brutal hangovers – “In bedrooms of Australia they are waking up and saying / What did I say and you know you should have stopped me . . .” – and “The Paradise of Kevins” does for Surfers Paradise roughly what “The Custom of Cockaigne” did for Armidale. Poems like these tend to be structured as anatomies, working through a list of possibilities generated by the subject. Other poems, not necessarily about Australia, such as “Shoes”, “The Superheroes in Old Comics” (a kind of sociological analysis of the culture that the superheroes operate in) and “The Thought That Counts” (a hilarious poem about travellers’ gifts) work in similar ways. Although these are good poems of their kind, the imaginative contribution is made at the level of content rather than at the level of conception and structure and, as such, you would have to say that they aren’t as far above good stand-up comedy as critics of poetry would like to see poems being.

Focussing, as I have, on the poetry from the book which is essentially about our country and how we conceive of it, does have the disadvantage of omitting those poems that are about the inner life or, at least, the author’s biography. I just don’t think that these are as resonant, as poems, as the socially oriented ones. It is no surprise that the best of these “inner” poems, “Aubade” – which describes what happens inside the brain while the victim is lying ill in bed – is very much in the style of the socially oriented poems, speaking of the “metal theatre troupe” which checks in at 3.am when the Carnival begins.

The last poems of Another Fine Morning in Paradise are a series of five centos, “Where the Bunyip Builds its Nest”. In most circumstances, the cento comes just after the pantoum as one of my least admired verse forms (if it can be called a “form”), but these are really remarkable poems. Each of the two hundred lines is a quotation from an Australian poem and the attributions are given at the end to spare the reader a long (and possibly fruitless) exposure to Google. I think the experiment lives by its conception. It is as though Sharkey had taken the romantic/nationalist cliche that a country is defined by its poetry and set out to make up an image of Australia literally based on its poetry. It is a wonderful idea and works pretty well. The first poem, for example, sets out the nineteenth century visions of the place:

. . . . .
The magpie sitteth silently,
above us spreads the brightening sky -
How nobly dost thou rise above all forms,
O intellect! without thee, what were life?
. . . . .

(lines from Robert Bruce, R.K. Ewing, S.H. Wintle and George Vowles!) The poems work their way through to contemporary Australia and its poets and, fittingly, its final subject is Australian poetry itself. In the final stanza, lines from, among others, Kate Lilley, Zan Ross, Bronwyn Lea and Peter Minter, produce:

If I don’t discontinue straight away,
I’ll grow large in Tibet, transmorph to Dakini:
yarnevano/ wotyarfind/ downther/ people
psychopomp and ceremony
{formless? paradox of construction -
Socrates said when our feet hurt we hurt all over.
My way is to make a large fuss and then I get over it.
Lines I improve, boundaries erode.

It’s quite an extraordinary achievement of scholarship and jigsaw puzzle patience as much as poetic power but the idea of a country’s poetry being given a chance to define it – at least in a provisional and slightly comical way – is a wonderful one. As far as I remember there are no lines from Sharkey poems included. That presumably derived from the author’s modesty or, at least, from his desire to stand only on the outside of this particular net, but not many people are writing so well and so humorously about the Australia we inhabit.

 

 

John Leonard (ed.): Young Poets: An Australian Anthology

St Kilda: John Leonard Press, 2011, 162pp.

If Felicity Plunkett’s Thirty Australian Poets gave a large number of poets a brief, walk-on appearance, this anthology of John Leonard’s presents far fewer poets at much greater length. The generation reflected here is also slightly younger than that in Thirty Poets since Simon West, the oldest, is a venerable thirty-seven. Presenting only seven poets has both advantages and disadvantages. On the debit side the selection of the poets to be included becomes less inclusive and hence more contentious. Leonard deflects this courteously in his preface by implying that his choice is one of informed subjectivity – “the poems in this anthology impress me as having a true distinction in quality and, personally, they move me” – and avoiding any comments about omissions or about the way this group might realte to other groups of poets of a similar age which could have been chosen. The enormous advantage is that readers get a twenty-page slab of poetry by each of the poets, enough to get some kind of idea as to what their poetry is actually like.

This leads me to the first of a couple of issues. The first is: Who exactly is the book for? At first I thought of it as a generous sampler for the John Leonard Press since three of the poets – Elizabeth Campbell, LK Holt and Petra White – have each had two books published by that valuable enterprise. But the tone of the Preface, focussing on the experience of reading contemporary poetry, looks very educational and it may be that this is a book imagined for undergraduate or better high school students. It would be nice for it to be successful if that is the case since what is happening now amongst writers young enough to be an older brother or sister of their reader is always more enticing for that reader than what has been done by generations before. The problem is, of course, that the contemporary is always difficult since it hasn’t had time to be fitted into a reading culture. The other objection to choosing a book like this as an educational text is that students need to be exposed to a full tradition, but this is nicely deflected when Leonard points out that this generation of poets, more perhaps than most, is informed by the poetry of the past and the possible connections it can make with that poetry. At any rate, this would be a good project to repeat for the next generation of poets, perhaps in ten or fifteen years.

The second issue doesn’t so much relate to the book per se but is a reviewer’s problem. How does one deal with a selection made up of few poets and large selections? Anthologies like the recent Australian Poetry Since 1788 and Thirty Poets ask to be considered externally. They are not really reading experiences so much as constructs that one wants to explore. If the reviewer is good enough, there will be some generational or national generalisations to be made. But you aren’t likely to find yourself talking about individual poets, let alone individual poems. The emphasis in Young Poets is squarely upon the output of seven poets and one is, at least at some stage, going to be talking about poets and their poems. Since I have written elsewhere on this site about all of these poets apart from Bonny Cassidy and LK Holt, I have used this opportunity to do some revisiting and some rethinking. I suspect that, as I write, the book in which they appear will melt away in favour the poems and poets which appear in it, almost as though it were no more than a group of pamphlets.

To begin with the first of the two poets I haven’t previously written about in detail, the poems of Bonny Cassidy are probably the most challenging in the book. They are in what is usually called a “post-Poundian” mode that is always going to be at odds with the kind of explorative free verse of contemporary Australian poetry, reflected in the work of the other poets of this book. In fact “post-Olsonian” might be more accurate though the amount of personal detail would have irritated a man opposed to the “lyrical ego”. You might find a connection with some of the poems of Laurie Duggan but his is really a kind of poetic anthropology, absorbed by cultures and their signs and seeing geology, say, more as a determining frame than a subject in itself. At any rate, Cassidy’s poetry is marked by its experimenting with an unusual mode and I am, consequently, on its side. This kind of poetry never takes itself for granted and so, whether it is talking about Margaret Stones’s botanical art or about the “recent” geological history of New Zealand, it will always have, as an undertone, the theme of what it is doing, how it is seeing. “Range” is a good example of this, beginning with sight and sound and quickly moving into a kind of self-directed imperative:

     A bird breaks
itself down, ties
its rune into a knot.

Always begin with a bird, like ruling a line
that stretches into angles . . .

This five-part poem is about the act of describing (it ends, “describing what you have seen”) and as such is about “creativity”. But even more it is about profoundly metaphysical issues since it seems to presume a particular relationship between the natural world and the observer. On the basis of the twenty pages of poetry here, it seems to reflect that American perspective of the way the self interacts with nature, but Australia has no tradition of transcendentalism or even of the kind of observer represented by someone like Ammons, so one wonders whether it is a model that has been, can be, or was intended to be, transported across the Pacific. Certainly the long section fom “Final Theory” included here (a Prologue and the first of four parts) seems quite distinctive, largely because it contains such a personal element – in fact, in many respects it seems as much a love poem as a registering of the geography, culture, botany and geology of New Zealand. The dynamism of the poem seems to derive from its exploration of scales, the delicious disjunctions between geological time-scales, for example, and the lives of the couple which the poem traces. It is certainly an issue that the poem returns to regularly:

That new space was dense with actuality. Its absurd
     dimensions
became acceptable, for instance, everything was middle
     ground.
Distance arrived from above and stayed until cloud locked us
     in.
 . . . . .

And, inevitably, like “Range” we expect it to foreground the processes of its own creation. When it does this the self is there again, not a purified self or an observing infiltrator but a “full-scale” emotionally-engaged-with-one’s-partner self:

Here is the poem, slowed by oil and grit,
to be shed and worn
as a skin.
Form may once have had some salvaging power,
but these days we let form whirl out of hand
like a camera in a Frisbee;
and see that order and delay cannot be made from space
     and time,
how could they?
All my words are gunning for extinction, all they can tell
     us is:
live more.
The photos you retrieve are a scream -
heart-battering reams of fortune, shadow and sleep,
as if "the sun fell . . . or leapt."

Your fidget-bone shrinking the aperture,
the flint of your lens against glacial gates

impose a double: lichen and hubcap
printed across one another

like two hands braced against the light, a herald for the
     Anthropocene.

I like “Final Theory” as I do the other poems in this twenty-page selection. I can understand that many readers won’t and would prefer poems more like those produced, say, by Caroline Caddy’s trip to the Antarctic. I can also understand that many readers will, sourly, claim that an extended sequence like “Final Theory”, as well as the longer sequences here by Elizabeth Campbell and Simon West are part of the corruption of the modern world in which poets need to write long sequences either (a) to meet the (understandable) requirements of valuable prizes (b) make a coherent project for a Creative Writing higher degree dissertation or (c) make a coherent project that will attract (what a mysterious metaphor that is!) Literature Board funding. But there is a lot of intriguing puzzling about poetry itself in “Final Theory” – not only covering how it should be done but also what it is and how it is generated by the cultures of the people who come after the geology is, more or less, completed. I find it challenging and exciting and want to see the other three parts.

 

Reading the two books of LK Holt is quite an experience. On the surface all one can see is the enormous confidence in her own poetic processes. She is the kind of poet for whom dramatic monologues or narratives from the point of view of an engaged and dramatically conceived narrator seem the natural habitat, possessing, as they always seem to, a Browningesque rhythmic drive and a fullness of poetic imagination and empathy. In a series of sonnets here, taken from her second book, we meet the Kafka of “Metamorphosis” just waking, a drunk who has walked into a door, a protestor who has just been struck in the head by a rubber bullet, someone beginning work in a ship-breaking yard, Lorca at the moment of execution, a boy out of control with rage who is shot by police and Douglas Mawson at an especially sticky moment. There is also a poem from a sequence spoken by Goya’s housekeeper and a long sequence, “Unfinished Confession”, spoken by a pre-op sex change patient. I’ll quote the opening lines of the first of these – the Kafka poem – as being in some way typical of what I’m trying to describe:

It is a mandible language, ours; one of release
or grasp; a byzantine binary of yes, no (yes);
the shellac click of stag beetles all het up.
Dear Franz you should love whom you want to
and hard - forget about the world's wanton
fathering and mothering . . . both will bear on
past your little momentous death.
Our parents always outlive us in a sense . . . 

This is terrific stuff – I especially like “your little, momentous death” – but sheer confident monologic energy like this always induces doubts in the reader and leads us to wonder whether it might not all be just a particularly impressive kind of dramatic rhetoric. What we need is some kind of indication of what the poet’s stake in these monologues is. Or, at least, the conviction that somewhere underneath there is a stake. It is hard to imagine a biography which is in some way engaged with all the poems I’ve sketched in above. I’d like to believe that the tension beneath them is not one of content but rather of form: that they represent a kind of public face to a poet who does actually have doubts. Perhaps they are doubts about the very ease with which they seem to have been written. We know in the case of other poets – I’ve already mentioned Browning – that the poems of most certainty are often the poems of most doubt. But you would have to know a lot of a poet’s biography before you could speak cponfidently about generative mechanisms as profound as this.

All this will lead to the fairly obvious conclusion that I like best those poems of Holt’s which are personal and slightly weird. Amongst the sonnets there is a lyric (which I deliberately omitted in my list) describing how an old door is transformed to a table and then a garden bench. It has the same confident assertive style as the monologues and is, I suppose, not much more than a brief allegory (what was recently marked out as a feature of contemporary poetry: “the significant anecdote”) but it still has resonances and intriguing tensions (between, for example, denotative description and a rather more high-flown conclusion) that are harder to find in the monologues. Two poems, “Poem for Nina” and “Poem for Brigid” seem to me to stand out in this selection. They are personal poems about the author’s very stake in the friendships they describe and they are complicated and not at all predictable: always a good sign in a poem.

 

I have looked at length in past reviews at Elizabeth Campbell’s poetry. She looks strong no matter how or where her poems are presented. Here, by virtue of the fact that the poets of the book are organised alphabetically, she is the lead-off voice and her poems look more than comfortable in that responsible position. Given that Error, her second book, was published last year, it’s reasonable that only one of these poems is new. That poem, “Black Swans”, is intriguing because it is a meditation on error – in the sense of inheriting a way (through ideology or cultural tradition) of seeing things which determines what we see – that takes one of the most famous of the Ern Malley poems as its core context. This, of course, is yet another testimony to the unkillableness of an imaginary poet who died thirty-seven years before Campbell was born and Campbell’s generation is one of the first (of many, presumably) for whom the story of Ern Malley, Max Harris and the hoaxers will not be one soaked in the irritations of literary polemics. The Ern Malley poem in question here, “Durer: Innsbruck, 1495” is, itself, a version of a poem of McAuley’s which he was unhappy with, a poem which is about a painting and in which the poet finds himself a “robber of dead men’s dream”. If this poem is about artistic revenancy then “Black Swans” is about conceptual revenancy for although she is an avenging angel, coming to destroy:

we still hope
to cut her open and find bedded neatly inside
goose, duck, chicken, quail: all the known unknowns.

Poetry, philosophy, economics: the mind
repeats, in its ignorance, the vision of others:

all swans are white, all swans are white.

The other poems selected include two of the horse poems from Letters to the Tremulous Hand as well as two of the best poems in Error, “The Diving Bell” and “Brain” – both strong poems about various glitches in body and brain. These two poems, together with the sequence, “Inferno”, lead one to think that Campbell (together with West and White) might be trying to work out answers to the question of what a body/soul distinction for the twenty-first century could look like. We also get a chance to revisit that difficult sequence, “A Mon Seul Desir”, based on the famous series of late fifteenth century tapestries. It is a far from straightforward sequence and, as I’ve labored over it in my earlier review, I’ll spare readers a revisiting. John Leonard’s comment in the introduction, perhaps concerned that readers might run aground on the sequence which, after all, appears quite early in the whole book, recommends reading it as a poem about love, rather than an exploration of obscure late medieval art, and I suspect that that is a good tactic, at least for initial readings.

 

Sarah Holland-Batt is the author of perhaps the most likeable set of poems in this book, though that adjective has no implications, good or bad, about quality. It’s just that her work seems to be nicely pitched between accessible and questing. She also has (together with Graeme Miles) the highest percentage of new work after her debut volume Aria. If I had to hazard a guess as to the direction of this newer work – always dangerous when based on such a small sample – I’d say that it is definitely less emotionally expressionist than the earlier. Many of the complex poems in Aria seemed at heart, either opportunities for lament or opportunities for celebration. The self is present in these new poems but not at such a dominating level. An exception is “Rain, Ravello” which seems in the earlier mode: a long description of rain eventually establishes itself in the reader’s mind as a sympathetic exterior response to internal misery and the poem finishes, “Art is not enough, not nearly / enough, in a world not magnified by love”.

The other poems seem a lot breezier, focusing on life sciences and art. “Orange-Bellied Parrot” is like a cross between a Robert Adamson bird poem and Bruce Dawe’s “Homecoming”, enacting an imaginary return made by a stuffed parrot in the British Museum (surely the ultimate in exilic misery) to his homeland. “Botany” recalls the school experiment of mapping the spores of various mushrooms, while the poet interprets the results differently, seeing “a woodcut winter cart and horse / careen off course . . .” But one wouldn’t want to take these too sunnily. A brilliant poem, “The Quattrocento as a Waltz” celebrates the freedom of a new art style in abandoning the tyranny of the religious – here a sun-dominated, top-down world of stiff madonnas – and celebrating the real of the world, even if that real is a world of misery:

Let the darkness shake out its bolt of silk.
Let it roam over us like a blind tongue.
Let it bury its razorblades in the citrons
and its hooks in the wild pheasants.
Open the window: outside it is Italy.
A fat woman is arguing over the artichokes,
someone is dying in a muddy corner,
there’s a violin groaning in the street.

And other poems such as “Primavera: The Graces” and “Medusa” slide the poet into the poems as an allegorical and not necessarily positive figure – here too the emphasis is on suffering and death. “Persephone as a Whistling Moth”, far from the best poem in the group, is perhaps the clearest in that it takes a mythological figure who oscillates between the dark and the light (as so many of the poems of Aria do) and crosses her with another poetic myth of the moth and the flame.

 

The poems of Graeme Miles seem a long way from those of his first book, Phosphoresence, though, probably, there are evolutionary links I can’t, from a superficial rereading, trace. He seems a poet anchored in the mundane, especially the mysterious mundane of family and ancestors, but at the same time obsessed by the presence of things within other things. A fine sequence, “Photis”, deals with a painter in whose portraits animals continuously seem to emerge and from whose body a child eventually emerges, whose “soft skin is full of animals”. Ghosts of relatives past emerge from the liminal spaces in “Verandah” and in “At 30 Clifton Street”, the house seems to induce visions of its own ghosts. As one can imagine, dreaming is an important part of this world since dreams are yet another sort of poem with a complex and usually unresolvable relationship with the waking world and a poem about sleep, “Mineral Veins”, concludes with:

          Better to turn down,
find you can breathe easily under a world's weight
of earth, and that air was no more your element
than the endlesss vacancy it fades to.

As one can also imagine there is a lot of interest in transformation, Ovid’s obsession: it occurs at the level of myth in “Isis and Osiris” and at the level of a kind of humorous surrealism in a poem like “Talking Glass” (I went to find pasta for the wary / to prepare their pianos. I tried to speak, / knowing that I’d spoken pasta / in the past, but now there was broken glass / between my teeth . . .”
So in the case of this poet, ordinary events in life are likely to produce poems whose interests and structures are not at all obvious ones. A good example is the final poem, “Where She Went”, which is about the death of his grandmother (at least I assume it is: one has to be careful about making casual unequivocal assumptions about relationships. It is a marker of how young these poets are that the deaths which occur to them are those of their grandparents. Very soon it will be the deaths of parents and, in no time at all, the deaths of friends and contemporaries!):

Shade inks a human on the surface of the water,
brings it from a lostness so complete
that only this skeletal light
and athletic paperbark are lean enough to reach it.
It's reformed by remotest coincidence of lines,
dreamed by shade from the bones up
replaced where it never was.
Skinny land and paperbark
are the brassy echo of a wooden room
beside a deeper lake,
where the same figure saw her face shift in the mirror
like a friend she couldn't trust.
Rooms were closed then and vigils sat through.
Strangers covered the mirrors she'd left
and motes of dust fell one by one
precise as the knife-thrower's act in a circus.
They waltzed the wardrobe back from the doorway
and sold her clothes.
And she passed the white rock
which some said was a headland
too steep for goat's feet,
and some said was a marker stone
set into grey soil dry as ash,
a white stone just big enough
to overfill palm and fingers,
cool as liquid overflowing
and with weight to make you think of fractures.

This a poem that moves in four magical stages from the shadows on the water suggesting the woman (not in a simply Rorschach way, but in a much profounder movement from the deeps to the surface). Then it moves to the woman’s room and her funeral and then, surprisingly, to a description – which sounds like the Classical world – of moving beyond a boundary stone. But it doesn’t end there because the stone is imagined declining in size from  headland to marker to fist-sized. These are unusual emphases and markers of a very distinctive poetic mind.

 

Simon West is a tricky but impressive poet who seems highly sensitive both to dislocation and also its opposite: the moments when – and processes whereby – we emerge from a dislocated state. It’s a poetry where we always seem to be crossing thresholds. “Out of the Woods of Thoughts” – whose title seems to allude simultaneously to Dante’s selva oscura (an image that recurs in this poetry) as well as the wood of the suicides of Inferno XIII – is a good example.

We woke with the crook of our arms empty.
Each morning the triple-cooing turtle-dove
would probe about our yard,
"coo-ca-cai?" A nag and clamour
I couldn't help but hear as "cosa fai?"

Mostly summer turned away, tightened
to a knot of roots at river's edge,
where earth erodes from a red gum,
unable to grip things, and strangely exposed.

No use saying "it was him not me",
or "dispel the senses and repeat, The mind lies".
Even the faintest trails led back to that weight
cradled in the stomach's pit.
What was it doing? What did it have to say?

These seems an excellent introduction to the West-world especially its quality of being simultaneously precise and yet slippery. It’s a world where we move from sleep to waking, dreams to everyday, from natural speech into language, from the constructing, rational mind to the immanent natural.

A precious eight pages of the allotted twenty are devoted to a long and difficult sequence, “A Valley”, which is obviously central to where West’s poetry is at this point and which recalls many of these processes. It is not an easy sequence to get a handle on and consequently – if a reader is honest – not an easy set of poems to like. It is, like “Out of the Woods of Thought” about emerging from a dark wood, an emergence that happens in the last two poems. But the nature of the valley in which the protagonist is trapped for the other fifteen poems of the sequence is difficult to feel confident about. To what extent it is a conceptual one, and to what extent it is emotional (even, allegorically, personal) is really difficult to determine though, if Dante is the model, I suppose the same could be said of the Commedia. It is perfectly possible that it is imagined to be a valley of monolinguality broken out of by mastering a second language.

“Out of the Wood of Thoughts” contained an odd middle section where the roots of a red gum are “strangely exposed” by erosion and West is very sensitive to the texture and grain of wood.  “The Apricot Tree” seems on the surface a poem about childhood where the environment is symbolised by a rather grotesquely split apricot tree used as a set of cricket stumps by the boys. It begins, significantly, “I try to home in on this” but the poem’s conclusion takes it away into the inner life of the split and exposed wood:

I'd seen that wound open in wood. Under

a hard rind the core's gore colours
lay like a deep bruise: a reversal

or confirmation from within
of stone fruit, and equally alive.

In “Door Sill”, another childhood memory poem, that piece of wood is an unpainted slab of redgum which marks the boundary between the domestic house and the outer world:

It was a threshold we loved
to tilt ourselves on the rim of,
leaning forward on tiptoes . . .

The selection includes “Marnpi Rockhole by Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri” from West’s first book. On first reading that looked very atypical, even positively out of place. But now seems more central because it concerns art and the way art deals with the conceptual maps we put over the endless flux of the universe. As such, this genuinely incomprehensible painting seems like a gateway to a quantum world and reflects West’s interest in the texture of the worlds revealed by the dissolution of surfaces.

 

Petra White seems to be a poet who continually wants to connect a fraught self with the outside world. From the poems in this anthology we can sketch in a childhood amongst people at the dottier end of protestantism, depression and despair, and a seriously sick lover. The first of these appears in the first poem, “Grave”, but also in “Trampolining” where the speaker and her brother save for a trampoline while the adults take part in a suburban prayer meeting. The experience of the trampoline is one of ecstatic movement in the world, significantly oscillating between earth and sky, taking place “in the present-tense, / cast off by the adults for the kids to play with”.  The desire to connect self with the world raises a lot of issues. Like Elizabeth Campbell, she is interested, for example, in the relationship between the self and the natural world. “Ode to Coleridge” deals with the body/soul distinction but not in any academic way: the issue of whether a sick soul sees the world only as dull and lifeless (Coleridge’s position) or whether the world can heal the soul (Wordsworth’s) is a crucial question in White’s poetry. 

The poem which engages with the world at its most “social” is “Southbank” an eleven part sequence based in a Melbourne work situation. At first it seems a minor piece of social recording but rereadings show it to be far more complex and engaging. Amongst the parodies of business-speak – “I am pleased to announce that Wayne Loy / joins the Networks & / Infrastructure Team to give cover . . .” – there is an examination of what it means to be a suited worker in an industry designed to provide aid to people in need “out there”. The answer, I think, lies in the Heidegger comment, included in the poem, that we only see how things work when they break down (a statement that expresses, after the event, the entire rationale of Modernism as a broad cultural phenomenon). The Melbourne office is, in the last poem, “a portal, / point of stillness from which the world extends” and many of the poems want to explore this movement from a shakily-secure self into wider worlds of experience. We see it schematically in both “Woman and Dog” and in “Kangaroos”. In the latter poem the rows of dead kangaroos by the roadside are tribute to the fate of those moving through experience who make the wrong choice, “one wrong leap against / thousands of right ones; thousands of hours / lived hurtling through space with no notion of obstacle”. They act, finally, both as guardians of new worlds and as psychopomps for humans:

Always turning to leave, wider to go -
they emerge in dissolving light as if they carry
the Earth in their skins, as if they are the land they inhabit . . .
it stares at you through them, looks through you
in the shared-breath stillness, their telepathic here now
group hesitation. As if something's deciding
whether to let you in or through. As if there was an opening,
a closing. Then turning away again, loping off
into that open where death stands to one side (you imagine)
and each leap is a leap into deeper life, deeper possession.

It’s a constant movement in this poetry to desire a deeper life, starting, as it does, from a vulnerable self. There is a profound difference between the young girl in “Ricketts Point” who, playing at the water’s edge “suddenly marvels at how the world / tips open to a broad deep space, not fearsome” and the damaged self of “St Kilda Night” for whom the beach is a nightmare experience:

Stripped to the soul, squatting at the shoreline,
thoughts prey like sharks but never bite,
no voice inside the skull sounds right.
O listen to the tiny waves crash their hardest,
as a lap-dog yaps its loudest to be loud.
Pitched past pitch of grief: how far is that?
. . . . .

Whereas many of the poems in this anthology derive their strength from complex conceptual approaches to life and writing, White’s are strong because of the fractures that generate them. There is nothing sensationally “confessional” about them but the underlying dis-ease makes all the issues – self, world, society – crucial ones.

 

 

David McCooey: Outside

London: Salt Publishing, 2011, 73pp.

Outside is David McCooey’s second book (his third if you include Graphic of 2010 though most of the poems in that chapbook are republished in Outside). His first, Blister Pack, was published in 2005 and was an impressive debut volume noted for its compressed elegance. It is also an introduction to many of the themes of Outside. Of its four parts, the second and fourth recorded the miseries and pleasures of love lost and love regained and the third was rather a collection of disparate pieces. It is the first section which stood out on first reading. The sense I had at the time was that these poems were probably written last: they look ahead and seem in a slightly more self-confident mode. Whether this is true or not they, more than the other poems of Blister Pack, seem to link closely with the poems of Outside.

The emphasis in McCooey’s poems is on a kind of hyper-sensitive response not so much to the natural world as to the ambient world. They lead one to want to construct a parodically typical McCooey poem in which the poet is alone in a room (or his car) and the incomprehensible machinery that surrounds him – fridge, video-recorder, radio (or car radio, engine, windscreen wipers) – impinges on his consciousness and seems to be sending messages that are just beyond interpretability. One step farther away from this ambient environment is “the outside”, the world of trucks passing, birds calling, cars starting up and so on. One step in the opposite direction is the inner world, mainly the world of dreams. This spectrum is clearly laid out in the first poem of Outside, “Another Dream”, which moves from the (significantly) violent outside (“trees / roar at the wind” through the domestic machinery (“a gas heater gives its / free translation / of a record at the / end of its groove”) to a sleeping person whose head contains “a cupboard of dreams”. The two extremes pose the most questions but they seem to be left as imponderables: a poem about Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut says:

. . . . .
Lastly, ask whether it is
     the outside or the inside
     that is beyond reckoning. . .

At any rate, “Signal-to-Noise Ratio” from Blister Pack is a good example of the sensitivity to the immediate environment which, after all, contains mysteries enough:

The refrigerator keeps in time with cool darkness.
A video records, though the screen is blank.
Even the stereo cannot be silent.
Its lines are open and are noisy.
It listens to itself and hums.

This is locking up at night, fin de siecle.
Who knows what real silence is?
Outside, the city is in second gear.
I close the door and wonder
At the inexhaustible self-expression of things.

Only the clock, like time, seems silent;
Its LED flickering over with infinite indifference,
As if dealing out a pack of jokers.
My pen is rasping out a name I almost know.
And you? Can you hear me listening to myself.

It’s a good poem with enough of a twist in its last line to make sure that we aren’t too familiar (in the sense of “casually matey”) with it. But the real and activating tension, I think, is between its sense of what lies just outside comprehension matched with its clear, denotative language and its highly streamlined syntax. It’s a set of propositions followed by a question and where possible the propositions are one per line – a kind of rhetorical end-stopping. That makes for a very attractive idiom: suggestiveness expressed clearly. There are very few gestures in this sort of poetry and no lapses into suggestive (but ultimately vague) images. There are certainly no gestures towards the epiphanic which always, after all, trails whole theologies in its wake. One of the best of a fine series of unrhymed sonnets based on French phrases is, as one might have expected, the one based on “Je-Ne-Sais-Quoi” which speaks of a time when a mind

Can glimpse its shadow, and entertain
Those moments of I-know-not-what: the sound
Of bells, or just after; the sight of clouds
Upon the milky page of childhood; the
Nostalgia of trains; and grappling with verbs.
And a moment, not for anything so
Unsubtle as revelation, but a
Stillness, of empty longing, homesickness
At home: echo of a question hitting
The walls of the well as it goes down, or
Else the mirror saying, “I know not what.”

“Distance” records the experience of hearing his partner’s voice on the car radio while driving home, “Just outside Melbourne / I hear your name announced and then / Your voice appears . . .” and crucially the next words record, not that it is a voice from beyond (or away) or the way in which the tones of the loved one re-animate a dulled world, but that it is “utterly // Unmagical, as everyday / As the speed limit”.

McCooey conveys this state better than anyone around but it leads to a number of questions: exactly what, psychologically and metaphysically, is this state? How does it relate to what poetry does? There are also questions about the two “farther” states. The nature of the inside world we usually leave to Psychology – though that may turn out to be a flawed strategy – and McCooey’s two epigraphs in Outside from Winnicott’s Playing and Reality give some idea of where his own thoughts are going. And, as I’ll emphasise later, there is much about the nature of the outer world which is a difficult issue for McCooey’s poetry. It may well be that McCooey is dealing with these questions and is doing so far more satisfactorily than I am able to. But I was intrigued by a recent review, in The New York Review of Books, of a Don Delillo collection of short stories which identified a particular state of trance, evacuated (the inevitable word that appears here in critic-speak is kenosis) of the transcendent as a quintessentially postmodern gesture and speaks rather well of a condition which “empties out all thought, resulting in a kind of mystical opacity verging on enlightenment but never arriving there”. It is something very sympathetic to poetry which, after all, thrives on the poet’s power of attention and exploits the concomitant tone of hushed awe while being very equivocal about having this framed by any sort of religious sense. You can see something of the effect in McCooey’s poetry of a secular vision (well and truly after the death of God) which nevertheless is sensitive to liminal and very suggestive states. Of course it’s an act of critical stupidity to try to understand a poet through the lens of a general position or description of the zeitgeist, but it does provide a way of thinking about the implications of this sort of poetry and the problems it raises.

The second issue is what to make of “the world”. One of the later poems from Blister Pack raises this problem. In “Bird and Fox” the poet is, as so often, driving (ie within a highly defined ambient space) through an environment that begs to be interpreted allegorically: a hill (an unprocessed part of the natural world) is cut off by both the highway and by the opposing hill which, with its housing estate, hardware store and service stations, has been converted into “an adamantine / network of networks”. Picked out by the sun is a fox which “indifferently // looks my way, / then up and around . . .” (This recalls that wonderful Robert Gray poem, “The Dusk”, in which a man comes face to face with a kangaroo at the edge of an allotment and the significances raised by this encounter, never explicitly analysed in the poem itself, spread like ripples.) There are a number of issues in “Bird and Fox” which perhaps boil down to: What is the world saying here? and What am I going to do with it? The poem goes on to worry about this:

I manage the speed hump,
     and make my ponderous
way to the roundabout,

leaving behind
     the hill and its
ambiguous animals,

neither picture book
     nor symbol: strange
suburban agon . . . . .

There are no real solutions but the problem is clearly outlined and taken over into the poems of Outside. How can I get the fox and the bird into a poem if I am not to treat them as part of a simple rural description or as symbols (metonymic or metaphoric) of another reality?

I have a strong sense that the poems of Graphic, some of which are about Kubrick’s films and others, in a quite contrasting mode, about autobiographical experience, are crucial attempts to deal with the issue of letting more of the world into the poems. I read the fine poems about the Kubrick films as, in a way, homage to the filmmaker whose images are always stylish to the final degree of what that word might ever mean but never evacuated by abstraction. In other words there is an awful lot of the world in Kubrick’s images and you feel that their ultimate responsibility is to the world rather than cinematic art. And yet, as art, they are – as these poems say – fantastically sophisticated. “How many science-fiction / films” asks one of the poems about 2001 “have focused / so resolutely on the soft, / primitive violence of eating?” And another makes the fascinating point that the “murderous stare” on Bowman’s usually bland face as he goes to shut HAL down was “stored ghosts ago, sunk / within the base of / his prehistoric brain”, that is, Bowman’s brain is a computer whose origins lie in the events with which the film begins. My own widow’s mite here involves observing the wonderful rapid fades-in and -out which effect the transitions of those first scenes in the far, far past. There is no mind here and so there is no connectivity (or, perhaps, no sense of time or, even, death). Since there are no connections there is no narrative (and hence no montage) and so this most beautifully conceived example of narrative (who has ever been bored by even a few seconds of 2001?) grows out of the first experiences it documents. Not only is space travel (and meeting supra-human alien cultures) made possible but so is narrative itself.

Sometimes the world presents itself as horror and we experience it as trauma. I think McCooey knows that this ought to appear in poetry if poetry is to relate to human experience. Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove takes the position that the issue can only be dealt with as high farce but then it is a film about pre-horror decisions and ends on pictures of mushroom clouds without ever having to look at what is happening beneath them. The poem on The Shining (which I’ve always felt to be one of Kubrick’s few failures) seems to stress its factitiousness. The Kubrick film which deals with horror and trauma at about the dimension at which people can most relate to it (or be confronted by it) is Clockwork Orange whose basic point, it seems to me, is that thug-violence is child’s play compared with what science and political authority can do. Significantly McCooey’s poem about this film is the least satisfying and is omitted from Outside. One of its techniques is to use personal experience (“In nineteen seventy-three, / the year I turned six, / I was taken to see . . .”) as a device for looking at the film, as though it were some toxic object for which one had to work out strategies for seeing it only from the outside and never sympathetically from the inside. As a result I don’t think I’m being too harsh when I say that the result is evasion and contemporary pieties. The autobiographical poems of Graphic and Outside deal with trauma at a manageable level: memories of a fox dying in agony at the side of the road (seen from the insulated car), a visit to a whaling station, accidentally – as a child – seeing chickens being slaughtered industrially. But these don’t seem to be true McCooey poems. Though they continually use the issue of memory this seems more like evasion than a way of letting raw and confronting violence into an elegant poetry. They remind me of the first of Gwen Harwood’s “Father and Child” poems in which a child kills an owl. You can see what she is trying to do, to escape from the rather jeweled high style which is her métier and to let something nasty in. But poetically the results are poor – it almost looks like a poem that could have been written by anyone and only stays alive (though, paradoxically to me, it is widely anthologized) by its uncomfortable pseudo-confession, by its raising of the issue of the poet’s stance to the material (“How autobiographical is it? is a crucial question in Harwood and there is something about her shape-changing personality that makes these uncertainties pleasurable to her) and the way this contrasts with the rest of her work.

Ultimately, how to let the world at its most extreme into poetry like his is probably an insoluble problem and I’m happy to leave it to McCooey – who is a good critical thinker as well as a fine poet – to puzzle out. In the west, one extreme position is summarized in the often repeated comment that the Napoleonic wars don’t enter the world of Jane Austen’s novels (though she was very attuned to contemporary events and, because of her brothers, had a stake in them). Presumably she was too focused on her patch of “two inches of ivory”, detailing the social comedy of the time, to be able to fit the other events of the world in. I think of Hafez who lived through the indescribable horrors of Tamberlane’s invasions. You wouldn’t know it from his poetry but then it focuses on one version of the inside world (the invisible world, or gheib) which, in a religious age (or to a religious sensibility), precedes and interprets what “the world” is. Perhaps Celan is the best example in the west of a lyricist of extreme sensitivity who made a way of speaking about a massive historical horror. What these random examples teach us is that your broad cultural framework (especially its belief-system) profoundly affects whether (and how) your poetry can deal with the horrors of the macro-historical; violence usually means something. The Catholic poetry of Peter Steele deals with these violences frequently, and they don’t seem to do any violence to his poetic mode. It’s a problem specific to us. For those still trying to interpret and write about a universe whose God has died, sensitive to the nearest outside environment, getting the violence of the world into a poetry that aims at stylishness is going to pose a lot of problems.

 

 

Felicity Plunkett (ed.): Thirty Australian Poets

St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2011, 285pp.

The significant poetic productions from the declining months of last year seem to have been anthologies. Not only is there this intriguing collection of thirty poets – all born after 1968 – edited by Felicity Plunkett but there is also an anthology, interestingly different but covering similar ground, edited by John Leonard called Young Poets: An Australian Anthology. And, as well as these, there is Geoffrey Lehmann and Robert Gray’s daunting Australian Poetry Since 1788. Though, generally, I avoid reviewing anthologies I will try to cover both the Leonard and the Gray and Lehmann in later months on this site.

Anthologies are weird and fascinating reading experiences. In many ways they are rather like poems themselves. They have an intention (to encapsulate a national poetry, to show what interesting things newcomers are doing, to raise the profile of poems the anthologist likes and diminish the reputation of those that he or she doesn’t, etc) but the possible meanings of the work often overtake its intention. Like poems they have a personal stamp but they also have a context – the context of other anthologies. Like poems they have complex and important internal structures: are they to be arranged chronologically and if so should it be by date of birth of the poet or by the period in which the poet floruit. This is a more important consideration than it seems: Kenneth Slessor and R.D. FitzGerald were born within a year of each other but the former, precocious, is really a poet of the twenties and the latter a poet of the thirties.

The intention behind Felicity Plunkett’s Thirty Australian Poets is, I think, to showcase (an unfortunate but useful word) the work of poets who have risen to prominence recently and perhaps, also, to give critics like myself, who have a dim and fragmented perception that a poetic renaissance (largely led by women poets) is taking place, the chance to see the group in toto and make some decisions about what is happening. And some evaluations, too. In this respect it is a very cool and clean anthology, eschewing subjective judgements at every point where it can. The poets are organised in alphabetical order by surname so that it is not a judgement of the quality of their work but merely the result of an alphabetical accident that the poems of Ali Alizadeh are placed first and those of Petra White last. (Alizadeh’s Iranian origins prompt me to make the point that the divans of the classical Persian poets – Hafez, Sa’adi, et al – are organised in the same, neutral, way whereby the poems are placed in alphabetical order according to their final, rhyming words. A Western equivalent might involve something like organising a collected poems not chronologically but according to the poem’s first letter so that the Index of First Lines became, in effect, the contents page. It’s an intriguing rethinking and one that it might be interesting to try with a Collected Auden or Graves, say.)

Similarly there is no weighting of representation whereby we know that the anthologist considers one poet to be more significant than another because the former gets more pages allocated than the latter. Here everybody gets about five pages. I like this because, when I am doing my thinking about the quality of these poets and the nature of what is happening in Australian poetry, I don’t have to enter into a debate with the anthologist. Many anthologists are inclined to be opinionated and the reader’s fight with them (on the subject of individual choices and omissions, both of poets and poems) can obscure the wider issues. Felicity Plunkett is as anonymous as an anthologist can be and brings to mind (another “showbiz” analogy, I’m afraid) those award hosts who have the good grace to get off the stage quickly and let the real stars of whatever show it is get on with the job. In fact it’s not entirely coincidental that images of award nights keep sliding into my prose here. There is a slight sense about Thirty Poets of a public performance where everybody – in alphabetical order – gets their five minutes to show what they can do before being replaced by the next act. There is nothing wrong with this. If you wanted to know what was happening in, say, Australian stand-up comedy, then giving thirty comedians five minutes to do their thing in front of an audience might be a lot better than a show put together from what some entrepreneur thinks are “the best stand-up comedians in Australia” carefully organised (according to the structures of comedy whereby some acts work well as warm-ups for others) to emphasise particular performers.

In keeping with the anthology’s general tone of a calm dispassionateness and an overall lack of indulging whims or vendettas, there isn’t too much that one could object to in the choice of the thirty poets. There is a strong argument for including Graeme Miles whose first book (reviewed on this site) was an interesting and challenging one and one could make a case for Adrian Wiggins and perhaps Brett Dionysius, Liam Ferney and some others. Certainly they wouldn’t look out of place (or tone) in this anthology, especially if they replaced some of the weaker selections. And there are others who might have had some sort of claim. But, all in all, this seems as good a presentation of a generation as one could ask for. We aren’t told whether the editor or the poets actually chose the poems but I suspect it was the latter in collaboration with the former and the selections involve a mixture of published and new work. The poems chosen do seem, in the case of the poets whose work I know well, to give a good sense of a poet at his or her best. But the format does have a slight levelling quality. In the case of those poets whose published work is probably uneven (I’m deliberately avoiding names here, rather than being vague or coy) five pages of poetry can make you think they are stronger than they are. Those poets who are marked by their ability to write very different but equally strong poems end up being reduced slightly in a volume like this. If one read the books of these thirty poets I think one would feel that the poets’ abilities and achievements were much more varied than Thirty Poets alone suggests. And then there is the issue of the way a poet’s work is “set” in the arbitrary, alphabetical context of other poets’ work. To name names, for once, at the end of reading this book, I felt that, yes, Elizabeth Campbell, Emma Jones, Bronwyn Lea and Nick Riemer were terrific poets, absolutely individual voices doing their own thing. But I wouldn’t necessarily have expected this based on a previous knowledge of these poets’ work. I did plan to read the book in reverse as an experiment to determine how much of this reaction was really a response to the setting of the poet’s work, but time and deadlines caught up with me!

As I said at the beginning, anthologies are, in a way, like poems. The aleatoriness of the procedures of arrangement means that these hundred and forty-odd poems are not naturally sociable with each other and one of the pleasures of anthology reading is to trace unexpected motifs as though this were the work of a single mind. There is a lot that is hermeneutically interesting about this procedure and both Felicity Plunkett (in her Preface) and David McCooey (in his Introduction) do this to some extent. The idea behind this sort of reading is that, like poems, anthologies reveal patterns that might well come from somewhere else.

This reference to McCooey’s introduction leads me to the most difficult of questions which it would shame a reviewer to ignore: What are the features of this generation of Australian poets? I’m so old that the issue of the challenge posed by the “academic” poets of the fifties (Hope, McAuley, Buckley et al) to the “Bulletin” poets (Wright, Campbell et al) is not merely an historical one. I have thought long and hard about these issues of poetic generations, their ruptures, influences, internal relationships and continuities. Most descriptions of poetic periods are very impressionistic and would not satisfy a professional historian let alone a scientist. Chris Wallace-Crabbe memorably spoke of “the habit of irony” when dealing with the poetry of the fifties and I spoke of the need to “make it new” as the imperative behind the “generation of ”˜68” but these were very gestural statements. Accepting, though, that it is probably impossible to give a completely accurate account of thirty poets, I’ll describe a few, equally subjective, impressions I have at the conclusion of this book.

Firstly, it is rather a shock – though it shouldn’t be – to see how professional these poets are. If the generation before were often the product of Creative Writing courses taught by poets who had managed to get jobs in universities and often looked out of place alongside the (declining) establishment of literary scholars, these people seem to be teachers themselves, almost always with doctorates. And they often teach something more demanding than Creative Writing. Judith Bishop (whose “It Begins Where You Stand” was lovely to re-encounter) describes herself as a professional linguist; Michael Brennan works in the Faculty of Policy Studies, Chuo University; Claire Potter “spent five years studying and teaching in Paris”; David Prater and Jaya Savige are both doctoral students, the former in Karlskrona, Sweden, the latter at Cambridge (Emma Jones has a Cambridge doctoral degree in literature). I might be confusing two elements here – professionalism and multilinguality – but I think they are closely related (John Mateer, Ali Alizadeh and Danijela Kambaskovic-Sawers seem to have had multilingual upbringings). At one level this professionalism seems entirely admirable. But of course there is a darker side and my second impression of this anthology relates to this. There isn’t much madness in Thirty Poets. Those working in a surreal tradition (like Louis Armand or David Prater) work in the thoroughly familiar (dare I say acceptable and professionalised?) tradition of reworking and rebuilding existing texts. The complexities of the poems of, say, Maria Takolander or LK Holt, seem interesting and challenging complexities rather than confronting ones. Other poems have a lot of emotional intensity and weirdness (Bronwyn Lea’s “Born Again”, which readers have a habit of remembering, stands out here) but it isn’t something that is going to change your ideas of what poetry can do. This response was provoked by coming across, very late in the book, Samuel Wagan-Watson’s “Night Racing” (“night racing through the suburbs / of white stucco dreaming . . .”) and realising that there was nothing else in the anthology remotely like this (though angry, aggressive poetry is not usually something I prize). It reminded me of my reading of Benjamin Frater’s 6am in the Universe (reviewed on this site). That is “mad” poetry though with a perfectly coherent aesthetics/metaphysics behind it. Should he have been included? He would have been the youngest poet in the anthology and his voice would certainly have stood out. But it would also have skewed a reader’s response to what this generation is like. It isn’t like the poetry of Benjamin Frater.

David McCooey makes the good point that the work of these poets “shows a profound knowledge of poetic precedence” and I want to explore this a bit. It is a useful idea because it brings the textual manipulators in out of the rain and under the umbrella where the (generally) lyrical and meditative poets are camped. I would approach this issue from a technological angle: this is the first generation of Australian poets writing under the aegis of Google. Whereas previous generations might have been addicted to particular forms – the villanelle and then the pantoum – now we find centos; there is one by Kate Fagan in Thirty Poets. To write a cento is perversely difficult enough but to read it respectably – almost impossible in the pre-google age – is simplicity itself nowadays. And it isn’t only a matter of locating and relating to poetic precedences. What would once have been the result of a monstrous, obsessive erudition, an interest in the most arcane byways of some subject (which, for some reason, is often a feature of the make-up of a poet’s mind), is now easily available at the writing desk. In a sense we are all erudite now and can “get up” things unimaginable to much cleverer people (like Hope, Buckley or McAuley). In The Best Australian Poetry, 2009, Liam Ferney introduced his complicated poem (which blended the Australian High Court with a host of popular culture references) with the off-hand comment, “You can google the rest. I did”. That registers an important moment. Thinking this through further, though, leads me to see it as a possible positive that someone who was, himself, very erudite, John Forbes, would have approved of. Erudition itself is not going to be as impressive as it once was and poems will be forced to work for themselves rather than rely on some wonderful piece of arcane knowledge inside them. And apart from Google there are the combinative powers of the personal computer. Everone knows how John Tranter exploited the capacities of the Breakdown programme and while it must have taken Laurie Duggan hours of painstaking work to assemble his set of anagrams of the names of Australian poets in the 1970s, children could now do this effortlessly as a party game.

A final subjective impression concerns the sexes. If this is the Age of the Professionals, I had also expected it to be, poetically, an Age of the Woman. My sense from reading the new books emerging over the last ten years was that a fairly high percentage of the good ones were by women. Publishers like the excellent Giramondo Press seem to make a policy of publishing women poets. Picking up Thirty Poets and knowing that in today’s world an anthology without any particular axe to grind would have to aim at equal gender representation, I expected to find quite a number of make-weight male poets. This isn’t what happened. For some reason, perhaps to do with the levelling quality I spoke of earlier, the poetry of the women doesn’t seem dominant at all. Related to that is the fact that, of those poets I would have omitted if I had been editor, more than half are women and the poets that I listed previously as ones who might have been included in an anthology like this without raising any eyebrows are all male! Thinking about this, I have come to the conclusion that it is “the age of the woman poet” but that the anthology doesn’t entirely reflect this. In other words I trust the subjective impression I have from reading all the individual books over the years above the impression I have from this anthology.

I said that anthologies have contexts, just as poems do. To put it another way, anthologies are aware of their predecessors. Thirty Poets alludes immediately to one of these, John Tranter’s The New Australian Poetry, by choosing the date 1968 as the earliest cut-off birth date for its poets. That’s an elegant and generous gesture, I think, although there is a big difference between a birth date and the date at which a group of writers make an impact. The poets of the “generation of ”˜68” were generally born after the Second World War. But Thirty Poets also seems to be the younger sibling of an anthology published in 2000, Michael Brennan and Peter Minter’s Calyx. I think Thirty Poets is, as an anthology, a far superior book exactly because it does reflect a single generation. Calyx’s virtue was that it anthologised interesting poets but they came from what appear, now, to be two quite separate generations. I also want to make connection when I read Thirty Poets with an anthology from 1968, Rodney Hall and Tom Shapcott’s New Impulses in Australian Poetry (also published by the University of Queensland Press). That anthology had a very strong sense of a generation (it turned out to be the one between the Bulletin poets and the ’68 poets). It too was organised alphabetically though it was much more “interventionist” than Thirty Poets in that it varied the number of poems by contributors and included highly interpretive introductory notes to each poet by the editors. In retrospect (and, probably, at the time) the faultlines within that generation were fairly clear. There were Brisbane poets (Hall, Shapcott, Malouf, Rowbotham, Croyston, Green and perhaps Harwood), Melbourne “university” poets (Buckley, Jones, Wallace-Crabbe, Simpson, Taylor and perhaps Dawe), Sydney poets (Lehmann and Murray) and a number who could either be seen as “unaligned” or loosely connected to one of these groups (Beaver, Smith, Stow). I mention this to ask whether the same (or similar) lines can be drawn in Thirty Poets. There are Sydney University poets here, there is a Melbourne group published by the John Leonard Press and so on. If they can’t be confidently drawn now, will they become clearer a few years on. Living in the Google/Amazon/Internet age means that groupings are likely to be matters of sympathy rather than proximity (let alone class or gender, those subgroups beloved of sociologists). All poetic texts are available, as influences, to everyone and so there are less likely to be poetic “gateways” in the form of elder poets lending books or supervising reading groups.

A final two points about this excellent book. By encapsulating a generation it turns the older poets (who were born before 1968) into a generation as well. This is something that I don’t think they were before and they might not like being now. That dividing line means that major poets like Anthony Lawrence, Judith Beveridge, Peter Boyle, MTC Cronin, Adam Aitken, Emma Lew and a host of others (these were literally the first names that came into my head) have become isolated into a kind of group. I don’t think this is a bad thing because their work is different to that of these thirty poets and seeing them as a generation might encourage us to attempt a more complex description before looking for continuities between them and the poets of this anthology.

Tom Shapcott edited Australian Poetry Now in 1969. In many ways it has the fewest continuities with Thirty Poets being a bit of a grab-bag. But, for me, it was a very exciting anthology introducing (or allowing the authors themselves to introduce) a host of poets I had never heard of. It caught the idea that a poetic renaissance was occurring by not predefining the nature of that rebirth at the editorial level. So in many ways it is crude. It has a hoax poet (Gwen Harwood’s Timothy Kline) and a lot of poets who didn’t sustain significant careers. But more than Thirty Poets it conveyed a sense of a lot of new (and often weird) things happening. If Thirty Poets recalls New Impulses in Australian Poetry then it is possible that there is room for an anthology that recalls some aspects of Australian Poetry Now, publishing people who are young, have not produced a book and who have appeared only in journals or online.

 

 

Gig Ryan: New and Selected Poems

Artarmon: Giramondo, 2011, 209pp.

 

Gig Ryan is not an easy task for a reader and an especially difficult task for a critic. But it is a task that must be undertaken because her body of work (nicely introduced by this two-hundred page Selected Poems) grows progressively more impressive. It has a consistency and intensity that simply forces itself on readers. It isn’t going to go away and we need to come to grips with it better than we probably have. One’s first response, as critic, is to be tempted to resort to the most basic level of description of difficult poetry which is to describe one’s own difficulties in the face of it. Really, of course, that is describing oneself rather than the poetry one is confronted with. At a slightly more engaged, analytical level one could write about the features of her style that stand out – which are, in fact, given how consistently they are deployed, worth thinking of as the Ryan idiom. One could write quite a bit about her fractured syntax whereby capitals introduce sentences that are not necessarily completed as in these fairly representative lines from “Achilleus” a poem in her fourth book, Excavation:

. . . . .
Perpetually a drag
Music greases its haggard souvenir
the muffled snow flicks down
and reckons you’re clapped in death
I watch the fight from the brown shore
The two in my head turn like a supermarket

I don’t know what close means, being dead all a life
Whatever comes, comes. Unergonomically, you crawl
in bed the sad cathedrals He looks at the gun windows
Writing swims into its pin
my mother’s white seashells
the slicing river.

Secondly there is her wonderful metaphoric language, especially the similes. I think someone elsewhere has pointed out that of all poets, Ryan is the one whose metaphors and similes are utterly unpredictable. To drag some out at random (one per book), “His eyes / romantic as aluminium strewn against a sea-wall”, “This slop hovering in the background like a new Hawaii”, “when you go out generously like armour”, “He stands in the doorway like freight / like fuel”, “Monotonous branches scratch the ditchy air”, “the cribbed tectonic music”, “the past’s porphyried gas”. These are not easy to generalise about, but they do have a shock value which disconcerts the reader in a valuable way. At any rate they are so far from what one might expect that they can be seen as part of a war on rhetorical predictability, always something that one feels should be a component of the higher reaches of poetry.

Ryan’s metaphoric language, if it is part of a rejection of the poetically-expected, meshes in with a third feature of her style: there are no lyrical graces. The poems are – to generalise crudely – hard, harsh and intense and never woo the reader with any superficial sexinesses. In this her work contrasts strongly with that of her friend and sparring-partner, John Forbes, which almost always, through its sinuous syntax and meditative shifts, remains attractive even when at its most incomprehensible. I always get the impression, reading Ryan’s work, of a stony (and honourable) refusal ever to let her poems be charming. But it’s a complex issue: greater artists than Ryan have been happy to operate from within a world of fixed expectations and to show that they could do even this rhetorical, generic stuff better than others. Beethoven, told that his slow movements reduced people to tears is reported to have said, “They’re supposed to”.

Of course, describing her style in this kind of generalised way commits the crime of seeing her work as a unit, immune to change. There is a clear shape to Ryan’s career and it needs to be registered, though the difficulty of the poems and especially the difficulty of distinguishing between dramatic monologue and “lyric” statement means that the shapes of these changes aren’t as clear as they are in the cases of other poets. But, looked at as a whole, there is clearly an “early” period made up of her first three books: The Division of Anger (1980), Manners of an Astronaut (1984) and The Last Interior (1986). The poems of these books, difficult as they are to summarize, seem built around inner-city relationship politics. As the title of the first book suggests, the authorial position is inclined to be angry, though ”rage” may be a more technically correct term than “anger”. My favourite line – which captures this perfectly – comes from “By Water”: “I want to throw up. Where do they make those people?”

At first you think there might be a model in those series of portrait poems that try to map an ethos: sequences like Pound’s “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly” or Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology. But Ryan’s poems are made more complicated by a surreal cast and by the reader’s difficulty in separating lyric from dramatic monologue from “ironic portrait”. Who is the speaker of the opening of “Armistice”?

His dishonour fractures at the messy gate.
It clinks like betrayal. You couldn’t give a damn.
Define anger, and I’ll tell you how I feel,
saying it as a liturgy into the massive aerodrome of days. . .

Or of the opening of “All Over Like a Prelude”?

You with your shining emotional hair.
He’s off to the disco, wow, get fucked by a man.
It’s Friday isn’t it. This is the itinerary he says,
one more shot, and we’re heroes.
What’s your clever story? I’m gullible as a lake,
glassy and no kids. It’s still love.

Kick. It’s your dead and doped-up brain
nothing matters to. Here in the land of the sublime,
we’ll roar tears. . .

What the poems of these books teach their readers, I think, is that we need to suspend the usual desire to ferret out the poet’s stake in the action and instead to see them as a continuing kaleidoscope of dramatic portraits animated by an almost disengaged rage. The more you read early Ryan, the more interesting the short, pamphlet book, The Last Interior seems because it is made up of a long series of truncated portrait pieces. It is a book I have read a number of times without feeling confident about the principles behind its construction, while being perfectly sure that it is not at all random. I used to imagine that John Tranter’s “Red Movie” might be a model because it is composed of fragmentary portraits but in that sequence the structure is a very conscious “field” which means that the reader is required to abstract the portraits. You couldn’t imagine doing that in Ryan’s case since the emotional involvement prevents abstraction and the last two sections (a series of elegies and a set of portraits) are moving to the point of being harrowing. Coolness is not the tone of any of these poems or an acceptable environment. How distanced the author is from her own rage is going to remain an imponderable until someone writes about this poet and her poetry from a more knowing position than I do.

The best known of these early poems is “If I Had a Gun” which was always going to be a good anthology piece. In fact, as I can testify, it is a wonderful teaching poem. Students’ initial responses range from “Good on her” to “Can you say that? Isn’t that a hate crime?” and, of course, you get to run through all kinds of framing devices including dramatic monologue (ironic or otherwise), conscious or unconscious humour, irony, hyperbole etc etc. But the crucial thing is that in its surface clarity it is not at all a typical early Ryan poem.

Reading Excavation (1990) is a very different experience and this selection helps readers with that fact by shifting “On First Looking into Fairfax’s Herald” to the beginning of the poems selected from this book. It and the second poem, “1965”, look outwards to a far wider world than the inner-city suburbs of Sydney or Melbourne. And as they look out, so their techniques are different. “On First Looking into Fairfax’s Herald” is like a slightly surreal collage of news items from the Sydney Morning Herald and “1965” (“The river winding red and green with corpses / She told me / They stood them on the banks / and shot them. . .”) is about Indonesia’s year of living dangerously. These are brave poems and one can’t imagine Ryan comfortably entering an environment more suited to Bruce Dawe. I don’t think they’re successful but they are successful in remaining true to Ryan’s idiom:

. . . . .
The millions of Opposition glues powerlessly together
This President? Tin.
Crying
out of earshot
The thick rivers. we parcel in our heads.
Whispering.
in Indonesia in 1965

But one wouldn’t want to make any crass generalisations about a new, open and outwardly turned style. The fifth poem in the book, “Chorus”, is as dense and challenging as anything in Ryan’s work:

1
I wake up without deception
a phone chatters off the hook
Wrapped in silence
the climbing yellow moon
Your parties never get delivered
He skates backwards
I retrieve
darkness and clearness
the flaming roses
What I said a sham
Your door waking the street

2
Already left.
Their talking scatters meaninglessly around the table.
It trinkets back behind the head
The head comes into view with its death-weight,
its torpor . . . . .

But the fact remains that although there are poems like “Chorus” as well as portrait poems and monologues about drug culture, there are still, in Excavation, a whole set of poems that face the sort of “contemporary issues” which are experienced by watching TV news or by reading Fairfax’s Herald.

This Selected Poems includes thirty-seven poems from Ryan’s next book, Pure and Applied, a high rate of retention which confirms that the author thinks that it is her own best book. I think it is, too. For a start it seems a more open-textured book, getting its power not by compression but by variety. It has portrait poems and monologues as the earlier books do including “Last Class”, the monologue of an academic giving his last class which, almost miraculously in Ryan’s work, could conceivably be written by someone else. It also has some very fine examples of monologues which are collections of its subjects’ (and victims’) actual speech, like “At the Laundromat”, “London Saver” and “Interest Rates”. Because these are subject to Ryan’s disjunctive style, they can be much more powerful than their mode (the irony of self-revelation) usually lets them be. “Eating Vietnamese” is a fine example:

“I’ve got a lot of doubts but he’s so considerate
I’m looking for a psych
to work through. He’s digital
where I’m a klutz, but living out of bags
was just too gross, scatting home to change
and then work
I’m trying to get him to smooth the place
You should stay too. The country’s lush
I want to hammer on my own for once
This restaurant’s divine They’re refugees
Asians are beautiful don’t you think, quite hairless
She wore apricot chiffon There were kids everywhere
So demanding. Am I missing?
I guess you’re going to soon
These places make me horny
It’s honest to see the way they kill”

This poem exploits one of Ryan’s strengths which is her capacity to record women speaking of the general malaise of their relationships but ultimately self-revelation is more damning than the kind of authorial contempt for both partners in the relationship that one finds in the earlier poems. This method also lies behind two poems about China, “One Hundred Flowers” and “Winged Victory” both of which mimic the propaganda-speak of the Chinese government, the former over the Tiananmen Square massacre and the latter over labour relations behind the great Chinese export drive.

Also in Pure and Applied are, for the first time as far as I can see, poems of travel: to London, Rome and other stops. These are strong poems and at no point mere poetic travel journalism. The distinctiveness of style means that we are a long way from tourist brochures or even critiques of tourist brochures. “Travellers from the New World” does seem a fairly light comical representation (“An American to the husband ”˜You do the outside I’ll go in’”) but others like “Voyage” (“Bitterness and rancour lathe inside / the heart’s bowled walls . . .”) and “Forfeit” (“Unreal world I see from the cave with opinion, change and decay / and then the blinding forms”) are complex and quite disorienting.

One is always drawn to any poem which is simultaneously the first poem of a book and its title poem. Readers are always searching for a poem-poem, something that might help them learn to read an author’s poems. I can’t find such a poem in Ryan’s work but for a long time I thought that the title poem of Pure and Applied might be one. I had assumed that it referred to the poems’ opening out into political issues and experiences of cultures other than inner-city Australian ones, admitting that this movement might be something akin to “applied” poetry. When the book was published, I’d thought that the drift of the title was disjunctive, establishing two kinds of poetry: “pure” poetry and “applied” poetry. Revisiting this book, I realise that I was probably misreading the intention. It is a conjunctive title, affirming that it is poetry which is both pure and applied. Unfortunately the title poem is not a nice analytical piece lecturing about the two terms. It is a five-part poem about public media and I’m inclined to read the fact that the five parts are in different styles that we meet elsewhere in Ryan’s work as making some kind of statement about poetry. The final part, for example, is one of the monologues of collections of speech that I’ve already spoken about. The third part is a representation of reality as mediated through the Age’s “Good Weekend” (“The sheets wind milky green . . .”) and the second part records the numbing experience of television watching (“Politicians nod like priests / You slip in the crowded chair like 3 million others . . .”). But the first poem is something else:

The channel caves in his hand like a weak cushion
as news reads the screen
and curved along its poverty, a reflecting and equivalent desert
occupies geometry
which devalues each tincture my chatelaine
which people vacancy
like today’s harping and the litmus of his hair.

It’s hard to get this poem out of your head (where does “my chatelaine” come from?) but I have always read it as an analysis of television as a McLuhanish medium. Thus it is tempting to see it as being about the “purer” end of analysis which will somehow be joined with the “applied” – the representation of the experience of being exposed to the medium – to make a potent poetry. I’m not sure these hopes have survived a rereading of Ryan’s work but, as I’ll show later, they do resonate with other binaries.

What strikes one about Heroic Money (2001) and the new poems in this Selected is that although they continue the outward-, macro-looking view of parts of Pure and Applied (they are perhaps more interested in the mechanics of capital rather than the structures of culture) they never forsake the basic dense, disjunctive style of Ryan at her best. There are no simple portraits like “Eating Vietnamese” and certainly nothing like “Last Class”. True, the titles like “Rameses”, “Eurydice’s Suburb”, “Mary Wollstonecraft”, “Cosima Wagner’s Book of the Dead”, “Tchaikovsky in Italy” promise external cultural reference points that the reader thinks will be a help, but the poems themselves remain very dense. Take, for example, the opening lines of the innocently named “Iphigenia”:

Ships slinged in low elastic waters knock
who chug you to the altar
where old blood crumbles.
Orange fire tassels air.
You look out from the coast

back when twisting horses rise . . .
and clay figurines scout on your shelves
or back, lost geraniums shimmered August
and then expunge, then 'fluey tenants later, then tied between two screens
your binary presence more real than soft dawn
when ritual tatters
and reversible names converse over the galloping maps.
. . . . .

One doesn’t want to use words like “accessibility” because they are inclined to beg the question, but there are more approachable poems in Pure and Applied, especially in the scathing portraits of the Prime Minister and President (“Two Leaders”) and the Chinese monologue poems. Heroic Money and these new poems seem a retreat to a stronger, purer but less approachable style (though “Kangaroo and Emu” might be something of a partial exception).

“Purer”, of course, raises the issue of the extent to which this “pure” and “applied” binary (or conjunction) has any value in finding a way for a reader to get more satisfactorily under the skin of this challenging idiom. You do begin to see pairs. In Pure and Applied, “Interest Rates” is matched by “Exchange Rates” and in Heroic Money “Critique of Pure Reason” is closely and suggestively followed by “Critique of Practical Reason”. And then there are pairings like “Ismene” and “Antigone” and poems which are imagined conversations like “Electra to Clytemnestra” and “Ismene to Antigone” (in Heroic Money). I’d hoped that such poems might preserve this “pure” and “applied” dichotomy since the Electras and Antigones of the Attic Greek world are nothing if not pure and their characters convey all the issues that arise from obsession and moral correctness balanced against the more pragmatic characters like Ismene, Chrysothemis, Orestes and Clytemnestra. But if this is what is intended in these poems, it isn’t easy to see.

So the double perspective of describing the features of the “style” and impressionistically trying to sense changes in theme and approach over Ryan’s entire work don’t serve criticism very well. I am confident enough about Ryan’s status to feel that this is a critical failure on my part (though a very enjoyable and intellectually demanding process) and, like anyone in this situation, I would like to shift the blame a little. It’s a matter of critical desiderata. Ryan’s work makes crystal clear that what is needed is critical, biographical and poem-centred work on this poet that will begin to give readers a better sense of what happens when she writes and what editing processes go on in the writing. Ideally, I am thinking of something like the interview with John Forbes in which he speaks at length about “Four Heads and How to Do Them”. Even something as crude as a list of the poems which she herself thinks are her best would be a starting point (though it could be said that this is exactly what a Selected Poems like this does). At any rate, readers need more detailed critical assistance from people who are positioned so that they have an intimate sense of how these fascinating poems try to go about their poetic business.

 

 

Jaya Savige: Surface to Air

St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2011, 78pp.

Jaya Savige’s first book, Latecomers (2005) began with a longish poem about the sea. In it a dead beetle floats, holding on to the serrated edge of a charred banksia leaf, and the poem goes on to make quite a bit out of this, investigating the idea of drifting at the mercy of the winds and tides of the world, hanging on, in death, to something that fits with us:

for, what we seek to hold to

when the world has
loosed its hold on us

may be what prevents us
from never having been . . .

It’s a bleak poem registering the infinitely small “tiny fires” of each individual against the massive and impersonal forces of the sea. And its first words – “I have come to expect / too much of the ocean” – is a reminder that we shouldn’t think of ourselves as especially favoured by the cosmos. And throughout Latecomers there are poems in a range of modes that are about Savige’s mother and her shockingly untimely death. You sense, in the variety, that there is a continuous revisiting of a wound each time with a different poetic configuration as though Savige were trying poetry out to see if it could assuage the pain.

This second book, Surface to Air, also begins with a poem about the sea. Although it looks a very different poem to the one in Latecomers – instead of being a single meditative arc it is a set of brief lyric sections blending description and statement – there is no doubt that it is intended to recall the earlier poem, especially in the section which begins:

Impossible to resist
the littoral drift,
stay steadfast in the swash

And, like that poem, it is designed to act as a kind of entrance-way to the book as a whole. They are different poems, though, in that the former is, for all its large statements, a mood piece whereas the latter is very much about the issue of leaving behind the sand island of the title and its concomitant domestic responsibilities. Surprisingly most of the images are not about lateral movements but rather about depths. But more of this opposition later.

It’s hard to count “Sand Island” as a success – there is something stagey about its “I have to go” quality – and it may well be that poetry (or Savige’s poetry) simply isn’t good at airing and resolving dilemmas. Almost immediately in Surface to Air we meet something poetry is good at doing: celebrating the moments of peace or bliss in the destructive tidal swirls of entropy:

A serene riot of bees, a pollen air,
one by one they zero in
on the bougainvillea. Our backyard god’s
a giant fig, downloading
gigs of shade onto the fresh cut grass.
Under the house, your summer dress
pegged by the shoulders
approaches and ebbs, a tidal apparition.
Pause on the back steps, Mona Lisa tea-
towel flung over your shoulder . . .
. . . . .
To not spill this thimbleful of stillness.
Soon we will return to the impossible
puzzle of light, cut by hot
oscilloscopes. Even now the crisp
silhouette of a crow sharpens itself
upon the rusting apex of the hill’s hoist,
caws, cocks for an answer. This time
we let it ring out, a black cell
buzzing across the dresser
when we are both undressed.

As usual with fine lyrics like this, there is a lot more going on than is apparent at a casual reading. In fact, when I try to come up with single description that might serve for Savige’s poems, I’m left with the word, “hardworking”. These are all very hardworking poems. At one level this might be no more than a lot of punning which manages to lace the different levels of the poems together tightly. In the poem quoted above there is a lot of weight on that strange noun, “dresser”. The sinister call of the crow, inevitably associated with death, is like a cell-phone call which lovers, who are, in Slesssor’s phrase, “out of time”, can ignore. Savige is an habitual punster and has an eye for odd words and phrases which have entered with a new technology (like “cell”) and have quickly become dead metaphors whose oddness is barely registered. An entire six-part poem, “The Minutes” is built out of mercantile/sexual puns (“She chooses / the rollover option // to minimize the risk / on her investment. // He’s just glad she’s / not losing interest”). Though the result might seem no more than clever, the epigraph from Auden “where executives would never want to tamper” suggests that this set of puns may be excused because it sets itself the nobler task of exploring relationships (at a verbal level) between money, eroticism and poetry. We also meet this punning on recent idioms in a poem attacking the mistreatment of asylum seekers. “Dead Air” celebrates the protest of Merlin Luck who, when evicted from an early series of Big Brother turned up for his interview with his mouth taped shut. The poem finishes:

The gobsmacked host
couldn’t turn to grist

Your expensive silence,
mute shout out to those
like you, we locked up
then voted off the show.

(The issue of refugees and asylum seekers, guests and invaders appears also in a fine poem, “Xenia”, deriving from Zeus’s title as “Xeinios” – “guardian of guests”:

. . . . . 
Having lost the bet with Poseidon

You’d hope for Xenia, the first safety net.
You’d think its merits were self-evident,
even in a place of endless dust.
But if one never thinks himself a guest

In a strange land, how might he intuit
the economy of hospitality?)

But the most striking way in which these poems work hard is in their remorseless intertextuality. Savige is very well read, especially in Latin and in modern Australian poetry, and the poems are packed with allusions. The first line of the poem I have quoted, for example, has a little joke that hovers between pun and allusion when the phrase “a pollen air” sounds out the name of the great French poet. The Mona Lisa tea-towel recalls a poem by Nigel Roberts and, even more weirdly, the phrase “zero in” in the second line reminds me of another poem from Latecomers where the island is the site of a WWII exercise and the first line is, “They thought our Wirraways were Zeros” (which also puns on the words “zero” in its cant sense of “worthless”). Of course, this may be drawing a long bow (to use a cliche which itself invites a whole host of metaphorical extensions!) but my excuse would always be that Savige’s poetry does this sort of thing, even to the most innocent of critics. Sometimes the allusions seem little more than contingencies – the Mona Lisa tea-towel, for example, or the echo of Bruce Dawe when the children at the Riverfire festival in Brisbane are “hoisted / high on shoulders”, or the quoting of the last line of Dransfield’s “Epiderm” – but on other occasions they are far more structural.

“Circular Breathing”, for example, is a fine poem – one of a series about visiting Italy – and in it Savige stumbles across a man playing a didgeridoo in Rome near the great church of Santa Maria. (Its title suggests more than the breathing technique of a didgeridoo player since the idea of breathing, of coming up for air, is found throughout this book.) Inevitably the situation leads to a lot of meditative material about topics as far apart as cultural dislocation and religion. In my reading of the poem, the poet wants to see the conventionally venerable Catholic church as a johnny-come-lately from the perspective of Aboriginal traditions while registering that those traditions are not ones which, as a white Australian, he comfortably inhabits. At any rate, the significant point for my description of this book is that the poem is structured in a way that is designed to recall Les Murray’s “An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow” (“There’s a fellow crying in Martin Place. They can’t stop him”) from its opening lines, “There’s a man with dreadlocks playing the didgeridoo / in the Piazza di Santa Maria, and everyone is listening” on. As is so common with allusions, one isn’t sure how far to take this. It’s tempting to remind oneself of Murray’s catholicism and see “Circular Breathing” as a kind of displacement of Murray’s famous poem so that what was the uncanny appearance of true religious expression in the setting of a superficial, mercantile and godless city suddenly becomes the expression of a far older religious tradition in the context of a comparatively (in terms of age) recent religion. As so often with allusions and borrowings which are more than passing gestures, a reader finds that he or she is asking whether this is a homage, an extension, an engagement or a rebuff.

“On Raphael’s Triumph of Galatea“, “Any glossy ad for cheap call rates / could match this shot: a sixteenth-century // Paris Hilton, statuesque on a jet ski . . .” clearly derives from John Forbes’s great “On Tiepolo’s Banquet of Cleopatra“, “Any frayed waiting room copy of Who / could catch this scene . . .” but the exact nature of the relationship between the poems isn’t entirely clear. It isn’t a Tranter-like rewriting, it isn’t an ironic updating and it’s in no way a critique. I’m left with the feeling that it is a homage without an ulterior motive, but one would have to say that the Forbes poem with its unforgettable conclusion is the better of the two. A line from Forbes’s “Stalin’s Holidays” (“juniper berries bloom in the heat”) also appears, transformed, in “Missile” as “Arabic numerals bloom on the dash”. And then there is “Stranded”:

Bailing you out
like Angela Merkel.

Keeping you grounded
like Eyjafjallajokull.

There’s not much doubt that this wants to be read as a homage to Laurie Duggan, mimicking his sharp social eye linked with his sensitivity to the double meanings of words like “grounded” to produce a short and sharp comic piece.

And, finally, on this subject, there is “Dransfield in Bavaria” where the allusions are complex. It is made up of six six-line poems forming a kind of travelogue devoted to Germany. The second poem contains the kind of knowing contemporary pun that I spoke of before when the sight of an “eviscerated swan” is followed by “fox news”. On the surface, the allusions to Eliot’s “The Wasteland” (“Munich’s cold slap shocked us” and “All-you-can-eat sushi surprised us / over the Starnbergersee”) are more obvious than those to Dransfield but I think that the poem is constructed to put Bavaria alongside the addict’s frozen waste from “Bum’s Rush”. Its last poem actually addresses Dransfield and finishes up engaging Dransfield’s Courland Penders dreams of rural aristocracy:

To quit heroin you have to leave the country,
the novelist says with a wink.

I wonder what you would have made
of Europe. What I’d have made of junk.

I guess I’ve never truly understood
the romance of those ruins of the blood.

Perhaps the intriguing complexities of high density allusiveness are best seen in “Deciduous” describing a cold climate (its opening line is “Maple leaves like rebel angels waken”) as a way of treating the sight of kids playing in the park. These children, frolicking with the fallen leaves are “laughing in the mulch / not seeing themselves much in the compost, / their own rough touchdown forgotten”. Why existence should be configured as a continuous fall – almost on the Neoplatonist model – I’m not sure but it reintroduces the theme in the book of horizontal travel (for example, leaving Bribie Island or going to New Zealand, Italy or Bavaria or travelling home in a car in a journey that becomes a voyage to Aldebaran) contrasted with vertical (falling to earth, diving, exploring the levels of sea bed, surface and air, coming up for air, entering the unconscious). Finally (in this analysis that reveals how shaky my grasp on this poem is) it makes allusions to computer terms – “phoenix”, “fire fox” – and looks remarkably like a poem that appears a few pages before called “Desuetude” with which it shares a remarkably similar title. That poem, like “Deciduous”, has a downbeat tone and is about the poet’s attempt to write a poem:

. . . . . 
      And when all else 
fails, he picks any other bright tidbit
at random: the planet-sized diamond, say,
dead star just discovered in Alpha Centauri.
. . .  . .
       so that even now, he sits
to write a well-made poem for you,
with words that flare a moment before they
die, like flecks of magnesium when lit,
but he has fallen out of the habit.

There is, of course, a whole genre of poems about the inability to write a poem and “Desuetude” is, at least, an honourable addition.

Finally there are three poems about the poet’s dead mother. One, “The Pain Switch” deals with the moment of death and is very raw for both poet and reader. The other, “Duende”, is brilliant. It is a sonnet and the spirit of the title is the dead mother’s voice, suddenly and clearly heard as an “urgent reprimand, maternal” at bedtime, “that liminal space, lamp off, / day’s bright splinter almost extracted”. It finishes with a grotesque and wonderful image:

How I wanted to demolish that wall,
retrieve the warm bubble of your breath.
How I shuddered like a bulldozer in winter.

It might be too much to map the growth in Savige’s poetry by comparing how good “Skin Repair”, “The Pain Switch” and “Duende” are compared with similar attempts in Latecomers to deal with this painful event, but there is no doubt that these poems are fine achievements. They seem to avoid the punning and the allusions although “Skin Repair” has the sort of conceptual slipperiness that often appears in Adamson’s poetry where divisions between subject and metaphor are kept deliberately vague.

 

 

Benjamin Frater: 6am in the Universe: Selected Poems

Wollongong: Grand Parade Poets, 2011, 140pp.

When a new publisher begins with two books, one of which is a posthumous selected, you are inclined to think of The Winter’s Tale’s, “Thou metst with things dying, I with things newborn”. But there are no tints of the autumnal in Frater’s book, any more than there are in its companion, Pete Spence’s Perrier Fever. Frater died in 2007 in his late twenties and his book is a young man’s book dominated by manic energy and manic creativity – there is nothing “composed” or even merely “lively” about it.

I want to begin describing it by taking polite issue with the otherwise useful Afterword by Tim Cahill which itself begins by trying to place Frater in an Australian poetic tradition and deciding that this cannot be done since his “tradition was one that he himself defined as a ”˜visionary poetics’: William Blake, Antonin Artaud and Allen Ginsberg . . .” I think this puts the cart before the horse when it comes to description. What matters first is what generates the poems – correctly described here as a “visionary poetics” – what matters least is where such a generative praxis leaves a poet on the various imaginary maps of Australian poetry. It is hard to think that any poet of any worth would begin by locating his- or herself nationally though, it is true, many have, early on, wanted to change the direction of their national literature. At any rate, almost by definition, a visionary poetics is going to be trans-national, tapping in to elements that appear in all the manifestations of poetic creativity. In some cultures such a poetics will be transgressive while in others it might be quite normative.

This is all very abstract and I should begin with the poems rather than issues like this, though what follows is no more than a set of provisional and tentative responses. 6am in the Universe begins with three poems from an earlier chapbook, Bughouse Meat. The first two seem surreal explorations of experiences under psychiatric care (in “the bughouse”) in a state of internal chaos – “Magog and Gog and Moloch inside / Megiddo is the body, the body is Megiddo” – producing a poetry which “is still considered / ‘untherapeutic’”. But these poems are of a piece with the latter, more ambitious “Ourizen” in that they share the same general, poetico-philosophical position, they include the references which regularly reappear later (the “subaqueous”, the “marineric” and the little totem of the Yak) and they have, at a deeper level, a weird interest in inversions. The pattern of “Megiddo is the body, the body is Megiddo” may be only syntactic but the second poem begins with the epigraph, “the wheel / is only the shadow / of the spider” which ties in with what seems like a typically visionary reversion of the usual order (though I can’t profess any great competence with this) so that the spirit world of the shadow has primacy over the physical world. One thinks of Plato’s “Time is the moving image of eternity” as something crudely parallel. At any rate, one of these inversions becomes a powerful generative device in the third poem, “The Argument”, whose title surely refers to the Eighteenth century use of the term as a compressed laying-out of the elements which will make up a longer work. “The Argument” begins with another epigraph built around an inversion, “the dreamer who butchered his arm to challenge his reality, / now butchers his reality to challenge his arm”. What follows is a four-page set of statements in which the repeated subject – “my forearm” – gets a free set of highly imagined predicates:

. . . . .
My forearm is a Nocturnal ballad of hieroglyphs,
              a battered-birdwing
              a supplicatory of bleeding ghosts,
              the end of a lion’s tyranny,
              an ancient Crocodile skull,
              the nightmare of and war of Spring,
              a Catholic Yak’s exorcism,
My forearm is our Golden fingerless child
              a piece of Apocalyptic debris,
My forearm has closed eyelids,
              is an Anti-american-warcraft . . .

6am in the Universe contains in a slip inside the back cover a CD with a number of readings by the author. This is one of the poems readers can see performed and it is quite a performance. It works, it seems to me, not because of its manic energy (that comes from mania and has no necessary connection with poetry) nor even from its apparently endless fertility (though that is a point where creativity and mania intersect) but rather because it has a paradoxically rational core, expressed in its epigraph. It is a manic set of images where the repetitive structure is attractive because there is a reason behind it. Its true ancestor is thus not Blake or even Ginsberg’s “Howl” but something like Christopher Smart’s “Jubilate Agno” where the celebrated celebrations of his cat Jeoffry are repetitive and manic but also logical in that they are expressions of praise for the natural world and its creator.

The major part of this book is the large section “Ourizen” whose title presumably was derived by eliding Blake’s “O Urizen”. Tim Cahill gives a useful description of the way in which Frater had planned this as part of a larger structure “Prey Hotel”. Just as “The Argument” was underpinned by a rational position, so “Ourizen” has a tight and logical structure. It begins with “The Repossession of the Sacrarium” which is about (a very loose word to use in this context!) what might be called “taking back the world” (or, for that matter, “re-establishing the divine”), asserting the infinite (and despising the measurers) and asserting the central power of creativity. This is very Blakean and overtly so since the third section invokes Blake’s Rintrah to curse all of Blake’s familiar enemies:

. . . . .

RINTRAH! who shook me from my skull, woke
me up, pulled me from the funeral of reason
and made me stare into the sunburst
light of imagination till my pupils wept tiny
         blood tears, sick with too much truth
RINTRAH! reveal your creations
         unveil your sweet tortures of Locke
as warning for any other ignorant empiricist
         who attempts to confine the dagger
of imagination with a weak and futile sheath
. . . . .
RINTRAH! for Einstein and Newton, gray
masters who named and covered themselves in
the
         tiny non-mental realities
         that are not realities at all!
. . . .

The next, large section is called “HAYZ” and is built, interestingly, around the four letters of the title. The first part, “hermeneutic” (also available in performance on the CD) is constructed out of words sharing the same initial letter. Its concluding lines will give some idea of it:

             harlequin
of
hari-kiri-huns
      on hell-bound-hog-skin-
hoars
herded and hoarded for
          the harvest of Hendrix;
a hallucinogenic greek sun god.

                                           Ha!

The Greek sun-god is, of course, Helios and the omission of his name is a nice way of signalling a climax. But what interests me about “hermeneutic” is that it works not by obsessive repetition and variation like “The Argument” or “The Repossession of the Sacrarium” but by obsessive accretion.

The other three letter-based sections – Arculation, Yek and Zod – are altogether more complex. “Arculation” is built around an accretion of words beginning with “a” but they are thinner than in “hermeneutic” and their continual re-appearance and play gradually pushes a complex of arc/ach/ark into prominence. “Yek” is a three-part nightmare poem that seems closer to the Bughouse Meat poems with its vision of the body distorted by a psychotic episode. It is here that the recurring images of underwater and inversion come into some kind of focus as it begins with an “apocalyptic Marineric Holocaust where the earth / wonderfully stands on its own head, / – the sky become an aquatic floor”. In this physical inversion into a “marineric” universe, the poor victim finds eels inside his body:

the eels of his body bit and gnawed
at the sinew and bone, he wailed
the eels of his body swam into his skull
and nestled in the folds of his brain
he wept and cursed the soft madness.

The second section seems to observe this victim from an external perspective, “I watched him prowl from foaming EmeraldYoke” before enacting a kind of creative rebirth sponsored by the magical letters of yek:

MARCH ON! off the shore of hair
                         into the mainland of Imagination!
                         YEKian infantry on the beach
                         caressed by unordinary Lime Sunset.

The final part of this section is a repeated celebration of this YEKian transformation and war against both reason and “the tyranny of psychiatry” while “Zod” is an examination of “zero” in the sense of the nothingness of the self which has exploded into imagination. There seems a strong influence of Artaud’s “To Have Done with the Judgement of God” here. The idea that nothingness and infinity are connected as a kind of reverse of the Big Bang – though the poems never use this image – is an intriguing one and poetically valuable because at all points the elaboration of the various forms of zero can also be the realm of the imagination in which all things are possible where, as Blake says, anything possible to be believed can be the image of the truth. Thus we get such delicious moments as:

Before god there was nothing
Before god there was Zer0

and Zoro
             is Zod
and Zod is the space where Tchaikovsky and
John Wayne
waltz
where Siberian buttons burn . . .

The last fifty-odd pages of 6am in the Universe are a section called “Ourizen” confusingly so since the entire body of poems beginning with “The Repossession of the Sacrarium” is also called “Ourizen” but one can understand the problems of the editors dealing with posthumous material. At any rate this second “Ourizen” is a unity in itself, beginning with poems of distorted autobiography and finishing (where else?) in apocalypse. Perhaps the idea behind the larger “Ourizen” is that this quite coherent pattern should be introduced by poems which affirm the triumph of creativity over the forces which oppose it (reason, psychiatry) and thus prepare the way for the second “Ourizen”.

At any rate this long, final section of the book begins with autobiography as Frater produces a history of his childhood in the South West of Sydney – though it is a history with a strong surreal cast. Whereas the idea of being underwater seems to connote the psychotic experience in the earlier poems, here the obsessive image is of green (appearing also as Emerald, Uaine) presumably derived from the tendency of those Sydney suburbs to use the word “green” in their parks, pubs and motels. The second part of this introductory section (which begins at “This Eve’s bait”) introduces the double image of the minotaur and matador and sets up, as the self’s agon, necessary before the poet can emerge into achievement, the conflict between the poet/son (the matador) and the various incarnations of father (the minotaur in the labyrinth). In the middle of this is a lengthy section of comparatively straightforward autobiography where:

My wallet has become
                                        a small leather directory of
mental health
and I chant Celtic mantra
                                                  through Centrelink . . .

And the poet is rescued by a “saintly social / worker / waist deep . . . in the / shit camp / of / a belltown / Campbelltown / my hometown”. Fairly soon (though I am unable to make much sense of the battles which generate it) we enter the world of apocalypse which makes up the sequence’s climax. Though the stock of images is familiar – and it is highly visual – there is nothing cliched about it especially in passages like:

“lavayah lavayah” scream the pistons of heaven
inverted mushrooming fist of GOD stretched out
                    of the sky, brilliant
          firelight of ruin, heavenly annihilation
     (littleboy and fatman were pomegranates)
                   torch the earth! . . .

I sense, though I can neither test nor justify it, that there is something a little contrived in this so that it makes a satisfying dramatic conclusion. It is inevitable that someone as talented as Frater would search for a narrative pattern that would lead from the impasse of psychotic trauma into some kind of satisfying closure but I feel that it has a provisional, slightly imposed quality about it and may have been subject to radical alterations as the writing went on.

What, finally, is to be made of 6am in the Universe? Is it a new path that Australian poetry might have taken or is it a therapeutic rave that shouldn’t have left the psychiatrist’s file? Well certainly not the latter since there is so much poetic creativity and achievement within it, not to mention pain and joy (though they are human, not poetic, categories). It can’t, also, be categorized as Outsider Art, though, even if it could, that category is so complex and conflicted that it doesn’t really have much value. Outsider Art (the important journal RAW appears in the poems so Frater was well aware of its existence as a category) seems to be driven by manic obsession and, to my outsider’s eye at least, only resists becoming boring when the viewer senses the frightening energy behind it. Frater’s poetry is rarely boring.

Better to adopt Frater’s own perspective, I think, and speak in terms of a “visionary poetics”. The only difficulty is that those two words cover a multitude of practices and beliefs. Blake, for example, who is obviously, for Frater, a major figure (together with Artaud and Ginsberg) seems to me never to be manic. We might think of him as delusional but his life was not one which fought continually against the psychotic. On the other hand there have been many writers whose lives have been marred by psychosis (think of Lowell) who have never espoused a visionary poetics. At the same time, many of those who have fought against any kind of restriction – social or poetic – have not done so under the banner of the infinite and the “YEKian infantry” of the imagination. Visionary poetics is also a solitary path (despite the existence of mentors in the past) and, though Blake, say, had followers, he didn’t immediately alter the paths of poetry in English (much to his own frustration). He has remained a kind of resource for later poets who have wrestled with their own drive towards celebrating the infinite. So we can probably dispense with the idea that 6am in the Universe will change irrevocably and immediately the direction of Australian poetry. More likely it is a book that will continue to retain an important resonance for some poets in the future: and that is quite an achievement. There is, of course, a certain paradox in the fact that this poetry, for which one wants to use words like “surreal” and “manic”, is made valuable by its sanity and the sanity of its thinking about its own project. This to the idea that much of this thinking may well have been encouraged by the two-part structure of Creative Writing Programs whereby students are obliged to produce a critical essay relating to their own practice. I think Frater was very lucky in his choice of teachers at the University of Wollongong. It is significant that the rage against institutions that we find in this poetry never extends to his immediate mentors. I have no idea to what extent Alan Wearne, John Hawke, John Scott and others contributed towards the rational component of his poetics, but that is the part which grounds the poetry and makes it more than a mere rave or endless repetitive celebration of “the infinite”. It is poetry that is is important to preserve largely because it wrestles so convincingly with questions about what poetry essentially is.

 

 

Barry Hill and John Wolseley: Lines for Birds: Poems and Paintings

Crawley: UWA Publishing, 2011, 224pp.

As someone whose natural habitat is probably a room filled with the books of a personal library, a true homo textualis (if that’s acceptable Latin), I am usually virtually blind to the outside world. Though I can recite passages of loved verse and prose I’m probably unable to describe the birds and trees on my suburban block. I’m not completely ashamed of this and I can always recall Bruce Beaver’s poem where he says “I can barely name six kinds of bird / and seven kinds of flower”. But it does mean that I am a sucker for anything that even momentarily takes me into the natural world and makes it alive to me. It is one of the things that makes the work of such disparate poets as Ken Taylor, Robert Adamson and Anthony Lawrence (to name only a few) very resonant. And so it’s no accident that I should find John Wolseley and Barry Hill’s book of paintings and poems especially satisfying. It is, for a start, a very beautiful book-as-object and simply handling its heavy, high-gloss pages – reminiscent, if anything, of an art catalogue – is a first step away from the more abstract world of text into the solidity of the world of art objects. Literary folk are often inclined to be snobbish about books like this, perhaps for fear that their magical text will be reduced to nothing more than captions for verbally-dull, artistic types. But here there is a happy meeting of text and image, a complex, evolving and fluctuating relationship between them.

Although it is a highly organised book – its sections are structured according to locations: Scrub Land, Wetlands and Shorelands, Forest, Marais and Maquis (set in southern France, visited by the artist), Mountain and River (set in Japan, visited by the poet) and a section called Return – there is nothing consistent or exhaustive in its treatment of the birds. In this sense it represents a response to birds rather than a cataloguing or exhaustive describing of them. And it is a good book of poetry (the only component that I am at all qualified to judge) exactly because the responses are complex and convincing. The introduction prepares us at least partly for this:

When a bird arrives, quite literally, into our space, it constitutes a burning moment in time, one which instantly seems to possess a memorable vibration. Birds have a natural, real presence. It is unqualified. That is their power. At the same time, their presence is constantly mediated by our culture, which sets off other vibrations, including spiritual ones.

I like the suggestive yet precise possibilities of this description. Birds come to us from the natural world, they are items in the natural world but are meshed in its complex, ecological webs. But our seeing of them is a product of the various cultures we inhabit, or are sympathetic to and so we bring to them our skills as artists or as merchants of text. Thus these poems are perhaps a series of responses, often from slightly conflicting cultural positions (it is, after all, a long way from the Sufism of Attar to Eastern Buddhism) to birds, paintings, music and even books. The poems are especially sensitive to the idea of entering and an important image is contained in “Which Way to the Golden Dam?” which begins: “To get to the golden dam / go through the English gate”. The gate is an English gate because we always enter significant ground from the direction of our own cultural backgrounds.

At one end of this spectrum of possibility for poems about birds are what might be called “poems of capture” where poetry sets out to “get” a bird into verse. As I’ve said in other reviews this is a fraught ambition for poetry – something revealed by the metaphors it induces – but it is something frequently aimed at and it does make sense to say that certain poems represent animals or trees better than others, either because they make us see familiar ones afresh or because they convey distinctive features that we have never really seen. You can find plenty of this in Lines for Birds. In “Mollyhawk”, for example, we get a series of blunt comparisons:

Thickset, swaggerer, a bull
 dog on the beach. Squat as a mollusc.
And with that prow of a beak -
 blood-tipped . . .

and, in “Cormorants Day and Night”, a sharply accurate visual rendition:

When it’s relaxed
 it has a yin-yang
 egg in its neck
On take-off
 the neck is stretched
 egg gulped down
as it leaves
 its mates to be
 a torpedo over mackerel sea -
the wings rudders
 to a quick hull in the dusk
 the neck so straight
 a pike could slip into it.
 . . . . .

A number of poems deal with this issue, especially “Nature Lovers” which, while sarcastically observing the troops of tourists with their Nikons and Hasselblads (“weaponry for capture”) also, in its epigraph, reminds us that earlier observers of the natural world like Wallace or Hudson, actually shot what they wanted to study. Poems like the two I have quoted above rely, of course, on metaphor and the poetic use of metaphor brings a lot of epistemological issues in its wake (to use a dead metaphor, not entirely inappropriate here!) since it could be said to compromise the absolute uniqueness of the subject. An interesting and important poem, “Like Nothing Else” takes up this issue by observing the subject, in this case a Gold-whiskered Barbet, emerging not only into visual definition from a fig tree but also from the nets of comparisons:

So innocent, so necessary, those leaves.
 So plump on green you can hardly say the word
 green. And the belly of the fig tree is Brahma’s
 its fruit legendary – ask anything flying past!
One leaf so content with itself it turns
 seems to fatten in its own compass
 it was bunched up like a rat
 (if there were such things as Leafrats)
When, really, it was just one of the Barbets.
 Leaf green in occupation of a spray
 its back a little hunched
 as it stretched its head like a rat.
. . . . .
Later on it gave its call. Cup Cup
 or more accurately the sound
 of empty cups being pulled, popped
 from the fat of someone’s back.
Further off Golden Throat did give its signal.
 More like castanets, someone said.
 But castanets with cup and pop in it-
 like nothing else, really, as fruit is fruit not a rat.

And this raises one of the most difficult representational issues for poets, artists and even camera-toting nature lovers: the fact that birdsong is one of the most significant features of any bird, as distinctive as its colouring or behaviour. Wolsely often acknowledges this fact by incorporating sonograms – which process the bird’s song into a graph – into his paintings. Hill is faced with the issue of processing them into words. Take “The Pied Butcher Bird’s Song for a Hammock”:

A phrase in the palm of the hand
           Notes delivered – there
           into a warm pocket of air
each note clean
           a reed sharp as the air -
           or a pool at a quiet billabong
the melody silky
           as smooth to the sky
           as the skin of a coolabah
the notes upholding and
           cradled by the morning’s heat
           Between them -
a rise, the
           throw of the next note
           It has the pause of a lasso
flicked out and then across -
           five notes
           sometimes six in a loop
 . . . . .

and so on. I don’t think the results are successful – this poem seems to have a very lame conclusion as though the effort of representing the song had exhausted it – but the aim is laudable. And there is, if not a model, at least a parallel case in Messiaen’s Catalogue d’oiseaux a deeply eccentric work of art that nevertheless can be said to be successful in what it attempts to do: to express by a solo piano individual birds and their contexts. The final poem of the Marais and Maquis section is an extended response by Hill (significantly, for any poem about birds, it has thirteen parts) to the Reed Warbler music of the extensive Book Seven of the Catalog d’oiseaux – “Tinklebell, tinklebell – / ice keys in a hedge / frost notes on a pond . . .” One of the ironies of my readings of Lines for Birds is that it sent me back to the Messiaen – which I had hitherto thought to be the most boring and ridiculous work in the whole of twentieth century music (where, even a devotee such as myself would have to admit, it has a lot of competitors) – to appreciate rather better what its aims and indisputable successes were. An odd response to a book which ought to have sent me outside looking at the local birdlife!

One of the most interesting poems about birdsound turns out to be the next poem in the book, though it is the first poem of the Mountain and River section. Here Hill writes about coming to grips with the song of the uguisu, the Japanese Bush-warbler. The focus is on the effect of the song on the observer, rather than on “capturing” it:

. . . . .
 I was looking and not seeing
 listening, feeling blind -
the uguisu’s presence was so strong -
 volcanic, terrifying in its own way
 you would have thought the melody
shot from a hot spring.
 Oh there was a beauty to it but
 beauty that was molten.
I peered – had to sit down,
 I failed to write it down (where was Messiaen?)
 My notes looked like the scratchings
of a rattled hen. The melody went on.
 The trill, like a machine gun, kept it alive.
 I was riddled with signs
I could not capture the song
 myself I could barely transcribe -
 implosions of mistranslation!
 . . . . .

Among the various puns here, especially about rifle fire (“riddled”, “rattled”), is the crucial word, “notes”. One could use this to go on to talk at greater length about the human, the cultural, the textual world and its engagement with the natural world but what strikes me here is the fact that this section of the book – Hill’s travels in Japan – is really part notebook, part letter and part imitation Japanese poetry (with interspersed prose sections). It reminds one of the great division between the poetry which aspires to be judged as a stand-alone construction of words and that which is really-worked over (or “-up”) journal entries. This latter poetry seeks to be judged by its success or otherwise in representing the natural world, of showing that its writer has, in the words of Rilke, learnt to see. The two different sorts of poems may sometimes be very similar but I think they are fundamentally different objects and demand to be judged in different ways. Like many of these poets, Hill is obviously a remorseless keeper of journals, not to record his own life but to record more of the impressions that result from that life’s interaction with the natural world than most of us register. He has also include some of his own drawings and quick sketches, which, together with the quickly jotted words, are an attempt to record, to fix impressions.

The religious element of the book seems to be, rather than doctrinaire, a comfortableness with any faith that responds to the natural world and to the “fullness” of that world. This means that Hill’s sensibility is generally Eastern, perhaps far-Eastern, finding sympathetic vibrations in Sufism, Shinto and Zen rather than in the European and Levantine religions of transcendental creator-gods. In the description of the way jacanas skip across lotus pads in “Sutra” he says, “It’s silly, the way we are surprised”, and in the next poem, “Truth”, based on Attar’s Conference of Birds, he speaks of the way in which the “silly” look of the hoopoe is “a form of wisdom”. But the best of these sorts of poems – ie those dealing with birds and their arrival as in some way religious events – is, I think, “Secular Streak”. Its subject is the Sacred Ibis, a bird with a resonant name but which most Australians know only as a scavenger and inhabitant of rubbish dumps. And that contrast is a significant part of the poem which describes its various arrivals. It certainly doesn’t come trailing clouds of glory although, after Shaw Neilson, the arrival of water birds is a kind of topos in Australian poetry. The poet shuts the door to prevent it scavenging inside: “Virtuous we were then / with nothing to give the bird – / both species hopeless”, but the best part of the poem is the deliciously equivocal conclusion arguing, as I read it, that there is a numinous but it is often hard to recognise, may well be rather scruffy, and certainly doesn’t simply declare itself:

The Sacred Ibis never says die.
 But it will pretend not to know you.
Next I saw it down the street
 by the side of the road
 outside the lolly shop.
It had the air of a former mayor
 going to buy the paper.
 The cars went slowly around it.
Any minute, I thought
 it’s going to step up on the footpath
 steal the tourists’ ice creams.
I walked towards the estuary.
 Follow me follow me, unbeliever -
 come down while the tide’s in.

The final and inevitable issue about poetry, painting and the natural world is the question of change. Birds are, obviously, not static, or even stable, markers of nature. They are subject to human stupidity and greed and to environmental changes. As the authors say eloquently in their introduction:

“We did not set out to compose a politically urgent book. But the shadow that falls upon the lives of many birds has, to some extent, made it so. The more we value a living thing the more we are unavoidably anguished at the idea of its extinction.”

And although the poems celebrate and explore, there is, undoubtedly, a shadow that falls over them and it can be seen or felt, at various places, emerging in the poems. One of the most prevalent is in the word “conference”. Attar’s great poem appears at many places throughout the book. It is a “conference” of birds in which the hoopoe (a bird that really does look silly, like Woody Woodpecker on steroids, but which bears a religious symbol on its crest) leads other birds in search of the mythical bird, the Simurgh, only for the birds to discover that, since they number thirty, they are thirty birds (in Persian, si-murgh) that is, God himself. But “conference” also, in Lines for Birds, refers to the failure of the protocols proposed at the Copenhagen Conference. A good example of one word resonantly expressing the best and the worst that the natural world can expect at the hands of its dominant species.

 

 

Elizabeth Campbell: Error

St Kilda: John Leonard Press, 2011, 60pp.

Error is Elizabeth Campbell’s second book and has at least this much in common with her first, the excellent Letter to the Tremulous Hand (2008), that each concludes with an extended set of poems devoted to a medieval mystery. In the first book, a ten poem sequence explores a host of issues – including poetic personality, the matter of copying, the act of entering imaginatively into the life of an historical personage – revolving around a medieval scribe/copyist who has escaped the customary anonymity because his handwriting is marked by a distinctive tremor. This new book, Error, concludes with a fifteen poem sequence devoted to the famous sequence of late fifteenth century tapestries, The Lady and the Unicorn. As with the former sequence there is a two-page introduction to establish the context. The sequence (which may, irritatingly, not be complete or in the correct order) is usually seen as being made up of five tapestries devoted to each of the senses and a final one in which the Lady at the centre of each prepares to enter a tent on which is written A Mon Seul Desir (most likely to be taken to mean “to my sole desire”). The sequence is most commonly interpreted to represent the lady’s gradual abandonment of the sensual world for the world of her true desire: philosophical and religious meditation. But it is an interpretation which is highly conjectural, doesn’t seem to fit with anything known of its noveaux-riche sponsors, and, by managing to get the individual tapestries titled after the relevant sense and order them the way it has, it supports itself in a circular way. At any rate, Campbell says, pointedly, at the end of her introduction: “I suspect all of this is more complex”.

Campbell’s sequence sees the tapestries as being about love – a complex phenomenon in any culture and at any time, but particularly elusive in the high medieval heraldic-allegorical tradition. And so she writes a poetic sequence about the different features of love, slotting in personal experience where it fits. The first poem, “Canso: toucher”, demonstrates this, but also the way in which “true” or “high” or “courtly” love is very much about identity and the way it is not only submerged in the loved-one but also reflected from the loved one:

I step off the round blue island
into the red sea and break a leg.
So you tend me

and I watch your face for clues
to what you stare into
so tenderly binding my leg:

what is this person

who loves you?

The Romance of the Rose of Guillame de Lorris, though two and a half centuries older than these tapestries, is probably the key text to these complicated issues of identity, but there is also the second act of Wagner’s Tristan (based on Gottfried’s poem which is more or less contemporaneous with the Romance), especially in the wonderful La Scala production where Waltraud Meier earnestly puzzles over words like “you, only, I, we, two” (to quote Campbell’s second poem) during the second act. “Love”, the final poem (in which the lady grows into a unicorn) says, is “holy envy”, though the servant who holds the case for the lady’s jewels tells her:

love itself is allegory – its fever
and its lion all costumes
of the mythic unicorn: a secret tithe.

These few glossed quotations will give some sense of what a difficult poem it is, and the difficulty of its central allegorical work of art is multiplied by the sequence’s freedom to mix personal experience in with it. But, ultimately, this is not simply an interpretive sequence and it is all the more interesting for that reason. Perhaps its final position is that love desires to become love and searches in the loved-one not for another self but for love. The lady’s tent is her inner self and, as the second poem says:

Myth we reject

turns inward – the selfless lover
loves no self in his other, loves only love, ends
folding on himself, ceremonial:

love’s mind loves
its own luminous terminology . . .

This technique of inhabiting existing myths isn’t reserved for the longer sequences. You can see it in “Ithaka”, one of the best poems in the book. The poem begins with Cavafy’s poem as though it were the embarkation point for its own mysterious voyage. Its first shift is to introduce the poet’s own situation – awake and mildly paranoid in a house not her own:

Lying alone unsleeping in this good house
that is not mine, the bright day gone to teeming night,
the thought-bark ground ashore again
. . . . .
                                        I lie awake and wait
for the batter at the door – sit up each time and look
as headlights crunch through trees,
three in two hours . . .

And then modulate into a fascinating study of poetic completeness, entirely logical given Cavafy’s theme in “Ithaka”, but unexpected nevertheless:

Sleep the safe journey, Ithaka arrival, waking.
An old, a respectable trick, I’ve done it,
this making a perfectly ended poem
that tells the reader “don’t waste
your time on endings”:

art as round and finished as the lives of the dead,
to celebrate the virtue of life’s unfinish.
. . . . .

I don’t know how critical Campbell wants to be of Cavafy (rather than herself at the moment when she catches herself “painting fakes”) but there is an inbuilt contradiction between the polish of Cavafy’s poems (not to mention their long gestation and delayed publication) and the theme that it is process not completion that matters. But I emphasise this to give an example of the distinctive way in which Campbell can make other fictions and myths her own: she neither yields to the story nor ruthlessly appropriates it, but makes a new story that seems to oscillate between the original and the private.

What might be called the “Ithaka principle” emerges at different places in other poems. A fine poem, “New Year’s”, describes the poet with two friends swimming before the “year’s turning” and meditating on what happiness is, whether it is something we find ourselves momentarily immersed in or whether it comes from a structured “good life” which is, however, built according to various templates,

. . . . .
one light among those that dot-to-dot
the improbable wilful constellation called
The Good Life, that is traced on other star-maps
as The Balance, The Empty Ship, The Maze
. . . . .

and an earlier poem, “Fireworks”, describes various people for whom the dream doubles as the fulfilment before, in a way that is very similar to “New Year’s”, describing three schoolgirls at an end of school fete towards the end of the millennium, walking at the edge of the oval where the fireworks (in a metaphor that anyone would recognise) are being prepared:

. . . . .
                    Three girls, sick on sweets

and their own secret metaphor – fireworks -
for the cuspy feeling that could be
hope or fear; the violent promises

beneath their words – "I will be" -: already
embarrassed by their own self-conscious ardour.
In the end they went home

before the first fuse, saw nothing.
The need was the feast, the promise itself the event.

There are many poems in Error which focus on process rather than abstraction and the chief interest of the small section devoted to Dante seems largely to revolve around the way in which, in Inferno, the souls are permanent, eternal expressions of their sins. Count Ugolino becomes:

                                             The damned dead by hunger
gnawing at the nape of the damned tormentor.

Stuck forever in the ice, in the pattern
of its own act like an Escher staircase
stubbornly moving going

nowhere. Back to yourself is nowhere.

And, in a way that now seems familiar, Campbell moves on to think about Dante himself and his poem. As the sinners are their sin so Dante is his poem and allegory is not a way of saying something in disguise but of inhabiting two worlds at the same time. This bleak little sequence ends in a warm poem about process in the form of lived life, asking, in its last line not the, “speak to me of the living” that we might expect but rather the Dantesque, “speak of me to the living”. Another poem, “Dalkey Island”, uses terns diving as a metaphor for thinking and points out that just as terns do not actively “dive”, rather they surrender to the passive force of gravity, so

Perhaps all your insights are this obvious -
modest freefalls out of doubt
when the mind stops beating and the head bows

out of the abstraction of the air . . . . .

The first sections of the book are called, respectively, “Error” and “Fear”. “Fear” contains two extraordinary poems, “The Diving Bell” and “Brain” the first of which recounts its author’s accumulated bodily damage and the second the experience of epilepsy. They belong to what looks like a little anatomy of fear, the central image for which is the idea of a room. The first poems are, similarly, grouped around errors. The opening poem is a wonderful recounting of the experience of involuntarily crying out at the remembrance of childhood cruelty. For this poet it happens in the shower whose waters then become an image of the passage of time “your hands explore what years have done // to the self that did that thing”. At least one of these childhood “errors” is an insensitivity to her mother’s recounting of her own past (and thus the author’s genetic history) contrasted with her own true poet’s sense of autogenesis:

. . . . .
                    I circled her
in disgust with her hopeless dead: absorbed

in the myth of my self-birth:
goddess of wisdom, learning, war – sprung
whole from my father’s head!

Letters to the Tremulous Hand and Error establish Elizabeth Campbell as, consistently, one of the best of Australia’s new poets. It remains to be seen whether the structure they adopt – especially that part which engages with a medieval (or other) problem with such an intriguing deployment of the self – is used again. There is an argument (which I’m not entirely committed to) that extended sequences of this sort smell too much of University postgraduate writing courses where they have the right blend of required imaginative research producing a nicely extended (and thus examinable) text. We are such a long way beyond that in the poems of the major sequences of these books that it shouldn’t be an issue, but then no poet can go around inhabiting an endless set of historical/artistic issues like the Tapestries or the handwriting of the “tremulous” hand. Campbell has shown that she can make her own successful choices in these first two books and so there is no reason to doubt that she won’t make the right decisions in the future books that readers of Australian poetry will be happily anticipating.

 

 

Caroline Caddy: Burning Bright

Fremantle: Fremantle Press, 2010, 104pp.

Caroline Caddy is a fine poet whose ninth book, Burning Bright, marks thirty years of publishing. I’m chastened to say that in my first draft of that sentence I wrote, almost instinctively, “a fine Western Australian poet”, as though she somehow belonged only to the poetic traditions of that vast, far western state rather than to Australian poetry as a whole. But the slip really points up how profoundly regional a poet she seems. Of course this may be an illusion: she may be no more “regional” than any poet who is locked into his or her immediate environment and it may simply be the comparative exoticism of this environment (to the eyes of those in Eastern states) that makes it seem a highlight of her poetry. To someone who had never seen Sydney, John Tranter might seem exotically regional.

At any rate, theoretical issues aside, Caddy as poet and person is locked into the south western corner of Western Australia and the first part of this new book has poems about her experience of that environment whereas the second half is devoted to poems that arise from buying land and turning it into a working olive farm. But there are also a group of a dozen poems documenting travel in China, and not just Beijing – she gets as far west as Urumqi in Xinjiang, a really long way. Superficially it is a paradox that a poet who is so much of her precise location in Western Australia is also one of Australia’s great poets of travel, with a whole book devoted to Antarctica to her credit and regular poems of travel into the “far East”. I won’t be the first person to say this, but it is the interaction of these two experiences that make her such a rewarding, and increasingly rewarding, poet to read.

The first, and most obvious thing, to say about travel is that it doesn’t, of itself, make anybody a better person or make them a better writer because they have a better-stocked inner life. Extended exposure to the “other” or to exotic experience may make the self richer but it doesn’t necessarily change it. Very stupid and very bigoted people have often travelled widely, each experience of the exotic being processed so that it confirms an existing cast of mind. One of the best things I have ever read about travel is one of Alistair Cooke’s Letters From America. Called, cryptically, “The Hawk and the Gorilla”, it is dense, complex and allusive enough to be considered to be a poem in its own right. I won’t bore readers with a sermon about it but it begins with the statement: “They say that travel broadens the mind but what they don’t say is that sometimes the broader the mind, the thinner it gets”.

Caddy is a wonderful poet about the various effects of exotic experience. She always looks at these encounters with an analytical, almost professional eye. One of her books, Working Temple, quotes her, in the blurb, as speaking of “that other hinterland of living in a country where you don’t speak the language . . . these are poems of observation. I wanted to be able to watch what was going on without being told, without moving the impressions of the senses too quickly into words”. This, of itself, lays out a whole theory of travel so that we work by ignorance to divorce experience from language and thus re-establish the primacy of experience – a phenomenologist’s project. But individual poems explore other ways in which the self is modified when it interacts with something alien, when it is involved in the process (as one of the poems from Burning Bright says) of “getting to be someone else because we are somewhere else”. “Streetwise”, for example, from Working Temple, describes the way in which, in China, clothes-style hasn’t “settled yet / into dynasties” so that all kinds of contradictory western periods – “Sixties makeshift fifties waisted / twenties rolled hose / trippingly Victorian furbelowed . . .” – can appear simultaneously: a postmodernist’s paradise.

. . . . .
First-communion   mother-of-the-bride   punk
                                                       I like the affront
the feast of it
with everything so new   experimental
                                                         that anything
                                                                          is valid
where the shine of information
                                   doesn’t come off on you
                                                   when it’s handed over
but reflects the way it’s taken
                                  copyright
                                        pleasure of the wearer.

In “Translation” it is not so much an exoticism of style or behaviour but rather the incomprehensibility of a single object:

In the Hall of Musical Instruments
                                                 a stone gong
                                                             flat jade L
widened at its obtuse junction
                                          and utterly strange
                                                                     to my eyes.
In a world where we are learning
                                                that we share so much
I can hardly believe its shape
is familiar to these people
             that it doesn’t seem just unearthed but
                                                                        not of this earth
the science of alien life-forms
who use their physical environment
                                                        in so different a way
that our and their
                 explanation of the same fact
                                                       can’t be credited
by each other.
Opaque green
               a patina that could have come
                                                      from precise machining
or a million million hands.
I ask what it sounds like
                        and my friend reaches
                                                        then shakes her head.
Between us
in the cool   in the dim
                         on thick silk ropes
                                                         hangs a strange key
a beautiful
yoke.

I won’t be the only person who thinks, at this point, of the Strugatsky brothers’ Roadside Picnic (best-known for being the basis of Tarkovsky’s Stalker) and I quote it in full, not only because it is a wonderful and memorable poem but because it marks what seems like the extremity of alienness. The title is, on second thoughts, interestingly surprising as is the conclusion, whereby the object becomes simultaneously a key to the foreign (foreign far beyond the ‘ordinary foreign’ of China) and something that binds the watcher.

So the “travel” component which appears in all of Caddy’s books is a potent one. But one wouldn’t want to feel that its counterpart – the regional, the poems of south-west Western Australia – is in some ways merely stable as though it were a static, iconic site that renews by contact. Caddy has a fine eye for process, for change and for the interactions between poet and environment. Her first book begins with a sequence about her farming ancestors. It is a movement towards understanding the self which is a fairly conventional one. But it is followed by an important poem, “Builder”, which worries over the connections between farming and poem-making, between words and stone:

There is an acreage I would like to own.
I go there to look
at the rocks and heaped windrows.

Walk through the farmers’ gate, twist of wire;
follow the tangled creek
spilling out to soft fans of mud and reeds
then gouging down again.

Too much clearing done here.
I imagine trees planted, hundreds,
the ripple and thrift of a dam.
I experiment,
one stone upon another.

My hands remember you, ancestor, builder.
How you knew these facts
are dreams, these dreams are facts;
the certain way they must be taken up
and handled.

It is a good thing to believe now
in the closeness of the word
and the stone.
Soon, we can begin.

There’s a lot going on here, not least of which is the planning of a parallel course as poem and farm-owner. Significantly, in Esperance (2007), which is a selected poems, this poem is moved from its position in Singing at Night so that it appears first and introduces the whole volume.

All of which is a long (though sketchy) introduction to this new book, Burning Bright. One should, probably, begin with the style since it is strikingly effective in the first ten poems of the book, those that deal with travels through the south-west. Essentially it is a matter of long, comma-less lines with spaces and steps: the opening of “Maringarup Pools” is a good example and one which will save me a lot of analytical description:

It’s there again    the lightly cupped water    the held water
                                                                                                       the pools
I know it’s more complicated
by the mud-maps   the tracks and gates
                                                      bits of rag tied to trees for direction
but every time I talk myself away    it’s there again
                                                     the skim of blue that could be sea . . .

It’s a style that appears in Caddy’s second book but it takes until her third, Beach Plastic (1989), for it to get going to the extent that she can exploit it. Twenty years later it seems the perfect mode for these poems about the landscape she inhabits. After all, its predominant feature, one which appears repeatedly, is its flatness and its shallowness. This simply isn’t suited to that lyric mode whereby the syntax of the poem falls through enjambed short lines to create its own, unique shape. That seems like the poem structured as a waterfall and this isn’t an environment where you would want to invoke waterfalls. The opening out of the syntax doesn’t, though, preclude the shapes of lyric that we find so satisfying because you can see in a poem like “The Commercial Hotel” the same cleverly dramatic closure. It begins with the openness and emptiness of a small town and then recounts a couple’s wandering out and then back before finishing:

Long after the generator was turned off
                                       and there was no more light
                                                      and the dark was a too warm blanket
and just as the pale stubble fields began to push
                                                                 lightly against the windows
we slept.

There are a lot of complicated things happening in this poem and, though they are things that we are used to in the lyric, they are done with an individual voice. It’s an empty environment where the existence of humans begins by defining it, especially by giving it some sort of scale but also – as human consciousnesses do – giving it a centre. But as the poem progresses the humans return to the increasingly domestic world of the hotel where “travellers lay arms legs outstretched / in rooms that smelled of beer” the natural world asserts itself so that at the end of the poem it is nature which is waking and the human which is sleeping. All this adds to a tense and dynamic structure to this poem and I have described it here to make the point that the “rolled-out”, flat, extended and spaced quality of Caddy’s style doesn’t preclude the pleasurable tensions and dramas that we associate with good lyrics.

These first poems are very sensitive also to the movements of the mind and the way it is related to the world. As in “Builder” there is a strong sense that one can and must build with words especially in an environment where, as one poem says, “I am blown on a millimetre wave of life / between towns inches deep”. In such a place “where life is thinly spread” everybody, including poets, must work. Two poems focus on irruptions into this strangely flat and shallow world. “Stirling Ranges” is about mountains whose precipitateness is deceptive in the flat surrounds and “Wheat Bins” deals with human constructions which sit weirdly in the landscape. It cleverly describes the odd sense of arriving – because the silos do not structure the landscape but sit on it, the approach is tricky and reflects the dominance of the scaleless landscape:

Such a big feeling to arrive in such a small place
                                                      realising not so much we’re here
                                                                                     but that it’s here
as we slow from the speed of the highway
                                                    shedding velocity
                                                                slipping into the turn-off
the choice to be made so quickly in the face of so little
we could easily say we missed it
                                       but even as we used those words
                                                                              feel ourselves doubting
knowing we’d sensed
                         gliding by the long wide Euclid something like
                                                                                                a mother ship.
. . . . .

It’s no accident that the wheat bins call up science-fiction imagery but, at last, the poem focuses on the way in which the slope of the sides of the bins is calculated to reflect exactly the slope of pyramid of free standing wheat. Inside the weird intervention in the landscape is a human dimension:

This is the constructed hold of our living
                                         that folded out   measured
                                                                               projected into the future
is a standing proof
and out here where the immense stricture of the land
                                                                     makes us smaller
                                                                                              is easier to read.

It’s as though Stevens’s “Anecdote of the Jar” had gone on to think about the inner shape of the jar and how it embodied its potter’s individuality in traces of his thumbprints and the shape of his (and our) life in its curves. The unusual word “stricture” is well-chosen too, since it is a description of the land but is only one letter away from a description of the wheat bin. This passage also, while I am on the subject of Caddy’s lyric style, demonstrates in a weakness one of her strengths. It would be easy, in this style, for the syntax to dissolve into a kind of participial wash and it’s impressive that her poems remain syntactically tight. But the “that” of the second line is an irritant because we don’t know whether it is a demonstrative adjective or a relative pronoun: it is the latter and the ambiguity in English is usually solved by a comma after the “that”.

The thirteen poems which follow are set in China and don’t mark any great advance over such poems in earlier books although, if pressed, you might be able to say that they have a casualness of observation, a lack of traveller’s-earnestness that might be found in the other books. One of the poems, “Shangai Renga”, speaks in Whitmanian terms:

. . . . .
I haven’t done anything today
and probably won’t tomorrow
                                only this has slipped me into gear again
though it too is a kind of idle
the empty space that runs the universe
                                 the loafing that observes its own creation
its own extinguishment.
. . . . .

and it is this bland religious sense that emerges in these poems. A Confucian temple transmits nothing transcendent, nothing that demands “you must change your lives” but rather a heightened social sense that would have pleased the sage:

. . . .
and if our hands on the braille balustrades
                                                                 couldn’t tell the difference
between alabaster and cement
                                     there would still be a transmission a civilising
                                                                            not of palaces or tombs
but the adequate and charming bones of dwelling
                                              the few good actions the few good words
                                                                                                         that last
what you say to me what I say to you.

Intriguingly, the poem called “Religious Experience” describes the creation inside a hotel of a temporary cloth hoarding while refurbishments to the foyer are carried out. It is described in religious terms – ritual entering and exiting – and the result (“a renovated coffee lounge”) contains a “perpetually resurrected altar of cakes and libation”. But, as in almost all parodical descriptions, the mocked infiltrates the reader’s experience and makes its own statement. Thus at the end of “Religious Experience”, the humble, social dimension of such experience is re-asserted:

Together with the one cup one page readers
                                       and the low hands cupped bow
                                                                  of the lighter ups of cigarettes
I breathe the deep aroma and read my magazine
                                                      with a diligence to be aware
                                                                              as if it’s a grain of sand
while the blessed stamped and proven human chant resumes.

My favourite of these “Chinese” poems is “Riders Qing Hai” in which poet and partner, near a stupa by a frozen lake, are accosted by “youths on their sturdy ponies” who try to persuade them to ride. It is really a “landscape with humans” poem and you get a sense of the immense energy deriving from their opposition. The description of the landscape is brilliant: the stupa looks as though it is holding the edge of the lake down and at the end of the poem it seems as though it is the riders who have stopped the lake moving forward. When Caddy describes this lake and the way in which “everything else floats / the plains that sweep down from the mountains standing dust / flocks of sheep that run forward / like the rapids of silty rivers” you feel the same response to landscape that dominates the poems of south-west Western Australia. Though there are no horsemen of stupas there to hold the landscape down and back.

The final part of Burning Bright – nearly half the book – is located in Australia and it begins with poems of possession, landtaking. Although the incredible press of humanity in China has gone, replaced by “the quiet and the dark”, there is, in these poems, a strong sense of the social. The poet’s neighbour, “Farmer Bob”, a man with his own preoccupations and own history, becomes important. He is the subject of a fine portrait poem, “Confederates”, which is held together structurally by American Civil War puns (“A Day in the Life” is also beautifully structured around “sand” and “castles”):

In Farmer Bob’s house there’s a picture of him
                                                  on a horse hat pulled down low
a pistol in one hand    flintlock in the other.
Banks government   politicians   as much as he has to say
he says against these.
Farmer Bob has two beautifully kept diesels
                                                                that generate his power
and could go on doing so forever
                                          as he replaces parts he makes himself
flat-bed drill and lathe bolted to the floor.
Farmer Bob has a wife who shines
                                                 a son he feels he is losing to the world
and a daughter whose dad can do anything.
In their company we are recruited
                                         into a union that keeps the statistics
                                                                                                    unreliable.
We warm our hands at his home-made barbecue
                                        chew his home-grown slabs of beef
that shrink a little and curl up at the edges.
Under the gaze of his sardonic eye
                                                    he knows we know
                                                                              it will be tough.

It’s a lovely, complex poem written with exquisite grace and tone. How much the American quality of the references is a dry comment about the way in which this self-sufficient life is an American dream (mediated through popular culture) rather than an Australian one, I am not sure. At any rate, there is nothing cosy or arcadian about this olive farm. The olives themselves, as they first appear, are described in terms of “the flames / of the little trees” and fire is a continuous presence. And one could talk at some length about the presence of fire in this final part of the book. It always seems to be in the background sometimes as a simple threat but, in the poem, “Diminished Responsibility”, which details the author’s response to a persistent, if not especially harmful, firebug, it seems to be a counterpart of the poems about neighbours in that it represents the darker side of the human sociability that Caddy is always interested in as well as the crematorium that awaits us all.

And it is no accident, of course, that the book’s title refers to burning. “Burning Bright” is, on the surface, not about bushfires at all but a reference to Blake. It is a complicated poem which begins straightforwardly enough describing the regions of the polar north, severely restricted in term of species of flora and fauna, and then speaking of the Siberian tiger, “padding gold on gold forest floors / rubbing thick black stripes / on black striped birches”. But it finishes on a far more cryptic note:

Under my hand    something that is me    and is not me.
Where it goes I go
hot prints on cool moss
stalking large through the leafy deer-sweet
                                                              in stunningly exhibited
                                                                                               camouflage.

I’ve puzzled over this. It makes “Burning Bright” look like a “poem-poem”, a disguised personal statement about the poet’s own sense of what she is doing since what is under her hand is, surely, her poems. So, to continue this reading, the poems are hers but she is disguised within them and they become a sexy camouflage. “The Pen Inside” is a much more straightforward poem about poetry. It deploys a wonderful image of the pen which does the writing in the evenings as being like those LED garden lights which charge up during the day and switch on automatically when the sun goes down – Caddy’s poetic inspiration is obviously unbidden but reliable. Like poems, these lights cast a small and faintly illuminating glow on the unknown:

as I watch and wait
                            walking from one to the next and back again
feeling for something that’s still there
                                                                  I can just make out.

This involves a nice pun on the word “still” exploiting its double meanings of “yet” and “motionless”. Generally the last poems of Burning Bright have a valedictory quality but when they recall deaths it is usually with a calm, non-transcendent perspective, approving of the mother who wanted her to “chuck my ashes over the fence at the old farm”. I’ve avoided speaking about the second last poem, “The Tibetan Cabinet”, since, although I am sure it is one of the most resonant poems in the book, I’m not entirely sure whether it is about death or poetry. But there are no such difficulties with the last poem, “Dawn”, which, while hardly comparable with “The Tibetan Cabinet”, is clearly there so that the final mood we take from Burning Bright will not be negative. The images are of machines and the social world but, ultimately, it is the natural world which renews itself:

to be for someone a house at night
                                a good car just before the journey
overalls that smell of oil and machines
                                                a lap after weeks away
what the eyes screw up for the heart grabs
                                  feel the great    deep   quiet engine
                                                                                             start.

Joanne Burns: Amphora

Artarmon: Giramondo, 2011, 135pp.

Given that Joanne Burns’s first collection was published almost forty years ago, it is not surprising that her output is fairly extensive, running to sixteen books if chapbooks are included. One of the features of the full-length books is the way in which they are always divided into sections – there are usually about half a dozen of them. These sections contain poems that are not only related thematically but also in terms of method. Whether they are written in batches or, in the preparation of each of the books, a couple of years’ work is subdivided into convenient groups, I am not sure: but I suspect that the latter is more likely to be the case. Reading as many of her books as I have been able to find confirms the presence of a distinctive stance towards the world – humorous, unsentimental, never pompous or prophetic, immersed in fleeting experiences – which sometimes produces successful poems and sometimes doesn’t. What I do feel confident in saying, however, is that Amphora is a really successful book, without doubt her best. What stands out about Amphora (though this may be a feature of her earlier books which I have simply missed) is the interesting patterning of its sections. Reading it is a bit of a voyage although, as I’ll show later, the final destination is difficult to describe.

The first section has a confusing double title “Ichoria” and “Angles not angels”. The second part of this, alluding to Gregory the Great’s famous pun, seems to set up the parameters of this section: angels not as gestures towards transcendence but as rather more homely openers-up of perspectives for poetry. The first poem, “Pitch”, is very much about the kind of inspirational angels which Burns’s poetry will have room for. They are going to be fairly practical and unambitious:

i want an angel, maybe even two,
like the ones assisting isidore, the
spanish farm servant saint, angels
who were seen to plough the fields
for him while he was deep in prayer,
i don’t know exactly what they looked
like but i don’t need one with that much
muscle or one from the top ranks of the angel
hierarchy and I don’t want an angel with huge wings
that rustle . . .

and so on in this delightful way although the poem – which is very much a compendium piece (a mode that should be encouraged) – has room for angels to function as poetic inspirers and as guardians: “a flash of light a silver wink in the dark a stroke of thought behind the brow down the nape of the neck so slow it’s really fast. it could remind you that you’re about to die if you don’t shift your arse”.

Two longish compendium poems, “Raft” and “Rung”, explore this decidedly earth-bound experience of the transcendent. The former is concerned with light and darkness and reads almost like a gloss on Jeanette Winterson’s “not all dark places need light”. It rejects “the bright pin and pierce / of a vision” and decides there will be “no eulogising of celestial light / over the dark satanic”. Instead, the poem concludes by dreaming of a proto-order before the division into light and darkness though that dream could itself, be seen as a transcendental gesture.

“Raft” is threaded, rather unsatisfactorily, on an opening reference to the idea that carrots help children see better. This pleasantly homely start moves into a meditation on seeing and light. “Rung”, on the other hand, is a set of poems about ladders and, inevitably, myths of transcending by climbing onto a higher plane. Yeats (“The Circus Animal’s Desertion”), St Perpetua (who, before martyrdom, imagined herself ascending a ladder), Wittgenstein (for whom the ladder of language has to used then abandoned), Miro and others all get a mention as does the step-ladder behind the poet’s bathroom door and the ladder used to prune back the bougainvillea after her father’s death (“this ladder has no fine points sticking up towards heaven”). It finishes by asking why ladders should always be associated with climbing upwards:

but me. i look for an easier solution. enough of biblical endurance and ordealism. i climb down the ladder of memory. rusting, salty, white-painted rungs. the nervous thrill of that moment. not the tongue stretching up for the dry, sticky host of a first communion gravitas but arms reaching out for that first swim in deep water. letting go of gravity and pushing out into glossy emerald waters. the heart electrified in the momentum of its liberation. sun streaming through squinted eyes. arms lifting over the water like sudden wings. kicking towards epiphany. so this is heaven.

That is a fine expression of a poet’s poetics, a way of avoiding what another poem describes as “fresh phanic desire” which, inevitably, curdles into sentimental debris. And “sentimental debris” is the defining note of the second section of Amphora in that it deals with the lives of individual saints including such luminaries as Maria Goretti (“the perfect girl who would always choose death”) and saints Rita and Zita. If there is an overall position in these poems – which are inclined to focus on the way the saints are portrayed and presented – it is that the popular saints (as opposed to those “journeyman saints . . . . hanging onto the lower rungs of beatification”) are part of a media glamour show. Their numbers increased by the late pope as a “restoration project. fortifying church pillars against the chisels of the western cynics” they are “the showbiz circus sideshow, the special effects saints. the stars”. I especially like the conclusion of the poem about St. Zita which makes a lot of this explicit:

- maybe brigitte bardot wouldn’t like this card but would
zita like b. bardot; zita was bolder than a sex kitten
bolder than the brass of a church     saints are a part of
celebrity but who would pray to a movie star primping on
in a make up van, enduring the stare of a thicker light,
fussing over heightcellulite & snapping only a good side;
like domestic servants and maids stars could pray to
zita – as a finder of lost keys, i don’t know how she got
this additional gift, perhaps there’s an upgrade degree
for saints like her: how to deal with a swipe keycard

With the book’s middle three sections, “Streamers”, “Amphora” and “Pogo”, we are in the environment of a kind of mild surrealism. The first is subtitled “a series of koannes”, neatly personalizing the koan as a textual exercise designed to frustrate the logical mind. The twenty-nine short poems lace various paradoxes together in a way that makes the syntax as problematic as the content. They can be as homely as the first one:

weigh the rice before you boil it
how else can you catch up
with yourself wash the radish
after you eat it the soil requests
you share its emergency although its
colour may not suit your hand towel

or as “poetic” as the seventh:

the dream dog barks
mid-caninese and you
bark back in spanglish in
the neighbour’s dream you yell
in caesarine no river
to cool your salmon

“Amphora” – which is actually the book’s middle section – is a collection of poems built around common cliches. Some of these use misread (or, to be technical, untroped readings of) phrases so that “she kept her distance” modulates into “she kept her distance in a yellow and blue lacquered box she had bought on dal lake” and “the trouble with leaving things up in the air . . .” becomes the introduction to a poem which finds things in the air difficult to find and, when found, difficult to get to unless (in a return to the world of saints) like Christine the Astonishing, you can make yourself as light as a bird. But more interesting are “Relief” and “Composition”. The former crosses the punning technique with the earlier compendium poems by beginning with the poet as relief teacher (a phrase which, perhaps thankfully, doesn’t get the same treatment) asking “for the slip which lists classes to relief teach for the day” and going on to become a poem about petticoats and teachers as well as a poem about all the other possibilities of the word “slip” including how time has slipped away since teachers wore slips.

“Composition” explores, I think, the idea of poems being built out of the detritus of existence. Though this is a critical cliche it is not a verbal one and this page-long prose poem describes the poet setting out on a tour to collect pails of dust from the “inner and outer fields of your farm debris”, packing the dust into amphoras (intriguingly this poem uses two words that seem important to the book) and allowing it to settle and petrify so that when the amphoras are smashed open there are neat columns which can be fitted into an impressive piece of architecture – a book of poetry, presumably. The poem finishes with the poet browsing “the dharma of dust whisperings while playing the harmonium at auspicious interludes of mist”. Overall it is a poem about “passive aggrandisement” where poetic material just accumulates – “let life grow these soft goods for you”. It is difficult for the innocent reader to decide whether this is a kind of poetry being contemptuously rejected or a kind of poetry that she finds herself, willy-nilly writing, but it is an engaging piece either way.

The poems of “Pogo” accrete around specific words, being written in what Burns calls “a semantic state of mind”. “Lathe” is built around the various polysemic possibilities of “poppet”, “Spreadsheet” of “coaster” and “Stock” of “dice”. This latter is a favourite since it brings together the abstruse Latin meanings of “die/dies” and the humble task of preparing soup stock:

always dicey, this word play. you let the words roll around in your mouth till their sheer brio pushes them out through your cheeks. qualmlessly. how long should the cud be chewn. chawn is a better word. but you hear the purists chut-chutting. the edges of words cutting.

you dice the vegetables like a textbook illustration . . . .

The question here – what is the best length of time to go on doing this semantic/polysemic play? – is a good one. Burns never takes us into the vertiginous possibilities of something like Finnegans Wake but the result in these poems of Amphora is a taut and intriguingly structured poem.

This leads us to the last two sections of the book, “Writing in the Dark” and “This week next week the week after”. The first of these is very brief, containing only four short poems and they quickly teach us that the title of the section has nothing to do with writing poems while watching television. They are dense, surreal and difficult and are really “night” poems in a way that makes you recall the Winterson quotation I used earlier or perhaps even the slow movements of Bartok. “Eheu fugaces” is probably the most approachable, being a very visual night-piece but “Nocturnal emission” is altogether more difficult. It contains the image of the poet walking off a ferry at night “with your mouth / wide open and new countries rush / to fill it”: this might either be sublime (travelling on water disorients you to the point where familiar land is new) or very basic (you get home, watch the news and experience a host of new cultures). At any event, it has a complicated conclusion:

providence, nocturnal
providore, a geography
of faith, when you swallow you
don’t choke on a wild herb’s lotion.

Some of the twenty-five poems that make up the final section seem verbally generated: those beginning “making room / in the room” and “what is the theme of the theme”, for example, although they enjoy exploring the conceptual conundrums they propose. “Pencil it in” warns that anyone borrowing the grin of a prime minister might be stuck with it forever – as we used to be told would happen if the wind changed and “Bookmark” is a good example of the way these sorts of poems hover close to a paraphrasable meaning:

the ghost swam through
the loyal grass in a voile meander
the extravagance of its weeping
shivered through the gums in search
of a more sylvan setting this
ambiguous nostalgia was really
disconcerting the anthology
reeked of too many early mornings
the cellophane flowers already sweating

Is the anthology Australian and the bookmark English/Georgian? The solution must lie in some kind of set-up like that.

As I said at the beginning it is tempting to read this as a highly patterned collection structured in sections as two; three; two. It is also tempting to read it as a kind of voyage in poetry from the relaxed and chatty (though the subject – the religious – is a very serious one) through the mildly surreal results of polysemic verbal play, to a kind of deeper surreal that the poet thinks may be the way into certain subjects. Perhaps it isn’t a one-way journey so much as a patterned presentation of different kinds of poetry, free from any judgements about their relative value. At any event, this is a book where comments about poetry itself (as in “Composition”) are important and the most revealing may be “Zag”, the first poem of the final section:

the poems are running
running away running from
that dread of having to explain
themselves, those lists of
food ingredients they’ve
read on the back of packets
instant noodles for example;
they don’t want to be registered
for gst or voting rights they know
they don’t live in a democracy but
at least they can live in privacy if
they scatter

Peter Steele: The Gossip and the Wine

St Kilda: John Leonard Press, 2010, 65pp.

In the poem in which they appear, the words of the title of Peter Steele’s new book (themselves derived from a Peter Porter poem) suggest, perhaps, no more than the conviviality of the Last Supper contrasted, in the poem, with the sinister but necessary events offstage:

Dead man walking as he goes to dine -
The handing over broached and squared away -
He settles to the gossip and the wine,
The casual banter and the heart at play.
. . . . .

But read as the title of the book, they clearly reflect two different directions that the poet wants his verse to travel: “gossip” for the gregarious, human dimension and “wine” for the spiritual one. It makes sense in terms of the Afterword to Steele’s 2003 collection of ekphrastic poems, Plenty, in which he says:

I am of the belief that poets are mainly on the trace of the Human, that familiar, curious, and largely mysterious creature. The greatest of medieval poems in a European language is called a “Comedy”: and although I am aware that the title does not refer to clowning but to a happy ending, the pilgrim figure in that work is what might be called a sponsored blunderer, a quester by ricochet. Dante is exercised to know not only how things will turn out, but who it is for whom things will thus eventuate. It is most appropriate that this should take place in poetry, in which everything leans yearningly towards the possible consolation of song . . .

One wouldn’t want to make too much of this dichotomy – the sociable human below, the remote but incarnatable divine above – for fear of being simplistic, but it isn’t a bad map even if, in The Gossip and the Wine, there are really three groups of poems rather than two.

It begins with a group of a dozen poems built around various events in the Christian year: some of these poems are part of an imaginary biography of Jesus, others are reflections prompted by the festival itself. Thus the Ash Wednesday poem, “Contemplation with Ashes”, is about neither human sociability or the divine so much as the sheer violence of the world. And it uses one of the most powerful weapons in Steele’s own poetic armoury – the learned list:

These, among others: Assyria’s mailed archers
          and mounted spearsmen, the charioteers
drinking to devastation, Sennacherib boasting,
          “of Elam, I cut their throats like sheep”;
Polybius, of the Roman way on storming -
          “the purpose is to strike terror,
the very dogs in halves”; the Langobards,
          each broadsword sleek with lacertine figures,
each lance of a strength to lift its wriggling target;
          Byzantium’s troopers . . .

At either end of this sequence are two longer, meditative poems. “Advent”, the first, is about Steele’s own emergence expressed as a biography of three men: Odysseus (The Odyssey read early, in Perth), Dante (seen rather as in the quotation from Plenty as a yearner, “rapt at the feast of song”) and George Herbert (someone whom it is hard to dislike). Put together they make a kind of composite biography encapsulating a theory of what humanity is and what its poems do: “the heart is a nest / for nurselings making music in an air / they barely guess at”. And it makes its first line (there is a Greek name for the trope deployed here where you expect one word and get another – but I’ve long forgotten the technical terms of rhetoric) “All my life I’ve been at the school of yearning”, introduce the central word of the collection. The first yearns for home, the second for “the best of notes, / stilling the world to hear and yearn” and the third to “have it out with God”.

The last of the poems of this sequence, “Reverie in Lygon Street”, is an ambitious piece and your heart warms to it once you get inside it a little. Structured as three sections of three stanzas each, it sees the poet in a market meditating, in turn, on human and vegetable variety, books and finally the quest to see the relation between the divine and the human. The drive here seems Greek as much as Christian in that Steele’s love of the particular and love of registering the particular in one of his lists stresses the multiplicity of the world which any unifying principle must be balanced against. The core of this comes out in a few lines in the first section of the poem:

                                                       I’m gawking
now at the avocadoes, now at garlic,
          a sucker as ever for the cabbage in
its ostentation, for the blushing apples to which
          the maddest George devoted a corer
as golden as his dreams, for the jokey banana,
          for maize in spite of the Aztec blood,
for the swank of strawberries, the almonds left behind
          as a pourboire by Tutankhamun,
for the parsnip that doubles for Pasternak the yearner,
          for snow-peas and pineapples, the cocksure eggplant,
                    and the mandrake called tomato.

Believing Him here, as in my folly I do,
          the once and risen mortal, prompts me
to ask about the old days. Were the leeks
          as good in Galilee . . .

Entering a bookshop in the second section prompts a meditation whereby the theory of poetry that the first poem of this group, “Advent” ventures on is modulated into an unusual theory of reading whereby the reader’s task is to hear “the melodious thing in a book’s tempest, / its cataracts and clowning”. This is a more than interesting position about texts, treating them as analogous, at least, to the complex of particulars in which the believer must find hints of the divine. It is consistent with the response to Dante in “Advent” but it makes me nervous by creating a scenario in which human intelligence, expressed in texts, is devalued at the expense of echoes of the divine. I’m not sure that Euclid or Newton would have wanted their works treated that way, just as I’m nervous about the characterisation of Dante in “Advent”, but it’s a tenable approach, especially from a Christian perspective.

This fine sequence occupies the first third of the book. The rest is made up of a series of sonnets responding to moments in the gospels broken up by longer poems which are often focussed on the humbly human. There may well be a pattern to the appearance of these fragments of Jesus’s biography (are they positioned to align with readings in church, for example?) but it isn’t one that I can see. They are quite different to the poems in the first section that deal with Jesus. Those are daringly imaginative, conceiving him, in three successive poems as “Star Man”, “Green Man” and “Water Man” and they operate by trying to move Jesus out of limited, local environment into wider spheres of particulars. It’s a reverse of the process whereby God is discovered in particulars. God expands here to experience particulars so that a stanza beginning with a description of Jesus’s life among the Galilee fishermen, moves quickly to wider oceans:

. . . . .
                                        He saw plankton
bloom to clouds, could touch the holdfast of kelp,
          the bristles of krill, the fins of tang:
lantern fish hung in the twilight zone, the vampire
          squid from hell gazed in the dark,
black smokers vented.

These are fine, complex poems, but I can’t find anything as satisfying in the sixteen sonnets based on the gospels in the second part of The Gossip and the Wine. They seem to be almost genre-pieces – expansions of the gospel stories. And one of the things that betrays them as genre pieces is the bluff tone: one of the earlier poems begins “Getting him up the hill was a long business / however you gauge it . . .” and I quote this, rather than one of the sonnets, as the best encapsulation of this tone. Why do these gospel revisits always seem to do this? Even Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi” (though it quotes Andrewes) begins with a hearty “A cold coming they had of it”. Presumably poets feel the opportunity (or obligation) to counteract the iconic status of the gospel narratives by seeing them obliquely as events in a real world populated by many who, although they might not be singled out in the narrative, still have a right to be acknowledged. It is part of a complicated question, or, at least, a question that grows more complicated the longer you look at it. My position would probably be that it is a response to the generally abstract nature of biblical narrative (I except the David story of first and second Samuel here as one of the great masterpieces of ancient narrative). The gospels, in particular, seem remote and abstract to the common reader. There are almost no concrete details (apart from some matters of geography and legal process) and it is clear that none of the texts which survive have any actual contact with the man from Nazareth. It can be argued, of course, that biblical narrative favours the iconic or abstract, but really that just means that it is bad narrative.

I wonder whether this abstractness doesn’t account for much of Steele’s love of religious art because there he is in touch with a long tradition of trying to make these events concrete. Some of his poems give brilliant readings of such paintings as Crivelli’s “Madonna of the Swallow”, but they result from more than just a good art historian’s eye. I think they derive from a sense that all of these are concretisations of vague texts, attempts to make the iconic “real” in a way that people within the last seven hundred or so years will recognise. Of course none are final concretisations – everything is provisional – but perhaps there is a response to a kind of cumulative effect. Just as it has been argued that the meaning of a text is the sum total of sensible readings of it, so perhaps Steele feels that he is doing something similar for representations of the gospel stories. But a bluff tone and a knowing way of speaking about minor characters such as the High Priest’s servant “ . . . a lout, / And a slave with it, obedient to the bark // Of the officer bloke, to whom he’s a waste of space . . .” doesn’t seem the right way to go about it. The right way to go about it, demonstrated continuously in Steele’s other poems, is to harness the intense particularity of poetic language, its capturing of learning in technical words and its torrent of icons (to distort a phrase from “All the Latest”, a fine poem from this book and one which demonstrates what it is speaking about).

The poems that I have called, crudely, “human”, are certainly more satisfying and in them we see more of Steele at his best. “Folklore” is, for example, is a fine celebration of a loved doctor (presumably a colleague) couched in terms of the kind of folkloric cures that would once have been such a doctor’s tools in trade. It concludes with another example of Steele’s tendency to characterise himself (in the manner of Francis of Assisi, perhaps) as a yearning fool-for-God but also with a heartfelt tribute:

                                        Continue
to use your powers wisely, for us
          whose wits are turned, often enough, but who know
good when we see it, and love too.

A number of these poems focus on the humble side of the human by dwelling on folklore: “One for Pieter Breugel” is based on his “Netherlandish Proverbs” and is a catalogue of the sayings in the painting, and “After the Irish” is a set of Irish sayings (I say this confidently, though I have never actually heard any of them!) including the memorable “The road to Heaven is well enough signed, / but it’s badly lit at night”. But the two poems in the book that I like most are very much about relationships between the macro and the micro, or between the divine and the human. “Dancing” (its epigraph is another Irish saying, “God is good, but never dance in a small boat”) is built out of two stanzas of wonderful technical detail:

                                             on for a ceilidh or clogdance,
          huffing and puffing the hornpipe, invoking
rain by the lakeful, turkey-trot matching the Lancers,
          reels from the Maenads, kabuki as haka,
hoedowns and riggadoons, nautches and hays and fandangos . . .

followed by a lovely stanza about Sir John Davies’s “Orchestra” in which Davies is encouraged to keep his eyes on the heavenly dance and “say goodbye to small boats”. And “Gardens” is a celebration of monks and their gardens based, so the notes tell us, on the De Naturis Rerum of the Augustinian abbot, Alexander Neckham. It begins with a stanza of delicious tactile particularity:

Swinking they called it, and meant the drive of the spade,
a rake’s reluctance, the haul at loins
of mattock and pickaxe, the tilt of a swilling pail:
the new turves tamped and beaten.

but the poem is really about whether the garden feeds the divine (by growing flowers along the graves of dead monks in preparation for some eventual rebirth at the resurrection) or whether it feeds the hungry human body. For the present, it feeds the body:

For the present though, and this side of the moon,
the belted diggers had at the earth,
keeping, they thought, body and soul together:
“First the starch, and then the singing.”

Keeping the body and soul together, in the sense of keeping the human and divine together, is a noble task in a Christian context and it must be one of the tasks of a Christian poetry.

Cameron Lowe: Porch Music

Geelong: Whitmore Press, 2010, 76pp.

The 2005 chapbook, Throwing Stones at the Sun, provided an introduction to the likeable poetry of Cameron Lowe and many of those poems reappear in this first, full-length book. One’s response to Throwing Stones at the Sun was that there was a tension between a basically lyric gift – a sensitivity, that is, to the here and now and the larger patterns of memory and entropy in which it is meshed – and a love of the kind of dashing, semi-surreal imagination of John Forbes whose turns of phrase appeared in a number of poems.

By Porch Music, things seem to have complicated a little. The powerful drive towards the lyric is still there and it is stressed in the title which very much suggests a celebration of the things seen close at hand from that most homely of viewpoints, the porch. Lowe does this really well, especially in an extended poem of getting up and into the day like “Morning Light” which, after a rehearsal of all the events leading to breakfast, asks what a message floated in a bottle might say and concludes with its own answer:

That the eucalypt on the traffic island
is flowering with abandon;
that bats have come for the summertime -
by May they’ll be gone.
And there is nothing else like this -
nothing at all.

What I like about these lyrics is that they are never take-it-or-leave-it expressions of lyric simplicity, but instead, have tentacles that connect them to wider issues than the conventional lyric obsession with beauty and its ephemerality. In “Yellow Pansies, at Evening”, for example:

Counting them now, an economy
of colour in the fading light,
rising together from a pot
on the porch,
not a dry set of numbers
considered alone,
but a richer,
more collective intent,
black eyes searching out
the sun that’s now gone.

the lines that come at the hinge of the poem, “not a dry set of numbers / considered alone”, are deliberately dry themselves and prevent the poem being elegant whimsy by embodying the theme of abstraction (which leads to meaning) versus embodiment (which leads to presence). “Morning Light” had begun with the poet’s injunction to himself that the experience was “nothing grand – / the scale is neither big nor small” while it is registering the “little waves / of abstraction as the morning, / devoid of ambition, simply occurs”. Similarly in “The Dragonflies”, being visited by a cloud of these insects tempts the couple in the poem to “read it as a sign: / that to be here, together, / amongst these trees, / just as we are, / may be enough” and the issue is the delicate balance between the experience itself and its putative meanings. And the preceding poem, “Saturday, Eastern Beach” embodies the same issue in a phrase: a couple, meshed in a seaside, “lyric”, scene watch a massive tanker and the partner asks, “Where’s it headed”. Though the question is ostensibly about the ship, it is also about the scene itself and the poem which is being derived from it and so the question is really, “What does it mean?”

And then there are the issues of authorial position. In “Normanby Street” a description of this semi-sacred place, replete with picket fence, church spire and pansies on the porch – in other words, items which recur regularly in other poems – is continuously interpenetrated by reminders that “You are not this place”. Two poems, “A Sunday” and “Alice” relate to this. On the surface, “Alice” is a lovely poem about the way in which the drive towards extinction (“the rose dead-heading / its way toward June”) is counterbalanced by the human:

Now, suddenly, amongst

falling leaves and dying buds
your smile lights and the colours,

all of them, come creeping back.

But you are confident, from the other poems, that the complexity of the philosophical position behind this is recognised and thus incorporated in the poem: for this is a Romantic stance, best embodied in Coleridge’s “Dejection: an Ode”, where “joy” emanates from the watcher in order to penetrate and animate the lifeless objects of sense. In fact this may well be the theme of “A Sunday” which counterbalances “Normanby Street”’s “You are not this place” with the repeated assertion that “This empty street needs you”. Equally “Romantic” are the issues of the inner and outer and language itself. “Breathing” is a complex and satisfying poem in which the first half is devoted to the lover’s back (and, significantly, her breathing) using images from the natural world for her body so that fingers are leaves and hands are stones. In the poem’s second half she becomes a landscape (“her back itself an ocean”) but one which might speak:

. . . . .
Seashells, she might say suddenly,
half-asleep in the sun, dreaming
perhaps of distant, pebbled shores,

little waves rising,
crumbling, repeating again and again,
meddling with memory . . .

This interpenetration of the three crucial realms – the human, metaphorical and external worlds – not only makes the poem a sophisticated one, it also reminds us of the epistemological issues that lie behind what often seem to be simple lyrics.

Of course, one of the things the lyric can do is celebration and, for some reason, we are happy if that is done innocently – that is, without the markers of authorial sophistication and engagement with larger issues. One of the nicest poems of Throwing Stones at the Sun is included in Porch Music: “Summer” is worth quoting in full:

The smell of sausage on the wind
from a distant backyard brings you erect
and summer grins like a show clown
because it knows it’s being watched.
In your baggy shorts and T-shirt
you could be a surfer, and you know it,
but that was summers ago and seems now
like a mirage, or an ad on TV,
where wetsuits slide like quicksilver
toward the waiting water, which viewed
through a screen is as beautiful as a bottle
of Coke and just as sweet. As the day’s
heat softens into evening there’s that
sausage again, adrift on a hot breeze,
whispering: it’s summer, it’s summer.

I quote this in full, partly to demonstrate the Forbesian influence that I spoke of initially, for Forbes was (surprisingly, given the complexity of his ideas about poetry) a great writer of celebrations. Also, as I said initially, the two drives of Throwing Stones at the Sun – one towards lyric meditation on the world just around the porch and the other towards a more surreal practice – a complicated here by the brief second section of this book, called “The Corrosive Littoral”. Most of these poems are derived from responses to paintings by James Gleeson whose surrealistic lushness seems, on the surface, a long way from the pansies and picket fence outside of the porch. Indeed this section, even in its title, seems so utterly different to the book’s first section, that at first it looks like a challenge to the poet – either from his unconscious or from a critic – to expand his palette. It might almost have been a skilfully constructed Writing School exercise, designed to catch this poet at his weak point.

The fact, though, is that these poems are very good and “very good” not in the sense of “accomplished”, but in the sense of engaging the poet’s deepest responses. My tentative explanation for this is that classic surrealism (and Gleeson is no exception here) is obsessed by desire, works through dream, and engages memory. This is not so far from the thematic material of the first part of Porch Music so that when we read a poem like “The attitude of lightning towards a lady mountain” we are in not entirely unfamiliar territory:

In the science of cosmetics she’s the product
of the test: among so many reflections there can be no need for reflection.

Yet her value to the history of mirrors
remains a mystery to merchant bankers
and to lick her, as if with lightning,

is the secret ambition of adolescents
racked with lust. On the catwalk in Paris,
or naked in a kitchen in Geelong,

her forehead is the glitter of sunlight
striking ice on the summit of Mount Fuji;
even then she’s a fiction of desire too cold

to touch. When she whispers in the night
that sex and violence are futile you’re witness
to the true confessions of a lightning rod.

The “lady mountain” of the Gleeson painting is very much a totem (another feature of this sort of surrealism) and the poem too confronts the totemic qualities of this obscure object of desire. It is omnipresent (her embodiments appear in both Parisian haute couture and in Geelong kitchens), unattainable and, above all, a source of power. We meet her again in the poem derived from “Gardens of the Night” where she is much more clearly a totemic female.

If these poems engage with ideas of desire which are present in the poems earlier in the book, then others deal with more distinctive themes. “The Descent”, for example, responds to Gleeson’s lush landscape by taking us back to the lyric objects of the other poems:

It begins late in the hottest month, this thin fiction that summer’s ending, as if winter’s always with us, curled like a spring around our fingers or our childish hearts. And if autumn’s a dream of falling, then the night sweats spill their abstract meanings like lyrics from our parents’ songs. It’s always been like this: dust days drifting in and out of the last evening light, then that slow descent into sleeping, the street outside a dark river leading us back to ourselves, to beaches and distant suns, to pale moonlit hands pressing down, down. In the night all the words return, the bitter, hissing spume of memory, making of the motion of this quiet street obsolete patterns in the sand.

There is a lot you could say about this poem but I’m interested in the way it transposes material from other poems. It begins with one of Lowe’s obsessive touches: the exact time of the year. In the earlier poems this always seems connected with a sense of seasonal change and the very clever result is that lyric immediacy (the exactly documented appearance of the singular item) is balanced against both ephemerality (when the season is declining into another) and eternity (when the circularity of the seasons is stressed). In “The Descent” the fall is not into winter or summer but into the image rich-world of sleep and dream. And the poetry of the night is like the lyrics of the songs of another generation, that is, lyrics whose meaning is just out of reach.

For me, the most intriguing of these later poems is “City on a Tongue” (the painting on which it is based, I have never seen). As with the first two poems I looked at, this is a poem about desire conceived totemically. The female figure “rises like a city on your tongue” and the city image is continued when she floats above the poet animating the world beneath, “As she lights her lamps at evening the sky above you glows with sudden fire . . .”, but, of course, desire never satisfies the immense energies it arouses:

Once you thought yourself the only music in her streets, the  melody that stirred her like a gentle seaside breeze. Now those same streets echo to a song that’s sung alone.

Most intriguing to me is the way the poem gets a bathetic effect out of looking like a prosified poem. In fact it looks as though old rhyming “fourteeners” have been opened out into a prose poem. It’s an unsettling and interesting effect: whether it’s a unique formal discovery of Cameron Lowe or something well-known among poets, I have no idea.

Where Cameron Lowe’s next book will go is anybody’s guess. The lyric world is so strong and done so well and with such awareness that you feel it is likely that this idiom (rather than, say, responses to surrealist paintings) will prevail. But there is plenty of room – and talent – for experiment.

 

 

John Tranter: Starlight: 150 Poems

St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2010, 214pp.

This is a large, four-part collection and its variousness or, at least, the various ways in which it explores its central themes, make this a good introduction to Tranter’s poetry for those readers yet to engage with it. The poems are generated in different ways but almost all are concerned with the status and dynamic of the poem itself. This issue of status is immediately separated from a kind of generally accepted notion of the poem as a stand-alone product, the response of a skilled worker with words to some sort of impetus, whether that be an event in the outside world or a nagging irritation in the unconscious. Tranter’s poetry has always resisted this model, sensing that there is always an element of the fake about this, not to mention a lot of worrying assumptions about the nature of the human self.

For decades Tranter has explored generative systems. These have included the computer programme BreakDown which, by analysis of the frequency of letter repetitions produces a passage of text which is entirely incomprehensible (truly “surrealist” in being determined but aleatory) but at the same time, definitely in the style of the original. We know from a passage given to Philip Mead and included in his excellent “How Poetry Became Posthuman” (it appears in both Mead’s Networked Language and The Salt Companion to John Tranter) that a lot of “poetic” work needs to be done to make a poem or prose passage from such data and so there is no sense of a machine doing all the work. In fact the amount of labour looks daunting in comparison with the kind of work a conventional poet might have to do with images and phrases prompted by “an experience”, and Mead explores Tranter’s description of the process as a reverse of jazz-improvisation and his suggestive image of feeling like Dr McCoy in the Transporter room of the USS Enterprise when things have gone astray and the transmitted humans have become scrambled.

Another generative method (employed here in “Five Quartets”) involves “whiting out” words in an original to produce a text which contains only words from the original in the order in which they appear. Then there is the process of taking foreign language originals and passing them through a speech to text programme that produces only English and making a poem from the chaos that emerges. The “Speaking French” section of Starlight is built this way (using poems of Baudelaire, Mallarme, Rimbaud and Verlaine) and I might – in the interests of self-aggrandising scholarship – point out that something similar was done for Latin and Hebrew texts by Louis Zukofsky (though without the computer-assistance) and there is a very funny little book which processes Mother Goose Rhymes into French in a reverse procedure. And, finally, there is the wonderful opening poem, “The Anaglyph”, which built by retaining the first and last words of each line of Ashbery’s “Clepsydra” and building a poem by filling in the gaps – though a better description might be to say that it evacuates Ashbery’s poem in order to infill it with Tranter’s own material.

The obvious critical question which emerges here is: What generates this obsession with textual generation? Is the powerful drive to break down and reconstruct a response to imperatives in modern culture or does it have an individual, psychological component (assuming that that is not an out-of-date obfuscation)? A lot has to do, I think, with Tranter’s own engagement with the issues of influence and how this relates to the status of texts. Instead of poems as discrete (almost excreted) objects, we have instead a continuum of text production with individual authors reinhabiting and rewriting the work of the past. Robert Duncan had a similar view of creativity as a transformative continuum but in Tranter’s world there is a lot more pragmatism and avoidance of a kind of pan-creative mysticism. Sometimes all that is taken is a tone of voice or style (as in the case of the BreakDown generated texts) evacuated of meaningful content and asking to be informed by a new content which can be comically and satirically at odds with the tone and content of the original. Sometimes a syntactic structure is taken as well as a good deal of the “meaning” (as in the case of rewriting the poems of Les Fleurs du mal in the last section of Starlight), and, in the case of a poem like “The Anaglyph”, a formal requirement is made which is derived from the original poem but not in a way that that poem would conceive of “form”. But it shouldn’t be felt that this process is, in some way, an avoidance of poetic personality, a reducing of the poetic self to some mechanical producer of arbitrary texts. There is a lot of Tranter’s poetic personality at all levels of Starlight and, as we will see, versions of the poems of as “strong” (in the Bloomian sense) a poet as Baudelaire come out sounding perfectly consistent with the Tranter of Crying in Early Infancy and Dazed in the Ladies Lounge.

So Tranter’s engagement with past masters and influences – especially Rimbaud and Ashbery – has a personal and psychological dimension that is an important part of his output, though to say that merely skates over an immensely complex issue. It is no accident that two of Tranter’s most important early poems: “The Alphabet Murders” and “Rimbaud and the Pursuit of the Modernist Heresy” are, respectively, an attempt to ask what a contemporary poem might look like once the various rhetorics and dishonesties and stripped away, and a kind of biography of the great precursor of the modern whose injunction “One must be absolutely modern” is a cornerstone of Tranter’s poetic development. (It might also be more than a coincidence that each of these poems was entirely rewritten.) The engagement with Rimbaud is a personal one.

At the same time, it is hard not to feel that the sense of being in some way a construction, a momentary consolidation of genetic and cultural factors (with some very permeable boundaries), is, in Tranter’s case, not a result of absorbing what psychoanalytical theorists in foreign capitals argued last century, but is rather a deeply personal experience. It can lead to a sense of unreality and dissociation. These are states that Tranter writes about brilliantly (“The Moment of Waking” appears as the first poem proper of both his Selected Poems) and they can also be states that the poetry induces in the reader – there is an especially mesmeric quality, for example, to the eighty pages of sonnets in the “Speaking French” section of Starlight. A crucial early Tranter poem is significantly titled “Waiting For Myself to Appear” (as with the other two poems I spoke of, this was rewritten) and Tranter’s sensitivity to the culture of the nineteen-fifties, especially its imported American films, surely derives from the fact that adolescent selves are even more obviously unstable, temporary constructions than adult ones. A great poem from the 1988 volume, Under Berlin, “Those Gods Made Permanent”, is an extended meditation on the movies and the actors – escaping time through the messy chemistry of developing film – who have become not so much models as possible personality-configurations for the people watching. The poem as a whole rather recalls “Rimbaud and the Pursuit of the Modernist Heresy”, at least in tone, and it concludes with the same kind of powerful look towards a bleak future:

                                                  The years
punish those of us who survive them
is one way to look at it, and if the sight
of a torn movie poster flapping in the wind
upsets you, so it should, the slope is
downhill now and the strange valley ahead
is brimming with darkness, where your father’s ghost
waits to welcome you into the company of shadows.

(It is hard not to be interested here in the final reference to the father. It looks at first reading like a reference to Hamlet, but Tranter’s parents figure, if not largely, then at least regularly in his poetry and especially in interviews he has given. They represent, perhaps, the tenuous genetic component of the self, while the poetic mentors represent the poetic dimension.) Similar material to that found in “Those Gods Made Permanent” appears in “After Hoelderlin” a version of “Da ich ein Knabe war” / “When I was a boy”) which is used as the prefatory poem to Tranter’s second selected poems, Urban Myths, though the poem is less dark since it inherits the tone of the original:

. . . . .
You characters caught up in your emotions
on the screen, how I wish you could know
how much I loved you; how I longed
to comfort the distraught heroine
or share a beer with the lonely hero.

I knew your anxieties, trapped
in a story that wouldn’t let you live;
. . . . .
These dreams were my teachers
and I learned the language of love
among the light and shadow
in the arms of the gods.

This unintended segue suggests that I should begin my look at Starlight with the short third section, “At the Movies”, the only section that might be called “occasional” in that the poems spring from an authorial mind’s engagement with cultural objects. Tranter’s fascination with film, as I have said, goes back a long way. “Red Movie”, the sequence from his second book, might be a starting point although its interests seem methodological – it is about “field composition” and the refusal to treat characters as self-contained consistent elements. Under Berlin is probably a better place to begin because we meet there not only poems like “Those Gods Made Permanent” which are general in their approach, but poems like “The Creature from the Black Lagoon” and “High School Confidential” which are engagements with film as a cultural product, focussed on individual films. The first of these is a brilliant poem which sees the “host” film as an expression of the fears of its culture (“that creature, / rising like a new disease from the gene pool, / why should we pity him? Deracinated, / maybe, but what a guy!”) and simultaneously as an interlocking set of generic conventions that make its narrative path predictable:

. . . . .
You pity the girl in the bathing suit -
she may be a palaeontologist, but
sure as eggs she’s going to get
a terrible fright. And the ethnics,
they have to die on our journey
towards the knowledge that shimmers behind
the South American facade . . .

Starlight includes poems based on well-known films like Vertigo and Forbidden Planet as well as on more obscure works and also a television series, Columbo. The title of “Caliban” is an acknowledgement that Forbidden Planet is a transposition of much of Shakespeare’s play to the science fiction realm of Altair 4. Tranter’s response to the film is, interestingly, congruent with its location in the culture that made it. The id of the scientist, powered by the machines of the planet’s extinct inhabitants, takes the form of the gigantic invisible monster that destroyed the initial expedition and threatens to destroy the current one, sent as a rescue mission. If The Creature from the Black Lagoon is most easily read as an expression of American fears of miscegenation, then Forbidden Planet embodies fears of the destructiveness of the unconscious mind in post-Freudian America, interestingly crossed with fears about out-of-control technological developments (such as the H-Bomb). I think, in passing, that this is quite unlike the “take” that most contemporary Australians would have on Forbidden Planet. We would be much more likely to see it (as we do The Tempest) as lending to post-colonial allegories whereby the obliterated inhabitants threaten the colonisers by infiltrating their consciousnesses. Again, as with earlier “movie” poems, this poem has multiple perspectives. The film is a metonymic expression of its culture both in its settings and themes. But the poem also wants to position itself outside the film in the shooting, (“What do they talk about in the studio canteen / between takes”) in its technology (the spaceship is steered “through a field of sound effects”) and in its genre (“Why is he there? / To romance the Professor’s nubile daughter whose / air of innocence hangs around her like a perfume”.

The Columbo poem is also about frames within frames and different viewpoints (it may be worth reminding readers that Tranter’s first book was called Parallax, which is in essence no more than a double perspective). It is also a sonnet structured so that the “turn” after the eighth line is exactly at the point of the change of perspective whereby the focus on the scruffy detective’s interrogation, which takes place on a movie back lot, widens to take in other “characters”:

and we notice, a hundred yards away, between
two hangar-like studio buildings, an actor
in a Roman Centurion costume, smoking
and talking to a friend, and beside him
a kangaroo on a lead looking around
then tentatively sniffing the ground.

This is really one of those Chinese box structures that fascinate Tranter. The kangaroo exists inside a film about filmmaking (and crime). Film “contains” reality and, since it exists in the real world as an experience, is also contained by reality.

Probably the most complex of these poems is “Boy in Mirror”, about Hitchcock’s Vertigo – its companion piece, “Girl in Water”, can be found in the “At the Movies” section of Urban Myths. It includes an opening section on adolescent responses to the film and is built out of a free flowing commentary on the film which stresses its complex motifs and openness to an allegorising approach. The poem gives a generic-narrative interpretation of Vertigo which, like North by Northwest, contains, the poem says, a woman imprisoned by a monster who must be killed so that the princess can be rescued.

. . . . .
Cherchez la femme, then the action
moves to a strangely threatening rural arena
far from the city: dangerous heights and fatal falls:
the (blonde) is unfaithful to the hero, maybe because
she has been captured and possessed by another monster
and soon the hero is a cuckolder and the woman adulterous
and thus fallen, or falling, or dead and gone . . .

We also get a lot of impressively detailed critical reading, especially involving connections with Proust that perhaps derive from the original novel on which Vertigo is based. These may be well-known in the land of film-criticism but they are new to me. The perspectives in this poem are not only the different ways of reading the narrative itself (ie with a progressively wider lens producing an archetypal reading) and the increasingly fine observation of detail, but they also bring in the adolescent boy’s response to the eroticised body of Kim Novak and his identification with the wounded policeman.

Starlight’s fourth section is a series of responses, or rewritings, of poems from Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal. Like those of the second section, these poems are marked by energy and a clear pleasure, both for writer and reader, in the way syntax and energy interact in an imposed form. Baudelaire’s metier is to live within the sordidnesses and aspirations of his age rather than claim to stand outside it. In these transformations the seedy world of mid-century France becomes the modern world of crooked entrepreneurs, addicts and prostitutes. The first poem is an example of the section’s title “Contre-Baudelaire” because the original is clearly addressed to the poet’s muse and when it speaks of her having to prostitute herself, Baudelaire is speaking of himself. In the Tranter we get one of those portraits of women which can be found in his early poetry and the title is changed to “Venus” – one of the points the poem perhaps wants to make is that Muses cannot exist in a world of contemporary poetics (a similar idea lies behind Adamson’s Theatre which responds to Bonnefoy’s interest in the nature of a modern muse):

Gothic girl, nightclubber, speed queen,
when the icy north wind rakes the streets
and you stumble home to your claustrophobic room
and find the heating cut off, what will you do?
A shot of something will warm your guts for a while,
then the bottle’s empty, and the alien at the store
won’t give you credit any more. Rummage in your bag:
garbage, more garbage, and an empty syringe.

You might get work in soft-core porn, perhaps;
or a job in a fly-by-night shoe shop, or a temp position
typing up bullshit for a junior sales executive,
or maybe you could try a standup comic routine,
learning to handle the hecklers and get a laugh
exposing your miserable life for a share of the take.

Other poems use transformations which update Baudelaire in a more co-operative way but some work by using bathos. The “divine brothers” of “Le Flambeau Vivant” who guide the poet’s steps along the pathway of beauty become the actors of “Screen Angels”:

I see them in the air, creatures of the screen,
born of stories concocted for money to feed
the crowd with a perfectly average IQ . . .

though, given poems like “Those Gods Made Permanent”, this might not be quite such a harsh take on popular culture as it seems.

The use of bathos works most interestingly in the little poem, “Rotten Luck”:

To put up with a career as pointless as this,
it takes the courage of a gambler.
Okay, someone has to do it, but
like they say: vita brevis, ars longa.
The grave I look for is covered with brambles,
on a lonely hill in the bush. Jazz began
by livening up a funeral march. So
mix more drinks and make them stronger.

More than one winning lottery ticket lies
forgotten in a drawer. Dentists ply
their skilled and painful trade, ignored.
Many an opium poppy flaunts its
spangled petals in a silent jungle glade,
far from addicts, that babbling horde.

This is not only a better, tighter, and more intense poem than Baudelaire’s “Le Guignon”, it makes a point of transforming its original humorously. The Baudelaire goes (according to the translation of William Aggeler):

To lift a weight so heavy,
Would take your courage, Sisyphus!
Although one’s heart is in the work,
Art is long and Time is short.

Far from famous sepulchres
Toward a lonely cemetery
my heart, like muffled drums,
Goes beating funeral marches.

Many a jewel lies buried
In darkness and oblivion,
Far, far away from picks and drills;

Many a flower regretfully
Exhales perfume soft as secrets
In a profound solitude.

The process of dragging the poem downwards here, from its lofty and slightly clichéd perch, seems to liven it up considerably. The way in which a jewel lying buried away from picks and drills metamorphoses into a lottery ticket and a reference to dentists is interesting because not only is the result good but it becomes even better when origin of the transformation is looked at.

In the case of “Albatross” the transformation is extreme. The original poem begins with a description of the way in which sailors, to amuse themselves, capture albatrosses so that they can laugh at the way in which these lords of the air struggle clumsily to walk on a ship’s deck. The final quatrain allegorises this out to be a symbol of the poet who, when exiled on earth, finds his giant wings prevent him from walking. In Tranter’s poem, the bird is transformed into a corporate high-flyer and the sailors into regulatory authorities who “sometimes, to amuse themselves . . . arraign them in the dock”. And the clumsiness of the albatross is dwelt on at some length so that, in the dock:

. . . . .
That brain like a steel trap that could easily recall
a shift in their investments of half a point
months ago, among a welter of obscure trades,
now struggles to remember who said what
about some crucial deal a week ago.

Perhaps the most interesting case of this “transformation by expansion” is in “Pride” based on “Chatiment de l’Orgueil”. The original describes the fall of an academic theologian who, Lucifer-like, becomes so proud of his knowledge that he attributes the success of the church to it and says, “Jesus, little Jesus! I raised you very high! / But had I wished to attack you through the defect / In your armour, your shame would equal your glory”. In the Tranter the age of high theology is “the Age of Plastic” and the academician a “Californian Marxist Theoretician / flushed with a tenure-track appointment”. What is of interest is that Tranter spells out what he considers the failing of the Theory-age to be – something not required by the original which is far more gestural:

. . . . .
he woke from a bad dream choked with simulacra
and cried out: “Theory! I nurtured and raised you!
But had I wished to trip you up through
the defect of your initial faulty premise -
cultural formations are “like languages”, they
have a “grammar” – why not “like roles”, they
interact with other “roles” constituting
a “narrative” of social interaction? – why not
“like a circuit”, interacting choices which
summed in Boolean groups constitute
a variable and cybernetic current of meaning? -
faulty, plausible simile – from which everything else
extends like a cantilevered road to nowhere -

your sudden fall from fashion and power
would far surpass the velocity of your takeoff,
and you would plunge to earth, a moral lapse,

a fashion blunder, a shameful memory, a fad!”

This seems to me a viable critique of the modern anthropological assumption that cultures can be read like languages, an assumption that alarms linguists and seems to have no “epistemic warrant”. It doesn’t, though, mark Tranter out as “anti-theorist” since the language assumption is the grafting of one section of the humanities (linguistics/grammar) onto another (anthropology) and Tranter’s suggested “why nots” finish up in the world of “high-tech”.

There can be little doubt that “The Anaglyph” is the dominant poem of this collection and one of Tranter’s great achievements. Structurally, as I have said, it inhabits Ashbery’s “Clepsydra” by retaining the opening and closing words of each line. It is probably (I’m a critic not a poet) a more difficult procedure than this simple description makes it sound – “serpentine” and “congruent” appear as consecutive line endings, for example. More importantly, it began (as Tranter describes in his notes on the poem on his website) as a response to a request to write something about Ashbery’s poem. Since criticism, even at its most basic level of offering a reading, places the writer outside the poem being discussed, one can understand Tranter’s solution of writing a counterpart poem which will explore (among other things) his own relationship with Ashbery not by standing outside and speaking about one of the poems but by inhabiting it. It’s hard to write about thye poems of friends. Seen from this perspective the formal structure seems very significant and spins out a set of metaphors in the reader’s mind: it could be likened to making a building inside the facade of an older one; it could be like putting your father’s suit on and walking to and fro before a mirror. The poem itself speaks of it as “like gutting then refurbishing a friend’s apartment” and one of the recurring references in the poem is to Kinnell’s “The Bear” in which a hunter kills, eviscerates and then enters the skin of a wild bear. True, these bear references also relate to the idea of inhabiting an image of oneself once one has achieved a “reputation”:

That we are afraid of it – inhabiting a reputation, the whole thing
About establishing who you genuinely were – are – I’ll admit. There
You hope your opus will be taken for legerdemain, but your effort sinks
Deeper into the mulch of history, while I adjust the mask that
Just fits more loosely every decade . . .

Ashbery himself appears at various places (at the conclusion he is invited to join in at drinks in the evening) perhaps most significantly in the passage that begins:

                                                                                          Then the shreds
Of another adventure assemble: a tour of the old college premises
Undertaken to the tune of the jig “From Rochester he came hence,
A writ of Cease and Desist clenched in his teeth”. Here, see this,
Like a pistol on a silver platter, it’s all yours
And it was mine once . . .

But it is also a poem about Tranter’s own poetic development and his thoughts, as a long-time practitioner, on the whole business of literature: in this sense it is perhaps closer to “The Alphabet Murders”.

One technique that can be found in some of Tranter’s “rewritings” is the one of seizing on a basic metaphor of the original poem and extending that metaphor by treating it more casually and sometimes comically that the original poem: you can see this in the images of poem-production and of the ship sailing into the dark which Tranter takes over from Peter Porter in his rewriting of Porter’s “On This Day I Complete My Fortieth Year”. “Clepsydra” uses images of space, sky and flowing water – the “torrent” of verbal facility. It has been read, not entirely convincingly, as a poem about the phenomenon of influence and there is no doubt that this is the major theme of “The Anaglyph”. You do get some sense of the complexities of relationships between poets. Influence is an anxiety but not for simply Bloomian/Freudian reasons. How does one poet engage with an admired and world-famous mentor avoiding the insulting process of carping about minor details so as to carve out a space in which to operate. Tranter is to be admired for not adopting any of these and related tactics. Ashbery appears all through Starlight and one of the functions of “The Anaglyph” is to prevent this seeming in any way clannish or, even worse, a diminishing of Tranter’s own considerable status. I think it succeeds brilliantly and part of the reason for this is how much “The Anaglyph” is a Tranter poem, replacing the trademark Ashbery mixture of a strong sense of logical connection that fails all the time to be graspable, with sharp-edged images and an intense language bordering on “verbal intemperance”.

There are no comparable complexities of relationship between Tranter and Eliot and the notes to Starlight contain the acid comment that Eliot’s “Four Quartets” “at nearly a thousand lines, seemed to me to be far too long”. “Five Quartets” by “whiting out” words is, at one level, a contraction of its original (the kind of thing that is popular in literary papers where a whole lengthy novel is reduced to a few lines of bathetic precis) and it also a distortion of the meaning of the original since what results is (though it can be said to be “in” the poem) like nothing that Eliot might ever have said or wanted to say:

. . . . .
Words move the Chinese violin, while
words between the foliage
waste a factory, or a by-pass.

There is a time for the wind to break
and to shake the field-mouse with a silent motto.

You lean against a van
and the deep village, the sultry dahlias,
wait for an early pipe.
. . . . .

The result is more complex, though, than the procedure seems – an experience I seem to have had all through Starlight. As with the BreakDown poems, there is a touch or parody here in that some of Eliot’s mixture of oracular utterance and dry pontifical tone survives.

Tranter is a great poet and like all such poets his work is marked by a continuous pressure to develop and experiment, to explore to the last detail all possibilities. It is good to see that, after a very slow start, there is now a solid groundswell (if swells can be solid) of critical mass accumulating about his work: The Salt Companion to John Tranter is a good beginning. But all great poets pose distinctive problems for their critics (a displacement perhaps of the problem that writing about Ashbery and Rimbaud causes Tranter). One can imagine that Tranter will attract critics for what seem to me to be the wrong reasons. For example he provides new texts for fine tuning a writer’s endlessly evolving idea of the exact nature of post-modernism. He also provides new material for a discussion of the interpenetration of digital technologies and literature, as he does for those whose interest is primarily in Culture writ large rather than poetry. Tranter is a poet not a project and he would not be the great poet he is if he did not outrun the usually doughy batch of critical and cultural interests that makes him attractive to many readers and writers. You worry that in the future there is going to be a lot of bad criticism. In his website notes he quotes Wilde’s very accurate statement that “All bad poetry stems from genuine feeling” and one is tempted to add that all bad criticism derives from intellectually respectable motives.

 

 

Anna Kerdijk Nicholson: Possession

Parkville: Five Islands Press, 2010, 63pp.

It is almost exactly fifty years ago that Douglas Stewart wrote, in the preface to his collection of “Voyager” poems, that “any Australian should be able to read a poem about Captain Cook or Leichhardt”. He saw these explorer narratives as both myths of origins and resonant tales that might bridge the gap between the crude but reader-attracting bush ballads of Lawson, Paterson et al and the increasingly hermetic and abstruse modern lyric. Anna Kerdijk Nicholson’s version of the Captain Cook narrative is certainly readable and probably more approachable than Slessor’s great poem (which it inevitably confronts) but it is a complicated work nevertheless.

“Five Visions of Captain Cook” was structured by a system of refractions and so, interestingly, is Possession. Instead of a simple, chronological engagement with Cook in the form of third person narrative or dramatic monologue, Kerdijk Nicholson’s work has, instead, three imagined books, interwoven so that they reflect on each other. Fourteen poems are about Cook at various stages of his career: they are second person lyrics and the fact that they continuously address Cook (“You’ve ordered the deadlights / be kept open . . .”, “You imagine the scent of South Sea fruit on your fingers”) means that they highlight the interaction between the poet and her subject, leaving us to wonder who possesses whom (for just as Slessor’s poem is moored alongside, A.S. Byatt’s novel is also in the offing). Six poems are imagined to be “Notes extracted from a lost manuscript”: these are lyric poems, meditating on what I might, if I was jaundiced enough, call post-colonial pieties and look as though, in conception, they might have been inspired by Peter Boyle’s Apocrypha. Finally, there are nine poems about the poet’s own life. These recall, to some extent, the poems of Kerdijk Nicholson’s first book, The Bundanon Cantos (another work which thinks about its structure very carefully) and, as I’ll say later, far from being intrusions of authorial egotism into the life of a distinguished subject, are actually a crucial part of the book’s structure.

The lost manuscript poems begin with an imagined definition of that problematic word “explore” suggesting that its derivation from the Latin “ex plorare” (literally “to cry outwards”) is occasioned not by the calls of a hunter, as is commonly assumed, but “possibly from the shouts of those who are objecting to being examined or investigated, whether in organised scientific manner or otherwise”. And they finish with a fine poem, “Today the distance between the threads of the net”, which concerns itself with the net – both conceptual and mensurational but also imperial – that the great voyages of discovery throw across parts of the world. These lyrics, as lyrics appended to narrative tend to, derive a lot of their power from the interesting points at which they stand: they are very oblique. “What was lost” is a list poem, looking back at Cook from the position of a more recent Polynesia, stripped of much of its culture. “Ambition is such a small thing” goes back to look at the forces that drive a man like Cook, using the language of hawthorns and hedgerows as a metaphor for the net and concentrating on issues of dimension so that the world-changing comes from the small:

It is like the pip in the haw, hard
nor is there much flesh on it.
How is it that such a small thing
once it takes hold, hedges acres in?
If hacked at the base, slit
and laid, it still binds on,
thorny, covetous bugger.

And “You, the one who stands for us” focuses on dreams which perhaps lie (the poem questions whether “desire makes dreams”) behind ambitions:

. . . . .
What you started to measure,
we have measured.
We have counted the words 
of the world.
We have catalogued ourselves,
the outcomes of your dreams.

The poems devoted to the narrative of Cook’s voyage share something of this lyric refraction in that there is very little of the continuous about them. They do not, even, as lyric versions of narrative tend to do, locate themselves around dramatic highpoints. We see Cook, in Queen Charlotte Sound, watching a shooting star or considering one of Banks’s preserved heads. The opening poem, focussing on his childhood in Yorkshire, is an extended attempt to give some kind of character portrait and focuses on Cook as someone who responds to the mysteries of the wind and sea, especially the former:

. . . . . 
wings cannot contain it, it is the science of blessings,
it comes, or not at all. It is the only thing that knows us,
all the crannies, the secret places where the caulkers
have not reached, where the weevils hide; it sees all. Changeable
as it is, it is the truth. Measure it as you will, it cannot be over-
thrown, only managed, never mastered; and it will never be told
or embraced: it will be a relentless taskmaster and will never love.

The Cook we see here is one who struggles for some kind of control – over lands, names, words and fate – but who recognises that one must, literally, “go with the flow”. To fight against the often vicious demands of this particular deity means only that you go under. It’s tempting to see, in the way the wind and the ocean are described, something of the Old Testament Jehovah and to see in Cook something of a figure like Abraham or David who is not above exploiting any gaps left between the commandments of God. But there is also the question of whether the arbitrary rule of the winds and waves is not a metaphor for greater changes in human consciousness – in this case the Enlightenment demand for knowledge and measurement. Cook might conceivably be being described here as a man who becomes great by riding, rather than fighting, great imperatives in human history – though that might make Kerdijk Nicholson’s position seem closer to that of the Tolstoy of War and Peace than she might want it to be.

Finally, there are the poems which are about the poet’s own life. I have left these till last because, in a way, they are the most interesting. They are certainly the bravest because if they were not well and cleverly done we would have the impression of a poet shoving her head into great events in history. And it would not be once (like an artist basing a minor character on himself) but continuously: “Captain Cook: My part in his story”. The issue, as it so often is, is the author’s stake in the narrative. To make a narrative really live, to become literature, the writer has to have some connection with it, long and lovingly explored. It’s one of the essential differences between literature – something which has a chance (at least while the aesthetic effect lasts) of engaging a reader’s deepest self – and mere genre fiction (skilfully written to a template) or a Writing School project. Slessor’s poem announces at least one of these connections in its famous, though perhaps throwaway, lines, “So Cook made choice, so Cook sailed westabout, / So men write poems in Australia”. Cook is the point of origin, this says, for a country which, a hundred years later, produces the poet at his desk. And though there may be a wince at the gap between the great voyager and the petty scribbler, there is also the recognition that, as Cook was a mage figure, “beating krakens off / And casting nativities of ships” so is the poet, too, a magus, a bearer of whatever magic still lives in the world.

So the essence of these poems is connectivity and resonance. The first connection that appears – though I’m not sure any of the poems exploit it – is that Nicholson was born and grew up in Cook territory: Yorkshire. When she calls him “Nuncle” in one of the lyric poems, there is an assertion of kinship and thus to be searching for the essence of Cook’s character is also to be searching for the essence of the poet’s own. Again, though it is not a connection exploited, we could say that poets are at the mercy of not winds and tides but the vagaries of words and inspiration. Perhaps, since every poet is a voyager of either the inner self or the conceptual world, this is a connection present in all poems about voyagers: it certainly appears in Stow’s wonderful poem, “The Singing Bones”, where it is the poets who understand the explorers, “They were all poets, so the poets said / Who kept their end in mind in all they wrote”. These personal poems also refer to the death of the poet’s father and the sense that the parent always lives on in the child. Many modern narratives have begun with the death of the father symbolising (as in, say, Carpentier’s Explosion in a Cathedral) the death of an ancien regime, or, quite commonly, the death of faith or of childhood. In Possession the emphasis seems to be on connections and the way in which lines of descent mean that the past (Cook) is embodied in the present. True origin narratives establish the foundational figure as a blood-relative rather than merely the origin of a culture.

At a less general level, it is clear that the poems are shaped by the connections between Cook’s world and the author’s. The earliest of these describes cleaning up after a violent storm where “entire masts of forests” have been blown down. Banks’s dogs, which make numerous appearances from the wings, connect up with the poet’s dog. “Stars, unbroken code” is a long poem built around issues of mapping and living:

. . . . . 
The wind forbids as much as rain, unlike words
it does not discriminate; whatever the syntax or
the architecture, it wants it down. In this bright
spring blue, wattle-lashing sky, its hot violent
air rotates on the ecliptic, part of some zodiac
unable to be named and I have a cartographic urge
to transect the celestial equator, to contradict the wind.

Sitting still here in my Ptolemaic universe writing text
on text . . .

Both this poem and a later one concern themselves with the poet’s essential material, words. And it is something that Cook worries about too, finding them shifting and unreliable compared with charts. The final poem about Cook, “These few words I saved for a child’s mouth”, begins with a death, goes on to deal with the gap between reality and a verbal version of reality and concludes by making Cook think about a word which is crucial to modern Australians who have inherited a situation which was begun with his voyage:

You buried Young Buchan, epileptic,
landscape artist, in the deep:
Banks moaned I must submit
to the irretrievable loss . . .
no more of Buchan’s scenes of arcadia
of which we were going to be kings.
You rage. Indeed! Boswell says
Hawkesworth brewed your journals,
published journalistic lies -
you would rather a map any day,
where truth and beauty reconcile.
You like that word reconcile:
meaning “compute”, “make amends”
and “bring together as friends”.

Though it is probably not an intended meaning here, it is hard not to imagine the author reconciling with her subject throughout this book. Possession (very beautifully produced, as are all the new books from Five Islands) is quite a triumph against the odds. It ought to be no better than the kind of thing a new enrollee in a writing course dreams up, a project needing a convenient amount of research and producing a coherent, booklength work. But actually it’s a book of true poetic engagement, a worthy modern descendant of its hoary Voyager ancestors collected fifty years ago by Douglas Stewart.

Peter Porter: The Rest on the Flight: Selected Poems

London: Picador, 2010, 420pp.

This selected poems appeared not long before Porter’s untimely death earlier this year. The selection was made by Don Paterson and Sean O’Brien, though you have to read the introduction to find this out. It’s a good selection though it is, of necessity (given the size of Porter’s output) a fairly stringent one, choosing between half a dozen and a dozen poems from each of the nineteen books. Given how consistently good Porter’s poetry is (he’s the opposite of those poets who produce a small number of outstanding or significant or influential poems nestled in a mass of material that only scholars want to look at) this means that a lot of material is going to be left out. You won’t find “’Talking Shop’ Tanka” from The Cost of Seriousness, “The Philosopher of Captions”, “At Lake Massaciuccoli” (English Subtitles), “Men Die, Women Go Mad” (Dragons in Their Pleasant Palaces), “Scordatura” (Afterburner) and a host of other favourites. On the other hand, there aren’t many poems in this selected that cry out for omission. It is probably the best designed and produced of Porter’s books and has as its cover a fine photograph of its author which reveals him as intelligent, sensitive, haunted or scarred depending on which poem you have read before you look at it.

Porter poses a lot of problems for critics and the most pressing derive from the feature with which I began this brief review: the high degree of consistency in his work. One part of a critic’s toolkit is the ability to winkle out lines of approach to features which are more crucial (in being more important generatively) than others: to locate, for example, the unspoken grief at the heart of the jollity or, for that matter, the jollity that underlies what seem to be poems of grief. With Porter this is almost impossible since all these generative areas have been visited by the author and raised into the sunlight as themes in the poems. Poets usually have complicated relations with the texts they produce and saying something in a poem is often a way of not saying many other things, but Porter seems to have, of all the poets I have ever looked at carefully, the most open disposition. A critic is not likely to find a path into Porter’s underworld without finding that Porter himself (like Jules Verne’s Arne Saknussem) has been there before. You feel that, in the case of many authors where this occurs, there is a war being pre-emptively waged with the reader and that the poet proclaims himself, at every point, to be superior to the awkward and uninformed ideas of any potential critics – he is the one who laid down the clues and the reader, congratulating himself on his perspicacity, is actually only following them. But there is no such ego-driven battle in Porter’s case, just a calm thoughtfulness that permeates the poems themselves. The image that springs to mind of the totality of Porter’s work is that of a smooth sphere with transparent walls revealing fantastically complex inner mechanisms. Because it is a sphere it is almost impossible to get any sort of critically privileged purchase on it: there are no unusual poems encoding hidden generative areas which would make a good point at which to begin a description of the whole.

In conjunction with Porter’s poetry this month I have reread two critical works about him to see how others have dealt with this problem: Bruce Bennett’s excellent biography of 1991, Spirit in Exile, and Peter Steele’s small but satisfyingly dense volume in the Oxford Australian Writers series, published the year after. The Bennett is very concerned to trace the differences between volumes, matching them to biographical events. And it is true that the Porter “sphere” does change and evolve, But focussing on changes can highlight these at the expense of continuities. The Steele book is a set of “soundings” a critical procedure that seems well-suited to Porter’s work. It looks at the way in which a particular “issue” – for example the “thickness” of events – appears in the poems. Much as I like both the book and its method, it can’t escape the suspicion that there is something arbitrary about the chosen issues or, worse, that they are predetermined by the critical mind of the writer. Put together these two books actually form a very good guide to the first thirty years of Porter’s fifty-year publishing career. The diachronic and synchronic nicely counterbalance each other’s weaknesses.

One “issue” which appears a priori in anyone’s creative work is how the self is conceived and how it relates to both the world and to language. The Porter self declares itself early as a damaged one. The source of the damage is the loss of his mother, Marion, when he was nine and his banishment to a private school, and Bennett is right to focus on this sense of a traumatic loss of a childhood Eden. But there are other fracture lines: the mother’s family were Sydney-based while Porter grew up in Brisbane and of the two, the former is the more generously remembered probably largely because they were memories of holidays. One of the recurring images in Porter’s poetry is of the ferry “with a Lady’s name” which “wallowed round / the river bends”. The Mother/Father fracture seems to be, according to Bennett, between a well-bred slightly vulgar energy and a more desiccated, mercantile approach to the world. The damage continues of course with the suicide of Porter’s wife, Jannice, in 1974. It is impossible for any reader of Australian poetry not to begin to make comparisons here with Les Murray who functions (in Porter’s case) as a younger alter ego, admired colleague and sparring partner (possibly my favourite Porter poem, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Hesiod” is a full-frontal assault on Australian farmer poets and their raucous assertions about national identity and is a kind of opening round in a long debate/conversation). Murray has a lot to tell us about the degree of damage caused by the death of his mother and his experiences at High School but his analysis is very much ex cathedra and readers and critics are certainly not encouraged to often any contributions.

This damaged self is a highly receptive one though the receptivity has boundaries. This is surely the point of the last stanza of “On First Looking into Chapman’s Hesiod”. It is conventionally seen as a kind of whimsical desire on the part of a literary man for a world “out of nature” (to quote Yeats, a poet – like Dante – beyond the bounds of Porterian receptivity) where “home is just a postmark” and “plants conceive in pots”. But the real point Porter is making, I think, is that the more the poet is centred, locked in the holy ground of origins or his or her sacred sites, the less receptive they can be. A damaged self which is also rootless makes for maximum ability to absorb into itself the complexities of the world. Not only is the self highly receptive it is also highly connective. Porter’s legendary erudition and immersion in European art is not done to provide matter for poems. Porter never, in his poems, behaves like an art tourist, writing poems about individual sites or individual paintings, instead these things come up as parts of much more complex poetic wholes. The title of the poem (“The Settembrini Waltz”, “Non Piangere, Liu”, “Frogs Outside Barbischio”, “Alcestis and the Poet”, “Winckelmann at the Harbourside”) may seem to announce that the poem will focus on an interesting, suitably arcane topic, but it rarely does: Porter’s poems, and the titles they contain, are complex, multi-faceted phenomena.

Then there is the issue of language, another phenomenon, like the hidden levels of the self, which we are partly in control of and use but which also controls us. Porter always seemed (when I have heard him speaking of it) to have an exaggerated respect for the English language. He also had an exaggerated respect for the poetry of that language, especially for that of the canonical Romantics and Victorians, poets who are generally a step too far for my own receptivity. English is, of course, a great big democratic grab-bag of a language, an out-of-control creole with a “self” made up of at least four parts – English, French, Latin and Greek – and a host of other borrowings. It is tempting to see it – at the lexical level at least – as some sort of corollary for the receptive, fractured self at the heart of the poetry. You could do a lot of thinking about Porter’s obsessive love of punning (an issue, interestingly, which is the subject of a poem in Murray’s, The Biplane Houses) in terms of the way in which these jokes, sometimes excruciating – as in “The Werther Level”, “The Man with the Blue Catarrh” – are built on fractures in the language allowing for shock connections as well as maximum densities. Even the title of the current volume has to be carefully unpicked at this level. The double meanings of “rest” (recuperation/remainder) and “flight” (airline travel/escape) combine in a form which suggests the genre of paintings of Joseph and Mary on their way to Egypt.

And then there is, at the syntactical level, the issue of Porter’s love of phrase-making. This is so strong that my first attempts to say something general about Porter’s poetry were built around it: a kind of “The world exists to end up in a well-made phrase”. Early in Porter’s career this was felt to be some sort of intrusion from the sordid world of advertising in which Porter worked, and readers were concerned in case the inevitable vulgarity of this sort of mercantile phrase-making should corrupt the pure and virtuous world of poetry: one “Love goes as the M.G. goes” was felt to be enough. Bennett’s biography makes clear that the image of Porter as a copy-writer moving up into the world of poems is entirely incorrect: copy-writing was a job offered because he could write poetry and he took it up to earn money, finally judging that he was not especially good at it. “Looking at six books / of poems, painfully and / yet so slovenly / produced over thirty years, / I notice one well-wrought phrase”, says the first of the “’Talking Shop’ Tanka” from The Cost of Seriousness. But what constitutes a “well-wrought phrase”? Compression of disparate material and wit, obviously, but I can’t help feel that there is also an attraction to the way in which good phrases dissolve the boundaries between high culture and vulgarity thereby keeping language in contact with the powerful linguistic generative forces of what the Romantics called “the folk”.

This is all matter for a more detailed and less gestural analysis. But I’m also reminded that there is another phenomenon in Porter’s work which, if not exactly a “language”, is so close to being one that it is easily connected metaphorically. That is the world (or language) of dreams, the “black creatures of the upper deep” as they are described in “An Exequy”. In dreams the self speaks both for one and to one, the trouble is (as a politician said of the “people’s judgement” in the recent election) we are not sure what it means. Bennett sees as a kind of third stage of Porter’s career (the first is that of the damaged self which, as satirist, savages the surrounding world, and the second that of a more confessional poet trying to find poetic ways to come to grips with the guilt induced by his wife’s suicide) an engagement with seductive but troubling general theories like Freudianism and the interest in Theory (summed up in a later poem as the ogreish “the Theory Fairy”) circulating in universities. And there’s a lot of truth in this view. “Civilization and its Disney Contents” (a perfect example of a groan-inducing pun in the title which is also a profound and important observation of the general style of dreams – Porter once described himself as “if not the Leonardo da Vinci, at least the Cecil B. DeMille of dreams” and in “Leaving Mantua” as “a dream-master”) has Freud imagining the effects that Freudianism and Marxism, as systems, might have on each other:

It will never be forgiven let alone laureated to say
that the trouble with systems is that no one system
can cover everything – to work a system must be unified.

The following volume, The Chair of Babel, begins with two “bad dreams” poems in which messages come from the dead wife (“Bad Dreams in Venice” and from the id (“Bad Dreams in Naples”).

To prevent this review being nothing but a series of hesitant generalisations, I want to look at three poems which, though I had known them before, had never particularly stood out until this reading. Poets are always best served by readings of their work, so this is intended as a kind of mini-memorial, if not to the whole of Porter’s rich output, then to this month’s reading of it.

The first of them appears at the end of Porter’s first book, Once Bitten, Twice Bitten. It is true, as everybody says, that that volume, and the three that follow it, generally contain outward-looking poems and it is these poems which were early anthologised – “John Marston Advises Anger”, “Death in the Pergola Tea-Rooms”, “Annotations of Auschwitz”, “Phar Lap in the Melbourne Museum”. Poems which involve personal experience are, for the most part, very distanced, very outward: “Forefathers’ View of Failure”, “Mr. Roberts”, “A Christmas Recalled”. Given this I can see the reason for beginning the volume with “A Giant Refreshed”. It is not a particularly important poem (it is omitted in this selection) but it is personal experience turned inward and shaped by psychic pressures (in this case a sort of Protestant fear of judgement):

The Market gardeners of my home town,
Good Chinese, by the creek grew lettuce
In the sun and left on their own,
As the water ran by and the tadpoles swam,
Just worked to live or with a gun
and salt-petre fired at trespassers.
I do not often think of them but I dread
such sober judges of me when I am dead
. . . . .

(Typing this out, I notice for the first time, the little pun on the word “just”, conveniently capitalised – the sober judges will be the Just). At any rate, this is a long introduction to the last poem of Once Bitten, Twice Bitten, “Tobias and the Angel”:

When I play the sad music my conscience urges,
I hear through the great summary of our loss
My father praising the long cataract before his eyes
Where on the retina he starves for light.
We are an unlucky family and we have faith
For which we praise our oppressors and our God.


This has been a long journey; my dog is tired,
My companion is a holy dandy, his clothes are praise.
The fish leap from the river, short verbs hold time
For me in haul – I have an inventory of praise
And do not tire of the simple entering in,
Like my father closing his Day Book on his trade.


There is no justice: love relies on luxury,
Faith on habit, health on chemistry,
But praise sits with persistence. Today
There is a sun pestering the water, tomorrow
A water falling from the sun and always
The pilgrim cursing the falling water and performing sun.


I shall get home one day or if I die instead
An Insurance Angel will tell my waiting wife
His grave is furnished by his good upbringing,
His habits were proper, his doubt all to the good;
From his warm orthodoxy melancholy shrinks,
He did what he was told, obedient and sane.


So when the miracle strikes from the open door,
The scales fall from my father’s eyes and light goes in,
I shall be eating a traveller’s heavy meal
Made much of by the kitchen staff. Our house
Is not a tabernacle, miracles are forgotten
In usefulness, the weight and irony of love.

This seems so much more a Porter poem than any of its predecessors and its Porterishness lies in its complexity. But this is not the sort of verbal complexity that makes a poem like “Too Worn To Wear” (which appears three poems before “Tobias and the Angel”) almost incomprehensible, instead it’s a complexity that comes out of the connections within the poem. At one level it is a poem preferring the ordinary virtues to those wreathed in various forms of transcendence and its central statement is “miracles are forgotten / In usefulness”. The grand abstractions on which ethical systems are built – justice, love, faith – are all (in true materialist fashion) dependent on the physical world. You could also read it by focussing on its “confessional” or at least, personal, aspect. Porter’s father (in Porter’s own words, “a decent, timid man with no great expectations of life . . . a gentile in the rag trade”) was a man who took mercantile activity seriously. He was also, as Porter’s late poems show, a very keen gardener (eschewing natives for European plants) and so he becomes a kind of comically inverted version of the Hebrew God who created the Garden of Eden and, like God, did the expelling from the garden by sending Porter, after his mother’s death, to a boarding school. So there is a lot of history between the pair, lending itself to poetry. But this is a poem not of Oedipal conflict (another interpretation deriving from a system) but of a guarded reconciliation and respect. But hovering over this, or parked alongside, is – in my reading at least – the spectre of the transcendent and this gives to the recounting of all the virtues of the simple unambitious family life a faintly comic tinge. (The transcendent always does this: believers of various beliefs seem always on the edge of saying, “Is this the best you’ve got? Look at the glories we can offer!”). And the poem allows this into itself by seeing nothing for the son apart from life as a commercial traveller (a fellow-traveller to his father) who was well brought up and did the right things.

The transcendent appears in the form of the biblical story which is announced in the title. The Book of Tobit is part of the Apocrypha and tells a fairly lurid tale of the son of Tobit who travels to the land of the Medes where he marries his cousin. He is guided by the angel Raphael in disguise and discovers that a fish’s organs, if burnt, will drive away the demon of lust who has killed his cousin’s previous husbands and also cure his father’s blindness. But this story doesn’t appear in Porter’s poem in textual form but rather as a painting. There is an extraordinary fifteenth century painting by Andrea del Verrocchio in the National Gallery, London (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Andrea_del_Verrocchio_003.jpg), which is clearly the crucial text. Its existence in London is important because this poem comes before Porter’s first forays into Europe in search of its art (in “Exequy” he describes the first visit made by him and his wife: “I think of us in Italy: / Gin-and-chianti-fuelled, we / Move in a trance through Paradise, / Feeding at last our starving eyes, / Two people of the English blindness / Doing each masterpiece the kindness / of discovering it . . .”). The striking feature of the painting is its sublime looniness. It is opposed at every conceivable level to the sober world of Porter’s father. It brings the transcendental world of God – close enough to his creations to send an angel as a helper – not in solemn, significant or even wildly dramatic (Caravaggioesque) terms but in whimsical ones. The dog (an erudite friend pointed out that it is the only pet in the bible) belongs to no recognisable breed and the central gesture of the painting – Tobias’ grasp on Raphael’s arm – is weird and indecipherable, recalling a couple on an earliesh date rather than an angel leading a human. The problem of the poem at its first, casual reading is that the reader can’t decide whether or not this is a version of the Book of Tobit, dramatised by updating. My reading of it now is that both versions lie alongside each other: the poem interweaves them and allows each to compromise the other.

“Dejection: An Ode” comes from Fast Forward.

The oven door being opened is the start of
the last movement of Rachmaninov’s Second Symphony -
the bathroom window pushed up
is the orchestra in the recitative
of the Countess’s big aria in Figaro, Act Three.
Catch the conspiracy, when mundane action
borrows heart from happenings. We are surrounded
by such leaking categories the only consequence 
is melancholy. Here the tramp of trochees
as the poet, filming his own university,
gets everything right since Plato. What faith in paper
and the marks we make with stencils
when a great assurance settles into cantos.
The Dark Lady was no more than the blackness of his ink
say those whose girl friends are readier than Shakespeare’s.
Just turn the mind off for a moment
to let the inner silence flow into itself -
this is the beauty of dejection, as if our unimaginable death
were free of the collapse of heart and liver,
its faultless shape some sort of architecture,
an aphorism fleeing its own words.
Betrayal goes so far back there’s no point in
putting it in poems. I see beyond the pyramid
of faces to strong monosyllables – faith, hope and love -
charitable in halcyon’s memory, fine days
upon the water and weed round the propeller.
Now all the theses out of dehydration
swarm upon my lids: I was never brave
yet half an empire comes into my room
to settle honey on my mind. Last night
I quarrelled with some friends on politics,
sillier than seeing ghosts, and now this neuro-pad
is dirging for Armenia. Despair’s the one
with the chewy centre, you can take your pick.
I listened to misanthropy and had
the record straight. The woman in white,
the lady with the special presents of mind,
may now be on the phone from out of town
just to keep in touch. Think, she usually tells me,
of Coleridge and days in record shops
and all those “likes” that love is like,
a settlement to put our world in place.
What has the truth done to our children’s room?
The toys are scattered, the pillow damp with crying,
chiefly the light is poor and no-one comes
all afternoon: Meermaedchen of the swamp of mind.
I kept my father waiting, he will know
that the disc, long-playing for however, ends
in sounds of surface, of the hinge and wind,
an average door, a tree against the pane.

The title puts this poem together with “On This Day I Complete My Fortieth Year” as a rewriting-of or revisiting or alluding-to a canonical Romantic poem, in this case, Coleridge’s poem of the same name. In fact, here, Coleridge’s poem is crucial and is always present. The idea of turning the mind off for a moment is the opposite of Coleridge’s desire for joy to expand from the mind and to animate the dull objects of the “inanimate cold world” though, of course, it shares its metaphysical set-up. Coleridge’s poem is addressed to a lady and she becomes the “woman in white” – here presumably some kind of grief-counsellor, though also Wilkie Collins’s eponymous heroine – who is, with another of those excruciating puns that are deliberately included to shake up the high tone of the piece, a woman who brings “presents of mind”. The last part of the poem is an attack on the notion that the suffering of the world can be assuaged by a mind which thinks correctly. After the suicide of the wife, truth does nothing to the scattered toys of the daughters’ room, or the tear-stained pillow: it certainly doesn’t set you free. “Nothing is curable but may still be endured” as a later poem, “The Ecstasy of Estuaries”, says. The poem finishes with a reference to Porter’s father, then recently dead at the age of ninety-six in a nursing home in Brisbane. “I kept my father waiting” is a tricky clause. I read it as implying a kind of guilt for lack of visiting, as though the father hung on beyond the normal span of lives, waiting for his son either to visit or symbolically to take over responsibilities – as though the meaning were “I took a long time to become inured enough to grief to become an adult enough man and to be able to assume responsibility and allow my father to move on”. At any rate it is the father who knows that after death there is, if not silence, only the sound that vinyl records make when the needle runs in the repetitive groove, oscillating forwards towards the central hole and then back – an image that is going to need extensive documentation for readers in a future where the niceties of vinyl record construction are as arcane as the structure of the various kinds of horse-drawn carriages. It’s a powerful image but it is worth noting the degree to which it follows Coleridge in his images of the wind, the “Aeolian lute, / Which better far were mute”.

It also takes us back, rather wonderfully, to the opening of the poem where Mozart and Rachmaninov are being listened to on a recording (perhaps examples of “The sad music my conscience urges” that “Tobias and the Angel” begins with). Here the “leaking categories” are the worlds of art and ordinary life (a major theme in middle and late Porter) whereas in Coleridge’s poem they are the inner self and the exterior world of nature. The middle section of Porter’s poem is difficult – mainly because the references are unclear. He seems to be watching a documentary in which a poet revisits his university and he is irritated by the way in which poetic hindsight is always correct. This is followed by a reference to the theory that the Dark Lady of the sonnets is no more than the ink used to write. Both of these references, at any rate, seem critical of recourse to the world of art in which all assertions are correct and which is hermetically sealed so that all references are not to the “outside” world but to art itself. Something similar happens with dejection where the outside realities of physical collapse are ignored in favour of enjoying the inner silence. The danger for a poet is a lack of perspective: you have a trivial quarrel with friends and poetically it emerges as a lament for the victims of the Armenian genocide. It is a really difficult and challenging poem, structurally very complex. When I first read it, I pigeonholed it as a poem of inner misery where remembrances of his wife’s suicide lead on to a powerful statement about the bleakness of death but it is altogether more complex than that and may really be a poem that has to linked up with other poems about art like “Basta Sangue” or “And No Help Came”.

Finally in this mini-anthology of revisionist glosses, there is “Ex Libris Senator Pococurante” a fairly late poem from Max is Missing.

Carchemish, this tedious performance
our forefathers valued as the first account
of the creation of the world; it seems
no more than a boring battle between
the snakes and the dogs, with comic referees
called gods obsessed by their own dignity.


The Troiliad, just as silly and twice as long,
with lists of heroes, ships and towns,
interfering gods on shortest fuses
and magic implements and animals,
its love-life platitudinous
and its epithets attached like luggage labels.


The Hunnish Wars, a propaganda feast
prepared by an ambitious consul
for home advantage, as full of lies
as tedium. The style is gelid,
the facts factitious – it deserves its fate
to end up teaching grammar to dull boys.


Summa Cattolica, a sort of Natural History
of Credulity. Should you want to know
the stories of the saints you still might baulk
at being shown their laundry lists and tax returns.
This huge concordance mixes pedantry
with gloating martyrdom and police reports.


The Satanic Comedy, a strange attempt
to draw a picture of the world based on
the machinations of a city council
together with a paedophile’s infatuation
with a merchant’s teenage daughter.
In three books, Heaven, Hell and Nowhere.


Eden’s End. Expelled from Heaven in a war
with guns and bombs, The Devil tempts
God’s franchise-takers with his fruits and hisses.
Our classicist author makes Adam a market
gardener while Eve assembles Lifestyle hints
on Post-Coital Guilt and PMT.


The Interlude. In this almost unending
meditation on the life and times of one
banal existence, the author dares presume
we are as self-obsessed as he is.
Its marginal attractions are no better:
country hovels, childhood and wet walks.


Donovan’s Demise, the lexicon of Modernism,
its every sentence stitched into the text
like Cash’s name-tapes, this epyllion
of solipsism demands that we devote
a lifetime to its study. Properly examined
it becomes the scribbling on a ouija-board.

I still laugh out loud when I read this attack on the Western Canon (Bloom’s book is the subject of a fine earlier poem, “The Western Canoe”). It makes fun of – in order – The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Iliad, Caesar’s Gallic Wars, Aquinas’s Summa Theologica (I think), Dante’s Commedia, Paradise Lost, The Prelude and Finnegans Wake. The title suggests that we should imagine it to be the comments by Senator Apathetic on various works in his library or, conceivably, comments by a bookseller/critic on a library which has been broken up after its owner’s death. The only one that doesn’t work in its own terms is the last stanza which deals with Finnegans Wake by abuse rather than by caricaturing elements that even lovers of the various books can see to be there. The central issue of course is: how close is this to its author’s own beliefs. At one extreme we could read it as a expressing a set of literary prejudices. At the other we could read it as a dramatic monologue where the pleasure derives from the fantastic ignorance and stupidity of the speaker. The latter extreme has the additional complexity that it is possible that an ironic frame is being bolted on whereby the comments of the ignorant or naive are actually more penetrating than the comments of the experts. And on top of that, there is the reader’s inevitable suspicion, based on long observation, that authors attack other texts usually in an effort to clear space for the central text of the universe – their own. This could well be a satire on the critical machinations of authors whereby Porter looks wryly at his own prejudices. I’m inclined, now, to see it as an expression of views close to Porter’s own – he certainly had a profound dislike (which I never entirely understood and don’t now, given his love of Italian art) for Dante. If this is the case then it becomes an important poem in which an author, known for his receptiveness and ability to forage intensely in the world of literature, marks out some of the borders of that receptivity.

There is almost always something uniquely dispiriting about the death of poets. True, they may have their “best work” long behind them by the time the creature with the scythe tracks them down. They may even have been silent for decades, no more than a shell of the poet who produced the wonderful works. But usually, even then, the inner life is one of such richness and greed for its own expansion that the idea that it is now destroyed or disbanded seems like an affront to nature itself. Why, the argument goes, would our evolution have created individuals who have such an unimaginably intense imaginative life if there were not some purpose for it, an afterlife perhaps? It’s not an argument that, you feel, Peter Porter would have succumbed to. There is too much realism (and its concomitant, bleakness) about the structure of his intelligence for him to fall for what is, in reality, nothing more than wish-fulfilment. He was a great and profound poet whose work grew in its own strange way. He is, as I have said, difficult for critical analysis to approach, not because of the complexity of individual poems – though there is plenty of that! – but because of the complexity of the structure of the totality of his work. The emphases of the middle and later poems are slightly different to those of the earlier ones but the reader, facing one poem, also faces the whole. And what a “whole” it is. The back cover of this volume has a comment by Martin Amis: “His is a voice I value and honour. I need its nourishment daily.” At first you read this in genre as an understandable piece of hyperbole, but actually it may just be literally true.

John Mateer: The West: Australian Poems 1989 – 2009

Fremantle: Fremantle Press, 2010, 149pp.

Everything about the poetry and position of John Mateer seems interestingly complex. He was born in South Africa, spent some of his youth in Canada and has been based in Western Australia since 1989. West: Australian Poems 1989 – 2009 is, as Martin Harrison points out in the book’s introduction, only a fragment or facet of this poet’s work. Focussing on Australia, this book forms a kind of companion piece to his previous volume, Elsewhere (Salt, 2007) which republishes groups of poems dealing with experiences in Africa, Indonesia, Japan, the US, and Mexico. Mateer is, for reasons which will become apparent, a great travel-poet. The titles of both books are carefully chosen and each has a double perspective. “Elsewhere” is, at one level, merely everywhere but the poet’s home in Australia: Auden’s “altogether elsewhere” whose function seems to be to teach us about home by confronting us with the utterly different. But the book has as an epigraph a line from Rumi, “my soul is from elsewhere” and this reference to the “invisible world”, the gheib of the Persian mystical tradition, tells us that we need to look inwards as well as outwards when thinking about spaces in this book. Similarly this selection of Mateer’s poems with an Australian focus is called West but west is not only that far and isolated state of Australia (weirdly, at least for a citizen of the East Coast like me, oriented so that it faces Africa across the Indian Ocean) it is also, to quote Martin Harrison, “that post-World War Two, socio-economic mega-project none of us anywhere has escaped from”. One of the later poems calls this “The Empire of the Obvious” and to live in Western Australia is, in this respect, a double heritage.

The act of notionally separating one’s Selected Poems into two volumes (Elsewhere and West) might seem on the surface to be an act of simplifying or, at least, unravelling, but each book carries with it the full complexity of its author’s personality and background. Of course, everybody is complex (perhaps, like languages, equally complex) and, for all I know, a poet who has lived all his life in a TV-free village and has never travelled or been exposed to alien cultures, might have as complex an authorial position as Mateer, but in Mateer’s case the complexity is built into the voice and into the variety of his poetry – as literary scholars used to say, it is a foregrounded element. You can see it in a poem like “One of the Earthrings at Sunbury”:

Like a grassed-over plate, the earthring is almost invisible,
an upturned lip of dirt, an O, like an invocation in a pantheist’s poem,
yet also banal, this site of men’s initiation
fenced-in by the bright clear-cut architecture of outer suburban dreams.

                  A memorial, a sanctuary, archaic post-object art?

I sit cross-legged just outside the ring whispering a dharani.

Notice that? Faint, the whirring traffic on the freeway, the slight tilt
of the ring towards the city’s sparkling skyline, the bay’s silence
and the boring khaki plains that are rising up
to me here, to this ring and to the vanished feet that would have been
- more than a Noh play’s concluding (stamp!) -
an African pulsation, an Ancestral dance . . .

                  What is this history? a dematerialising?

even as I, an alien, a haunting, bow down to the empty ground.

It is tempting to call this a typical Mateer poem, although one would need to stress that the modes in which he writes are very varied, but I’ve chosen it as an entry point because it makes such an interesting contrast with Judith Wright’s early poem, “Bora Ring”. The dynamic of that poem works by contrasting the first three stanzas – written almost in the late nineteenth century mode of elegiac lament for the loss of the Aborigines – with a final stanza that reminds the reader that there will be a price to pay, that this is not a comfortable elegising: “Only the rider’s heart / halts at a sightless shadow, an unsaid word / that fastens in the blood the ancient curse, / the fear as old as Cain.” Though the poet is clearly “the rider”, she never appears in the poem in propria persona and you have to wait for great poems like “At Cooloolah” for the white observer to become something more than a cipher, to become more a fully complex observing human being. In Mateer’s poem (which I don’t suppose is likely to be as widely anthologised as Wright’s) the observer is an actor whose complexities and conflicted quality are highlighted rather than smoothed over. He sits outside the ring singing an Eastern Buddhist chant and using a metaphor from Japanese theatre. His sense of the dance that might have occurred in the ring is that it is “an African pulsation” and he sees himself, as a white man, as a ghost, haunting the site. And his distinctive presence is not only there as a character but it is there in its initial metaphoric reaction to the place because, looking like a grassed over plate, it has a double face: it is simultaneously an “Oh” of ecstasy and a banal grass circle.

Mateer is always going to be present in his poems certainly to the extent that he never allows himself to be a neutral “presenting” voice like the speaker of the opening stanzas of “Bora Ring” (continued in the lyric voice of an even more famous poem, “The Old Prison”). It is always a complex and conflicted self, and the poems, if misread, can seem self-centred. But they seem to me never to be trivially egocentric. They face up to the complexities of the perspective that the poet brings to the world and he is representative only to the extent that his self is, like the selves of his readers, complex, multilayered, altered by context and the situation in which he finds himself. And ultimately unanalysable.

The poems of West are grouped in sections and one might expect the section called “The Nature”, unlike the ones called “Exile” and “Among the Australians”, say, to contain poems where the lyrical ego might be simplified in the face of the immense complexity and weirdness of the Australian natural environment. But even here interestingly odd things occur. “At Gnangara”, for example, begins like a standard poem about an ecological crime whereby native trees are ringbarked and uprooted to make way for a pine plantation. Nature takes a hand in the form of a bushfire which destroys the pines and activates the seeds of the native trees:

. . . . .
                                                          Then bushfire

reduced the plantation to ash. After thirty years,
like a nation after decades of martial law,
bodies unclenching, eyes opening, native seeds sprouting.

It’s a strangely chosen metaphor and is surely a South African reference applied to the Aboriginal peoples of Australia. Where we might have expected something neutral, we get something highly poet-specific. The situation is recreated in a later poem, “Aftermath”, where the poet is implicated as an actor/observer much as he was in “One of the Earthrings at Sunbury”:

              Walk into my mouth,
into the head that isn’t mine.
              Sit cross-legged on the crinkly, sooty ground,
on the wisps of singed hair
in the aftermath. 

. . . . .

I approach a tree,
trying to tell its type from reptilian
evenly scaled charcoal skin:
apartheid? Near my hand on the bark, an ant.
In its jaw-hands a huge load of food.

In the last of the poems in this section, “Last Night”, Mateer recounts the experience of dreaming (“lucid dreaming” he calls it) that he was a black cockatoo. For a moment it seems a poem that has to decide whether it is going to describe yet another odd creature of the West Australian environment or explore the murkier world of the totemic animals and beliefs of the original inhabitants of the place where he is sleeping and who may be contacting him. At the poem’s end, the black cockatoo is his totemic animal but the tone is comic:

                     I was naked,
shaggy with feathers, and lifting
one foot, then another, flexing, looking
around the branches’ fretwork
under the roof of leaves. I
was uneasily considering if I had the right perch.

There are many birds, especially cockatoos, in this book and they can be treated, as here, reasonably lightly but they can also be part of the way older, deeper levels of personality – associated with the seeping influence of the land – can impress themselves on the already culturally mixed individual. In “The Cockatoo” – a mildly comic take on national identity – the bird stands for a kind of ethnic purity (it is, after all, a “native”) and is surrounded by a group of more representative, modern Australians:

Others might have expected conversation. We didn’t.
Standing with a Malaysian-Chinese man outside his furniture store
on Sydney Road, Brunswick, we have no need to talk.
The Lebanese bloke on his silver bicycle, taking a break from the kebab shop,
glides past us. We don’t notice. We don’t look up
from the sulphur-crested cockatoo unsteadily perched on the back of a chair.
We are waiting for him to hold forth on the subject of AUSTRALIA.

Also at this comic level another totemic animal appears in “The Local” which describes one of the wealthier suburbs where “professional men and genetically-chosen women, / or vice versa, sleep through this musky briny night”. These are prey to a menagerie of seditious animals and insects including cockroaches, possums and native and immigrant birds. Mateer, however, chooses the fox as his representative:

expert survivalists cosmopolitan as you like - 
who hide in the parkland and limestone
caves on the foreshore, who mesmerise chooks in the
millionaire’s backyard and are never
sighted slinking down these leafy streets.

In those poems which concern themselves with interactions between poet and people rather than poet and landscape, there is also a tendency to focus on a kind of parallel complexity of identity. “. . . Hermes is to Blame” contains a set of anecdotes of odd people and their odd fates, and a complex poem, “Invisible Cities”, describes the fate of Italian migrant for whom

being here will be like having sleepily boarded a European ship at noon
to wake startled at midnight on an unimaginable continent in a deserted industrial city.

What will happen will be a powerful act of transformation whereby eventually being in the place will be like

transferring all your possessions to some other room,
                                                          then taking the floor as your bed,

or like painting a nocturne blindfolded, the cityscape being in that darkness

as much noise as memory, seeming as Italianate
                                as those paperbarks in the summer moonlight.

Even a poem devoted to a detailed examination of a lover’s body (“I had told her I’m always / embarrassed by poems that aren’t specific enough”) in an attempt to fix a powerful experience forever in the face of entropic loss, cheats the author when the most striking memory is of an irrelevant trinket – importantly an exotic trinket:

                                           Most vivid, though,
I don’t know why, was that Ethiopian crucifix
hanging from its leather thread on
the back of her neck.

If the book falls into engagements with people, engagements with landscape and engagements with the self, there is also a substantial number of poems devoted to the history of race relations in Western Australia, notably “Talking with Yagan’s Head”, “In the Presence” (which is fifteen brief poems addressed to Yagan) and “The Brewery Site”. All of this puts a lot of strain on the poet’s already conflicted self-identity though the texts they produce are, because of this, more honest than the average poem-about-cultural-issues. It’s probably only typical of me that I prefer the lighter, comic touch of the poem, “Pinjarra”, which ends this section:

Down at the site of the battle which was more like a slaughter
some Nyoongar blokes showed him the crossing
where, there low over the blackened water,
they’d seen that fireball hovering white as a blind eye,
and he’d asked them if they’d tried to call out to those spirits 
and they’d laughed:


                   “No way, mate, we was off like a shot!”

Though this only recounts an anecdote, it must be a rare thing for a massacre site to be the subject of a serio-comic poem.

Twenty years’ worth of poems show John Mateer still to be what he was in his first book, Burning Swans, a poet who has done things in his own style and who seems never to have been interested in matching existing poetic movements and fashions. The complexity of the self which is behind the poems can make for difficulties for a reader: if you’re trying to come to grips with an item in the Australian landscape which you have never seen, it doesn’t make it easier when the describer himself is a bundle of complexities. But the result is always an honest one and there are probably more dishonest poets (“painters of fakes” in Picasso’s description) than is generally recognised. My reservation about West is that it is only a part of what this poet does. It was probably a careful decision involving parameters and considerations I know nothing of, but I wish that Elsewhere and West had been combined. It would have given a fuller picture of this poet’s abilities and achievements

Roger McDonald: Airship; Ken Taylor: At Valentines

Airship, Warners Bay: Picaro, 2008, 72pp.
At Valentines, Warners Bay: Picaro, 2010, 84pp.

One of the few consolations of staggering into one’s sixties is the experience of rereading books which were important to you in the past now that the gap between the first readings and the second has become so alarmingly large. When Ken Taylor’s At Valentines was written the Vietnam war was not yet over and Roger McDonald’s Airship was published not long after the fall of the Whitlam government. When the pleasure of retracing the steps of one’s own reading is coupled with living in a national literary culture that seems only too happy to consign books of the recent past to history, you have a double reason to celebrate this “Art Box” series from Picaro Press. So far it has republished, as well as these two books, earlier works by Judith Beveridge, Geoff Page, Rhyll McMaster, Judith Rodriguez and a number of others. Australian poetry will be all the healthier and richer if it continues indefinitely.

Airship was the second of Roger McDonald’s two books of poetry. It followed Citizens of Mist (UQP, 1968) and seems, on rereading, still to be an extraordinary advance on that first book. I remember that, at the time, it seemed so radically different a book that it was hard to believe that Citizens of Mist and Airship were actually written by the same poet. This is not a judgement that stands the test of time – today it is the lines of communication between the two which stand out: though that doesn’t alter the surely indisputable fact that the first book is a comparative failure and the second a great success. The poems of Citizens of Mist are, generally, socially oriented. They are interested in people but are not extended portraits: they tend, rather, to be impressionistic and focussed on crucial moments in character’s lives. Thus the first poem, which narrates a visit by Charles Wadsworth to Emily Dickinson, reminds us that this is his last visit before leaving for San Francisco. It alights on a central moment in Dickinson’s creative life, speaking of the poems which “upstairs are tight in their packets” – presumably both in the attic and in the poet’s head. This focus on crucial moments does reveal the eye of a certain kind of novelist: the period detail is absorbed but not included and the reader has the sense of large and complete worlds standing behind the poems: there is certainly nothing vague about them. The iconic poem of this type is probably not the title poem (which is positioned at the centre of the first and larger of the book’s sections) but “Sniper”. This is not only because it is the first poem to suggest its author’s interest in the history of warfare (McDonald’s novel, 1915, was published in 1979) but because it suggests itself as a metaphor for what the author is doing in these sorts of poem: selecting a target, preparing the ground and making the kill:

. . . . .
                    Two hours ago
He set its aim; when the first horseman
Steers down the hill
He knows the exact wagon rut
For a hoof to touch
As a mark for the kill.
. . . . .

The first two poems of Airship seem, superficially, to set out an entirely different agenda. “Components”, true to its title, sets out the objects in the poet’s surrounding space in a highly formal and formalised way: three visual images are followed by three sound images (“three components / equally clear”) though the initial group of visual images is followed by a sound, “And distant thunder / walking into glass”. It’s obviously an important “statement” poem – being placed first is evidence enough for this – but I’m not entirely sure how it should be read. Though the visual contrasts with the aural, there is also the fact that the visual components – a teapot, a desk on straw matting and a mango tree – are part of the poet’s world whereas the sound images – a millet broom, a child’s fist, a woman’s voice – are intrusions which are, at least for most writers, inimical to writing. And it is tempting, as part of a process of looking for continuities with the first book, rather than disjunctions, to feel that the three sound images also represent a wider social world which is demanding to be admitted into the poem.

The title poem, “Airship”, suggests visitations from an invisible world that have a decidedly transcendental quality:

Recovered from pale blueprints
and forgiven its heritage of charred metal
the airship moves at the wind’s direction
through the next world. A high
slipstream of time
brings it in view: just
bouncing, it seems, from cloud-edge
to treetop, almost a milky bubble.


Now, this moment we peer,
throats tensed ready to shout,
the ship tilts its nose to the sun
and its oval shadow contracts to a grasspatch
as it shimmers and disappears.


What message arrives from the mariner
trapped in this bottle? Silence.
A freak technology has lifted his tongue -
someone, somewhere, knows and speaks his name:
perhaps he’s among us now, not yet alone.

It seems a long way from the gentle, Hardeyesque scepticism of the last two poems of Citizens of Mist – “The Roses of Guadelupe” which contrasts the immense beneficial importance of a vision of the Virgin Mary with the fact that it is shown, in the last stanza, to be fraudulent and “Jack Hope” which is essentially a gloss on the bleak joke that the light at the end of the tunnel is usually that of the oncoming train – to this visitor from “the next world”. And yet one could make the argument that the poem is, fundamentally, not interested in some message from another world, what it is really interested in is the person in this world who has summoned up this apparition. Probably it’s a metaphor for the poet, but it does reinforce a predominant interest in this world which is, after all, the world inhabited by the sniper, by Emily Dickinson and by the other citizens of mist. One could also argue that the intellectual gesture is essentially the same: McDonald’s interest is in that odd nexus (the waist of an hourglass) where something brief and compact can be described but where this brief, compact thing opens out on both sides to whole worlds. In Citizens of Mist, generally, these worlds are both social ones, whereas in this poem, at least, they are the social on the one hand and the “otherworld” on the other. Interestingly the title poem of the first book, “Citizens of Mist”, can be read either way. I had always read it as simply suggesting that the nineteenth century figures with which the book tended to concern itself were rather shadowy:

Watching the rain, they find no course beyond
The skim and random scattering of sound;
Walking with care, they only gain
What sight one footstep gives of ground.


Later, by firesides, they cry for warmth.
In gentle company they sit alone.
Somewhere a blue they’ll never touch 
Curves over bone.

Reading this back from Airship one is inclined to see it rather differently. One could read “the blue they’ll never touch” as intimations of another world (the one the airship came from) but one could also read the poem as being about characters waiting to be summoned into meaningful existence by a poet, much as someone has summoned the airship from its haven.

If “Components” shows its importance by its position and “Airship” by being the title poem, “Two Summers in Moravia”, the book’s third poem, provides Airship’s epigraph: “This was a day / when little happened / though inch by inch everything changed”. In a sense it’s a manifesto for a whole kind of fiction: that which focuses on the historical crux and finds this in little, apparently insignificant things. But though it is a theory of fiction, it is also an idea that lends itself to expression in McDonald’s poetry in the way that I have been describing because it is yet another example of his fascination with the individual moment, beyond which – on either side – lie large worlds.

The portraits of Citizens of Mist continue in Airship but they tend to be rather more abstract, as though they were examples of this perspective on life and art rather than portraits in their own right. “Sickle Beach” narrates, as its crucial moment, a man’s death, but it is located in a poem which stresses the landscape. And “Woman and Boy” occurs at the moment when a mother and son in the bush hear their dog bark:

. . . . . 
Brushing through low grass
she walks to the dray -
paused here on a journey
at the junction of two
invisible streams
she thinks
in all this time on the move
I have never travelled,
. . . . .

The fact that her personal life is empty and repetitive and that movement is not change (one thinks of Dawe’s “Drifters” here) is expressed in that wonderful phrase “at the junction of two / invisible streams” but the idea of junction and the focus on that crucial moment is part of the larger pattern of these poems.

And then there is the issue of what kind of messages might come through the portal from other worlds. On the surface, one of the differences between the two books is the amount of nightmare imagery that Airship focuses on. But there is a poem in Citizens of Mist, “Introspection”, which prepares for this. In this poem the physical set-up – the subject is imagined positioned between double mirrors – is designed to dissolve conventional perspectives:

. . . . . 
The nightbird to his nightly round
Trills from a distance.
Always almost there.
No compromise – he draws the sound
In closer to his touch. He waits.
Only a darker shadow of his mirrored face.


But soon the capture will be made,
The double-dealing done.
Nightbirds
To that glassy glade
Will come unbidden, fly
Clear through the hollow of his unreflected eye.

The nightbird/nightmare world of Airship is a very striking one. It allows the poems to move from capturing social worlds to psychological worlds. It also allows the irrational into tightly written poems. One poem, “Nightmare”, is simply a description of a nightmare, relying on the power of the images of the unconscious to sustain it. “Flights” is (I think) a semi-comic collection of anxiety dreams about flying in passenger planes (a rather different kind of airship) and “The Accusers” allegorises what must have begun as a nightmare image into a confrontation with those who accuse the poet of various unnamed crimes:

Heavy-footed, wrapped in slimy furs,
the accusers plod through trees
and climb the gravelly slope
to my window.
They loiter in dark reproachful groups
tapping on glass. Above them, behind,
the stars they arrived from
gather and drift. A million rotting years
they stand there, picking at noses,
scratching the bleary pane
with waterlogged matches.
. . . . . 

The issue in this poem is surely whether these figures were declared to be the guardians of conscience in the dream itself or whether they had to wait for the writing of the poem. One suspects it is the former.

The last poem I want to visit is “Destinations”, one of the most powerful poems of Airship. At least it announces itself to me as such on this reading – I don’t remember having paid much attention to it thirty-five years ago. For a start it concentrates on the macro and micro perspectives, “when crickets tap like sticks / and wet stars glide / down gullies”, locating the human as an inhabitant of both or, in terms of the kind of description I’ve been presenting so far, seeing individuals as a crux with cosmic forces on one side and homely local forces (like those detailed in “Components”) on the other. The poem goes on to describe how, at night, other worlds come in to focus:

then a loosened width
of landscape lies revealed: the far side of the earth,
where outer limb, rooted trunk, leaf-mulch and bedded granite


swing in hollows between stars
un-dreaming discovery. Here pale roads wind
through hills lapping on silence,


while destinations offer themselves
at any moment, or else nowhere along the way.

It’s a potent image – “a loosened width / of landscape” – for a world that comes to us through the gate of the night. In a poem like “Woman and Boy” the frustratingly unachieved destinations are largely sunlit in that one can’t help but suspect that they are matters of personal fulfilment and an enriched life, but in “Destinations” they have a deeper psychological and perhaps creative significance.

Although Ken Taylor’s At Valentines was published in the same year as Airship, its poems go back to the mid-sixties, not far in terms of years from the poems of Citizens of Mist. But At Valentines, and especially its title poem, always stood out as a marker of difference. Whereas McDonald had to emerge from a kind of poetry that recalled the Judith Wright of “Brothers and Sisters” or the Tom Shapcott of “Elegy for a Bachelor Uncle” – a kind of gentle and sensitive, rurally inflected, fifties poetry – At Valentines seemed to come from nowhere and demand attention as a different way of dealing with issues that Australian poetry had always wanted to deal with. The problem with thunderclap newness, of course, is that if it is successful it becomes absorbed and quickly seems conventional. The probably apocryphal story of the lady who thought Hamlet was simply made up of a lot of common sayings is a case in point. And of course, Taylor’s poetry didn’t come from nowhere: he had begun writing while attending A.R. Ammons creative writing classes at Cornell in 1966 and the remorseless interest in particulars and how to organise them organically is a feature of the poetry of that most American of poets. Nor has At Valentines ever been totally “absorbed”: it is just that to a reader of Australian poetry now, at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century it would seem perfectly reasonable rather than outrageously experimental. Rereading it in conjunction with McDonald’s book makes me realise how little it assumes is shared between writer and reader. A poem like “Destinations” – to choose at random – can begin with some metaphorically dense allusions (“When crickets tap like sticks / and wet stars glide / down gullies of insect-haunted black”) that connote Night to all readers. As soon as we read the title poem of At Valentines we feel that we are being shown things whose realness is more important than what a poem can do with them:

At Valentines now
we potter
with boxes,
(the smell of ants,
urine by the
corrugated iron,
sand,
dried gum leaves,
rain spattered bottles
show the dust of
drops of rain
near the shed)
still keep
small ends of wire,
copper wire
found
snipped and
scattered near the
base of poles,
copper wire,
to be wound
for something,
brass wire to go into
tins of cigarettes,
tobacco,
with names
slightly rusted and
pictures of
Empire,
eight gauge wire
bent
for rabbit skins,
twelve gauge wire in circles
because it coils in circles,
crockery packed in
Bromwich Suns and
Larwood Heralds,
. . . . .

and so on for another seven hundred or so lines. But “At Valentines” is not a poem pushing an aesthetic theory of the supremacy of particulars over the conscious constructions that poets and other searchers for meaning incline to make of them. I may well have tended to see it this way when I first read it, but this late rereading stresses how personal and emotional it is and how obsessed it is with being Australian. The positioning in time and place is crucial. Valentines was the name of Taylor’s grandparents and they had retired early to Lorne on the Victorian south coast. Their world (embodied, literally, in these particulars) is the end of pre-war Australia, an end marked by the arrival of American forces during the war. The particular that the poem associates with the Americans is the bulldozer which at one stroke rendered the complex labour interactions involved in major earthworks such as dams almost irrelevant. The poem was written during the Vietnam war while Taylor was out of his native country. A war (as Robert Kenny in an essay quotes Robert Duncan as saying) is “a time of revelation” and this poem sees a later postwar generation picking over the remains of the lives of the prewar one. Acting as a kind of entree to the horrors of the second world war in the poem, are the 1939 bushfires which, with their horrific loss of life, occurred when Taylor was nine. The poem is alive to all of this, and wants to speak of it, just as it wants to see Australian history as occurring during the fag-end of the British empire, seen most clearly – in all its ambition and seediness – on the borderlands of the empire, such as Australia.

While significance flows through the particulars of the first part of the poem, the second, shorter part is overtly analytical. It’s another mode which Taylor brings off well but its analysis and assertion has always struck me as a less valuable mode. Lines like:

In a father to son process
unbroken by the most demonstrable wars,
we have, in love, preserved an ancient empire
to points beyond relevancy,
gaining the illusion of a fresh start
for all contestants
with each colony, each awful dominion.

while alive enough (“demonstrable” has a second meaning of “fit to be demonstrated against” and “in love” is a sharp reminder that this is not a world of villains and heroes) is doughy stuff compared to the intense details of the first part of the poem. Later the poem reverts to a kind of expressionist description that is neither the organised particulars of the first part or the assertion of the opening. The result is brilliant:

And now the little guerrilla roofs hide in
lightly timbered country,
the Empire dwindles to a single, sun-bright
dusty detergent country store.
We live in the distance of shadowed ground
between you and the grey palings of memory
inclined to earth.
Each year the nails rust,
each summer is dryer than the last.
And what is without is within,
as fish people trees
in occasional brown floods,
as flies engage the boxed green shade
of cypress dust,
as passionfruit tendrils
tremble with honey-eaters and
miles of mauve grass move
with the weight
of one ibis.

At Valentines begins with its title poem and ends with another extended poem, “Pictures from the Sea”. It shares with “At Valentines” the structure of a long opening part built up out of details followed by a shorter, more analytical second part. In the first part, however, the details are individual scenes taken from Taylor’s experiences as a natural history feature-maker in the Southern Ocean. Whereas Valentines is a place of slow decay, fadedness and dust, this is, in contrast, an apocalyptic landscape:

. . . . . 
Stomach stones dribbled in death like walnuts
among the spines of white shells,
the crusted bull kelp,
the carapace of a crab, discarded claws
and tented skins,
rent from skeletons,
broken by the weight of live seals 
. . . . .

The poem takes as its challenge “And the sea? What pictures have we of the sea?” and attempts to use the sea as a kind of biological matrix for humans: a broader perspective than the cultural one of the title poem.

Many of the other poems in At Valentines exist, modally, between these extremes of raw particulars and extended analysis. This is true of important poems like “Maurie Speaks About a Secret Australia while in Iceland” where the significant differences involve the invention of an alter ego (and interlocutor), derived from the phrase memento mori, and the highlighting of the fact that the setting of the poem is outside Australia (in fact it is set, nearly enough, in Australia’s actual antipodes). This setting – children’s swings held at an angle by the wind – represents immense energy in stillness and is used to underscore the idea of life taking shapes through details which are basically descriptions of men (I read them as soldier-invalids from the first world war and the setting of the poem as being between the wars though it could well be a post second world war image) dying or waiting to die in small town hospitals, “a secret Australia / of dark green paint, / scrubbed floors, / shaved heads and sunlight.” There are at least two ways of coming to grips with this “secret Australia”. One is to see it as a prewar set of conditions of life which were never properly recorded and are now sinking into oblivion (how many of us can name the common brands of cigarettes or tea or soap of this period?). The second is to see it as a “true” existence, an authentic Australianness which is not part of the overarching national conceptions either of that time or of the cultural historians of the present. This second reading is rather more abstract but the two are not mutually exclusive.

It is no mean feat to offer in one’s poetry a new way of seeing (even if the roots of that way of seeing can be said to lie in a very different culture). Now, At Valentines seems a wonderful and important book in a period full of important books of poetry in Australia. It is less well known than many others and that is an unfortunate accident, but it is, at least, being kept in print and available. Although Taylor’s career has been, in overall creative terms, extremely productive (his work in the ABC’s Natural History unit is especially important) he has never been prolific as a poet. But he did, after At Valentines, publish a book of travel haiku, Five, Seven, Fives, and, in 2000, a fine book of poems, Africa, which was, at least, received favourably and which went on to win major prizes. I mention this to remind myself that, poetically speaking, he is actually a more prolific poet than Roger McDonald. At any rate, both Airship and At Valentines are books that should be in the collections of all serious readers of Australian poetry and Picaro Press deserves admiration and thanks for making this possible.

David Musgrave: Phantom Limb

St Kilda: John Leonard Press, 2010, 68pp.

Phantom Limb catches its reader’s attention by containing two poems that are terrific even on a first, casual reading. The first of these is the book’s opening poem, “Open Water”, a long, ambitious set-piece that keeps itself afloat wonderfully and introduces many of the themes that circulate around the book’s poems. The second is “Young Montaigne Goes Riding”, known – to me at least – from its appearance in Judith Beveridge’s Best Australian Poetry 2006. Both are poems about moving over surfaces and both are poems about processes of knowing.

“Open Water” begins with the experience – always slightly disorienting, even to off-shore fishermen – of leaving coastal waters behind and rocking on the heavier swells of the ocean, “the massive rocking / stillness of the deep and its sparking / serrations”. The first shock is that the poem modulates to an extended meditation on the colonisation of Australia, post-colonially correct but beautifully phrased nonetheless:

Out of this same illimited plain
the British had come, wind-stung and flawed
and laden with cargoes of concepts
and shadows, things which couldn’t be seen
but assembled themselves, a ruling machine
intricated into the vast and difficult continent-factory,

. . . . .

                              These were the blood-lessons:
that something which does not yet exist

is not the same as nothing: folded deep
within ourselves are nuggets of future
and the shock of their dredging . . .

There’s a kind of limited determinism expressed here which seems very Sydney if only because that city is always in the presence of the open sea which stands as a Solaris-like symbol of an open field capable of producing superficial structures from deep generative movements. The poem finishes by locating the poet on a vertical and horizontal axis: you can go down or you can go across. In the case of the latter you will be travelling either back or on – ie forward in time.

Complicating the weave of this poem is a set of references to the processes of writing: time is “open like a sentence” (which may also be a double pun designed to allude to the convict period), the movement of the waves is iambic and, in the poem’s conclusion, the fishing lines are like a “scrawl on open water”. I read this – a bit tentatively – as a desire to implicate the observer/poet in the poem, saying something like: just as the deep field of cultural assumptions generates surprising results, poetry is generated in a related way.

“Young Montaigne Goes Riding” is written in the same, stately six-line stanzas as “Open Water” and like that poem it deals with how we move over the surface – this time, of the land. Montaigne, the great documenter of the mind’s meditative processes (and of its indissoluble bond with the body) prefers “the oblique // paths which wander and meander to the one / which goes straight to the truth”. He thinks of his ideas as being like horses: “Sometimes they follow each other at a distance; / at others they glance sidelong at each other.” It’s this absolutely honest subjectivity which makes Montaigne, of course, always seem so modern to us. But I think this poem is really concerned with how poems work: they begin in subjectivity and are structured out of weird accretive allusiveness – and the poem is an example of its own subject. To return to the language of “Open Water”, it’s more a case of watching the shapes that the line makes as it drifts across the surface than concerning one’s self with hunting the fish swimming directly below. It rather reminds me of Graves’s fine little poem “Flying Crooked” which celebrates the poet’s (in the poem, the butterfly’s) “just sense of how not to fly”. In Graves’s work the distinction is between poetic thought and prose thought, whereas in Montaigne’s it is probably between human and honest mental activity on the one hand and, on the other, theological or scientific thought.

These two fine poems set up something of a guide for Phantom Limb as a whole. There is, as the first line of “Death By Water 2” confesses, an awful lot of water in these poems. “Bodies of Water” is a fine poem, for example, which opens out the pun of the title so that while it lists the various ways in which we experience and move through water – as ocean, rain, steam, vapour trails – its conclusion reminds us that water moves through us: “we move from state to state, / water flowing through us, / we through water, / a consciousness, a breath”. “Odyssey” is a little poem which cleverly establishes the hero’s love as neither Calypso nor Penelope but the “sun-deceiving, / faithful, all-embracing sea”, and “Puddles” is a nice celebration of love in terms of the way in which previously isolating pools of water can join, “pooling our lives”. There is a lot of water as rain in the book and, perhaps significantly, near the end of the book there is a sequence of sixteen brief poems about water’s antithesis: drought.

And then there is “The Swimmer: A Cento”. Made up of lines from writers ranging from the Beowulf poet to Rupert Brooke, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Elizabeth Bishop, Byron and even Ovid (my ability to list these has nothing to do with a prodigious literary memory and intelligence but everything to do with the Google search engine), it is a kind of ultimate celebration of the act of swimming, of “disappearing into the black depths” and of “the continuous dream of a world underwater”. The title, assuming that the collage effect begins immediately, must come from Adam Lindsay Gordon’s poem although that poem has a dark, suicidal theme whereas Musgrave’s poem concludes with the idea of swimming towards the light. Finally – though I could go on at length about the appearances of water in this book – there is a rather lovely early poem, “A Glass of Water”, which begins with Cocteau’s statement that a single glass of water lights up the world and then goes on to describe (straining every available double meaning) a complex composition in which, as in “Bodies of Water”, water lies both outside and within:

Behind the wedding couple, a mirror harbours
their reception.
Outside, from the verandah, the harbour mirrors
the exception
of city from sky, hills snug with houses


and a glass of water standing on the railing,
half empty or half full. In the failing


afternoon light
brightening buildings counterpoint the darkness,
glinting upside-
down inside the glass, and the newly-weds,
seen from outside


joining hand to hand for the wedding reel,
glide under its meniscus, head over heels.

As well as celebrating and recording the multiple significances of water, many of the poems set out to locate their author by exploring the past, those “nuggets of future” that “Open Water” spoke of. “Lagoon” – another water reference – is about the author’s actual origins in Bathurst (a dryish city). “This is where I come from . . .” the poem begins and continues by examining the convict past, “impatient and impenitent / forebears transported for a brace / of crimes” before making the crucial statement: “I have inherited their future”. Perhaps the central symbol is that the lagoon has been “drowned / under Chifley Dam’s / green skin” which suggests that the past is not forgotten because of changes in modes of living so much as changes in size and significance: here, one water drowns another. The next poem in the book, “Death By Water 2”, takes up a similar theme, tracing forebears back through a great-grandmother who is the great-granddaughter of a couple, Mary and Thomas, the woman of which was the illegitimate daughter of a drowned American naval captain and the man of which drowned while trying to cross the flooded Cudgegong River. As the poem says in its opening line, “It’s little wonder I write about water” and it’s significant that the structure of the poem moves forwards from the antecedents rather than backwards from the poet: it reminds us that the past was once a present which sets up resonant patterns in the future rather than being a mass of fact brought into focus by an enquiring ego. In fact one wonders whether this might not be an attempt to see things from a Montaigne-perspective, avoiding the clinical, question-focussed methods of theology (or science). As with all such enquiries, the issue of the extent to which the past determines us has to be faced. I suspect that in Musgrave’s case there is a continuous experience of surprise discoveries: as in “I find myself writing a lot of poems about water and then I discover two drownings in my family tree”. I’d describe it as a “mild determinism” – perhaps it’s no accident that these poems make me think of FitzGerald’s “The Wind at Your Door”.

Another poem, “Freeman’s Reach, Hawkesbury River”, makes a lot more sense in this double perspective of finding the past in oneself and using water as a dominant setting. It is a poem which focuses almost entirely on framing:

Out of the silence, a team of ducks
lands on the river with a whoosh
of compression braking, drowning
out the sound of cattle chewing
on the other bank. From around
the bend a speedboat lamely chugs
upstream, then turns away, its wake
a tightening knot on the river’s stillness.


Poplars quiver like yellow whips.
Bee-racked, rising out of thick grass,
castor-oil plants brandish their pods,
tiny red grenades armed with green pins.
Behind us, a hill mined by rabbits bares
its guts behind a retaining wall
of chicken wire.
                        Half a rampart,
the ironbark jetty warps over water
and, standing at its end, a poet
completely surrounded.

I have the suspicion that if one met this poem on its own one might have problems. They wouldn’t relate to its meaning but rather to the issue of whether it is worth its weight in words. It might well seem like nothing more than an egotistical portrait, at best asserting some kind of identification of the poet with the landscape. But it certainly gains a lot in the context of the whole book. For a start, like “Death By Water 2” it works “backwards”, or, at least, in an unexpected direction. Instead of being a portrait of a stretch of water introduced overtly or otherwise by the poet’s presence and voice, it is the portrait of a poet in terms of a stretch of water, “completely surrounded”. And the water is not just any water, but all the waters that have percolated through Phantom Limb. So that one has the impression that the poet is almost induced into existence (again Solaris-like) by the river. “Grieving” moves in the same direction when it describes grieving as being like “cramming words back into your mouth” and then moves backwards to speak of grief as a place “where words begin”.

Finally there is the book’s title poem which, initially puzzling, may make more sense in the context of an interest in these “nuggets of the future”. The body of the poem is about an unexpected identification between an enemy and the poet’s long dead father. It concludes:

I dreamt of him the other night
- wood is ash’s dream of being whole -


and when I woke, the only clue
to what I’d lost, like a tingling nose before the lie


was an itch where nothing itched before,
a phantom absence: the limb I never knew I had, excised.

Although we probably should read this as a poem about the intimate relationship between love and hate, the context of the book as a whole encourages us to read it as being about people and experiences from the past which the growth of the shape of our lives makes bewilderingly important. When this happens and the figure is absent, you get something like the experience of having a phantom limb.

At least that’s my reading and I’m sticking to it. It does help to explain the book’s title and allow that title to point to this otherwise unremarkable poem. As a whole, Phantom Limb has a tremendous internal coherence, driven by its twin obsessions of water and the shadow that the past casts. The fact that it never foregrounds these in any way that appears poetically predictable means that within the consistency is a lot of variety. As a result, it is a really impressive book coming to the truth of things – like Montaigne on his horse – on its own, distinctive pathways.

Peter Boyle: Apocrypha: Texts Collected and Translated by William O’Shaunessy

Sydney: Vagabond Press, 2009, 292pp.

This – by Australian standards, fabulously ambitious – new book by Peter Boyle imagines a collection of hitherto lost documents dating from, roughly, the eighth century BC – the age of Homer – to the end of the first millennium of the common era. These documents include delicious possibilities such as lost books of Herodotus, Xenophon, lost dialogues of Plato, fragments of lost Greek plays, a lost text by Pausanias, notebooks of Lucretius, Catullus and so on. There is a framework which has them being found in the papers of a William O’Shaunessy a kind of Classicist equivalent of Ern Malley. The texts, in keeping with our interest in the suppressed texts of the early Christians, are designed to show an element of human history which has been edited out – but more of that later. Importantly the world of the period that these texts cover is rather different to the known world as well. There is, for example, the kingdom of Ebtesum, imagined to be in the Sahara and a sister city of Kitezh which has the power to disappear and reappear in a different place (outside Kiev) two thousand years later – the latter city is presumably derived from Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera. There is also a nearby Essene community! Atlantis is a group of islands off the west coast of Africa. And just as the geography is surreal, so are the cultures and the events within those cultures: we meet on one of the Atlantean islands, to take an example at random, people who have perfected an operation to cure others of the sense that all is not well; and later we meet the sages of Ecbatan who write their sacred works in sand.

One of the powers on the Atlantean islands is Eusebius. Here we have a clear allegory in that the Eusebiolans represent the modern United States. A lot of the material about their cruelty and the lunacy of their culture (based on the teachings of a “Nicanorean” church) is grimly funny. The initial description, masquerading as a brief summary of the culture such as one finds in the first book of Herodotus, describes how:

Not content with owning houses, lands, islands, factories and latifundiae of all kinds, metals and fruits named and unnamed, they began the practice of claiming everything from magic spells to words and phrases. A small group of the Eusebioli, forming themselves into a corporation for the purpose, asserted their right to the invention of the words “yesterday”, “today” and “tomorrow”. A rival consortium took out ownership of the present tense. So fierce was the vindictiveness of the Eusebian courts, whose jurisdiction extended beyond earth to galaxies visible and invisible, so absolute the force of their arms, that for decades no one could speak any more in the present without suffering confiscation of all their goods and the enslavement of their children for several generations. Likewise when a spell was developed to enable the sun to rise in the morning, it became the property of a corporation threatening the earth with darkness if they did not part with a third of their wealth . . .

Two-dimensional and psychotic as the culture of Eusebius is, it makes a good point of introduction to the alternate worlds, cultures and histories of Boyle’s book. Although the Eusebiolan modus operandi is based on an out-of-control rapacity and lack of respect for all humans, at a deeper, generative level, it is a culture of reduction. A much later passage – imagined to be a Brief History of Eusebius by one Macronius of Illyrium – describes the culture’s especial hatred of “paradox makers”, those who use language in a way that suggests an infinity of possibilities between two positions:

In Eusebius children spend from five to seven years learning off by rote long lists of the visible . . . . . For those who grow up in Eusebius the heady combination of superiority and humiliation throughout childhood ensures a timid anxiety. Whilst the maximization of inequality is the political goal of the Nicanorean ethics, its devotional emphasis is well captured by the chant uttered in ancient Vedic ‘Make me narrow, narrow, narrow.’

It is this constant plea for a widening of human creative, intellectual and emotional possibility which makes Apocrypha very much one with Boyle’s other work and very far from being a kind of sterile postmodern game. The title poem of Boyle’s previous book, The Museum of Space, was a complex prose poem much of whose exact significance has always escaped me. But there is no doubt about the significance of the final lines:

In the museum of space no art work is ever completed. Sand and water filter in equal measure from the ceiling to the basement. Constructed on the ancient alignment of heaven and hell, the museum opens onto the silent inexhaustible corridors of the brain.

“The silent inexhaustible corridors of the brain” is a fine phrase but a very precise one. Within the mind, all things are possible and thus this poetry makes one of the many pleas for a kind of surrealism so that the universe may never become the lifeless, mapped, reduced version of it that most official culture propagates. Of course we have heard this before, in Blake’s “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear, as it is – infinite” for example, but most of Boyle’s references are likely to come from the poetries of the Romance languages, whose surrealism has a distinctive cast – humane rather than metaphysical. In the wider scheme of things – before I leave this issue – it is possible to carp, partly because the plea for the “inexhaustible corridors of the brain” reminds me of Spengler’s famous distinction between the Greek view of things which began with no concept of space, only of related objects and tentatively moved out from there. This was contrasted with the Indian “mind” which evoked the concept of infinity immediately and then proceeded to project into this infinity its own visions. Infinity is a fine, undelimited and not very private place, but the culturally Greek in me wants to ask, what is to stop it being filled with, say, the psychotic, nightmare visions that make up the Jain cosmology?

At any rate, carpings aside, Apocrypha, would be a magnificent achievement if it were no more than a series of imaginary texts whose underlying appeal was for a wider recognition of human creativity and a greater sensitivity to human suffering, often caused exactly by the cultures of measurement and reduction. But the heart of its achievement, I think, lies in its portraits. There are a number of memorable people, most but not all, poets, who circulate through the text. When they are poets, we are left with a small anthology – a dozen pages or so – of their poems. Some of these are as good as anything Boyle has written. Take, for example, Irene Philologos. Exiled with her husband from the Byzantine court (probably at the turn of the fifth century, AD) to a small village where she can be quietly left to die, she is sustained, so a brief biography tells us, by her poetry, preserved as A Poetic Journal of Ten Years in Boeotia. Irene is, like so many of the creative figures in this book, an exile: someone whose outer resources are very small but whose inner resources are rich and sustaining. She provides one of the two epigraphs for the whole of Apocrypha: “To one who is wise the tiny and the immense equally bring fear and blessings” – the insight of the exile. Her poetry is very much about the thisness of the ordinary and, of course, her sense that it is either permeated with the infinite or a gateway to that infinite:

Gold has its distinct flavour -
gold pulp of the opened gourd, golden rice,
the gold skin of a fish
frying in cold air as sunset widens:

as a girl I thought I knew you,
thin paint on high domed walls,
the artisan’s fresco-work, what alone could hush
the wild eyes of Authority.

Here as my life folds over
you enter me -
humble substance of the everyday.

If Irene recalls a latter-day Ovid, stuck at the mouth of the Danube, another poet, Erychthemios, self-exiles himself to Alexandria where, so his biography tells us, he settled down “to live in the simplest manner possible”. He did this because of the intuition that “the smallest possible poem may capture the sky”. And the first of his poems collected is about basic entities: “just this hand / just this street / just this river / just this stone”. For all that Erychthemios shares Irene’s situation (voluntarily in his case) he is a rather different poet. Take this fine poem about one of life’s miniatures – the mosquito:

Half an arm’s length above me
mosquitoes tracing a zigzag pattern,
unpredictable, elaborate,
more beautiful than stars.

Completely still
I watch the grey swarm’s
inexplicable drawing -
tiny masters of life and death,
greetings!

The difference here is cultural (Irene sees the divine as gold, Erychthemios is sensitive to the infinite possibilities of appearances for the gods) but it is also poetic. It is hard to be precise about this but Erychthemios seems a classical lyric poet with a social outlook and the need to project his poetry into an audience. Somehow he seems deeply Western (the minimalism feeds into a dramatic, suffering stance) while Irene might finish up Japanese. The difference – though I’ve not described it adequately – is important because it reminds us of the extent of the dramatic in this book. Boyle’s previous poetry often has had consistent themes but very varied incarnations. Here the dramatic requirement has ensured variety and consistency. It’s tempting (so good are the individual anthologies) to think in terms of Pessoa and his freak creation of different voices. But I don’t think that is happening here. If Apocrypha had been done in the spirit of Pessoa, there would be far less overall consistency underlying the different speakers. Pessoa would have invented at least one poet whose poetry and attitude to poetry would have been entirely at odds with the overall tone of the book and its themes of celebrating the infinite, understanding the relationship of large and great (outer and inner, above and below, and so on): I can imagine the first line of such a poet: “These fools who speak of the infinite . . .”!

This leads me to a reservation. Generally the voices of known writers (Herodotus, Plato, and so on) are imitated very accurately. But buried within Apocrypha are a number of poems by Catullus, imagined to be from an early notebook. Boyle protects himself here by making the poems unfinished and early but they just don’t sound like Catullus:

If you seek Catullus,
look for him far away
in the coiled smoke rising
from a pyre by the Ganges

or right beside you
in that garrulous wounded bird
who’s forgotten all those days
when the birds passed freely between us.

                              ~o~

This black doesn’t suit you, Catullus.
Put some bright red,
some glittering brocade
on your shoulder -

the divine is in everything.

Catullus is a hard poet to categorise. He certainly is amenable to the spirit of Apocrypha in that he can show a dazzling grasp of the significance of dimensions (the Imperial and the homely domestic perspective of love and life) and, above all, a way in which this shift in dimension can be the energising structure of a lyric poem. In Catullus XI, especially, the poem moves from a grand tour of the edges of empire to a flower cut by a ploughshare at the edge of a meadow. The introduction of the poem is enormous and hysterical and its “matter” is reduced to two words, “vivat valeatque” – may you live and prosper – before the humble but electric conclusion. I pick on this poem to argue that Catullus doesn’t write lines like “the divine is in everything”, which – true as they may be – rather lie there and look at you. He is a dramatic, formal poet always looking for dynamic and dramatic structures (and is a master of such structures).

A final figure to look at might be “Leonidas the self-exiled” – not a poet but a fairly copious philosopher who asks the question, “What is it that is worth saying?”. Leonidas lives his life on the island of Phokaia in the Southern Indian ocean amongst a race of people who are described in some detail. They are migrants from Australia, colonising the island from boats in a kind of reverse of the colonising of the Pacific by the Polynesians. All their boating skills are immediately lost – or sacrificed – but they develop a language of extraordinary complexity, a language that is

a kind of parallel universe, which flows alongside other activities, a music, a tapestry, a mirror that all attend to while going about other unconnected tasks. Their island is small – two days walk suffices to trace its perimeter. Their language brings the universe into their presence: from stars to sea monsters, from the delicate quivering of fish to the listless ripple of a desert wind. Humour and grief flash in jagged splices across their language. They have lost everything and gained everything . . .

This is one of the book’s best statements of its great theme of expressiveness and it is hard not to think of Phokaia as representing the best of Australia (which is not mentioned in any of the early documents of the book), perhaps the best of Australian poetry. Whatever the case it argues for a minimalism that holds the infinite within a small space.

It’s hard to think of a more ambitious book of poetry in this country, at least recently. I think it is Boyle’s best book, by some distance, because it solves so brilliantly the issue of finding varied forms in which to say something that is, essentially, consistent. It might be worth pointing out that the very first poem of Boyle’s first book (“From Instructions Given to the Royal Examiners in the State of Chi” from Coming Home from the World) is in exactly the kind of mode of the poems and prose extracts of Apocrypha. The examiners of the candidates for entry into the Chinese civil service are encouraged to look anywhere but at the actual mechanical answers to the mechanical questions:

Examine the candidate’s state of mind
as he inscribed the answers to all of the above
and estimate the temperature of his brain cells
as he lay awake in the cubicle at night
longing for raw oysters with calamansi juice home.
. . . . .
Identify the direction of the wind
as it hurries the leaves of all the provinces
away from everything known,
brushing them with a fragrance
of unnamed creatures waiting to be born.
Remember for what purpose
you are setting down these dreams
under such limited starlight.
Remember the waves which are forcing you
further and further off all courses into the terrible wilderness of death.
Then forget all of yourself and all your hopes
and write your mark and comments in the correct space
for the perusal of a higher order.

It’s hard not to hear the accents of Phokaia in the advising voice here, and the character of the Eusebiolans in the portrait of the examiners, people who tend to miss the point.

Les Murray: Taller When Prone

Melbourne: Black Inc, 2010, 89pp.

This new book of Les Murray’s seems, on first readings at least, to be firmly in the late Murray style, inaugurated by Conscious and Verbal in 1999. These books will, you feel, inevitably be described as less combative, less in need of an opponent, often more playful. You have to be a quite a remove from the poems themselves to speak in these terms since the individual poems are usually, and intriguingly, very different from one another. At any rate, Taller When Prone encourages the taxonomist in me in that it makes me want to try to make some sense of the way different experiences get absorbed and expressed in different kinds of poems in the late Murray books. Murray’s poems do fall into various types or, at least, have familiar interests: there are portraits, poems devoted to arcane but interesting facts, poems revelling in the physicality of the world, poems revisiting personal and familial history, poems laying out Murray’s complex though by now familiar values and poems which analyse historical events in terms of those values. But this typing is fairly superficial. At a deeper level, involving the way the poems actually operate as poems, the way they come to their material and “deal with” it, there is another series of types, apparently independent of the material.

To take the portrait poems (of which there are more in Taller When Prone than in, say, The Biplane Houses) as an example. “The Double Diamond”, despite its title (which might have more significance than merely being a rural reference), is a portrait of an eighty year old man’s appearance at his wife’s funeral. It may be an attempt to pay tribute to a relative (“He was the family soldier / deadly marksman on tropic steeps.”) and to keep alive a certain rural generation, but to me it seems like a poem whose function is to support its final lines in which the eighty year old says, “Late years, I’ve lived at the hospital. / Now I’ll forget the way there.” It is, in other words, a celebration of rural wit embodying self-deprecating grace under pressure. Thus, structurally, it should probably be connected to poems like the comic one in which Murray is mistaken by a neighbouring lady diner for a writer of cookbooks. When these “books” are praised (as she leaves) Murray responds that they have obviously “done you nothing but good” before commenting “which was perhaps immodest / of whoever I am”. Or it might be grouped with “Phone Canvass” where a caller for the Blind Society responds to Murray’s “shy questions” about what blindness is like with a long poetic description before finishing “I can hear you smiling”.

Other portraits celebrate, like the one of Matt Laffan who lived with birth defects caused by the fact, Murray says, that the emigrations from Ireland led to a loss of lore as to which bloodlines should not be mixed. It is a celebration, though, in which the celebrator, in the concluding stanza, allows himself to be compared and contrasted with his subject:

Popular with women, and yet
vision of him in their company
often shows a precipice near
or a balcony-lit corridor.
I would have lacked his
heroism in being a hero.

The heroism, in other words, in being a visible rallying point for those suffering an affliction is greater than living with the affliction itself, because it makes one vulnerable to the group, one of the major baddies of Murray’s moral universe. Another poem celebrates a New England “outlaw”, Black Tommy McPherson, finally a victim of either social or anthropological snobbery (he was drugged by someone who was, perhaps, “a Darwin reader”) enacted through their agents, the police. Of course, in this view of things, there is the comforting fantasy that his “group” – “diggers, carriers and Cobb and Co. men / with relations and not” – wreak a kind of revenge by declaring the hotel black “in the new jargon of then”. The whole poem is done as a kind of bush ballad, in keeping with the time and location of the action, but it is ramshackle enough to look like a part-parody of the mode. The interesting part of the poem is the conclusion where, as with the Matt Laffan portrait, Murray brings himself into the picture:

I was thinking about New England,
of the Drummonds, the Wards and the Wrights,
how they’d all conjured gold from that country
by their different methods and lights.


All the gold I’d spun out of country
was imagery, remotely extolled,
but Tommy McPherson sported his with an air,
a black cousin with literal gold.

Although this is done with proper deference (Tommy’s gold is literal while the poet’s is merely metaphorical) there is still an alignment and affinity-making going on when Murray declares Tommy a cousin (metaphorically speaking). In fact some odd counter-images go on here. Tommy is black in colour but not “black” metaphorically – that experience is saved for his killers who become “black” in the sense of being removed from business and perhaps social intercourse. Tommy also owns literal “gold” whereas Murray, the poet, is the literal/literary man.

There are other portraits where the author doesn’t appear (at least, “literally”), such as that for the Cubanophile push member, Harry Reade, and a very moving poem, “Nursing Home”, where Murray presents one of his best realisations of sanctity on earth in the form of the elderly lady “distilled to love” who “sits holding hands / with an ancient woman / who calls her brother and George”.

And then there is a poem about the death and burial of Isaac Nathan, the setter of Byron’s Hebrew Melodies and perhaps son of the son of Poland’s last king who, finishing up in the antipodes, became, in 1864, the first tramcar victim in Sydney and who was buried in Camperdown cemetery near one of the putative originals for Dickens’s Miss Havisham. Of course I speak knowledgeably like this thanks to Wikipedia and a description such as I have given looks at the poem from the wrong way around. On first reading it is a congeries of completely arcane snippets of information which challenges you to get your head around it. As Sydney’s first musician, first attempted recorder of aboriginal chants, first victim of technology and member of an ethnicity always prone to persecution, Nathan may be being celebrated here as someone with whom Murray feels a bond (as he did with McPherson and Laffan), but this isn’t something the poem explores openly.

To me, although this is a portrait, its more important underlying mode involves the acquisition of arcane knowledge. There is a great deal of this in Murray’s poetry (the title of this book comes from a poem which lists a group of weird errors about the world) and it gives great pleasure both to its author and to its reader. A poem from The Biplane Houses where Murray identifies himself as a sufferer of Asperger’s Syndrome lists, among the features of that condition, “great memory”, but the poem that meshes best with it, for me, is a very early one, “Portrait of the Autist as a New World Driver”, from the 1974 collection, Lunch & Counterlunch:

. . . . .
they simplify
who say the Artist’s a child
they miss the point closely: an artist
even if he has brothers, sisters, spouse
is an only child


among the self-taught
the loners, chart-freaks, bush encyclopedists
there are protocols, too; we meet
gravely as stiff princes, and swap fact:
did you know some bats can climb side on?


Mind you, Hitler was one of us.
He had a theory. We also count stern scholars
in whose disputes you almost hear the teenage
hobbyist still: this then is no Persicum variant
nor – alas, o fleeting time – a Messerschmitt variant
. . . . . 

Another result of reading Taller When Prone is that one would like to follow up these threads which link poems by mode. But that would involve investigating their origins and etiologies – an immense task that I will happily leave to future Murray scholars and critics.

“Visiting Geneva” is simultaneously a portrait of that town and of John Calvin. (It also contains, in its list of the historical refugees of Geneva, a great deal of, to me, arcane knowledge.) But it is really one of those poems where Murray’s ethical framework comes into play. Calvin can be analysed under many heads, very few of them at all sympathetic, but to Murray he represents two vices: the mechanical joylessness of a certain kind of Protestantism with which Murray was familiar from his upbringing and, more importantly, the desire to create division which leads to groups, classes, castes:

. . . . . 
but, when you were God
sermons went on all day
without numen or presence.
Children were denied play.


I had fun with your moral snobbery
but your great work’s your recruits,
your Winners and Losers. You
turn mankind into suits -


Even Italy, messer John.

Readers of Murray are fairly used to this and, it is true, the application of Murray’s ethical position is less abrasive than it once was. For the first thirty years of Murray’s poetic career it was so extreme that it was something that readers, critics and scholars simply couldn’t avoid though discussion of it seemed uncomfortable and fed back into Murray’s own difficulties of those times by making him seem (to himself) assaulted on all sides. But if somebody makes a career of punching you in the prejudices (with their own prejudices) what are you to do: sit quietly and accept it? In the poems of Taller When Prone there is less of a fullscale assault and more of a quiet niggling that most readers can pass over with no more than a pained smile as coming with the Murray territory. One poem, “The 41st Year of 1968”, ascribes the horrors of last year’s Victorian bushfires to the hippy tendency to decry clear felling of rainforest and to seek homes in the deep bush. It’s title also suggests that somehow the poets of the great poetic upsurge of that period, sometimes called the “generation of 68”, were in some way involved (despite the fact that they were, by and large, extremely urban). In the Murray universe, it is true, there will be subterranean (probably metaphoric) connections between the writings of a great generation of poets whose values were, poetically, socially and politically, opposed to his own and the doings of those who wanted to drop out into the bush. Again, the poem looks like an elegy on the surface but is really a punch, or at least, a speculative jab. Another poem on the subject of bushfire, “Hesiod on Bushfire”, absorbs the entire horrible experience into Murray’s larger perspective in a way that recalls his debate with the late Peter Porter (Porter’s wonderful dig at Hesiod and his rural verities in “On First Looking into Chapman’s Hesiod” prompted an essay in reply from Murray) and even “The Burning Truck” the earliest poem of Murray’s Selecteds. “Hesiod on Bushfire” concludes:

. . . . .
Sex is Fire, in the ancient Law.
Investment is fire. Grazing beasts are cool Fire
backburning paddocks to the door.
Ideology is Fire.


The British Isles and giant fig trees are Water.
Horse-penis helicopters are watery TV
but unblocked roads and straight volunteers
are lifesaving spume spray.


Water and Fire chase each other in jet
planes. May you never flee through them
at a generation’s end, as when
the Great Depression died, or Marvellous Melbourne.

This is, in mode, quintessential Murray. It is enormously compressed and would take a lot of teasing out before one became comfortable with that sudden conclusion. Compression is usually a poetic virtue but it does have the additional advantage for Murray of compressing his social ideas into gnomic phrases that act as talismans and are difficult for a hostile reader to unravel.

Another poem, “Eucalypts in Exile”, is intriguing because it looks like a celebration of something distinctively Australian but sustains itself by being built on what I’ve called arcane knowledge: we are told that overseas plantings of gum trees have been thrown in Paris uprisings, been used to sop up malaria, and so on. But the poem finishes by moving the entire material into the world of allegory. Eucalypts are “loveable singly or unmarshalled” but they are “merciless in a gang”. They burn violently, “they have to shower sometimes in Hell”, and they cause the kinds of bushfires that “Hesiod on Bushfire” and “The 41st Year of 1968” are about, but at an allegorical level they represent groups motivated by ideology – the quintessential villains in the Murray universe.

Another of the types that turn up in this book are what you might call “travels in retrospect”. Travel literature of any kind is intriguing because one learns a lot about the personality of the writer who, in good travel writing, subjects him or herself to experiences which will test comfortable ethno-certainties. Taller When Prone begins with an interesting visit to the Taj Mahal, “From a Tourist Journal”. This poem starts with a brilliant compressed statement of difference:

We came to Agra over honking roads
being built under us, past baby wheat
and undoomed beasts and walking people.

Wonderful as this is (what prose travel writer can be said to be so luminously compressed?), it has to be pointed out that the poem, rather than lose its bearings in an alien reality which is beyond empathic connection, stresses the solid strength of the observing self. Murray is capable of fitting something as alien as the Taj, the Moghul culture that produced it and the modern-day inheritors of that culture, into his own system. He understands the poor who wear soldiers’ uniforms, “I’d felt that lure too, and understood” and the poem finishes with a description of a world of groups and hierarchies and perspectives and depths that is familiar to us from Murray’s poems about Australia:

Schoolkids from Nagaland posed with us
below it, for their brag books, and new cars
streamed left and right to the new world,
but from Agra Fort we’d viewed, through haze,


perfection as a factory making depth,
pearl chimneys of the Taj Mahal.

The tension that makes this a powerful work seems to me to be between its superlative rendering of difference and a simultaneous assertion of sameness, an assertion that “my system works, it can cope with this”.

It is possible that this is what is happening in a difficult three-line poem, “The Springfields”: “Lead drips out of / a burning farm rail. / Their Civil War.” I understand the basic situation here: when farm timber was burnt, the lead of the bullets fired in the Civil War which had been embedded in them, melted out. And the bullets were fired by Springfield rifles – a name always likely to produce wry smiles at its ironies. But in the Murray universe, civil war is the war between castes. Is he really suggesting that the American Civil War was a chance for the foul urban elites of the north to attack the honest white poor of the South? History is a lot more complex than that and one can’t believe that Murray would be so reductive.

There’s a lot that I’ve omitted by focussing on the different kind of modes in Murray. I’ve strategically managed to be in a position where I don’t have to say anything about the really cryptic poems like “Medallion”, “Singing Tour in Vietnam” and “The Fallen Golfer”. There are also poems of landscape which turn out to be poems of perspective. And there is a fascinating poem, “As Country Was Slow”, which focuses on the new roads around Taree and Buladelah. Roads are a Murray obsession and the cars that drive on them lead back, as so much in this book does, to “Portrait of the Autist as a New World Driver” where they are described as “high-speed hermitage[s]”. “As Country Was Slow” contains a magnificent description of Australia:

We’re one Ireland, plus
at least six Great Britains
welded around Mars
and cross-linked by cars - 
Benzene, diesel, autobahn;
they’re a German creation,
these private world-splicers.

I love the idea of Central Australia being described as Mars. How the rest is read depends: it could be referring simply to Australia’s total land area but if you want to stress the pun in Ireland, you might say the intention was for it to represent Tasmania while the six Great Britains were the mainland capitals. If you read it geographically then Western Australia (out on the western margins) might be Ireland. And if you read it in terms of ethnic heritage then it might mean that the “Anglo”-derived population of Australia outnumbered the Celtic by six to one. At any rate, the poem has a wonderful conclusion which returns to Murray himself, partaking of both the modern world of cars and the older rural world of horse-drawn carts and wondering whether, with a fuel or economic crisis, the future might finish up looking like the past. In doing so he speaks of his own ride to the graveyard in that vehicle which is always slow:

The uncle who farmed our place
was an Arab of his day
growing fuel for the horses
who hauled the roads then.
1914 ended that. Will I
see fuel crops come again?
I’ll ride a slow vehicle


before cars are slow
as country was slow.

Sarah Day: Grass Notes

Blackheath: Brandl & Schlesinger, 2009, 73pp.

Sarah Day is a fascinating poet whose work deserves to be more widely praised. She is also a really uneven poet, capable of following a stunning second book (A Madder Dance, 1991) by a really weak third one (Quickening, 1997) and this (to me) undeniable fact has coloured my responses to the two books which have followed: The Ship (2004) and now this new book, Grass Notes. Instead of trying to work out what underlies the poems and whether this has changed as the years have gone on – my usual initial questions of a substantial body of poetry – I find myself asking, in Day’s case, why some of these poems excite me so much while others seem, at best, ordinary. It is actually hard to believe that the poet who wrote the first four poems of A Madder Dance is the same poet who wrote the first four poems of Quickening. The best I can do is to propose the idea that she is a poet who, at the deepest level, responds to the frameworks by which we deal with experience, rather than the experiences themselves or their meanings: she is – and I’m nervous here about being reductive or Procrustean – a poet of perspective.

This (at best) generalised suspicion certainly makes some sense, in retrospect, of her first book, A Hunger to be Less Serious (1987), a good but in no way remarkable debut collection. It has four sections and the opening one is a group of portraits. Nestled in here is the book’s title poem which might well have appeared in the second section and is only a portrait in the sense of resulting from observing a group. Here a row of cars waits for a bridge to swing open and a barge to pass along the canal: it’s the European equivalent of waiting at the rail crossing for the train to pass. For a moment the drivers and car passengers are allowed out of their regimented and mechanised existences and flock to the side of the canal to watch the passing of the barge (and its attached dinghy), a symbol of a flightier, less “serious” mode of existence:

When she comes into view, the tub meets all expectations:
an old canoe-stern, trailing her fledgling nose-up in the wake,
sailing sublimely past the crowd and the procession of deserted vehicles,


away, away into the horizon,
carrying on board a gleaming catch
of strayed dreams and wish-fulfilments.

This is one of those poems of dichotomy of which the book’s second section is full. It is something poetry, with its powers of compression and suggestion, does better than prose but it is a familiar mode and one in which it is difficult to spring any surprises. Before I leave these portraits, though, I should mention “Voices from Ti-tree”, not because it is especially successful but for its relevance to the later poetry. It is three (rather than two) monologues delivered by orphaned sisters: the first keeps the house together, removes the scrap, kills the hens and keeps the pot full; the second gardens by burying waste to enrich the soil and the third collects detritus from the shore, ostensibly to help the other two but really to revel in the beauty of the chips of porcelain she finds. I’m not sure about the first sister but the other two clearly symbolise methods of creation: alchemical transformation of scrap and the collecting and arranging and meditating on detritus ripped out of its context. The image of a person collecting from the shore fragments of the lives of others and trying to make sense of them (which is, I suppose, trying to find a perspective from which they can be read) is an image that appears in a number of Day’s later poems.

This is a three-part allegory but in the book’s second section we are in the world of posed, symbolic binaries. Two brothers who are fishermen respond to either the calm water inside the bar or the wilder water beyond it. “Fountain and Bell” contrasts the perspective of the bell tower which can see “the village neat; / fields and farms are mere pattern” with that of the fountain which watches the women immersed in their domestic lives of laundry. Most important of these is “Anemones” which contrasts two approaches to the beach (and thus, to experience). The male, when a little boy, observed the goings on in rock pools whereas the I-figure was a lot more engaged:

It occurred to me today, the difference,
yours and mine, out there among the rockpools
on the beach.


Even now you hang back,
loath to touch the fleshy female forms
recoiling from the plump translucent lips


of scarlet sea creatures – phantom lives
which float unanchored and without direction
beneath the glassy surface.


Oblivious to sound and touch and smell you only see
and only what you want to see.
A little boy you knelt for hours on end


beside the smooth shallows,
absorbed by tiny patterns, subtle shadows,
species only patience will reward.


I could not wait, I liked to see things move,
to hold them in my hand, to feel a hundred
tickling legs wriggling through finger spaces.


It gave you the willies the way I’d poke inside
the magic sequined rings of broken shale and shell
to feel the life inside respond and hold.

On the surface this seems to oppose a fastidious desire merely to observe life (with the use of a single sense) with a passionate desire to immerse oneself in life using all the senses. There is also a suggestion of a kind of pre-adolescent sexual disgust in the former. But it is worth noting, in the light of the poems which are to come, that this is also the opposing of perspective against immediate experience. If I am right in believing that Day’s poetry is at its best and fullest when it engages the former, there is a certain irony in this early poem’s positioning of the narrator so that the latter seems to be the approach approved of. Perhaps “Anemones” is balanced by a poem from the final section of A Hunger to be Less Serious, “Hawk”. Here the binary is the hawk’s view of the world with the hare’s. For the former it is a matter of “the higher / I soar / the better / I see”; for the latter, experience is a matter of what a later poem calls “immersion in substance” for the hare “sits up / and sees / the whole world / move with one wave – / green”. Interestingly we are not given any clues about which of these perspectives is approved. Perhaps the whole natural world is beyond human preferences but though my claws might be stained in blood I think that, in general, I’d rather be a hawk than a hare!

Though A Hunger to be Less Serious might have prepared prescient readers for the general direction of the poems of A Madder Dance, it is the quality of this second book which is a surprise. As with the first book, it begins with portraits. The first is of a pilot, a man used to hawk and bell-tower perspectives, entering the upper floors of a hotel. It has a wonderful, complex conclusion that is far beyond those of the earlier poems:

To swoop down, re-enter where the miniature looms
large as skyscrapers, is to step backwards


each time, to enter the unstructured humdrum
of the atom. Give him beauty, order and the balm


of those who are also located in arrival, departure,
flux, for whom I will be gone soon are the words


most easy to find. Those ahead of their selves,
whose souls, travelling overland on foot


and many times overtaken, have given up the search,
taking a spiral route of their own choosing.

This is a long way from “the higher / I soar / the better / I see” since it relates perspective to immediacy in a way that echoes through later poems – even though I’m not absolutely sure of the meaning of the last lines. At any rate the “spiral route of their own choosing” is code for an immersion in experience that processes experience in a different way and it recurs in the second poem, a monologue delivered by someone in the electric chair. He says, predictably enough, “It is hard to see the pattern / when you are the lines that construct / or the lemniscate you are riding” but the poem’s last lines recall the image of the spiral in the first poem:

People are the evidence that of time,
distance, order is born
though in stepping back to view
the choreography, a foot may whirl
into the gyre of a madder dance.

These two complex poems are intriguing and successful but they are a little stagey and Day may have felt that they are too “philosophical” in that, despite their settings, their true fabric is one of undiluted (and rather instructional) meditation. This problem is solved by one of the best of the poems in the book, “Goldstein’s Drapery”. Set in a fabric shop it points out how the stacks of material become a kind compressed history of fashion as though they were archeological strata. They provide, in other words, a removed perspective from which fashion (and life) can be understood but they are contrasted with the shop’s owner who lives immersed in the moment and has “the sense within her of the new / coming on to the new coming on to the new”. A similar idea is restated in “Oblivious Among the Dust” which is, perhaps, not as interesting a poem as “Goldstein’s Drapery” but which I have always remembered for its wonderful line, “Things change. Those straight slacks my mother wore . . .” in which one of philosophy’s great propositions is welded to a thoroughly homely example proving, if proof were needed, that the most powerful effects in discourse are achieved by radical modulations between “high” and “low” levels.

Finally, in this revisiting of A Madder Dance, there is “Handles to the Invisible”. It too is concerned with perspective and begins with a gesture which is distinctive to Day’s style. A couple wander around a beach looking for “detail” and their wanderings are imagined to be plotted on a map – in other words seen from a very removed perspective. At any rate, the details that the characters collect are fragments of pottery and glass which have been abraded by the sea to the point where their totality has been compromised and their context removed. They are, the poem says, “handles to the invisible, / ornate illusions [surely “allusions” is intended though this spelling is repeated in a Selected Poems] to the untold or half-told . . .” and it is hard to know whether the poem is delighted more by the notion that huge and independent worlds lie behind these fragments or by the celebration of the homely, broken survivors and their challenge to a poet to recreate the larger whole.

The Ship combines two main thematic drives. There is the sense that, if you alter perspective, you can see a hidden world, behind the surface world. And this world is usually a menacing one. The book prepares us for this when it begins with a poem, “Underneath the City”, set in the subterranean world of sewers from which “subterranean missives” are sent to the upper world. Another poem expands this by describing a town built on abandoned mines so that the messages sent are specifically a reminder that present comfort is predicated on past exploitation. “Menace” describes the sense of menace which lies “behind the scenes / of urban seeming” and “High fire Danger” focuses on the way that a future apocalypse might be figured in a day of bushfires which are themselves announced by strange alterations in visual perspectives. These, as do many of the poems in the book, show themselves sensitive to a many-layered quality in the world where alternate worlds are aligned alongside, behind or underneath the ordinary. It is the reason for a poem the exact implications of which, if we encountered it on its own without the context of Day’s approach to things, might escape us. “Out of the Dark” moves from simple rural family experience to ask an important question:

As the smell of autumn rose from the ground,
like mushrooms and the evening valley exhaled


its cold oak-leaf breath over the thin layer of daytime air;
and the bonfire exhausted itself along with the excitement


of children, now withdrawing, the herd of Friesians
must have approached, stealthy as the encroaching night,


curious as cows can be, drawn by the glow
or the mood of contemplation around the diminishing fire.


Who knows how, when you are gazing inwards at an ember,
a circle of great-faced beasts can materialise


at one’s shoulder out of the dark periphery?

True, the word “inwards” carries a lot of weight here and it is possible to read the poem more as a description of an invocation of a greater world rather than the perception that such a world exists, hidden, beneath or behind the usual social one and can be seen by a readjustment of one’s vision, but the impulse behind the poem is the same.

The second theme of The Ship is signalled in its title and recalls the first poem of A Madder Dance. We are in the world of departures here, of “embarking, disembarking”. But the journeying ship, train or car is also a mobile world, a present which moves through time and space, moving its perspective as it does so. The QE2 “slips downriver / illuminating a continuous present” in much the same way as the poet’s child, carried in a shopping trolley or in the back of a car, in the book’s last poem, is a point of view exposed continually to the mundane. “Cruise Ship” is built around the issue of what the view would be like from different positions and “Easter Train” – a kind of revisiting of “A Hunger to be Less Serious” in which the barge is substituted by a train – moves its point of view to be that of the celebrating journeyers rather than the spectators. There are many other poems which operate out of this group of concerns and methods. “From the Flight Path” for example concludes with Day’s characteristic gesture of mapping movement (that is, seeing it from an enormously remote perspective), “Seven miles up, / the crowded corridors / of the great circle routes / encircle us like planet rings” but most interesting is the title poem. Here we revisit the experience of being a migrant child travelling to Australia by boat from England (an experience I share with Sarah Day, though mine occurred rather earlier). It is a multipart poem (which nowadays always raises the suspicion that it was written with a competition in mind) but it rather beautifully combines both the themes I have outlined. It is very sensitive, for example, to other worlds, or, perhaps I should say, other versions of our world. She knows that the ship travels powered by “a Dantean underworld / of underpaid labour” and devotes a whole poem to a shipboard conjuror who can convince children that eggs can emerge from his mouth. But over and above this is the interest in perspective: one’s home becomes a pencil line seen from the back of a departing boat and, most interestingly, the perspective of time alters the entire experience into a metaphor:

Of the ship, memory makes a metaphor
with the passage of time,
its broad staircases and mint-green lino,
the portholed vision through a pristine hull
of ever-changing ocean, are the means
by which a new life is superimposed on the old.

And so (after this long introduction, fuelled by a desire to, in some way, get to grips with a poetry I have admired since I first read A Madder Dance) to Grass Notes. It is another fine book, working its way through and within its obsessions. In one of its poems, the idea of riding on a donkey’s back or in a ship (both images from “The Ship”) is transposed into the whimsical mode whereby the narrator is an ancient Roman being carried in a litter. This method of transport provides an “elevated view of things” but of course depends on an underworld:

                       Up here, the view


above the lice-infested heads
of those who clothe us, bake our bread,
might ripple under scrutiny
of carpers in a century


who fail to feel the roll and sway
of their own Rome in its heyday.

In other words, in ancient Rome compared with the present, as John Forbes said in a different context, “the machinery of capital’s more obvious”. The book’s title sequence deals with relationships between white settlers and indigenous inhabitants, a theme that seems more difficult to suppress and drive underground in Tasmania than on the mainland. Its poems ask a number of questions: what were the first indications? What did the artist of “View on the River Derwent” see or “not own to seeing”? How do the dead white gentlefolk sleep in their graves? And how could human beings deploy something as brutal as a mantrap (a kind of “oversize rabbit snare”)? The final poem of the group investigates the nest of a silvereye seeing in its sheep’s wool, human hair, horsetail hair, coloured thread from a washing line and the grass that makes a structural background, a kind of miniature artistic embodiment of colonial history. It’s a wonderful idea – a matter of perspective.

Again, as in the earlier books, there is a focus in these poems on the idea of the present and the immersion in this present. “Present Time” is a homely though complex little poem in which two people, positioned on ladders pruning apple and pear trees, look at each other:

Time never seems less linear
than when you are up a ladder
leaning on a winter’s sky,
selecting new wood from last season’s spurs
on the apples and pears.
Perhaps because hands have been working
to this same end through millennia
or perhaps the yearly repetition
of a simple task on brilliant days
such as today, when every tree bud and skin pore
is vivid as if viewed through magnifying glass,
this and all past years’ prunings
become simultaneous, so that time makes anathema
of the calendar and its meaningless numbers.
And I look up through pear wood to your face
squinting against a cold sun
and down to my feet at the strewn saplings,
the present moment saturates all given form
with past and future.

As I read it, looking into the partner’s face is not a matter of an experience “out of time” but one intense enough to focus all the elements of what is a regularly repeated experience. Thus all past lovers, pruners, growers, apple-eaters, celebrators of new growth, etc, lead to a single moment. It’s a variant of that peculiar perspective where we can think of ourselves and our current situation as something that the entire history of the universe has prepared for (as Hegel felt when he saw Napoleon entering Jena). A related poem, “Finding North” (its title significantly raising the issue of bearings), is a poem about a woman towing a small boy in a small boat, but its interest is in how this moment in the present relates to larger issues:

What does an elderly woman
towing a child, a small boy,
in an inflatable boat,
through shallow water
tell me about history?
. . . . .

is its opening gambit. And the poem goes on to imagine wider, cosmic perspectives that can say nothing about this image, concluding with the reality of the couple moving “as if in a spell / cast by the continuous present”. (I like the little grammatical joke in those last words – but that probably says more about me than the poem.) At any rate it supports my general view of this poetry – that for Day meditation on perspective is more poetically productive than engagement with immersion – by providing us with a memorable (though unexplorable) image. “Immersion” and “perspective” are both abstract nouns, but in Day’s poetry the latter serves so much better as a base for exploration than the former.

The book begins with a poem, “The Observatory”, which is about perspective and dimensions. Here the cosmic is allowed to penetrate the earth-sized, though this may only be at a metaphoric level:

The rattle of wind in sclerophyll
is the murmur of cosmic dust
and particle shift. With each break
in the clouds the queue shuffles
a patient step forward.
Beyond the observatory’s dim glow
bush is black as dark matter tonight;
the distant river is negative space, 
and the city on the other side
a scattered galaxy.
. . . . .

And the third poem, “Apples”, exploits Day’s neat connection of the humble with the macro by celebrating a fruit that has “weathered / the rise and fall of civilisations” to end up on an ordinary plate for our pleasure.

Some of the poems remind us that altering perspective is a technique for preventing poems sagging under the weight of their own subjects. A long poem devoted to lugging the heavy, dead body of a wombat off the road so that it can rot in a more dignified way (an activity which, by the way, recalls that of the second sister in the poem, “Voices from Ti-tree” in A Hunger to be Less Serious) has a surprise conclusion where the process of decay is mapped (in that movement Day’s mind often makes) as making a body recede “into two dimensions”. And a monologue from a funeral director’s point of view concludes, surprisingly with a withdrawal from assertiveness:

Empathy and imagination 
are what I bring
to the job. Humility
is what the job brings to me – 


in the calm or trepidation
of your warm hand.

And the book finishes with more poems about death, there the deaths of strangers and emigres. Death is a theme that appears in the later poems of The Ship, especially in “for JMR” where even the approach of death is seen as a matter of point of view and the author wants to ask – with that insistent interest in perspective – “how it all looked / from that distance”.

Michael Farrell and Jill Jones (eds.): Out of the Box: Contemporary Australian Gay and Lesbian Poets

Glebe: Puncher & Wattmann, 2009, 214pp.

Out of the Box is significantly subtitled “Contemporary Australian Gay and Lesbian Poets” rather than “Poetry”, suggesting that it puts the visions and achievements of individuals ahead of a survey of what is happening at the poetic coal-face of this particular sub-culture. It is an example of what I call a “sectional” anthology, though an exact definition of that term would be a difficult business. Basically I am thinking of those anthologies which collect writers who share a descriptive tag. It might be a collection of work by ex- or current soldiers, by members of what we used, innocently, to call the “migrant population” of Australia, or by indigenous Australians. (I’ve always held out hope that one day the world will be sufficiently sensitive to begin to be interested in left-handed writers – but at the moment that is little more than a faintly comic dream.) Then there are regional anthologies and state anthologies. Of course one could argue (as Michael Farrell does in one of the book’s introductions) that, given a wide enough perspective, all anthologies are “sectional” in that they all have to delimit their choices in one way or another. Thus an historical anthology of Australian poetry might be seen as a sectional anthology or, on another tack, the tag might be a temporal one like “modern” or “nineteenth century”. Despite this reservation, I still want to retain the idea that an anthology of Gay and Lesbian writing belongs to a different order of anthology to John Kinsella’s or John Leonard’s recent books.

I think the fundamental difference is that, in the case of the latter, we want to know from the anthology “what is going on, now? or then? or there?”. In the case of sectional anthologies we want to know: “what is it like to be you? What do you do in poetry which is different from what we do?” And it is about here that I have strong opinions. The former of these questions (“what is it like to be you?”) is, surely, best answered in prose fiction, not poetry. It is the glory of the novel that it can (admittedly not always and not always successfully) take us into the perspective and experiences of someone who is different to us. What I always want from sectional anthologies is a different sensibility which reveals itself in a different way of approaching poetry and, even, poetry’s conventional subjects. You would like to think that – to pick a gross example – a poem about a landscape (or even a mere gum tree) would be different when written by people whose sectional identities were importantly different. Or to put it all another way, I prefer the sectional identity to be a powerful background force rather than to be foregrounded into subject matter.

You get both types of poem in Out of the Box but its intelligent introductions show that its editors have thought, in their own ways, about these issues. Michael Farrell speaks of some people’s resistance to the project “along the lines that a gay reading of poetry (or poets) was a reduction. That something fabulous and 3-d was being made to fit this one limited concept . . . wasn’t that something poetry-haters do all the time?” Although this raises the issue to disarm it, it still retains some force. My way of reading the objection, would be to say that it is a power struggle, within individual readers and writers, between elements of their identity. I used to use a simplistic notion of shells to deal with this: we have several identity-shells – in my case they might include: male, born-in-England, heterosexual, working-class origins, middle-aged, left-handed, Queenslander, intellectual, and a lot of others. The issue is: which of these shells lies nearest to the core or (if we want to dispense with a unified notion of identity and replace it by a set of warring “shells”) which is the most powerful. I’ve never been a fan of the idea that we switch to a convenient dominant identity to match the situation, especially not in the case of poets. I think that I, and the editors of this anthology, would have a lot of trouble with a poet who didn’t place the identity “poet” always at the very heart of what they were. The fear of those who thought the project might be reductive is probably the fear that someone would say, “I’m essentially devoted to an activist intervention in the fate of the gay community – and I also write poems in my spare time.” And yet, put like this, the fear of reduction is a chimera. If it is true that only real poets (in the sense of having the marker “poet” always closest to their essential selves) write worthwhile poems, then why worry? The fear might, of course, have been a poet’s fear that his or her poems would be surrounded by fairly crude descriptions of sub-cultural life or calls to a barricade. In this case you have to trust your editors, and Farrell and Jones do a fine job here, looking for surprising approaches from their poets.

This is a long introduction to a book but, since it is the first anthology that I have reviewed on this site, it has generated a lot of thinking and rethinking about these issues. I can say that there are no reasons to worry with this anthology – either from the point of view of reductionism or quality. The standard of the poems is high, though not uniformly so, and there are few moments either in the introductions (which contain readings of some of the work as well as much else) or in the hundred or so poems collected in the body of the book when one isn’t given something to enjoy, admire or chew over. But, despite what I have said above about the editors’ commitment to the work of individual poets who happen to be gay or lesbian in sexual orientation, one’s first question is probably going to be: is there evidence here of something different to the “usual” practices of Australian poetry? And, if there is nothing that has not been seen before, is there a higher density of some element? My initial feeling is that the answer to both these questions is, no, though this could be a result of these poets having always sat, perfectly comfortably, within the broader anthologies of Australian poetry; that is, they haven’t needed to be taken aside and gathered in an anthology such as this to make their mark on the larger stage.

There could be reasons for this. Jill Jones’s introduction puts one case for the distinctiveness of Gay and Lesbian poetry when she says:

Poems can feel into, think through or enact various meanings of relationship. Including bodies, sexualities, society, family, locale, and, of course, linguistic structures. Gay and lesbian poets, in various ways, write from perspectives which, however obliquely, subtly, implicitly, or overtly, will “queer” this.

This is a conventional position and one which I have always held though I would be reluctant to trot it out in any sort of scholarly discourse without guarding my back. Hearing a lesbian poet say it is rather comforting, as though one had heard a negro intellectual make the claim that negro people were more sensitive to rhythm than white people. The complicating factor is that this can often be said of lyric poetry itself, especially court poetry. It used to be said that homosexual people, trapped in homophobic cultures, learned how to double-speak, how to say something whose “true” intended meaning could be determined by cues and which always had a perfectly respectable second meaning which any poet, hauled before a king or a court, could claim was the intended one. Court poetry worked in a similar way: a poem whose real meaning was that the king was having an affair with a minister’s mistress having lost interest in his own wife could always be written as a seemingly innocent poem about lunar eclipses, erratic planetary behaviour, sun-spots and so on. Perhaps it is not an accident that court life comes across as so sexually ambiguous: any love poem can be a gay one, any attraction or alliance simultaneously sexual and power-seeking. And court lyric poetry is one of the most powerful historical strands leading to the kind of poetry written in the modern world, where courts have, for the most part, long disappeared.

In other words, what Jill Jones claims as distinctively gay or lesbian in poetry is very much what readers expect in lyric poetry. I don’t mean this to diminish the importance of any anthology of such poems, in fact the attractive possibility is that gay and lesbian writers (as belonging to a sub-group that has been around since the dawn of poetry publishing) may well have been the ones who first exploited lyric poetry’s penchant for the obliquely critical, and protectively double-meaninged, and then passed it on to those living and writing through historical events like, say, Stalin’s terror.

A second issue which prevents gay and lesbian poetry being comfortably seen as different is that the old need for hiding and disguise has surely passed. One doesn’t want to leave oneself open to the charge of being an ignorantly lazy heterosexual here, but it is hard to believe that any readers of the poems of this anthology, no matter how fleeting their interest, would be homophobic or profess homophobic attitudes. And, to be fair, this is not the tone of the anthology. Looking for evidence as to what the condition of the gay or lesbian individual is here (Australia) and now (twenty-first century) in the introductions for this book, I was taken by Michael Farrell’s opening assertion that it is an interesting time, “a time when marriage has for several years been the most prominent gay political issue”. A wicked voice which I have tried unsuccessfully to still, tells me that this is tantamount to demanding the right to be conscripted or tortured. At any rate we are a long way from a liberation project involving subversion from within.

So, if the poetry does not seem radically different from what we are used to, what is the book’s use? Again Farrell makes a good point when he speaks of all anthologies having limiting factors and these limits create meaning. A number of poems which I had known previously do look slightly different in a homosexual context. To take one example, David Malouf’s “Seven Last Words of the Emperor Hadrian” (given a very interesting reading in Farrell’s introduction) looks rather different here to what it did in its first appearance in Southerly and its first book appearance in Malouf’s Typewriter Music. I had always read it as a fascinating exercise in translation, beginning with a “close” version (actually the most accurate word for word, sense for sense, rendering is the second poem not the first) and then blossoming out to freer and freer attempts to get closer to the heart of the poem’s meaning – entering by the back door, so to speak. And, of course, Hadrian’s little poem (which, amazingly, was spoken of contemptuously by the man who recorded it!) is fascinatingly complicated and elusive. Seeing it in the light of this anthology and of Farrell’s reading, I realise I have ignored issues of the exact sex of the “animula” that I should not have. Even worse, I am completely unable to even begin answering the question: did Hadrian think his soul was male, female or without sex? (And what is the significance of Apuleius’ allegory of Cupid and Psyche written not long after Hadrian’s death?). I think you would have to know a lot about Greek philosophy as mediated through an Ionophile, bi-sexual (but probably profoundly homosexual), Roman emperor in the early second century to answer this – though, no doubt, David Malouf does and can. It does, as they say, make you wonder – and that is a good experience for a reader. Something similar can be said for the reading of a few of the poems which I knew previously, especially Martin Harrison’s “About the Self”. This poem begins with a heterosexual experience that in normal reading one might pass over but which here looks almost incendiary.

One odd experience of reading Out of the Box is the sense that the poems by the gays are much more powerful than those by the lesbians. Perversely this seems an anthology of male success. And to forestall those who have immediately written me off as an unreconstructed chauvinist, I should point out that the fascinating fact is that this imbalance (of force, of poetic ability, of interestingness, of good poems) is the opposite of what I feel about contemporary Australian poetry “at large”. There, it seems to me, an enormously powerful, varied and interesting group of women poets rightfully takes centre-stage in any description of where things are. But here the “usual suspects” – Malouf, Harrison, Rose especially – look the strong poets that they do in a conventional collection. Certainly each of those three (and one could add others) has a sophisticated and challenging approach to meaning in poetry and it would be very difficult to be reductive about them. In other words this anthology may provide contexts that make you reread and rethink poems but I don’t think it provides contexts that make poets look either more or less accomplished and intriguing than they did before. That having been said, though, there are some poets that I have not read previously who I would like to read more of: a number of these are women and one, Stephen J Williams, is a man.

Martin Langford: The Human Project: New and Selected Poems

Glebe: Puncher & Wattmann, 2009, 205pp.

The main strength of this collection which selects from twenty-odd years’ work (Langford’s first collection appeared in a three-authored book, Faultlines, in 1991) is the consistency of its concerns. Consistency is not the same as homogeneity and Langford’s great themes of loss/entropy and what it means to be called human are developed in different kinds of poems, often in quite adventurous ways. It is not uncommon, in selections, for the consistency to be something that is retrospectively imposed when the earlier books are pruned, so that we see these from the perspective of the concerns of the most recent ones. But that hasn’t happened here. Reading the earlier collections shows that there was always this same set of interrelated themes. A second response is to register how good these later poems are: a polite way of saying, perhaps, that Martin Langford might have been one of those poets who are slow to develop but, at the end, not only have something interesting to say but are ready to explore different poetic shapes that can be devoted to this saying.

Faultlines began with a poem about immersion in the natural world. It had a very Sydney feel to it, not only in its invocation of water and light (it read rather like a Brook Emery poem) but in its assertion of the primacy of immediate experience over language and story: “This is a gift from the sun and the planet. / This is not something that humans and words have made up.” But the fourth and fifth poems are like a little introduction to Langford’s essential material. The title of “The Shadow” refers to the shadow of the ape, that part of us which is responsible not, in Langford, for the glory of unmediated experience of the natural world, but for a true, old-fashioned brutishness. I have to confess that this has always made me rather uncomfortable. I thought that the modern world wanted to overturn that odd division of the self into animal and “higher” which surely only reflects the confederate prejudices of the Greeks (whose higher self was a philosopher) and the Christians (whose higher self was sexless). (One is reminded here of Gibbon’s acid comment that it was a favoured opinion of the church fathers that had Adam not sinned, the congress of the sexes would have been unnecessary and “some harmless mode of vegetation” might have been invented for the propagation of the species.) Nowadays we rather want to focus on the fact that even the most violent animal predators are rarely cruel in the way humans can be, though, having said that, it’s more than possible to see in chimpanzees, and other of our close primate relatives, features of the less desirable side of ourselves. And lions at a kill are an unattractive sight as are, down the pecking order, hyenas. On the other hand they don’t build Auschwitzes based on crazy racial theories.

At any rate, it is not my place, as critic, to take issue with the author’s position. A critic’s task is to explain what that position is, as a distillation of the poems that it generates. The second poem, “Thermocline”, is a much more successful piece. The poet listens to his grandfather as he “keeps on talking: / miniature, serious sounds, / getting things clear, / setting things right” while in the larger view “the canons of entropy / tick, tick through all space.” Taking the laws of entropy and matching them with an old man’s vulnerability to the “merest breeze” is daring and brought off well. The one encourages large-scale rhetoric, the other homely description and thus they balance each other out really well. The most elegant expression of this sensitivity to entropy is the final poem of the 2001 collection, Sensual Horizon, “The Currawongs”:

No matter how fine-grained the present -
          a clearing of brilliant, nibbed grasses:
centreless, endless, a sea of blond etching,
          stem-shadows rhyming with seedheads,
tiny white stars nestling deep
          in the creases and blacks -
there are always the farewells of currawongs,
          rising through neighbouring forest
and wheeling away: Goodbye to the moment, Goodbye to the sacrament, detail.
One song, split up amongst many;
. . . . .
           Goodbye to the Edens of presence . . .
From sun doodling neon on water at Circular Quay;
          from shops of worn sandstone;
from luminous weed and warm steps;
          diasporas - the part song departures -
never more potent than out through a silence:
          the pause before rain starts;
through blue-shaded cumulus,
          pale-green and wind-harried skies -
blown leaf scraps, keening and belling -
          leaving you, always, behind, at your birthplace:
the bare rock no art can redeem -
the sweet-moment-just-passed.

The only thing that prevents me declaring this poem a masterpiece is that its rhapsodic mode is not something Langford does often and I can’t escape the suspicion that he might here be trying on another poet’s style and seeing how his material adapts to it.

At any rate, these issues form a kind of matrix in which the central issue of Langford’s poetry – what it is to be human – can be worked at. We are, it seems, located at two kinds of horizon. The first locates us at the point of just having left the brute world but retaining a great deal of its shadow. We are not yet, apparently, able confidently to reject the animal past and, when we do things like go to war or sell real estate, we behave as though the animal imperatives still operated. This is the theme of poems as different as “Touch” from Faultlines and “The Olympics” from Sensual Horizon. The former laments the fact that touch between humans has to be framed inside understandings and contracts:

. . . . .
Where is its art-form?

Why do we do it so badly?

So ungracious, sly?

Not walking as children,
through bright, starlit caverns,
but butting each other with needs
on the floor of some kraal?

And the latter is a reasonably predictable attack on the culture of competition, success and conquest (not to mention the inevitable cheating) that is implicit in the Olympic games (no doubt about to be held in Sydney when this poem was written):

. . . . .
Passion for triumph’s the perilous border
at which our whole project can fail.
If we can’t get past this, we will never get clear
of the canines and ranks of the apes. . .

One of Langford’s problems is that, having said this about our relationship to our animal ancestors, what is a poet to do? The 1993 collection, The Great Wall of Instinct (whose title reveals its position on this issue, though the book itself is radically pruned, contributing only five poems to this Selected) gives examples of one technique. A poem called “Fantasies” finishes with a rehearsal of the basic position:

But the stone of my coldness just sits there:

an ancient indifference -

like everyday selfishness;

programmed aggression from beasts
whose first task is to live.

And is followed by an example of a genre which is important in Langford’s poetry: the portrait. Here the portrait (“Kelvin: Walking at Dusk on the Beach”) is “infected” by the poet’s ideas about human behaviour so that the animal world keeps poking its ugly face through:

As always, talk is just con.
Kelvin wants torsos, wants power;
money to screw with
and others to keep him -
soft, knobbly gargoyle that spruiks
by the drifting of sea.

Always, though, fear
makes him careful:
like me, some scene
where the warthog masks up -
lips, tushes, plastered with blood -
settling small eyes to explain
that he’s kind, that he’s nice . . .

Dusk-colours swirl and dim homewards.
Windless, deep, estuarine glass.

Working on friendliness,
pig-monsters plough
through the hopeless and silver-aired calm.

I don’t think anyone, let alone the poet in the calm light of retrospection, would think that this was a successful poem. For a start it seems too happily judgemental (though the exact force of that crucial “like me” is difficult to determine) and it also succumbs to the problem that the “theory” automatically removes any humanness in the creature under observation: thus neatly begging the question. But a portrait is a way of embodying abstractions and thus a potentially fruitful area for exploration, more fruitful, probably than the beauties of “Currawongs” which promise, ultimately, no more than stretches of lovely rhetoric. The title poem of the collection in which both “Fantasies” and “Kelvin Walking at Dusk on the Beach” is another kind of portrait, rather more abstract in that it shows the moments when the animal instinct emerges. The second part of this poem, dealing with “your lover”, is, presumably, interestingly close to home, but the first is a portrait of a “decent and hard-working” man:

And the most important thing,
of course, is not to get flustered,
when the face of the decent and hard-working father
who raves on and on about trade unions, sport,
somehow turns shiny and skink-like,
his prayer-knots of Articles
shrunk to the curious feints of a small desert niche -
tactics and tricks of the gene
in a sterile, red dust . . .

So much for our position as creatures not yet far enough removed from the “sad primate life” to be able to escape its shadow. The other horizon seems to be, rather, before us. It appears in Langford’s poetry as a world or mode of existence in some way reflecting the natural world, especially the sky. Our current state, it says many times, is one of grids, lattices, bars, nets, snares, traps ”” all symbols involving a division of space. And there is an emphasis on the division of time as well. Beyond this particular horizon is the undivided breadth of the sky and the vast mass of the sea. But, since this is, after all, a humanist not religious position, notions of transcendence have to be treated with great care and tentativeness: it is not a matter of earning something or learning a technique in order to leave the sordid present behind. This is good news for poetry since poetry, faced with the certainties of the conventional religious transcendences, really can’t do much more than toe a party line and put itself, obediently, in a diminished position. Poetry seems flourish in the frustrating impossibilities of transcendence. Perhaps this is one reason why Sufi poetry, at its best conceived on the datum of the irritating absence of God, is as good as it is. At any rate, the tentative gestures of Langford’s poetry when it looks towards the horizon in front, make for good poetry, I think. I especially like “Flooded Paddock” from the terribly titled 1997 collection, In the Cage of Love’s Gradings:

One hundred years ago,
someone first pondered,

then got up
to slab fence all this:

smashed fragrant chips into sunlight;
clambered through tatters and hush . . .

Now it marks nothing but ocean:
somnolent hectares of wash.

Fence-posts, redundant, guard eddies -
sky-countries: cloudbanks and haze.

Undaunted – cheerful -
I head off to tension new work.

It is an interestingly optimistic poem and one which symbolically expresses the hope that freedom from contemporary divisions can be productive.

In Sensual Horizon, there is a fine set of poems about music, that notorious introducer of the topic of transcendence. The first describes a symphony (Mahler? Bruckner?) speaking of a large orchestral climax:

. . . . .
a pause for some piccolo griefs . . .
And then the great launch
of the final tiered claim: that we’re home,
that we’re on higher ground.
That we don’t have to live
in the difficult rippling of now.

The second poem continues the reservations of the first, approving the music of Debussy rather than that of the romantics who surely didn’t “believe in the triumph [they] pleaded”. The sequence ends with an assertion of the homeliness of the true human position (having rejected the transcending gestures of a host of composers):

There’s a home
in acknowledging
no other saves me -
a neighbourliness -
side by side, equal with.

Yet how will we ever again
source such power
if we’re not fighting
masks of ourselves.

There is a slight flatness about this – the horizons are very limited indeed – so perhaps it is worth noting that this is the location of the great Mozart operas (masterpieces of an ambience of secular enlightenment or at least of a universe in which, as a later Langford poem says, “galaxies wheel past, regardless”) which advocate, among much else, forgiveness as well as a refusal to impose stratospheric expectations on other human beings. It is remarkable though how many of the poems have, buried within them or overtly displayed, a double perspective. Often it is just a matter of the cosmos (the ultimate indivisible whole that we inhabit) making a guest appearance as it tends to do in the first series of poems from In the Cage of Love’s Gradings were the explicit aim is to register the strangeness of landscapes: the strangeness, attractive to poetry, emerges because of our double position – we are seen in the perspective of the landscape but the landscape is seen in a far wider perspective as well. In “Clouds” the possibility of release is raised and all that seems required is that human beings should change their perspective. A site of competition, an urban basketball court, is constricted by wire and walls, but – the poem says – it takes only a few steps and a change of focus:

Wire and brick walls
round a basketball court:
cars;
and then ads,
as if everything sought to be food.

Every direction,
a montage of walls -
except, through a gap in the steps:
cloud upon cloud,
a fabulous slurry of greys.

Self disappears there.
Verbs have no subjects.
Ownership does not exist.

Luminous floodplain
of stories not broken by fear.

Just down this stairway.

Down these few steps and across.

Connecting our feral animal life with stories as the poem does here, uncovers another element of the Langford universe: the world of life on a restricting grid of ambition, violence and selfishness is also the world of narratives. Stories in this poetry are a means of self-location. They help us make sense of things but they also limit; they are, in the words of another poem, one of the “contraptions of identity”. As one of the later poems, “Story”, which talks about the possibilities and functions of poetry says:

Story
keeps glancing at places
where it
cannot go:
where senses arc out
on the curve of the other -
where poetry starts. . .

Perhaps this is summed up best in an extensive prose poem, “Agon”, in which the “narrative of the streets” is seen to be in competition with “the silence of the sky”. What I like about this poem is its refusal to stop at the level of simple opposition or, even worse, of the trumping of one perspective by the other. The conclusion is complicated and sophisticated:

The sky was not a narrative itself.
But then: neither really, were the shops. Although they used language to trade with and dream with, such phrases and constructions as they used only really resolved into bigger fables with the creative use of elision: an upward drift of singularities, subsumed within the hierarchies of simplification. Really, like the great sky itself, there was simply rub and counter-rub, drift and counter-drift: in the case of the street, however, the atoms and particles were investments and obsessions, favourite sayings, private speculations.
Which did not prevent everyone from combining them into the convenience and simplicity of narrative. A narrative which, such was the general cast of mind, they habitually opposed to the ahistoricism, and the lack of context, which they thought of as being attributes of sky.
That neither, really, were narratives, meant little or nothing. The question remained, as potent as ever: which one was going to win?

“Agon” isn’t included in New and Selected Poems though the book in which it appears, Sensual Horizon, is fairly generously represented. All of Langford’s earlier collections – including Sensual Horizon – are reduced to a mere hundred pages or so. This is very ruthless but justified since the number of successes is fairly small. I do have a strong sense though of an increasing sophistication in the poems, a move away from the desire to state a philosophical position about where the human race is located to a desire to explore both what this means for poetry and the ways in which poetry can explore and exploit it. And the result is that The Human Project – the “new” in this New and Selected – is by far the most satisfying individual book of Langford’s. Which means, I suppose, that a long, long apprenticeship must finally have borne valuable fruit. All of the book’s themes are familiar from those of the previous ones, but they produce poems that are far more interesting and complex.

The first three poems act like a kind of overture for the entire book. “The Creature’s Tale” is a faux-children’s rehearsal of human history with a message that the earlier books have already prepared us for. At some stage a creature learns “to say choices” and to dream of a life “free of fresh blood”. Almost immediately it is dining with friends and driving “out to vineyards and hills” and then sitting alone playing with words which tell “tales of enlargements”. But, as with the other two opening poems, the tone is a lot more equivocal than we are used to because the tales that the mind can dream, and that language can tell, can make a world even more frightening than the old world of the instincts. I like this reservation and it continues into the second poem, “Lionspaces”. Here the narrative is of the gradual human mastery of the environment, displacing the lions which had once dominated and, eventually, “clearing the forests of Europe, Iran”. The conclusion is not entirely clear but there is no doubt that the tone is, again, equivocal:

Our fate, it seemed,
was to shape things forever:
the lions would never come back -
golden-eyed, blown, without pity,
crowding the yard in an impatient mood,
swarming sedately
while Grandfather’s lawn disappeared -
twitching their tails, testing doors:
while you waited too - in a puddle of sweat -
not so concerned now with justice,
why it is some poems sound right.

This bringing together of two sides of the human – the side which is driven by animal instinct to build a world of grids and structures which will destroy animal life itself, and the side which is that of the language-using, world-dreaming humans, sensitive to others and especially to the animal other which is now under threat – makes for an engaging complexity and thus for a better poem. The final opening poem, “The Predators” extends the issue by describing humans as “word-haunted predators” and concludes:

We shall diminish the list of the warm ones
to foxes, five birds and rodentia.

Cousins. Hard cases like us.

Our landscape plans include:
stale exhaust, status-lined vistas;
the comfort of signage;
room for our families;
somewhere to nurse our regrets.

Easy to say we are SS who listen to Schubert.

But where did such genes learn such speech-arts?

Creatures defined by their teeth
but condemned to imagine?

Justice, for instance. Equality.
Kindness. And joy.

The old attitude to animals survives in poems like “Travelling with Birds” where, watching that wonderful film, Langford asks “What could be better than living the life of the instincts?” and answers by glossing it as “to give oneself over to precedence, lust, skill at war” – neatly taking out of play an entire poetic obsession with the issue of what a life of experience unmediated by language might be like. But generally animals now make an appearance under the flag of entropy – they are the diminishing and threatened. And some of the best poems of The Human Project are exactly about this including “The Silence of the Frogs”, “The Animal Book” and “The Animals are Passing from their Lives” the last of which, rather in the tone of “The Creature’s Tale”, imagines the animals of the world rather shamefacedly acknowledging the “superior powers” of the humans, trotting calmly into oblivion, and thus forming a kind of reverse of the procession onto the Ark.

But in essence The Human Project is worried about the situation of the language users, especially the poets. And the general issue – what can I do and how should I do it? – is the same issue that, unspoken, has appeared in the earlier books. Does one write portraits? Poems of protest? Poems of endless explication? And why are these unsuccessful? Well one of the best responses to a strongly experience impasse is to express it – as impasse. There a lot of good poems here about poetry and the situation of the writer. In “The Monks”, for example, the dream of brotherhood and forgiveness which motivated (in Langford’s view at least ”” my own might be more sceptical about the characters of medieval recluses) those monks who formed the manuscript-copying communities on the coast of Britain is destroyed by the instinct-driven barbarities of the Norse invaders. Doomed, their only bequeathable creations will be their manuscripts and their example:

On the horizon, a long-boat starts inching their way.
Nowhere to go so they may as well sing twice as loudly.

They sing me the room I write this in.
They sing me the question of what I should do with it now.

Again, these poems reject transcendent solutions. “The Answer” carefully reminds us of the dangers of such dreams and, by using the phrase “final solutions”, neatly implies not only a criticism of closure but of the nightmare fantasies that have, historically, come from such visions:

What is it with artists?

Who told them
their wounds could dissolve
to an unchanging bliss?

The transformative poem.

The redemptive design.

Happiness does not stay still:
it’s a mood that change takes.

Enough if we tease out of changes
a tension, a grace,
that might quicken heart’s doze.

But to dream of a final solution!

What terrors -
what midnight desires -
can only be solved by re-birth?

I think “Mahler in Midsummer” is largely about that composer’s dream of transcendence (“the great dream of being beyond terms”) and its failure.

The dream of transcendence is also the dream of, in some way, defeating the fact of entropy which rules the universe as surely as gravity and some good poems engage this. “Lit Crit”, the first of the section devoted to poetry and poets, goes:

The first test
is to ask
whether the poem
thinks that anything
can be saved.

If it says yes,
then don’t trust it.

The poet was scared.

It is no good pretending that the correct context for the language-using animal is anything other than the prospect of death and nescience against a profoundly uncaring and unimaginably vast cosmos. All of Langford’s earlier books, among their later portraits, have had poems dealing with the death of loved ones. Unfortunately as we get older there are more and more opportunities for such poems. The final sequence of this New and Selected Poems is a little suite on the death of his mother. Although it is a pendant piece, it gains from the entire context of the rest of his poems with their concern to identify the human and never to turn one’s face away from inevitable losses.

Laurie Duggan: Crab & Winkle

Exeter: Shearsman, 2009, 163pp.

Crab & Winkle – the title derives from the name of a now disused railway line – is a record of Laurie Duggan’s first year in residence in Kent. It begins with autumn and ends at the end of the northern summer. Its cover makes an initial (and one of the best) attempt at describing what is going on by calling it “a warped Shepherd’s Calendar for the age of climate change”. Another, cruder, way of describing it might be to say that it is a book made up of excerpts from a wide-ranging diary “covering everything from the landscape and culture of South East England to the ordinary events of finally accessing one’s luggage and arranging the art on the walls of one’s house to meditations about the future and the likelihood of poetry surviving” put together so as to make it cohere while its individual elements are all juxtaposed. In other words, like Duggan’s earlier The Ash Range, it is an assemblage, a collage even, and, as these sorts of things (and their distinctive capabilities) are not very common nowadays, it raises all sorts of interesting questions.

It is, by definition, very hard to quote from this kind of book in a way that gives, in a reasonably brief space, any sort of sense of what it is like to read and so, to spare my readers a long attempt at categorised description, I’ll exploit the one great advantage of criticism in cyberspace “no limits on the length of quotations” and reproduce two passages chosen pretty much at random. The first is the opening page of December and the second the opening page of March.

December
The Descent of Winter? Possibly
(the warmest autumn since . . .

no sign of the Royal Mail (the writing
gets littler and littler
                                             (a review
finished yesterday, deranged, maybe
 but on deadline
                                   (someone outside
in a parka, like the Michelin man
                                                            (car lights
the excess of energy. Will there be anyone
to remember us?
                               (would Frank O’Hara
enjoy it while it’s there
                                           (the syntax
strangely wrong
                                   (begin again

*

marked on the directory: the Oxo tower
 an advertisement for beef-cubes
a palindrome at the centre of an empire

At the dining hall of the Inner Temple the consumption of wine has fallen off since the advent of the internet (letters would formerly be answered in the morning).

Sir John Sloane’s museum is a surrealist trouve,
stones, plaster casts and false walls . . . 

And from March

settling in

a bright, perfectly clear day

Basil’s 77 Beasts:
his work, by accumulation,
detail magnified, or shifted

a painting, viewed
in different surrounds

the shadow of a lamp, its reflected light
cast upward on the shop wall

                                                                      the way such a dark presence in Chiroco’s painting might emanate from another time, be a trace rather than the immediate effect of an unseen object

                              THE THING! (writ in dripped blood)

                          *

By Hollowshore and the Ham Marshes, against a stiff wind along the muddy top of a dyke. Down Oare Creek and up Faversham Creek, the skeletal spire never out of sight. Off the dyke, at low tide, crescent bogs, startled waders, the stiles (“lovers’ gates”) always a mud patch. Closer to Faversham, the shipyards, then diversion around new housing to Front Brents.

                         *

Tiepolo and the defeat of gravity:
that we should see the great event from beneath . . .

And so on, although even these two longish passages fail to give a satisfactory sense of the book since they omit so much of its variety.

Crab & Winkle is a Janus-faced book that looks outward to the world and, at the same time, inward. But the inward view has two components. There is, inevitably, the interiority of the poet/diarist but more important is the way the book worries about itself and its own structural integrity. In this sense it is a true book of process and the central structural concern is whether (in Pound’s terms quoted on p.80) the whole thing “coheres”, the central fear being that, as a line in November says, “the grand projects become miscellanies”. It is not a new problem but it is one that the book states clearly when looking at the sea wrack near the nuclear plant at Dungeness:

if art can be made of old rope
shoes and driftwood
what follows?

everything here is deposited
everything can be carried off

In fact one could make a good argument that the real process in this book is not in outward things – the walks, travels, trips to galleries, remembrances of artists and writers, miseries of settling in, quotations, sharply observed signs, and so on – but rather in this sense of what it might be, how it might be described and how the responsible author might make good editorial decisions. At one point (p.130), having observed through a hole in the wall “a garden // allotments and duck ponds / sheds and bridges // as close to willow pattern / as the Home counties allow”, Duggan asks “what would hold English matter / as ˜Blue Hills’ held Australian?”. This reference to his own serial set of poems, appearing throughout his books, alerts us to his desire to find a form for his responses to a new environment. In a way the “walk” is a structuring device (as in A.R. Ammons’s much admired “Corsons Inlet”) but there is too much to include that isn’t observed on Duggan’s various walks: though he does imagine a poem:

Duggan’s Tramps through Kent #33
or see my By Trailbike
& Hot-air Balloon Through England.

(Duggan has a neat habit of writing what might be called provisional poems like this and including them assemblage of the book. I especially like “Immigrant Spring Poem” which, fittingly, opens the April section signalling, in conventional English verse, the beginning of spring:

When the [ ] sings before dawn
from the branches of the [ ]
the blue [ ]s unfurl
while grey [ ]s circle in the skies.)

Crab & Winkle proposes (or flirts with) a number of descriptions of itself and its method. A trip to Marrakech in February throws up the idea of the two kinds of Middle-Eastern rug/carpet:

as those rugs
this journal
woven or knotted

It’s a pregnant metaphor especially as knotted carpets contain nodes built up in the intersections of an existing woven base. Thus the observations, memories etc are built on a background of context and when turned over reveal a perfectly coherent picture. But it’s never really explored and thus may be no more than a suggested reading method, or hopeful writing method. October, on the other hand, concludes by comparing a diary, carefully kept on a previous brief visit to England years before, with the current one:

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . but this is
half-diary, half-what?   The opening of the
field?

(half-man, half diary)

the lamp’s angle reveals brush strokes on plasterboard
a great sea of institutional off-white
the odd dip and puttied hole

a Freudian ship

                              in which we serve

I’m inclined to read this as comic dismissal (despite Duggan’s approval of Black Mountain figures) of the “field-theory” approach to poetics of the sixties though that approach was, itself, designed to deal with Poundian problems of inclusiveness over a lyric voice with a tendency to gestures of transcendence. January finds Duggan, among other things, working on a separate poem “One-Way Ticket” saying of it: “the parts alright (mostly), but not the whole . . . it’s a labyrinth, confusing but leading somewhere” so that the fate of this poem is like a little inset miniature of the Crab & Winkle project as a whole. And towards the end of the book (in June) there is a complexly patterned group of three excerpts which begins with a notion of poetry as estranging, as “unheimlich”:

The importance of strange poetry, of unfamiliarity.

a mind always elsewhere
not focussed on text
but allowing it to shift
as a film before perception
odd detail in clefts
part of the net seen clear
the weave otherwise vague

This recalls the image of the rug or carpet and also the experience (recorded in March) of seeing how, in a Renoir exhibition at the National Gallery, the technique is “sketchier than reproduction suggests” and the underlying “fawn canvas” often shows through. The idea that there can be momentary glimpses of part of the underlying net is echoed in the next section, a geographical comment about the siting of Faversham. The Thames and the Medway refuse to blend together (thus setting up a metaphorical warp and weft) and a quoted comment points out that the fact that the towns of Faversham and Sittingbourne are comparatively sea-going, sea-manufacture-oriented (where one might have expected agriculture) occurs because of a concealed delta of the Medway. It’s hard to tell how fortuitous this connection is but it is a revealing one, looking to poetry and Duggan’s own peculiar brand of “poetic anthropology” to reveal underlying structures usually covered over by an agreed-upon self-image: in modern England this is usually the world of sanitised National Trust images. It’s no accident that the section following this deals with visits to churches and country houses and finishes with the word “industry”:

Statuary in the gardens by those who play at Gods.

Then Firle, staid, half-finished in its grandeur.
the “long” (not the “short”) view.

so what’s heimlich? old money
heating its cavernous ante-rooms?
a sense of order outside which
is chaos (“industry”)?

Finally in this quick survey designed to prove that this is a poem that worries about its own form continuously, there is a late passage in which the fact of having accidentally taken a wrong path on a walk (and finished up on ground used for army training), is exploited for its symbolic value by being followed (after a description of a photo of upper-class ladies playing at working as hop-pickers) by a passage that recalls this idea of estrangement and even flirts with the idea of compost (enormous quantities of valueless material eventually producing by a process of compression, juxtaposition and mysterious transformation something valuable).

so, the scattering
of phrases, the mulch
making up this (or
making this up), things
don’t hold until
a strange discourse
takes over, the notes
blind to purpose
except the track of
improbability, in fear
of taking up too much
of the page (off
the page? no,
Mister O, on it
firmly

I have a strong – though subjective – sense that Crab & Winkle works brilliantly. It is the most enjoyable of Duggan’s books and enjoyableness is something they usually rate highly for. Of course the task as reader is to try to work out why it is a success. I would say that its success depends first on the chosen particulars. Duggan has brilliant eye and ear for those moments when the structures of reality peek through the agreed-upon surface of life. Sometimes these emerge as acts of critical observation of others’ works sometimes as quirky or ambivalent found signs. Secondly, as he wryly admits in a passage in October, he has a complete “lack of narrative sense” and this means that unity through a narrative framework (“a year in the life of a stranger in Kent and some things that happened to him”) is never really an option. Thus he is thrown back onto edited juxtaposition and the exploitation rather than suppression of the radically different modes that his observations take.

Another feature in Duggan’s favour is his position as bemused but intelligent outsider (something more difficult to sustain in his Australian poems). In other words, the estranged view comes naturally, or more naturally than for many others. Outsiders are more likely than inhabitants to see that the environment has all the properties of a theme park; as long as they have a reasonably sceptical frame of mind (or cast of eye). He also has a masterful control over tone so that this position as diasporic outsider is never cute or whimsical and the intensity with which the book looks at the world means it can never be accused of being merely fey or a diaristic exercise in self-revelation. (The worst that could be said, along this line, is that if one put together the homesick references to the close friends that he feels form the core of his readership, one might detect a slight air of “nobody understands the complex things I am trying to do”.)

I don’t want to suggest that the success of Crab & Winkle depends (as so many diaries do) on the personality of the narrator but the issue does arise in the book itself in Pound’s rather more aesthetically sophisticated notion of a “shapely mind”:

I have functioned as though things put together stood for something, or rather become something other than what they were before.

the disjuncts are too great . . .

o.k. so Pound said mind is shapely
my mind? I wonder.

elusive bar talk
always seems more than the sum of its parts

a woman picks several leaves of the Alder(?) for
what purpose? and one decays, blown in,
at the base of the table

(there’s no place in a writing school for a poetic predicated on doubt)

our “worldly goods” somewhere in the Indian Ocean.

Although “shapely” is used here in a much more structuring way than simply attractive, an attractive mind is a great help when it comes to making anything based on a diary of observations attractive and convincing to a reader. The profound fear in Duggan’s poetry (and which drives him to the provisional aesthetics of books like this rather than any “well-made” poem) is of portentousness. It’s admirable to see it being so ruthlessly avoided but it also has to be recognized that the “lyrical ego” is an important part of most writer’s sense of themselves especially at the beginning of their careers. In other words I think Crab & Winkle is a wonderful freak book by an extraordinary and very untypical poet rather than a model for other, younger writers; if writing courses were built around it there might well be an even higher percentage of failed attempts than usual.

Judith Beveridge: Storm and Honey

Artarmon: Giramondo, 2009, 89pp.

This is the fourth book by one of Australia’s most loved and admired contemporary poets. By this stage we should have fairly confident ideas about the shape of her poetic genius, but I have always found that Beveridge’s poetry as a whole constantly remains a step or two ahead of me. Critically, there is nothing especially worrying about this but it is a reminder that sometimes knowing a writer’s first books gives one no ability to predict anything in the current one. And yet, reading the new book, one can see that it fits organically with the earlier ones – it is not a matter of a sudden shift in aesthetic theory or practice. Each new Beveridge book has sent me back to the earlier ones looking for poems that didn’t seem important on first reading but which now click into focus.

Storm and Honey is almost entirely about the sea. It is made up of a thirty poem sequence, “Driftgrounds: Three Fisherman”, and a little collection of a dozen discrete poems, “Water Sapphire”. There are connections everywhere with earlier books. Firstly Beveridge has always seemed to want to move into sequences: in Accidental Grace there are a set of Indian portraits and, more tellingly, a Buddha sequence. In Wolf Notes there is an extended (and extremely elusive) sequence, “Between the Palace and the Bhodi Tree”. Here, the “Driftgrounds” sequence is structured so that three different personalities (Grennan, Davey and the narrator) can be bounced around in dramatic conflicts. Each has a mystical component. Grennan is a kind of old man of the sea with a history and, often, surprisingly idiosyncratic values; Davey is wrapped up in the mystique of the way he approaches the world – neatly symbolised in “The Cast” by his obsession with his fishing reel:

                                                                      Davey
is still turning over his reel, clicking it, calibrating,
counting as though he were sure he could crack that pack

of digits, or break into the structure of brute matter itself.

The narrator is a rather dreamier figure – less of a professional than the other two but perhaps possessed of a valuable ability to float on the surface of reality.

Although it begins with a shock when a child’s body is discovered in a shark, this is not a sequence built around narrative drive. Nothing that much happens. People fish and there is space in the structure for some portraits of other characters. In the same way that “Between the Palace and the Bhodi Tree” seemed a sequence length extension of the Buddha Cycle in Accidental Grace, so “Driftgrounds” seems an extension of all those fishing poems in the earlier books. And we have to ask what the significance of the sea is in Beveridge’s poetry. Wrestling with this, there seem at least two, reasonably exclusive possibilities. It could be that it is the ground of the poet’s being as the harbour was for Slessor, the Manly beaches for Beaver and the Hawkesbury for Robert Adamson – the primal landscape always returned to. Or it could be that it is nothing more than a conveniently reduced and thus manageable symbol of a Buddhist perception of the motions and interactions of the entire cosmos, of “brute matter itself”.

There is some poetic evidence for the former in that the poems deploy a bewildering range of words from the arcane reaches of English vocabulary which, in their harsh consonantalism (always a strength of English) create a sense of extreme tactility. The very first poem begins with a line that stresses hearing and exploits strong alliteration – “We heard the creaking clutch of the crank” – and the sequence is drenched with words like “whidders”, “brattle”, “chitter”, “flacker” (the noise of ducks taking off), “roils”, “moshing”, “katabatic” and so on. We aren’t that far from Seamus Heaney here or Lowell’s “brackish reach of shoal off Madaket”. There’s no doubt that one of the drives behind these poems is realism through tactility and why be tactile and realistic if the subject is no more than an allegorical setting? The highly tactile, aggressively consonantal, becomes the theme of one of the poems of the sequence, “Hooks”. The narrator, responding to the functional beauty of the varieties of fishing hooks – the width of the mouth, the offset of the point – comes up with various imaginative names for them: “wild-beaked bait-giver”, “ibis leaning / over the shallows” and “greenshanks / in flight”. They are poetic in the oriental mode:

                    I know Grennan and Davey
would think I’m silly naming these old hooks, but what

else is there to do when you’re stuck in a boathouse, no fish
          running, when the hooks’ real names -
Sproat, Sneck, Big Bend, Model 20R – are just not poetry.

Perhaps not, but this beautifully contrasts Asian with Germanic aesthetics and “sproat” and “sneck” have the quality that animates the poems of the whole sequence.

Two earlier poems from Accidental Grace are brought into focus by this sequence. In “The Fishermen” there is a strong sense of the sea and the crafts that it encourages as symbolic of the universe itself, a place of shifting threads, sometimes forming knots and nets, sometimes connected to individuals by lines rather as the girl of another early poem “Girl on a Rooftop Flying a Kite” is connected to the sky by a line. And the fishing lines of “The Fishermen” are complicated because although they are straight lines (and thus symbolically opposed to the lace and net patterns of woven lines) this does not mean that the fishermen are in a kind of exploiter/exploited relationship to the sea. The poem ends, memorably, with a surprise visitation:

They have always reminded me
of lace-makers. The way they stand
at the shore, looking at the sea
as if it is an open page of knots,
never a closed fabric stitched
by needles. And the way they stand
as if darning a yacht, a bird,
distant waves breaking in circles,
the passages the moon takes out
through the cliffs.
In their baskets
are things found in the hands
of needleworkers, haberdashers.
And see how they sit in the garnet
dusk, running threads into eyelets -
then bringing them back
and exposing an intimate dark.
And how they love the moon
in a scandalous design – as if
they were assured that the night
would not end without rapture
or the meridians to paradise.
. . . . .
In a chivalry
of lines they listen to the sea,
to the shells, to their reels click
in an amethyst quiet; to Odysseus
step out of the water shawled
in their sunstone-coloured nets,
his hand on his heart in a gesture
of disclosure, only the moon now
offering them sight over the waves,
as they too lift their arms into the sky.

I have quoted this poem at length not only because it is a wonderful poem and lays down so much of the important background for these later poems, but also to demonstrate that, although it seems the kind of thing which is the germ of “Driftgrounds”, it is different in that it prefers the rhapsodic to the aggressively tactile. There is another poem from Accidental Grace, “To the Islands”, which is about movement into another imaginative space. This movement is triggered by the sounds of the sea:

I will use the sound of wind and the splash
     of the cormorant diving and the music
any boatman will hear in the running threads
     as they sing about leaving for the Islands.

I will use a sinker’s zinc arpeggio as it
     rolls across a wooden jetty and the sound
of crabs in the shifting gravel and the scrape
     of awls across the hulls of yachts.

I will use the wash-board chorus of the sea
     and the boats and the skiffler’s skirl
of tide-steered surf taken out by the wind
     through the cliffs. . . . . .

I don’t think there is anything quite so explicit in “Driftgrounds”, but reading this poem in conjunction with the sequence makes one think of all these various poems about the sea, about fishing and fishermen, as inhabiting a kind of pre-departure ground. One of the characteristic moves of Beveridge’s poetry is into another imagined space and, as I’ve said of “The Fishermen”, the line connecting the individual to the sea is one of the means of departure. On this subject, it is worth dwelling for a moment about the way the works of other poets enter Beveridge’s poems. They are always italicised and acknowledged in notes and they seem stepping off points. And, of course, the quotations themselves are lines (of poetry rather than monofilament) and one has the impression that the complicated issue of influence is, in Beveridge’s poetry, no more than a momentary gift of an entry into a new world which will be the poem she is writing.

What evidence is there for seeing the sea as a symbol for the interactive universe? It is important to note a phenomenon here which, poetically, is as powerful as the tactile language. These poems are inclined to exploit simile, sometimes to the point of comic exaggeration. Take the opening of “Spittle Beach”:

     It’s cold among the siftings of shell and sand;
the rain falling slantwise out at sea. I walk among the pylons,
     fish scales are stuck to the wood like grey sleet.
               Far off, a yacht ”“

          its spinnaker filled with the wind looks as bulbous
as the vocal sac of a bell toad or a bullfrog. Along the shore
     weed, and the blunt white shells of cuttlefish;
               jellyfish like smeared

          globs of glyceride. An octopus, its head like a perfume
bottle’s puffer, has just squirted a whift of ink, tentacles
     curl in the air like baby fingers while the man hauls it in.
               Yesterday there was a shoal

     of fish turning through the current like a mirror ball,
or like . . . .

and so on, like upon like. And these similes are often genuinely metaphoric in that the connection they make is with something utterly alien to the world being described – the puffer of a perfume bottle, for example. What is the idea of reality that lies behind this? Does it come from a sense of process which undermines our inclination to see things as carefully outlined individual entities? Although it is far beyond my metaphysical capabilities, it has always been an issue for readers of the poetry of Robert Gray who has an openly Buddhist conception of reality behind his poems. And so it is no surprise that the most densely “similied” poem – so dense that you feel at times that it must be a private joke – “The Harbour”, the opening poem of the “Water Sapphire” set of poems, is dedicated to Gray. It reads like a parody of the drive for precision by simile:

Out on the harbour yachts are clustered like little wedges
of hard white cheese stuck with toothpick-thin masts.
The moon is a cocktail onion, or just plain soda cracker,
but the sun is a dollop of hot chilli relish floating above

the vol-au-vent shape of Fort Denison. At Cremorne Point
a lighthouse gleams like a salt cellar. Out between the Heads
those white spinnakers are as tautly bellied as garlic cloves.
. . . . .

And – as before – so on and so on. But at the moment when we think we are reading a parody or a poetry class exercise (“Construct a series of similes for a poem entitled ”˜Sydney Harbour Conceived as a Dining Table’”) the poem shifts into a loving celebration of Gray’s “Late Ferry”:

                                        I’m watching all this from a balcony
just as the wind gets up, just as I’m remembering your poem,
Robert, about the late ferry crossing the water – and as
the light spills intemperately and wantonly as honey.

It is very beautiful, the way in which the symbol of transcendence (or, if that is too metaphysically loaded a word, plenitude) should also be a food.

So the poetic methods of these poems employ what I have always thought of as opposed principles: the tactile, consonantal language emphasises the gritty thinginess of things and the high content of similes opens things out into larger patterns, stressing not individuality but connection. So finally I am not sure whether Sydney’s coast here is a ground of being or a symbol of the connections of the universe.

There is a third possibility about the book’s conception of the sea: it may symbolise not existence but poetry. Any poetry focussing on the making of nets and the casting of baited hooks into the sea looks as though it wants to be read in this way. It may be an easy option – it is often easy to read difficult poems as allegories of artistic creation – but when Davey in “The Point” rows his boat through a shoal of similes and comments that he is “just going on my nerve”, most of us are going to think of Frank O’Hara’s famous manifesto. At one stage I even wanted to push the analogy to the point where the three protagonists represent different approaches to writing poetry or even, more intriguingly at the level of gossip, three actual poets. But that way madness probably lies. At any rate, the poem after “The Point”, “Grennan Mending Nets”, does seem to invite this kind of symbolic connection between making poems and knotting nets:

So good to just let fish and weather turn his head, to sit and work
taking thread from warp to weft; to listen to the sea pull in and out
without a thought for tarry or departure, even for what the boats

have caught, long nets dragging from the bowsprits, wakes trawling
through the river’s inwrought gold. His fingers work the mesh,
the open weave twisting until it seems the sea itself is locked.

. . . . .

                                                            Already the light has pulled away

from the oars of boats we may never see again, and though his
hands hold weight he likes to let his mind drift, then let it find its
place like a cut and finished thread at the back of the tatted shore.

I wrote earlier of Beveridge’s love of the movement out from one reality into an imagined one and the way lines of poetry can be the tickets that enable this. This is an area that someone looking at her work so far as a whole would want to focus on. My sense – with precious little to support it – is that the world entered remains an imagined rather than, say, researched, one. It might be not so much the experience of an alien reality (the sort of thing we aim for when we learn the language of the place we are visiting and thus try to be something better than mere tourists who might as well have stayed at home and watched Discovery channel) as a metaphoric extension of the poet’s own reality. This becomes important when considering the wonderful “Appaloosa” from “Water Sapphire”. As other Beveridge poems, it includes an epigraph from another writer (“I have always loved the word guitar” – David St. John) so that the world of horses which the poem is going to enter is made available by quoting a line in which another writer enters the world of music. And the poem’s syntax is a matter of continual denials of the equestrian world:

I have never been bumped in a saddle as a horse springs
     from one diagonal to another,
          a two-beat gait light and balanced
as the four-beats per stride become the hair-blowing,
   wind-in-the-face, grass-rippling,
     muscle-loosening, forward-leaning
   exhilaration of the gallop.
. . . . .

while the intensity of the language affirms the reality of the experience. And the poem concludes with the statement that the means of entry into that world is the love of the word “appaloosa”, itself a kind of North American linguistic equivalent to the “whidderings”, “chitterlings” and “brattles” of the sea poems.

Finally there are the worlds that can’t be entered. William James famously said of the octopus: “such flexible intensity of life in a form so inaccessible to our sympathy” and in the final poem of Storm and Honey, “The Aquarium”, we get to look, through glass, at a row of these impenetrable otherworlds. And, though James is nowhere invoked, it seems right that the star of the show is the octopus. It represents a challenge not only for the individual poet but for poetic language itself. Luxuriating “in its own arms” it looks as though it were trying to write – a kind of mirror of the watching poet – and the words it seems to want to write – lollygag, lollipop, lollapalooza – recall the word “appaloosa” of the earlier poem. When she returns to the octopus she sees it enact one of those freak transformations using a ring in the tank:

          and in a flash
     as though it were a length of voile or Dacca silk, it draws
all four metres of itself through the ring’s small hole
               shape-shifting then tightening
          its small face against the glass before it holds the rim
     of the ring again, and it draws itself back through
               as if into another portal, another hole in space.

Storm and Honey is quite a book, full of remarkable pleasures and more than justifying its author’s status as one of Australia’s most important writers. Of course, as the sensitive reader will see, it is not a book that I feel thoroughly “on top of” (always an inappropriate metaphor for criticism – it should be replaced by “lost happily inside”!). Beveridge is one of those poets whose body of work grows in complexity as she goes on. But one important feature is worth concluding with: you never get the impression that Beveridge is a comfortable exploiter of the sea as useful material for a set of poems. She sets herself the challenge – as the upper echelons of poets do – of making each poem a unique and momentarily flashing structure – not unlike the forms that the sea throws up. It is the opposite of that rhetorical approach which masters a proven method, finds an amenable subject and then works it over. But it means that almost all the poems of this book respond to a sensitive probing of their conception and structure and provide enormous readerly pleasure in the process.

Maria Takolander: Ghostly Subjects

London: Salt, 2009, 67pp.

I have commented elsewhere on Australia’s lack of a minimalist poetic tradition. In a sense it is something that could have been predicted because minimalism, at least in poetry, often requires a distinctive kind of audience. This might be made up of courtiers who understand the subtle double-talk of court language and the way it extends naturally to poetry, or it might be made up of aesthetes within a canonical culture who understand the briefest and subtlest references. But whatever the situation, whether I’m describing Wyatt, Hafez, Li Po or Basho, I’m certainly not describing Australia. You feel that the emptiness of the land and the absence of public appreciation of poets as well as the lack of a strong tradition of critical response all mean that poets here are shouting to each other and spinning long poems, essentially built on rhetorical formulae, partly to be heard and partly to keep alive their sense of themselves. It occurs in other English language traditions – in the US and England, especially since the nineteenth century – but in Australia it seems acute. When poets do choose a minimalist style without any confidence in their audience, they finish up as hermeticists, something that Australian literary responses are very intolerant of, or they write haiku and tanka for all the world as though they were sipping tea in a miniature Japanese garden.

These homely thoughts (to quote Alistair Cooke) were prompted by Maria Takolander’s Ghostly Subjects in that Takolander, as well as being an exciting new poet, also writes in what might be thought of as a branch line of the minimalist tradition. It may well come from having a Nordic (Finnish) component although one of the poems (significantly called “Minimalism and the Abstract”) seems to reject this when it says “you see I do agree with igloos / but I can’t recall the language now I’m afraid / I’ve lost my nordic goddess.” Whatever the cause it is always a treat to read poems of consistently high quality written by a young Australian poet which sound so unlike the poems of other young Australian poets.

Ghostly Subjects is technically Takolander’s second book because Narcissism – a small volume in the Whitmore Press series – was published in 2005. Half of Ghostly Subjects is made up of the poems of Narcissism, but Ghostly Subjects has a much clearer structure and certainly a more helpful one when it comes to trying to work out what Takolander’s poetic personality is. Its four sections: Geography, Chemistry, Biology and Culture make quite clear not only the ambit of the interests but also the structure of the intelligence. They are already abstractions rather than experiences and though the book is full of poems inspired by experience and recording that experience, there is a lot of processing that has gone on before the poem appears. Similarly there is an emphasis in the book on the process of learning: the first poem is called “Geography Lessons” and there is a suite of poems later in the book called “Lessons Learned from Literature”. In other words, this is poetry coming out of an intellectual tradition (to use the word loosely) interested in a subtly different way of dealing with experience.

The middle sections – Chemistry and Biology – concern respectively love and, very generally, the body. “Grief” is profoundly minimalist and as close to impenetrable as Takolander’s style gets:

Stay that pebble.
Child


In your fist.
The well is tended.


Quietus.


--


Now it rises.
Like something mammalian.


Savage
Of the sleeping mewlings.


Poor.

With the help of the title we can work out a fair bit of this and it can always be defended by the claim that as it deals with the painful and indescribable it can only do so by approaching the subject tangentially. Perhaps it is no coincidence that it is followed by a relaxed gothic prose poem exactly dealing with what Poe – in the poem’s epigraph – calls “feelings more intense than terror for which there is no name upon the earth”.

Ghostly Subjects’ section on Culture begins with a poem, “Cosmetics Department” which is entirely about surfaces. And the hard, brittle surfaces that the poem deals with (“Fingernails are hard with all of human secrets”) are matched by the sharp assertiveness of the style which refuses to cocoon its subject (Make-up? Popular culture?) in a cosy nest of lengthily described personal experience. Other poems from this section deal with the films of Kubrick – a film-maker of particularly intense visual surfaces – and a number of writers – Kafka, Plath, Borges – also noted for their distinctive surfaces. The Kafka poem begins with the word “paranoia” and the Borges with “narcissism” and these words are the titles of the last two poems of the previous section. The narcissism of the poem of that name, though, is the result of a happy obsession with all the parts of the body whereas in the Borges poem it seems to derive from Borges’ notion that an artist such as Shakespeare is capable of dissipating himself into so many characters that he becomes nobody himself – an echo of Borges’ much-loved description of the circle whose centre is everywhere and circumference nowhere.

When I began by saying that I see Takolander’s work as an avenue of a minimalist poetry (and there must be many other ways of locating her work) I did not want to give the impression that it was stylistically homogenous. Yes, “Cosmetics Department” is ruthlessly and abruptly propositional and the tableax poems are short, sharp vignettes. But there are places where the reins are loosened a little. “Whale Watching”, for example, is a big set-piece poem of the kind we are familiar with in Australia: a group of people are gathered above a beach in the hope of seeing whales give birth and the child of one of these people breaks away to go to the beach herself where, in a nice pun, she “ignores even the officious waves”:

. . . . . 
You’re worried about her and break away.


I’m no mother.
These whales are more warm-blooded than me.


I stand a zealot among zealots,


Waiting for the tear, the breach:
Error or revelation.


When I find you at my side again,


She’s sand-covered and crying.
I learn she’s lost her Tic Tacs.

It is revealing how much that last line – deliberately bathetic it is true – looks awkward and rings false. Casual domestic anecdote is not something that Takolander seems to do well or, generally, want to do well.

The most intriguing of these rein-loosening poems is “Reality Check” the final poem of the Chemistry section. It is said that all poets carry within their writing – published or unpublished – an anti-poem, something utterly different to all their other work, perhaps committing those things (sentimentality, cruelty, self-obsession, impersonality – whatever) that they would consider unacceptable in their “day-time” poems. This may well be what is happening here because “Reality Check” is everything that the other poems aren’t: relaxed, extensive, discursive, chattily personal. More, in fact, like a classical elegy. It details everyday experiences of travelling with one’s partner to poetry readings, exhibitions and so on. But underneath (or perhaps on top) it is a poem-poem recording the desire to incorporate memorable bits of dialogue into poems:

. . . . .
                                   Another time, driving back
from a poetry reading at Portarlington, the road to
Geelong taking us to the crest of a hill from which


we could see Melbourne floating like a magical
castle across the bay and the You Yangs as blue as
the sea, you exclaimed: “Fuck me, look at the sky!
How big is it?” I started a poem with those lines but
never finished it, the Muses, whom I like to confuse


with the Furies but who are, rationally speaking,
probably just judgement and chance, compelling
me to patience. . .

The poem, for all its casualness, has a complex double structure. It is a love poem in that the lover’s words are embedded in it and it thus celebrates the weird relationship of two poets. At the same time it is one of those poems which in speaking about its own making, finishes by becoming the thing that it previously spoke of. It finishes with an outsider’s words being included in the poem as well and since they were “I’m not here”, they are included paradoxically. It is tied up nicely in a pun in the last sentence: “The cry seemed / unselfconscious. I realise its place in this poem.”

To me the most interesting section of this book, though, is the first: Geography. This is because while poems dealing with, say, popular film are an experience of the last forty years or so, geography has always been part of the Australian poetic tradition largely because it was a challenge to English language poetic forms to come to grips with the strange lands which the first settlers found. So it’s more possible to judge what kind of difference Takolander’s poetry represents. Not unsurprisingly the approach is very visual and the emphasis is on perspective and scale and these relate to sharp visual portrait making – tableaux as one of the poems calls them. But the interest isn’t exclusively painterly since the poems worry continually about the interaction of the human and the natural. In a sense this is an extension of the question of perspective and scale since it asks what the role of the human is. And the poems also hover on the edge of an expressionist pathetic fallacy, wondering to what extent the human can be upscaled to the natural. If this sounds very abstract, well they are abstract poems! “Geography Lessons” seems largely about this and the final lesson is

How an ocean can rage at the moon
        until you adopt its colossal anger as your own
        and live believing it is all something personal.

And a fine, complex diptych, “Driving by the You Yangs”, contrasts two different views. In the day view the emphasis is on the mountains seen as a backdrop to the intense, minuscule activities of life: “These starlings above the railway line / Are always panicking, / Their tiny hearts like ticking bombs . . .” In the night view, all emphasis is on the driver: “The night, immense and tragic, / Makes of me what it will. / Inside these uncertain windows, // Fire-lit by passing cars, I’m a child again . . .” “Ghost Story” is also about scale and perspective moving from the widest of perspectives, “Under a night sky . . . On a land mass shifting over the earth’s blood . . .”, down to a domestic quarrel in a cottage.

Perhaps the most intriguing of the poems in this section are “Peace be with you (and also with you)” and “Tides”. The former, I’m not totally confident with:

We are waiting for the avalanche:
This surge of turbulent gods and angels,
Debris of ages, rendered.


We have gathered for the wake.
Beautiful, we offer up our eyes:
Lapis lazuli, marble white.


Please, not to brood.


Under divine sky, obscene,
We shift cold limbs,
Fist and grapple tender haloes.

This seems about suicide bombers on their first day in heaven though there are other ways of reading it (as the bomber’s family gathering to celebrate, for example), but it is intriguing for its positioning in a section called Geography and for its figuring of the visitation of the divine – or the instant of explosion – as an avalanche. The second poem, “Tides”, is about the Madrid bombings. Here the emotion behind the poem is really intense and geography acts – in its perspectival role – as a kind of containing device, or at least a framing one.

Entire oceans don’t know what to do.


. . . . .


Dismembered fish and rock-torn gulls.


In the unfurled trains, fires, residual, are made from air.


Phones are ringing in the pockets of herrings.
Sirens, sirens, sirens, sirens.


The unfathomable suddenly everywhere.

That rather lovely, and in no sense decorative, pun in the last line connects with the first line and emphasises the perspectives that the poet is interested in. The result is a highly processed poem of anger and despair.

Overall it is the rejigging of a very old set of engagements with landscape makes the poems of Ghostly Subjects fascinatingly relevant. It is possible to write brittle poems about the surface semiotic systems of items of popular culture but something more challenging to try to write about landscape in the way many of these poems do. And it is a tradition that one wants to see kept and to see continually successfully refreshed in this way. After all it sorts out those influences that are merely alien blow-ins and which have no power to have any kind of hold on landscapes that have puzzled us for over two hundred years. The first section of this book is alone enough to establish that Takolander’s style is both challenging and successful.

Andrew Sant: Fuel

Nth Fitzroy: Black Pepper, 2009, 122pp.

 

Andrew Sant’s previous (his tenth) book was called Speed and Other Liberties and carried as an epigraph a quotation from Marc Bloch: “Contemporary civilisation differs in one particularly distinctive feature from those which preceded it: speed.” The title of this new book suggests that one of the things it might do is to explore the material which is combusted into producing that speed. And it’s true – fuel and speed do make regular appearances here but they do so from surprising perspectives. Fuel is really more about location, balance, self-awareness and, well, perspective. Sant’s recent poetry seems, to me at least, to be happy to avoid those things which knock us out of balance, things such as erotic love, transcendence and the arrival of the divine in the form of visitations. It is humanist, in the old sense of the word, in that human life is at the core of its concerns, but it has very little patience with the tendency to inflate the significance of that human element.

A good example of these interests is the first poem of the book’s fourth section, “The Promethean Gift”. As the title tells us, it is about fire and, in this respect, it balances the section’s final poem which is about water. In “The Promethean Gift” humans are situated between fires and lizards in terms of their need for fuel:

. . . . .
In appreciation of this, I raise
a whiskey, and to friends
who, unlike hidden
lizards in the woodpile,

as a species need
ready fuel. The fire is keen
about this, like smoke
in clearings before humans

moving coldwards cleared
more and more. . . . . .

In a sense this issue is taken up again in a series of poems called “Cycle”. In one of them the image of the human flanked by the fire and the lizard is repeated. The wood-burning fire has a fast metabolism, faster than that of its human owner and feeder, but the lizard which has been hibernating in the sawn up logs has one which is slower than either:

. . . . .
                    When it slid
its few burnished inches
into the open, the skink
unfroze a trick rehearsed
in the Triassic of riding idle
with the inanimate
while woodsmoke showed
whose metabolisms aren’t
for slowing . . .

So the volume of demand for fuel and the speed of its consumption, not to mention the activity of the heart, is one of the ways this poetry wants to situate us: what one might call a biological positioning. But there are many others. And one of the most attractive throughout the poems of Fuel is the drive toward fitting us into geological frameworks. The first, very fine, poem, “Revisiting Cliffs” specifically contrasts our sense of the elapsing of time with geological time. Clambering up cliffs in the search for fossils, the adult man thinks about the boy in him and about the passing of a few decades that makes the massive change from child to man. But the act of climbing is taking place over sedimentary rocks which cover millions of years and contain, between their strata, fossils which themselves contain a “glimmer” of the mammals which we will eventually evolve from. So the growth of a single human is also set in the context of evolutionary growth that goes back to the Jurassic. The end of the poem is interesting:

What a strange wonder,
on this latest day of all creation,
to be human, scramble up
a cliff face to extract,
with a pick, a bunch of old stones

and look into it deeply for orientation.

The word “wonder” (which appears twice in the poem) has a suggestion of the miraculous which the poems of Fuel generally avoid, though there exist, of course, perfectly secular wonders, such as looking at images from the Hubble telescope. But the search for an orientation is close to the heart of the book and another good poem, “Rock Music”, takes up the geological theme, operating, as many of the poems do, in terms of contrasts. There are two kinds of rock music: the stuff that comes out of the radio – absolutely up-to-the-minute and focussed completely on the present – and the strange sounds made by rocks themselves. If you switch off the radio, the poem says, you can attempt to tune into “the frequencies of stone” working through sandstones, schists and flint:

                                             Elsewhere
you, as audience, facing Triassic strata,

may get transported by sediments
bound together like pages that predate
the break-up, layers
of the supercontinent Pangea.

Ultimately you arrive at a meteorite in a museum which “signals, mysteriously, all / it can about how life modestly began”. “Rock Music” has the attractiveness of being a comparison built into a single phrase in the title. It’s not a powerful poetic technique but it is one of the things that Sant is good at and it lightens and animates the poems. To be without direction is to be “all at sea”, for example, and one of the poems, “Mr Habitat at Sea” exploits this (Mr Habitat is a kind of alter ego whose experiences fill out a dozen poems of what looks to have been, originally, a sequence and is now spaced out throughout the poems of Speed and Other Liberties and Fuel). A small but intriguing poem, “The Misses”, invokes the formidable teachers of primary school but is really interested in the way that formal education contrasts (or, perhaps, complements) the immersion of informal education:

There were fields, seasons
containing forever, to quicken in;
nests, eggs, chicks in the hedges -
grazed knees, open space.
                                                       As well
there were the firm
Misses at the beginning
of our formal educations: I remember
Folkes, Powell, Josa.
. . . . .

What you get from the formal component of your education, the poem wants to say, is identity, location and orientation.

Contrast, the way Sant’s poems use it, is not a way of correcting (one road wrong, the other right) but of locating. The second poem of the book, “Two Fisherman”, is built from an intriguing contrast. For the first man, fishing is a social activity and takes place on a petrol driven boat fuelled, metaphorically, by dreams of the big pelagic fish out beyond the harbour. He gets a single thirteen-line stanza, as does his counterpart:

Fisher two is stationary, with a heron’s patience,
edge of a lake, and if there’s no strain on the line,
nod of the rod towards promise, there’s meditation.
He waits, winds in the fly, casts and recasts
a gossamer arc. The lake is corrugation, then it is glass.
Or in his boat he stays put, anchored
as he might be at a bar, looking dreamily
to see what might happen, beyond his beer.
The trout is elusive, tactics and a Sunday
gambled might win it. The man’s moves
are sudden, spiderish. He’ll use
many old tricks till, by nightfall, he too
may be spent. Eleswhere, women later might surface.

Two approaches to life are set up here and both seem viable – neither at least is explicitly condemned. One blasts through its element in search of fulfilment, the other floats patiently on it. One works by capture, the other by luring; one by action the other by stealth.

A more significant matter may be the ambit of the allegory. Do these men represent approaches to life or approaches to poetry: fishing – using lines to bring strange things up from the depths – has been a metaphor for poetry long before Seamus Heaney got out his fishing rod. And the issue of what licence readers have to read these poems as allegories about poetry itself extends to other poems in the book. “Two Fishermen” is followed by “Marvellous Harbours”, which is also, at heart, a contrast poem. It juxtaposes open, wild water with enclosed water; the fishing boat’s arrival with the tourist liner’s, the view from the harbour’s surrounds and the view of the harbour from the “cannon level” of approaching boats. One wants to read it as being, like the fisherman poem, about open and enclosed, raw experience and calm processed experience. This makes it seem an allegory of ingestion, always something close to poetry and its response to experience.

And then there is “Dedication to a Potter Wasp” contrasting, on the one hand, the torpor of a poet from temperate climates who has finished up in the tropics and, on the other, the remorseless energy of the wasp which goes about building little clay poets for its eggs and filling them with paralysed caterpillars:

. . . . .
Nine cells I’ve greeted – two already set hard
when I arrived as a guest – each deftly erected
during slack afternoons or treks from the house;
the lot being rendered – this northern wasp cannot stop! -
smooth as a pot, while I, sluggish in the tropics, praise
this maker, now pack to fly in pursuit of the south.

“Maker” in the last line signals “poet” but, apart from that, I suppose there is no really compelling reason that it should be read as a contrast of the productivity of two poets. In fact, given the rest of the poems in the book as a kind of interpretive context, it is most likely that Sant is interested in contrasting the metabolisms of the wasp and the human.

The poem that perhaps best sums up this interaction between biology and geology, between fuel and perspective, is “Heart on a Summer Afternoon”. Here Sant addresses his own heart, beating rapidly after climbing (as in the first poem) to a place where there is a perspective, “a view / to die for, if you’ll excuse / an expression that smacks / of conflict.” Again, the place of perspective leads to a meditation about where humans fit in the scales of things and here it is the swallows, so fast that a “target summer fly moves / like a Zeppelin in their sight”, which contrast with the human. If the wasp was dogged application personified, the swallow is a frantic life-in-process:

. . . . .
Now I have my breath back,
many thanks, quite steady
along, I guess, with the swallows’
intake as they swoop, squeal,
and rise above the house, all
thoroughly in the present,
unlike the slow, reflective
humans on the path.

The poem finishes with an acceptance of torpor in the summer heat and locates the evolutionary origin of the human heart in African warmth, rather than the paleolithic conquest of the cold forests of Europe:

The African
beat you keep in my chest
is great; we’re sunned and fed -
as if, in this equatorial heat, vast
Europe might still be the risky
domain of strange primeval forest.

Fuel is, as I said initially, largely about the implications of a humanist view of existence and perhaps prizes perspective as the ultimate gift of the self-knowledge that derives from this. I said it was a book without much interest in those potent experiences – erotic love, epiphanic experiences of the divine – which disturb that humanist position. That was a little misleading since there are poems which focus on these issues but the fact that they seem unusual poems in the context of the book actually supports my case. The erotic appears in an odd and intriguing poem, “August”, where, after extended descriptions of place and an extreme sensitivity to perspective – an aeroplane’s view is imagined and then a hawk’s or eagle’s and then that of the lowly oystercatchers at the ocean’s edge – two lovers appear on the beach, significantly described in evolutionary terms as “late arrivals”. The intention seems to be to see erotic intensity from an evolutionary perspective and the poem finishes:

                         We might be headed, right now,

arm in arm, down a platform
at a grand station, lovers pressing forward
through a crowd in the Age of Steam.

And there is another poem, “In the Land Called Desire”, which is also about love, setting up an allegorical landscape where mountains are mere blocks to fulfilment and the streets of the town have one mission which is “to offer rapid passage”. It remains a very Sant-like (Santly?) poem though in its interest in what fuels the erotically charged heart:

. . . . .
Fuel exists, carboniferous heat,
and harnessed water that drives townships,
lit up, into the night; but there’s no energy
as inexhaustible as that seen
in a lover’s eyes while crossing a bridge or square . . .

And, finally, there is a puzzling poem, “Visitants”, about, as its title says, visitations. A door slams and the house’s owners think in terms of ghosts. The author, a visitor himself (hence the plural title) sees a raven land clumsily in a tree and is of the opinion that the bird is the cause of the various goings on, falling leaves on a windless day, and so on. I don’t feel completely confident about this poem but I want to read it as an assertion that there is a logical answer to the phenomenon but that that logical answer – the raven – is, seen from the right perspective, a miraculous one because life itself is miraculous.

A human-centred view of life is a complicated one for poetry since it removes as a motivic force the power of the numinous. Visitations are phenomenally powerful poetic (as well as personal and cultural) experiences. Poetry itself is also, of course, a power in the human-centred universe and Fuel doesn’t seem to focus much on this – at least not overtly. But what can be said about the poems of Fuel is that they are never reductive and are very alert to what that first poem calls the “wonder” of true perspective.

David Brooks: The Balcony

St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2008, 120pp.

In the middle of the three sections of this new book by David Brooks are three poems written in the spirit of Catullus, exploiting that poet’s ability to speak passionately about his contemporaries – friends as well as enemies. The third of them, “Catullus 123”, provides a kind of defence-in-advance of the entire book:

“One hundred love poems? Don’t be ridiculous.
Your colleagues will give you shit,
and all those others, for whom love is
an expression of failure, lack of nerve,
something not really to be talked about
in gritty Sydney or those smug and urbane
capitals to the south of it.
. . . . .”

This and the book’s epigraph (“for Teja / 77 love poems / (and then some)”) gives us a pretty good idea of what to expect from The Balcony and at the same time protects it from the condescending comment that it is a “brave book” in the Yes Minister sense of the word. What we get is really fine, lyrical writing of a certain mode. Whereas the driving force of Brooks’s previous book, Urban Elegies, might be described as openness in the face of anger, this book’s seems to be something like wonder in the face of love, an experience that readers should celebrate as much as writers. It is full, as one might expect, of portraits of the loved-one but the most telling is “Balkan” which, with a title that exploits that word’s connotations of the outre, tells us that this relationship is not a bland, cosily domestic one.

The best of these poems partake of that complex of tones which lyric poetry (although one doesn’t want to generalise too freely about something this complex) throughout the ages and the cultures of the world, has exploited. The emotion is intense and recognisable but, far from being a spontaneous shout, enough complexities have to be going on “under the bonnet” (to borrow a phrase from a poem of John Jenkins) for them not to have to rely on the power of the emotion to sustain them. And the complexities are balanced by a sense that the poem itself is an ephemeral, self-supporting text that momentarily captures an experience but which doesn’t aspire to building something that will resist the entropy of the world. In the case of someone like Catullus, a central figure of this tradition in the West, you feel that in the background is a strong group of aristocratic and similarly inclined friends who make up the audience that enables the poems to be written. I’m not sure that one feels this in Brooks’s case: what you get instead is a solitary’s a sense of bewilderment and bedazzlement in the face of overwhelming experience.

Lyric poems, like these, are also a bit of a test for the reader since any laboured, furrowed-brow-in-the-tutorial kind of response is directly contrary to the poems’ spirit. It’s a transaction where the poet assumes that readers are friends who see these things easily – as easily in fact as the impression the poet gives of their writing. Take a later, short poem, “Vukovar”, for example:

A warm day
over the fields of Vukovar:
in the lanes between the blackberries,
beneath the muddy pools
drying after the morning’s rain,
under the short-mown meadow
and the fields of kale,
under the cruising hawk,
the hapless dead
bearing their chests to the sun.

The title is a word so pregnant with connotations that we read the single sentence of the poem waiting for them to detonate. And detonate they do though, in a daring move, the climax revolves around a single word that will always look, to those reading it for the first time, like a misspelling.

Another example might be the book’s second poem, “The Field”:

I saw you leaving, from the corner
of my eye, and went outside
as soon as I could get away,
but you had turned
into a broad field,
a still evening,
a strange bird’s cry.

The pleasure of this little piece (by no means as important as many of the other poems) revolves around the ambiguity of “turned into”. The other person enters a field and disappears and in doing so has “become” a field, an evening, a bird’s cry, dissolving in a way that matches the poem’s movement from precise (if oblique – “from the corner / of my eye”) syntax to open list. And then there are the implications of the word “field”. Nobody who read poetry in the sixties and seventies will pass a word like this without a quiver of response since it connotes extended ideas in both writing and philosophy. “A field of interactions” was a proposed replacement for individuals in a period when people were desperate to get rid of essentialist notions of the self. And that’s what happens in this poem when the individual disappears, so – unlikely as it may seem (in fact, unlikely as it is) – this can be read as a comment on French and American notions of the “shape” of reality in that distant period.

But “The Field” is also an example of a process that can be felt throughout The Balcony in that it begins to dissolve borders between the various levels of reality. Good lyric poetry can be funny like this. It seems on one level sharp and full of the thisness of things – there is a bird, a room, a tree, love, pain, whatever – and yet at another level very equivocal about the status-in-reality of these things. They can double as allegorical elements or as passing similes, they can be illusions or dreams or totems. The Balcony’s first poem, “Isla Negra” (the first poem of each of the three groups seems very sensitive to place) is perhaps a better example than “The Field”:

The traffic had finished on the avenue.
The full moon was low behind the twin bridges.
The fruit bats had gone, leaving their bitter-sweet
carnage under the fig trees.

For almost an hour
I’d watched you sleeping, lips
half-open against the black pillow, eyes
closed over your unfathomable dreams.

When I shut my own at last
white horses were grazing the night fields somewhere,
people were speaking quietly
in a language I did not know

clear water
rippled over dark river-stones,
a long, white crescent of sand
beckoned like a path

the eyes 
of a hundred forest creatures
watched us, like familiars,
under a million stars.

The drive of the poem is one that appears often in this book: the gaze moves from the loved one to the cosmos. But this simple and fairly common movement is played against a lot of very complex levels of reality. It begins with the pillow which might be literally black (a word introduced in the placename of the title) but also might be metaphorically so. Are the white horses grazing in the writer’s dream or in reality outside the building where the writer is dreaming? And the language of the people – was it one the writer didn’t speak or couldn’t identify? The climax of the poem is the climax of these ambiguities and, as with the other two poems I’ve spoken of, is embodied in one word. To speak of the forest creatures as “familiars” can imply that the lovers are accepted by the natural world as honorary citizens in a way that the people who form the various targets of poems like the Catullus ones will never be. But familiars are also animal forms that the gods take when they want to assist, or keep an eye on, their devotees. And these are usually the darker gods, the demons, though it would be in the spirit of the poem to imagine them here as benevolent. At any rate, there is an enormous difference between an image of lovers being united with the natural world and lovers being protected by visitants from the otherworld. And the single world holds both possibilities perfectly making a mode that looks to be one of unequivocal expression, actually one of shifting borders and ambiguous footings.

There are a host of the otherworlds in this book and it is one of its achievements that they are never invoked sloppily. Heart, head, soul, dream, past, memory all make appearances as do a set of metaphors: the lover’s body as city, the lover or the self as totemic beast, and so on – as one of the poems says: “Such / realms there are in all of us”. Usually, the most immediate sense that poets have of these otherworlds is their own poetic renewal and the sense that this must be originating outside themselves in some way. There are many celebrations of this in The Balcony. Whether it is straightforwardly caused by the love the book celebrates is a different issue: a poem which reworks the Orpheus myth certainly suggests that it is. Many of the poems are attentive to the fallow periods with their inevitable frustrations and frightening sense that nothing may come ever again. “Australia”, for example, seems to be a minimalist take on Hope’s poem and also McAuley’s “Envoi”, both poems about creativity and renewal and, in the case of the McAuley, a poem that cleverly brings metaphor next to reality so that each seem to have an equal validity. “White Tulips”, in a four line spell, speaks of three of the traditional conceptions of how our sensibilities divide: “White tulips . . . /astonish / even the exhausted heart. // Don’t / tell the soul then / or whisper to the brain” and this is followed by a fascinating poem, “Wait” which shows how wonderful simple assertion sometimes is – though it begins with a symbolic scenario of a spider continuously repairing its damaged web:

. . . . .
Sometimes the heart grows so large
it floods the body.
Sometimes it is no bigger than a nut.
Sometimes the dark creeps in
and it seems that it will never go away.
A great deal that is lost is findable.
Much that seems dead
is not dead at all.
Much that is obvious
needs to be said
again and again.

The issue of why this should work here, and not be part of the pompous lecturing that one finds in bad poems written out of an ideological certainty, is a tricky issue and I’m not sure I can answer it beyond saying that surrounding poems set it in a perspective of passionate experience and often act as concrete images for it. I know this commits the fallacy of assuming that genuinely felt experience makes successful poetry, but it’s the best I can do. Another little poem, “A Call”, situates poetic renewal as beginning outside the self and, like the earlier poems I spoke of, depends for its effect on a pun on “lie” (“Hold / back, let / language lie”) and “The Poet’s House” deals with this renewal in completely objective, almost comically distanced, terms:

A poet is living in this house again!
The whole place is a mess!
Students’ essays
pile up unmarked,
letters are left unanswered,
books lie about unread.

before concluding with three lines that have more in them than appears on the surface:

Who will throw the poet out?
Who will ever
bring in the garbage?

When lyric poetry’s sense of inviting in material from strange places and dissolving the conventional boundaries between reality and the worlds of dream, allegory and metaphor that surround it is put together with transformative erotic love (where does that come from?) and the equally mysterious arrival of creativity, there is a lot of complexity for good poetry to exploit and roll around in. The Balcony does that. What I like most about it is that far from being a book to get things (Balkan love) out of the way so that the poetry can go back to exploring its previous concerns (working on itself as an oeuvre) it’s a book that inhabits and (often bemusedly) explores the ground of poetry itself.

Emma Jones: The Striped World

London: Faber, 2009, 55pp.

An extraordinary first book by a Sydney poet of whom, I’m ashamed to say, I have never heard. I suppose the fact that the poems which have previously appeared have all been in English journals, and that the publisher is English, might form the basis for some kind of defence but, as with all discoveries, you can’t help thinking that you should have known enough to see it coming. At any rate, The Striped World announces itself as great first books do: as a confident, almost authoritative, voice wrestling (if voices can wrestle) with a coherent and sophisticated set of concerns. You get a sense of the distinctiveness and strength of the voice as early as the first poem where the moment of birth (a good place to begin a book) is described in a memorable phrase: “We just rolled from each other like indecent genies”. The coherent set of concerns involve, as far as I can see, issues of process (as opposed to such fixed entities as identity) and the issues of outside/inside in the whole spectrum of manifestations from perception and epistemology to the womb and birth. These “issues” emerge as short, sharp lyrics and extended meditative set-pieces.

An example of the latter is a brilliant and complex poem, “Citizenship”. It begins with a description of the public library at Provincetown in Massachusetts, a library noted for having a half-size model of a racing yacht in one of its reading rooms. There is an element of the grotesque about this setting – this place from which the poet looks outward to the world – that makes the reader think of other poems which work in and out of a weird location. The first of Beaver’s Letters to Live Poets with its shark aquarium comes to mind but a more telling comparison, given that the poem is set near the site of the pilgrim fathers’ landing place, and thus close to core American experience, is probably Lowell’s “For the Union Dead”.

In a room like this, with the sail of a ship
passed through the upper glass
of the doorway, and the walls lined with books,
Henry Kissinger: Years of Upheaval, and books on war presidents,
and elms in the windows, and the pilgrim dead
ballooned from their branches
like spinnakers winched to the dead Atlantic -
it’s good to be an alien, in America.
. . . . .

“It’s good to be an alien” is only partly a cultural judgement, a response to the overwhelming potency of the United States. More significantly, it is an epistemological issue. As the poem says: “Perspective fills the window”: looking out through the library window imposes interpretation on what is seen in a way that recalls Blake’s belief that the doors of perception are not clean and which takes up a Blake quote in the book’s epigraph: “The sun’s light when he unfolds it / Depends on the organ that beholds it.” What worries the poet about cultural interpretation seems to be that it solidifies experience into shapes that are hard to shift. Those shapes are perfectly symbolised by the rooms of the library (doubling as the inside of our minds) with their weird superpositioning of boat and books. And when you look out through the glass of the washroom at the elemental sea and sky you see your own face reflected in the glass and imposed on them. Jones wants something different exactly because she is a poet with a poet’s perceptual responsibilities:

. . . . .
Permanent change, the permanence of change.
In the window, the sky meets the sea,
its neutral twin in the wash-stand.
. . . . . 
Here, my sight is a wrecked president. An act.
I see, and I want to see
other things. The particular grit.
Rococo-less stars. I want to see particles, not pictures.
As though there could be matter without memory.
As though I wasn’t
a visitor, in these parts, as though I wasn’t
made, a limited thing.


Because I’m tired of fabulation . . . . .

The poem finishes with the story of the man who returned from a trip to find his own funeral being celebrated when a body had been misidentified. When he protested that he was definitely alive they told him, “You’re no citizen” – presumably because all the necessary official papers now declared him dead. The poem is, finally, I think, about the poet’s position. Rejecting the fables of identity leads to a kind of statelessness. It reminds me of the conclusion of Peter Porter’s “On First Looking into Chapman’s Hesiod”:

Sparrows acclimatize but I still seek
The permanently upright city where
Speech is nature and plants conceive in pots,
Where one escapes from what one is and who
One was, where home is just a postmark . . .

At heart, though, Porter’s rejection is cultural – it rebels against the dangerous politics of place with their appeal to a kind of essentialism that we would now be tempted to call fundamentalism – and Jones’s seems, finally, to be epistemological. But to say that the poem is about perception doesn’t mean that it is a cool, philosophical piece. The author introduces a touch of Lowellian angst in a passage that is quickly elided and easy to miss:

. . . . . 
It was good to give myself time, it was good
to be an artefact
washed up and out on the timely rocks,
the buoys, of Massachusetts.
. . . . .

“Citizenship” is an example of those large poems that I like a lot. You can live inside and explore them as a reader and they don’t reject you, even though they often take a lot of time and reading of the poet’s other work before they begin to come into focus. There are a number of others in The Striped World, including “Waiting” which, like “Citizenship”, is set in a library. This is a poem which takes up one of Jones’s major images of process and perception – the wind – and uses it, together with the story of the fate of a school friend, now ensconced in the United States, to anchor an extended meditation on change. Rather nicely, a central passage combines Pound and St Paul, recognizing the potential double meaning in the famous statement from “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly”:

. . . . . 
It says “why write? there’s nothing in it.”
When we were girls
we had the souls of girls


and now that we’ve grown
we have the souls of girls. Why say
“innocence ends” when the same


blue bird beats in the chest
as before, and we breathe the same blue water?
I haven’t put childish things from me.


And when I spoke as a child
there was no difference. So should they write
“innocence ends”, or “there’s no such thing”?


And should you write? Wind, white cloud,
white paper . . .

Another extended piece, “Sentimental Public Man”, explores – I think – the implications of conceiving self as process rather than identity by looking at its darker, political, side. The public man has no real self and that is the cornerstone of his popularity: he can be transformed into the various identities which his public want. The poem begins by associating him with another of this book’s major images, the cage, but later speaks of him in terms of a mirror:

. . . . .
Someone walks with me for my protection.
And if I say
“things happen, and an average man


is made a brilliant thing
by solitary acts
and the gaze of his countrymen”


he says nothing;
it’s as if his pocket mirror had spoken;
it’s as if we must


as he says, go out, bright and blank,
and draw the world in,
and make it in our image.
. . . . .

Finally, in this loose grouping of long poems, is “Conversation”. This has a delicious structure whereby two demotic sentences, “Oh this and that. But for various reasons . . . I put off going back”, are separated by a thirty-four line, one sentence, expatiation on what the reasons are, all done in the highest of high styles. It is probably the poem which contains the most complete laying-out of the metaphysical and epistemological tenets in this poet’s materialist position and the individual statements are intense, figured and memorable. The child self is the doll in the doll’s house, “the fictive soul in its brute cathedral”; difference is “just distance, not a state”; this poet’s attitude to matter is “the kind of shuttered / Swiss neutrality a watch might feel for time”; the essential organ of perception, the eye, is “that heated room” and death is not the end of matter but a situation in which

. . . matter turns to matter,


and my small inalienable witness to this is real, I can’t pretend
to wish to be a rooted thing, full-grown, concerned


with practical matters, in a rooted world, and careful of borders,
when an ineradicable small portion glints, my mind, that alma mater,


and says, make your work your vicarage . . .

It’s quite a dazzling poem, structurally inventive enough to support its burden and, at the same time, lightened a little by a potentially comic setting.

The issues which I’ve tried to trace in these long poems underlie the shorter pieces in The Striped World. “Daphne”, for example, takes Ovid’s story and turns it into a statement about process over fixity. Daphne worries about the implications of a view of the world which might have her say, “Once I was a girl, now I’m a tree”. As she says in the poem, “Season’s don’t arrive. There’s just a shifting.” “The Mind” seems to expand on an image from “Conversation” and describes (it reminds me of Coleridge) the mind’s active role in creating forms, forms which are “your subjects and your penal inhabitants, / your cracked and cleaving citizenry.” It finishes with an image of the menagerie:

. . . I live in you like a paradisal ape
lives in a garden, walled, with onlookers;
as the zookeeper lives; as the girl lived in that house.

(Am I the only person left alive who thinks that “like” should never be used as a subordinating conjunction?)

Images of prisons and menageries form an important part of the shorter poems which are about perception and their significance is reflected in that these poems supply the book’s title. “Tiger in the Menagerie” is a fine poem because of the skilful way it enacts its theme whereby the striped tiger inside the barred cage everts so that the tiger is inside the cage. This is done by some lovely, fancy, cryptic and shape-shifting syntax and results in a chinese-box kind of paradox. A rather simpler but equally memorable poem is “Window” where the perceptual issues are, as in “Sentimental Public Man”, expressed through a character: in this case a sad man who looks out into the public world and also in into the world of the body. But the wonderful conclusion seems to stress that the poem’s real interest is in the phenomena of the mind and its perceptual processes:

Both were impatient.
Sometimes they’d meet
and make a window.


“Look at the world!” said the glass.
“Look at the glass!” said the world.

Finally, in these short poems, there is “Death’s Sadness” a really sharp (six line) poem about the twin towers which gives some idea about how Jones will deal with public issues – always a difficult question for a good poet since they bring with them desperately formed, solidified interpretations and thus are, almost immediately, cliches. What we get in “Death’s Sadness” is something really cryptic, so cryptic that I can’t work out whether its stance towards the events is something out of which a poetic method of talking about public outrages could be created:

Who knows death’s sadness when he parts his hair?
He parted it to the right, then left.


Death was a sad Vatican, his own state.
His lookout was a little mirror.


He sure was clever. The buildings slid.
Death had a hand in that and everything.

This poem leads me comfortably to speak about the two poems about which I have been silent. “Zoos for the Living” occurs early in the book and “Zoos for the Dead” almost at the end. They are two poems concerned less with perception and process than with Australia and its history: in fact they look like two surviving episodes from a kind of alternative poetic history of Australia. In the former the flooding of Adaminaby during the construction of the dams of the Snowy Mountains Scheme plays against memories of the poet’s mother’s arrival from England:

                                                           A beebop blonde
blue-eyed British jitterbug, she had a ticket to ride.
And her skin was as pale as the lashed cliffs at Dover.
It had a quality. It had a ring to it. And I was stitched in:
an alleged convict-celt, with a bland facade


like an Anglican chapel, and with secularized, mild,
deferential, careful, middle-class good manners.

In the latter, stolen generation material plays against images of diving into the wreck – here the wreck of a convict transport, the Miranda. The recurrent metaphor, drowning, is a magnificent one for Australian history which has brought the art of forgetfulness to a peak of perfection. The tone of the poems is slightly larky – with plenty of comic and grotesque surreal about them. The major issue is whether they represent the best things in this book, or are interesting early experiments in finding a mode to write about one’s native country and one’s self. They aren’t the poems in the book that I remember most lovingly but one can put the case for them by imagining how tempting it must have been to do them in the style of “Citizenship”, the style that Lowell mastered to bring the personal and the locally historical into focus together. You can imagine a poem circulating around the image of Adaminaby, the drowned town coming to the surface in drought, representing, as the drowned river does in Deliverance, the refusal of past trauma to be forgotten. The poem will then move in and out of personal memories, with a carefully titrated degree of revealed personal trauma, perhaps with a narrative section summarizing the poet’s history, before finishing with a plangent phrase that unites the country’s history with the author’s personal history. There’s a lot to be said for a poem that resists this method, that is prepared to seem less solemn and po-faced.

Time will tell, I suppose, whether these two Australian zoo poems are the best things in the book or the weakest. I’m reminded of another great first book, Judith Wright’s The Moving Image, which concludes with that long and very complex poem which gives its name to the book. I’ve never met anybody who actually liked it, though literary scholars have to work it over since it contains so much of the philosophy which lies behind the great shorter poems of the book. It’s an important poem that literary history – every bit as addicted to forgetfulness as macro-history – has chosen to forget. It’s hard to know how good a poet Emma Jones will end up being but one’s tempted to say of The Striped World that its poems promise “anything, everything”.

Louise Oxley: Buoyancy

Melbourne: Five Islands Press, 2008, 87pp.

Buoyancy is Louise Oxley’s second book. Her first, Compound Eye, was published in Five Island Press’s admirable New Poets series in 2003. I mention this because the books in that series are little more than pamphlets and Oxley’s entire output (she is now near her mid-fifties) thus amounts to little more than a hundred pages. There are poets who produce that much every two years. One of the results of producing so little, so carefully, though, is that there is a high degree of consistency within the poems: they may often be very different as poems, but reading them we are clearly in the same world and it’s a world that one can get to know and admire.

It’s instructive to look at the first poems of each book. Compound Eye begins with “Night, Connelly’s Marsh”:

a plover is grating the dark
into stars      the cry springs
like blood along a scratch

I trip on a loose plank
on the jetty      the wood is tense
the moon askance

who lied first to whom?

your letters have become
mere shoals of fingerlings
small change

a cormorant will pocket them

I’ll wait here for a while
between breaths
spanning tides

It’s what might be called an expressionist piece. The driving force is personal pain and it is allowed to distort perceptions of the natural world so that the plover’s call grates and arises like blood along a new scratch. It is also a short-breathed, tense poem – the kind that talented beginners often produce before they get the confidence to inhabit larger, calmer structures. Given how good the other poems of Compound Eye are, this may be no more than an accident: no doubt all these features could be justified mimetically so that lack of personal confidence is seen as reflected in a lack of syntactic and stylistic confidence.

Buoyancy begins with a poem about watching a whale breach off the Great Australian Bight. As with “Night, Connelly’s Marsh”, everything is set in a liminal site: the continent drops away into sea and the whale emerges from water into air. Unlike the first poem, though, there is a relaxed, “long-breathed” quality about “Surfacing”. It too might, of course, be mimetically responding to the whale’s breath, but it is really a matter of poetic confidence that all the details are sufficiently animated by meaning and observational precision so that the poem never loses its momentum:

Here’s where the Nullarbor stops.
As if it suddenly forgot itself, the land
falls into the sea and I am groundless.
You are too, but you belong there;
you come out of the blue like a dreamer from sleep,
breaking from its lilt and swing, lift and sink.
Where the elements give way, nebulae of spume
drift off, constellations from the edge of space.
With a headful of echoes and krill
and a crystalline eye angled against refraction
you are making sense of latitude and current,
sizing up the horizon from below. Bejewelled
in barnacles, breaching worlds,
you are all collision, elision,
a balancing act on a fluke, a moment of trance, 
an evolutionary quirk.
. . . . .

The brief reference to the self in the third line warns us that we are still in the same world where it is personal distress that is driving the poems and this is taken up in the last lines:

it’s as if the earth were too hard,
walking too painful, as if
to open the throat and cry, to draw breath
through mouth and utter, to close a hand and grasp
were nothing, and I wish I, like you,
were a thing of the past.

These represent some kind of climactic shock but there is nothing trivially dramatic about it. The magic of “Surfacing” seems to me that it balances the personal and natural world very complexly and beautifully. At one level the careful observation of the animal can be read as the mind distracting itself before it returns to more pressing matters. This would make it something like Rossetti’s “The Woodspurge”. But there is a more intimate relationship between whale and viewer than between plant and poet. The whale has, among mammalian features such as a sex-life, a quality of balance which is a result of buoyancy. And the book’s title alone warns us that this is going to be one of the reference points of this world.

We meet it as early as the second poem of Compound Eye, “Paper Nautilus”. These shells, washed up periodically on the beach, seem to be used as symbols of poems. Interestingly, since they are empty, they represent poetry made from loss, “a tentative tracing of absence / the rare orchids of loving words”. Even more interestingly, and as an example of the kind of balance between the personal and natural that Oxley does so well, they induce metaphors within the poet herself:

Now I think of a spooked mare
tucking her tail under
or a fair-haired girl in a french plait

And the shell’s rising to the surface (and to the surface of the consciousness of the poet) is, like the whale’s surfacing, a metaphor as well as a reality:

she sings to the surface
rising surely as a phrase long practised
the sea’s dark lyric
never failing beneath her

“Paper Nautilus” seems to come halfway between “Night, Connelly’s Marsh” and “Surfacing” in that, though an extended poem, it does have staccato quality as though observations were being thrown out serially. But it also has a surprising ending which, like that of “Surfacing”, returns us to the personal though in a way so radical that I am not at all sure what is happening: at worst it remains a bracingly abrupt surprise for the reader:

Here you are at fifteen
leaving the water
a wonder of lengthening limbs

seeing the camera
your head on one side
those childbearing hips that have
so far as I know
remained empty

The obsession with rising and floating makes some sense of a powerful early poem, “Voice Over”, the first poem by Louise Oxley that I remember reading (I included it in the 2003 Best Australian Poetry). It is a “full” narrative, rather than a lyric poem with narrative elements, telling of the rescued sailor who has been alone in the sea, treading water for so long, that he continues to do so in bed in the submarine which has rescued him. Eventually he stops by being encouraged to think of walking home, of “surfacing” into the “real” world:

. . . . . 
It was the doctor’s silvery
potion of reason that broke his stride.
He was walking now, uphill, along
the line of argument
and it was growing dark.
Someone had ploughed the home paddock
in his absence; breakers of loam
clung to his boots. Upstairs a light was on.
She would be bent to her sewing.
He raised his eyes.

“Buoyancy” itself is a poem about observation – and thus about poetry. The personal element is very subdued but the line “You taught me this as we waited for platypus, None came” establishes both human relationships and a setting of absence – in this case, non-appearance. The poem seems to be saying that the creatures which have buoyancy live balanced between elements and their life is involved in making “ecstatic circles”. It concludes:

A wallaby thumped once, waiting to come down for a drink.
Then the silence of moss, the forest spongy with yielding,

while bull-ants worked their songless chain-gang
along the log where we sat suspended over water,

the beetles too, marooned, held by the skin of the lake
in a planetary gyre, a half-eye on one life and a half on the other.

A conclusion that introduces another element in this poetic universe, that of sight and sight-lines. It reminds us that the whale of “Surfacing” has an “eye angled against refraction” and is able to make some visual sense of both worlds. There are a lot of poems about seeing in “Buoyancy”. “Line of Sight”, for example, deals with the man who is in charge of a microwave broadcast tower. He is balanced between earth and air transmitting the earthbound schlock of “soaps or ads or dating games or news” through the air and “his wavelengths, like the days he works in / are short and do not bend.” And finally there is “The Radiolarian Atlas” devoted to Haeckel’s research on plankton. Here the emphasis is on the miraculous creatures whose complex shapes not only evoke metaphors (“galaxy and daisy, asteroid and carapace”) but also suggest there is a contiguity between the structures of the universe at all scales. However, it will come as no surprise, as the reader gets to know Oxley’s world better, that there is an emphasis on the “narrow shaft of light” inside the microscope and on the balance required to wade out into a sea “a blue so far-flung and fantastical / that fish might swim in sea or sky” to collect the creatures in a net:

The water is cold, but not as cold
as it was yesterday, and it is rising.
White water thumps at your knees and thighs,
pushes at your pubis, navel and breast,
foams at your throat. Remain on the seabed.
It is the floor of truth.

Straight lines and curves are the subject of a fascinating poem, “Beelines”. This turns out, on some inspection, to be a single-sentenced, impeccably rhymed Petrarchan sonnet and it’s tempting to read a mimetic purpose behind that fact since a single sentence is a straight line and a complex rhyming scheme is a series of repetitions which, I suppose, makes some sort of circle. And the poem is about the straight line that the bee makes on its approach to the blossom (the source of the cliche “to make a beeline”) contrasted with the circular dances it makes to provide information and the macro-fact that spring, when all this is going on, is a result of the turning of the earth:

So this is the noise earth makes, turning again;
this fine-tuned, coming-in-to-land, abdomen down
heading into blossom, threads of drowsy sound
shuttling towards and away in almost-unison,
each steady furred excursion into talc-scented pollen
ending in intimate probe and suck, the pointed black
legs that brush past and steal, but only to give back
something new, something known yet wanted, the swollen
certainty of honey, even as under them petals fall
and earth spins into its small
yearly miracle outside our bathroom window,
the tree hovering once more and blown
with whiteness, as if a cloud had come
to settle there, and begun to hum.

Finally, in this catalogue of straight lines and rises, descents and balances, there is “Walking to Witch’s Leap” which might well be my favourite poem from this book – though there are plenty of contenders. It is a forty line, single sentence poem that enacts the notion of falling that it is so obsessively about:

                              because down is where it goes,
on earth anyway, streams to the sea or underground,
leaf and seed to earth and earth to leaf and the seed
the currawong bounds for with his heavy grace,
his cadenced elbowing bound; even cadence
once meant fall . . .

This lovely hymn to entropy is strung between a first line which uses the word “upended” and a final line which finishes with “end up”.

As I’ve said, the great quality in Oxley’s poetry is continually to find ways of respecting the natural world – in all its incomprehensible alienness (well catalogued in the poem about the radiolaria) – while, at the same time, finding ways to speak personally. It is a matter of balance where what I have called an expressionist poetry – where intensity of emotion distorts all perceptions of the natural world which are used as correlatives – is only at one end of the scale. Almost every one of her poems seems to face up to this problem and to attempt a unique solution. You have the general initial impression that the dominant emotional state which seeks expression is one of disappointment and loss. “Things to tell you: day 193” is one of these, almost morbidly built around absence. And “Phase” is about handing in divorce papers one day short of what would have been a twenty-year marriage. One poem which cleverly balances the natural world and the inner is “Waiting with birds: three lessons” where, again, the lessons of the birds – in sequence, according to my reading of the poem: “go about your ordinary life”, “don’t fantasize, look to yourself” and “live in the present” – are a way of dealing with a mind-numbing sense of emptiness.

But absence and emptiness are not the only sources of these poems. There are plenty which rise out of plenitude. “Border Country”, which concludes the book, is a sequence of poems about happy love in Wales and contains a fine sestina and a sonnet. Perhaps this is a nod to the Welsh poetic tradition which encourages a high level of poetic formalism or perhaps poems arising from happiness need tight forms to control them. And “Horsetails” is a really lovely poem that should be enlisted in the slim notional volume of great Australian love poems. It starts with a long, oblique, ten line description of a horse in a paddock and of horsetails in the sky before modulating to a poem of happy, physical love before concluding:

Soon, you say, our window will be white with plum-blossom
and you talk of the coming again of our first season
and the hen-run you will build under the apple trees.
But I am already embracing your word,
riding horsetails over the Sweetwater Hills, galloping upwards
on the inadvertent joyful possessive adjective our.

On balance, despite the loveliness of poems like this, I think absence is the more powerful generative state in Oxley’s poetry. Perhaps this is the case throughout the corpus of the world’s poetry since it reminds us of the processes of inevitable entropy and, perhaps, absences induce poems to fulfil them more easily than happinesses induce poems to express them. It will be interesting to see what happens in Oxley’s poetic world of the future, but I am very confident that there will be not one but a series of solutions and that they will be sure-footed, balanced, buoyant, intelligent.

Barbara Temperton: Southern Edge

Fremantle: Fremantle Press, 2009, 112pp.

I first met Barbara Temperton’s “The Lighthouse Keeper’s Wife” in the 2006 volume in the Best Australian Poets Series (ed Judith Beveridge, UQP) where it provided a wonderful compressed, elliptic and barely comprehensible portrait of madness, or incipient madness. That three-page poem turns out to have been a distillation of a much longer work. Temperton, in her Acknowledgements to this new book, Southern Edge, uses the word “maquette” and it may well be that, rather than a distillation after the event, the version in the Best Australian Poetry is a sketch that was later expanded. Whatever – and it’s not an insignificant issue – the full version of “The Lighthouse Keeper’s Wife”, together with two other narratives, makes up this new book. I have a soft spot for verse narrative which I think Australian poets like Alan Wearne, Les Murray, John Scott, John Tranter and Dorothy Porter have done pretty well at, and I have an especially soft spot for those which work well. Southern Edge is one of those: an exhilarating, engaging and surprising book.

The three stories fit together neatly in the sense that there are harmonies between them and they share motifs and phrases. The first describes the fate of the wife of the keeper of lighthouse at Point King which guards the entrance to the channel leading to Albany. The second tells the story of a country boy who takes up with a heroin addict who is most at home on the rocky cliffs south of Albany. The third describes the journey made to Albany by the assistant (and lover) of a scientist who studies birds on the tidal flats outside of Broome. So these are narratives dominated by the same place and the place is the southern edge of the continent which, we are reminded, is constantly being separated from its true partner, Antarctica. So Albany is both a place and a state of mind. It reminded me rather of Thea Astley’s It’s Raining in Mango where a similarly out-of-the-way place is defined in terms of the way it is a temporary home to those moving north to oblivion or moving east (sideways) into suicide.

Each of the narratives shares an event whose origin is the sea. In “The Lighthouse Keeper’s Wife” the central character loses her second daughter to the sea early on in the piece but she loses both ex-lover and eldest daughter to a wave caused by a shudder in the two separating continents:

The third wave comes from the deepest part of the world -
a shift in the earth’s crust raising a ripple
over the continental shelf -
with every rising metre it accumulates
fish that see in the dark, relics of drowned ships,
winged bones from the spines of lost voices.
Near Breaksea, mulie boats are downed
and, with the harbourmaster’s launch, dragged
across the miles-long backbone of the Sound
to stranding at wave-edge, hulls ballooning
like jellyfish at the high tide line.

In the other poems, there are witch-figures associated with the sea (the wife of the lighthouse keeper feels like somebody on her way to becoming something of a witch, though without the seductive capabilities). Julz, in “The Gap”, introduces a boy from a farm (where land is stable and water sinks steadily into earth), to a liminal world along the unstable coast where water is dangerous. She is adept at rock-climbing and fishing (crucial skills at the edge) but she also introduces him to sexual experience so powerful that it metaphorically unmans him:

. . . . . 
When she gave me back to myself
and I lay mute, gazing out at the high star-city
through the gap that had once held a skylight,
I was no longer a man but a child
curled into a question mark and breathing.


Julz bought me at cost price from my parents,
paying them in the coin of grief she paid her own,
for our absences from the shearing,
couplings in iron-outbuildings, in stacks of hay.
After my rebirth in the machine shed
my father drove out alone . . .

And in “Jetty Stories”, the bird-scientist, dying in the tidal flats, puts a curse on the lover who has left her so that, throughout his long, mad drive to Albany, he is assailed by vengeful birds. I think these characterisations work brilliantly largely because they are not overdone. The second part of Temperton’s previous book, Going Feral, was devoted to poems exploring the interaction between actual people and the mythical avatars they seem to suggest – at least that is what is going on in my reading of them. I don’t think these poems are really successful though they obviously prepare the ground for these later narratives: I think there is a limit to which one can tolerate the inevitable superimposing of mythical character with ordinary person. There is a limit to how many Persephones, Ishtars and Isises you can have wandering around the local supermarket. If the magic in the personalities of ordinary people needs to be highlighted, then it has to be done in another way. In “Jetty Stories” and “The Gap” there is plenty of the uncanny but nothing of overt mythical identification. It is possible that this derives from a plan to provide myths for the area – in that case recycled ones will hardly do: Albany is not Arcadia – but whatever the cause, the result is a triumphant success.

Verse narrative works well when it begins to exploit some of the possibilities that aren’t really available to verse’s charming but plodding neighbour, realistic prose. I have always (to ride an elderly hobby-horse for a moment) thought that it is one of the tragedies of Western Literature that its originary text is Homer’s Iliad. Wonderful as that work is, its canonical status tends to take away its freakishness. A work from an illiterate culture, recently descended from a full-scale warrior culture, nostalgically looking back to (and idealizing) a greater, Bronze age culture, designed to spin effortlessly and at length from the mouths of rhapsodes who, travelling from place to place, needed to entertain groups of men over a lengthy period, is so narratively distinctive that it should never have provided a model for poetry, let alone for its prose descendants. Its idealism, its excellence and some accidents have caused it to be edited and preserved intact but I wouldn’t be the first to feel that a full anthology of early Greek lyric poetry might have been a more desirable start. Verse narrative is best when it works in a completely different way to the Homeric model, exploiting – as Temperton does – the drama of ellipsis. Not knowing is the origin of all suspense and not understanding is the origin of our hermeneutic drive. And both these are familiar to spectators at a drama and to readers of lyric poetry who want, always, to know what the poet’s stake in the poem is, how true it is, where did it come from, or, more basically and more commonly, what does it mean?

Narratively, much of the brilliance of Southern Edge derives from its disposition of the narrative elements. “The Lighthouse Keeper’s Wife” feels like a set of animated photographs, or perhaps, brief film sequences opening and closing with fade-ins and fade-outs. You aren’t quite sure of passage of time between sections and you feel that this represents in a satisfyingly mimetic way, something of the central character’s dissociation. The very first poem (which, accidentally or otherwise, recalls the last poem of Going Feral) is, itself, about the odds and ends found washed up on the beach. I’m tempted to read this, as well, as an analogy for the narratives which are to follow: the task of the wife is to make sense of the things that are cast up by the vast forces of the ocean. Fittingly, at the end of the first poem, it says: “She has either left the world / or just stepped into it”. “The Gap” has similarly disjunctive scenes but blocks of quoted material and an alternation between first and third points of view adds to the complexity. I have to confess, in the case of this narrative, that I’m not entirely sure what happened to Jules: did she genuinely disappear, get herself murdered or die, on the farm, of an overdose? I’m reluctant to ascribe this uncertainty – which has persisted over several rereadings – to too great a degree of ellipsis in the narrative’s construction. I’m content to blame my own bad reading. And “Jetty Stories” begins as one of those narratives where we were told things whose significance we didn’t really appreciate: its first lines are:

The Traveller knows her intimately,
scientist in a red sarong - 
migratory bird a long way from home,
white-haired witch from the Arctic rim . . . 

All of the details here matter, but it takes us a reading of the entire poem to get any sense of their real significance. Later it resolves itself into a journey narrative with nightmarish bird attacks occurring sequentially and finally into a set of epiphanic visions (including the past as well as the present) on the jetty at Albany which convince the central character that he must return to the north. These final passages are not easy:

He understands about returning now,
that the sea is a fluid continent flowing by,
that land rises like the tide,
that there are no mangals in these cold waters,
no living sargassum,
what he sees passing is the molten skin of time
dimpled by uprooted seagrass, bait bags,
solute in solution: the cells of the water-dead
dispersed in ocean.
. . . . . . 

I think the clue to the Traveller’s return lies in this Heraclitean notion that the sea – not the land – is what is permanent and that humans exist as migratory animals across a universe of flux. There are no homecomings because everything changes: in each of the narratives someone reminds you that “the tide is turning”.

Verse narrative is easy to do badly and hard to do well – stories like these have to have the right balance of mythic resonance and elliptical, hermeneutical suspense. Southern Edge adds to the small group of successful Australian works in that genre: it’s a gem and a real surprise.

Vincent Buckley: Collected Poems edited by Chris Wallace-Crabbe

Elwood: John Leonard Press, 2009, 522pp.

It is just over twenty years since Vincent Buckley died and, as some sort of memorial, we have, this year, John McLaren’s more than serviceable biography, Journey Without Arrival (North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing) and this elegant Collected Poems, accompanied by a genial introduction by Peter Steele. What we don’t have are answers to questions like: What kind of poet was Buckley? How good was he? I had hoped, this month, to be able to answer these questions, at least to my own low standards of satisfaction, but I’m not sure, after a long exposure to Buckley the poet, Buckley the critic and Buckley the memoirist, that I can. Buckley is notable as a man who grew to hate his first two books of poetry (The World’s Flesh of 1954 and Masters in Israel of 1961) and, if there is a consensus of opinion about his work, it seems to be that Arcady and Other Places of 1966 is a breakthrough book (it begins with a suite of poems, “Stroke” about his father’s death, poems that have been widely appreciated and anthologised) followed by Golden Builders in 1976 as a kind of consolidation and then The Pattern in 1979, a book focussing on Buckley in Ireland – his second home (or non-home). Rereading these books, this month, I found myself full of reservations about this imaginary plateau of mature achievement. I think they still have a lot of detritus that hasn’t been cleared away and that they are equivocal about this detritus, still clinging to it as a possible source of poetry. In my reading there is really only one great Buckley book and that is the posthumous A Poetry Without Attitudes published as the major component of Last Poems in 1991. If this seems to make Buckley’s fame rest on a slim volume, it is worth pointing out that A Poetry Without Attitudes runs to more than one hundred and fifty pages – longer than the corpus of, say, Slessor’s work. Of course, preferring someone’s last book looks dangerous because it has a touch of triumphalism about it, fitting into the template of a kind of narrative climax. But Last Poems made a huge impression on me when it appeared and it has lost none of its power eighteen years later. It is a book that a major reputation might well be founded on.

First, though, we have to deal with the earlier Buckley, especially the Buckley of the first two books. Chris Wallace-Crabbe, the editor of this Collected, has yielded to Buckley’s own estimate of the worth of his earlier poems by including only a selection, and has taken as a guide the selection made by Buckley himself in his Selected Poems of 1981. Interestingly, he has reinstated two poems: “Late Tutorial” and “Impromptu for Francis Webb”. The second of these is dedicated to a poet born in the same year as Buckley and who, you feel, is a kind of alter ego to be quarrelled with, admired and feared (or at least, his fate is to be feared). The poem speaks of the world as a place which must evolve to express the divine and wants to warn Webb of the danger of poetry and language being a refuge from an insanity caused by the present corruption of the world. Poets are supposed to be cleaning up words so that they can match the divine rather than using them to build walls:

                              Words would become our home
And cosset us, till one dark day we find them
Dwindled to ash, or rigid as a tomb.

Our task is this: To keep them swept and sure,
An open courtyard where the poor may find,
Always, the walking Love, Who does not rest
In hearts which fear and hatred have defined.
. . . . .

“Impromptu for Francis Webb” is full of certainty, the very certainties which, I think, Buckley grew to see as poetically false, certainly false to his own poetic and intellectual character. When he speaks of these early poems being based on rhetoric, I think he means not so much an excessive formalism as a tendency to think that poetry operates in the world of elegant assertions. For some poets it does (one could write at length about the function of propositional assertion in something like Rilke’s Duino Elegies and the way in which they balance sureness with a kind of implied gesturing tentativeness) but for Buckley it surely doesn’t and much of his career can be mapped around the gradual playing out of this truth. The core for him lies in the body and the mind’s responses, as well as in a kind of visceral response to community: it doesn’t lie in understandings expressed as propositions.

I’m not sure why Buckley rejected “Late Tutorial”, perhaps because it is, inevitably, rather pompous, tweedy and condescending in tone – something quite intolerable in retrospect. And yet the content of the poem is full of doubt and a reasonably convincing sense of failure. The students want knowledge and assertion (the kind of stuff that “Impromptu for Francis Webb” is built on) but the pressure on the teacher with “nerves at war, the mind in dishabille” is unbearable. He wants to confess his failures (which are also the failures of his poetry and poetry in the twentieth century) to his students by speaking in oracular mode:

“O man is sick, and suffering from the world,
And I must go to him, my poetry
Lighting his image as a ring of fire,
The terrible and only means I have;

And, yet, I give too much in rhetoric
What should be moulded with a lifetime’s care . . .”

But knows that anything like that would produce only “loud embarrassment, / . . . and the noses blown / In frenzy of amazement at this short / Still youthful puppet in academic gown.”

One is always leery of generalisations about local cultures but one can hear, in this poem, echoes of what is often said of nineteenth century English poetry: that after the over-the-top romantics, poets had to accommodate themselves to a progressive loss of intellectual leadership. Bards were replaced by scientists, and poets had to look elsewhere for the ground of their value to the community. The poets of Sydney never possessed or aspired to intellectual leadership but the poets of Melbourne (perhaps because of that capital’s stronger or more defensive sense of community) did and their inability to be intellectual leaders was a state that was difficult to adjust to.

The other poems from the first two books are impressive, though. Especially “Autumn Landscape” which seems (at least in my reading) to take us straight into the heart of Buckley’s early ideas about the world and the spirit, about a religious humanism superior to mere doctrine.

See the flame balancing in the leaves
The old man piles, until they cloud and choke
Under the musty top, where the green crisps
To blackness. There, the air-channels stop
Their running light. Above, is sweetness lodged
In dens of smoke more sweet than honey-cells.

And from all distant quarters how the bird
Gathers its song! And how the rake
Leans crazily to the wall, and passing wheels
Clamp sound to fire – the sparks that wince from stone
As though my hands had ambushed their flame:
Dark cells I touch, beyond the bounds of breath.

A flame, flames, balancing in dark leaves,
Like water that goes straitly on stone.
No more. No hero in the striding mist
Of smoke, or sweetness; but the stony land
Is burning, burning, in this chestnut tree
You gaze on. Breast of stone. A destined land.

Yes you can hear the McAuley (another problematic poet of the period) of “Terra Australis” and “Envoi” here, as well, perhaps, as Brennan. But it’s still a good, formal, rather stately poem, using a symbolic scene, rather than propositions, to make a statement about how, basically, death and decay can be transformed into sweetness by fire. As this is happening in the ancient, dried-out country of Australia, there will be nothing theatrical (“no hero in the striding mist”); it will be a natural process but it will still occur. It is hard to call “Autumn Landscape” a major poem but it is a genuine one and it benefits, perhaps, in this Collected, by being followed by “Winter Gales”, a poem that counterbalances any bleak optimism by a very negative vision. Surprisingly, Wallace-Crabbe has chosen not to reinstate “Walking in Ireland”, a poem many would find important for Buckley at a number of levels. Firstly it introduces the theme of Ireland as a place of family origin, a subject which occupies Buckley for all his writing life and secondly it introduces the larger theme of Buckley’s inability to be utterly at home in any place or institution or even genetic pattern. True, the poem seems to attempt an assertive conclusion (“Can anything, in the gathering light, be foreign?”) but we remember the carefully described awkwardnesses of the earlier part of the poem (“Everything here, strange in its very nearness, / Perplexes me like the shape of a foreign room.”) to the point where we (well, “I”) want to read the conclusion as proposing a new and more inclusive sense of what is meant by belonging.

Arcady and Other Places (a title we know so well that we can’t see how wonderful it is – though the book itself doesn’t contain much that explicitly reminds us of the arcadian face of the world) probably owes its popularity to the two sequences, “Stroke” and “Eleven Political Poems”. What is really happening, though, is a poet moving from a tendency to be hieratic (or dense, or stately) towards a sense of being more open to life and its vulgarities. It is a long journey from “And the light grows tall / In the flame without smoke, and the day without number” to “In the faint blue light / We are both strangers” and it is a journey that we are happy for poets to make: it’s why we prize Yeats’s Responsibilities and Lowell’s Life Studies. The problem is that we can’t help judging them contextually: they are “breakthrough” sequences in the dramatic narrative of a poet’s growth, and it is difficult to go through the exercise (though it remains a valuable exercise) of imagining them shorn of all context as though they were poems come across in an historical anthology, or poems preserved on scraps of paper after the Mongols have been through. I think they are actually good sequences viewed in that light. “Stroke” is full of conceptual sophistication: the death of a father is, after all, symbolic of the death of God, and dying focuses on the physical and resists the impulse to casual transcendence (“Now, in the burnt cold year, / He drains off piss and blood . . .”). The opening lines establishes Buckley’s existential position – always a stranger when he should be among kin – and the way they segue into poetic description suggests that alienation might be the correct stance for producing poetry. Perhaps that is one of the many possible reasons for the two panels of memory in the sequence. The first is a memory of childhood, of reading outside at night when the air is as cold as the father and the warmth is provided by words:

. . . . . 
And if I think back, there’s nothing mythical:
A cross-legged kid with a brooding nose
His hands were too chilled to wipe,
A book whose pages he could hardly turn,
A silent father he had hardly learned
To touch; cold he could bear,
Though chill-blooded; the dark heat of words.
A life neither calm nor animal. 
. . . . .

The punctuation in this passage has a lot of work to do. At the end of this poem, Buckley is returned to himself, to the world of academic life (“Manuscripts, memories; too many tasks”) and it concludes with a pregnant but slippery proposition, “We suit our memories to our sufferings”. The second memory poem (the fourth of the sequence) is a kind of induced race-memory, focussing on the generations before his father. From the poet’s perspective it is a movement farther back: from the father’s perspective, though, it is quite different. The first memory poem is a move forward in time to the generation of his son while this second is a move back to the generation of his father. The entire sequence finishes, on the surface at least, affirmatively:

Dying, he grows more tender, learns to teach
Himself the mysteries I am left to trace.
As I bend to say “Till next time”, I search
For signs of resurrection in his face.

One of the things that makes “Stroke” stay with us is that by this time in Buckley’s career, we have experienced his lack of belonging so much that a relatively straightforward affirmation of faith is problematic. I want to read it as almost a desperate gesture, a way the poem wants to conclude but one which is compromised by doubts and discomforts so deep that we can sense them in the awkwardness of all the human interactions in the sequence. The father is not a man who, in the last run-in is dedicated to God (whether he knows it or not) and has thus moved out of the ambit of the son’s life, the world in which he feels comfortable. This is a son who is always estranged from his fathers.

Some of these themes are taken up in other poems in the book, especially “Places” and “Shining Earth: A Summer Without Evil”. Both are embodiments of a vision of a transformed world: in the first, a sacred place stands for what the world might be like and in the second this is achieved by a brief moment in time. Again, taken as poems without context, they have an irritating triumphalist certainty about them and I prefer to read them in the contexts of doubt and awkwardness which make them ecstatic fantasies, all the more poignant for containing the seeds of their own uncertainty. The sequence “Eleven Political Poems” works by creating a bathetic language to suit the world of politicians, the power-hungry and the servants of totalitarianism. There are no gestures towards transcendence and the poetic voice is never put in a superior position to pass judgement. All in all, the achievement is really dramatic rather than intellectual. It is interesting to contrast the poems of this sequence with another political poem from Buckley’s next book, Golden Builders. “Willing Servants” follows the successive resignations of officials of the Nixon presidency, each a little more senior than the last and each implicating the person on the next rung of the ladder. It has a Bruce Dawe-like quality, especially in its long sentences and its continuously-held, slightly grotesque (or at least un-obvious) image of the functionaries as shepherds in the fog. But it is not a technique or a subject that is anywhere near the heart of Buckley’s poetry.

Golden Builders begins with a sequence and ends with one: in this way it approximates the structure of both the previous and the succeeding books. The opening sequence, “Northern Circle”, is, superficially, about a trip to Canada. But its real subject is place and belonging; its method is to approach the familiar by beginning with the utterly unfamiliar. There is a touch of Descartes’ “Meditations” about this. We can arrive at the truth of a subject by immersing ourselves in it but we can also do it by stripping away all our assumptions and tentative conclusions and then looking at the subject afresh. As I have been suggesting, Buckley’s poetry is, in a way, bedevilled by its own openness to different forms and here a rather American poetic approach to place is allowed to have a go at the material. There are indents and tabs that would have been unthinkable in the poems of Arcady and Other Places, let alone those of the first two books. And the result is, like almost all of this book, an admirable, interesting failure. The un-Australian cold of Canada drives the poet back into sensation, back into the body and its responses (“here you sweat differently”) and to a sudden awareness of surprising differences: the fact that cold precludes scent makes the poet realise how full of smells Australia is. There are also two fascinating prose poems (another form you wouldn’t expect in earlier Buckley) in Golden Builders, “Brought Up to be Timid” and “Closed House”. I suspect that Buckley undertook this formal experiment (very rarely repeated in later published work) for its narrative/associative possibilities. “Brought Up to be Timid” seems, in its central part, to be almost more intimately connected with the central theme of not-being-utterly-at-home than any other work. It imagines (having begun by blaming it on a socialised timidity) the awkwardness of a strange place (even if it is a pub) and the paranoid sense that others, in contrast, do completely belong:

. . . Better not move too freely here; the whole place is theirs, it’s here they have their vivid and opaque lives; they know its secrets, their coffins will stand at last in the smell of this cathedral, this cul-de-sac rings for them like a lovers’ lane. Even the restaurateur, who lives elsewhere, on some neat slope at the end of a tram-ride, has the run of it. Every opening of the door brings him in company, clients, lights, a living. He is a native, and the foreign place delivers him cargo . . .

The poem finishes with a fantasy of radically, violently new experience imagined as a traveller crying “The Sea! The Sea!” It is possible that we could read the inn as the body and that, in dream fashion, the identity of the poet moves from the awkward guest to that of the innkeeper who hopes to receive, through his senses (and “doors” in this book inevitably alludes to Blake’s “doors of perception”) some experiences of a radically different order. This may be the better interpretation, but it is hard not to remember (as I had done since I first read the poem when Golden Builders appeared,) the guests who feel never “at home” and feel themselves surrounded by people who are completely “native”.

The title sequence of this book is an extended (twenty-seven poem) work. It is one of those poems that is probably better read-about than actually read. I’ve always found that it looks better from a distance, seen through the eyes of a sympathetic interpreter (there is a comparatively full treatment of it in McLaren’s biography). There are a lot of good things that can be said about its sophistication and ambitiousness but the painful fact is that it doesn’t work as a sequence. Its virtues, if it has any, lie in how open its author is prepared to be about how desperate his search for a form for his material is. The figure who lies behind the poem in various shapes is Bruce Beaver. Letters to Live Poets is there on the surface in the Roman numerals, in the second poem beginning “God knows what it is about Town Halls. / I’ve lived next door to three of them” which almost mimics the opening of the first “Letter” before going on to look like “Letter V”, in the ageing male prostitute who recalls the paper seller of “Letter XIII”, in the experimental dogs which live in cages above the offices of the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and thus provide the same kind of nightmarish, over-riding symbol as the sharks in the aquarium of “Letter I” and so on. These are so open as to be allusions and I read them as one poet’s acknowledgement of another. But it is also there at deeper levels. Beaver’s foregrounding of his psychological malaise frees Buckley up to do the same. The time of the writing of these poems was, as McLaren makes clear, a time of serious physical and mental stress for Buckley, and this is allowed into the poems, especially numbers VII and XV, as admissions that “my mind’s not right”. Beaver’s influence (or model) is also there in its emphasis on life as a process occurring within a city: to document the city you need only recount the details of your living.

The second figure who looms over “Golden Builders” is Blake. His contribution comes from his continuous sense that Jerusalem and London (or Israel and England) are co-terminous. In Blake this seems to have been reasonably literal, the expression of a weird extreme English Protestant position deriving presumably from the idea that the English are one of the lost tribes and that those feet really may have, in ancient time, walked on England’s mountains green. If the literal basis is ludicrous the spiritual implications and possibilities are enormous because it provides a symbol whereby the quotidian and the sacred are inside each other. Melbourne is the sacred city, or at least the sacred city can be found within Melbourne. It is all very alchemical in that alchemy was not about changing base material into gold, but in releasing the divine which is present within all material, base or otherwise. This conceptual framework might suggest that “Golden Builders” is rather static: a poem about momentary illuminations, odd angles of vision, odd acts of kindness or companionship. Actually the poem is made dynamic by a regularly reappearing emphasis on building and destruction. Cities are in a constant process of evolution so there is always the possibility that, in the future, they might evolve in a way which expresses the divine rather better. Blake also provides two styles or voices. Two of the poems mimic the quatrains of poems like those of Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience as well as using symbolism in a very Blakean way:

The tree that has a winding root
The faces brightened with desire,
These power wear down the stone of doubt,
There each man builds a spine of fire

And there he walks on layer thorn . . .

(that third line, which looks as though it should read “These powers” unless “power” is an adjective, has remained unamended in this edition). Other poems use the more oracular mode of Blake’s “prophetic books” although that tactic runs the risk of making a poem like number XXII sound a bit like Allen Ginsberg!

If Golden Builders seems to fail by being too open to new possibilities, The Pattern of 1979 is much more restrained and, perhaps, more successful – certainly it is a likeable book. Ireland (both the Ireland within the poet and the historical, sociological, geographical reality of the country itself) is the subject matter. Again, the search is for a satisfying form to contain all the responses and it is no accident that the book, like so many of Buckley’s, begins and ends with sequences: “Gaeltacht” and “Membrane of Air”. The poems are prefaced by a definition of the word “pattern” which prepares us for the fact that it will live in the book as a unifying feature through the exploitation of its different meanings. Ireland is a mould from which the genetic material of the poet emerged; it is a template, a decorative design and a precedent. There is also a little introductory poem which tells us that this will be a journey back to Ireland but also a journey in the reverse direction, back to Australia; it will oscillate like a sewing machine needle, stitching the two together. And “journey” won’t simply be a matter of trains and cars; it will also be trip back to water, to origins of life. And it will be made by a poet in emotional extremis:

And go to: and come back from:
the slow starved pattern
I follow with inflamed nerves
to discover, close to the beginning
of all, a tadpole barely
at movement in the clammy water.

“Gaeltacht” is an extended meditation on the experience of meeting one’s equivocal “homeland”. A set of visual images is preceded by “you keep looking for some way / into it, letting your mind bulb around one / image or another”, and Buckley finds that “the origin is not / one place but ten thousand”. “Membrane of Air” is a more difficult work, keen to expand the experience beyond the simply social. It begins and ends with water and the poet’s injunction to himself to “start low”. I’m not sure what was intended in the opening and closing sections: the sea is the source of life and blood; it connects Ireland and Australia and is the medium whereby a population moved from one place to another but ultimately, despite the enormousness of the connections, there remains a membrane between the two. This is only a crude, external reading, but I’m simply not sure of the implications of the focus on molluscs in these passages and the implications of one of the central poems which sees the sea as a symbol of psychic terror. Again, not to press a point, one feels that this may derive from Beaver, especially the iconic seawall of the poems of his second book, Seawall and Shoreline.

What makes The Pattern so attractive is that, inside these laboured-over structures there are poems where Buckley seems to be himself. That sounds stupid, but I mean that there is an acceptance that everyone, poets and readers, is the result of a complex of features, genetic and social, that we barely comprehend but which we want to understand. But it is possible, momentarily, to put the self-conscious sense of one’s presence aside and simply write out of it; to write, as the next book says, “a poetry without attitudes”. I find myself returning affectionately to poems like “Spanish Point”, having, despite a long exposure to Buckley’s situation, very little comprehension of what it is trying to do, but a strong sense that it was written under the pressure that produces real poetry:

That night the wind’s closed eye
opened inward, and the Atlantic
shivered, laying its salt reflection
on our windows. Indoors,
you squirmed in your soft blankets,
in the floorcot, neat
as a kitten in a butterbox. Where mouse
preyed: black, quick, he ricocheted
from nest to nest along your warmth.
You cried out, his rush
staring in your eyes’ drowsy vortex,
dragging a black hole into position
at the floor’s centre. At least
there was something
there we stepped over
or around, a minuscule abyss
close under the timber joists.
All day,
travelling in the chipped moon-landscape,
your eyes were
heavy as milk.

Yes, you could make a case for some kind of influence from Lowell – you can’t write about winds in the Atlantic without recalling “Quaker Graveyard” or of sudden meetings with vermin while in a state of psychic distress without recalling “Skunk Hour” – but the poem rings true. It is not totally comprehensible (whatever that might mean) and, with a bit of luck, might have been equally mysterious to its writer, but it feels whole. The features of Ireland which appear – the sea, the landscape – are givens, not opportunities to confront, experience and explain, and the pressure of the poem comes from the fear of the stability of things expressed in the vortex of the wind, the eyes of mouse and poet and the sense of the existence of an abyss which must be skirted or crossed. It seems a poem where the powerful drive to understand origins is by-passed in favour of something much more expressionist.

“At Millstreet” is another fine poem from the collection, also more relaxed. But the relaxation (in terms of questing for origins and structures) allows a genuine pressure of lived experience to enter the poem almost as though it arrives on its own terms rather than as an expression of something:

Barm brack, soda bread, its thickness
doubled with butter: fresh cut
ham, tomatoes, large hard strawberries,
all fresh as a rivulet. The only smell
came from their clothes, where fireside
smoke had been absorbed like sweat.
Lake-flat land that held the hoofbeats
of the Rakes of Mallow. The bog-cotton
shuddered in the breeze, touching
a scum of anemone-like small flowers.
Glass glittered . . .

It is a poem about position, of course, as almost all of Buckley is, but perhaps it is no accident that this poem concludes with a memorable image of awkward distance, far more memorable than the laboured ideas behind the sea and membranes of air:

They served me: “that’s right all right”,
agreeing with everything I said,
creaking like leather with my strangeness.

In a sense, the best of Last Poems is made from poems like these in The Pattern. The Foreword to the original printing of Last Poems by Penelope Buckley, describes how the book was pieced together. Buckley had imagined making a MS out of these poems, largely found in a computer file. I think it’s possible that the poems were lucky that Buckley’s death meant that this intention was not entirely carried through. The MS Buckley selected would, after all, be highly patterned. One of the strengths of the poems of Last Poems is the impression they give of being a little raw. They perhaps haven’t been entirely polished and they haven’t been set in the kind of context where their charms can sparkle. This may be imagination, but I feel it again, now, rereading the poems. The result is wonderful: puzzling, powerful works written without a theory or, at least, without a worked-out intellectual position. This is what I understand by “a poetry without attitudes” in the little poem that prefaces the collection:

. . . . .
That would be worth it:
friend without envy,
love without bile,
a life’s work without guilt,
a poetry without attitudes.

It can’t, after all, mean “poetry without prejudices and opinions” because these poems are full of those.

It is fascinating to compare poems like “The Good Days Begin” and “Spring’s Come” with “Autumn Landscape” and “Winter Gales”, the first two poems of this Collected. In the early poems, good as they are, you can feel the work that has gone in to stiffening them up and making sure that the allegorical significances are clear to a good reader. “Spring’s Come” is quite a different business:

Spring’s come, but not the cleanliness,
the wind brushes dirt in corners,
and the tiny black seed pods
seem covered with drapes of cobweb,
leaf-slivers, and dried matter,
the whole growing like a set of mobiles.
Time to enter, Botticelli-woman,
with the light on your shoulder
and the strong leg forward
protecting the sacred place.

There is a poetic freedom about this in that the poem moves on the elegance of its two sentences with their related length (six lines, four lines) and contrasting modes: the first is an expository list, the second a disguised imperative. There is also a gestural quality about it: you hope (though I may be out of order here) that its writer might have said of it “It’s a poem I like though I’m not sure why. I’m not even entirely sure what I thought I was saying and so I don’t mind if it gets omitted.” This touches a quality of the true lyric which has often been lost with the rise of literary studies and canons: ephemerality. There is also a lot that could be said, analytically, about the poem’s meanings but it seems a poem that might be reasonably casual about its own implications. The “sacred place” must be the Primavera’s genitals as much as the flower-strewn ground she walks on and, yet, in a way, these are the same. Once we get genitals into our heads, how does that connect up with the lack of cleanliness and are the cobwebs symbolic of pubic hair? And so on and so on, but freely and pleasurably, a play of possible readings ad perpetuum rather than a hunt for the planted seeds of meaning. And then the Botticelli reference leads us to think of the notion of allegories in his own paintings, the elusive significances that no-one is fully agreed upon, and this thinking suggests that here may be a poem which contains fragile clues to its own reading . . . and so on, even further!

Two other poems will serve to illustrate this combination of rawness, accomplishment, mystery and openness. The first is “The Curragh in Cold Autumn”:

The punters in the stand spoke like spitting.
“Fockin’,” they said, and “fockin’, eh, fockin’,”
through the fagends hoarse as eucalyptus.
In the Members this speech was more drawn,
less committed, as the fieldglasses hung
below the halves of whiskey. High Style,
by Interest out of Nonchalance.
You’d almost think they’d won without betting.
All the same. The wintry wind, the air
unravelled like a rope, belted so hard
it sliced clods from the ground. And the three-year-olds,
slicing too, came awkwardly, their silks
rain-coloured, no-coloured, in the blast,
their shoulders struggling, down the interminable straight,
their hooves dripping, as if running at us
from the black caves of County Meath.

I won’t labour the obvious here, but just try to describe what I like in this poem. It is largely the matter of contrast, of the poem going in a direction that is not entirely predictable. The first part, the first five sentences (which get progressively shorter), is well-observed social comedy concluding with an arch irony that makes you think of Dawe or Murray, “You’d almost think they’d won without betting”. At first you think that this will be contrasted to the physicality of the wind and of the horses and that mere social comedy will be put in its place by visceral sensation. But the end of the poem twists so that the horses seem more like psychic demons, spinning out of the kind of vortex that we met in “Spanish Point”.

Something similar can be said of “Iceland Foxes” in that it is a poem of lovely twists which prevent it ever being the writing-class poem that it might have been. It begins with a portrait of “poet in old age” but, while speaking of his freedom (or mental obligation) to read, suddenly moves into the kind of animated description of a scrap of his reading that suggests that his mind has moved, in the poem, from grumbling about old age to a fascination with the expectations immigrants have of a new country:

Boring as a cuckold
I find all the same that I need to
keep up with my night reading:
all the mind-triggers of our decade
from Historical Geography
to Dolphins, ESP, the Saints of Cornwall.
The first people to arrive in Iceland,
I read, found there only one mammal,
the fox. The Iceland Fox. Laying a musk,
giving birth, in the stench of volcanoes

while the impulsive, panicky invaders,
peering from ships bent like a riddle,
tried to see, to descry, wolf-stag,
lynx-bear, running jerkily on the sulphur slopes,
chased by half-men, screeching, with their knifestones
pelting the air. Eyes full of old habits.

At about this point, we think we are perhaps encountering a general observation about invaders that will go on to slip in a subtle allusion to Australia. But the poem goes on to see old age as a new existence to which we bring the wrong expectations:

Reading, imagining this, I say to myself:
Now, you’ve lasted through forty years
of universities, those correct pun-loving islands
with their soft grievances, their clubs, their baby-talk,
their low-rust landscape of the soul
where watchfulness is normal -
a gauntlet of islands – and you’ve come
into a new life, skilled in Agecraft,
free to think anything, tell any truth,
scotch any lie; and yet you sit there
doling your last years out to yourself
as if they were mogadon or heart-pills
while the organisation-persons hunt
confidently past libraries, carrying on
as if the jungles were not a form of culture
in which to invent new species,
not something learned and trained for,
but pristine things, native, imperative,
the most natural of enclosures.

There is an ironic bitterness in finding that one treats one’s own experience with the same conceptual timidity that one always despised in ambitious but second-rate academics. And again, as with “Spring Comes”, one is tempted to go on hermeneutically and to say that the structure of the poem, which is one of surprising twists, is an attempt to demonstrate that what the content of the poem says we don’t do (look at new landscapes with new, not old, eyes) a poem might be able to do. Not a bad description, in poetry, of one of poetry’s immense capabilities.

What kind of impression does one get of Buckley from this Collected Poems and John McLaren’s biography? It is dangerous ground for an outsider like myself since there are excellent readers who were his intimate friends and who know both work and man infinitely better that I do. But, sometimes an outsider’s view is useful. The central issue for man and poet seems to me to be about position. He seems, as I’ve said periodically through this essay, positionally awkward. Our first picture of him is as a brilliant boy reading outdoors at night in rural Victoria. He is someone with a strong Irish background in genes and culture but who is never able to access this unequivocally. A Catholic who jibes against the various complexities of dogma and against the power politics of the church in which he is also a participant. An academic who would rather have been a poet, and so on. The abrasions and irritations seem continuous, but they must have been, to some extent, self-inflicted.

But “position” is a lot more complex in its implications than this. So much of Buckley’s narky manner in debate seems to be about an exact definition of his position and to be informed by a dislike of anything that he could construe as misrepresentation. Cutting Green Hay is a brilliant memoir, partly because this exactitude of defining position goes on at such length. There is a kind of weird pas de deux between Buckley and the writings of Santamaria which touch upon Buckley’s activities: they are continuously quoted and quibbled with – like one partner nibbling the other’s ear. It’s a bizarre and fascinating book which had the effect on me, when I first read it, of making my own country seem like a foreign place (not a bad thing when you come to think of it).

And then there is Buckley’s criticism. Essays in Poetry Mainly Australian (MUP, 1957) is an easy book to admire and a very difficult book to like. It has early essays on important figures like Slessor, Wright, Hope and McAuley but its tone is appalling. This is because it wants, all the time, to position these poets. It never shows any tendency to operate inductively – that is, from the poems to generalisations – but always moves from general statements about the poet’s poetic locations to valuations. I know that brief essays such as these can always claim that the intense engagement with the poems lies prior to the judgement about position and that superior criticism doesn’t need to show this preliminary work. But I don’t get any sense of an intimate response to the poems: those quoted seem merely to illustrate a generalisation about position. And the real problem is that if you are worrying about someone else’s exact location you are, willy nilly, positioning them vis a vis yourself. As a result Essays in Poetry has a tone that is hard to forgive: it seems snide and self-inflating by denigration where good criticism should always be open-minded and open-hearted. Its overall sense of the young writer who finds himself drowning in the shoddily imprecise and unacceptable contributions of his elders and setting out (together with a chosen crew) to add some rigour and raise the intellectual standard of debate, can be a successful way of beginning an academic career but it is not a good way to begin a poetic career. And that poetic career, in Buckley’s case, is about finding ways to turn the awkwardness he felt as to his position (conceived in every possible way) and his search for an arcadia in which there were no abrasions between himself and the world, into good poetry. Many poets have an essentially megalomaniac mind in that they can’t reconcile their vision with the world as they see it. Sometimes they just don’t look at the world too closely, sometimes they snipe away at the world. To do him justice, Buckley, I think, thought the failing was largely in himself. In the last part of his career, as I read it, he achieved wonderful poems by accepting himself as a complex of intricate difficulties and simply (or not so simply) writing out of this position. If you can’t cure it, or even fully express it, you can exploit it. And this produced the best poems of his career.

Peter Porter: Better Than God

London: Picador, 2009, 81pp.

It would take a long, exhausting (though ultimately pleasurable) overview of Porter’s previous sixteen books to say something sensible about how this new one fits into the overall shape of Porter’s poetry. But the Porter poetic profile – a huge range of references, immense compression, sardonic humour and a meditative cast that yokes together surprising ideas and follows them down mysterious paths – is not radically different in this new book from that of at least the past two. Much of one’s interest in mapping the shape of a great poet’s career might, anyhow, only be morbid: although the treasured hive of experiences and references must continue to grow, at what point does sheer aged exhaustion begin to abrade the ability to write? Peter Porter has just turned eighty and Better Than God shows no sign of any slackening in his poetry’s ability simultaneously to challenge and to give pleasure: a reminder that in these days of vastly extended lifespans, Porter may be no more than reasonably matured, latish-middle-aged. There may be, God willing, many more books to come.

To say that a book is brilliant, funny and entertaining is not the same as saying that it is particularly easy, though. But the one thing that you can say of the difficulties in Porter’s work is that they don’t derive from an a priori aesthetic theory: you don’t have to go away and “get something up”, you just need to read the poems very carefully, live with them a little and allow them to talk to you. There is a tremendous density in a lot of these poems and it is a density that emerges in different ways. You get compressed allusiveness, for a start. Most of my first few readings of the poems of this book were done to the nagging accompaniment of afterthoughts about the title and the little poem that introduces the collection: “As He said of the orchestra / at the Creation, they can play / anything you put in front of them”. What is this intended to mean? What is better than God? It could be music, for a start, though it’s not clear whether this would be human music or the singing of angelic hosts (though there exist aesthetics in which these two things are related). Most likely, and harmonizing with a number of poems in the book (especially “No Infelicitous Phrases Need Apply”) it might well be the assertion that creation (or Creation) is the setting in train of an incredibly complex series of developments and potentialities for evolution rather than the making of a fixed universe in the medieval way. Or perhaps flexible, interpretive, human artists are better than creator-gods. Or perhaps poetry and music are better than theology. And running along as a kind of undercurrent is the fact that this little poem makes us think instinctively of Haydn’s great work: perhaps we should read “the Creation” as Haydn’s oratorio rather than God’s fiat lux.

Sometimes the compressions are in the movement of the argument. There are many poems here in three-line stanzas. Some of them are terza rima, some not, but in all cases the three-line form acts as a little warning to expect some bumpy reading. “Lost Among Lizards”, for example, is, in its broad structure, a kind of eighteenth century “essay” – thoughts prompted by the author’s holding a lizard on his palm. But structurally it is a long way from the leisurely, meandering expatiation of the traditional essay. “This beauteous quadruped / [which] sits in my hand and wonders” doesn’t appear until the eighteenth out of twenty-three stanzas, making the bulk of the poem a kind of extended introduction. And it makes some very sharp sideways steps:

To ask yourself do lizards ever dream
Will entertain a burning afternoon
As uselessly as any other theme

You might cull out of thought. You say the moon
Has served its misanthropes as perch
To set despair out, stage a night cartoon

Of Nineteenth-Century divine research,
The ever-loving, ever-seeing eye
Of what kept faith when at a fatal lurch

The Sun of Sureness seemed to fail the sky
. . . . .

Even the poem worries about this shift (“Yet, why . . . / bring out the moon to simplify a state / of nervousness”) but the underlying idea is that, once the nineteenth century had removed a conventional God, issues such as the status of other forms of life (lizards, for example), or the status of humans as animals, or the relationships forged between the macro events of the universe (stars) and the micro (fireflies), all need rethinking. And the very movement of the poet’s mind, so restless, must be opposed to the living-in-the-skin immediacy of the material world:

But now the circuit of my mind has gone
Behind the burning light; I cannot feel
That warm-limbed, lizard-like phenomenon

Of living in the real world, the real
Unpersuaded territory where
No truths impose, no needs can break their seal.
. . . . . 

Eventually Porter decides (I think) that he might be able to share with the lizards of the world a fear of impending apocalypse and, if the lizards had a literature, it would be one of little, Gulliver-like heroes in a world where “we know the source of every scream / And pitch our ears to dying’s monotone”. Unlike the lizard’s, the human’s eyes look inward and the poet feels that reading a book might be a safer option that mind-melding with lizards. In literature living is “forever independent of surprise” and is basically about love, life and other social matters pitched comfortably at the dimensions of the human. It’s a fine and complex poem and recalls the Porter theme of preferring the city over nature (“On First Looking into Chapman’s Hesiod”) or gently mocks the American desire for a poetry of immersion in the sensual at the expense of any ratiocination.

All this is done in a fairly expansive meditation where it is the shifts that make for initial difficulties. Sometimes the compression is so intense that there is a kind of exhilarating gnomic density. Take the wonderfully titled “That War is the Destruction of Restaurants”:

All occasions bloom within priorities.
Insensible and more insensible selves
Choose to marry in their most-frayed cuffs.


They are promising riches in the Afterlife
Where every thread unravelling is a star
Within a plain of anecdotal stars.


This is the only true intelligence
Of taste: you open eyes in infancy
And see a dog in death-throes from a bait.


The prunus clipped, a glorious parent and
A fearful one speak of themselves at tea.
The five-foot line is waiting to usurp.


Like God, our animators are upset
By nought on nought, always too many noughts -
Stop dying now, they say to Dacca floods.


In Pantheons the heroes may not snore
Or be androgynous in twilight tombs
Since sexual peace is firmly cut in stone.


Year on year the wars arrive and raze
The science plains: we want to order fire
And do so staring at the plat-du-jour.

Not the kind of poem that approaches you wagging its tail. In some way it is about the vagaries of an individual life from infancy to the discovery of poetry (“The five-foot line is waiting to usurp”) contrasted with the patterns that religion and art impose. But the movement is so abrupt and so dense that it reads like a set of propositions, an impression supported by its title which suggests a kind of medieval exercise in argument. This won’t be to everybody’s taste, especially the taste that runs to “lyric grace”, but to me it belongs to those experiments which push disjunctiveness to the limit. Its formality is heightened by the fact that, apart from a couple of the opening lines, it is in a rigid ten-syllable form.

Many of the poems in Better Than God, especially the later ones, return us to the world of Porter’s Queensland childhood. “The Burning Fiery Furnace” takes up one of the themes of “That War is the Destruction of Restaurants” – that of individual life over mass-life – and mocks Australians’ continuous fascination with defining their national self-identity. Why bother with the mass, the poem says, when you have the infinite complexity of the unit to deal with:

. . . . . 
Henry Ford was right: what’s history,
Why do Australians wonder who they are?
Infinite stars in heaven – your one star
Is your own life – the millions don’t agree.

They sulk in digits and symposia
And measure muscle-tone and their synapses
. . . . .

“My Parents Were Walking Islands” revisits the “glorious” and “fearful” ones of the earlier poem, and “Ranunculus Which My Father Called a Poppy” follows his father’s later life but these family poems are also inclined to extend the ambit of the word “family”. Maternal and paternal uncles killed in the first World War appear as does an earlier ancestor, Robert Porter, who carefully worked the middle ground, giving Australians what they wanted and needed architecturally. He rose to be the architect of the appalling and little-lamented Boggo Road Gaol – surely an example of the mystical bond between object and name since both could hardly have been uglier. It is probably no accident that the first poem in Better Than God looks forward, among other things, to these family poems. “Buried Abroad” begins with the discovery of the body of Bert Hinkler, the Bundaberg aviator, in the mountains of Tuscany years after his disappearance:

. . . . . 
His first bi-plane hung
in the Brisbane Museum
while a captured German tank
stood guard outside
to stop imagination 
sorting out its dead.

My Father’s only brother -
with no known grave in France
or any cache of letters sent
from London back to Brisbane -
suggests his nephew join him
anywhere but home.

It wouldn’t be a Porter book if it didn’t include its share of meditations on death and this establishes that gloomy subject immediately. Extinction can be dealt with on a personal level – “The Burning Fiery Furnace”, generally about childhood, concludes with night saying, “State your preference, the stake or sword” – but it can also be dealt with biologically and socially. In “Young Mothers in the Square” the young go about thoughtlessly blossoming, much to the poet’s amazement:

. . . . .
How can they play, as Gray observed,
Unconscious of their fate? The curved
Blades of their death swing round
Like frisbees looping to the ground
Where everything is burgeoning,
A rose, a laptop, someone’s bling.

Death can also be approached abstractly in poetry. “The Dead Have Plans” is one of those three-line poems, structurally very interesting in being in triplets where the rhymes are disjunctive in terms of meaning. One gets the sense that the rhymes might have been determined first and the exercise in writing is to compose a poem around them. “Men/man/cumin” would be a challenge as would “passions/pensions/positions” and “gods/words/tides”. Though the effect is intensity rather than comedy, it rather recalls Lewis Carroll’s “The Mad Gardener’s Song”.

And, together with death, there is art. “The Judgement of Cambyses” sees Gerard David’s oddly cold painting of judicial torture as being about the complicity between observer and torturer; “When Did You Last See Castagno”, while referring to Andrea Del Castagno’s painting of the hanged citizens, is really about scale, about a sparrow’s position alongside the painting of the last supper. There are two poems to poets and, even closer to home, a poem like “Whereof We Cannot Speak” which begins by taking issue with Wittgenstein’s famous formulation and then continues by inverting it:

There is nothing here “whereof”. We are
philosophers and drainmakers,
prospectus-holders, vainly gripping
the under-edge of a minor star.

On which we know we can’t stay quiet.
How many sonnets must we write
before the great gong sounds in Heaven?
. . . . .

This vision of humankind as language-animal appears in a slightly earlier poem in the book, “We do Not Write the Way We Are”. If we are encrusted with parasitic words then this lends strength to the idea that words are evolved by the mass to produce the meanings of the mass, rather as Cultural Theorists are inclined to see narrative, or Jungians a Collective Unconscious. Porter’s poem is unhappy with this and wants to assert, as so often in his work, the individual over the mass. The tone is deliciously bathetic and it is fitting that, in this review, Porter should have the sinisterly named “last word”:

. . . . .
How do we scan the things we write?
Is this our fabled Second Sight,
the huge reflective Self interred
in generations of the Word?
I’d love to pose as Terrorist
or Trotsky under House Arrest,
       but sadly I’m not mad.


Instead, a circumstantial Truth
without the vanity of proof
is mixing in my double mind
with darkness lining up behind,
an unfree kind of Free Trade Zone,
a Fascist rule insisting words
       report to me alone.

John Millett: Circles of Love

Port Adelaide: Ginninderra Press, 2008, 72pp.

Since his first book Calendar Adam of 1971, John Millett has hammered out an impressive poetic career but one which, to use a phrase that might not be entirely a cliche given how much of his poetry has documented his wartime experience in the bombers of the 10th Squadron RAAF, has rather flown under the radar. Chris Wallace-Crabbe described him recently in The Age as “undervalued” and I wholeheartedly agree. The three books about wartime experience, Tail Arse Charlie (1982), Iceman (1999) and Last Draft (2002) are fascinating in ways that we might expect them to be: they document one variety of extreme experience and record information from a generation of people now leaving the scene. But they are also fascinating in the way they come to grips with these experiences, especially in the way they spin out into interest in the lives of others rather than focussing on that of a single protagonist. The two books devoted to Millett’s childhood locus – the upper Macleay in Northern New South Wales – West of the Cunderang (1977) and Come down Cunderang (1985) – are also people-oriented works rather than, say, geologically focussed in the way common in the 70s and 80s. There are two other books which make a good introduction to Millett’s work. The first, Dragonfly Tie (1997), is built around four locations but is also, essentially, portraits and the second, the recent The People Singers, is a collection of poems devoted to people on the south coast of Queensland.

Millett is especially responsive, in his portraits, to the hidden lives of characters. Rather than make character depend on genes, geography or climate or whatever, he seems to want to remind us that such ideas are reductive: we can hardly begin to understand the complexity of people’s inner lives. And the structuring of the inner life is not a matter of psychology or repression: it is the natural process whereby people of necessity bury whole areas of experience – to use the language of this recent book: they draw circles around these lives and carry them within. “The Prisoners”, from Dragonfly Tie, is a poem which, among other things, worries about this:

. . . . . 
There are times that go into
the past almost unnoticed, of their own
accord. They are the moments
when the village is in remission -
when the prisoners from the jail
inhabit it like fleas on a dog.
Crimes are unlocked and unpunished.
The river tries to pull down
the willows into it.
It is a woman pulling a man
into her or a man into another 
man – secret and silent under
the lips of its surface.

I try to pull down the clouds
into my garden, but they are already
spoken for, above the small
shops and the tourists with their
money hidden in pockets, where they keep
the secrets of their lives.
They are like the crimes
of the prisoners when they behave,
those who are trusted,
let out to decapitate grass,
pick up pieces of their lives
like scraps of paper tourists discard.
. . . . .

Although this is a poem about tourism and heritage and may seem to belong to the same stable as something like FitzGerald’s “The Wind at Your Door”, its real subject I think is the relationship between the life of the present – lived on the surface of time, so to speak – and the hidden lives of the past. The tourists with their wallets and rubbish visit the little village which contains the old gaol, a perfect symbol for the hidden and slightly disreputable experiences of our lives. Another fine poem from Dragonfly Tie, “Japanese Visitors on the Walk at Circular Quay”, has a similar vertical axis. As the Japanese brides step on the names of the poets on the plaques, the fire of the poets’ words runs up along their legs, “They whisper the words so hard these girls / can hardly wait to be visited by / the chiming apples of their new husbands”. Millett’s real interest in his portraiture is the interpenetration of hidden lives. “It is a woman pulling a man / into her” may seem just a metaphor here but in reality sex is the subject that an interest in portraits, especially of the material that lies within us, almost overwhelming in its detail and complexity, is going to gravitate towards. So perhaps it is no surprise that now, at the end – or near the end – of a long career, Millett has produced a fascinating book about love and sex: about what the narrator of Lawrence Durrell’s Justine calls, “the austere mindless primitive face of Aphrodite”.

Which of her faces does Aphrodite show in Circles of Love fruitful domestic union or anarchic erotic passion? The answer is that the two are balanced or, more accurately, held in a continuous opposition. Like all the great poets of love, Millett is fascinated by the timelessness of erotic ecstasy and the way it exists in a framework of time-driven change, what one of the poems calls, “that hidden / changeling each minute makes into / another shape”. I think eroticism is our fundamental experience of this opposition and for this reason have always thought that something like Slessor’s sonnet sequence “Out of Time” has an erotic base though the poem itself gives no sign of this. Of course, ascetic medieval mystics popping in and out of trances in which they are unified with God – in order to sign the cheques and cook the meals of ordinary life – might disagree.

At any rate, erotic ecstasy in Circles of Love is a matter of interpenetration, of the breaking down of borders. It is an absolute good to be celebrated: one of the women in one of the poems wants her lover’s muscles to shout to the world, “It’s beautiful to be in another body”. Understandably there is a lot of fluid imagery involved either of the sea or of music and one of the more difficult poems in the book is titled, tellingly, “A Place the Sea Knows”. The loved-one’s body can also be figured as a river, the medium that the lover exists in. The opening of another poem, “Mario and Jessica”, will give some idea of this:

Mario, a critical mass, has the power to cripple
the blind aces of other man – but now, touching
Jessica so, he becomes something never before existing -
and she, touching him, becomes so much more than
she was not, a thermal wind, swallows flow down, onto
the face of the river, to touch water asleep – as he and
she sleep in the undercurrents of each other’s breath.
. . . . . 

But there are a host of metaphors used for the boundaries that are penetrated. There are rooms of the self, languages of the self, books of the self, countries of the self, bodies and minds of the self. And I think that in these metaphors lies the experience of change which stands opposed to timeless ecstasy. In Millett’s poems, the principle which is opposed to erotic love is not the descent into a kind of humdrum domesticity but rather the solidifying of boundaries. We meet this in what is the book’s central image: the idea of circles. The fourth poem of the book, “Two Circles of Love” prepares us for this. Two lovers, Mario and Shani, have two stanzas of erotic fulfilment:

. . . . . 
They touch a pleasure older than Africa
and she is a glove enclosing his whole life -
the jewels of his semen white as ferns in the frost,
then after sex, lost countries of sleep.

But, of course, the usual temporal processes apply:

Over time love fades until he becomes nameless,
his world no bigger than a finger. He moves to Italy,
draws a circle round that part of his life.
She remembers how the wind opened his door
and walked in, how daylight blew across
the carpet – and his shadow would touch her -
his name asleep on her hands.


Now the room is locked and her life weeps.

The idea here, and throughout the book (where, as in the book’s title and in the titles of many of the poems, “circle” is used as though it were a poetic form), seems to be that everyone’s life develops and changes but carries within it past experiences which are dealt with by being turned into self-contained narratives sealed by a barrier. When a poem focuses on one of these experiences it, so to speak, describes a circle. And so, one of the borders that can be broached in erotic love is the border that isolates and parcels up previous experience. Such experience is often erotic experience, but it can also be the kind of extreme experience of warfare, encountered while young, that Millett writes so well about.

Of course, in a book made up of poems about eroticism, the shameless gossip who lives inside the head of every reader wants to know what the author’s stake in this is – how much is autobiographical? This is a drive almost as powerful as the erotic itself and I’ve always thought that we shouldn’t suppress it or even be ashamed of it. The first thing that can be said is that, in some poems, the author appears as virtually an observer. “Two Sides to a River” begins with the poet watching “young Mrs Jones” cross a bridge to visit her lover, Matt Lyall, while her husband, a Vietnam veteran, waits on the other side of the river, locked in the encircled world of his trauma. “Hooker Singing on Beach Avenue”, “The Hollow Created When Lights Go Out” and the comic and much admired “The Widow Lovers” seem reasonably distantly observed portraits of the kind that might well have appeared in The People Singers (in fact the last of these does, in a slightly different form). And there are other poems which, in their mode and references, seem to suggest that they want to be read as autobiography. One of these is “Her Own Life” which begins with the woman leaving, contains a stanza in which the man himself leaves (at least metaphorically) to return to the world of bombing raids over Germany:

. . . . . 
Sometimes he goes back to the
grim aircraft flying through flak and
into the nightmares of all air gunners
who survived raids on Germany.
They never again became human.
. . . . .

Now this might well be fictional, or it might be exploiting the experiences of a wartime mate but probability insists that we read it as a poem true to personal experience. As we do “Love and Holy Jesus Country” which describes, with a Dylan Thomas-like swagger, an early love affair in Sydney to which the narrator brings his rural background “trackless paddocks, / post and rail poverty, stringy bark, black / sallee, mulga, the sly grasses . . .”

Others of the poems in Circles of Love form a sequence which is distributed throughout the book. It is tempting to read this autobiographically as though it were a roman a clef with names changed regularly to protect the innocent and not-so-innocent. But, ultimately, only the author knows the extent to which it maps his own experience and it is probably best to try to read it only for the fascinating story that it tells. There is a lot of infidelity underneath the tortured relationship between husband wife and various lovers. There is also a pattern of imagery dedicated to these poems which includes clock faces, scarves, smudges and the moon. The centre of this sequence is, perhaps, “Circle for the Thin Man”, a poem which meditates on the genetic results of infidelity. These include the knowledge the narrator has that his father was unfaithful to his mother and that he has, as a result, a half-brother: “I saw the boy once. / My father looked out of his face.” When his own wife is unfaithful and sleeps with an Indian visitor (among many others), the results are significant:

When she said, “Your son kicks my heart.
He is a poem inside me,” we sifted through words
for a name that would join us in a single sentence.


Then – “Do you, William, take this . . . (foetus)?”
The calendar moved past us and the future
was hungry. Months later the poem I read
might have been Lebanese or Italian - 
though an Indian looked out of his face.
I remember his birth date – the afternoon
suddenly still – the old tree I loved
on the boundary between us said “Goodbye.”
When the child first cried his tears were crushed
petals against my cheek and against his dark skin - 
his face a map of India drawn by an old master and
my wife. I knew then marriage was a scratch ticket
and this child, a small coin dropped through
a slot in the world’s money box.

It’s a measure of the strength of the poems of this book that, after several rereadings, we go on wanting to make sense of its narratives rather than become bored with them. This leads to the thought that it is not easy to write well about eroticism. For a start, once the first flush of voyeuristic pleasure fades for the reader, there has to be something really powerfully-done to sustain a reader’s interest. And secondly there is the widely held suspicion that Australian male poets do not write well about love. The Vitalist tradition (which must be incarnate somehow in Millett’s work) legitimates eroticism by raising it (and slightly abstracting it) to the power of a life-force, but individual readers are still fussy about whether there is too much or too little explicitness and so on. I can’t think of a recent book of poems which “does” the erotic better than Circles of Love. It is a logical extension of the interest in human personality and intense experience that has always been present in Millett’s work but here it is followed logically into the darker, hidden countries of the self.

Rae Desmond Jones: Blow Out

Woodford: Island Press, 2008, 72pp.

Rae Desmond Jones published four books in the eight years between Orpheus with a Tuba (1973) and The Palace of Art (1981). The date of publication of the second of these means that there is a publishing gap of twenty-seven years until this new book. Though it’s a significant poetic silence it does contain a book of short stories and two novels. Alan Wearne includes him under the rubric of “one of the great unsung elder statesmen of modern Australian poetry” and it’s a judgement I’m inclined to agree with. His early work was strikingly distinctive and, though one wouldn’t want to fall into the error of treating his poetry as though it were completely homogenous, much of this distinctiveness is carried over into this new, late book.

For me, the first marker of Jones’s poetic manner is the way he is completely at home in the seedy, urban world. And to be “completely at home”, in literary terms, is a very complex phenomenon. To take a reasonably uncomplicated poem from Blow Out, “Heat”:

Tonight this summer while the fires burn
Around the city & the smell of smoke hangs
Near the ground & ash gently dust the sheets,

At 11 pm TJ drops his customised harley in the street
At just the right angle so the moon
Stares unblinking at her own reflection
in the silver black enamel of the tank,

Unzips & rolls his hips back
Then puts his hand in his pockets & closes
His eyes, lost in a paradise of sweet relief.

A flood of piss arcs & flushes the curling leaves
Of a rosebush peeping over the fence
As a ghostly virgin kisses his deep bruised cheeks
& whispers “fuck me” into his cauliflower ears.

Slowly and lovingly he tucks his prick
Through the narrow fork of his jeans as though it
Requires ponderous care & deserves
Nothing less than a crane.

He turns & bellows at the smooth closed blinds
“well what are you looking at? Never seen one
Before? It’s got your name tattooed on it.”

Still unzipped, without a cause, the defeated hero
Stumbles over the squealing gate.

Essentially it is a portrait, one of many in Jones’s work, but, as often, the position of the narrator is difficult to determine. It is calm and slightly distant – the ampersands, endemic in Jones, emphasise this – but it is not socially distant. There is no sense of an authorial position which is, in any sense (financial, social, creatively) superior to TJ. This adds a slight sense of unease to readers which they are probably reluctant to acknowledge since it would make them appear to be no more than literate snobs. To add to this, though we all consider ourselves unshockable, there is the slight frisson that this is a poem about someone urinating – not the most disturbing of subjects, certainly not Basho hearing the cry of the abandoned child, but, at the same time, not one that usually falls within the ambit of the subjects for poetry. In other words, although one of the powerful ways in which poetry historically renews itself is to shock readers by including hitherto unacceptable material, we don’t get the impression that this is what Jones is interested in doing.

“Heat” is a good example of a Jones portrait and emphasises one of his strengths as a writer: an ability to look at the lower levels of urban life dispassionately. You meet this in his novel, The Lemon Tree (though there the life dealt with is as much postwar Broken Hill as it is inner Sydney) and in his book of stories, Walking the Line. But, in the case of “Heat”, one wouldn’t want to think that this dispassionate registration is all that is going on. The poem is set among the bushfires of the Sydney summer season and opens with careful references to the moon reflected in the motorbike’s fuel tank. The final lines connect TJ with James Dean as a rebel without a cause and describes him as a defeated hero. The poem thus spirals, though not too far, towards allegory whereby someone who might have had a prominent and admired function in a different culture, is reduced, in the situation in which he finds himself, to the sordid and the belittling.

Crossing film references with urban reality is a common event in Jones’s poetry and a way of contrasting behaviour which, in context, is heroic, with sordid realities. I know that it is the underlying setup of both Ulysses and “The Wasteland”, but Jones does it in a distinctive way. There is a group of poems at the end of the 1977 volume, Shakti, which are very much concerned with the values of Hollywood popular film and the way these relate to reality. But there is nothing trite in what these poems have to say and the way in which they operate: they are not simple works though they are often (“Jungle Juice”, “The El Paso Restaurant”) funny. One of these poems, “Flak”, crosses the imagery of war films with Eliot’s notion of poetry being “a raid on the inarticulate”. It begins “It could become one of the great classic / film cliches – almost like John Wayne’s back / in the searchers . . .” and finishes:

             you are the only one of the squadron
to survive to walk the streets of london on leave
haunted in the fog past army greatcoats in pubs
& lily marlene it has everything life & certainty
of death the black night of the soul multiple
metaphors of society the body & an inbuilt
cross-reference to oedipus at colonnus & lastly the tides
under waterloo bridge

“Flak” is not an easy poem to summarise – its concern with writing is an additional complexity – but it does focus on experience mediated through the powerful visual cliches of film. I mention these poems from Shakti because one of them is about James Dean. It is a three part poem which begins with the author in a car and the crash which killed the actor behind him. But the processes of transformation have already begun so that

in the rear-vision mirror you catch
him looking through your eyes narcissist
as ever the flowers of his mockery recurring

eternal late movies on television

The poem’s final section makes it clear that, when the American car pulls up beside you at the lights, with James Dean as its driver, you need to keep ahead of it:

move slowly past him the manual gear change
up when the lights go green

the speedometer needle climbing & the sleeve
caught in the door & leave him
& america

pissweak reflection & creator of a generation
now gone to parenthood & the suburbs
& the chicken still screaming on the veranda

this seems straightforward enough, even rather programmatic for a poem, but the last lines are much more equivocal:

the tragic screen widening to cinemascope
the sun coming up & the huge mandala of the wheel
easy in your palm

I’ve never been entirely sure whether the tragic screen is something that the accelerating car can keep ahead of (in other words, it widens in the rear vision mirror) as it speeds towards a transcendent reality, or whether the screen is in front of the driver and the point being made is that we never escape the screen, the permeation of our lives with the images of popular culture.

Both “Jungle Juice” and “The El Paso Restaurant” – the last poems of Shakti – take a comic approach to reality and film cliche. In the former, Tarzan “his testicles banging together like billiard balls” turns up at Dr Livingstone’s hut for the 1936 Congo Fashion Parade while the gunboat “Vorster” “captained by Joseph Conrad / and on her decks princess grace kelly and robert morley / arms linked each side of little black sambo” arrives at the village’s wharf.

Blow Out’s “Heat” can lead in other directions as well. As I have said, it is one of Jones’s portrait poems and there are a number of these, some surreal, some realistic. The finest is probably “The Generator” from The Mad Vibe. It is a portrait of a character over the top in every way:

always brilliant
& all the world is queer
particularly you
                       he voted
                       petula clark for post-
                       mistress general


had a volkswagen fitted with a siren
screamed up & down pitt st
chasing police cars
                           he hated the public
at seventeen was sure life was barren
& at twenty hungered for royal weddings
told me he could speak to jesus
on the royal telephone
the joy was not divine
he preferred orgasms . . .

After introducing this character, the poem goes on to describe how he discovered the ultimate sexual thrill when he met a man who wanted someone to apply electric shocks to his scrotum, someone to turn the generator. But one day his cat is run over messily and he

just sat there in samadhi contemplating
the wires between the stretched out poles
of mind fizz out into the open palm 
of night
            i am the cat the cat &
            he repeated the cat is dead man
            i am the cat
then he kissed me got into the Volkswagen
dropped the clutch
started the siren & as he accelerated
filled the night with flame
crossed the arc &
burned straight out towards the gap

Again, there is a lot of the high literary in the middle of this very raw portrait, especially in the symbolism of the generator, the spark and the gap – here the gap between self and others, or even other species.

What does this amount to as a kind of introduction to the poetry of Rae Jones? The central fact seems to me to be that, comfortably inhabiting the low enables your movements towards the high to be both genuine and, poetically, successful. I don’t think any Australian poet writes such moving concluding gestures as Jones. The reason is that most poets are situated in their poems in a kind of poetic equivalent of the middle class. The climactic closing image is then no more than a rhetorical gesture of the sort that can be learned in writing schools. But if the poet and the subject of the poem are firmly in the gutter, then the gesture upwards becomes the sparking of a powerful gap. There are a whole set of cliches (lying in the gutter, looking at the stars etc) which accumulate around this idea but they don’t make it any less correct. Jones himself is not above deploying such cliches. In a fine poem to his daughter at the end of this most recent book, “Singing Crazy”, he listens to Patsy Cline on the radio (for me, rather a lifetime riding pillion with TJ than a day locked in a room with a Country and Western record!) while his daughter is at music camp:

. . . . . 
Patsy plays the whole register of sloppy emotions -
Each fine nuance of intuition & response from delicate
To crass so I guess I’m the same, reaching for the stars
With one arm while shovelling from the slop bucket 
With the other. . .

It’s a dangerous moment but then the whole poem is about the power of cliches.

Whatever the implications, Jones’s conclusions have great power, far beyond their rhetorical techniques. I can remember reading the first poem of the manuscript of his first book, Orpheus With a Tuba. It is a portrait of a piano tuner who describes how, in a lift, he met a friend, a violinist, who now owns a Stradivarius and how, when the lift door opened, there was a friend to meet him and escort him

          through the crowd of shoppers
with dumb faces buying lingerie. you pause
afraid of being misunderstood, before you


return to the piano with the screwdriver,
locked in the blind numeral of self.

“The blind numeral of self” – that’s not a bad phrase to conclude a poem about the relationship between art, on the one hand, and on the other physics, mathematics and mechanics. And Orpheus With a Tuba is full of such frissons: a poem about a modern incarnation of Orpheus finishes with the girl holding his head and singing to him “of the sweet & inarticulate / stars”; a poem about the death of an uncle concludes with memories of the poet’s mother (who broke the news by telephone) “i can only offer her now / lumps of memory torn out / of our dense and common heart”. And perhaps, best of all, as an example of this distinctive high/low conjunction, is “The Poets”:

they speak to a vast audience
consisting mainly of one another 
all of whom nervously shuffle
manuscripts & wait their turn


meantime the masses who are
as usual deaf blind & stupid
just keep walking to the bus or
into the office reading newspapers
& quite obviously don’t give a fuck,


& who can blame them . . .

The poem goes on to imagine one of these people accidentally reading one of the poems published in the corner of the review page and then returning to “real life” thinking of

     the legs of the office girl
so tightly clenched he thinks
her pussy must almost pucker &
blow him kisses


but rarely he might think
at how unreal the world has
become & how beautiful & how
soon he must leave it which is


also beautiful & how time 
passes but in any case perhaps
just for a minute he thinks
poetry & knows himself


dwarfish, blind & ugly &
returns once again to the real.

It’s a wonderful, moving and inspired conjunction of the vulgar, the sublime and the poetically powerful.

“The Poets” introduces an important element into this high/low conjunction – that of poetry itself. It’s a complex question but generally, one suspects, in Jones’s verse, poetry represents the transcendent, the most definable manifestation of the high. And yet, contrarily, the function of poetry is to expose us to truth and one of the features of truth might be that the life we are living is not as “high”, that is – enlightened – as we think it is. So poetry has a kind of simultaneous raising and lowering function. There is a fine poem in Shakti, “Strathfield Street”, which works away at this.

in strathfield street
an old oleander parades
a purple rinse bouffant &
passé
        the houses in
        poisonous good taste
        lean back from the paths
        & the ladies watch but
        look the other way as
        they sweep their verandas
behind the railway the clouds
bank heavy & the trains slide along
the tracks like hungry
caterpillars
               near the barbed wire
               a sunflower swings
               its bull head angry &
               confused
the matter of poetry in
acres of the rational & sane
the utterly ordinary beside a sign
which advertises invalid aids
& surgical footwear
                     a fine drizzle crosscuts
                     the trees & on a leaf of
                     the oleander the world
                     condenses into a delicate
                     & ugly flower

Not at all a straightforward poem in terms of what it wants to say about poetry in the world, the sunflower alongside suburban realities, but it does succeed in making those overwhelming realities faintly insubstantial.

The poem which follows “Strathfield Street” in Shakti is “The Pier”. It too is about poetry but explores the idea (originating with Rilke?) of poetry being about the ingestion of experience, its processing and then excretion as art. Here the reality is, unlike that of Strathfield Street, described with a metaphorical density that make it seem magical in itself:

at the end of the pier
old tyres are nailed stretched
out black half moons
on to the timber
              around the headland
              rocks push old bent teeth
              through the receding gums
              of sand & trees . . .

A shag surfaces to swallow a fish:

the fish is gone & the swallowed
christ breaks into many parts
in the belly of the bird
             as the acid works
             inside him he folds his
             wings & moves elegant &
             serene the simple body
             of a bird
below our legs the silver
mangroves tremble & rise & it
is past midday
               the sun flakes
               the white gull shit
               on the pier.
caught in the body,
the uncomfortable damp layers
of it

This seems to be the inverse of the preceding poem in that the processes of making poetry and the status of that poetry are mocked. The divine reality (the “Christ’s body”) is swallowed and all you get from the resulting poetry, it seems to say, is shit.

Interestingly this image of ingestion appears in the first poem of Blow Out, a sinister/wry piece called “The Last Drop” in which ordinary workers line up for their morning caffeine fix in a poem which connects this to mounting a scaffold – for “the last drop” – and communion:

          Here as the last drop falls, the biscuit breaks
Like the body of Christ on the wall into fourteen staccato images,
          Down through ripples of brown & white caffeine,
Swirling into redemption (until lunchtime)

And in another poem, “Shot”, (which reverses the role that Jones usually plays of dispassionate observer so that he is the one snapped on a mobile phone) it is significant that he is caught in the process of eating:

. . . . . 
she opens the phone raises it
focuses blinks & clicks capturing
my soul.


I see myself in a diamond of light,
an old man sitting alone
with a piece of broken biscuit caught
between his teeth

And it may be that a metaphor like this is really at the heart of “A Brick & Sandstone YMCA” where the alter ego of real poetry (“the fractured poetry / of commerce and power) is focussed on:

. . . . . 
I walk on past the sushi bars
           & doner kebab stands,
Breathing the richness
           Of burning oil & scorched meat,
Listening to the fractured poetry
           Of commerce & power,
Wheeling & dealing;
           The pimp with acne scars,
A policeman with his sagging gut,
           A thin girl with dead blonde hair
& needle scabs along her arms.

Meaning passes through me
           & whispers then moves softly on.

Above my head a monorail car
          Slides pneumatically
Into the future
          Gripping a single greasy rail.

It’s a fine, if disturbing, last image though I’m not sure if the monorail car is a symbol of the commercial world which travels on one track which has to be kept greased or whether it’s a symbol of the world of experience which passes through the consciousness of the poet. After all, it too might be one track: the first poem of the final section of the book (which begins with a visit to the optometrist) establishes that this is a poet who could conceivably be called “one-eyed”. But the fact that these last lines recall the end of Lowell’s “The Union Buries its Dead” leads me to think that the earlier interpretation is more likely to be correct.

This final section of Blow Out, “Familiars”, has a number of portraits. There is one of a dealer who, when under pressure from the police, takes up windscreen washing at an intersection:

. . . . . 
But if someone gives him a tip
He leans across & breathes
A mouthful of Marijuana smoke into the cabin
As the lights change & they accelerate away
& he waves & whispers have a nice day

This is a ”˜nice” poem and the poems of this section often do something unusual in Jones’s work by being nice. The two poems to his daughter, Alysse, are clearly of this kind as is the book’s last poem, “The God of Naughty Children”. The elegies for his father, mother and grandmother, familiars in the sense of being familiar ghosts, could conceivably have been written early in Jones’s career; when “Telephone Elegy”, for example, was written. They are solemn and intense beneath their co-ordinated clause structure, but the last three poems of the book strike a slightly unusual tone. Perhaps extended fatherhood and even an extended period as mayor of the Council of Ashfield in inner Sydney (has any previous important Australian poet ever been a mayor?) has not so much softened a sometimes abrasive approach (the “mad vibe” mode) as create yet another alternative.

Sarah Holland-Batt: Aria

St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2008, 62pp.

In the last few years Australian poetry has seen a number of exciting debut collections and Sarah Holland-Batt’s Aria is another that can be included in that happy genre. In fact it is a knockout collection and this came as something of a surprise to me since I had met only a few of the poems in journals when preparing for our annual Best Australian Poetry anthologies and, when seen in their journal incarnation, they were far too disjointed to show a reader how they wanted to be read.

For a first book Aria is very coherent despite the fact that it is full of different modes. The poems seem to be strung between two poles. There is an overwhelming sensation of lost love and grief which drives the poems towards brevity and stasis and, at the other extreme, a kind of escape into longer poems which inhabit the sky rather than the ground. I’m immensely taken with these more optimistic, freer, longer works. Their mode is operatic and rhapsodic and it is no surprise that the book’s major cultural references are late-high-romantic: Rachmaninov, Puccini and Mahler. Hence also the abrupt title, Aria.

We meet the conjunction between loss of love and stasis as early as the book’s second poem, “Shore Acres”. It’s a powerful piece:

. . . . . 
But this year nothing moves at Shore Acres;
the water is static as land, and stripes
of foam bone its slate like a corset.
We are here for the end of movement.
You stay to watch the ocean. I go back
to the Japanese garden . . .

One of the impressive things about this poem is the way it embeds exhaustion into the movement of the poem itself and it does this while retaining the generally enjambed style that, in other, different poems, keeps the whole thing moving quickly. Even the book’s epigraph from The Cherry Orchard, “I know that happiness is coming, Anya, I see it already”, subtly associates happiness with movement.

In an odd way, loss of love and the resultant state of psychic depression are unpromising material poetically. They are potent, resonating experiences but that is all: they don’t encourage verbal coruscations, for example, the way a rhapsodic response to the natural world can. They can result in a continual grinding down which produces a poetry which is spare to the point of being minimalist. This is reached, I think, by a three line poem, “Laughter and Forgetting”:

We have no name for this wilful happiness.
We just wake to it every morning, in love,
but one always loving the other a little less.

It’s a small brilliant piece, balancing happiness and grief, but one couldn’t make a whole poetry out of this mode. I think “Letter to Robert Lowell” is an attempt to resolve this difficulty. It’s an act of mimicry, overtly copying the Lowell of “Skunk Hour” and “Night Sweat”. The last two stanzas will give some idea of it:

The traffic crawls toward the Tower Mill.
Two o’clock: in my left temple
a migraine builds: jots
and temporary sketches
skid across my field of vision,


two white dots conjoined, twinning
like the searchlights they raked
the river with last night.
A suicide. The man
couldn’t swim, and washed in with the tide.

If I had to guess what was happening in this poem, I would say that Holland-Batt, by briefly inhabiting the poetic method of Lowell (a method in which a diseased mind imposes itself on the environment, isolating stories and sites of misery) allows pain into a poem without the movement towards stasis that this usually involves. In fact the movement is towards baroque elaboration. I said that it was an act of mimicry: it might be more accurate to say that it is borrowing the mode of a vastly different writer and trying it on (perhaps with a wry apology to its owner) as though it were a coat. Something similar happens in “Not a Life, But Like One” which looks like an imitation of one of the Americans (James Wright, Galway Kinnell?) who do wintry stoniness well: “Lights over the bridge. The coldest wind. / And a little rain straining to make itself heard / on the way down to the river.”

Interestingly, “Francesca in the Second Circle” seems, by introducing Dante’s notion of Hell, to contradict the poet’s overall scheme because the essence of the punishment of the lovers is that they do move: they run before the dark wind which symbolizes the passions they were damned for. Paradise is the static place and Hell (or at least its upper reaches) is a place of miserable movement. The poem makes sure that it harmonizes with the overall scheme of things by emphasizing – as Dante does – that the movement is circular. And so, as I read it, Francesca prefers the continuous and cyclic revisiting of misery which is a kind of stasis. She, after all, is the one who famously says, “There is no greater sorrow than to recall happy times in times of misery” and I like the idea that this might hint that her depressed state remorselessly forces her to revisit the good times like probing a bad tooth.

Two poems, “Late Aspect” and “The Art of Disappearing” are about one of the results of stasis in that the poet gets subtracted from the entire scene. At least this is what seems to happen in the former poem where the objects of existence remain but they are no longer animated by a perceiving human presence – rather as in Coleridge’s “Dejection Ode”:

As for the veranda: it is empty.
A windchime sieves the air, and the cicadas
emerge like metal stars.
The night is preoccupied with its own story:
the unpainted ladder flush against white
weatherboard; a curl of dry duct tape spiralling
from the tennis racket like an apple peel;
the fierce, unfilled shadow eclipsing the hammock.
This evening I have abandoned the possibility
my questions will be answered in a voice
I can understand, and but for my present
outlines I disappear, my face covered
by the haggard, smoky sky; the garden, the night
ringing with the sawing pulse of insects, that unison
for which there is no human word.

I really like this poem because it is so intelligently intense: it is a long way from a howl of misery. In its almost dispassionate look at what is going on among the objects of the world the world during grief, it reminds me of John Scott’s great poem, “’Changing Room’” which finishes:

She’s leaving; and the similes are gone.
A borrowed room, and everything quite suddenly
and only like itself: this coat, this coat.
          This floor, this floor.

Then there are the longer poems. These are not consistently or simply rhapsodic but what is happening in them is very different. I think they all share a freedom of poetic movement and this movement itself gives the impression of a freer poetic imagination. Of course, in “Rachmaninov’s Dream”, the composer dreams his dream – simultaneously of the lost past and the frightening future – while composing the famous Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini so this poem is literally in a rhapsodic milieu.

I think the most important of these longer poems is “Remedios the Beauty” a sort of dramatic monologue from the point of view of Garcia Marquez’s famous levitating washerwoman. It is hard to resist a reading of it which makes it an allegory about the writing of the very poems I am speaking about. In this reading Remedios’ flights are the poet’s flights as she explores the freedoms of composition in an extended mode. What is striking are the unpredictable twists and turns of the poem which can thus symbolize the freedoms in this all-movement mode. Look at the first dozen lines, for example:

Levitation is easy. I am at home
with the peregrines; I move
in their registers, where each small kindness - 
a quick kill, mercy – passes, weightless
and unremarked. Gusting thermals bring
me parallel to the sky’s cusp, papered
and insubstantial as a sucked egg.
Here, time rounds its edges through wires
of nimbus. It could be years. The names
of small things – animals, stones – flake
away, fish splintered from the spine,
the jacket lifting, curled and loose.
My body comes into a new lightness.
Surrounded by snow, water washing
water then thawing it, letters fall 
in the drifts, the crystalline seraphs
dissolving into a vast dark stretch . . .

And so on, including revisiting earth. As I’ve said, it seems a poem which celebrates the freedoms possible in its own making. And the continuous enjambments of Holland-Batt’s style mean not so much that we misread lines as that two separate meanings can run concurrently. So in the first line, Remedios is home (in her grandmother’s house on earth) and by the second she is home in the sky.

We always search, in the work of a new poet, for a “poem-poem”, a poem which works as a kind of allegory of what the author thinks a poem is. “Remedios the Beauty” might well fill that role in Aria, but so might a small poem, “Materials”, which appears in the middle of the book:

I am trying to understand memory,
how it is that after all the falling and failing
these floorboards still sing. Woodsmen
sounded this cedar so the emperor could sleep,
and each mournful creak has carried
centuries. So my feet practise
a broken music scored for his enemies.
The men who built these halls understood:
best not to think it will last forever.
House the emperor in paper and wood.

Unfortunately, it is one of those frustrating poems that you suspect are perfectly straightforward from the author’s perspective but which elude a reader’s grasp. There is a reference to the “nightingale floors” which Japanese carpenters built deliberately so that they would squeak when used: this was a security device that made it difficult for an assassin to approach the Emperor, though what it did for the sleep of the Emperor himself, I’m not sure. One way of reading the poem is to respond to the author’s initial admiration for the fact that these things still work after several hundred years: you house Emperors in wood and you house memories in poems and, if you are lucky, those poems will resonate down the years, still working for casual visitors years from now. Or we could focus on the fact that the author comments that her walking on the floors is exactly what the enemies of the Emperor do. If we allegorize the Emperor as memory then the poem might be saying that the only way memory can be approached is through processes that are inimical to it. That would make it a much bleaker poem, epistemologically: the approach to experience destroys the experience. I’m not sure.

Back to the abrupt title. Are there any other books of Australian poetry with such a small (four letters) title? It’s the kind of question which, in a civilized country, might occupy pundits on a TV program. There turn out to be (according to a quick search in my shelves) a number of five letter titles (Anna Couani’s Italy, Kris Hemensley’s Trace, Philip Hammial’s Swarm, for example) but as far as I can see only two other five letter titles: Judy Johnson’s Jack (Pandanus Books, 2006) and Philip Roberts’ Crux (Island Press, 1973). At any rate, it’s obviously important to the author that the book should choose something that represents the more optimistic reach of the binary. The first time I read it, I thought that “the end of movement” – or even “here for the end of movement” (a phrase from the book’s second poem) – might be a better, because more striking, title but that would only have reflected the bleaker component of Holland-Batt’s vision.

Paul Kane: A Slant of Light

Geelong: Whitmore Press, 2008, 31pp.

This beautifully designed pamphlet contains twenty-three poems selected from Paul Kane’s three previous books: The Farther Shore (1990), Drowned Lands (2000) and Work Life (2007). It is subtitled “Australian Poems” and chooses those poems from the books directly relevant to Australia, though it does omit two of an Australian suite from the first book. This immediately arouses, of course, a host of issues that I’ll just leave lying on the beach: is Kane a kind of cultural hybrid? Which cultures hybridize best with Australian? What component of Kane’s poetic sensibility is Australian? Is this reflected in the poems “set” in Australia or might it be seen to better advantage in certain of the “American” poems? We are into “Only an Australian could have written An Imaginary Life” territory here.

Kane is not a prolific poet but he is a very good one. He has a high degree of sensitivity to landscape and the way it reflects process. And like most poets of process he is sensitive to the vast wastetrap of entropy that the universe is composed of. He is an elegist in the sense of griever. But his books do change their methods. The first, The Farther Shore, simply contains too many extended, safe, scholarly poems to present a challenge though it does, in its final section, move to a more lyrical mode. By the time of the first section of the next book, Drowned Lands, there are some brilliant, if fragile, symbolic set-pieces: “Acceptance” is a good example:

Gray across the bridge, the bridge
itself silver, shining in the dull air,

the gray mist and water below
pale, obscuring any view but

the prevalent neutrality. Gray, then,
with splashed color, lights moving

slowly, the bridge trafficking in
anonymous lives, sequestered worlds ”“

it could be this way always, somber
and yet not sad: washed, toned down,

quiet, even serene. It would be
all right, with much still to praise.

Splashes of light – representing sealed off, individual lives – moving across a bridge suspended over the river of process in a monochrome landscape. The setting is bleak but the poem concludes with a tentative (and typical) movement towards affirmation. Other poems, like “Shadows”, take up this symbolic scenario, always equating colour and brightness with affirmation:

A ribbon of cloud billows in the valley,
An opaque mirror of the river below.
You are crossing a bridge in sunlight,
Suspended above cloud, water, ground.
. . . . .

It is no accident that this is a poetry very sensitive to the possibilities of dawn, especially the idea of travelling towards the rising sun, watching its lurid colour animate the grays of predawn.

Later in Drowned Lands affirmation hardens towards a vaguely defined theological sense and the poems become overtly concerned with religious subjects. A set of such poems is introduced by “Concedo Nulli” in which the poet visits a church next to the Maison d’Erasme in Anderlecht and listens to choirboys practicing in a Latin that Erasmus “would have / smiled at”. It is a situation full of symbolic significances for the seeker who feels that the power to affirm might repose in a religious context. Erasmus is a scholar’s icon, a humanist who “never left the Church, from / which he was always apart: wit, satire, / ridicule – even mortared stone can rot”. The poem finishes with the poet responding to that part of the service which praises “neither knowledge nor folly, / but an absence we cannot account for.” There are attempts at wit, satire and ridicule in various parts of Kane’s output (versions of Martial, some funny “Two Liners”) but it is not what he does best. Nor are attempts at ecstatic invocation. Drowned Lands’ second last poem, “The Repentant Magdalen” finishes

You – parabolic! – who exist beside
me here, touch the radiant cell of this
life, illumine me beyond reflection,
and make remorse the glass of what I am.

And it seems deeply unconvincing. You suspect that Kane knows this too because the last poem, “Lines Left at Shiprock”, returns to the low expectations and generalised desire for affirmation that he seems – to my eye and ear anyway – to do best. It also reverses the symbolic scene of driving towards the rising sun:

Westward, wings of rock
enfold the setting sun
as the world tilts
towards the edge of night.

You have come this far
and still you think
your life will endure.

So the poetry of Drowned Lands is built around a twin sensitivity: to moments of revelation, “out of time”, and to the processes of a time-structured personal world with its personal experience of the infinite flow of life. And the dominant of these processes is loss. The same concerns are carried over into Kane’s most recent book, Work Life, as is the tendency to slot poems with a more theologically inclined investigations of the possibility of revelation at the book’s end. Work Life, however, begins with a section of poems that deal with macro-ethics – prompted by the attacks in New York. There are portents:

. . . . .
      a Great Horned Owl in daylight
shrieking that calamitous cry – and I cannot
bear to tell you the sorrows that followed.

and there are meditations:

. . . . .
                    we who
began with the word liberty in our mouths

ended with blood on our hands? That we
who surrendered freedom for security

lost both? . . .

but the other sections of the book deal with the obsessions I have already outlined. “Psyche” is unusual in that it is a nineteen page poem in couplets but it is a meditation on revelation: at the beginning of spring the poet – “trying / to wake up in a world so stupefying / that I despaired of anything more than / momentary wonderment” – finds himself with a butterfly settled on his head. The poem is an experiment in essayistic middle style, pursuing the possible meanings of this event. In a way, poems like this are a kind of elegy for that long lost style and are rarely really successful, though one can appreciate a poet’s attraction to the ins and outs of thought and the way a long poem is bedded in time and can thus reflect the linear appreciation of time. Seen in this light, luminous lyrics – like “Acceptance” – beg the question in that they structure the poetic experience to be timeless. My own taste is for middle length accretive poems: like those of Peter Porter or Jennifer Maiden and Kane produces one of these in “Doo Town” which begins as a comment on people’s playing with the name of their town and moves on to being about our attempts to escape language, using the escaped convicts of Port Arthur as a metaphor begging to be brought into the game. This kind of poem has always seemed richer in possibilities than attempts to resuscitate, in the style of Hope, an archaic mode.

The whole second section of Work Life is devoted to poems exploring loss and the last of them, “A Murder of Crows”, unites loss with the poetry’s other great theme of the flow of time and the moments of its arrest. It begins with two moths, symbols of grace, and then goes on to imagine the possibility of the relentless onward flow of time being momentarily arrested and reversed:

. . . . .
Our world acts as a membrane directing the flow
of time in its singular forward direction,
but now and then something seeps through in reverse,
a backwash from the other side, like a check
valve that fails in the plumbing, or – if it serves
some purpose after all, beyond us – then
like a vitreous fluid weeping unnoticed through
the trabecular meshwork of the eye.
. . . . .

The poem finishes with a memory of its dead dedicatee speaking about the arrival of crows. When the crows appear, the strength of the poem’s mediation is enough to see them as negative images of what is white arriving in another world.

So what are we to make of A Slant of Light which includes “Australian” poems from the three books? Well, Australia is a land of strong sunlight and strong colours and we might thus expect the poems to be more positive than those which write of the gentler, softer light of the north-eastern seaboard of the United States. Australia might well, we guess, be a land of continuous, even apocalyptic revelation, but the truth is that what we get here is a sampling of the three books that seems to accurately reflect their character though we are spared any overtly religious poems – Australia, perhaps, being a place where you are less likely to come across a religious painting or step into a little church. There is one moment which is utterly Australian, though. When one of the two-liner jokes says : “First sex and the birth of Cain: / the root of all evil” (which looks like one of those comical condensations of literary works – in this case of Hope’s “Imperial Adam”) you have to read “root” in its lovely, vulgar Australian-English way to get the joke.

The sensitivity to loss is there. There are a lot of elegies involving a good deal of meditation about the absoluteness of loss. “Third Parent” is an extended poem which describes the lost one but also describes the absence she leaves:

. . . . .
We have nowhere to go now, with every reason
to go: friends, professions, a group, and love
of the land and the light – all the circumference
of a life without the centre, as if a void
were proof positive for the existence of God.
. . . . .

There are five other elegiac poems, two of them dedicated to Philip Hodgins.

The sensitivity to light is there as well. An early poem, “Philip Island” works hard to stress the strong coloured outlines of the place where “deep-green water – nothing like the sky – / folds in upon the strand, with mist on its back”. The obsession here though, as so often in the early poems, is with time. Memory is an insignificant recreation of the “flow of created time” while the experience of the place now

          is not of the moment, having
no use, no immediate connection to life,
      but the sheer chance encounter with something
continuous, distance made more distant by rain
      on the water, whenever the sea storms.
. . . . .

And “Hard Light in the Goldfields” meditates on the importance of the slash of light that is found in so many of Kane’s poems. The location itself suggests a symbolic scene: the horizontal band of light is between the dark sky and the dark, gold-bearing hills. The poem really wants to ask why the light is important; this is really another way a poet can question his own obsessive responses. But we live in evil times: “Has hope / diminished to that extent, that a mere / streak of light is set upon as evidence / that all is not darkness”.

. . . . .
And if the world in its indifference
can bring us comfort, what need have we
of benevolence? The sky-gods withdrew
a long time ago, but that streak of light -
how it answers to a need, and the need
answerable to neither hope nor faith,
but to the ground of being in the world.
. . . . .

I like “neither hope not faith” – it evinces a good, stony scepticism.

One poem worth noting is “On the Murray”. The allegorical implications are, of course, immediately obvious but, like many good allegories, it is mysteriously about both worlds: the surface and the significant. Yes this is a celebration of one of Australia’s great poets who rises “from heights rare in Australia” and uncoils

like a great serpent on a journey cross-country, the long
line traversing, composing, all terrains – as if limning
the borders of at least three states of mind: call them the New,
the South, and the Victorian. The Murray’s capaciousness
is legendary, and the flow, the flow draws tribute
wherever it appears . . .

But it is also a fine poem about the river as much as the man.

The book’s title comes from its first poem, “South Yarra”. Here the symbolism of light is present but it is seen in a domestic setting. The bar of light in the morning separates “the joy / of the not yet begun” from “the shadow of the dream”. In a way it seems to be a typical Kane poem. It may well be, though, that he grew tired of these careful symbolic scenarios freighted with obsessive images and in the most recent work has wanted to explore other possibilities. However I can’t help feeling – even though I may be bearing bad news – that poems like “South Yarra”, “Acceptance” and their kind are what he does best.

Peter Steele: White Knight with Beebox: New and Selected Poems

Elwood: John Leonard Press, 2008, 236pp.

As with Jan Owen’s recent selected, this book contains an entire, previously unpublished work accompanied by selections from previous books. It focuses on what the writer is doing now but enables readers to put this in some kind of perspective. Steele’s output is made up of two early (and really fairly forgettable books), Word from Lilliput and Marching on Paradise, published in 1973 and 1984 respectively. The four books since have included two which are made up of poems about paintings (I have always thought that English might be a better language without the word, “ekphrasis”, in it), and Invisible Riders (1999) which is stylistically not dissimilar to the new book of this selected: White Knight with Beebox. There is a lot of wonderful poetry in both White Knight with Beebox and the selections from Invisible Riders. I’m interested in the way this particular poet’s mind works, partly because, as he is a longtime Jesuit and an equally longtime Melburnian, he comes with an intellectual apparatus as far from mine (callow, post-enlightenment intellectual) as I could imagine. He has always loomed just over the horizon of my reading as a fellow Australian but somehow one with a different spiritual and intellectual ethnicity.

But before looking at the mental patterns, there is the question of the image we have of the author from these poems and what we can guess about the author’s image of himself. There is less fierce or rhapsodic transcendence than might be expected and an awful lot of wryness. In a number of the poems Don Quixote and Sancho Panza appear and this pair (the idealistic but disordered mind connected to the uncomfortable body) seem to be Steele’s totemic counterparts or at least totems of the wry side of his poetry. “Ass with Harp” (an “art-poem” in that it is about a puzzling ass sculpted on Chartres cathedral) is relevant here because its subject is the continued presence of the humble flesh in an atmosphere of yearning for the heavens:

. . . . .
here, in a cosmic settling of accounts,
          fair and foul migrate for ever;
and here, taking a liberty with tradition,
          a carved dreamer begins to smile.

But the one with hoof to harp and roused eye
          remains arcane. Mocked by Jerome,
a sleeper for Bottom yet to come, a dawdler
          at ears’-length from Balaam and angel ”“

perhaps, on the pitted wall, this day of the Lord,
          he catches the note of dying Francis
who said of the body, for all his starry hopes,
          “I have sinned against my brother the ass.”

Don Quixote is also perhaps not far from Lewis Carroll’s White Knight of the title poem, the one who has a fine hive but no honey. Again the stress is not on the divine radiating downwards but on human aspirations to move upwards:

Grander mentors are wasted on him – the Greeks
          consecrating bees to the moon,
Jonathan risking death . . .

. . . . .

          The clique of Immortals, knocking back
their diet of nectarine juices and munchable candy,
          are at their best still in the dark


as to the sweetness this jerked and lolloping figure
          has made of himself. In default of a comb,
he’s bet on the dotardly build of his own flesh,
          going down fighting, coming up trumps,
licking a dear-bought honey off thorns, and always
          husbanding fire for the next dream. 

“This jerked and lolloping figure” – “Lolloping” is a word that recurs in this poetry and might bear the same relation to Steele’s poems that, say, “veteran” does to Bruce Beaver’s.

Other poems position the poet remorselessly as the wryly intelligent observer of the public world, an enlightened amateur. One of the best of them, “Mending Gloves at Anglesea”, moves, via a pun on the author’s names, to such a description:

                              the stitchwork will proclaim
          The amateur status of its wearer,
                    Ferric and stoney by name,
But understrapper among overlings,
A lightweight in the contest for chief lout.

while “Phantom Pleasures” speaks very beautifully of those whose boats are “invulnerable to burning because their timber / is still unseasoned”. The amateur is only one step from the fool – indeed is, in his or her own estimation, a fool. Steele’s poetry, at the moments where it wants to speak of religious experience, often invokes the figure of the fool. There is, of course, a good Franciscan tradition for doing this but the character who figures more significantly than Francis is Christopher Smart. “Praying with Christopher Smart” sees Smart as rejoicing

                    though God knows how, at seeing the Lamb,
          all radiant victim and focal creature,
where knave and fool and we the bewildered are welcomed.

The wry component meshes in well with at least one aspect of a poet’s capacities: the sensitivity to words produces puns of every level of complexity and these have always been seen as homely, rather embarrassing lapses. They are the kind of things that poets usually censor in themselves unless their poetics permits it. Surrealism does (accidents of language are one of surrealist poetry’s driving forces) but so does a poetry that positions its author as a humble, “bewildered” figure. Steele’s poems are full of these lolloping jokes. The Earl of Burlington’s lackeys and flunkeys did not have to stand next to an airport luggage carousel “conscious of what they lacked / or how they’d flunked” (“Impedimenta”). In “Anhedonia”, autumn is a “season of musts and sallow fruitlessness” and in “Valediction”, when the poet goes to switch off the light – “It’s dousing time, the thumb upon the switch” – the connection of “douse” and “switch” recalls the “dowsing” of diviners. A fine poem (though its central stanza can’t resist a swipe at imagined scientific reductionism), “Puny Dragons”, deals with punning overtly (in the title as well as the content of the poem). It begins with ancient maps, full of imagined monsters, contrasts these with modern maps, imagined to be produced in a spirit of snobbish superiority, and concludes by celebrating the forces of dream which, employing tropes like punning, push into our consciousnesses:

. . . . .
Still, indiscipline being what it is,
          and emigrés from our dreams barefaced,
ceaseless vigilance is the only way.
          Here come the tropes, aswagger, wielding
their maps like so many gaudy warrants of licence,
          the back of their hand to Mercator, rhumbs,
and the sacred polyconic projection. To them,
          it’s never far from Tipperary,
Donne’s liable to riot over the globe
          displaying a body or two, Calvino
sweet-talks you out of your wits as brazenly
          as the cock-eyed exiled Florentine.
In default of any net to catch the wind,
          puisne dragons may be expected. 

One of my favourite poems from this selected is “Confluences”. It sees the poet standing at the site of Richard the Third’s death and responds to a whole series of fascinating connections. The date of Richard’s death is the same as the poet’s birth, for example.

. . . . .
          The stream was too much for Richard, slighter
even than the Rubicon though it is. If ever
          the trumpets sounded for him, it wasn’t
on the other side at Bosworth. Conceivably,
          the real man’s well placed
to explain the matter to Shakespeare, who managed to die
          on his birthday, feast of St George,
that honorary Englishman, and who
          went wherever they go on the same
day as that master-forger of knights, Cervantes.

One could find a lot in this poem if one went searching for clues about how this poet’s mind works: it is surely significant that it finishes with the creator of Steele’s iconic Don Quixote. But in the light of what I’ve been describing, I want only to point out that puns are confluences, accidental meetings of sound, orthography and meaning. So the puns of the meditative poems in Steele’s outputs are more than just games made respectable by a tone of wry self-deprecation. They must be bound into both the structure of the psychology and into the metaphysical structures that psychology feels comfortable with. Hammering this out would be well beyond my capabilities (and stamina) but a fine and very moving poem, “Brother”, continues the etymologizing cast of mind that appeared in “Mending Gloves at Anglesea” (it also, surely, contains an allusion to the relationship between Moses and Aaron). An etymology is not strictly a pun but here it shows an interest in the confluence between name and character:

No day goes by without your haunting me,
You, whose tongue was always heavy with silence.


Watching myself taped, a mouth pouring
Word on crested word, I am ashamed


To have outlived you, whom first I saw huddled
Behind glass some wars and loves ago.


There is, as your brooding gaze always implied,
Nothing to say. But as I back towards


Your veiled country, let me say only
That you were never slight, nor I the rock. 

In the middle of White Knight with Beebox is a group of poems, “A Mass for Anglesea”, overtly engaging religious experience. Although they seem to make up a highly organised group, there are many different genres inside the group and I’m inclined to think of it as a miniature anthology. And you can see much of Steele’s array of poetic technique in this sequence. It begins, for example, with a prologue in which the celebrant prepares the material for the mass and devotes a stanza to fire, water, wine, bread and, finally, the word. I’m not au fait with the full theological and metaphysical implications of the various processes here (are we dealing with symbols or metonyms, for example) but the poem begins with a characteristic connecting of the local and small with the large so that the white tablecloth table is associated with the large expanse of the southern ocean which, of course, concludes in snow and icy wastes. This is a shift that begins “Mending Gloves at Anglesea”. Fittingly for a poet/priest, much is made of the fact that the poem concludes with the word of the gospels:

                                        Its tale
of good having the last word is a quaint one,
          given the plague and the camps, but I’ll read it,
heart a crosspatch often as not, and mind
          losing and finding the way.

The Kyrie is a set of three prayers, the first two on behalf of the little local community. The comfortable assumption of authority (and, admittedly, responsibility) on the part of the priest seems mildly irritating here, but I accept that that is a hyper-sensitive Australian response to a religion which thrives in more hierarchical societies. The last of the prayers begins by sounding as though it wants to approximate the verbal animation you get in Hopkins and concludes by asking for the fire of God to animate the heart and dispel the inner darknesses. It, too, can’t help noting the pun in the place name:

                                               Changer of hearts,
Downhill is Demon’s Bluff, and any old day
The cards may fall like that, the spirit darken,
Amen stick in the throat indeed, and song
Dry on the lips like salt. Come in, I pray,
Winter or summer, your own music about you,
Your fiery touch a mercy after all.

“Gloria I” is interesting because it attempts to re-animate what is a poetic cliché – the poem devoted to one of the bystanders at one of the miracles, the kind of thing that begins “She was always such a quiet lass . . .” and goes on to describe Mary from a neighbour’s point of view. “Gloria I” isn’t as bad as that, fortunately. It does the shepherds “shaggy under keffiyehs, the heavy cloaks / rucked high for the wind” and, if it works at all, does so by recalling an earlier tradition (Lancelot Andrewes and Eliot) and keeping the language level high. But somehow all it is doing is struggling to keep afloat against the deadweight of its own cliché.

“Gloria II” reads like the meditative poems that this book is filled with – I’m not sure why it has wandered into this sequence. Again it is in a mode that Steele’s poetry occasionally leans towards, a Les Murrayish swipe at the Enlightenment:

Transit gloria mundi” say the begrudgers,
death’s name as tart as quince
on their relishing tongues, a barrel of doornails open
to the casual reach, and ash like talcum
in its trim can. It’s always a Bad Friday.

It’s not really my business but sniping at the uncharitable or begrudging or sarcastic or in-love-with-destruction-and-death tone of atheists is just argumentum ad hominem: the tone in which a proposition is expressed or the reason for its expression is not relevant to the issue of whether the proposition is true or false. I emphasise this because in Murray at his worse there is a good deal of pre-Enlightenment (ie medieval) vitriol and one looks at Steele, as a modern Jesuit, to see how a sixteenth century tradition of argument can be recreated in the modern world. One wants something better than informal logical fallacies.

“Credo” begins with a large perspective on history and the cosmos and then switches very beautifully to the local by engaging with a truck driver on the forecourt of the service station. As he drives through the stands of eucalypts he becomes a kind of wood-man and the poem then transitions to Jesus (“the other traveller, working his passage / from boy to man, country to city, / sawyer’s horse to the bloody work on a pole”). This is all wonderfully done, seamlessly producing a poem that is as well-made as a fine piece of wooden furniture. It is worth dwelling for a while on this element of Steele’s technique: many of the poems are driven by transitions or disjunctions which are announced in the language of argument or by a demotic turn of phrase. So the first three stanzas of a terrific poem, “Impedimenta”, begin: “Overdone? Well yes, it can be, as when . . .”, “For all I know, the Earl was an ascetic . . .” and “Whatever. Noble, gentle or simple, later . . .” and the final stanza enacts an elegant shift to the wry self, “Wary myself, instinctive investor in / body-armour and multiplied options . . .”. I could list many similar examples of this core poetic technique. I love this kind of poetry built on enjambment, disjunctions and the drive of logical syntax: I could devour quires of it and this selected has brilliant examples. At the back of my mind, however, is always the slight fear that this is a rhetoric, a way of producing a well-made poem that could conceivably be imitated and could certainly be parodied.

“Sanctus” deals with ecstatic celebration of the divine and takes its cue not from Christopher Smart this time but from Blake. At the end it provides us with some kind of definition of holiness “a trace / of light and sweetness taking flesh, / the heart ringing like crystal” before making a reasonably daring transition to helping up a little girl:

                                           Down the road,
          drooling a little, eyes rounded,
another of Mary’s children makes for the beach,
          every day a maceration.
Fall as we do, retrieved as we are, by the instant,
          my hand out if she’d like, it’s
                     Holy, Holy, Holy.

The last poem of this group, “Fires”, is built on a different meditative model to the one I have been describing. It accumulates and aggregates images of fire and concludes with Jesus walking towards us (a structure I have met in other poems about religious figures):

                                                       It’s true
          of the tramp from the north, his eyes


learning the country, change on his mind and its trying,
          good news aflame in his mouth,
no time lost of the little they let him have,
          burning and blessing and burning.

It’s just that here the connections are not as clear as in the kind of poems I’ve been describing and one has that sense that here is a poem where the reader is not at all immediately comfortable and we need to look at it carefully in order to make some sense of the landscape we have found ourselves in. There are a few poems in the book like this. One way of putting the difference might be to say that the poems of transition and disjunction occasionally sound like Hope (of the Casserius poem, perhaps) whereas these others sound occasionally like Peter Porter.

Finally, though not the last poem of the group, “Offerings” is a wonderful celebration of human creativity beginning (with the customary wide perspective) with the cave painters of Lascaux, and including Neolithic flint blades and Chinese oracle bones and coffin-handles. The final stanza surprisingly but very satisfyingly moves not only towards names but towards the tactile experience of the words themselves – something a poet is especially sensitive to but which everybody can relate to. And the method of the poem is not argument or analysis but listing:

And blessed are you who fit us all for naming -
          telling the arrow’s nock, the gladdie’s
corm, the Bellarmine jug, the Milky Way,
          spinnaker, follicle, Nome, Alaska:
catfish, deckchairs, the age to fall in love,
          gaspers and megrims and the Taj Mahal,
derricks, and El Dorado, and peach Melba.
          Blessed are you: the years toll,
and yet I chance my arm enough to say,
          (the brute tide swayed by the moon)
I bless the wine and the bread.

Just as the priest can bless the host so the poet can bless language (itself mysteriously connected to the word, or Word).

The last two poems of the sequence seem derived respectively from a statuary group and from a carved scene on a plaque. And concluding as these poems do with human creativity and its results reminds me how many of Steele’s poems are responses to painting and further reminds me that I have barely considered the thirty-five pages in this selected which collect these. That will just have to wait for another suitable occasion.

Lucy Dougan: White Clay

Artarmon: Giramondo, 2008, 91pp.

Lucy Dougan’s first book, Memory Shell, was published as one of Five Islands Press excellent series New Poets in 1998. It didn’t seem really successful to me at the time – the individual poems were usually fine, often interestingly mysterious, but one couldn’t pick up a consistency of voice or consistency in the poet’s conception of the way she wanted the poems to work. It is true that there was a thematic consistency: as the title suggests, memory is a key preoccupation as is loss – the first and last poems record the loss of a parent, though they do so in very different ways. Another poem, “John Clare” concludes that nothing, neither “act nor pilgrimage” will bring back what has gone and only “imagination, / that sly politician” will trick us. Memory Shell does contain a poem which has stayed with me, though, “The Novice Embalmer’s Art”, a work that circulates around the issues of loss, memory and recreation:

The Novice Embalmer’s art

preserves love’s trace
in a forensic desire
from sheet stain and soap splinter,
dog-eared pages and circled text,
the sleep-pressed bed’s declivity,
flowers picked and left.

develops an obsession
for the newly vacated,
is jealous of last words to others
and begins to circumnavigate
an erotics of the used 
that great shifting land of love’s detritus.

it is beautifully real, this land
yet subtle as another’s shadow,
fleeting as your breath on a page,
as fugitive as any presence,
only I can truly fix your hereness
now it is erased.

This new volume, White Clay, is a striking achievement and represents a quantum leap. Its interests are not largely different to those of Memory Shell but it is consistent in its notion of what a poem might look like. One might have reservations that the poetic method has limited its horizons compared to the experimental earlier book, but there is no doubt that this is a far more successful individual collection. Perhaps part of the reason for this is that its general consistency allows us to appreciate more of the complexity of its author’s view of life and the way that complexity inhabits the poems.

The structure of White Clay involves a large slab of essentially autobiographical poetry framed at beginning and end by a set of rather different sorts of poems. The central, autobiographical group looks as though it were conceived as an individual book-length work, perhaps in answer to the question: if memory cannot restore the past, what can it do with my own life? It introduces familiar material involved with living (parents, sex, children etc) but also a lot of material specific to this poet. This includes a slightly mysterious ancestry and consequently distance from a sister who might be only a half sister (I apologize for being vague about what are biographical facts but I have only the poems and my readings of them to go on), and a Neapolitan family connection.

The childhood material is coloured by a healthy (in Eastern states it would be called Vitalist) interest in sex. The title poem – one of many involving white clay – recounts the experience of making plaster statuettes in a school art class.

In high school
she moulded a man
and a woman.
When the work
got her palms
tight and dry
she was learning
something about touch.
. . . . .
The man lay along
the woman’s back.
The girl stroked the slip
from faceless starts
to uncertain ends
and found a word
that softened her inside. 


Another girl
called it fucking.
She tested this word
against the raw silk
limbs she had shaped.
There was no congress
between form and sound.

Boys looked at her now . . .

This story of erotic beginnings, fittingly couched in terms of art, moulding and control (she learns that though the bodies begin cold and finish hot “they could not be counted on / to do what her hands wanted”), continues in “Frangipanis” to sexual experiences:

Now, the bruised gift
you carry to my lips, my hair, brings back
the scent of love before care . . .

and then quickly to social/sexual perspectives in “Perfectly Good Evenings” where private school boys (and their tendency to spoil perfectly good evenings) are passed over in favour of “ramshackle boys, often motherless”:

And another sitting in a garden at dusk
rubbed the heel of his hand
from chin to cheek.
I never said, but that sweet rasping sound
wiped clean the reign of private school boys
and made me begin over all again with men.

Between “Frangipanis” and “Perfectly Good Evenings” comes an impressive poem, “The Rose Round”. The central character, in a circular rose garden, breaks a bowl with rose decorations at the edge. Thus this is set up symbolically as an art-life poem: the character has been reading romances where the heroines “won out / and were more careful / with the world / than me”. Her brother shows her that the bowl (not insignificantly made up of clay, fired in a furnace) has broken cleanly and can be repaired but the same cannot be done with life:

But I felt the wind
spring cold
through the ragged rose round
sprays of tears
on the brim.

The art-life connection remains one of the themes of this group, indeed of the entire book. In “Stunt Double” the character imagines living her life like the actresses in soap operas, speaking “queenly monosyllabic / lines like – don’t ask this from me now”, and wondering if she really wants her family’s “messy life”. In “Mannequin Brides” the clothes-dummies (works of art, conceivably made with clay) stand above the ordinary world like oracles or goddesses. They challenge the passersby with an image of perfection which highlights the fact that these people have lived lives of compromise. But the interesting turn of the poem comes at the point where it leaves this perspective to focus on imagining the mannequins entering the real world, abandoning the fixed perfections of commercialized romance.

Perhaps the brides will forsake the itch
of borrowed lace for the tat shops instead,
being careful not to wed
legends like Mine Forever.
They are escaping
the most important day of their lives.

The point here is that, though in art the bowls can be mended and re-achieve perfection, this is not the case in a real world made up of imperfections and compromises. It’s surprising how rare it is for writers (and other artists) to stress this.

Real messiness enters the autobiographical material at about this point. The exact issue is not absolutely clear, but it suggests the discovery that her biological father is different to her parent. I like the fact that at this crucial point, far from lapsing into a denotative my-life-as-trauma mode, the poetry becomes very dense. The central image is her older sister’s compact – its powder (more chalk) is used to make-up the central character’s face so that it can face the crisis of identity involved. In a sense it is made into a work of art. The central event is reconsidered as an expulsion from the garden, the image of Eden having been used liberally in the poems of erotic experience.

But that garden is gone
and my sister leaves me grown-up
games of gin and make-up
and a deep breath in, she promises,
will hold this spell for hiding tears.

I breathe with the lean-to for a while.
Its ship-like listings
forecast storms ahead.
I’m left to court strange blood
as the gin burns through
the buried scarlet of my cheek.
I try to straddle this uneven ground,
figurehead sturdy.
I might build an internal Armada.
The day overhead pales
and everything fades out
to a queen’s powder white.

And there are, indeed, storms ahead. The next poems deal with loss of father and mother and culminate in two important poems, “Everything Broken” and “White Clay II”. On my first reading of White Clay these made the profoundest impression, probably because they are comparatively free-standing meditations – though they undergo that pleasurable deepening as you get to know their context. “Everything Broken” begins with a broken up tea service and thinks about the way this stuff began as clay – it is material of life fired into art. But art carries with it the memory of the life in which it had its origins and so:

. . . . . 
When we’re very old
refusing food somewhere
a cup will sit
in the mind’s clearing ”“
the one thing saved
from everything broken
and the part of us going
will crave the intimate river
of its making – one toe
two – till we are cupped
in the mud we had
taken to our lips
daily – asking if things
were worth the life
we spent on them.

“White Clay II” describes finding a damaged statuette of her mother made by her father. It too thinks of the clay from which the piece was made:

. . . . .
There must have been 
a day, a time,
a starting point – one afternoon – 
when he carried the clay
close to his chest
and began to coax her out . . .

and seems to conclude by saying that this damaged statue is a kind of half-way point between the perfection of art and the messiness of life:

. . . . . 
She seems to say,
if clay could speak,
that there can be comfort 
in incompleteness.
His marks are echoes.
Like her, he wanted me to know ”“
a series of breakages,
a letting go.

The last poems of the book deal with these experiences more in the manner of the poems of Memory Shell. It is though poems are expected to justify themselves by being different in approach to their neighbouring poems. “Beneath Us” is a kind of surreal narrative where all of those who “went before” are imagined to be underwater swimmers above which we tread water. “The Chest” explores (again in a surreal way) the potentialities inherent in the symbol of the chest which contains all imaginative possibilities but which is also the human breast. “Strange Flowers” is a dream-poem in which, interestingly, the poet is instructed to look for “strange flowers” – in other words a dream tells her to look in dreams.

The obsessions of the body of the book recur, however. “Small Family of Saltimbanques” is a wonderful portrait of a family of performers who are probably symbolic of a life which is complete and un-messy: as perfect as a tea-cup or rose bowl:

. . . . . 
Their mother watches them with a poised neutrality.
She is with them the same way her oldest child dances.
At any moment she is tuned to another order, to almost
imperceptible openings. The colour of skin
beneath her eyes, a feather-blue in forest light.

The openness to erotic experience of the poems of early girlhood re-appears in “Female Pan” and there are plenty of poems in which one wants to read tokens, charms, and letters as symbols of the perfected life of art.

The book’s first poems are also about art but instead of clay and porcelain, the range is expanded to texts. The book’s fine first poem is built around a letter received from a friend in Spain and there are poems about books (The Transit of Venus, Anna Karenina) as well as a poem about finding lines transcribed from a poem by Rupert Brooke – it recalls Hope’s “Meditation on a Bone” though there is a big temporal gap between the Edwardian poet and the composer of that ferocious runic text. These are complex and interesting works and one doesn’t want to be reductive and see them merely as developments of the book’s general concern with art and life. However they have their own set of images. “Letter from Spain” is very much about edges. It begins “When I slip into the lane / there’s another order” and it is tempting to read this as a symbol of the tangential approach that poetry has to meaning, as is the phrase with which the poem concludes “working quietly at the edges”. The poems based on verbal texts seem to have interleaving as their central image: what matters is the way texts move in and out of our lives or, perhaps better, how we move in and out of texts. In the case of “The Quilt” in which a woman cuts up her dresses, makes a quilt from them and sends this to Gerald Brenan as a wedding gift, it is about how grief can create a work of art that someone can live in and under.

Jan Owen: Poems 1980-2008

Elwood: John Leonard Press, 2008, 328pp.

(also) Jan Owen: Blackberry Season (Warners Bay, NSW: Picaro Press, 2007). First published by Molonglo Press, 1997.

Jan Owen is one of those poets who becomes progressively more interesting not because the quality of the work improves radically or because they write a breakthrough work, but because it takes a number of books before readers can see the outlines of her distinctive imagination. Such a situation is an ideal one for the publication of a selected poems such as this. It is built out of generous (and, as far as I can see, well-chosen) selections from her first five books and contains a book length new work, Laughing in Greek. Reading it enables us to see how restlessly Owen’s poems move internally from the microscopic to the cosmic; from the present to the past (and vice versa); from the local to the exotic; from the abstract to the embodied and from the act of representing to the act of meditating. Given this restlessness it is no surprise that the poems are interested in rooms, horizons and frames – all things that must be crossed or exited when one of these shifts is made.

For a critic it is nice to be able to say that much of this can be found, inchoate, in her first book, Boy With A Telescope, published in 1986. The very first poem, “First Love”, describes an adolescent falling in love with a Titian, or rather, the subject of the Titian, when she should have been attending to lessons on Archimedes’ principle: the result is “a D in Physics”. It is a poem about art and reality but also about the frames that mark them out. When,

. . . . .
Ten years later I married:
a European with cool grey eyes,
a moustache,
pigskin gloves.

the young Englishman of the painting has stepped out of the frame into reality. And when, in “The Riding Habit”, a painting of a tailor is used as the basis for an imaginative filling out of the relationship between a noblewoman and her tailor, what is this but the author reversing the process by entering through the frame into the picture and describing those components that we cannot see?

In a series devoted to the Duc de Berry’s Tres Riches Heures in her second book, she describes the magical May painting at some length, seeing its picnic as an embodiment of the idealised courtly love tradition, though “torture, famine, poison, war” lie “outside the frame”. But the poems are not only interested in this move to what is outside the frame: the wonderful illuminations of this book are noted for the astronomical pictures at the head of each page. They bring the cosmos alongside the everyday in a way that Owen’s poetry often wants to do.

Her first book’s title poem, couched as a painting title, is an example of the movement from the local to the cosmic though here that is configured as the poem’s subject matter rather than as a meditative shift in the poem itself. The poet’s son surveys the stars:

Shadowy neanderthal, his silhouette
straightens to shake a fist
at the prowling clouds
then down again eagerly
to Saturn’s swirling rings
or Jupiter trailing his brood of moons.
The warm room of the family
is galaxies away;
tonight he charts the distance and the dark,
burning with a cool celestial fire;
names like charms spin in his head -
Betelgeuse, Rigel, Aldebaran -
they peal like bells in the cold air.
. . . . .

(It is probably no more than my own obsession but the conjunction of “charts” and “charms” here has always looked significant.) When, later in the poem, the poet asks, “And may he always stand so – / a little to one side of what he loves . . .” it encourages us to read the astronomy as no more than a symbol. But this is to reduce the poem to being one about motherly concern for the future growth of her offspring. What the rest of the poems in this selected teach us is that the stars and their perspective are serious matters indeed.

All of Owen’s books introduce the world of travel and the exotic about halfway through. In Boy With A Telescope we are introduced to Hungary; in Fingerprints on Light (1990) there is a suite of poems from Hungary, England, France, Israel and Turkey; in Night Rainbows (1994) there is Hungary once again and Venice; in Timedancing (2002) there are an important group of poems from Malaysia as well as some from Italy and in Laughing in Greek, poems from Holland and France. This is a long way from the world of exploiting comfortable cheap travel in poetry. It is about allowing the exotic into the frame of experience, and the frame of the book, as a balance, as a different kind of knowledge to the local. It may also explain a strange poem from Blackberry Season (1993). That book, recently republished by Picaro, has always worried me. It concerns itself entirely with the poet’s childhood past in Adelaide, providing a set of brief pictures of the child’s life. It is a warm book, nowhere exploiting any sensational trauma. In fact it is, possibly, a polemical work, objecting to the current fashion of seeing childhood as a site of abuse, and doing it by substituting loving parents and a close bond with her brother (in the first poem the child climbs into her baby brother’s cot and it is “agreed” between them that “there is room for both”). But these continual recollections don’t have the enlivening and distinctive twists that one is used to from Owen’s other poems: in other words, Blackberry Season is problematic in being the least problematic of her books. As a portrait of an Adelaide wartime childhood, there is no room for poems about travels to Hungary or Kuala Lumpur, but, in the middle of the book is a strange poem, “The Egyptian Room”, which seems to be a description of a room in a local museum. My guess is that this is, in miniature, the inclusion of the exotic, patterned to match the other books. Certainly the subject of the poem is allowed to influence the style so that it is not really like the other poems of Blackberry Season:

Stillness rose from the stone and wood
and linen here: they breathed in mysteries
lightly, carefully touching all they could -
the hunting mural, Khafra’s cold black knees.

. . . . .

The sun was high. I am Khepera at dawn Ra at noon and Tum at eventide.
They and the lotus pillar on the lawn
cast no shadows on the world outside.

In one of the most brilliant of these “exotic” poems, “The Pangolins” from Timedancing, the animal itself – and the poem devotes itself to describing it, to “capturing” it with great accuracy – does not appear until the end of the second stanza. The poem, up to that point, has focussed on the alienness of the setting in which dubious messages are read in dubious light:

Throwing the I Ching by the northern wall
(Mountain over Water: the cataract clears),
rereading the dubious message in dubious light,
dusk there is as brief as thirty years.
The dogs were off at the end of the garden, barking
at moonlight or monkeys, tenor and alto and bass.
Under the rambutans it was lighting-up time,
teetering lanterns in the bushes and grass

were practising emerald – becoming, yes, here;
the fireflies above were loopy with desire.
A pounding of fists south-east from the Surau
was the kampong boys on their Thursday drums. The air
yearned after the odd missed beat like a tired heart.
And then the stranger came. Out of the neat
fit of the dark. Self stood back. No-name
trundled up, snuffling the mulch with her slender snout.
. . . . .

The poet is as exotic a presence to the pangolin as the pangolin is to her. In other words the meeting with the exotic is far more complex than a stable self meeting something that it doesn’t usually find. The poet’s self, itself, is under pressure, surrounded by dubious messages. The pangolin is a homely, earthy phenomenon, but not a conventional one. The net of metaphor that the exotic elicits is Western: it has a scientific component (“a relaxed bell curve validated with scales / perfectly graded – 3:5:8:13”) and a mythical one, a variation of the Sphinx’s question to Oedipus (“What goes on four legs at night and none at noon?”.

Night Rainbows begins with a group of poems involving rooms and the best of them, “Left”, shows what can happen when the movements in time which are part of Owen’s poetic personality are harnessed to the image of the room:

Maybe coming late from the womb
I stayed out of sync
between is and was,
watching the ants or the clouds too long,
seeing things from behind,
tender and strange.
Days like provincial towns
with every gallery just on closing time
and the crowd streaming by
the other way.
Or the only open one
is an archaeology museum
and very quiet.
I stare alone at spearheads
and stone axes marching back
to the twenty-fifth millennium BC
with a firm declaration of war.
Four rooms ahead
the guided tour has sighted Ur.
Back here, some bungling guard
has bolted the intervening door.
I’m left in the Palaeolithic,
trying to dream up fire.

It is not a poem that covers all the issues of her poetry and of her position within it but it does, in the third and fourth lines, speak about the issue of the present and the past and of the intently local perspective as opposed to the wider one.

And so to Laughing in Greek. I don’t think this will ever be considered the most likeable or successful of Owen’s books: it is more ambitious than the earlier ones but has too many flawed poems in it for that to happen. Like all of her books it begins with a set of poems that outline the book’s themes. As with Night Rainbows, here these are room poems. Thematically, however, they want to be about philosophical – at least, both metaphysical and epistemological – issues. The first, “Room”, begins with the consequences of the Enlightenment:

Say, what went wrong
was what went right: the question mark
reared up against the word
and down that sinuous vertical doubt
abstractions slid to elbow out
visible angels, solid gods.

and goes on to consider the human response to this:

. . . . .
We’re given a little room, a little scene
to reason reason out and guess
dimensions surging from the other side.
But is there “side” beyond its word,
what deepens the abyss when we say “fall”?
Why ever call such shadows up?
Look how the night sky wheels around -
Antares, Fomalhaut, Achernar, Sol,
time-lapse traffic grave with light
like our slipstream of love and fear.
And a human hand held out is half a star.

I haven’t quoted this poem at length out of admiration. Like so many of the poems in the first part of Laughing in Greek it doesn’t seem successful in its attempt to ratchet up the level of abstraction. But it does contain the issues that I have been speaking of. Here the room represents the limits of ordinary perception, our “frame” or “horizon” – to use a word common in Owen’s poetry. Words do not invoke the dimensions beyond (a nod to the idea of humans as language and language-limited creatures) but they exist in our experience of the cosmos which is, itself, contained in magical, iconic names such as Antares. Perhaps I’m leery about this poem because I disagree with it: I think it makes the mistake of assuming that the scepticism of the Enlightenment is an attack on the notion of other dimensions whereas, at its best, the scepticism of the Enlightenment is an attack on fraudulent, superstitious and lying representations of the other dimensions.

The second poem, “Ante-Room”, is as unsuccessful as the first but interesting because it circles around the issue of language. The specific issue is metaphor, one of those imaginative techniques whereby language tries to reach beyond the frame of mundane apprehensions of reality. According to my reading of this difficult poem, metaphor controls the door whereby “concepts craving life” – including, presumably, other dimensions – might, like petitioners in an ancient court, have access to an absolute ground of reality. The last part of the poem is a kind of mildly comic lament for the author’s own descent into adulthood (or into a post-Enlightenment historical period – depending on one’s reading):

Before joy tamed its alphabet to words
or peacock intellect flaunted its span,
the here and now was clearly lesson one
but all I learnt is scattered to the birds,

food for the moon and manna for the sun.
Dear drifting self, best come hard round,
your captain’s crazy and your first mate’s blind,
surly mongrels. Try a different tune.

The third of these first poems, “Corridor” is the densest of all and written in a compressed, very unattractive style. In its deliberately bathetic quatrains it sounds a bit like “The Phoenix and the Turtle” or Peter Porter on a bad day:

What helical two-step slides through us?
Hypnotized by jamais-vu
we’d strip the face off with the mask,
the mouth for me, the eyes for you.

And so on: yes it does make sense but it is not an attractive path for Owen’s poetry to trace.

Fittingly, the poems of travel-experience are prefaced by a long and very abstract meditation on the nature of travel itself, “Travelling towards the Evidence”. Like the first poems of the book, it is difficult and not really successful – though those two things are not related. What does work in the poem are the rapid modulations from meditation to moments of actual travel – there are brilliant moments in which you get the sense that the poem has suddenly set you down in the real:

Cynicism’s copper and lime

is a coin on the tongue
for Charon’s deep pockets; time
as a brief ID is the happiest fake.
What god of the unlikely gets us here?

With Pepe and Isabelle, say,
and the saturnine stare
of twelve cooked goats’ heads
watching us sip goat broth

in Jemaa El Fna . . .

The poems that follow this are more like the travel poems of the earlier books and are a mixed bag of attractive pieces. Noteworthy, perhaps, are “Levity” which records the story of the Chevalier de la Barre who, at nineteen, was tortured and killed for contempt of the church (and owning dirty books as well as reading Voltaire). In a sense, he is one of the iconic heroes of the French Enlightenment and it might be unusual to see a poet, in a book generally doubtful about that value of that historical event, celebrating him. But the poem may be more about the backpackers who, today, “size up the same scene”, the argument being that violent intolerance can exist in contradictory ideologies – the contemporary secular as well as the pre-Enlightenment Catholic. Also impressive is the last of the group, “Salt”. A brilliant poem not about arriving or experiencing but about leaving, it details all the aspects of existence that one leaves behind beginning with the “gap-toothed men untangling nets”, going on to the “windows round the waterfront” and finishing with the clock-tower spire, the last thing seen, which is “a candle for what you were”.

The best poems of Laughing in Greek are the ones that come at the end of the book, after the travel poems. “Shifting the Dark” is a kind of search for a totem. It begins with a list of creatures that have appeared before in Owen’s poetry as connected with joy: the butterflies that once congregated around her head, the gnats and the resurrection beetle, the scarab, that appears in “Beetles” (from Fingerprints on Light) and “Egyptian Room”. It then rejects the family totem, the bee, in favour of the firefly (a creature which has also appeared in earlier poems, notably in Timedancing.

. . . . .
I choose the spirit green of fireflies,

drifting afterthoughts at the river’s edge,
ghost shuttles, elf breath, nimbus of limbo.

Think of a light left on past any hope of return,
oblivion underwriting desire;

they are heart space from the void,
round trips shifting the dark

with the simplest argument,
I shine therefore I am.

Such crosslife clues for stars,
these perfect strangers do no harm.

It is no surprise that this totemic animal should be invoked in terms of movement, of shuttling between states, since that is so much part of Owen’s poetic. No surprise, also, that the second last line sees them as one of the counterparts in our lives of the cosmic.

“Touching This Matter” and “The Trellis Fence” are big, set-piece meditative poems. The former begins with detailed portraits of insects responding to the triggers of instinct and its first image, of ants crawling across a sunny patch of wall, is described in typically Owen terms so that the sun, the cosmic, has landed on the wall. Issues of instinct lead to thoughts about the status of the mind and the human:

. . . . .
Flatlandedly, I’m peering over the rim
of non-existent time and edgeless space

wondering whether it’s maths or madness or God . . .

before (always something that poetry does well) modulating to the poet in an actual, physical location but a physical location in which time is dissolved:

I fall to picking up sticks, purposeful, brisk,
as if for a fire, as if it’s getting late;

. . . . .

I’m back in my grandparents’ garden
gathering almond husks to throw at the chooks.

We’ve ample space between our ears
for time the symbiote.
“Later,” we promise Poppy, not yet two,
and she nods, “Uh,” placated. And will wait.

The last of these poems is “The Offhand Angel”, significant because it deals with poetry as well as the other issues of Owen’s work. It is significant also because it speaks in terms of balances between the perspectives that dominate the poetry and of the shuttling movement between them that is so characteristic of Owen’s method. The offhand angel is, himself, a kind of muse; a spokesman for another dimension that is, after all, perhaps no more than a different hemisphere of the poet’s brain. He begins outside of the frame but is gradually, in the course of the poem, incarnated to the point where the poet can, at the end, say “Come through . . . Come in”.

Philip Neilsen: Without an Alibi

Cambridge, UK: Salt Publishing, 2008), 111pp.

Philip Neilsen is a poet whose work ought to be better known. There are a number of volumes preceding this new Salt Publishing book including two small Gargoyle Poets pamphlets as well as the full length Life Movies of 1981 and, though the poems have appeared irregularly, it all amounts to a fairly substantial output even for a poet in his late fifties. Somehow it seems to have glided under the radar of anthologists and translators and that is a pity since there is much to admire – and, as publisher of two and a half of these volumes, haud inexpertus loquor. One of the things that Neilsen does which may make him a poet of our time is articulate fear. In We’ll All Go Together (a shared book with Barry O’Donohue, 1984) this was fear of nuclear annihilation. In this new work, Without an Alibi, it seems, on the surface at least, fear of ecological catastrophe. But I don’t know that fear is a response that, in itself, has ever produced a good poem. Certainly panic hasn’t – to my knowledge. What we get from Neilsen, and it is his characteristic poetic movement, is a way in which assertiveness (always something that can sustain a poem) deals with fear.

Without an Alibi has two sections. The first is devoted to the forest. Here we meet a fear for the forest but it is balanced by a fear of the forest. The first of these fears resolves itself as a fear of reductionism (always a good thing to fear). Robinson Crusoe, in the third poem of a sequence, “Literary Forests”, looks at a tree and sees “congealed / within it a sled, five stout barrels, a fort” – that is, for all our sympathy for someone trying to survive in the wild, his view of life (late-seventeenth century, mercantile, practical) reduces the tree to the sum total of its value to him. Finally Crusoe is stranded on “a thin strip of sand” and behind him “indistinguishable groves hovered, / hissing with insects, promiscuous scents, / backward-looking, taboo.” Paradoxically, he hopes for a miracle, that the ocean “might one day puff its cheeks and send ships, / wooden angels flying for captains of industry, / the bold ecstatic prayer that is engineering.”

In these early poems in the book, the forest is best represented by the wild-woods (of The Wind in the Willows) and there is nothing cosy about the experiences they offer. The fear is for the various ways in which their potent magic is reduced. In “The Imperial Forest” the Amazon is reduced to a place from which drugs can be brought to Europe:

. . . . .
Adventure and profit are multiplied
by the fruits of bark and seed,
the magic, once-secret garden,
a home-brand pharmacopeia.

In another poem, early Christian saints defeat the ancient spirits of the forest in Germany and in “The Fairy-Tale Forest” the dread forest of Germanic folktales becomes properly sanitised – the wolf of Red Riding Hood does anger-management classes, Pooh and Piglet study hospitality at a polytechnic until finally:

. . . . .
All the woods were accessible and safe
as Woolworth’s. At night they were patrolled
by axemen, monitored by CCTV. But sometimes
the forest folk peered out at the trees hung
with safety lanterns, paths lined with hand rails,
and yearned for unimaginable menace.

This seems nicely to sum up the paradox in these poems. The fear is for a reductive process which will remove the fear of the forest. And it is continued in another fine comic poem “Public Liability”. Here, the civic fathers, motivated by childhood terrors (“they are the lost child again, / running through a forest / from animal noises”) destroy the city’s trees and those they have left are reduced to trying to “project benevolence, avuncular interest”, they “try not to stir alarmingly in the breeze.”

So what is it that the wild-wood represents and which is valuable enough that we should overcome our fear of it? In Tolkien’s world, it is a kind of social/ecological harmony that is threatened by the rapid changes that go on in wartime. In Neilsen’s poetic world, it seems to be either the wellsprings of the imagination or a part of the world not subjected to a contemporary fashion of brainless mercantile reductionism. A crucial poem here is “Brisbane, 1959-1960” – dedicated to David Malouf and very Maloufian in style and sentiment. It begins by recounting the childhood world of the encroaching bush (a sensibility that the civic fathers of the previously discussed poem have not outgrown):

Each night the bush moves closer
to the suburb and the mosquito net,
and in winter the wolves come.

Outside my parents’ house,
the sweet-pea trellis, Oleanders,
dissolve into fir trees.

At dawn the pack is drunk with moon,
running the rim of hills that holds us here.

Still half in sleep, lungs swollen,
I cough phlegm into a china bowl.
The grey tree tops are jagged, as obvious
to me as paw prints on linoleum.

Why does the child imagine that there are wolves on the south side of Brisbane? They must come from the world of European folktale brought over to Australia by English settlers. Or is the idea here that all children have night terrors related to the natural world and the form they take is unimportant? At any rate the poem’s second section describes the child, one year older, accidentally setting fire to the bush. The poem finishes:

Fire, asthma, the genial doctor’s night visits
to administer adrenalin injections.

Lizards appear again in the charred bark,
beetles luminous as watch dials.
But no wolves rise from the ashes.

This poem is important because it is a personal one detailing how an individual can lose the fear of the wild-wood. The issue that makes this a complex poem, rather than a good performance, is the fact that we are not exactly sure whether getting rid of the wolves of nightmare is a good thing or a bad thing. There are no easy targets in this poem: no civic fathers, no neighbouring vandals, no blinkered imperial merchants. Two other poems in this section belong to this more lyrical, open-ended mode. “The Need for Seclusion” talks, very elegantly, of the mind-expanding effects of wilderness, but seems to associate it with a return to infantile perception:

. . . . .
Though we lack the migratory path
of geese to the wetlands,
our radar leads us back
to the first database,
evergreen and deciduous,
a mental woodland
many days wider than
Thoreau’s cabin on the pond.

And in “Death Will be Unsighted” (a title with a delicate allusion to Thomas’s “And Death Shall Have no Dominion”), the primal fear of death is dispersed by the forest “this anchor to earth / this complicated light . . .” How does the experience of the forest lead to an overcoming of the fear of death? I think by associating it with the social (“the creaky staircase, / the level crossing, or beery pub”). What I like about the conclusion of this poem is that it doesn’t try to rationalise the experience of the forest: it goes on narrating the effect it has on the mind and the question of death simply melts away from the poem:

Wild plums grow in tangled weight
each September, and over there
is a courtesy of wildflowers
where the thinking animal falters
beneath a flock of parrots,
is suddenly wrapped
in the same instinctive colours,
the details of existence brilliant,
more precise,
walking on dusk.

After the forest, what next? We might expect more concentration on the social world. The second section of the book is called “Metamorphosis” and it is a puzzling title that sets the mind scurrying. The final poem of the book shares this title and is an inversion of Kafka’s story: here a beetle turns into a writer and has to deal with a lot of problems including the bleak fact that the books containing the writing that the beetle is forced to do in his new incarnation will ultimately be “consumed / by insects”. How should we read this? Does it mean that possessing the requisite skills to be a writer turns you into the one person capable of seeing the futility of the process. It would be a bleak vision with which to conclude a book that does have a positive core – the forest. Does it refer to the fact that writing is contained in books which are processed out of forests and which will, courtesy of beetles and their friends, return eventually to the natural world? This would make it a bleak meditation on the function of consciousness and, as such, would fit in with a poem like “The Anteater” which begins this section. In this poem human behaviour in current wars is detached from the preferred metaphor of the anteater (which locates its prey precisely and with minimum collateral damage) and lined up with the metaphor of Swift’s yahoos:

In the desert dawn
a machine with polished snout
sniffs the confusing air.
If it had a heart
it would flirt with indecision.
History beckons us backwards:
we leave the jungle
for the grassy plains,
manipulate sticks,
discover language,
still shriek and shake our paws.
Swift’s man-monkeys
rattling our digital spanners.

Metamorphosis (incidentally the name of a poem of Neilsen’s second book) might also, conceivably, refer to Neilsen’s tactics of finding the basis for a strong poetic voice amongst themes of angst and fear. Changing yourself into the bluff speaker of an often ironically positioned monologue is one of these. A poem from Life Movies begins: “When Alice got back from Wonderland / she had a few questions to ask” and “Lewis Carroll’s Counsellor” from this book begins: “And so, reverend, when you took / those photos of young girls, / you thought you were preserving / a memory of innocence, is that right?”.

Whatever the answer, the second section of Without an Alibi has poems with the same themes as the first but with a lot more humour. “Harry Potter Book 8” tells us what happens in a world where the magic and terror (like the magic and terror of the wild wood) have been removed: Harry becomes headmaster of a sanitised Hogwarts, Voldemort enters a retirement home, Hermione’s career descends to joining a pop band:

And Harry, now middle-aged, paunchy,
two novels published to mixed reviews,
takes to visiting the magic wood each night,
walking marathon, thoughtful miles like Dickens.
The wood seems smaller than in his childhood,
and dark shapes follow him everywhere.
He thinks of slowing so they can draw closer,
to see if he recognises anything in their faces.
He considers never going home to Ginny or the kids.
Just staying here
where there is always more to wonder at
than to forget or justify.

This kind of comic inversion is something Neilsen has always done well, partly because he can do a confident narrator’s voice so well. It is a light-verse genre but here given depth by being consistent, thematically, with the book in which it appears.

“The Romance of the Clockmakers” is a comic, symbolic scenario in which Charlotte of Paris, weighing up her suitors, is won over by the one who has invented the spiral spring. The wedding is happy but the poem finishes with yet another image of reduction:

Charlotte relished the certainty of measure,
freed from the sun’s uneven passage,
the autumnal loss of Nature’s treasures.
The coach sprang and sped on polished wheels,
dashed from cobbles to country lanes,
past peasants at work in the shrinking fields.

The best poem of Without an Alibi is, I think, “The Lie of Biology”. It is one of those poems one meets often in books where the author is speaking very personally but in a way that readers find a fraction equivocal. There are no double fears here, but there is a concern for the author’s personality and his place in things. It might also be an allegory about the scenario poems that Neilsen does so well – or at least about where the author is located in such poems. Four stanzas are devoted to each of the four grandparents, the first three describe photos of visits made in which the author consistently looks out of place: he has a Dennis Lillie moustache in Southampton, a padded jacket among sun-seekers in Scotland and a “long-haired / conscientious objector” look among the culture of officers and bureaucrats of Konigsberg. The final stanza is devoted to an imaginary photograph from a yet-to-be-made visit:

Great grandfather Nilsson left Bergen
in 1874 for the Windjammers and tropical
Queensland. I am delaying this fourth
and final trip, the one to Norway.
I can see the photo already. There I am,
standing by the multi-coloured boats glistening
with rain, or on the edge of the fiord
with a beanie pulled down over my ears,
looking genetically uncomfortable,
trying to smile my way into the frame.

Judith Bishop: Event: Poems

Cambridge, UK: Salt, 2007, 68pp.

Judith Bishop’s brilliant first book, Event, appeared last year and if I’ve taken some time writing about it, it is because there is a lot to absorb and it doesn’t metabolize easily. Event has a quality shared by other first books (John Tranter’s Parallax comes to mind) of being highly organized while, at the same time, being composed of different sorts of poems.

There is almost a defensive quality about this, as though the author felt that it was imperative to pre-empt any descriptions involving the word “grab-bag”. It is divided into four sections with a single poem “Interval” in the middle. Allotted to different sections are poems which clearly belong (in the sense of “were written”) in groups. These include the poems about paintings and some prose poems about relationships – all are broken up and dispersed throughout the book. Even the central narrative sequence about Cortes’ translator and mistress in the conquest of Mexico is spread across three of the sections, as though Dona Marina found her life turning up in the pages of different books. The variety of poems makes it a really difficult book to feel confident about because the reader is challenged not only by a variety of interests but also by a variety of modes.

One tactic is to step back and take a distanced, impressionist view. The common themes of these poems turn out to be love, loss, betrayal and language. At a slightly higher resolution, the things the poems seem sensitive to, and are animated by, include: visitations and arrivals (the latter being the former seen from a different perspective), links between micro and macro perspectives, and links between the animal world and the human.

Event opens with two stunning poems, either of which is enough to ensure that this is a book to be taken very seriously. The second of them, “Desert Wind”, describes an urban winter landscape which, in a powerful and (to the reader) unexpected transformation, becomes something like a painting of a
desert scene:

High, bright winter morning: the tenement’s tree-antlers
clatter on each corner and the stepping black spines are smooth
and glossy as mirages; framed, the scene shines as if transported to a desert,
and never (since this winter day will not end hereafter, having left
the field of time), will the trees
flicker leaves again or carry broods of flowers . . .

The scene may be out of time but it doesn’t preclude the book’s first “arrival” – a “random bird” which

           alights, hoarse-throated after days of luckless questing
for a moth or a spider that has cellared spring rains in its body, so honeying
the juices of itself . . .

Later in the poem a snake arrives, searching for dead hummingbirds. The poem finishes on a note of optimism when “a human voice” (most likely the lover’s but, considering the ambiguities of “yours”, conceivably the poet’s or even the reader’s) rises “like a yam tendril” to animate the objects of this strange tableau. But it is the two birds of “Desert Wind” that I want to stay with.

There are birds everywhere in Event. The book’s second section has, pretty well, one per poem. In a description of Rembrandt’s “Presentation in the Temple” they figure as a simile which concludes a poem in which we don’t expect birds to appear at all “As the child’s foot stutters / like a just-fledged bird”. But the shock of the simile matches the shock of the birth of the divine child: one disturbs the poem, the other the universe. Birds seem symbols of arrivals from different dimensions. Many other poets are, pre-eminently, poets of annunciation in that they have imaginations strongly moved by the arrival of messengers (usually angels) from other worlds. The best of such poets don’t simply let the matter rest there though. Bishop wants to explore the origins of the arrivals, their perception of the new world and the result of the clash of the worlds that the bird bridges.

Which is a clumsy segue to the central narrative poems of Event, the sequence devoted to the Spanish conquest of Mexico, seen from the point of view of the Nahuatl/Mayan/Spanish speaker who accompanied Cortes as guide and mistress, most notably at his entrance into Tenochtitlan. The arrival of the Spanish is, of course, from the Aztec perspective, the arrival to end all arrivals: it simply puts an end to their empire. I’ve always thought of it as an example (like the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem) of a consistent, mythically-oriented culture suddenly being confronted by wider perspectives: in other words, reality or history or the world comes visiting. There are birds everywhere in this story: Montezuma identified the Spaniards with Quetzalcoatl the bird-serpent god whose return they awaited (no accident, then, that the two arrivals in “Desert Wind” are a bird and a snake). In the first poem of this eight poem sequence, Dona Marina (as a child) breaks the neck of a hummingbird which has been ejected from its nest. One of the great things about reading Event is that it made me read Inga Clendinnen’s brilliant Aztecs: An Interpretation, and I owe to that book knowledge of the fact that, in their afterlife, brave Aztec warriors returned to earth incarnated as hummingbirds or butterflies. So, symbolically, Dona Marina destroys the warrior tradition of the Aztecs. Marina’s Nahuatl name means “grass” and in the third poem she imagines the gods arriving like winds:

Something builds across the skies today: a bent
to which the maize submits. These are the wind
bridges which the gods may use to visit us.
If they should come to break us,

I’ll desire them, I’ll arch. Grass is
as grass does . . .

The ferocity of the Aztec’s pantheon of gods makes them unusually pliant in the face of the invaders.

Arrivals require translators since an arrival can also be a linguistic irruption. One of the themes of this book is the way language betrays: it forms much of the material of the poems of the third section. It is fitting then that the final act of Dona Marina’s poem is an act of betrayal. An old woman offers to marry Marina to her son and lets slip that a revolt is being prepared in Cholula. Marina betrays the revolt to Cortes, provoking the famous massacre.

Birds are also associated in this book with scale. Many of the poems relate to the idea of a double perspective. The bird’s eye view (I did try not to commit that pun) is contrasted with a sensitivity to the world at a micro-level. The fourth poem of the book, the very fine “It Begins Where You Stand”, moves like a camera lens (or flying bird’s view) from the speaker to a small bird tapping on a window pane. This bird has a message but it is not about history or betrayal: it is about the intuition of the macro-event:

. . . . .
As the boy groans, the cardinal morse-codes her intuition
that the wind, within the hour, will have turned
toward the east;
and spawned a tornado in its wake

In “Vertigo” a blackbird arrives, “swooping out of her alarm”. “What is scale?” the poem asks, why does someone anxious to welcome “injured dogs, and kids / who come with bloodied knees” not respond to the far larger scale disasters of the world occurring at a pitch “lower than the melodies / familiar to your bones”?

The book, as a whole, wants to push us towards expanding the range of the signals we can absorb. There are three poems (also spread throughout the book) which signal their relatedness by having their titles in inverted commas. The first of them, “’And the Clouds Cleared the Sky . . .’” describes another desert wind. This wind is an arrival that does not touch the world of objects but alters our perspective of them:

. . . . .
                                        and the high,
efficient winds didn’t lift a dried leaf

or brush a sparrow’s wing, but caused a white dress and pine table
(white pine, the table dressed) to shine much more acutely, just as if

each form exploded and reformed, or blurred its outline then
resharpened at a higher resolution; or as if our

resolution was a matter of the light, or the timing of those changes
no-one owns, but all absorb . . .

The last of these three poems is the final poem of the book, “’The Chords of Snow Melting . . .’” Although I’m not sure that I understand the last line – which signals the author’s stake in the poem – there is no doubt that the bird has a hyper-sensitivity to the infinitely microscopic. And like the bird of “It Begins Where you Stand”, the bird which is introduced to share this poem with the humans can intuit the macro in the micro:

The chords of snow melting are unheard, perhaps, by any but the bird,
attuned with all its body

to the sawings of a grass blade or a seed falling from its flower head,
meaning danger, or future,

or the wind slowly gathering in force.
But see the snow – how in melting, it clarifies.

A pitch, low or high, must be sung by water molecules uncoupling
small attractions, gaining force and mutual distance.

Restless one, I know.
The songs we’re singing are as clear.

Other poems from Event focus on this juxtaposing of the human world and the animal world. “Rabbit”, which I first met in Judith Beveridge’s The Best Australian Poetry, 2006, takes a fresh look at this trope asking from the rabbit help in the task of reclaiming the animal in the human:

. . . . .
Rabbit, laid ragged at the fold of day’s field, where the sparrow-hawk stretched
the star’s scarf across her wing: with your velvet heart, you occupied
the blood’s old theatre: with your hushed ballet of spring, you
performed the coiled rites you have taught us tonight: showed our ropes of matter cut
by the one puppet-master, hanging in his own winds.

Another, lesser, poem, “The Birds Reported from the South”, reminds us that the hyper-sensitive world of the bird is one we can acknowledge but that ultimately there is a distance between us, even though we like to believe we are travelling in the same direction:

. . . . .
A briefly mutual gaze is the whole of our acquaintance,
my high-minded gull, my dear, quixotic mynah:
our eyes betray a knowledge of rigidity onstage,
then you turn away softly, to toss a twig or blade.

Hail, red-eyed pigeon; prancing sparrow, hail.
Tonight we file together, at some distance, to the show.

Birds and winds come from above, of course. And there is a strong sense in Event of the disposition of things on a vertical scale. The gods, in other words, do come from above rather than from the side. One of the painting-poems, “Sorretto da Quattro Angeli”, imagines the deposition as a falling from divinity to humanity and matches it against a young man suiciding by jumping out of a window during the Kosovo war. And a complicated poem, “Threnody”, begins with a mirror on a rubbish dump reflecting the blue sky and briefly connecting the lower with the upper worlds. In two poems, bees are trapped by surface tension and die by slowly giving up their body warmth to the lower world of the sea.

In this review I’ve dealt only lightly with the personal drama that underlies so many of these poems. I’m not being especially tactful here, it is more a result of an interpretive nervousness. No-one minds making a mistake about an author’s conception of, say, the animal world, but one doesn’t want to make a mistake about an author’s emotional life! Three of the prose poems are vey much about this, but “The Indifferent”, “Definition of a Place” and “Epistles” all share a sensitivity to what might be called the schematics of place: there are horizontal axes to be observed as well as vertical ones. In the first of these, the author walks the middle ground of the littoral between the low-tide sea and the high-tide detritus of “gull bones and cuttlefish blades” and in the second the lovers are at the bank of a creek with a bridge above them “holding up the shallow arc a bomb of swallows pitched under”. “Epistles”, the third, is the most complex of them but its opening – which unites virtually all of the things I have been speaking about – emphasises its importance:

Birds, insects plummet through our days like meteors, visitations, breaking the immutable glass fixed upon our sight by sunlight. It’s then we see the planets most vividly, through those quick breaches in the air: we see how terribly far from us they are. You, do you come closer to me than these falling wings, do you come, are you there, am I yours, in your own transparent orbit?

The poem finishes with a final arrival from above, a leaf which must be put on the stream and sent, against “the one direction of life”, up the stream towards the source.

As I said in opening, these poems seem to have been written over a long stretch of time. Moreover they seem (and it is only a reader’s impression) to have been written in small, consistent batches. One of the common features of first books is that they collect work from a far longer period than any subsequent book and so there is a kind of archeology involved in reading them. Bishop’s poems, at least on the evidence of those selected and arranged in Event, are very consistent in their interests and sensitivities. And these sensitivities – to arrival, to the layout of space, to translation (a word deriving from a spatial metaphor) – are engaging and rich in poetic potential. You want to see a second book, quickly.

Alan Wearne: The Australian Popular Songbook

Artarmon: Giramondo, 2008, 93pp.

To readers used to Wearne’s previous massive poems (The Nightmarkets and The Lovemakers), this new book will come as something of a surprise. It is made up of three parts. In the first, which gives its name to the book, there are four sections each of seven poems, all variously rhymed sonnets (apart from two villanelles and a set of triplets). The second part is a set of eleven “Metropolitan Poems” and the third is a seven page dramatic monologue, “Breakfast with Darky”. That is: forty short, individual, unconnected poems. The structure seems to be that the poems of the first part are inspired by the popular songs that become their titles, while those of the second part are inspired by individual suburbs in Melbourne or Sydney – generally, these suburbs form at least part of the title.

Wearne is Australia’s great master of poetic narrative, but one wouldn’t want to treat his work as a consistent whole. The monologues from his first book, Public Relations, brilliant, small poems like “A Molester’s Fortune”, “Warburton, 1910” and “After Adultery” are, in a way, closer to the monologues here than are those of his first two full-scale narrative poems, “Out Here” (of 1976) and The Nightmarkets (of 1986). But in other ways, these poems do reflect the kind of developments going on in The Lovemakers. One of the (very many) remarkable things about that enormous tour de force was the comic poem of the second last section in which the love-lifes of two of the book’s major characters were tied up. The Nightmarkets had been very serious and po-faced and would never have accommodated the kind of slightly manic grotesquerie of:

     Neil was in Melbourne attending a funeral,
he called up his old flame to check out her scene.
     She was delighted and jumped at a meeting,
before he’d fly out from Tullamarine.

And so on through twenty stanzas each finishing with the “lovely liquid” name (to quote an earlier Prime Minister) of Melbourne’s airport.

But there is a lot of this in The Australian Popular Songbook. Indeed any poem which is not a full monologue, rigidly in character, is likely to have a least a touch of this larky style. Patrick White’s typical though imaginary suburb of Sarsaparilla is celebrated by a comic poem done in calypso style (the music is included in the book):

Fifty years past, for a fact,
on some semi-rural tract,
lived a man whose prayers asked, “Boss,
what on earth can follow Voss?”
Question answered, thus he wrote
(as my ballad shall denote)
in his hardly elfin grot:
Riders in the Chariot.

Riders in the Chariot,
ev’ry page a new bon mot,
't's to cross and 'i's to dot,
Riders in the Chariot.

and so on through eight comic stanzas. “Poem for Cathy Coleborne” an equivocal celebration of Fitzroy in the nineties is another comically rhyming piece. This process of allowing the grotesque in to what might otherwise be profound Wearnian meditations on the implications of not only what city his characters live in, but what suburb, even what street, they live in, intrigues me. While “Out Here” was done in impeccable blank verse (the default mode for the dramatic monologue), The Nightmarkets was full of different verse forms, some syllabic, some accentual. But the latter poem was never less than deadly serious. In this new book, either Wearne’s interest in odd verse forms has encouraged the humorous and bathetic, or the desire to be humorous has legitimated the choice of some challenging forms. And complicating this is the fact that for poets of Wearne’s generation, form itself is not the sine qua non of poetry. When such poets do write in complex forms – sestinas, villanelles, and the ever present and irritating (at least to me) pantoums – there is always a postmodern sense of mocking performance about what they do. It is as though they were saying: “I am writing a sonnet but I am just using the formal requirements in a mechanical way. Don’t take them too seriously, the soul of the poem does not lie in them. And expect some deliberately bathetic fulfilling of the formal rules. It’s a game”.

Although The Australian Popular Songbook seems a long way from the epic dimensions and ambitions of The Lovemakers, it does carry over a lot of its concerns. The first poem, for example, inspired by “Down Under”, a pop song even I know, is about the Mr Asia drug syndicate which figures so prominently in The Lovemakers. It also recalls The Lovemakers technically because the speaking voice hovers somewhere between character and author. One of the devices of The Lovemakers was the use of a voice which gave the impression that it had been affected by the world in which it was operating – using its slang, for example, but still with the underlying accents and syntax of the author. In “Down Under”, someone is getting inspired enough to think about importing drugs from South East Asia:

. . . . .
                               And, if here the law
Is “Fit in Western Freak”, well, a brain may yet take off
to one stoned night you tripped into their pigshit trough
but rose back grinning at the tribesmen; or that pleasing twelve hour lockjaw
session and how “With gear like this” you mused,
“not merely fortunes but our souls are made!”
     So how?
                    Well, one mate’s ex-in-law’s this dodgy nark,
whilst another (he’s fevered with the prospects!) reckons on someone who’s
“Like something someplace in some gemstone trade . . .”
     “G’day,” you’ll hear a sardonic Kiwi mutter, “I’m Terry Clark.”

Another poem about the same evil organization is “Neutral Bay” from the second part of the book. Here we are in the much more conventional world (technically speaking) of the monologue. The speaker is one of the young women who couriered the heroin back to Australia in their luggage:

         I’d get in from the airport after midnight
and wait a day, till someone came around,
unloaded me and made me Thanks sweetheart
$15,000 richer. Then I’d hardly be noticed,
not till Allison called, or Kay, and we went off to buy
all those incredible clothes.
. . . . .

Interestingly, it is this simpler mode which is the one chosen to bear the brunt of the ethical perspective on the drug syndicate. When the speaker flies home to see her parents the gossip is of how “someone’s kid was ‘into drugs’, / always someone’s kid and always drugs”. The courier, seeing the results of the trade, wants to escape but is addicted to the money in the same way that the kids are addicted to the drugs:

Who knows what The Organisation’s doing
right now: cutting, grinding and packing;
delivering, collecting and waiting
and how I never wanted to feel damn special again.
But Thanks a lot sweetheart of course I did.

“Neutral Bay” is preceded in the Metropolitan Poems section by “Chatswood: Ruth Nash Speaks”. Here the subject is, ostensibly, the notorious Bogle/Chandler murders of New Year’s day, 1963, and the speaker is the hostess of the party that the doomed pair left, never to be seen alive again. In a way, it recalls the structural techniques of earlier Wearne narratives like “Out Here” and The Nightmarkets. In both of these, there is a central narrative event, but it is no more than a focus for studies in people’s lives and how these relate to all those determining features – city, suburb, school, etc – that Wearne is obsessed by. Since the death of Bogle and Chandler is an unsolved crime, we know that this is not going to be a narrative which proposes a solution. It is not going to finish with Mrs Nash saying, “And, just to teach those randy buggers a lesson, I slipped some dog-worming pills into each of their drinks to give them the runs”. Instead, its interests are in the way that the unseen, violent future event structures everything leading up to it into a narrative:

. . . . .
so there’s Gib on arrival lightfooting it down our hall,
and there’s Gib a day later lightfooting bugger all.

We think we know the limits? We're merely to follow this text:
Lives unfold lives fold, here’s one hour here’s the next.

And where in a plot place “the heavens”, their ever expanding no?
Well you barely ask such questions of the CSIRO,

For (lab coats, leather patches, pipes and British cars)
my other half worked with boffins who rarely trusted the stars.
. . . . .

Mrs Nash’s concern over the shape of fate is given added poignancy, of course, by the fact that she died exactly on the eleventh anniversary of the murders and that her husband suicided exactly on the thirteenth – though neither of these events is foreshadowed in the poem. “Chatswood: Ruth Nash Speaks” is a brilliant meditation and might even be called a meta-narrative. Again, as in the poems I began with, this can be balanced by one with ethical considerations. “Breakfast with Darky” is a “straight” dramatic monologue whose speaker, serving out his time in a Melbourne high school in the late seventies was, in his younger days, the author of a book of stories in the socialist-realist mode. A new, young staff member recognizes his name and wants to know why there was only one book. The title of that single collection, Just Doing My Job: Stories from the Struggle, is worth pausing over for a minute. It is very funny and cruelly accurate. I’ve always suspected that novelists have a particular ability to imagine the titles of books they would not have wanted to write themselves. After all, if you can imagine an alternative reality, peopled by alternative characters, you should be able to imagine that reality’s fiction and the kinds of titles its books would have. Anthony Powell, an author whom both Wearne and myself admire, was a master of this and one of the running gags in the Dance to the Music of Time novels is the row of titles of books by a pretentious old writer of high-flown romance, St John Clarke: Dust Thou Art, Match Me Such Marvel, Fields of Amaranth.

At any rate, “Breakfast with Darky” is an attack on this particular, leftist mode mainly because it approaches reality through ideology:

Mike was so sincere, so fragile with it,
I couldn’t bother to advise:
“In the end I only wrote what the party
wanted. Quitting that much of my life
required . . . how much heroics?
Just one. One on a day I would not
be labelled. Simple? Yes, simple."

In the end, “Breakfast with Darky” is more about the ethics of writing than it is about the ethics of politics. The speaker’s unpublished second volume sees the great battle of the classes as being played out like a game. Once people accept their part, reality unrolls. I think it says, finally, that that is fine for all except the writer.

Among the sonnets of the first part of this book there are some very fine achievements. Some are comic (the general tone is comic), like the monologue of the girl whose father has run off with her best friend. This is perfect, right down to the speaker’s high-rising terminals:

. . . . .
So, when I get to see him and he’s all earstud ’n’ lovebite
(hoho, who’s been helping you co-dependent through the night?)

and familial interaction seems the least of his chores:
“Err how’s y’mother, Princess?” Jeez Pop, jeez Pop, how’s yours?

The embarrassment! He’s fifty-one, she’s twenty-four,
so wouldn’t you move further than Maroochydore?

There’s better, it’s worse but, the Get this! fun begins.
They run this motel, see? And she’s expecting,
     she’s expecting . . . twins?

Others, like the two poems about his mother’s younger life in Brisbane during the war, or the poem about the Argonauts Club are modest and somber. I think the best of them is probably “I Go to Rio” which modulates suddenly from the mad world of Peter Allen, Judy Garland and her daughter to the real Rio de Janeiro in which the author saw, before a match at the Maracana, the players holding a banner, aimed at the police death-squads and saying “Please Stop Murdering our Children”.

Wearne is, as everybody who reads Australian poetry knows, a one-off. Better than our novelists he gives a sense of what it is like to live at one of many times in one of many places. His sensitivity to and inquisitiveness about all the issues which determine us as individuals is unparalleled. Paradoxically, he is not somebody who has radically changed Australian poetry. What he has done is stretch it by taking it into the world that novels usually inhabit: the world of registering the infinite detail of social life. The trouble (if one wants to look for serpents in this particular garden) is that he is so good at the narrative poem or the dramatic monologue – both based on the suggestion that only a fraction of an entirely detailed imaginary world has been revealed – that it makes it harder, not easier, for any poets wanting to tag along in his footsteps. There are plenty of poems being written as narratives or monologues today but they all look stagey or coy or self-focussed in comparison to Wearne’s work. If the function of literature is to make some kind of sense of what a place is and how its people live within it, then Wearne is one of Australia’s most precious literary treasures.

Elizabeth Campbell: Letters to the Tremulous Hand

Elwood: John Leonard Press, 2007, 68pp.

I have been looking forward to this book of Elizabeth Campbell’s ever since I met two of her Tremulous Hand poems in Anthony Lawrence’s The Best Australian Poetry 2004. The poems were interesting mainly because they were quite different from what one expects from the sort of poetic biography that Australian poetry is, at the moment, full of. But at the time, the subject was even more interesting: an unnamed monk who, at the beginning of the thirteenth century acted as a copyist in Worcester, despite a tremor in his writing hand. It is always exciting when a poem can introduce us to an unknown historical reality and I was fascinated by this figure: someone old enough to remember the Old English which was in the process of being replaced by the new, half-romance idiom of Middle English. He caught my imagination as being analogous to the great Icelandic historian, chieftain and thug: Snorri Sturluson. The two were, most likely, coevals though Snorri was, perhaps, rather the older of the two. The Tremulous Hand, as part of his activities, compiled a word list of Old English, the language of Aelfric and Wulfstan as well as a host of other celebrated medieval scholars.

Snorri’s fate was to see not the decline of his language (Icelandic robustly resisted all incursions and the language of Snorri can be read with ease by Icelanders today) but the loss of his poetic culture. This occurred because of the freak mischance that the complex metaphoric language of Old Norse poetry was derived from Norse myth. When the church arrived at the end of the first millennium (just before William the Bastard arrived in England bringing French with him) the myths went. And when the myths went, the poetry became incomprehensible. Snorri fought against this by compiling a collection of prose retellings of these myths (the Snorraedda) which was designed to act (surprisingly for most first-time readers) as a poetic primer. It is irresistible to think of the Tremulous Hand, at almost the same time and in a much humbler way, compiling a glossary of a beloved language now passing out of existence. I imagined the pair of them, one in a scriptorium the other on his estates, at pretty much the same time and in neighboring countries, each fighting for a past which was sliding into oblivion.

Regrettably this is a moving but inaccurate view of the situation of the Tremulous Hand. The major text which Campbell has used, Franzen’s The Tremulous Hand of Worcester, debunks most of the romanticized elements in favour of bleaker truths. The tremor is most likely congenital rather than being the grief-laden response of an old man desperately trying to record the past, etc etc. And, to do her justice, there is nothing in Campbell’s poetry that desires or needs a romanticized view. Her ten-poem sequence, devoted to the scribe, is at the farthest possible remove from the conventional poetic recreation of a life. The Tremulous Hand sequence is really a kind of meta-poetic-biography. What Campbell is interested in is, among other things (this is a very complex sequence), the morality of writing about historical figures. She is also interested in the nature of personality, history, scholarship, writing, the act of transmission, where love comes into all of this and even the nature of our existence trapped between past and future.

The fourth, six and ninth poems seem to focus on conceptions of self inside the process of history. These are all impressive meditations, especially the ninth, “ansyn/face”, which focuses specifically on the question, “What do we do / when we take another’s words and say them / again in a different hand?” This makes a neat connection between the act of scribal transcription and the biographical poet’s search for a suitable subject. In the middle section the poem continues to address artists. Syntactical difficulties in the first sentence (of the fourth stanza) make the exact authorial position tricky to determine but it seems deliberately to reject the postmodern position that there is no transcendent ground by which to judge knowledge and imagines a last judgement where all would be known and “salvation // would be endless recognition”. The final section of the poem is complex and moving:

My face is my end

though it changes: as never-same
as the river of speech that can’t talk
backwards down the arrow though they quote
or spade us up on the last day.
What saint’s face did they uncowl,
that came for you?

You wrote: Sanctus Bedus was iboren:
here that scholar is, poling you over the river
here you: a glimmer
behind my shoulder, a pocket compact:
long chosen, the helmsman
lifts your hood, bears my face.

We carry those who transmit us: so Bede ferries the Tremulous Hand and the Tremulous Hand ferries the author (at least that is what I take the reference to the glimmer behind the shoulder to mean). But this is complicated by the last two lines which contain a number of disorienting puns and ambiguities: who lifts whose hood and bears/bares the author’s face? A complicated and fascinating poem.

Campbell herself tells us that she came across her subject through an interest in dialogues between the body and the soul and this issue percolates through the poems. One poem, based on the extraordinary opening of Heloise’s first letter to Abelard, concludes by positioning the poet respectfully:

To the minor scholar, the minor poet
to the body, the soul:
to the dead, the living.

In the second poem of the sequence, she asks the Tremulous Hand to teach her the difference between “divine truth and cramping” that is: between the soul (and its transcendent co-ordinates) and the immediate demands of the body. This poem opens out into an issue of epistemology. The poet declares herself “suspicious of anything / that could be called expansive” and “suspicious of anything reductive”. She is suspicious of the former because even the soul has to have a precise location and of the latter because the things that experience is reduced to (such as sex) turn out themselves to be strange and complex. Removing expansion and reduction however “clearly flattens // like the blotting-out of sin – like the Earth / I am on not in”. This epistemological quandary is only a small part of the complexities of the Tremulous Hand sequence but the fact that it is important for the poet is stressed by the poem that opens the entire book, “Proverb”.

Here the expansion/reduction binary is expressed in more philosophically conventional terms as the battle between generalization and datum. Does the truth lie in the facts or in our understanding of the facts? “Who could love detail for its own sake?” the poem asks, “Surely a gentle mind turns straight / away to symbol?” Although successive readings have left me a little more nervous in the face of this poem than I was at first reading, there is not much doubt that here the author comes down clearly on the “data” side of the binary:

But Mother Doubt, you early laid on me

your threefold cradle-gifts:
sadness, restlessness,
and foremost of these, a hopeless

passion of reality.

The “Letters to the Tremulous Hand” sequence sends its thematic feelers out to other poems in the book, as well. The dialogue of the body and soul, for example, re-emerges in an earlier poem, “Gravity”, which begins by expecting all the usual jealousies between the two but concludes: “Our bodies fly us like a kite”. “The Song’s Bride” built of the “Song of Songs” and Christ’s parable of the wise and foolish virgins also is probably a body/soul poem.

“Fetch” is a complicated poem recounting a friend’s near-death experience in an upturned canoe. It is about facing death (“facing” has, of course, a double meaning in this book) and about incarnation and invocation (“fetch” is the key word) in a way that recalls the ninth poem of the later sequence. It also, incidentally, recalls the river image at the end of that poem and, like the second poem of the sequence has a lovely invocation:

Nick, old friend and
                  one of the few
who can inhale water and breathe out
                                   love, love -
go back for me, still my lungs, smell my hair.
Fetch me up and tell me I will live.

A four-part sequence, “Passengers”, is marked by a strong sense of our movement between birth and death or between the past and the future. The book itself has two epigraphs: one from Jennifer Harrison about the past (it asks “is memory the soul?’) and a crucial one from de Beauvoir, “the future has no face.” The third poem of this sequence is a little story about a pair of clowns waiting with the author at Athens airport and entertaining some children to pass the time. The book’s obsession with the relationship between ourselves and our faces clicks into focus here. The clown persona is a kind face without a history: it is what our faces might be like if their function were only to render expression rather than our pasts:

Without a mask
he becomes a mask
. . . . .
Rummaging his bag for the hidden he is
Search, leaping up plain
as Hope at each annunciation
of flight or passenger, lips fished in an “oo”
of “Surprise”, or else he’s Rage chewing “shuttup”

silently and shaking a fist
his every impulse even anger kind in its equality.
. . . . .
His mask completes him, whose repertoire
does not include: grief, guilt, memory:
without a past. The children watching are more
tangled; tired and amazed, yawning to believe
his promise, that they will be
reborn to a parentless face.

Finally there is a kind of unofficial sequence about what is clearly another obsession (though one which, for obvious reasons, does not make it into the poems to the Tremulous Hand) – horses. Even here, though, familiar themes arise. “Equus” and “Forget” revolve around a horse whose foal has died and thus explore the nature of grief, consciousness and memory. Throughout these poems you can feel the body/soul binary pushing for recognition. “Horse” deals with the pure responses of the body to stimuli and takes this into surprising areas:

. . . . .
                         Stripped
of motive
made the
        pure reaction
of a massive self all action is
messianic. A body that saves nothing, but stops and turns and starts.

That word “messianic” pulls you up short and makes you nervous about your reading of the poem. Finally, in “Longitude”, the poet stands at the still centre while the horse, on a long rope, paces out a circle. The horse, we are told, is oriented horizontally “her spine // long into landscape like a ridgeline: / forwards like time” while the author is vertical. It is, like so many of the poems in this book, difficult and intriguing. The binary begs to be particularized: the horse is the body, the person the soul. But it could be read in other ways.

Letters to the Tremulous Hand is a pretty exhilarating first collection by someone who is more than a “minor poet”. There are very complex poems sharing similar thematic material but never to the point where one poem acts as a touchstone to explain the rest. Here, what we get instead is a series of different reflections on these themes. The poems are very difficult, especially for an innocent reader who has nothing but the text to work with, but it’s the kind of difficulty that is not gratuitous. You feel that the poet has our interests at heart but also has a very complex view of life to share. This is the second John Leonard Press book I have reviewed on this site and I really need to say that the production standards, especially the printing, are absolutely outstanding. All of these books are, physically, a pleasure to read.

Kevin Brophy: Mr Wittgenstein’s Lion

Carlton: Five Islands Press, 2008, 96pp.

Kevin Brophy is a Melbourne poet who, in the course of four books published since 1992, has become progressively more interesting. I don’t use the adjective, Melbourne, in a casual manner. His poetry is deeply connected to his mother-city in all kinds of ways not the least biographically: as one of the biographical notes says, he grew up in Coburg and lives in Brunswick. And the first poem of his first book (Replies to the Questionnaire on Love) looks as though it is establishing as the ground of his poetry not Melbourne but the delimited suburb of his everyday life:

. . . . .
Last week a woman staggered from one house
with blood on her face.
She washed at the garden tap
while someone watched from behind a front window blind.
A woman from the flats next door
stands on the street with her mouth open for hours.
I sweep broken glass from the gutter
before I drive my car away.
The council planted trees along my street
and on the next morning they were lying, uprooted
as though they had tried to fly away during the night.
. . . . .

This poem almost lays out a host of images which could only be followed up narratively. But it also introduces a perspective more suited to poetry. At the end, when a nephew from the impossibly-alien suburb of Doncaster asks about the broken glass, he is told “This is Brunswick . . . where life is as fine as railyard dust”. In other words, instead of dissolving into infinite particularity, the poem suggests an image that will serve Brophy well: the continuous processes of entropy (another poem speaks of the “sandstorm of the years”) that reduce everything to a dust coating a surface. (Infinite particularity is something I’ve always thought of as a Melburnian vice, the counterpart to that intense sense of belonging to a small area and being acutely aware of differences between suburbs, football clubs etc. I can remember Alan Wearne’s brief biography in Australian Poetry Now saying that he was born and educated in Blackburn South and then continuing “the South is important”.) It is true, of course, that dust from Melbourne’s Brunswick will be slightly different to the dust of, say, Brisbane’s The Gap, but the process is a general one. Brophy’s second book (Seeing Things, 1997) begins with a poem called “My Mother Says” which does for Brophy’s life what “As Fine as Railyard Dust” did for his suburb: it lays out a set of experiences which might be the nucleus of a personal narrative or a poem:

. . . . .
Lizards in the back lane spiders in the back yard
tadpoles in the creek rats in the tip, nature grey or black
creeping metamorphosing dying in shoe boxes and jars.
My mother says I convinced her once
that I’d been delayed by aliens
on the way home from school.
And then to be left-handed.
What kind [of?] luck was this?
Each inky word smudged away as I wrote it.
To be left-handed is to know that everyone has taken sides.
Are the memories in the croaking head on the ground?
Or in the flapping body tied to the line?
Will I write with my left hand or my right hand today?
Aiming an axe-blow at the memories I miss the past.

Brophy’s poetry is all about the balance between the particulars of a finite, localised existence and the larger patterns of the universe. Perhaps, in a sense, all poetry is like this – strung out between particular perspectives and broader ones. It’s just that in Brophy’s work you feel the local component very strongly. This begins with a postwar Irish-Catholic upbringing and continues into a modern, highly localised present. Fewer major Australian writers than you would think are called Kevin.

One of the characteristic gestures of Brophy’s poetry is to move upwards, a move that takes you away from the immersion in the local perspective and to more of a God’s-eye view. A delightful poem from the third book (Portrait in Skin, 2002) is called “Up There” and it details the experience of trying to fix a leak in the roof of fellow-writer, Myron Lysenko. The poem slowly moves from one perspective to the other:

. . . . .
Up there, on the open palm of your roof,
lifted closer to the face of God
or closer to some eye that looks
at everything but changes nothing,
we must have understood the universe takes care
of everyone, even its poets taking words like coins
from chimney sweeps, like candlesticks from bishops.
Up there, where the universe must know what it’s doing,
we could shake hands with trees
. . . . .

If I had to guess at the shape of Brophy’s poetic development, I would suggest that his poetry has deepened and become more engaging as the local and particular has moved from being externalised subject matter to being a cast of mind that simply inflects any treatment of the experience of living in the world. This means that the poems become less focussed on their external subject and are freer to accrete structures and ideas. As his books progress, the number of predictable poems – portraits, narratives, satires, descriptions etc, decreases and the number of genuinely surprising poems increases.

 

The title of this new book, Mr Wittgenstein’s Lion, suggests, however, not so much an increasing interest in being-in-the-world so much as an increasing interest in abstraction, the world inside the head and even metaphysics. The book is framed by two poems about poetry, a sure sign that methodological and epistemological issues are at the forefront. Both of these poems are amusing and important. The first, “Difficult”, is about the poem as object: the metaphor used is that of a house which might be bought or visited. Significantly, it is not done as a satirical piece crossing a real-estate agent’s patter with the serious issue of the status of poetry. In fact it is a complicated little poem that moves away as the reader tries to grasp it. Although the writer has left – that is, readers will have a free hand interpretatively without having to worry about intention – the house is full of the signs of lived life: “a green bin steaming with the evidence of wasteful life / in a corner of the kitchen is what you’ve come to expect from art.” Most interesting is the conclusion:

A green and oily ocean’s creeping closer every century
and an ochre desert lies less than three thousand kilometres away.
It is difficult to know what is the greatest threat to this poem:
reader, silence, landscape, weather or its absent occupant.

This struck me as a surprise when I first read it and it still comes as a minor shock. One of the satisfying features of this book (and a sign of its quality) is the ability of its poems to take entirely unpredictable directions and this is no exception. The logic of the concern with erosion (a localised form of the generalised entropy of the universe) is a surprise in this poem but it is no surprise in the context of Brophy’s poetry generally.

The book proper begins with four poems based on holidaying in the Victorian uplands. They each belong to the comic genre of the city-dweller brought blinkingly out from his suburb into the bush. This, though, is never the driving force of the poem: it remains a delicately nuanced undertone. Everything is slightly sinister:

. . . . .
The kookaburras watch like cops on a stakeout.
The wombats move so slowly we do not see them.
The stars are too close, too many, spilled everywhere.
The river runs like a perfect machine past us.
. . . . .

but there is a familiar, strong sense of dissolution. The houses slowly become derelict and “House, River” actually deals with a visit to an abandoned house and, as it does so, describes the poet’s position in the middle of this process: “all I am is this visitor who touches / nothing, notes some things and backs out”. The image for this process (and shared by each of these poems) are the holes dug by wombats or miners: “always there is this going inside”. Even the past itself slips down muddy holes in the earth. In terms of the larger issue of the sort of ideas that generate this approach, it might be significant that this emphasis on dissolution occurs in poems which are set in a location which is both non-suburban and high. The mountain view of this group of poems, might well connect with the view from the roof.

At any rate, there are other poems in the book which involve an interest in the high and low perspectives. A sestina about being strapped at school blessedly avoids any comment on the brutality of the Catholic education system in the early sixties and rotates – in that weird and obsessive way that sestinas do – about issues of high and low. The boy has to lift his hand up but thinks of his own shoe laces which are unlike the teacher’s and “frayed and unravelled, offer no sign of higher / aspirations”:

. . . . .
We learn the virtue of respect by lifting an arm or
prayerful mind, any small gesture of attention
to the higher life or the closer matter of our laces.

“Shoe Laces” is followed by “Repaired and Disconnected”, an equally complicated poem. It is a meditation about the experience of relying on technology: of living, as the poem itself says, “in a city of engineers” and amongst others “who believe in engineers”. There is an elevated example – people in an aeroplane – and an earthly one – a man having heart surgery. Quite a lot goes on with these two images and the notion of being disconnected but I’m intrigued by the way in which the material about the airline passengers is concluded by the image of the aeroplane – disconnected – falling out of the sky. The writer imagines this but also imagines that the scraps of the plane are tidied away by “an authority designated to do just this” so that there is no real evidence of its ever having happened. Again elevation is connected to entropy and, in a way, the parts of the plane fall like the “railyard dust” in the first poem of Replies to the Questionnaire on Love. The idea of cleaning away the ground-down detritus of the processes of existence forms the image at the heart of “Manual Work”. This poem, which might have been merely cute but which resists that fate impressively, is about those who, at night, clear away the tears, the dead animals and even beggars

for gods at night must empty their pockets of misfired creations
knowing they will be scraped and swept
and carted away before dawn.
It’s the dark, the dark that keeps the sweepers in a job.
They open the hand of day for us. We hide until they’ve gone.

Entropy can manifest itself, of course, as the death that awaits us all. At this level its true poetic expression is the elegy. And there are plenty of deaths and monuments in this book although, significantly, they are not generally used as opportunities to sketch in the life of the departed one. They are much more abstract than this. One of these poems describes the processes of a funeral and has an odd and disturbing conclusion:

A woman murmurs to her companion about a spider
that moved across the cover of a book on her desk
as though it had emerged out of the cover illustration.
Could that happen? she asks.

The best I can do with this is to note that the scariest irruptions involve the movement into our lives of something that previously seemed contained in another dimension. Death turns out to be active even though it had always seemed to belong to another, order of existence.

A very fine poem, “Monument”, also deals with a burial but is concerned that even the stone monument will be worn away by the rain:

We filed into a chapel much like any chapel.
Six men lifted the box up like an ark.
Afterwards we stood round trays of biscuits in a circle.
Under a porch other circles smoked and hunched because
the rain came down as though erasing this hour
would be enough. The rain was all there was.
No monument of stone can stay carved forever,
the rain will see to that, or a board of management.
Our dead will live then die with us we know.
The grave like love is more puzzle than testament,
its stone more frail than we can show.
The rain, the rain came down on us
a perfect monument forgetful of us.

The rain, symbolizing entropy, eradicates everything, eventually. It is intriguing though that in this generally abstract meditation the poem includes a little barb at managerialism: “the rain will see to that, or a board of management”. It is as though the poem arcs back to anchor us in the world of the small citizen of a Melbourne suburb meshed in the usual earthly battles with local councils, state governments and so on.

If entropy is associated with rain and the elevated perspective, death is associated with night. The dead, in the poem of that name, meet up during the night to shuffle around and they speak to us in dreams. Night is a complex state in Brophy’s poetry: it connotes domestic contentment (at the end of “You in Sleep”, for example) but it is also one of the states in which we are the vehicles for words and stories that we channel. Speaking of poetry, “Translations” says:

In this language the gods and spirits take an interest in us.
This speaking we do is another way of dreaming.
. . .
Our speech, we say, keeps arriving, a mystery.
In this language another world speaks to us.

Finally, there is a strong theme throughout this book, of that point where metaphysics and epistemology meet. There are scattered poems interested in a kind of sterile perfection possible only in the mind. Here the railyard dust has been wiped away and, as “Surfaces” says, “the cleaning of surfaces is a return at last / to the dustless paradise of a room in the mind / where thoughts like new appliances / are sleek and modern”. This theme can be found in the title poem, but it is present also in poems like the slightly Wallace Stevensish “Tulips” (“The tulip does not know the theory of tulips”) and also in poems like “The Mental Life” and, especially, “Plums, Prams and Camels”. This poem seems to describe a world of Platonic perfections:

Every colour made and re-made each day
and the shade kept dutifully below the trees;
each green spike of grass kept pencil sharp
and sand obeying laws of softness;
fences resting their long selves
against trees intent on filling plums with juice -

This paradise is ruined by the real world in the form of an intruder who breaks into the poet’s bedroom:

In our bedroom almost on the street
we talked and loved, gave our bodies
to whatever time we had until a man one night
climbed in our bedroom window
seeking peace or petty cash or nothing much
more than his arrival, making us believe
he’d left outside a wild and tired camel -

I believe all this.

It is not a poem to feel entirely relaxed inside but I read it as the irruption of the actual world into the abstraction of an ideal world. It is also, then, about how the real – in the sense of the gritty particulars of, say, a Melbourne inner suburb – can demand entrance into a poem. Interestingly, the “real” does not make the predictable demands of the local environment – it brings with it, instead, the surreal phenomenon of a camel. A most intriguing poem.

There is a lot more going on in Mr Wittgenstein’s Lion than these observations suggest. Like all good books of poetry it includes puzzlement as one of its effects. In fact it is the poems which shift gear in unpredictable ways that remain most defiantly with me. I’m thinking of small, slightly tangential, poems like “Bloodthoughts” and “Finger-mind”. And then there is the lyrically beautiful “The Hazy Ships” which announces the ships in the title and then ignores them to talk about a trip to the beach until they make a sudden and surprising reappearance in the last line. And then there is the significantly titled “After Rain”:

There are six thousand languages still spoken on the planet
and within each one the word for rain makes people look at the sky.
As it rains outside the radio talks low in the kitchen,
those small dry voices going on, reassuring me.
When the rain is here the sound of it is better than thinking.
My son asks me if a baby could be taught to speak
every language on the earth and we agree it might be possible
if the rain keeps up to teach a baby anything we wish.
The rain makes pairs of us, it muffles wars and panics ants;
the rain gives all its knowledge to the earth;
and after rain the birds around here have much to say.
They’re out there now like children let out of a classroom,
shaking themselves on Anna’s roof and in the bottlebrush
where there must be mouthfuls of insects like lollies in the air.

There are none of the expected meanings here. Rain is associated, not with the slow processes of decay but with a kind of teacherly and familial closeness. The theme of language – entirely unexpected in a poem like this – weaves its way throughout. Even the conclusion is a surprise because, good as a cosy day inside is, the newly-washed world outside, full of epiphanic promise, is better.

The Wagtail Series, Nos 62 – 72

Warners Bay: Picaro Press

Chris Wallace-Crabbe: The Thing Itself. Wagtail 62 (Warners Bay, NSW: Picaro)
Robyn Rowland: This Road. Wagtail 63
Philip Salom: The Family Fig Trees. Wagtail 64
Anna Kerdijk Nicholson: What was lost. Wagtail 65
Michael Sariban: The Riddle of Perfection. Wagtail 66
Anne Edgeworth: Purdie’s Meditation. Wagtail 67
David Malouf: Guide to the Perplexed. Wagtail 68
Judith Rodriguez: Manatee. Wagtail 69
Bruce Beaver: The Flautist in the Laundry (selected by Craig Powell). Wagtail 70
Lee Knowles: Lucretia. Wagtail 71
Richard Deutch: Floating the Woman. Wagtail 72

The Wagtail series comprises monthly issues of a selection of a poets’ work. Each pamphlet is exactly sixteen pages, attractively designed and uses print-on-demand technology. Unlike your reviewer, the editors allow themselves one month a year off – so eleven issues are released annually. And this series is not the limit of Picaro’s activities: they do a chapbook series and are also beginning to release reprints of books of poetry which have, in that odd phrase, fallen out of print. The sixteen-page Wagtail series can be looked at in two different ways. At the atomistic level, each little pamphlet is an introduction, successful or not, to an individual poet’s work. At the holistic level, the series makes up a kind of giant, evolving anthology of contemporary Australian poetry where everybody gets sixteen pages in the spotlight.

To take the first, first. How good an introduction to these poet’s works are these little books? It’s not always an easy question to answer. Some poets are, for example, more easily introduced in sixteen pages than others. Generally, the more multifaceted your poetry is and the longer you have been writing then the less likely it is that sixteen pages is going to be enough. And there are different types of introduction: there are those that are a sort of sampler and there are those that aspire to be a “Greatest Hits” – though I can’t think of any living poets for whom that would be a good strategy – you need to wait till the band has broken up.

Take the case, first, of Bruce Beaver. This is poetry I know well so I feel fairly confident in my judgements though, it has to be admitted, Craig Powell – who selected these poems – knows the late poet’s life and work far better than I do. In The Flautist in the Laundry (70) I miss both Beaver’s brilliant portraiture and his sense of himself as enmeshed in the creative lives of others, as part of some overall human creativity. Powell’s selection is made up of:

“Harbour Sonnet V” (from Seawall and Shoreline)
“The Flautist in the Laundry” (from Open at Random)
Letters to Live Poets V
Lauds and Plaints I
Lauds and Plaints XII
Day 7 (from Odes and Days)
Death’s Directives II
“Lady Made for Love” (from Poets and Others)
“Quiet Companion” (from Poets and Others)
“Vespers” (from Poets and Others)

I’ve bitten the bullet and constructed my own counter Beaver collection, making sure that it will fit within the confines of the Wagtail booklet:

“Under the Bridge” (from Under the Bridge)
“’Remembering Golden Bells’ and Po Chu-i” (from Under the Bridge)
“Impresario” (from Open at Random)
Letters to Live Poets XII
Lauds and Plaints XII
Ode VII (from Odes and Days)
Day 38 (from Odes and Days)
“R.M.R. Muzot 1921-1926” (from Charmed Lives)
“Late Afternoon” (from The Long Game)

Photocopying these and making up my own imitation booklet and then reading it alongside the Powell selection was revealing. Of course I think mine is the better introduction (it would be perverse if I didn’t) but my Beaver comes across as a rather “heavier” figure and my collection does miss the light but serious charm of the title poem of the Wagtail collection. Also I see that I have shamefully omitted the poet’s wife who is the subject of the first and second-last poems. My group begins (well, nearly) and ends with Po Chu-i. All told it is less domestic, a bit less human, a bit more literary. And yet there is so much Beaver that both selections are forced to omit: above all the Beaver of As It Was – surely one of the great Australian autobiographies – but also the Beaver of sexual mythology and psychology.

Philip Salom and Chris Wallace-Crabbe are difficult poets to introduce in sixteen pages. In Salom’s case this is because the best of his poems occur in a distinctive matrix. An early book like Sky Poems, for example, was made up of poems that either existed in an alternative world of the sky or involved sky in some other, less radical way. When two poems are removed from this mesh, as “Smithy’s Dream” and “Being There Perhaps, Or Not Quite” are here, the reader is left without a lot of context to help in making sense of them. Even poems which make perfect sense on their own – like the one about finding a Buddha statue in Singapore:

. . . . .
Not the knot-haired door-knocker brassy kind
or the pissy-nosed, prefect and perfect.
And never the sleek reclining Buddhas like clones
dumb on opium in Penang, counting the tiles
on the walls opposite, each tile the wise
ceramic face – of Buddha.
. . . . .

lose a lot when they lose their context: in this case an enormous, multi-faceted poem about living in Singapore.

The same could be said of “Feng / Abundance (Fullness)” a tart political poem which concludes: “when / abundance is over, auditors arrive”. This is one of a sequence of brilliant poems in A Cretive Life based on the I Ching. Somehow it looks more whimsical alone than it does in context. Perhaps the most intriguing poem is the title poem, “The Family Fig Trees”. Salom has a powerful imaginative drive that almost needs a conceptualised matrix in order to express itself as something more than just hectic rhetoric and it is almost a disorienting shock to encounter as conventional a poem as this. Salom is brilliant with the dead – “Seeing Gallipoli From the Sky” is one of the best poems in Sky Poems – and in “The Family Fig Trees” dead ancestors make a dignified appearance prepared for by a long meditation deriving from the intersection of the fig trees of the farm of his boyhood and the metaphorical idea of “family trees”.

The difficulty in the case of Chris Wallace-Crabbe derives mainly from the extent of his writing life. His first book was published nearly fifty years ago and by the time of his Selected Poems of 1995 there is only room for a handful of poems from each book. The tactic here, faced with this fecundity (and a concomitant level of variety) is to select from late in the career. The earliest poem in The Thing Itself is “The Amorous Cannibal”, the title poem of a book published when its author was over fifty. But late Wallace-Crabbe can be an exhilarating country and a small selection could do worse than act as a guide for readers venturing into it for the first time. What you get here is a small, self-contained and self-consistent little group of poems. The themes are God (the first poem describes a mobile phone ringing in a cemetery and the second is a dramatic monologue in which God thinks about his creation), reality, the dead (“Trace Elements” is a wonderful poem from the early nineties beginning “. . . but surely the dead must walk again. / They stroll most oddly in and out of / small corners of your being, optical [b]lips.”), consciousness and language, love and the self. The final poem is not “Afternoon in the Central Nervous System” with its wonderful conclusion:

. . . . .
                                        The dumb gene
says nothing at all, but sits at home in my soul
writing me still across its illiterate plan:
a singular man chewing some general cabbage,
looking out across the second millennium
and feeling as fit as a trout.

but the much more circumscribed “At the Clothesline” which in a highly formal style (that recalls early Wallace-Crabbe) faces extinction with a slightly unconvincing image of hope:

What I’d thought a fallen shirt
Under the lines, flat on the grass
Was nothing but my shadow there,
Hinting that all things pass:

That many we loved or used to know
Are dragged already out of sight,
Vanished fast, though stepping slow,
Folded into remorseless night.

My dark trace now has quit the lawn.
Everything slips away too soon,
Yet something leaves its mark here like
A rainbow ring around the moon.

David Malouf’s Guide to the Perplexed (68) is a selection whose coherence indicates that it offers one view of the poet’s work. It is an introduction to one side which, perhaps at the moment, its author feels to be the most valuable side. Here, we are generally in the world of the domestic and the unflamboyant erotic. The wildest perspectives tend to end up with a solitary individual, or a couple, in bed. The book begins with “The Comforters” – a poem which announces the transition to the adult world in which dolls are replaced by partners who feel real pain, but which also records the tendency of the childhood world to remain. And it ends with “Stars”:

. . . . .
                    From centuries

off, out of the reign
of one of nineteen pharaohs,
a planet’s dust, metallic,

alive, is sifted down,
hovers in a bright
arc upon your cheek.

Miraculous! I lean
across the dark and touch it,
you smile in your sleep.

How far, how far we’ve come
together, tumbling like stars
in harness or alone.

What is omitted are examples of Malouf in the grand manner: “Bad Dreams in Vienna”, “Report from Champagne Country”, “ A Poet among others”, “At Ravenna”, the suite “A Little Panopticon” and so on. As a sampler it is not entirely satisfactory but it is a coherent collection and does give us some sense of what must be Malouf’s judgements on his own poetry. Significantly, his most recent book, Typewriter Music, is consistent with the poems of Guide to the Perplexed though no poems from it are included.

Robyn Rowland’s This Road seems to me to be an excellent introduction to her work though it may be that the reasons behind this response are not good ones. Taken in bulk, Rowland’s work can be oppressive with its endless fixation on the history of the poet’s self. This is just my reaction of course and there are, I know, readers who find this personal nakedness brave and stimulating. But I still feel that her second book, Perverse Serenity, is no more than poetry as soap-opera or, more generically accurately (since it involves two competing loves) poetry as romance. The best of her later poetry has been a climbing out of this pit and a looking at the world which is inflected by the self but never wholly and solipsistically dominated by it. I really like the title poem about a meaningless road built by the starving Irish during the famine so that the “frugal English” could “avoid feeding the starving for nothing”, though this liking probably comes from the stony impersonality of the poem. The fury is there, as it should be. So is the wry response to the symbolic potential of a directionless road. But they seem so much more potent when the poet isn’t standing in the picture as well. There is also a wonderful poem called “Young Men” where a whole set of generalisations are made about the creatures of the title. You read it, first amazed and then outraged that anyone should make such crass (even if benevolent) statements:

. . . . .
The hearts of young men are patient and calm
not furtive or selfish as the middle aged tell us,
they share, they say “wait for me to help
I’m here and not hurrying away,
with me the job takes half the time and is half as heavy”.
. . . . .

But you finally get the point that all this derives from one young man. The leap from one young man to the whole crowd of them is an example of benevolently judging the group by the best. I may have read this wrongly but it works by injecting the self into the poem in a puzzling and fascinating way. I know that this can look like bad criticism: judging a poet’s work by what is atypical rather than facing up to what the poet chooses to do (like preferring all the Yeats poems that don’t involve Ireland) but it derives from the immediate response that This Road is a really good little book and a really good way into the poetry of Robyn Rowland.

Judith Rodriguez’ Manatee is also a good introduction. You get examples of her in her distinctive riddling mode at the beginning and end in “Is it Poetry? They Ask” and “The Line Always There”. Poems like these (one could add dozens of others) remind one how underestimatedly difficult a poet Rodriguez is, but they work poetically because of the tension between their forthright, almost bluff, tone and the slippery possible meanings that make the reader bracingly unsure of his footing. There are two examples of her slyer indirections (what I call her “this poem is not about houses” style) in “The Mahogany Ship” and “Manatee” both of which are really about poetry despite the tug of their solid, significant “topics”. And there is the much admired “Eskimo Occasion” a cross-genre piece where bringing up children in Australia is conceived as an Eskimo poem. One of the reasons Manatee is a good introduction to Rodriguez’ poetry is that it reminds us that it is still there and still demands the kind of detailed critical engagement it has never received. I always go away from her work slightly breathless with the sense that this is far more difficult (because more complex) than I had imagined.

Michael Sariban probably deserves to be better-known than he is. The blurb of his most recent book, Luxuries, is written by Philip Salom and is, unlike most blurbs, really accurate. It speaks of the poems’ “surreal epiphanies” and the way that they tend to move from inquiry through perception to “a kind of acceptance”. His best book is probably Facing the Pacific whose three sections are, more or less, built out of encounters with the sea, with the land and with darkness. And these are distinctive encounters because the slightly bluff, confident tone of the poems is always being compromised by the outside world. So “Remembering the Southern Sky”, the last poem of this Wagtail and selected from the first section of Facing the Pacific, begins:

Of course, of course it’s not the same sky
I saw with the uncluttered eyes of the young
that midsummer night I decided to sleep

alone on an empty beach . . .

but concludes:

                    And ghosts of stars still hang
frozen like spray from a cosmic speedboat;
Republican gum trees fly the Cross with no

sign of a Union Jack; and the moon keeps
ageing at the same rate as us, though we
cannot be sure of the stars.

That is a wonderful finish and exactly captures the movement from certainty to a kind of nervous acceptance that is common in Sariban.

Although many Sariban poems begin with a meeting between the poet and some aspect of the natural world, there are, in The Riddle of Perfection, two wonderful poems about the animal world. Here the confrontation is (literally) of a different order. In “Close Encounters” we are the devils in the lives of the animals who “hurl / their whatever package of fur / across our dazzling path”. In “I Hate to See Their Eyes” there are three stanzas of a kind of superior, pitying lament for the apes whose eyes express their anxiety “the brows / knitted as if over a crossword”. It is all caused by a “tiny shortfall of DNA”

that has them leaping from tree
to tree, a leopard at their heels,
falling at times like Lucifer,
but never into our dim
enlightenment.

There is a lot of complexity here in the comparison with Lucifer and in the word “dim”. Sariban deserves, as I have said, to be better-known and he certainly deserves to be carefully read. The Riddle of Perfection contains only one poem written since the 2001 publication of Luxuries and one wishes there were more. He is the kind of poet who might well benefit from a New and Selected poems.

I have left the other booklets of this year – those by Anna Kerdijk Nicholson, Anne Edgeworth, Lee Knowles and Richard Deutch – till last not to belittle their authors but because they are poets whose work I do not know. Thus these are introductions of a quite different kind (at least for me). I had never read a word of the late Richard Deutch and I’m mildly disappointed that all the poems from his Floating the Woman come from only one of his four books – I would have liked to have had the chance to see a more representative overview. The energy of these poems seems to come out of autobiographical reminiscence – shoring fragments against ruins, perhaps. There are poems about what seems to have been a generally dysfunctional childhood in country USA and others about a cast of equally dysfunctional characters. But all this is prefaced by the fine title poem which uses the metaphor of a conjuror’s act to talk about poetry:

. . . . .
Trying to do one thing, I usually
end up doing something utterly
different, like floating a woman

or making the sentence as simple
as I can, pretending insouciance
later . . .

One would like to know more about how this plays out in the poems of this book which seem to know exactly where they are going and, though powerful, don’t have any obvious surprises either for reader or poet.

Anna Kerdijk Nicholson’s What Was Lost is made up of poems from two sequences. The first are from The Bundanon Cantos and the second from a manuscript about Cook’s voyage in the Endeavour. It is a nice balance: poems about a creative couple (even a creative site) juxtaposed with poems about a great public figure: the great navigator of the south. The cantos devoted to the Boyds are part of a complex matrix – they are introduced by pungent little statements which are put together to form the classic, thirty-six verse renga that is the opening poem. The world of art weighs heavily on this set of poems and you feel a sense of making, constructing, collaging seeping through into the poems in a way which is rare in poetry. James Cook is an altogether more difficult subject for poetry because he exists as icon of human seeking (or cipher of colonialist rapaciousness, depending on your position) and icons can only ever be seen from the outside. This leads to an inert poetry: the history of Australia’s voyager poems is an attempt to overcome this (Slessor’s “Five Visions of Captain Cook” explicitly announces that its character is an object and only the responses of others can be recorded). Cook’s interior is especially hard to penetrate both because we lack contemporary biographical material and the man himself has a bluff, none of your business, Yorkshire quality about him. Nicholson makes a good attempt, in these few poems at least, to allow the interior of Cook to be what lights up the verse, but I’m nervous about the hearty tone and the fact that the poems are written to Cook, “You feel you’re falling and jolt awake . . .”

Anne Edgeworth’s Purdie’s Meditation begins and ends with poems of travel but the real subject is the passage of time – something which, if you are (as this poet is) so old that you were a child in the depression, you would be especially sensitive to. But passing through time is a form of travelling and as the end of “Nomad” (a comic recital of the rooms the poet has slept in) says “Although journeying / continue when one can raise energy and the fare / I suspect I’m there”. Lee Knowles is also an inveterate traveller and the poems of Lucretia contain poems about the places and about the experience, especially of travel by sea. Much of this is hard-won wisdom: “it’s sometimes worthwhile going too far, too late” and “Leave / your old ways behind. / Not your old self, / you’ll need that”, but I really like the poem which contrasts the world of starched white clothes above the waterline and the more relaxed goings on that happen below the waist lines of the yachts and their owners:

. . . . .
The pens of control have the wind
by the collar tucked away
in official notes. But below
jetties these yachts tug as
they please and their owners
sleep long and late in and out
of dreaming. Their stories go
uncensored. No one can stop
too much love or murder in these
all too human vessels . . .

As I’ve said, these comprise eleven interesting introductions to a suite of very different poets. And as I’ve also said, the entire series can also be looked at as a kind of egalitarian, continually-growing portrait of what is happening in Australian poetry. Looked at from this perspective, there are, however, some notable omissions: Murray, Tranter, Adamson, Maiden, Kinsella, Wearne to list the first that come to mind. It may be that some of these poets don’t want to be part of the project or it may be that the series editors want to space the larger-calibre cannons out a little. And what about periodicity? When is it safe (and desirable) to “redo” certain poets. Eleven poets a year makes well over a hundred poets every ten years and that seems about the right number for the kind of virtual anthology I am thinking of. Perhaps after ten years, poets can be revisited and their number of poems, consequently, doubled. But by then, if everything goes well in Australian poetry, there will be so many young poets anxious to get elbow-room among what they consider to be their dreary elders that there won’t be any chance of repeat visits to these individual poets.

Iran Diary: December, 2007

Hamedan, 9/12/07

The two-hour nighttime flight from Doha arrives at the splendid new Imam Khomeini Airport in the south of Tehran. It is a great improvement over the old Mehrabad airport though that did have the advantage of being in the more salubrious, northern part of the city. For people heading south, this new location makes for a flying start and the journey to Hamedan is appreciably shorter. The passport control officer is, perhaps like all of his kind, decidedly unhelpful though his English is good – far better then my Persian. I don’t have to fill out an arrival card, the information is collected by means of a mild interrogation. He is, from the beginning, worried about the fact that my passport is a little water-damaged on one side, coincidentally exactly where the signed part of the visa is placed.

“Yes, the envelope that it came back from the embassy in got in the rain.” Where will I be staying? “Well I forgot to bring the exact address but it is in Hamedan with the Family F.” What? “In Hamedan with the Family F.” I start to spell the name out. Where? “Hamedan” Are you staying in a hotel? “No, my friends are collecting me.” Is this your first visit to Iran? “No, my third.” Was that on a different passport? “No, the visas are all there.” He flicks through my passport in a resigned, unhappy sort of way and then stamps it.

On the four-hour drive to Hamedan I catch up with news of my numerous and various friends. One of the daughters is now a postgraduate student in Canada, another is about to enter university. The state of my favourite family – widow, daughter and three sons – is concerning. Since the husband’s death they seem to have slid more and more into poverty. Their house is decidedly unsafe and probably has to completely rebuilt. Quotes of around thirty thousand Australian dollars are mentioned. Not much I can do there. They are living on a small pension but, like many, are suffering from the current bout of inflation. When I first came to Iran, an Australian dollar might well buy ten times as much in the way of basic living materials like food as it would in Australia. Now, since an Australian dollar seems to buy only about five times as much, there is strong evidence that Iranian prices must have doubled. The family has just enough to cover food but not essential utilities and there are sad stories of near cut-offs and desperate last-minute borrowings. K and I ponder some, at best temporary, solutions.

While K stops to buy cigarettes, I get to talk bad Persian (for the first time since my last visit) to one of the sons of this family, A, who has come along to give moral support and hand out cups of tea or coffee from the front passenger seat. The conversation is entirely about football. When I first met him he was in early adolescence and his first words to me were “Harry Kewell”. That formed a bond which has lasted. He offers a quick summary of the English game: Leeds are now bad (though doing well in the third tier), Middlesborough are very bad (fortunately I don’t know the Persian for “potential” and “relegation”) but Arsenal are sublime, playing the best football from a club team I think I have ever seen, Real Madrid at its best, notwithstanding: Fabregas, Clichy, Flamini, Walcott etc etc. You don’t need a sophisticated grasp of a language to operate on a subject like this, further proof, if it were needed, that football is one of the great bonding forces of the world.

In the family house the decline is all too evident. True, there is a new television: last time I came only one channel worked and to get a new channel you had to retune that one. But there are great patches in the ceiling and cracks in the walls. The house itself is a kind of freeform u-shape around a small courtyard. Depending on how you divide it up it is either three rooms or one long one. The ceiling is high and the floor uneven, as though it simply follows the natural undulations of the ground. The walls have been made of soft brick and are probably well past their use-by date. To make matters worse, the instant that it is rebuilt, the government resumes about six feet of the road side of the house as part of a widening process. A rebuilt house will have to be a two-story affair. General gloom at the prospects. Not that you would know anything was wrong from the behaviour of the family which is, as always, immensely hospitable. Lunch (or a late breakfast) is served: tea, flat bread, butter, panir (a kind of cottage cheese), honey and talk.

Hamedan, 10/12/07

A good night’s sleep and thankfully few manifestations of jetlag. At most of my friends’ houses we all sleep together on the floor. The ladies of the house carry out a stack of thin mattresses, each of which has a quilt made by folding a blanket and pinning a sheet around it. They are spread out on the floor and everybody is accommodated. I want to resist Iranophile ravings here, but this is a truly civilized process. A small house like the one we are in now can have up to a dozen people sleeping over at the end of one of the obligatory mass meals – which are also, by the way, taken on the floor though often a row of chairs will stand, unused, against the wall, almost like framed pictures of themselves. I was the first to go to sleep while others talked on and so I missed Deportivo losing to Barca. That was on in the early hours.

Possibly to get me out of the house, M, my Persian teacher, and F, the lady of the house, take me out for a walk. First we go to the street bazaar which sets up in this area each Monday – and then moves to other areas on other days. This is not a real bazaar: that is a permanent construction, entirely under cover. There are fruit and vegetables here and a lot of, well, junk: as though a bomb had exploded inside a Crazy Clark’s. I get smiles that are friendly rather than surprised, a marker that tourists are a bit more common here than they used to be, though apparently they are more common in summer and spring and more likely to be found at the tomb of Avicenna. M and I walk along a main street till we get to a small hill from which Hamedan can be seen. What to say about this city that I have such a soft spot for?

Hamedan is exactly the same as it was on previous visits and probably has been since it was the capital of the Medes: a fairly ugly, temporary-looking place all done in shades of brown brick. The urban ugliness of Iran is something I would like to know more about. Is it because I come from a clean and green city that I notice what perhaps most other inhabitants of the world would not? Is it to do with that ubiquitous Persian notion that the exterior doesn’t matter, it is what is inside, in the heart, that counts? At any rate, like all Iranian towns, it is made up of a set of large roundabouts which are joined by the major roads of the town. These meidanha can be alarming: firstly on account of the way the traffic circulates around them looking for ways to get across to the desired exit (you could write a book about near-death experiences on urban Iranian roads) and secondly from the kind of municipal whimsies one sometimes sees on the land inside the roundabout. I’ve seen, in different places, large animals made of concrete, incomprehensible statues, concrete mushrooms, concrete renditions of fruits of the world and, most bizarrely, large plastic models of ball-shaped cacti. There is no green anywhere. Spare blocks of land between buildings are left just like that, like building tips. Long ago when I asked why the council doesn’t grass these over to make pretty, temporary parks, I was told, “Because the Afghans will take over and play football there”.

What redeems Hamedan – if that is the right word – are the mountains. As an inhabitant of sub-tropical river flats I had actually subliminally registered these as clouds. But we are in the high Zagros here and a huge range runs to the south of the city in rather the same way that the Alburz runs along the north of Tehran. The biggest mountain of this range is Alvand, a steep, looming peak, snow-covered and sparkling in the bright winter sunlight. You can accept a lot of urban ugliness when it is butted up against something like that.

In the afternoon we watch live football from Tokyo where Sepahan of Isfahan play the Japanese club Urawa Reds. Sepahan means “army” – literally it is “soldiers”, the plural of the Persian word which gets into English via Hindi and the English of the Raj as “sepoy”. Sepahan, unaccountably happy to play with a right-hand side to its defence that goes entirely missing in action, lose one-three after plenty of warnings from the forwards and midfielders of the Urawa left. There is a bit of depression but not much. This is essentially a household supporting Persepolis (pronounced Perseplees with the stress on the last syllable) which, with Esteqlal, is one of the big two teams of Tehran.

Malayer, 11/12/07

Last evening we moved to the flat of another friend, M’s sister. When the electricity failed we moved on to the house of her daughter and the daughter’s husband. Both have recently retired, the latter as a bank manager. For an Iranian he has extraordinary looks: he might be a Russian or, even, a Norwegian. Their house is about as luxurious as I have seen in Iran. It has three self contained levels and the middle level is let out. There is much laughter and embarrassment when, looking for the television set which is “below”, I stumble into this middle flat terrifying the man who rents it. At midnight I am at the end of my tether and we return to the original house to find the electricity once more working.

Today is a good day to sample Iranian television. Especially the international news station, IRINN, which, bless them, runs banners in English. These are revealing and worth sampling:

Iran’s commander: Iran never sought nuclear weapons.

Cargo trains begin between Koreas.

Ice storm in US claims fourteen lives.

UN urges restoring Gaza fuel supply.

Afghan troops take Taliban town.

Civil Rights Group: Israeli policies raise racisms.

Persian Gulf States: Israel threatens Mid-East.

Berlin schools hire guards after attacks on pupils.

Chinese yuan hits new high against US dollar.

Palestinian Cabinet: Expansionism a blow to peace.

Egypt slams Israel for continuing settlement construction.

Zebani: US presence temporary.

CIA chief faces congress grilling over interrogation tapes.

Argentina swears in female leader.

One of these banners was too cryptic for me:

“Iranian Research Team preparing for Afghan Lullaby.”

I know all this stuff simply reflects a government line and that the rules are fairly straightforward: nothing good must be reported from Israel or America, not even stories about shaggy dogs rescued from ice-floes. But they do harmonize with the Iranians’ sense of themselves as a nation proud of its scientists and philosophers, surrounded by countries which are alien (and sometimes, like the Gulf States, staggeringly rich) because they are Sunni Muslim but with which reasonably lasting links can be made. Beyond these states is Israel, a land of thugs, and America which used to be a country that was merely self-obsessed, materialist and insensitive but which is now, under the Bush Administration, shown to be also a country of thugs and torturers. As for the news itself, it is all spin. True, it’s not exactly Goebbels’ Germany. It spins at about the same speed as Fox News though without the ugly, abrasive edge. Oh for an independent news service: who, but a politician, wants to live in a world of nothing but spin?

Then there is the aesthetics of the television world in Tehran. The visual quality of the programs is quite distinctive, high-quality and, above all, consistent. On television, outdoors Iran seems much prettier than it is. But there are a lot of flowers. Two men talking about football, of all things, are likely to have a glass table between them, saturated with flowers – perhaps even artificial flowers. One wouldn’t lightly use a word like “kitsch” for a culture that produced the Sheikh Lotfullah mosque and the great Friday Mosque of Isfahan or which produced the architect of the Taj Mahal, but it teeters on the edge of being very cloying – at least to Western eyes.

Malayer, 12/12/07

A day of two parts. The morning is spent with M and her niece’s husband, H, seeing various sights of Hamedan including the Tomb of Avicenna and an ancient stone lion reputed to be of Achemenian vintage. These are things I have seen before but it is always good to see something again when you know more about it. This applies to the second part of the day, as well. This trip is going to be a visit of only small journeys since they are expensive and I want as much of my traveling money as possible to go to friends. The Gate at Kermanshah is within striking distance and, although I have been there once before, it will repay a second visit especially as, the first time, the famous Behistun inscription was covered up for repairs. We decide to drive beyond Kermanshah to Eslam Abad where we will stay with friends. If we make an early start back (not as uncomplicated a process as it might seem), we have a whole day to explore Kermanshah, the Gate and the inscription.

We leave at three in the afternoon and so by the time we approach Kermanshah it is already dusk. You need to know something about the geography of the Gate for what follows. Essentially it is a pass that takes one up from the sea-level lands of Iraq into the high plateaus of Iran. Because it is so marked and the mountains so high, one is never in any doubt that one is on the right road. Everybody has been through here: Cyrus the Great on his way from southern Iran to conquer Babylon in 539BC (and to earn the epithet “The Anointed of Yahweh” in the Old Testament) and Alexander the Great a couple of hundred years later, in the opposite direction) on his way to doing to the Persians what Cyrus had done to the Neo-Chaldean empire. The Gate skirts the southern side of an extraordinary mountain – actually a short range of mountains – which is now called Bisotun. This name itself is worth looking at. The mountain is so high and so abrupt that it was in the past associated (like Mt Sinai) with the gods. Then its name was Bagastan: the place of god. This became corrupted to Behistun and, since that doesn’t mean anything in Persian, it was eventually changed – by the Persian equivalent of what we call anglicisation – to Bisotun, which means “without pillars”.

As we approach through the growing dark, something miraculous happens. In the distance, among the ranges of high mountains, Bisotun slowly reveals itself as the dominant feature. Largely it is the abruptness that does this. The thing is a mile high and seems to go straight up. As the sun sets behind it, and we get closer, it simply occludes large parts of the sky. And there, as though added by a designer, in the pink and lilac sky to the left, is a sickle moon, pointing like a bow to the great mountain. An image to take to the grave.

Eslam Abad, 13/12/07

We arrived last night to stay with a family which I remember well from a one night visit eight years ago. Then we were on our way back from a trip to Isfahan and Shiraz , traveling north along the western Zagros. Ideally this, too, should have been a one-night visit but last night the lady of the house was ill and had to be taken to hospital. Since everybody but me (I was so tired that I slept through all these disruptions) didn’t get to bed until early in the morning, we would not be able to set off early enough the projected visits to Kermanshah and beyond. This is a really lovely family: a mother and father and four sons each of whom is married and has children. The two older sons have moved out, with their wives, and the younger two live in the house downstairs. When we arrive, I remember the two “middle” wives perfectly, G and Ko. I was fascinated by their lives. They lived together, as close as sisters, though they were completely unrelated. They are both very beautiful and don’t seem to have aged at all.

Everybody turns up for the evening meal. There are now two boys who are at school as well as two younger children. These are very charming and great fun to talk to largely because they can make themselves understood. The Kurdish-inflected dialect of the parents and, especially, the grandparents – everybody seems to talk as though they had mouths full of pistachios – is altogether more difficult. It is as warm and loving an environment for children (and their mothers and fathers) as you could imagine and yet it is an environment of such limited horizons. Eight years ago, there was only one school age child, a little girl who, in the way of little girls experiencing a profoundly alien visitor, made a great deal of me. When we left, she gave a children’s book as a present. I haven’t ever forgotten – I still have it. I meet her and her father in the street after the first of our walks around the town. She is now fifteen or sixteen, very self-possessed and clearly remembers me. Later in the day, she and her mother come to dinner and, in the afternoon, while I am sleeping, she returns with a book and a card as a gift. I shall have to reciprocate somehow – a book of photos of Brisbane would be nice.

On my first visit I thought Eslam Abad must be about the crummiest town on earth: small, dirty, insular. In a way it is provincial urban Iran, not the mullah-ridden, ignorant Iran of our fears, but a simple, devout and self-contained place. Today I have two walks around the place and I warm to it a little more. Oddly it seems to be thriving, at least relatively. There are a number of new buildings being built and even a new shopping arcade. The second walk is with K, M and the wife of the youngest son together with her small son. It is in the evening: promenading and window-shopping time. I get to look more closely at the people on the streets. This town, together with Kermanshah, is the centre of the Kurdish area of Iran. People are just different-looking to elsewhere. It’s hard to talk about it without seeming racist but the faces are all unusual in one way or another. The women often have a strong-jawed, mannish look that makes you think of gypsies, though one woman I saw looked like a small, homely version of Michelle Pfeiffer.

In the evening we go to the house of the second son for a meal. Everyone (except the oldest son and his family) is there and the children have a computer, though we can’t get the web-browser working. After eating we watch television and I get to talk to G the lady of the house. She is a language learner’s dream, having the rare gift of asking questions slowly and clearly. “How are your children? Are they grown up yet? Do you have any grandchildren? How many languages do you speak?” Suddenly I remember that on my first visit, eight years ago, I spoke to her on the roof of this same house where we had been having an outside meal. She had the same lovely, gracious manner then and I think it was the first time that I attempted to speak in Persian to someone without the intervention and aid of M or K. Gracelessly, I had forgotten all about this through the intervening years. At least at the end of the evening, when we make our goodbyes and she uses that lovely Persian formula, “Bring our greetings to your friends” I am able to say that I hope to be back in a year or so, perhaps accompanied by some of these friends. Much Inshallahing.

By Iranian standards this is a very early night. We get back to the house at about 10pm though I am half-delirious with social exhaustion. But since we need to make an early start (early being sometime before lunch) we need to sleep. I pass out the moment my head hits the pillow.

Hamedan, 14/12/07

An early start, leaving Eslam Abad and traveling east towards Kermanshah. There are wrecked Iraqi tanks pointedly left outside the town. In the war the Iraqis took Eslam Abad but not Kermanshah. Between the two towns is a piece of typical Iranian geography: a high flat fertile plain, a few kilometers in diameter, with mountains on all sides. Basically when one travels in Iran (at least in western Iran ) one moves from one such valley to another courtesy of a pass through the encircling mountains. The Iraqi assault got as far as a small town in one such valley. Its name, mysteriously, is Mahi-dasht which, if it means anything, means Fish-Plain.

On to Kermanshah where we stop to do some shopping. At the opening to the bazaar is a shop famous for its biscuits. They are called nan-e-brenj: rice bread. On my first visit we all watched fascinated as a single worker pinched off the dough, rolled it and set it on a large baking tray. He did this at the rate of about two biscuits a second and one was torn between admiration of his dexterity and fear for what a shift of four hours, six days a week doing this would do to one’s body and brain. At any rate he has either been pensioned off or has retired because his place is now taken by two much younger men who are no slouches themselves. We are allowed inside (the privilege of the exotic tourist) to take photos and are given a small cardboard tray of free, freshly made, delicious biscuits. I stand on the upper level with the boys and M while K wanders around taking movie footage of the shop front staff, all of whom are delighted to be filmed. The advantage of standing on the upper level is that one is near to the oven vent and its blessedly warm air: today is a cold day in Kermanshah.

As soon as you leave the city, traveling north-east, Bisotun begins to make an appearance. Turning a corner you see it suddenly looming up at the edge of the town. It’s a bit like the minster at York – you can’t get it entirely out of your field of vision. Where Kermanshah runs up against the mountain is a park. Here you can see massive Sassanian inscriptions made in the base of the mountain. They have never attracted me, though they are, undoubtedly, historically significant. The most striking is a huge arch cut into the mountain with relief statues of Khosro II (590-628AD) with the gods Ahura Mazda and Anahita as well as some hunting scenes. Below is what looks for all the world like a medieval knight in armour and on horse with a spear. For all their importance as recorders of the style of a dynasty which does not have too many sources they are not appealing, though there is an Hellenic look about the images of the gods.

A few kilometers down the road (which hugs the southern side of the mountain) we come to the village of Bisotun . After the death of Cyrus the Great in 530 BC, probably in a skirmish on his north-eastern borders, his son, Cambyses, inherited the empire and extended it by annexing Egypt. Although circumstances have combined to turn Cambyses into the very model of a looney eastern potentate (Caligula and Nero come to mind), he did conquer the third great empire of the day (Cyrus had conquered Lydia and Babylon ). But he also killed his brother, Bardiya. When Cambyses died, one of the priests impersonated the dead brother and took control of the fledgling empire. He, in turn, was killed by a cabal of nobles and the kingship passed to one of these, Darius the Great. We know all this from Herodotus, though even this bare outline of events will suggest to the ordinary conspiracy theorist that there are many other scenarios: what if Bardiya wasn’t killed by Cambyses and Darius came to the throne by killing one of the sons of Cyrus? It is all thrashed out in Book One of Herodotus who is very reliable about the Persians, even if he never saw this inscription and knew precious little about the empire’s administrative and banking centre, Persepolis.

Darius’ first year on the throne, 521BC, was spent establishing his credentials by putting out spot fire rebellions. These are recorded on the great inscription of Behistun. In fact we know that one of the rebellions occurred while the inscription was being carved because the layout has been altered to accommodate new information. Like all of the Old Persian inscriptions it is in three languages: Old Persian, Neo-Babylonian and Elamite (the old civilization of the southern Zagros, long gone by the time of Darius). When I first came here, it was covered for repair, now it is open to the public for the cost of admission to a sealed off park. You go past a weird little statue of Hercules, probably Sassanian, which now at least doesn’t need to be enclosed in a box for its own protection, though I suspect that the head has been replaced by a new copy. To your left is the pool that Alexander saw and you begin a climb up the mountain. To be fair, the inscription is not quite what you expect. It is not carved on an outward-facing bulwark of the mountain where it would be thrust into the faces of all who pass by. Instead it is on of the walls of a large cleft. Deep in the cleft is a fire-escape-like set of steps for the conservators: the public can get only to the base of these, about fifty feet below the inscription. The inscription is clearly visible though one wonders whether anybody who had not seen copies of it would recognize it. It is rather smaller that I expected and you do need to know what it looks like to know what it looks like. But there on the left is Darius, seated before a row of captives, each of whom is different and each of whom represents one of the rebellious kings, and there are the rows of priceless Old Persian text. If I tell you that there are approximately 80 surviving inscriptions in Old Persian, most of which are less than five lines, that this is over five hundred lines long and that the next longest is sixty lines, you will get some idea of its linguistic as well as historical value. In their day, the Persians were the most powerful people on earth and all paid tribute, even their neighbours the Greeks who later were successfully to resist a Persian invasion by Darius’ son. Persia is to Ancient Greece as America is to Iran. But, unlike the Greeks, and unlike the Jews who, as prisoners of the Babylonians, were inherited and eventually freed by the Persian kings, the Persians did very little writing. There may have been extensive demotic administrative documents, held in Persepolis, but if so they were destroyed when Alexander burnt Persepolis in 330BC.

In 1836 An English military man, Henry Rawlinson, had himself lowered on ropes from the top of the mountain so that he could transcribe the letters. This enabled him to decipher Old Persian. Looking up beyond the inscription at this formidable mountain, I get a better sense of his achievement. “Had himself lowered by ropes” doesn’t sound much in a book, but standing here below the inscription I reflect that it is not something I would do.

Looking at it more carefully, I have the heretical thought that this is really a disappointing site for such a famous piece of self-justifying propaganda. This leads to the thought that perhaps this cleft was chosen for the simple reason that the masons could build scaffolding more easily. Instead of being one of those freak achievements which completely overrides the difficulties of its site (like, say, the pyramids) perhaps there is something a little opportunistic and gimcrack about the whole affair. At any rate, it is a potent experience to stand fifty feet below one of the great documents of the past: worth seeing and also worth going to see.

But if the inscription of Darius is a little less than I expect, the Gate is considerably more. It is a fairly wide pass, at times a true (though narrow) valley. When we get to the end of it, before the town of Sahneh, we stop at the side of the road to look back, to see by day what two days ago we saw at dusk. It is a really impressive site with the enormous range looming at the far end. We have lunch at Sahneh and then off.

Malayer, 15/12/07

We have a very quiet morning in Hamedan. Most people seem to be sleeping so I finish Zuleika Dobson something I brought with me, having started it well before leaving Brisbane. What a strange novel it is, surely the strangest novel in English. How fitting to be reading it in such a strange country but I shudder to think what I would say if someone here asked me to explain what it was about. At 3.30, when everybody is pointing more or less in the same direction, we set off for Malayer.

Malayer is a smallish town (perhaps 30,000 people) to the south of Hamedan about an hour’s drive away. Here we stay with family of K’s which I know very well. I always feel immediately at home here. It is less exotic than the others though not more Australian. It is made up of husband and wife and three daughters, though the middle daughter, after enduring a difficult divorce, now lives with a new husband (and brand new baby) in the south. The eldest daughter, Mm, lives with her husband in the upper part of a comfortable, three tier house. I get the room of the youngest daughter, S, which has a bed and a computer with internet capabilities. On this computer, S has digitized pictures of her older sister’s wedding and new baby. There are an awful lot of them.

Iranian weddings seem to go on for ever. Some of the scariest things I have seen in Iran – the country of revolution, war, religious intensity – are wedding videos. They too go on forever and at various points small pink butterflies are superimposed on the happy couple. Nobody finds this embarrassing. To make it even worse, the brides in the still photographs always look awful and look nothing like their real selves. But they do look consistently awful: there is a distinct style going on here.

Later on there is laughter in the kitchen and I prick up my ears when I hear my name. S has asked Mm why she doesn’t wear a scarf now Martin is in the house and the answer, apparently, is that I am like a father. I take this, optimistically, to mean that I am an accepted member of the family rather than that I am so old I hardly count in matters of etiquette.

Today Esteqlal lost 1-3 at home. Much slightly undignified rejoicing at the discomfiture of a rival.

Malayer, 16/12/07

A quiet day. I have a cold and spend the morning reading and writing. After lunch I watch Boca Juniors lose to AC Milan in the world club championship which pits the best team in South America against the winner of the European Champions League. While I am watching I notice that N, sitting alongside me, is reading a book that has the formidable, unsmiling face of you-know-who on the front. Whether it is a collection of Khomeini’s speeches or a properly written book, I can’t find out. It certainly isn’t a novel. Was Khomeini as good man? “Definitely.” This is unanimous in the house. Why are you reading him? “He tells us about Islam.” I ask if he seen as the “Father of his country”, as though he were an Ataturk, but the phrase doesn’t seem to work in Persian. He is the architect of the Republic. We talk about the horrors of revolution and how the experience here is paralleled in other countries: indeed the English Civil War and the ensuing Commonwealth seem very close. A bunch of religious fanatics take over the place, attempt to remake a culture on grounds they approve of, and ultimately run out of steam. My friends have never heard the cliche “Revolutions eat their own children” but there is hearty assent. And then, as if a fundamentalist revolution wasn’t enough, came the horrors of the eight-year long war with an invading Iraq . The man of this house was a police officer in Khorramshahr on the Shatt al Arab and there are many old photos in the family albums of bombed bridges and houses.

In the afternoon we get Liverpool vs Manchester United (one nil to the away team) and Arsenal vs Chelsea (a win to Arsenal). Afterwards there is a long interview with Ahmedinejad on another of the channels. I say “interview” though the interviewer looks solemn and opens his mouth very rarely. As far as I can make out it is a long, wide-ranging kind of talk (he uses a sheaf of notes) generally focusing on economic issues. Ahmedinejad looks, I have to say, rather good. When he appears on television in the West there is always a slightly buffoonish, hectoring quality about him. This is exacerbated by the fact that he is a small man, usually surrounded by a bulky entourage. The sense we often get of him is that he is not unlike Bush junior, a small man, rather out of his depth. Here, on his home turf, he looks a good deal better. He comes across as thoughtful, measured and sincere and has, despite what seems to be a mild strabismus, a wry and attractive smile. To help him out, there is a far more sympathetic camera positioning so that his head and shoulders are much higher in the frame. All the furore about nuclear weapons seems here nothing more than a cleverly exploited distraction.

Ahmedinejad’s problems are at home and they are really serious problems. The Iranians whom I know all tend to have what is called a “zero-sum” understanding of economics. They know their country is wealthy in natural resources and that high world oil prices mean that dollars are flowing in at a mind-boggling rate. They also know that they, themselves, have never been well-off and that jobs are now even harder to get than before and that inflation is eating away at the buying power of the toman. Therefore, it seems to them, someone is pocketing all the wealth. This doesn’t bode well for an elected government.

I don’t know when this interview was recorded but tomorrow Ahmedinejad sets off on the Haj. In a surprising way it’s hard not to wish him well but it is just as hard to imagine him surviving another election.

Malayer, 17/12/07

K and M have gone off to Tehran on business, some of it involving the final, financial throes of the divorce of the daughter of my Hamedan friends. I decide to stay behind here in Malayer until they return. There won’t be much traveling but it will at least be calm and give me a chance to write up this diary properly. It is good for me in language terms as well: I simply have to make myself understood. Over the ensuing days, by the way, this becomes easier. An element of charade is woven into our conversations and these persist, even when not necessary. So a conversation which begins with some statement about mullahs (always suspected here of pocketing the country’s wealth, though I, myself, have never seen an unduly rich one) will be accompanied by a gesture of wrapping ones hand around one’s head to indicate the amameh: the turban. Any reference to police is accompanied by a tapping of two fingers on the shoulder to indicate official rank and so on. In fact it occurs to me that when we try to learn to speak a language – ie communicate verbally – we really teach our listener as much as they teach us. We have first to teach them the basic rules of how to speak to foreigners in your own language and then we have to teach them what version of their own language we actually know. The former means teaching them the basic rules: no slang, no metaphors, speak slowly and show where the wordbreaks are. The latter means helping them know what vocabulary we know and what we don’t know. It’s an odd reversal of roles but it seems essential. In this family our communication improves as we get closer together and there is much laughter about the fact that I can understand N but rarely M. N, we say, understands Martin’s Persian!

Today we go to look at a century and a half old Qajar period house which is within walking distance. It is in the process of being turned into a museum. Almost everything in Iran seems to be in process: new buildings, because landscaping is never done, always look to be about two weeks away from true completion. On the surface, for someone who has seen the Behistun inscription, this doesn’t seem especially appetizing but how wrong one can be. It’s a fascinating place: a large walled enclosure with extensive, two story living quarters, stables and workshops. Below is a large, cool room with a fountain in the middle and the bases for beds all around: plainly somewhere to go in the heat of summer. Stored away in this room, in the process of being prepared for some kind of display, are the most amazing pieces of agricultural equipment: wooden ploughs, hoes, harrows etc that we see only in period films where they look suspiciously new. All of this looks incredibly clumsily made though, from a woodworking point of view, some are surprisingly complex. There is rotary plough, for example, designed to be pulled between two oxen, which is made up of flat wooden blades set into what must originally have been a section of a large tree trunk. These blades have been individually adzed and then fitted into a deep groove cut in the shaft. There must be thirty of them and it must have taken an age to make and keep in repair. One of the completed sections is a life-size diorama of people treading grapes and then turning the juice into a thick liquor from which a paste is made. In the room next door a life size model of what is presumably the owner of the house is sitting at a table. Always anxious to take advantage of any photo opportunity, M leaps across the low barrier and sits next to the model while I take a quick photograph.

In the afternoon Persepolis play Petro-Chimie of Tabriz in the ugly and cavernous Azadi Stadium. After the revolution the name of Persepolis was changed to Piroozi (Victory) as in the Melbourne team. But everyone refers to is by its pre-Revolutionary name just as, in Brisbane, Lang Park is generally still Lang Park. The game is a fairly clinical dismembering courtesy of a technically superior midfield accompanied by some good finishing. 4-1 to Persepolis.

Malayer, 18-20/12/07

Three calm and productive days in this town. On one of the evenings we watch an historical film about Abraham (Ebrahim). This is in keeping with the season because this year the Eid-e-Qorban (which celebrates Abraham’s near-sacrifice of his son and to which the time of the Haj is attached) takes place around Christmas time. Like the fast of Ramadhan it is on a solar calendar and will be at a different time next year. The whole story celebrates Abraham’s testing and submission except that in the Qur’anic version it is Ishmael not Isaac who nearly goes under the knife. Given that it is Ishmael, the son of Hagar, who, even in the Jewish tradition, is the ancestor of the Arabs, this tweaking of the biblical original seems appropriate. The Eid-e- Qorban also produces that ubiquitous and lovely formula, often heard at the end of telephone conversations: ” Qorban-e-shoma ” “I am your sacrifice.”

On the next evening we visit friends of M and N who (like me) have a son who is just graduating as an engineer. He speaks English, and would like the opportunity for some practice. His father is a handsome retired military man who, in the time of the Shah , learnt about servicing F-4 Phantoms in Texas and Colorado. I get to talk on the telephone to the family’s daughter who is a doctor, about to emigrate to Australia . “What is Sydney like?” Very beautiful. In fact, a little like Istanbul.

Walking back from another visit to the Qajar house, I see that the sun illuminates the Kuh-e-Sard above Malayer and stop to take a photo. Unfortunately a petrol station is in the foreground and I am quickly stopped. It is forbidden to take photos of petrol stations – presumably in case the information should be passed on to someone planning to bomb the place. One shouldn’t be too scornful about this: during the war petrol supplies were bombed regularly by the Iraqis.

Hamedan, 21/12/07

We arrived here yesterday evening. It is a familiar, hour-long journey, this time enlivened by having become involved with several cars constituting a wedding party. This made for some dangerous driving as they wove across the road with much tooting of horns and flashing of lights. It is often said that Isfahan would be a wonderful place if it weren’t full of Isfahanis. Similarly, it is tempting to say that Iran’s roads would be wonderful if they weren’t full of drivers.

This morning we have a shopping expedition though the bazaar is closed in honour of the Eid-e-Qorban . It is seriously cold and the mountains have an odd, glowing look, as though they were back-projected. Fortunately all the shops have heaters.

In the evening there is a large feast in honour of the Eid. I am asked what changes I have seen in Iran since my last visit. A difficult question. The cars are better, but there is petrol rationing. How can there be petrol rationing in an oil-rich country? We also have a brief discussion about Iranian art films. They are criticized here for presenting too bleak a view of the country. As social-realist documents they tend to avoid the urban middle-class (unless dealing with some issue like women’s rights) and thus give the impression that Iranians don’t have mobile phones, good cars etc etc. I respond that this may be true but is a minor negative given the exposure of Iran to the world that has been achieved by the films of the likes of Kiarostami, Majidi. Makhmalbaf etc.

Because it is the Eid-e-Qorban, there are enormous amounts of food eaten and large numbers of photos taken. My Persian teacher, M, always a party animal, puts on a tape and she, and many of the other women, dance. The men sit around sheepishly refusing their wives’ pleadings that they dance. But we do contribute the clapping. After all this there is a Hafez reading. K reads a poem for individuals chosen by a kind of lottery involving the rings of the ladies present. I get a poem but, since it is one I do not know, it goes over my head. Social exhaustion takes over.

Hamedan, 22/12/07

Off to the bazaar in search of gifts for friends. The gold-sellers (talaforoosh-ha) dominate with their brightly-lit shops, the size of three or four phone-booths joined together. They are, as always, friendly, even affectionate, thoughtful, bottomlessly polite. They are also important people in the community, certainly not mere retailers. The gold and silver bangles, rings and trinkets which they display are their property. When they close for lunch all the trays are put in a safe which occupies a good deal of the shop. They sell gold ornaments but also rebuy them. When they sell, the value of the item is the value of the gold by weight with a premium of about twenty-five percent for the workmanship (this can often be very fine). When they buy an item back, they pay the going price for the gold alone. And the buyers (phalanxes of women squeezed hungrily into the tiny space in front of the counter) are not just buying high-quality junk. Gold rings and bangles are a way of carrying money around and when you need cash you sell an item or two at the talaforoosh who also act as unofficial money-changers – men of significance.

Regrettably gold is just too expensive for my budget and this, combined with the fact that my friends know that I derive no pleasure at all from shopping (as some people derive no pleasure from watching football) results in my getting packed off, with A as a guide, to look at the ruins of Haghmataneh. This is the ancient city which became Ecbatana and, later, Hamedan. It lies pretty well in the main part of Hamedan, a deserted stretch of land full of earth mounds. By a miraculous piece of good fortune, it was never built over (though there was, apparently, a caravanserai here for a century or two) and so has remained available for archeological excavation. And this has progressed significantly since I was last here: you can walk on shaky scaffolding over an extensive stretch of excavated houses and other buildings from the early period. And the museum is now complete. It is an impressive place showing finds ranging from a Bronze-Age burial to objects from a succession of Persian dynasties through to the Islamic period.

As part of a pre-existing arrangement, I am to go with H to see the so-called treasure-letter (Ganjnameh) – an important Achemenian inscription. Unfortunately by the time we get there it is rather dark, too dark to take good photographs. And so we arrange to come again in the morning when the path will be just as dangerously icy, but the sun will illuminate the lettering.

Hamedan, 23/12/07

Back to the Ganjnameh this morning with H. The ice is a few inches thick and dangerous to walk on so we tippy-toe up towards the monument. I have been working on an attempt to understand its location. In the past it always seemed to be carved on a rock which is in a dead-end valley. I had presumed that the valley was some sort of cool retreat for the Achemenian court at the height of summer: next to the inscription is a beautiful waterfall. But it always seemed odd to spend countless man-hours carving an inscription which declares, virtually, that you own the whole world (courtesy of Ahura Mazda) on a piece of rock near a glorified picnic area.

The inscription is, in fact, visible from a road which runs up a mountain spur and thence over the mountains. This road is an ancient one and connects Hamedan to the town of Tuyserkan. The road was part of a larger path taking people from Iran west to Babylon via Hamedan and the Gate at Kermanshah. As you came down the mountain pass towards Hamedan you would see it on your left. It must have been an impressive reminder of who ruled the known world that you were traversing. It would take you a long time to get to Babylon and if there were other inscriptions on the way you would be reminded of just how vast the lands of the Great King were.

More than a millennium later, this road became part of the Silk Route. There was an alternative, southern route, branching off at Qazvin and going on to Baghdad and then to points farther west. It was a way of avoiding the snows that were likely to delay you on the northern route through Tabriz, Turkey and then Constantinople.

The inscription itself is in unbelievably good condition. Like the one at Bisotun it is in Old Persian, Neo-Babylonian and Elamite: all in cuneiform letters cut into the rock. And the rock is a darkish granite and exceptionally hard. With the morning sun shining directly into the lettering you can see how clear and precise the carving is. Like the great imperial processions at the entrance to Persepolis and like the “Alexander” sarcophagus in the Istanbul museum, it might have been made yesterday.

The two inscriptions are a few metres above head height and you can see beneath them the holes where the mason obviously inserted poles to support the Achemenian equivalent of painters’ planks. The one on the left is by Darius and the one on the right by Xerxes. I like the theory, however, that both were commissioned by Xerxes and the one ostensibly by Darius was written by Xerxes to stress that he was no newcomer: his father had ruled and passed his patrimony on to his son.

I can remember the surprise and excitement when I first read the translation into English that was then provided at the site.

A great God is Ahura Mazda, who created this earth, who created that heaven, who created man, who created happiness for man, who made Darius king, the one king of many kings, the one lord of many lords. I am Darius the great king, the king of kings, the king of countries having many men, the king in this great earth far and wide, the son of Hytaspes , an Achemenian.

“I am Darius the Great King, the King of Kings . . .” I am still amazed at how familiar this seemed. Our knowledge of ancient history prepares us for this kind of imperial rhetoric – it was probably stolen from the Babylonians – and instead of being an experience of estrangement, it seems something that our pasts have prepared us for.

The Ganjnameh also records, in an oblique way, the occlusion of the Achemenians from later Persian history. The later dynasties, Parthians, Sassanids, Safavids etc, were always remembered but nobody knew who had produced these inscriptions or what they meant. Hence the inane names. Ganjnameh means “treasure-letter”, presumably because somebody thought it might tell people how to unearth a nearby treasure. Persepolis was (and still is) called Takht-e-Jamshed (the Throne of Jamshed) and the nearby Achemenian tombs Naqsh-e-Rostam (the Inscription of Rostam). Both Rostam and Jamshed are mythical characters from Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, written around the turn of the first millennium AD, so it’s a bit as though, in the future, the remains of Buckingham palace were found and called the palace of King Arthur.

It is the Greeks who all of us, Persians included, have to thank for the true history of this, the first really extensive empire in the world. Especially that indefatigable researcher, Herodotus. He certainly never got as far east as Hamedan, however, because his description of the capital of the Medes has all the attributes of tall tales transmitted at a distance: fabulous wealth, seven differently coloured walls, etc. Little wonder that when, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, amateur archaeologists turned up in Hamedan, they were looking for the remains of a middle-eastern Eldorado and hence, no doubt, the idea of an inscription being a treasure map.

On to Malayer in the evening. K and M begin some very serious packing while I, altogether lighter in worldly goods, watch Manchester United beat Everton (thanks to a last minute foul on Giggs in the penalty area) and Inter win the Milan derby by the same score: 2-1.

Tehran, 24/12/07

It’s Christmas Eve and we move on, with our goods, to Tehran. Unfortunately, these goods occupy so much space that there is no room at the car for M and myself. We follow on by bus and taxi.

The parting between Ma and M (who is Ma’s wife’s brother’s wife!) is formidable. They begin exchanging formulae well before the door. All in all it takes perhaps three or four minutes but it seems like an eternity. At the end they both look exhausted. And these courtesies continue in the short taxi ride to the bus terminal. The first half of this is occupied by M and her husband’s niece Mm offering payment and the driver resolutely refusing it until it is virtually stuffed into a crevice in the car. The second half is taken up by the women refusing the change he offers. This is all show, of course. It is called ta’rof, the refusal to accept money for goods or services. It may be a sham – you have to pay – but it is still an impressive display of courtesy, emphasising that your new friend (in this case the taxi driver) would never dream of sullying your friendship by asking for money. The bus ride is comfortable and safe, the only thing worth recording being the extensive eucalyptus plantings around the city of Qom. The bus pulls in to the southern bus terminal of Tehran and after that we make our way north by taxi.

I really think that everybody on earth should, at some time in their lives, experience five or ten minutes of a taxi ride through the southern suburbs of Tehran. It shows us (among many, many, things) how parts of our brain are separated. The part connected to our senses tells us that very soon we are going to be killed or interestingly maimed in a serious accident. The other, logical part, reminds us that the driver does this all day, six days a week, and is still alive: there are no burnt-out wrecks beside the road, no screaming ambulances, no visible blood.

It is best described as a cross between dodgem cars and rally driving. If you have enough savoir faire to relax, it can be quite exhilarating and you can admire the skill of the driver who must belong to the most skilful group of non-competitive drivers in the world. You can also admire his impeccable good humour since the disposition of his passengers makes his driving even more difficult. Since no man can sit alongside an unknown woman and since the number of passengers must be maximised to ensure a good profit, some awkward configurations take place. In this little car there are five of us. I sit in the middle of the rear between M and a young man on my left while two men sit one on the other’s lap, in the front passenger seat.

Finally we find the house of M, one of K’s uncles. It is in the better part of the city in the north where the suburbs begin to work their way up the southern foothills of the Alburz . Tehran stretches out for kilometres to the south though you would hardly know: all you can see, after a block or two, is the great brown cloud of pollution.

Tehran, 25/12/07

K and M leave at 3.00am but I don’t hear them go. In the morning I have a longish chat to K’s uncle while waiting for my own flight in the afternoon. I can understand most of what he and his wife say and the conversation is immediately political. He is the first person I have met who approves of Ahmedinejad . Mr Khatemi was a good, cultured, civilised soul but not a real politician. He asks how Ahmedinejad is seen in the west. I answer, as I’ve written before in this diary, that he looks a good deal better in Iran than in the west. Had I heard of his performance at the American university? I had and agreed that his response to the students: “You would not be treated like this if you visited my country” was a telling blow. Agreement.

K’s uncle thinks that the Iranian parliamentary system – we are watching, on television, proceedings in the splendid new Parliament House – is a good one. Systems of democracy should not be imposed but should grow from the culture of the country. Since I know only that the religious component acts as a block to progressive legislation, I realize that I know nothing about the intricate relationship between the two components of the parliamentary system.

What about inflation? K’s uncle thinks it arises out of the cost of importing technology from the west. In essence it is an argument that Australians are familiar with. If we have a recession is it a result of government incompetence or is it simply that the larger economic world has caught cold and sneezed all over us? He belongs in the “influence of the wider world” camp.

Petrol rationing? How can there be petrol rationing in a country with so much oil? It is because Iranians waste oil shamefully. Rationing is a good way of reducing this and reducing the brown cloud outside the window!

Brisbane, 27/12/07

A reasonably uneventful return through Doha and Singapore back to my green, warm and damp home town. I have a few days to tidy up this diary before inflicting it on all those friends who ask: What is Iran like?

I seem to have been away from the place for five or even six months, but in real time it has only been long enough for the Queensland Roar to tot up one home win and an away draw. Good results.

Brook Emery: Uncommon Light

Carlton: Five Islands Press, 2007, 72pp.

This is Brook Emery’s third book. The first two – and dug my fingers in the sand (2000) and Misplaced Heart (2003) – share what are, essentially, philosophico -poetic concerns. Emery is especially good, in these, at registering the sense of an observing self, simultaneously part of the normal processes of the world and apart from them. As the first poem of his first book – significantly about the sea – says:

I'm in the sea but not of it, neither fish
nor fisherman nor sailor with their understanding
of its distance and its depths . . . . .

He is also good at epistemological issues, such as the fact that, when part of the world momentarily makes some sense (“coheres” is the word he is inclined to use) we are uncertain as to whether that is a pattern we impose or whether we have uncovered an underlying law. Does knowing less make patterns easier to discern? That is, is there a tension between empirical data and generalisation? He is continuously intrigued by the status of thought and the fact that thoughts arise naturally in us and play over experiences. He is also highly sensitive to the way in which the future passes through the present and on into the past and the fact that these three time-states are decidedly different. The present is the world of immersion while the past – full of traces of the present – is a remembered and analysed construct.

This all might make Emery seem like a second-rate philosopher but the fact is that he is a first-rate poet. He manages to convince us that these are not only intellectual issues but intensely internalised ones, part of his visceral experience of the world. This is done by the deployment of a small but potent cast of symbols. Of these water – as the sea and as rain – is the most common. Yes, the sea seems to represent the incomprehensible world of the data of experience – swimming is never a simple act in Emery – but it is also part of a personal environment. Emery, like Slessor , is profoundly a Sydney poet. Many poems are set inside a car (often during a rainstorm) and the situation is exploited as a way of coming to terms with the artist’s sense of being simultaneously inside and outside the world. After the rain, so to speak, come the birds, often exploited as symbols of thought.

Uncommon Light builds on and extends these first books – a critical commonplace – but it also makes radical changes. It begins with a poem, “Very Like a Whale” which is, as its title suggests about imposed perception. This seems contiguous with the earlier books, but there are two elements here that I think are rarer than in the first two books and which are very important in this new one. One is an emphasis on the self:

. . . . .
        I am not what I imagined,
                       here I am the illusionist
                       and dupe of my illusions,
        making the angels disappear, wishing them back again.
. . . . .

And the second, only suggested here in the word “angels”, an interest in the possibility of transcendence of some kind. Later in the poem, the self is redescribed in an entirely materialist, evolutionary way as:

               one more clay figurine with beseeching hollows
                                           where the eyes should be,
                                           as different from the others
 as I am the same, no more evolved
                                           than a roach,
                                           no better than a rat,
                                           happy as a labrador in the sun.
                  This is grace, the rest is commentary
                  and I would let it go: in millennia

 I'll chatter metaphysics with a chimpanzee, now
                            my thoughts are the antlers of the Irish elk,
                                                     the wings of flightless birds . . . . .

Of course a word like “grace” leaps out at the reader in a passage such as this. To complicate matters, it is not easy to be entirely sure about its significance here. It could be saying that grace is the state of living entirely physically, at one with the natural and animal world. It could also be saying, of course, that “grace” is a theological nonsense, a sense of bodily rightness that has become encrusted with commentary.

So Uncommon Light extends the generally epistemological concerns of the first two books into questions of our material identity and the validity of the idea of transcendence. It is also obsessed (I don’t think it too strong a word) with the idea of evil. This is a theme sounded in a number of poems towards the end of Misplaced Heart . Poems like “Self-portrait with Exploding Device”, “Aubade and Evensong: New Year, 2003” and “Commentary: Two Days”, though corralled in a single section of the book, all address the idea of suffering in the contemporary world. This note is continued almost immediately in Uncommon Light . The second poem, “Spring”, recalls the book’s epigraph from Orwell:

. . . spring is still spring. The atom bombs are piling up in the  factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are  streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going around the  sun and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they  disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.

“Spring” uses, as its central metaphor, the idea that we absorb time as sunlight and eventually let it show as cancers – “Our darker selves in and out of seasons”. And this bleak note is taken up in “Finches Perhaps” which deals first with the response of our thoughts when faced with a site of horror such as the Khmer Rouge torture centre of Tuol Sleng and then with the “tyrants” themselves:

Birds strip the hanging air, cut through it
between bars, through chinks, always at this

flit-flitting peak, this in and away as we say,
monstrous; as we say, how could anyone

have endured; thinking they, thinking if I were,
as birds dart in micro-moments through

our scant attention to how time corrodes
between denials then and now. It happened

and happened, normal really how helpless
rectify appears. Mind that thinks manacle

and bird and time cants to be a shrug. Tomorrow
the new tyrant's found in a spider hole, he has

a thick white web of beard, he has a gun
he doesn't fire. A torch shines in his open mouth,

the talk again of supervised elections. Distinctions
are this stark: Tuol Sleng – the poisoned mound -

used to be a school; its commandant
taught mathematics; its guards were adolescent.

Coherence only in the birds, what they have reclaimed.

It is a potent poem and, as far as I can see, gets double value out of the birds flitting in and out of the prison windows. They symbolise our thoughts – and thus connect the poem up to its author’s epistemological concerns – but they also symbolise a natural world that is, by definition, coherent.

The issue of the nature of evil gets a thorough working over in a four part poem called “Monster” whose parts are spread throughout the book. This poem impresses in the way it operates by statement and denial. Emery often puts both sides of a situation and lets the statements lie alongside each other – working by balancing possibilities rather than a potentially reductive assertion. The first “Monster” poem asserts unequivocally that the monster is present with us in the womb. Monstrosity is not a perversion or a freak sport of nature but an inherently human condition – we are all capable of running Auschwitz or Tuol Sleng . The second poem worries about the essentialism of this position: no monster, after all, produced the Lisbon earthquake – that is a product of some random and completely natural processes. It experiments with the idea of lived experience being made up of encounters between the good and the bad, the monsters and the saints:

. . . . .
I know saintliness exists. It's all around me.
My next door neighbours in their simple modesty,
the lady down the street who is always

helping someone older than herself. Even the slow
judicial process conceives it natural to be better
than we are. I'm trying to shoo the gloomy birds away

but crows repeat about me on the lawn; and the vulture
and the kite, the cuckoo and the owl: should I have given up the ghost 
when I was drawn from the womb? 

The third and fourth “Monster” poems censor the first two by overlaying an epistemological rigorousness:

. . . . .
                                            I'm embarrassed

by the flimsiness of my resolve, the silliness of saints and monsters,
conversations with a being who can't plausibly exist,
this mockery of flagellation . . . . .

and a return to issues of coherence: are observations of order “true but trivial” or a window into profound underlying laws? At any rate, the final result is bleak:

Against the livid orange sunset, consolation
(Is it a wing? A fuselage?) dips behind the hill,
out of the debris: fragments, disconnected things,
suffering that makes nothing holy.

Others have noted that Emery is a master of extended – usually multi-part – poetic meditations. At the core of Uncommon Light are a number of these. They make a very impressive achievement. The first of them is “That Beat Against the Cage” another poem to work over the bird/thought connection. The essential question that it asks is: where is life primary and where is it secondary? Its eight poems come down against the idea (shared by Buddhists and twentieth century metaphysicians) that life is an observed process and that what matters is not essences but field and flow:

. . . . .
Life lopes away as we dally in sub-plot, or worse
in a stream of consciousness; these thoughts,
sometimes like chirping birds, more often
like the incidental murmur of the sea, or wind
that gusts down evening streets. They never stop.

And yet, despite this confident rejection, there is still an intellectual openness: “I think it is. I think it isn’t”:

Yet there is confinement when all is in its place ,
the mind becomes eye's slave, scribe of boundaries,
reporter of coherence.
. . . . .

What complicates – or adds a third perspective – is a sense of a kind of non-transcendent transcendence which can be found in many places in this book, not least in its title – a quotation, we are told, from Augustine speaking of God’s view from an omniscient perspective. Some of the best poetry in Uncommon Light is that describing this sense that “The world holds back / a secret for itself, puts up a lattice work / of truth and lies.” Ideas are difficult to do in poetry but an almost queasy sensation is something even more challenging. One of the poems from “That Beat Against the Cage” makes an impressive attempt to speak of a transcendence that can be sensed but not really argued for:

I would see the outline of the world sufficient
had there not been an unconcealment ,
as though the wind were taking off its clothes,
a folding and unfolding of bird and tree and light
all the time back to swirling fire, emergent seas.

It's as if I'm deep inside the world, gripped
and almost capable of understanding
the mystery that is no mystery, that yields
but in yielding withdraws behind the clouds.

This seems an alias of beautiful, an inkling
that is in the moment but escapes the present.
Nothing here's sublime, nothing fixed and final ,
nothing artful: this records confusion and the mind's existence.

I know that many will find this kind of meditative beating out of ideas and positions unattractive, but I am greatly taken by this poem and the way it tries in words to get towards the edges of a profound but non-religious experience – a profound philosophical sensation. “That Beats Against the Cage” finishes with an unequivocal rejection of that version of the-world-as-process which leads to an idea of art as the solipsistic recording of the transient:

It's untenable, this drifting that sees the world as drift.
The fantasy should ebb, become the half-recalled
calling of the sea, or else lifetimes will be spent meandering
self-consciously through the matter of the day,
shuttling back and forth as if transience
could be a domicile . . . . .

Other poems record this sensation of approaching a transcendent which is not located above or even, really, within: it is more that it is underlying. “Nevertheless Also There” is an example. Beginning “The ordinary, it seems, is something more”, it goes on to describe the bodily sensation of seeming removed:

                       a kind of separation where my body
was an empty overcoat given form by air
and the something that was absent, too physical
to be a thought, too stark and inessential
to be a soul, was also there without a shade
or outline though it looked to float above me
and to occupy an equal space. This division
outlasts the waking moment so a day or life
or lives are spent in mist and expectation
or the purblind clarity left by rain when the everyday
is edged and charged and hardly changed at all.

And “Making a Presence” takes up the same theme, speaking of the unseen which makes

                 a presence here, a passing that takes us
even as we hold together harder. Hours blow by
and the stranger remains, making fans of trees ,
sharpening the sand, whispering and hissing till we
hear the vacancy it sings, this way, this way, it lies.
Wind whistles beyond us and my voice is the sea
torn to snow, cattle beneath a hill, an empty room ,
something promised and just beyond my reach.

Finally there is the title poem itself. Thirty-eight one line statements, questions and imperatives. Like another poem, “Tourism: What the I Sees”, “Uncommon Light” is an attempt to move into a poetic mode quite different to the usual meditations of Emery’s work. It is about the eye and its responses to what it sees. One line “An edge we share: it makes conspirators of us all” is about the involvement of subject with object while another “Starlight becomes us: no, really; divinity adapts as it descends” while looking neoplatonic is probably a statement of human- centredness so that all things become human size when we process them. That would make it the inverse of Blake’s “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite”. Finally there is the mysterious question “Common and uncommon light: who patrols the border?” which could be interpreted in many ways including as a rhetorical question. The significance of “Uncommon Light” though, is not so much what its gnomic sentences add to the complicated concerns of the book but rather in its move to a different mode. Of course this Delphic mode is not necessarily more intensely “poetic”. Philosophers from Heracleitus to Nietzsche and Wittgenstein have enjoyed the way cryptic propositions engage with discursive thought.

Looking at Emery’s work so far we can see a clear pattern of movement from a poetry almost entirely concerned with issues of reality, essence and knowledge to a poetry that almost is forced to face some of the mass horrors of the world. In Uncommon Light it tries to find ways of doing this that do not sacrifice the epistemological rigour of the earlier work. At the same time it quietly, and often in the interstices, asks painful questions about the value of poetry. The prospects – for the world, for knowledge and for poetry – might said to be bleak but bracing.

Tom Shapcott: The City of Empty Rooms

Cambridge, UK: Salt, 2006, 125pp.

Every decade or so I get the chance to reread the poetry of Tom Shapcott in order to try once again to make some sense of its shape. There is a productive stretch of forty-five years between the first book, Time on Fire, and this most recent one, The City of Empty Rooms, and that amounts to a lot of poems. The shapes we see in a writer’s career are always provisional, of course, and always likely to be inflected by one’s current concerns, but on this read-through I find myself wanting to account for the reasons why Shapcott’s last three books seem so successful compared with their predecessors.

One pattern within the body of work, obvious to all, is the way poems continually return to Shapcott’s Ipswich origins. There is a movement backwards that seems to grow more pronounced as time passes. In a way it is a kind of reciprocal movement because movements outwards – in travel or the acquisition of high-cultural stock – seem to induce their own need to return to base. It will come as no surprise to readers of Shapcott that this new book contains a series of poems called “Beginnings and Endings” and that the first of these are set in Ipswich mentioning, in the first line of the first poem, that shabby icon, Denmark Hill. It will also come as no surprise that it is a series of sonnets with the Petrarchan rhyme scheme, tricky because there are only two rhymes in the octet. (Shapcott’s skill in the sonnet form is something that goes uncommented on since his career generally has taken place in a non-formal phase of our poetic culture but it ought to be given some attention. It may be that a sense of craft status – easily measured by the ability to produce cleverly rhymed sonnets without the desperate enjambments and twisted syntax of most writers’ attempts – gives a kind of poetic confidence that allows the poet to run the risk of seeming to fill up poems with material of a personal and often uninteresting kind – what one of the poems calls “this utter / Concern with trivia”).

The first poem of the “Beginnings and Endings” section finishes very denotatively:

Dad was a lieutenant in the VDC. They climbed
The shaky ladder to the top of the water tower
To signal messages from Brisbane over
To Amberley Air Base. The camouflage convinced us but we named
Our dugout air-raid shelter "The Spider's Lair."
We stored blankets and comics and first-aid dressings there.

But things are not quite as contingent as they seem here. The last poem of this sequence takes the image of the spider and expands it into a symbolic figure of the poet:

I have become a spider living in dry places.
A huntsman behind the lavatory door
Among stale smells and in the shadows of a poor
Attempt at secretiveness. My meals are pieces
Of forgotten fragments, dust-mites and the minute carcass
Of something once animal. I need nothing more.
I have a terrible patience. But you may be sure
That when I move, the action is an abrupt process.

I have many eyes and I live in no real past
Or in an eternal present - I am not lovely
But that does not mean I am withdrawn. I am not overly
Gregarious. I wait and I watch. I keep a decent
Silence. But there are some skills where I have power.
At times I have spun a silk web strong as wire.

If we are tempted to see this as a fairly stylized symbol celebrating the ability of one who feeds on trivia and detritus but who can spin from his body a strong poem, it is worth looking at the first poem in the book, “Totems”. The point is made here that, if it were possible for the poet to choose his own totem (and thus choose an image for himself) he would have chosen the noble Red Cedar or the Black Bean tree. But, as the poem says, you don’t choose your totem, it is always there and eventually recognizes you. The final section of “Totems” leaves us again with spiders.

Yes, a tree,
I thought.
The bark spiders waited.
I shuddered
Perhaps sensing
Even then
Their time would come.
Feet soft as the undersides of leaves
And a quickness like bird-shadow
They remain
Foreign
Not to be understood
Even when they are predictable.
They return
In my dreams
And I come home
To them
Warily
- as befits a true Totem.

There are a number of issues raised here, not entirely relevant to the review of a book but not irrelevant either. One relates to this idea of totems: it is the issue of the history of Shapcott’s conception of the self, something tied in with the history of his conception of poetry. Another is this theme of recognition and its counterpart, annunciation.

To begin with the self. Time on Fire, published in 1961, is a very mixed book and I feel confident in saying, with the wisdom of hindsight, that the faultline that runs through it to make it shaky is the idea of the self. We meet a newly in-love man, full of the kind of rhapsodic inanities that (cynicism tells us) comprise a very dangerous hubris. We also meet a kind of over-inflated haranguer lecturing about time and cities. Shapcott won’t thank me for quoting any of this but something like

Blind city! Blind world again! denying all
the true discovering joys, grown stale and gross
even here, in this new land! Yes, yes, this is
Man’s metaphor, this is ourselves . . .

has a morbid – almost pathological – fascination. It comes out of a stance which is ultimately, perhaps, derived from the Jindyworobaks (though you would have to know a lot about Australian poetry in the fifties to work out the full etiology) but which simply doesn’t suit the deeper personality of the poet. It looks like empty bluff. This is nothing but praise because it means that Shapcott lacks the kind of proto-megalomaniac absolute certainty that you need when you set yourself up in this way. Later we meet other Shapcotts. Some – the world-weary documenter of urban life with small children and marriage problems – are less effective than others. In two of his best books, A Taste of Saltwater (1967) and Inwards to the Sun (1969) we meet a poet developing his dramatic powers and becoming involved in historical narratives and lyrics. Whether this hides the self or enables someone to express it allegorically depends on the poet’s stake in the poem. In “Macquarie, as Father”, the last poem of A Taste of Saltwater, Macquarie is conducting business and meditating on the colony while his wife is going through a difficult birth. It is tricky to work out why Shapcott is writing this poem (good, as it is). As a father himself, is he finding a connection with a generally rather remote but immensely important colonial governor, a connection that enables the poem to come alive? Is it an allegory about the birth of the country? Or is it a poet moving from the hectoring style of the bad public poems of the first books into a way of annexing Australia as his true ground by imaginatively entering its history as dramatist? It’s hard to be sure.

And then there are those poems, beginning with a dramatic portrait, “Medea of the Salt Swamp” from The Mankind Thing of 1964, which harness the power of myth. This can be done allusively (as in “A Country Marduk”, which is predominantly one of Shapcott’s portraits of a disaffected city-dweller) or directly (as in the dramatic sequence, “Minotaur”). I think these are the best of Shapcott’s early poems and so I can’t go along with the obvious objection that myth is merely a way of shoring up a poet’s shaky sense of who he is. The theory must be that poetry draws power from great archetypes when they are embodied in individuals. It is a theory that poetry, in actuality, ought to rebut. But in Shapcott’s poetry it usually works very well. If that seems a subjective summation, look at the second poem of the “Minotaur” sequence:

Before anything else, my hands – strong
and obedient as weapons, the meaning of power.
But then these only as extensions of my stature,
corridors of the palace, my body. To belong
to the immediate creatures, to feel in my deep chest
lungs claim tribute from the subservient air,
and to know in my dark bloodstream where
all chemistry comes kneeling – there is no last
reward of consciousness. Proud, and in awe,
like the upthrust messenger of my naked thighs,
I move beyond animal. Everything in me is praise:
blood to seed-time, thought to power, fear
to knowledge, and the beast made marvelous.
It is my tongue, only, falters. Language remains monstrous.

There is a lot of energy here, some generated, probably, by a mastery over the form of the thing – I love the way that the crucial line “there is no last / reward of consciousness” straddles the conventionally important conclusion of the octet and beginning of the sestet. But a lot of the energy must come from the identification of poet with minotaur. The exact nature of this is something I’m not entirely certain of: the minotaur represents the animal world celebrated, in different ways, in Rilke’s eighth Duino Elegy and in that entire American tradition of desiring an immediate, preverbal apprehension of reality. But language remains beyond his achievement and, as a result, when he dies (in the fifth poem) he is nothing more than divided-up and disappearing flesh. The best I can do, interpretively, is to suggest that the minotaur represents a kind of critique of a drive towards poetry of immediate experience coupled with energy that derives from a frustration on the poet’s part that he has trouble finding a balance between poetry and experience. As the first poem after the introductory “Totems” of The City of Empty Rooms says, “Language is alienation / But it’s what we have.” As is so often the case, this painful stake in the poem, helps to produce a terrific result.

The middle books are Shapcott’s least successful. We meet Shapcott the experimenter, Shapcott the poet open to contemporary influences, especially those trying to solve the issue of how to be “immediate” and Shapcott the traveler. All of these seem provisional. To take the last, for example, it seems to me an almost insoluble problem how a poet should deal with travel experiences. Almost by definition they are some of the most profound things that happen to us. They can change people into poets (Byron, for example) when the experiences need clarification and expression. But, since the advent of mass air travel, they are experiences open to virtually all Australians. So a poet is likely to get caught up in the dreary “I am a traveler not a tourist” game and poems of travel begin by looking portentous. It would take an exceptional poet – or a poet exceptionally lucky in his or her experiences – to alter this default setting. Some of Shapcott’s travel poems are good ones in that they are momentary solutions to the problem of this mode, and he is never an arrogant or self-satisfied traveler. But it seems to me to be an uncomfortably, though necessarily, adopted self.

The poet of the books that date from The City of Home (1995), seems on much surer ground. All these patterns seen by looking over a poet’s career are, as I have said, provisional, but in these most recent books the self seems a really stable entity: stable and complex. I think it comes from life-experiences having gained sufficient momentum that they are now worth contemplation in their full complexity. I think it has taken Shapcott a long time to establish a stable poetic self, longer than most. Some poets, even while young, seem to have an astonishingly precocious grasp of the complexities of life (Auden is the first example that comes to my mind) while others, Michael Dransfield, for example, early on write out of their particular life situation. In The City of Home, Chekhov’s Mongoose (2000) and, now, The City of Empty Rooms we meet the same kind of exploration of the self’s experiences so that poems of Ipswich oscillate with poems of travel, poems of personal experience oscillate with poems that explore the genetic inheritance that has its role in the way experience is shaped. All in all, the structure of Shapcott’s work can be said to be about the structure and interrelations of the sum total of our experience.

It is not only in the poems of the section “Beginnings and Endings” where the characteristic move is backwards. That gesture is shared by the poems of the first section. My favourite poem in the entire book is “Cape Lilacs for Elizabeth”, a poem about many things including Perth and the Western Australian writer, Elizabeth Jolley:

“Cape Lilac, we call these.” In South Perth
Elizabeth pointed to the massive crown of blooms
That made the modest trees a great posy
So delicate no Kodak film could pin them.
“In Queensland,” I said, “we call those White Cedar;
It is a rainforest native.”
I learned, later,
It is ubiquitous. It thrives in the Balkans,
in Asia, in warm Africa. The rainforest examples
of my youth proved birds were the first migrants.
Late spring, Adelaide. I am taken back
with a sudden pain to that park in the West,
and our day together. Cape Lilac.
I hear your voice in that name, Elizabeth,
and again its flowering canopy forces abundance
from a delicate framework, like ghosts in the flower shadows,
and like your voice, re-naming for me
a whole new territory from things
I had assumed I knew unerringly.

This is the kind of poem that deserves to be well-known, especially to people learning something about the immense capacities of a seemingly simple work. Yes, it is an elegy for Jolley, the flowering canopy of whose prose arose from a very delicate framework – both intellectually and physically, but it is a lot more. It is also, for example, about the way the name is preserved in the other’s voice and the way it preserves that voice. A later poem for Bruce Beaver (fittingly conceived as a letter) emphasizes the way text can be a miniature score for the voice, more important even that its generalized information-carrying capacity. So, like poetry, names can enable the dead to continue speaking to us.

Shapcott’s imagination has also turned the White Cedar in a species indigenous to his own environment but, as we know, the appeal to indigenous purities (“He is a true Serb”, “Ich bin echt deutsch”) is a chimera. Everything is begun by migrants. This is true of the ideas in our head – which turn out to be imported – and it is true of our inner selves – which are compounded of our genetic heritage. This is the kind of material that the best poems of Shapcott’s most recent books have worried about. In “Looking for Ancestors in Limerick”, Shapcott makes it clear that he took not documents but his own self – actually a highly distinctive genetic document – when he went searching for his grandmother’s family. In another poem with the same setting, “Reclaim”, we see the poet beginning by rejecting angrily the kind of genetic determinism that leads people to assume resonances but being lead, at the end, to accept that no individual is utterly self-contained when it comes to physical and psychological features:

. . . . .
I felt anger.
No, I felt drawn in
I was who I was and it had nothing to do
With them.
. . . . .
My life had been discovery and the truth
Though it seemed everything was sudden
And unfamiliar.
. . . . .
We hear your genes, they said.
Welcome.
The rocks in my mouth
Had grown huge as volcanoes. Mountains
Were remembering rainforest
And the ancestral voices were as foreign
And familiar as each part I sought to disown.

But to return to “Cape Lilacs for Elizabeth” for a moment, there is also the issue – interesting to me – of what might be called annunciation. What prompts the poet to make the movement backward to an experience in Perth a movement that is a sort of temporary reverse migration? Why is it that in late spring in Adelaide he is “taken back”? We might guess that it is news of Jolley’s death, but it is not made explicit. It could be a similarity in air temperature or another element that resonates with the poet’s current position. It is not a question that I can answer here, but one day I would like to look at the body of Shapcott’s poetry and examine these – for want of a better word – triggers. The issue emerges again in one of the poems in this first section of The City of Empty Rooms. “Rain in the Courtyard” begins, like “Cape Lilacs for Elizabeth”, with the poet in Adelaide. It is a rainy day and, after two stanzas, we are in the past, in Tuscany, where crucial experiences occur “Tuscany / Altered everything”. But the transition is made very abruptly and without explanation:

Looking through thick walls of my window
In Tuscany I had the courtyard
The well in the centre with its twisted iron scrolls
And its small core of darkness
Where sound was a dropped stone.

This issue ties in with the idea of recognition, common in this book. In a very early poem “River Scene” (it is the second poem of Shapcott’s first book) kingfishers are used as a symbol of the heralds of annunciation. It is a clearly set up symbolic scenario with the poet’s friends focusing on the river shallows where water plays over pebbles that are what time (or Time as it conceived abstractly in this book) does to mountains. Only the poet sees the kingfishers whose startling blue appears and disappears within trees:

. . . . .
Their sudden snap
and whip of air and sunset-blue glass was sharp
and feather soft; and brief, was brief; too small the cymbal-
tapped time of their flight through the unknowing trees. I only
saw them between the seared and vanishing branches harp
and glitter away. And only I saw, for the others still
talked and stoned the shallows. “That magic 
of Kingfishers – did you see? Again. There! Again – and a shower
of turquoise remoulded the trees. . . .

I like this poem (though I suppose it has an uncomfortably and probably Vitalist touch of the-artist-as-privileged-being staring at the trees while the common herd play in the shallows) but the fact remains that the kingfishers are external agents. In the poems of these recent books, annunciation is replaced by recognition and resonance. It is as though the self’s submersion in reality creates pathways that are not generally recognized. And these pathways lead to connections between elements that are surprising to those prosily constructed of us who are not so sensitive or aware. It is natural to move from Adelaide to Elizabeth Jolley, for example, because Shapcott and Jolley are connected by their individual responses to the same tree. These are the “intangible resonances” spoken of in another poem, “Returning to Looe”.

The issue of the individual and his or her double status as genetically determined object and free-floating self is carried over into the third section of the book which deals with artists, most especially musicians. In an intriguing poem like “Mozart, Mahler, Those Russians” this double-status is worked out as a meditation on the old literary-historical issue of art’s relationship to its times. Is Mozart a function of his period or a free-formed genius? Both and neither, the poem seems to say. Though “I hear the tumbrels / Beyond the next allee / In Mozart”, the balanced structures of Viennese classical music are balancing between surface and an understood and registered deeper reality, here symbolized by the stubble and the head rash under the aristocracy’s wigs. The temptation to read music as a response to the horrors of its period (the emerging determinism of psychology in the Vienna of Mahler’s day, the mad Stalinist regime overlooking Prokofiev and Shostakovich) tells a lot of the truth but not, it seems, all of it. The poem concludes:

Music has been weighed in the balance
Like any other object. It is as if
We might hold the scales.
This is why only we can agree
They are all right,
Allowing us to decode the music as symptomatic
Or in sympathy with each very decade.
Yet somehow things are not right.
Something’s omitted. There is the squint
Of the specific man, there is the convention
Or the breaking of convention.
But how do we fit the silences
In our Balance sheet?
We are restricted
By the very idea of balance.

This section on music is followed by what one has to call a section on travel though it is not a victim of the failings of this mode that I spoke of earlier. The denseness of the book’s obsessions means that travel experiences know exactly where they belong. The first poem, “London 1972”, is not a list of Australian writers met in London but rather a reflection on the perversity of those meetings and of the situations of the writers. This is because, as the poem says in its conclusion, “everyone I met in London came from elsewhere”, all are migrants and the resonances with the place they are living in are not predictable. Another poem from this section deals with seeing Chekhov’s Ivanov performed in Montenegro and what is this but art migrating to another language and culture? It is not a big move from Chekhov’s Russian to Montenegro’s Serbian but it is a big move for an Anglophone poet to enter “the other world” of such a performance. Interestingly the poem is about another “move” or, I suppose, migration: this time from the metaphorical to the actual.

. . . . .
This performance, under the olive trees and the night sky
Was clearly designed for the climax of the Second Act:
Instead of the offstage fireworks display, in fact
We are given the real thing. Rockets fly
And crumble above us. What were the words again?
A card game, dull neighbours, desperation. The gun.

As in “Cape Lilacs for Elizabeth” there is more going on in this apparently simple poem than immediately catches the eye. When the curtain falls on the climax of the second act – where the wife discovers her husband kissing another woman – we expect “fireworks” to occur offstage between the acts. But in fact, through a mysterious but accidental “rightness of things”, there is a real fireworks display taking place in the area. So the event moves from metaphor to reality. But it also moves in the opposite direction because, of course, a performance in the former Yugoslavia that ends in suicide must be, unintentionally, a metaphor for the events in that area in the 1990s.

So The City of Empty Rooms is built on a stable and very complex view of the self and the relationships between the self and the complexly structured world it inhabits. The self floats much more than in Shapcott’s early books but continually makes connections, makes movements or has connections made with it – as when the self is “recognized” by its totem. It is a book obsessed with migration conceived metaphorically and also literally. It has a section, which I have ignored so far, which is made up of angry poems. I don’t think these are very successful but much of that may be a prejudice on my part against polemical poetry. Each works hard to have a complex enough rhetorical strategy to retain our interest. The first of them, “The Ballad of Razor Wire”, pretends to focus on the manufacture of the wire which seals people in camps:

Once it was simply ore in the ground
Out in the lonely places
Then heavy equipment gouged it out
And put it through its paces.

Heat and pressure and good hard cash
Make it a solid investment
And ingots grew from the furnace mouth
To quantify what the rest meant.

Spin rock to wire and make it sharp:
Skill is a marvellous weapon.
Razor wire is iron rock
In its ultimate concentration.

Here is a concentration camp
Stuck like a harsh outstation.
Do not think of the people inside
Who appealed to our generous nation 

Remember the steel and remember the money
Remember that God is a liar
Remember the key is “misinformation”
And remember strong razor wire.

The only point I am going to make about this poem, indeed all the angry poems, is the obvious one that the event which lies behind them and generates the anger (and which, for the first time in at least my life, made me ashamed of being Australian) is related to migration. Thus this section, so unlike the others in tone, is part of a deep unity which The City of Empty Rooms possesses. Is it an accident that Shapcott is outraged by this particular event or are there resonances between the complicated theme of the sensitivities of the self in this book and the events of the Tampa? It is hard to be sure but it is a question worth asking and one which, itself, chimes in with the questions that the poems of this book ask. It also makes some sense of the book’s title. At first, The City of Empty Rooms seems mainly designed to recall the title of The City of Home two books earlier. The poem called “The City of Empty Rooms”, which comes at the end of this second section, is not about an allegorical city (as “The City of Home” was) but about the Gold Coast. But as we read its description of virtually empty high-rise towers, where “if one figure moves it is an event: / Like a spouting whale, or like a lone sea eagle”, it reminds us, intentionally or otherwise, that we inhabit a country in which it ought to be possible for us to be generous about space – if Australians were just more generous, that is, than we actually are.

Simon West: First Names

Glebe: Puncher & Wattmann, 2006, 58pp.

This impressive first book is marked by an elegant lyricism and is accurately described by Chris Wallace-Crabbe on the cover as containing poems which are “intensely observant, gravely acute”. There are poems about place (usually a very cold Italy), about relationships and about, well, metaphysics. It is also a very tightly organized book deriving from a consistent and complex poetic personality so that readers feel confident in allowing each of the poems to provide a context for others.

Take, for example, “Mountain Pass”, from the middle of the book:

Cloud veils sweep up a gully towards us.
In the rivalling currents of open air they flounder
like small birds. There is nothing to hold but wind.

Our bearings are scenes snatched from a slow procession.
A broken string of peaks and ridges, sheer
faces, fragments that continue to disappear.

Stones click beneath our feet. Rawness
of rock or in pockets and dips, the flesh
of soil or snow. Inhuman realm. Inconstant.

One lone larch tree has grown to the height
of a man. But already down to its torso
it is worn by wind, clean as driftwood or bone.

Our guide says anything that rises above the level
of winter snows - snow that spreads its blanket
of white life - anything at all is punished.

Learn to grow low, we think, grip rock,
trust to a single limb
or a handful of day-long flowers.

Read in isolation this seems a fairly straightforward poem with the only worrying surprise being that the snow is described as a blanket of “white life” rather than something less positive. It invites, certainly, being read as a “poem-poem”, one of those pieces, common in first books which, allegorically or otherwise, give us clues about the poet’s sense of what his or her poetry is. This poem seems to say, in its conclusion, that the flowers of poems come from keeping one’s head down, relying on the earth, and not expecting to produce anything epic or earth-shattering but rather small, evanescent lyric poems. But in the context of other poems in the book it becomes a little more complex.

One of the reasons for this is that the poems are very sensitive to the idea of a vertical axis. There is a down-below, there is an up-above and there is a half-way between. In other words, you don’t innocently find yourself positioned between sky and land. It is also a book full of its author’s Italian influences and Dante figures prominently: so below, halfway and above allegorizes out not only as soil/origins, culture and sky/transcendence but also as hell, purgatory and heaven. For me, at least, this adds a dimension to “Mountain Pass” since the word “guide”, used in conjunction with Dante, inevitably recalls Virgil, Dante’s guide in the first two parts of the Commedia, and the fourth line strongly suggests that we should be thinking of the weird procession at the end of Purgatorio.

First Name’s key word – it is repeated four or five times – is “humus”, that generative material produced by the movement of living material downwards towards darkness. West’s poetry is clearly obsessed by this basic material which seems resistant to the pressures of the surface-world. An important, if not entirely successful, poem, “And Your Insistent Need”, is about the vertical scale at the bottom of which humus lies. Here the “need” is the drive towards transcendence, towards the blue of the sky. We are lifted up “by the eye” in a way that recalls Eckhart’s “The eye with which I see God is the eye with which God sees me”. It concludes:

Mind, demented blow-fly,
you who won’t renounce your want of the source,
the sex of stars beyond the sky-light,
you who butt the glass of meaning’s window,
ignoring the cataract and downpour of
dust and weather, the tug of gravity.
Your green fingers make a humus balm, aid
the spread of mushrooms full of moisture.

An interesting poem, “The Halfway Garden”, gives us more clues about this axis. The garden contains both upper and lower (its higher, fruiting plants are aligned with the sky so that “your jewels hang like stars and planets”) despite being positioned between them. The final stanza reads:

The air thickens, strands
 darken and turn,
 like vespers the wind whispers above
 the fosse of no man’s land. Here I’ll continue
 to fathom the workings of your eyes.

“Fosse” is a Dantesque word but my inherently dirty mind focuses on its sexual meanings. Yes this is Dante first meeting up with Beatrice in the last cantos of the Purgatorio and thence being able to ascend to paradise but it also suggests the endless, horizontally human world of sexual activity and exploration as well as the other activities of mundane social life. There are not a lot of love poems in First Names but they are charming and not simply cute, in this respect like the poems about children.

I don’t know whether the model for the structure of this book is the Commedia or La Vita Nuova but it begins with bleak poems about the world that could equally well suggest either hell or a life before one meets one’s Beatrice. The best of these is “I giorni della merla” (wrongly acknowledged in the book’s prelims as appearing in The Best Australian Poems of 2006 when in fact it appeared in The Best Australian Poetry of that year, though I suppose only an editor of one of the series would be concerned about this, given the irritating closeness of the names of the two series of annual anthologies). Here we meet an Italian town in the dog-days of January, the very bleakest season of the year. “Winter: Prali” is not only located in the same season, but also includes a burial:

. . . . .
Someone had dug those months down to the earth:
a humus balm, dark and gleaming with ice,
a sinister fecundity from which the line
of people stretched across the bridge to town.
. . . . .

Whether the structure comes from the Commedia or not, the last poems of the book – beginning with “Marnpi Rockhole by Mick Namarara Tjapaltjarri” are decidedly “philosophical”, concerning themselves, especially, with the interaction between the three levels that I have already spoken of. Although they conclude with two poems, “Higher Elements” and “Flower-Echo” where the references, pace the Paradiso, are suitably celestial, the overwhelming sensation of reading them is the surprising one of fear of the dark. This fear permeates the world just above the warm and productive humus. It is after all, the world in which we live, but it is conceived here as a world of almost motiveless threat. I’m not sure what kind of cosmic perspective generates this. Certainly Dante can help because he invented the idea of a “selva oscura” that needs to be woken up from but it is unlikely that a twenty-first century Australian writer is going to take on board the full ramifications of early fourteenth century Catholic theology. At any rate, these final poems are full of sinister thickets.

Even the humble Banksia in “Seed Eyes” becomes sinister:

. . . . .
Mute spirits locked in wood and all
anguish, all wordless knowledge. See it
in the quicks of their eyes, eyes that seem
                    to accuse        us?
                    to judge         us?
seed eyes that germinate fear over
here here in the thick of the mind,
flashing as if we had something to hide.

I notice, as I write this, that on my first or second reading of the book I’ve written “Why?” in the margin at this point. No doubt I assumed that I’d eventually be able to answer this question but I’m as far from being able to do this now as I was then. In the final part of “Seed Eyes”, the trees become associated with postcolonial guilts and paranoias:

Did it gleam like the tip of a spear
or a wordless thought, that fear, for Banks
who pinned them under his name, and took them
in under the shadow of his tongue,
. . . . .

and in the second section, which I have already quoted, they recall the wood of the suicides in Inferno xiii. But what, ultimately, generates such an intense response in the poems of this book (suicide and settler-angst seem only two unlikely possibilities) I am not sure.

So far I have spoken of First Name’s structure and the dominant image of the vertical axis between earth and sky. The other dominant theme of the book is the experience of language. Though this is predictable enough in poetry, West’s engagement with it is quite surprising. There is a genuine fascination with the word, its sound, almost its taste in the mouth that fascination continually alters the path of what might be, otherwise, predictable poems. The first poem in the book, “Mushrooms”, really comes from later obsessions but is put first because not only is it a stronger poem than those set in Italy, it also demonstrates this theme of the tactility of language:

This morning by the path I saw them.
Bold heads clean as paper
had butted aside the earth, and rose
like probes all about my feet,
capsules eager to outgrow
the dark grounds of their birth,
to join at last the light of day.
The soft-fleshed name, mushroom,
of humus and moss, tugged at me
as if it had something to say,
as if it too could be prodded
 nd wielded by the tongue, turned
over to expose an under-
belly’s hidden treasure of gills.
And the bloom of meaning when thought
breaks from such pods, then spreads outward
like the scattering of spawn?
Shhh . . .This tissuey fruit is all
syllable, is already
bowing to the moisture of the earth.
Mushrooms fulfil their word, and then some.

I quote this poem in full because, as well as being a fine poem in itself, it encapsulates the best of this book. The mushrooms grow in the humus and reach into the middle world of air. In other words the poem begins with the theme of the vertical levels, a dominant obsession in First Names. But at the point where we might want to plod on with a fairly predictable allegory the poem changes direction entirely to speak of the word “mushroom”, its textual quality and the near puns it generates (not to mention near anagrams – you can nearly find the letters of “humus” in the word). It is this change of direction to something which is, in itself, less predictable but which is, in the context of the book’s themes, entirely predictable, that makes “Mushrooms” such a strong poem (despite the spinelessness of its subject). “Seed Eyes” – the Banksia poem – is prefaced by Dante’s “Nomina sunt consequentia rerum”: “Things determine their names”. This is a long way from the arbitrary nature of the sign but it does express a partial truth about language that poets are sensitive to. Somehow connections keep emerging between, on the one hand, sound and even the visual shape of a word, and, on the other, the object that the word refers to. The lover of Beatrice is likely to find the meaning of her name entirely fitting.

The fine poem, “Persimmon”, works a little like “Mushrooms” in that it makes a similar shift. Two stanzas describe the fruit, and the fact that it must be eaten at the point of rottenness (like the more familar monstera deliciosa here in tropical and sub-tropical Australia). Again the essential allegorical significance is clear – we ingest this stuff only at the moment when it has almost slipped over the edge into humus – but the poem’s final stanza, instead of exploiting this, shifts gear to speak of the fact that Italian has, apparently, a word for that indescribably precise experience of eating a not-yet-rotten-enough persimmon. And this, in turn, recalls the person who taught him this – lover or teacher, perhaps dead.

But to wait until it is almost too late,
to have to handle and break open that decay,
to scoop out the flesh with a spoon, to risk
the sudden coat of fur on one’s tongue.
I wonder how you would have described that taste,
and imagine your mouth flexing each of its muscles
to accommodate the vowels of allappare.
No English verb is ever likely to do it justice.
Mind the gap, you might have said, pleased to
span it with such an agile leap of the tongue,
relishing the sweet existence a lack can have.
Allappi. Allappa. And already my mouth has roughened
to roll these words out in memory of you.

Poems with a strong sense of hierarchically ordered levels of space as well as the tactility of words are going to both embody and, occasionally, speak about, a poetics. The best of the comic poems, “All or Nothing”, begins with two stanzas of elegant play with the letter “O” – the zero behind things, the marker of the vocative, the groan of love and war, the exit from the womb, etc etc. But its conclusion suggests what poetry is and where it “lies”:

O naught, I want you.
What I want is to lie with you
and reach your source, know
all there is to know,
though thought will twist away from there,
play its echo games, its word games.
I want to overcome these
and silence everywhere,
and fill your void with words.

This suggests two poetries: that which frenziedly reaches the source of generation (“the humus theory of poetry”, or, to mix metaphors, “the salmon theory”) and that which is produced by the mind’s swerving away from this generative nothingness (“the baroquely decorated doorway theory”). We meet the latter in the last two poems of the book. “Higher Elements” is, of all the poems in First Names, the one done in the most high of high styles, and it sustains this elevated level remarkably well. In my tentative reading, the poem is a group of “loving syllables” cast upwards “like a die”:

. . . . .
parched northerlies crying wolf,
the bowels of insects feeding on the sun,
trees fawning before it with green fingers
charged with photosynthesis,
water curled at the edges into
a liquid echolalia.
And this baby talk, this babble
you give voice to, rising high from spheres
of life, this bold cry, binary of vowels,
takes its place among the elements.

Here the words “babble” and “echolalia” are the ones which connect this poem to the conclusion of “All or Nothing” and the same image is continued in “Flower-Echo”. Rather daringly, this poem is written not in high-style but in a way that recalls the nursery rhyme “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”. But the message – a version of “as above, so below” – is that the flowers of the natural world are echoes of the generative capacities of the cosmos and, since “Mountain Pass” used flowers as an image for poems, poems too have their place among the elements:

Twinkling logo, little word,
made flesh
and fallible by tongues;
ephemeral thought, wee
accident,
how I wonder what you are.
Re-sounded here, now,
flower-echo
from past springs,
echoing on in us, into
futures
bright with atoms.
. . . . .
Tiny star and insubstantial
up above
the world so high,
radiating across the ages
and over
galaxies of black,
your thin light
is beautiful,
takes its part in makeshift
constellations.
Resound then,
here, now.

Petra White: The Incoming Tide

Elwood: John Leonard Press, 2007, 52pp.

One of the difficulties with first books – and this superb debut by Petra White is no exception – is the lack of a host of previous publications to act as a kind of context for the reader. That makes a critic’s life hard and you are always nervous that you are going to get something terribly wrong. My sense of the poems of The Incoming Tide, however – accurate or not – is that they locate the self of the poet in three different ways: as member of a family, as worker and as inhabitant of a number of littoral areas, but particularly that between shore and sea.

Of these the third is the most important and I would describe White’s principal concerns as involving this macro-perspective and using work and the family as ways of anchoring it in the homelier, domestic world. This can make for some surprising and pleasurable shifts. The long sequence of poems, “Highway”, for example, describes a trip with a convoy (or perhaps putative “family”) of hippies made along the Eyre Highway through South Australia. This is littoral territory with a vengeance as Nullarbor Plain meets the Great Australian Bight providing cliff edge and horizon as horizontal limits. And the poetry rises to meet this challenge, especially in “Bunda Cliffs”:

The shelved-in sea hived with diagonals,
verticals, horizontals, slabs of sleek water
ferrying hazes of air in its crystal,

vapouring the desert’s tongue.
We funnel blue glimmers, personless gases,
far-outness pouring into the breath,

our own power just enough to keep us
from billowing out like kites. The cliff
props itself up, its piles of age and buried faces.
. . . . .

When, in the final poem, people run into the sea at Cactus Beach, a clever switch in perspective describes the land as though it were the sea:

When he tore off his rags and ran into the sea, we all ran in after him.

Beyond us was the jetty, a shark net, milky still water
that remembered the blood of a young boy.
Further out, the alpine peaks of whitest sand dunes.

The desert looked on, changed nothing.

But even a sequence with as cosmic a perspective as this carefully anchors it among people. The first two poems describe members of the expedition – a semi-demented misfit who is “our fool, our thing / of darkness” and a small boy who is, for a brief period, lost in the dunes – and the third poem, “Eucla Beach”, takes time out to describe the poet’s grandparents for no more obvious reason than that, on the trip from England, their boat would have passed this beach on its way to Adelaide and that the grandmother “would have loved it here”. Always a sucker for radical disjunctions, I find the appearance of the grandparents to be deeply satisfying and, of course, the poem encourages us to make order out of their inclusion. The grandmother’s walks, we are told, connected her to herself by unjoining “the joined-up dots” of the familiar, mapped world; emigrating to Australia was a spur-of-the-moment thing which was like “leaving the planet” but it results in the locating of the future poet:

. . . . .
Sea laps towards me like the breath of another,
and draws itself back to wherever I might have been.
. . . . .

And, finally, in Adelaide they were in a kind of desert “free of the crimes of a nation not-quite-really-theirs” and at Eucla “a past buries as easily / as sand moves”. We seem to be in an inverse of the Judith Wright world here: the essence of this family is not the discovery of indissoluble genetic bonds which mean that the poet is guilty because of the actions of her forebears, but rather – in the desert – the obliteration of such joined up dots leads to the discovery of self through making a new patter. That self is implicated in family, but not in any way determined by it. That, at least is my reading of “Highway”. It is a considerable sequence which, I think, is at the heart of where this poetry really wants to go. But I could be wrong.

The cosmic positioning also moves into the essentially philosophical area of the relationship between human self and natural world. I think that The Incoming Tide is bookended by poems that recall Wallace Stevens: the final poem, “Ideas of Order at Point Lonsdale”, does this overtly of course. The book’s first poem, “Planting” is a sonnet that has that Stevens-ish quality of fairly simple, abrupt documentation coupled with a refusal to help the reader as to significance:

So he gave you the tobacco plants, seedlings,
and you planted them behind the house
you half-lived in. He was nobody,
friend of a stranger’s friend. But he
gave you the seedlings and you pressed them
just lightly in the soil, before night
fell into rain, heavier, darker, greener
than the tiny sound or hair-line root
that might have flared into a moment’s light
as you lay still. When the rain
stopped, the eves and over-burdened gums
let fall their water, a long, unbounded echo
that welled into morning. The garden gurgled,
the plants drowned, the sound was yours all night.

An absolutely self-confident poem but not one that it is easy to feel comfortable with. Again, one searches desperately for context. A gift – a human, though remote, act – is drowned by the natural world. The frail threads of the roots of the seedlings are entirely subsumed by water. So far, so good, but the final clause “the sound was yours all night” is, of course, entirely equivocal. The “you” both possesses the sound of the water and makes the sound: thus, in the latter reading, becoming aligned to the heavy, dark and green natural world. It recalls Stevens’ great poem which begins as a simple assertion of the separation between the brute world of the sea and the singer but goes on further and further to enmesh the two.

In “Ideas of Order at Point Lonsdale” it is the continuous interaction between the world of the sea, the world of the sky, and the human which is stressed. The scene is set on a pier, projecting out into the sea (which is, at Point Lonsdale, a channel entering Port Philip Bay). The sea and air are connected (raising a hooked fish is described as “fish / after fish seeps through the cloudy / eye of its brother”) while humans occupy a kind of interzone. There is nothing of the sublime or even vaguely creative in the world of these humans, however: they are no more than children fishing although there is an older fisherman who “shivers like a hatchling” and whose “dilate eye is blazing with / outward-seeking light”. I’m aware that both of these readings – of “Planting” and “Ideas of Order at Point Lonsdale” – are no more than inadequate gestures, of course, and we’ll have to wait for White’s next books to feel more comfortable with these poems.

Family is the central theme of three poems devoted to two grandmothers and a sister. “Munich”, dedicated to the grandmother who appears in “Eucla Beach”, is striking in that so much of what it does – ie what the poet finds important – is surprising. It begins, for example, with a description of Munich, the city that White is in when the bad news comes. But it doesn’t go on to conventionally lament absence; rather, it celebrates presence:

. . . . .
She didn’t entirely want to be remembered,
no grave, no plaque.
Her memories, freed from her head,
swarming in mine, or some of them:
the child I was who sat on her knee
and the child she was in blackout Stoke-on-Trent
step awake, two slippered ghosts,
past houses blasted to rubble and bones
. . . . .

As in “Eucla Beach” experiences are freed from their conventional and determined patterns and can be made into new and unusual ones, including fine poems. The second grandmother poem, “For Dorothy”, is unusual in that it portrays the woman, not in terms of her relationship to her granddaughter, but in terms of her surrounding children. And, finally, “Sister”, is a lovely, almost comically surprising poem whose essential structure is that it is about sisterhood only in its title and its last two lines. The bulk of the poem is devoted to a long and loving description of an axolotl “his polite uneraseable smile swanning / him upwards”. As the poem progresses through four eight-line stanzas the gap between the title and the content of the poem grows more and more intense so that the conclusion is that much more satisfying:

Descendant of the Aztec dog-god
Xolotl, who with mangled hands and feet
guided the dead to heaven, his once trans-
lucent form refuses catastrophe; more
than the ailing tabby, the timorous
and watchful high-heeled dog, or the rented
fireprone house, he guards our dangerous
childhood pledge to never change.

It is one of those rare poems which is simultaneously sophisticated and easy to grasp: it should be immediately anthologized.

Finally there is the world of work. Again it is a slightly surprising to find such a context-for-a-self in a first book but the tone is ideal: never outright contemptuous but open-minded, engaged and prepared to mock when necessary. One of the balancing techniques these poems explore is to let business speak for itself and so the sequence, “Southbank”, alternates meditations by the poet:

Our time is sold not hired,
our names as simulacra
show us up in our absence
on semi-partitions, brass-plated.
We forget, like monks, and serve
an abstract we must
not care too much for.

with monologues from management:

I am pleased to announce that Wayne Loy
          joins the Networks & 
Infrastructure Team to give cover
          until Jill returns
from maternity leave. . . .

“One Wall Painted Yellow for Calm” is a full-scale dramatic monologue done by a worker in a Job Network office. I am not sure how “found” it is but it captures a voice and person so brilliantly that The Incoming Tide becomes one of those rare books where you would say that this is a technique worth persevering with:

                              I know you’re probably thinking
          I’m just some geezer
who’d be like totally unemployed, if not
          for the unemployed -
so we’re all in this together. I always say,
          we are each of us
individuals, to whom anything can happen.
          Last week I had a chap . . . . .

What makes these work-centred poems work is the tone of balanced and involved observation: harder to do than it might seem on the surface.

As I’ve said, most of the poems in this book rotate around these issues of Family, Work and what might be called Cosmic Position. I’ve omitted “Grave” an ambitious and lengthy poem which moves beyond Cosmic Position into theology or at least religious ethics. It is built around the grave of a young girl and has several of those surprising shifts that mark out the poetry of this book, eventually working its way towards the problematic flood of Noah’s Ark, worrying, as many poems have done, why we focus on the few survivors and ignore the horror of the devastation under the water. But I’m not sure it is a successful work; for once the transitions seem too complex to follow and, although it makes sense logically, it is, perhaps, the one poem in the book where the surprises are not especially pleasurable. but if it is a failure, it is a rare one. This is a very accomplished and very complex first book by a poet who can be said to be, already, of considerable importance.

Michael Sharkey: The Sweeping Plain

Carlton: Five Islands Press, 2007, 84pp.

Almost nothing in Michael Sharkey’s previous work – and it is voluminous – prepares us for the shock of how good, how sheerly enjoyable, The Sweeping Plain is. As his previous volume, History (Five Islands, 2002), was a kind of selected, it enables us to trace more clearly what earlier books like The Way It Is (Darling Downs Institute Press, 1984), Alive in Difficult Times (Kardoorair, 1991), Look, He Said (Kardoorair, 1994) and a host of pamphlets were doing. And we can search inside it for the seeds of this recent outstanding work.

History begins with a poem in which an RAAF F111 crashes at Guyra and it devotes the whole body of the text to recounting what is happening “on the ground” in a world that has precious little interest in what is happening in the sky. In fact the crash of the fighter-bomber is an opportunity to sketch in the local geography, physical and human.

. . . . .
The day the Air Force came unstuck was quiet;
from Guy Fawkes you couldn’t see a thing,

except cleared paddocks. Down by Bielsdown, no one heard,
and Whittakers by Styx was undisturbed:

the falls went under,
to Jeogla, where a man died on a tractor.

Two bricklayers left a dozen empty beercans
underneath the bridge, at Copper Rocks.
. . . . .

And so on. You can read it as writing back to Les Murray’s “The Burning Truck” where the results of a violent visitation from the sky cause the locals to follow it like disciples, or you can read it as an antipodean rewriting of Auden’s “Musee des Beaux Arts” where everybody goes on with the processes of living and working and is unable to see “a boy falling out of the sky”. Whatever the intention in this regard, “Plane Crash, Guyra” sets a tone of remorseless anti-transcendence. In the Sharkey universe there are no higher orders, no angels peeking into our world, no rewards in another life: everything is on the plain of the here and now. When “high-culture” references are made they are butted up against the ordinary of life in Armidale, Sydney or Wellington. Ophelia in “Fall of a Flapper” is stripped of any exoticism:

. . . . .
Later, she went for a swim, as she used to do
after a few tall sloe gins - and of course
some damn fool at the school had said
she had some style. Free-style, of course,
wasn’t what she did well, and the weather
was nippy: result - there were flowers
all around the chinoiserie. . . . .

And in the long series “Pictures at an Exhibition” characters in the painting are imagined to be talking (rather as the dead do in Master’s Spoon River Anthology), but talking in a way that focuses on their own lives rather than the privileged act of finishing up in a painting that is remembered. So a character in McCubbin’s “A Bush Burial” says:

It’s always been like this.
At picnics Grand-dad reads
his famous cousin’s wretched verse
while the hangi’s cooking,
the kid wants to know
when the ice-cream’s arriving,
and Mum’s had enough.
Sis reckoned Granpa went on
for an hour this time
till the family shot through,
and the dog got the pig.

The message, then, is: no transcendence either in religion or art. Nor even in love because the many love poems in the Sharkey corpus tend to end in frustration and despair – though never frustration and despair raised to a high enough pitch to escape the ordinary. It is always wry-mouthed. This makes for a fairly bleak appraisal of life and it is nicely captured in “Anything Goes” a poem whose opening seems to recall the first poem of the book:

The truth is life is mostly very dull,
and peace and war are ordinary things.
Most jumbo jets don’t fall out of the sky,
most bills get paid. Most people do not die
by firing squad. Most houses are not full
of revolutionaries: their occupants
are born into a class they did not choose,
. . . . .
The quick familiar things revolve like days
that idle or rush on in retrospect
and hurry us toward what we expect:
no stunning glory, or outstanding grief,
but lights on in a daytime cavalcade:
the only time we lead the big parade.

Only by dying to get to raise our heads momentarily above the great, predictable ordinary.

This is all very bracing and Australian but it has the problem that it neatly knocks out many of poetry’s traditional props. In “Look, He Said”, a writer who is able to get published only in the local literary journal complains about things to the poem’s speaker who, in turn, suggests that poetry’s material should lie not in the stars but in waking up to the ordinary horrors of life round about:

. . . . .
How come if I hear this story from the lady’s sister
& I hardly even know here, this guy opposite
can’t see what’s going on outside his window?
And the beating that guy gave his family last month
just before he went & shot himself
except he messed his eye up so it hung down like stiff jelly
from his face & he was wondering how come he didn’t have
another bullet left while everyone was screaming
and the jacks lobbed that his missus sent the kid for on a bike.
I hear about this stuff, how come he doesn’t.
. . . . .

But nothing in Sharkey’s work lives up to this credo and one suspects that that way lies predictability and boredom. Poetry, through the entire historical spectrum that we have of it, has never appeared at places where it is told by either governments or ethicists that it should appear. Much of the history of Sharkey’s poetry deals with the problems of a materialist but social-justice ethos and getting the thing to work in poetry. Generally it has been a story of honorable failure but things begin to look up at the end of History, perhaps fittingly in those poems that follow “The Triumph of the Takeaway: A Threnody for John Forbes”. I say fittingly because Forbes, more than anyone, wrestled with the problems of a materialist poetics and, generally, refused to let his poetry sink into a kind of “Cultural Studies in Verse” a fate that would be, in its way, no better than “Journalism in Verse” – which he described as “the poet on the site of the significant”.

The final poem of this selected, “Park”, shows one useful technique. It takes what might be called a cultural phenomenon – the park – and approaches it from every imaginable angle (it’s a thirteen page poem) in a highly disjunctive set of short stanzas. You can appreciate what is going on. Anything more coherent is immediately describable as a method involving assumptions. To begin with material about the park’s Persian origins might be historicist or, even worse, positivist. To investigate its changing relevance would be anthropological or, conceivably, political. To focus on the poet’s experience of parks would be lyric-poetical, and so on. The poem delicately skips from perspective to perspective preventing the reader too easily pigeonholing it while, at the same time, suggesting that its subject escapes all of these limited perspectives.

Another poem, “Floors”, uses a technique which will prove fruitful in The Sweeping Plain. Firstly it personifies the subject:

With no pretentiousness they bear us.
It is no concern of theirs what we propose to do,

or do. They stand us,
mimic earth’s pull, hold us to it.

Flat rejections do not trouble them;
indifference cuts no ice.
. . . . .

Secondly it provides a kind of perspective that is logical but disorienting, as though it were that of a man from Mars. It is the effect familiar to us from childhood in sayings like “A chicken is an egg’s way of producing another egg.” This is really an inversion of the age-old fellow-traveller of poetry, the riddle. One could, in fact, rewrite “Floors” as a riddle: “What am I? I carry you but do not concern myself with what you do or propose to do . . .” In History “Past” and “Juice” operate this way and another poem, “More Characters of Jokes” extends the technique. Here a world is built out of texts:

. . . . .
World of Make Believe,
where blondes and turtles
are both screwed on their backs;
where Essex girls with half a brain are gifted;
Polish goldfish always drown;
the Reverend Spooner counts his phoney bucks,
. . . . .

And like the world of “Floors”, “Past” and “Juice” it is a world we recognize but which is not the ordinary world. This is a breakthrough for Sharkey and sets The Sweeping Plain up as a book which will have a far higher number of successful poems than any of his previous ones.

To return to the first poem of History for a moment – the one in which the fighter-bomber crashes in a generally uninterested landscape – it is worth noting that, in its last lines, it humorously misquotes Paterson: “There was movement all along the railway station / at Uralla, when the afternoon train came”. Similarly the title of this new book is a slight misquoting of Dorothea Mackellar’s much misunderstood “My Country”. It is hard not to suspect that “the sweeping plain” refers not so much to landscape as to poetic method and there are a host of ways of construing it. Perhaps the sweeping (noun) will be plain (adjective) (a construction that recalls “And the rough places plain” from The Messiah) or, equally, all transcendent gestures will fall before the sweeping (adjective) ordinary – the plain (noun). Whatever is intended, the book is also accompanied by a noteworthy cover which contains the entry which one second prize in the 1911 competition to design Australia’s capital city. I hope I don’t seem overheated when I say that this design – by the Finn, Eliel Saarinen – looks to me like an Art Deco expansion of Auschwitz. The function of this cover is, I assume, multilevel – like that of the title. It provides us with a nightmare image of the site of our government (and social engineering) but it also reminds us that one way of looking at the poems in this book is to see them as providing an unexpected perspective on the familiar, to turn the ordinary into a vision of itself seen from an unexpected angle – though always, of course, in the same plane.

The title poem sets out to do this – in the way I have been describing for the last poems of History.

War is what they do well, whether winning,
when the fresh-baked teenage veterans’ toothy grins
appear in snaps beside guess who,
between his photo-ops in stadiums,

or making sure that corners of some country
far away are full of heroes:
they are magic at such moments.
When they’re choosing to ignore the bleeding obvious,

they do that well, as well, and blame some other
who has let the whole team down.
. . . . .

and so on through fourteen brilliant and very funny four-line stanzas. One of the problems of this faux-riddle structure is, of course, that there is only one answer and this, if not handled by the author with a strong sense of how much the reader will understand, can lead to readerly anxiety. For most of this poem, the subject could be Americans as much as Australians and, even by the end, I have the slightly nagging doubt that the subject may not be “Australians” but “Australian men”. Most of the poems in The Sweeping Plain handle this issue (wherein the poet has to trust the reader) well. When we get to the five-poem sequence called “The Nations”, there is not too much doubt as to which country is which: first Germany

These people, as we know, admire music.
Their composers are required to drink coffee,

steal each other’s wives, turn fairy tales to operas,
and provide the world with clichés.

They’re renowned for spending all their lives just thinking.
Once, they worshipped spirits of the forests;

now, they keep the trees in line.
. . . . .

then France (“These people plant reactors on the borders / of their neighbours and consider this esprit”); then England (“The native population is one thousand, all descended from / Somebody. Nobody is all the other fauna”); then Australia (“Apology is next to apoplectic in their word-book. // Little of the country past the beach is known by heart: / the centre’s stone”) and finally, America, where the inhabitants are described as pursuing an ideal existence that can be found only in bad television:

. . . . .
They attempt to be as beautiful as humans,
but are dogged by rotten luck, bad hair and headaches.

They drive cars into a desert, conjure dust,

They take up sport and hurt their feet.

It is a rich mode if it is done well – as here. Or in “The Travellers in the Teach Yourself Books” where a world is made up out of the phrases used in the Teach Yourself language learning series. This world is familiar (if virtual) and reflects our needs and concerns, though often with unusual and comic emphases:

. . . . .
At first they’re well, until they lose their luggage
and have difficulty buying masks and telegrams,
umbrellas, two more pens, a handsome fish,
a pair of swimming trunks,
suspenders and a can of gasoline.
. . . . .

When they don’t work so well the failure, I think, revolves around the issue of solvability. So in “Wine”:

I was in my late teens when I met you,
Though I’d seen you at the edge of things before.

You were Claret then, in casual dress
In a two-quart flagon.
. . . . .

the jokes are just too easy and obvious and the whole poem seems to be a working out of a rhetorical strategy that doesn’t sustain our engagement with it. In “Sleep” however, the opposite occurs. It is worth quoting in full:

Better in here than the fantasy realm
Of interest, output, demand.

Sudden things happen and pass, and are no way connected:
Silent doors open and shut upon rooms with more doors.

People give chase or are hunted by strange moving shapes.
Here to act is to think.

Sex is a play where no guilt or remorse ever darkens the script.
People converse in the tones of a Nielsen quartet.

Everyone plays at behaving
Like people who never have dreams.

There’s no Larousse for each dish that is served in this trance:
A café sign announces Cordon Blur. And so it is.

Children have toys that can talk, and they watch
As black columns of smoke embrace towns.

When people die they are beautifully slain with their loves
And entombed face to face.

I hope it isn’t my stupidity that finds this a difficult poem. Difficulty is usually bracing and something to be expected in poetry but I’m not sure it can be sustained too easily in the kind of poems that this book is experimenting with. It begins by saying that the waking world (“of interest, output, demand”) is a fantasy world, unlike the world of sleep. The next three stanzas seem the describe the world of dreams (not at all the same as sleep) but their sinister language of doors and pursuit looks as though it could apply (or be intended to apply) to the corporate world. So instead of being given a description of the world of dreams (in the manner of the world of the Teach Yourself books’ dialogues), we are given a description of the “real” world which makes it seem the same as the world of dreams. I think. The issue I suppose is whether the doubt we have about the exact nature of the world of discourse – something that usually attracts us in poetry – is deliberate here and, if it is, is it tenable?

My favourite poem in the book is “The Advantages of Daughters” which appeared three years ago in The Best Australian Poetry 2003 (wrongly titled, in the acknowledgments of this book, as The Best Australian Poems 2003). Here the familiar world of parents and daughters is made constantly funny by sharply different perspectives. The essential standpoint is, again, that of the of the man from Mars (a realistic description of most parents as seen by their children) but the generalizations shift like a kaleidoscope:

. . . . .
And in their charity they help their parents comprehend
Postmodern sex, when parents come home early and discover daughters

Deep in exploration of their sexual orientation with the local pastor’s help,
Undressed and tantric on the lounge room floor. Don’t ask.

(I once held a class that used this poem – amongst others – and found my students shocked because they had read “help” as “assistance” rather than “assistant” a misreading that might have provoked a long disquisition on intended meaning, misreadings and riddles and jokes in poetry. We were spared by the clock.) Some of “The Advantages of Daughters” is fairly standard humour – only a level or two above a comedian’s spiel – but, at its best, as in these closing lines, it transcends this suggesting perhaps that the nightmare vision it elaborates is not much more that the paranoid fantasy of the father of a young girl:

Their men are hopeless, always waiting
For the right job, as if anyone needs jobs, they say and grin at you,

While noting how your eyes say Go and die a long slow death,
But somewhere else. It isn’t that they love to torment women (and they do),

But that one day, when writs are flying (and they will be),
That sweet child the monster’s with now might imagine you approved.

At present, in the playground, where the child is eating ice-cream
And reflecting on the compliments the people in the Indian ice-cream

Shop serve with the ice-cream (seven flavours: mango, cardamom,
Pistachio . . . Banana best of all she says, definitive), the clouds come

Hauling shadows through the park, where pigeons glide
Among the nikau and a possum snores contentedly in daylight,

And the wind is in unequalled form, as fathers look abstracted,
Now and then observing how the arms and eyes etcetera make a daughter.

Are there any examples of a more conventional lyricism in The Sweeping Plain? Yes, there are, but as in the case of later Forbes it is a lyricism often driven by the absence of a loved one. Thus words and images, instead of making transcendental gestures, try and fail to make up for lack of presence.

The darkness of the house returns;
you’re gone;
the fire’s low.
The wattle blossoms hung with ice,
the snow-filled yard remain.
The bell that tolls across the city
tolls my best thoughts of you
far from me.

The only real exception to this is the final poem, “Ghosts”:

I come back,
a ghost of twenty years
to haunt these places
I have been in.

Ice hangs off my lips,
air’s thick with mist;
the brown earth
disappears in clouds.

In twenty years
the wind will move dead leaves,
the birds will sing,
their parents, ghosts.

This is a poem about presence but, of course, it is presence in the form of a revenant. It feels as though the concrete reality of the place (established in the poem which precedes it, “High Country”) diminishes the reality of the visitor who is, any way, meshed in the usual animal processes of breeding and then moving off stage. It is an odd poem to put last unless its message is that we should trust the sweeping plain of reality rather than the poets who haunt it in such a provisional way. Interestingly it also appears in a 1984 book, The Way It Is, (different only in that there the title is “I Come Back”) but is not included as one of the selected poems in History. Perhaps Sharkey intends to include it in cycles of twenty years and History (2002) came a little early. The Sweeping Plain, by this reckoning, is three years late.

David Malouf: Typewriter Music

St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2007, 82pp.

Reviewers of this new book of poems by David Malouf have spoken of the gap of twenty-seven years between it and the earlier First Things Last, as though Malouf had been in a kind of poetic wilderness and had, now an old man, returned to his first love. In doing so they have, of course, neatly omitted the thirty-odd poems that come at the end of the 1992 Selected Poems (UQP). But that doesn’t stop a reader still going looking for continuities between Typewriter Music and First Things Last. And we should expect continuities given Malouf’s insistence on seeing the phenomena of existence (including, presumably, poems) more as parts of a continuum than in self-contained species (or genres).

Initially we want to say, of course, that all these poems inhabit the same universe: the universe of dream-realities, music, breath, transformation and mysterious and often homely angels who slide from one world to the next with equivocal annunciations: a universe that we need, increasingly, to call Maloufian. We meet different aspects of it in almost all of Malouf’s poems, of course, but from this new book a little poem,“Ombrone”, will serve as an example:

Of trees their lucent shadow
on water, each leaf

remade, tumultuous drops
of light coalescing.

To be at once
in two minds and the crossing

made without breaking
borders, this

the one true baptism, flames
by water

undoused, and sound by silence,
each rinsed leaf stirred

by a giant’s
breathing, deep underground.

Watching the reflection of leaves in the river provokes a meditation about living in two worlds and the crossing is made by immersion (baptism) rather than opening a door. It is an effortless crossing that celebrates the act rather than focusing on the existence of a threshold. A magical state is reached in which the water does not douse the flames of the autumnal leaves and the underwater silence does not quiet the rustling that the air version of the leaves has. The work of a great many poets is built around two-world binaries: life and art, experiment and tradition, free verse and formal verse, and so on, but Malouf is consistently concerned with the interpenetration of these binaries, the kind of effect we get when we look out of a window and see our own image interpenetrate the landscape. “Ombrone” isn’t, however, an entirely comfortable poem (at least in my reading) because it goes on to ask what, in the reflected world, causes the movement of the leaves. The final stanza provides a kind of answer perhaps by deduction or even by intuition. This introduction isn’t really the place to go hammering out whether the giant is simply a more sinister inhabitant of the other world or whether he represents a kind of geological underlay for the culture of the region, seen in what Malouf calls “the long view” of history, a perspective that drastically foreshortens evolutionary time. I simply want to make the point that we ourselves, reading Malouf’s poetry, re-enter a familiar though mysterious world.

This raises the first of a series of questions that, regrettably, I’m not really able to answer. Is the Maloufian universe present in the first poems of his first book? If we asked the author this, I suspect he would say that the seed of this view of the world is present in “Interiors” and Bicycle and that the later books should be seen not as a detailing and exploiting this world but rather discovering what is happening as it evolves. At any rate, one possibly minor but still intriguing continuity between First Things Last and Typewriter Music can be found in a sense of syntactic play. For all the splendour of those late odes in First Things Last, (“Ode One”, “An Die Musik”, “Ode”) there is just the slightest touch of flaccidity about them. They give the impression that they draw the energy that sustains them from an implicit and friendly nod of agreement from the reader – they deploy the word, “we”, in a way that suggests this. But the final poem, “Ode: Stravinsky’s Grave”, is really rather different, not least in the way, when it speaks of “we”, it means two precise individuals: the poet and his companion. Above all, it is full of puns and sly jokes which rely on syntax and enjambment. Unlike the other odes, which seem to be aspiring to “the longer breath / of late works”, here the lines are short and choppy and hence play against the syntax in a quite dissonant way – recalling Stravinsky himself, I suppose, who is, musically, a long way from late Schubert. Take the poem’s middle section:

                    We stay among the dead,
observing how the twentieth century
favours the odd
conjunction and has made

strange bedfellows. (Not all of us
would rejoice at the last trump
to discover we’d been laid
by Diaghilev). The parting

bell tolls over us,
and those who can, and we
among them, re-embark.
The weather’s shifted

ground so many times
in minutes, it might be
magic or miracle and you the day’s
composer as you are

the century’s, though at home among
immortals. We go back
the long way via the dead
silence of the Arsenal, its boom

raised, its big guns open
-mouthed before the town
.       . . . . .

Of course there is nothing worse than explaining jokes but “laid” and “boom” are punned on and the line break after “dead” means we temporarily read the sentence wrongly but in a way that makes sense: we go back past the dead. Since a double meaning of sorts is created this too is a pun. You don’t meet much of this playfulness in the poems at the end of the two selected poems of 1991 (A&R) and 1992 (UQP), perhaps because they are very much poems about local places: Campagnatico and Brisbane, but you do meet some very odd syntax that would repay careful studying. How, for example, could a great poet like Malouf tolerate a piece of stuffy neo-classicism like “as a spyglass finds when sun with dry thatch meddles” – not apparently intended as comic pastiche? And what on earth do these lines from “A Place in Tuscany” mean:

                between deaths

the coffin-maker croons,
from the same plank fashions
beds; in time these few
unchanging things assume
a village street is peopled,
as year after year and down through
the same names called

as night comes on and planets
hang  . . . . .

Our knowledge of Malouf’s poetry enables us to see that the word “assume” is used not as a synonym for “presume” but in the meaning of “take on” so that the recurring bedrock experiences of Tuscan life are – when seen from that foreshortened perspective that Malouf loves – gradually covered in progressively more civilized forms. But it is not a sentence that I could parse with any confidence.

The first poem of Typewriter Music, “Revolving Days”, is playful but not especially unusual syntactically. Recalling a lover of his youth, Malouf hastens to assure him No, don’t worry, I won’t appear out of that old time to discomfort you. And no, at this distance, I’m not holding my breath for a reply. All readers of Malouf will know of his obsession with the contiguity between different worlds. In itself this is not an uncommon idea – it may well the basis of most modern science-fiction – but Malouf is distinctive in his attempts to reduce the significance of the threshold, to argue that a spectrum of worlds exists and the act of crossing is not in itself especially important. Generally he is not a “dramatic” writer in that he doesn’t exploit the uncanny effect of sudden appearances from another dimension – such as happens in the first book of the Iliad when Athene appears behind Achilles, unseen by everyone else, and grasps him by the hair (surely a reference to the spine-tingling effects either of the numinous or, in my reading, the existence of a creature from the different dimension). And yet there are great dramatic moments in An Imaginary Life, especially when the centaurs appear in a dream, demanding to be let into Ovid’s life. In “Revolving Days” Malouf is visited by an image of himself from the past and knows that his lover of that period must be in the next room. It is a wittier and much more sophisticated poem than it would be if the lover stepped through a door to the past and confronted him: instead Malouf assures the lover that he will not be making any sudden incursions into the lover’s current world “to discomfort you”, Malouf himself will not act the part of one of the homely angels that we meet so often in Malouf’s world. I think this is a quite brilliant and unexpected inversion.

Many of the poems in the first dozen pages of the book are about love. “Moonflowers” is a good example and could, conceivably be a gloss on “Revolving Doors”

Gone and not gone. Is this
garden the one
we walked in hand in hand
watching the moon
-flower at the gate

climb back into our lives
out of winter bones - decades
of round crimped candescent
origami satellite-dishes
all cocked towards Venus?

One garden opens
to let another through, the green
heart-shapes a new season holds
our hearts to like the old.
The moonflower lingers

in its fat scent. We move
in and in and out of
each other’s warmed spaces -
there is
no single narrative.

And we like it that way,
if we like it at all, this
tender conceptual
blue net that holds, and holds us
so lightly against fall.

It is a small, wonderful poem and very enjoyable to get to know. It is not at all portentous but says a lot. And one could speak at great length about the syntactical playfulness that is going on inside it. I don’t want to state the obvious here but at the end of the first stanza it is only the hyphen on the next line that prevents us reading that the moon (noun) flowered (verb) at the gate. Similarly the word “climb” at the opening of the second stanza shows us that “at the gate” is a prepositional phrase modifying the noun “moon-flower” rather than the verb “flower” ie is adjectival not adverbial. And then there is the third stanza which is, initially, quite disorienting because the syntactic shape is not immediately obvious: it is the new season which, like the old, holds our hearts to the green heart-shaped buds that come with the season’s new incarnation. And then there are the little games: in the first stanza the first “in” modifies “walked” and the second is part of the phrase “hand in hand” but, put together, it enables the writer to write “in hand” twice. You get the same effect in the fourth stanza were, although it is perfectly good English, Malouf can write a line made up of minuscule words: “in and in and out of”.

There are two issues here. The first is the question of whether this is new in Malouf’s work. I think it is, although it is possible that there are some less well-known poems from earlier books that do something similar. The second is the question of why it is being done. This is a bit harder but my own feeling is that this play is a way of generating energy for the poem. We are not in the mimetic free-verse tradition where the shape of the poem, in ways either sophisticated or banal, mimics something in the subject. I think we are in a world where the poem derives energy from this play – but it is a much more sophisticated energy than the kick-along given verse by regular enjambment. Conceivably there are more sophisticated answers: Perhaps the solution is a superior kind of mimesis in that in a universe where borders are less significant than a process of continuous transformation, the objects too should be slightly ambiguous, as though they were seen simultaneously from different perspectives or as though they could be verbs as well as nouns. Criticism of Malouf’s body of poetry will have to get a long way along before we can really be sure what is going on here.

In these first poems, “Typewriter Music” introduces us to the typewriter which, like the bicycle of Malouf’s first full book, is an angel in the form of a strange and spidery machine and “First Night” is a love poem about the morning after. It comes with a theatrical reference in the title and a strong focus on continuity:

. . . . .
                                                  It is always
                    a high room we climb to. The pears
might be garden tools, the laundry hay, the ironing board an angel
     disguised by birthday wrappings; the same
          breath goes out, not always visible,
to join them.

It also reminds us that the most commonly repeated significant word in this collection is “breath”, a concept that needs quite a bit of analysis. “First Night” is not unlike “Recalled” in that both deal with the moment of wakening with the lover in the morning – the middle ages devoted an entire genre, the aubade or morgenlied, to this. And there is an echo of Tristan here, and in an odd poem, “As It Comes”, in the sense that day is a rather brusque (oede) affair compared with the experiences (and perspectives) of the night. Again, there is a “joke” in the syntax of the last stanza of “Recalled”:

. . . . .
We move towards waking,
break clear of the spell
whose moonlit skin contained us
sleeping, love-making,
into stretch, into flow again,

reincarnate, as shy
by day, the rare night creatures
we turned to in each other’s
arms go padding
away in our blood.

That they turn “to in” is the inverse of what we want or expect to read – “into in”. One boundary has been broken – each turns into a night creature – but the poem is written so that the individuals experienced their new identity as they see it in the other. Not a funny joke but, like the inversion of “Revolving Days” an enriching and complexifying piece of play.

In my reading of Typewriter Days, this first section of the book concludes with two poems that are about flying. One, “Flights”, tells us as much in its title, and is made up of a poem about taking off, a poem about going for a joyflight and a poem about arriving. If one wanted to enter full, speculative hermeneutical mode, one might guess that the state of the joyflight, that of spinning but not necessarily getting anywhere spatially, is a symbol of the kind of playful elements in the poetry that I have been speaking of. Fittingly the poem is one sentence, full of syntactic swoops and swirls with a trick enjambment at the end of the second last stanza:

A light plane loop-the-looping
over sallow hills, all
its rivets snugged in

and singing; its beaten thin
quicksilver skin beaded
with cloud-lick, its hollow

spaces a brimful hum,
the pressure inside
and out in an equilibrium

true as the laws
of this world allow, a new
nature in the nerve-ends

reached or recovered, in
the shallows of the skull,
and the tilt, as they right themselves,

of road, fence, powerline,
horizon, a draft
of the way things are and were

to be, the long view still
breathtaking as earth
bumped in after the spin.

The second poem, “Millenium”, is about the planes launched into the twin towers and seeks to balance despair with “the ordinary comfort // of loaves / and a rising”. This public subject is coated in obliquity (including an allusion to Eliot’s “Little Gidding”) so dense that it takes the reader a while to orient himself, to realize that the “dusty text” is a copy of the Qur’an somewhere in a madrasseh in Pakistan and the shoe is that of the “shoe-bomber”:

The fire that starts in a dusty text in one part of the globe
is a shoe that flies to pieces in another

The angel’s song caught like a wish-bone in the throat

Unspooled and spilling
in the dark, quicksilver jump-cuts tilt and scurry

Hands folded in prayer

Wings of the metal dove that without preamble slides its thunder
into head after glassy head

Four of the next five poems, “Like Our First Paintbox”, “”˜Poetry Makes Nothing Happen’”, “Reading Late at Campagnatico” and “Making” are about creativity and the status of the created object, a thing “which Nature had not thought / to add but once / there cannot do without”. At the centre of this group is an odd poem, “At The Ferry”. The poet, accompanied by sinister voice comes to the end of the ramp to the ferry:

. . . . .
Close by, either
behind or close ahead,
damped in the dampened air,
music. “This is
the last thing you will hear,” the stranger
whispers. His last word.

I stand and listen.
Silence
approaches. A silence approaching music.

It is really hard to get a grip on the situation here. On the surface it reads like an invitation to suicide, a kind of rewriting of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”. The point would then be that the refusal to suicide is based not on the call of “promises to keep”, that is, of the social world which words deal with, but of the world of artistic creativity. I think an early line “I come with empty pockets” could be read as a warning that this is not the intended meaning – “I don’t come, like Virginia Woolf, with pockets filled with stones.” And the poem’s setting amongst this group of poems about creativity suggests that we should read it as one of those liminal experiences – land projects into water, silence meets music – from which poems arise. But I can’t help being struck by the last two lines – they use the kind of playfulness I find throughout this book to do something sophisticated. “A silence approaching music” means, first, that there is a silence which is almost musical in its intensity (an echo of the opening of “Ode: Stravinsky’s Grave”), but since the silence also approaches the speaker, it can suggest that music (whose location the poem keeps deliberately vague) is present in the speaker. It is not unlike that clever ambiguity in Wordsworth’s The Prelude, where the “solemn imagery” of the mountains is received “into the bosom of the steady lake”. On the surface, “bosom” is metaphorical but there is an implied second meaning where “lake” is metaphorical: the landscape is taken in, simultaneously, by both boy and lake and thus, by implication, the location they share is each other.

The next six poems also make a little structured group. A translation from Latin is followed by a translation from Rimbaud and is followed by a poem with a medieval setting and then the trio is repeated. The first is a set of seven translations of Hadrian’s “Animula vagula blandula” called “Seven Last Words of the Emperor Hadrian”. Of course it is seven versions of Hadrian’s last words (which is a nineteen word poem) rather than his seven last words. It is a small joke but it does make us look for the actual last word of Hadrian which turns out to be “iocus” – joke. The last of these poems, “Psalter”, is about the way in which a text has a complicated history – of invasion and then settlement – behind it. It represents a kind of door to an historical world but it also enables Malouf to do here what he does in the next poem – the eight part “The Long View” – which is to take a compressed view of history. Seen from an almost infinite distance, history gets squashed so that we can discern its outlines better. And these outlines can be patterns of repetition as well as evolution. The first of these is “Straw”:

To be spun out of gold
into gold. In summer fields
temples, pyramids,

in the swallow’s bill mud-makings
of empire. A flute
for the god’s mouth leading

bare feet down
from trampled light to chambers
centuries underground.

The process whereby seeds produce plants which produce more seeds as well as straw is, in the “long view” no more than straw producing straw, though the allusion to Rumpelstiltskin ensures that we find the connection between straw and gold to be not unexpected. And in these fields buildings blossom in fast motion as do religious beliefs.

This long view of history can produce evolutions which become so quick that they are not far from being doors in their own right. In “Moment: Dutch Interior” seven brief stanzas delineate that distinctive world of apparently solitary and absorbed subjects that marks out classic Dutch painting. It is full of “the specific / gravity of the moment” – that is both specificity and gravitas – and the

          radiance with which
she fills it.

The absence
of another. Of others.

But the final stanza, unusually dramatic for Malouf, reminds us that, in the long view, this quintessentially Western civilized interiority has evolved from a world of hunting:

Thin as
a sliver of glass
a shriek from an animal-trap sprung in the grass.

The long view may also be the perspective behind “Allemande” where civilization is represented as a dance but it is a dance in which the reflection of the dancers in the floor becomes an image of the “ghost legions / of the dead they will one day // augment”. So the present is seen as a version of the past from which it has evolved.

The last thirty or so pages of Typewriter Days is introduced by an imaginary eleven-page letter from Mozart to his librettist da Ponte. It is structured as a kind of cantata with three poems interspersed throughout the prose passages. The letter is a meditation on music and language cast as a defence of the music of Don Giovanni, Mozart and da Ponte’s “dramatic joke”, in which, at the climax, a semi-human angel of death appears to invite Giovanni to join him in his, the angel’s, world. Opera is a Maloufian obsession (he has been a librettist four times himself) and so the coat of an imaginary letter from Mozart to da Ponte is lightly worn: early on it speaks of the ordinary world as being made up of such distractions as “cats, clouds, cars, tears, opinions”. It begins by differentiating between music and words: the former an abstract, self-referential language but also an innocent one, the language of Eden before the fall; the latter the language of temporality and the world of things, events and narratives. But music, like the Gods, longs to enter the contingent world of humanity and out of this marriage of the two languages, opera is born. But Don Giovanni is not any old opera and Mozart’s letter goes on to speak of his desire to allow a third language to emerge, the language of a reality that pre-exists both music and words, the pitch “at which most of the universe exists, but I had to lower it a little, tease it out, translate it back into what is accessible to our human ears”. There is a wonderful description of Mozart’s pinching of the singer of Zerlina’s part (a moment in which this other “music” is heard) when the Don (a modern version of a roving-eyed Jupiter) is described as being shocked, as though a god “out of an older opera had cut in and stolen a march on him”. The work’s three poems are not easy but seem to represent, successively, the human desire to reach up to a transcendent world (our falling can be graceful); the desire of the natural world to become part of our “game”; and the way in which, in opera, the fictional and the real meet (or at least approach each other) on the stage leaving us with “news of transformation / – our own, and a tune to whistle / in the dark of the tomb.”

The other two poems of this last part of the book that call for some comment are the sequences “An Essay on Angels – the short version” and “Into the Blue”, the former made up of six poems and the latter, four. “An Essay on Angels” begins with first apprehensions and progresses chronologically from there. The first poem which begins:

Have never seen one but being
curious am always
on the lookout, as I was
in childhood for white horses. Those

I did see . . .

And logic tells us that the “those” can only refer to white horses while the poetic logic of the passage desperately wants us to equate it with angels. Even here we meet the playful syntax that is such a feature of this book when the third verse says:

Do I recall
the first, and having
before that none
to go by, how I knew it? Will I again?

This is a bit like Henry James with enjambments. But the crucial feature of this sequence is the way that these mystical annunciations of the ordinary extraordinary evoke sexuality. We begin to think, allowing our own thoughts to run along their rails, that you can’t really talk about other worlds, entering other universes, meeting angelic messengers and so on without talking about the erotic. The angel of the cryptic second poem could come from a renaissance painting but could also be a lover:

Restless. A haystack
of jubilant straws, muscle,
wingtip the fools

of flight. Restless. Eyelid
and nerve, all quick flame, curl,
ear-whorl, heel uplifted.

Stillness only
in the eye of this storm, as
subdued by gravity,

it weighs
the flesh and its surprises.
Attending on the world.

And the meeting with the angel in the fourth poem – no matter how uplifting the intention – is couched in the language of being picked-up:

                              One,
half-kneeling to unlatch

his shoe, not even needing
to smile for you to get
the message, and no exchange
of names, just This

 is for you, I think . . .

Typewriter Music is disarmingly frank about love as experience (the fact that it opens with “Revolving Days” establishes this), but here eroticism is reduced to a kind of undercurrent as though it is yet another joke which po-faced readers may miss.

There is not much eroticism in “Into the Blue”, but it is about undercurrents, being one of those Malouf poems set in Deception Bay. In fact it recalls “Asphodel” from Neighbours in a Thicket in it’s desire to enter the water and experience the other which eventually became us. When it says of the bay, “Our limbs / emerged out of its salt”, there is an important meaning beyond the superficial one of finishing one’s swim:

. . . . .
When the moon blazed a track
     across it we were tempted. Only
our breath, only our need

for the next breath constrained us.
     It was our other selves
that tried it,

in sleep. And arrived
     safely. And never did
get back.

The second poem is a beautiful description of the perception of distance (between the local and the stars) simultaneously established and then dissolved when the speaker stamps on the wet sand and produces galaxies and the third poem, about rock pools, speaks the same language of the effortless and non-destructive crossing of a threshold that recalls “Ombrone” when it describes the surface as “glass you could put a fist through / unbloodied”.

Malouf is a great poet and Typewriter Music is a book worthy of his genius. Reading him is a potent and distinctive experience which can, oddly enough – and I doubt that I am the first to say this – mimic the very experiences that Malouf describes. For example we feel ourselves to be in a world which is familiar and distinctive but we are not confident that we know it exhaustively. There are always areas that we don’t feel entirely comfortable about – I could construct, for example, a nightmare in which I was faced with an examination question which said: “Describe the role played by, and evaluate the significance of, breath in Typewriter Music”. Sorry – the best I could do would be some incoherent notes delivered with a false show of confidence. There are also plenty of doors that lead to logical extensions of the ground plan of this world. At the same time we feel that the author is such a friendly and inclusive voice that his arm is always around our shoulders and he can’t really understand our problems: like someone trying to show you the face of Christ in a drawing of the clouds: since your incomprehension is incomprehensible all he can do is keep saying “Look, look.” But, whatever the difficulties and uncertainties, learning how to walk, no matter how unsteadily, in the Maloufian world, is a vital and essential experience for any reader.

David Brooks: Urban Elegies

Woodford: Island Press, 2007, 75pp.

On the surface (always a dangerous place to stand when facing poetry) the shape of David Brooks’s poetic career thus far looks reasonably clear. His first book, The Cold Front, was published in 1983 and felt deeply North-American. It seemed, at the time, to be a fairly straightforward example of the influence of poets like Merwin, Bly and Kinnell. There was cold everywhere as though snow was necessary to produce the near-stasis in the physical world that made meaning possible. After more that twenty years of apparent poetic silence (occupied with prose fiction with a generally Borgesian cast as well as non-fictional work) he produced, in 2005, Walking to Point Clear. The subtitle, “Poems 1983-2002″, staked a claim that the output of poetry had been continuous. Walking to Point Clear was a surprise in terms of its achievement: it is light years beyond his first book in both technique and sophistication. The settings were Australian – often the southern coasts of NSW – but it was still a book in love with cold, preferring night settings which highlight solitariness and silence.

The first of the two sections of this new book, Urban Elegies, “Living in the World”, is not so far from the poems of Walking to Point Clear though its title suggests more engagement with ordinary living and the poems have a deliberately rougher edge. The second section of Urban Elegies is, however, something else again. This is living in the world with a vengeance and replaces the poetry of stillness with white hot energy deriving from an immersion in the daytime world of work and life in the suburbs of Sydney. Here the influence is an Australian one: Bruce Beaver. The first of these elegies, “A Curse”, gets its drive from hatred and transmutes itself into a curse, drawing on one of language’s most ancient capacities:

The incomprehensible bastards next door
have sprayed poison
from one end of our garden to the other.
Apparently half a gallon of some
as-yet-to-be-identified pesticide
has been found preferable to a phone call or a five-minute visit
to ask if we might trim a vine.

It is not “God knows what was done to you” but it is still pretty impressive. The poem goes on to list the lost before mounting its curse.

The dwarf conifer, the box-bush,
the laurel, the basil and parsley,
the thyme and tarragon and oregano,
the chili plants, the galangal, the lemongrass, the six
proud native irises are all
withering before our eyes
and we can only guess as yet
about the earthworms, caterpillars, skinks,
crickets, praying mantises, slugs, slaters, snails,
or the fate of any birds that might have eaten
from this treacherous buffet.

It’s a fine passage: the list suggests naming is a way we grope for the dead using all the powers of pre-literate language. The idea of cursing, or making a spell, also taps in to this. And lists inside angry prose or poetry also have the subtle rhetorical effect of implying that the writer is so angry that he can’t produce anything structurally more sophisticated. The poem concludes by protecting itself from the charge that, compared with lost lovers, dead children, Milton’s blindness, Swift’s madness, the Fall of Troy and Hell, Heaven and Purgatory, the loss of some plants in a small suburban garden is, poetically, pretty small beer. It does this by reminding us of the symbolic significance of the garden:

Let this then be a curse upon them:
Let them continue to be
self-exiled from the earthly heaven.
Let them never find
such a garden within themselves.
Let there at least be poetic justice.
Let them never understand such
fury, such sadness as this.

The sheer sophisticated animation of this poem is what makes it magical. It seems so far from the careful lyricism of the earlier books as to almost be written by a different poet. We finish Urban Elegies hungry for more of the same in this new, open, engaged and, above all, passionate, mode.

And yet, and yet. Since the new is always related to the old, one wants to look again at the earlier two books to see how accurate one’s first responses were. And when this is done, The Cold Front turns out to be a more individual work than it seemed at first blush. Yes it is built on a style deriving from Kinnell, Bly, Merwin et al and yes it does prefer the elemental symbolism of night, cold and darkness – as though meaning in poetry occurs as the material of the poem approaches stasis – but it is a book full of poems that can now be seen as very much in line with the later work: that is, as what we will have to call “Brooksian”. Many of the poems share a sense of trauma enacted against a backdrop of a forbidding world of darkness. The trauma though seems to be not so much psychic as domestic: the title poem, for example, speaks of “the long conversations / with pain in the final sentences”.

The most Kinnell-like of them, “One of the Last Nights”, begins in the darkness

On one of the last nights
I rise
from the bed where I have waited,
from the pillow where I have fled
. . . . .

but concludes with affirmation:

I come to the river
down the precipitous bank
and I kneel
and drink deeply, lifting
the dark water from its foil of stars.
It is all there: moments
rear in an emptiness,
light is wrung from the dying.

It is all there: the river
tearing itself to whiteness
over the snags.

Yes it is portentous and rather stagey but it embodies the essential stance of these poems: light from darkness. Sometimes the process is inverted. In “Wheatfield”, which begins “After the argument, the blood’s / blind clutch”, a bird of the night crosses the golden field:

Behind me a night-hawk
breaks
from a jack-pine, circles
and flaps westward
jagged under Orion

leaving how much
here
amidst the ripening,

how much
leaning
on this dry
stump, cracked to its roots, the rings
of all its years
burst open?

Again, it is a slightly creaky, staged symbolic scene but there is a lot to be said for these last lines which, instead of describing how the shadow of the Angel of Death touches odds and ends as it passes, asks ambiguously how much it leaves: that is – as I read it – how much death it leaves and how much it passes untouched.

These poems want to move towards affirmation. Affirmation only works when we feel, as readers, that it is hard won. The rest is just fakery. The Cold Front manages to convince me, at least, of its integrity though I am not sure that I can remember its having done so on first reading and I am not sure that many of the poems will appear in a Brooks Selected Poems. Affirmation here does not extend beyond the minimal opportunities offered a number of things: by poetry,

. . . . .
steer
now by shardlight,
by rags of the song,
by spray
still clinging to the lifted thigh

by family, by recognizing mortality and by being connected. As one of the later poems says:

. . . . .
I go out
into the middle of a field
and the stars
like the old philosophers
are silent

I plunge my shovel
into the soil I stand upon
and the house of my life continues.

The final poem of the book, “The Swineflower”, offers us an interestingly grotesque image of the poet, as a pig-like devourer of experience producing out of his own mortality sufficiently fertilized ground to generate “the carnivore orchid”, the swineflower of poetry.

The best of the poems, “On Durras Beach”, contains all these features: a state of psychic disturbance, a glance at the domestic situation (which might or might not be related – the light of the lover’s eyes is, at any rate, not accessible to the speaker) and a powerful sense of mortality. Only the existence of a poem and the infinitesimally small light of the fire act as counterbalances:

Another night,
again the moon, self-hugged, self-eaten,
rolling imperceptibly deathward.

I stoke a small fire on the beach
with driftwood and the gnarled
roots of my sleeplessness

and watch the wind
weave through the flames
the dark tongues of the cosmos.

Night-long the waves
gnaw Durras sand, reaching
for the clump-grass, the lip of our yard, the house

where you lie sleeping, arms
furled in the emptiness, eyes clutching
their invisible parcels of light, and I

in vain here watching,
asking what light there is
from driftwood, knowing only

this poem, only this sound
of beachfire
as it burns on into the darkness

and that self-hugged, self-eaten,
binding what shore we can
we roll deathward, while the faint stars shine.

It is important to register that in this generally inward-turned book, there is a section – the fourth – devoted to what might be called poems of engagement. It is as though, this early, Brooks also desires an outward looking poetry. The tone of this section is established by the first poem, a translation of Milosz’s “Campo di Fiori” in which the writer thinks of the burning of Giordano Bruno in Rome (and the way the citizenry returned to the normal processes of pleasuring the flesh) on a beautiful day in Warsaw in 1943 when the sounds of the carnival drown out the shots from the ghetto.

This section contains “The Magi” a kind of inversion of, or answer to, Eliot’s poem. Here the magi return but find themselves out of sorts in a world where great changes are slowly happening. Again it is stagey, but that doesn’t reduce the sudden shock of the section where they come across a village completely frozen in mid-action (almost like Sleeping Beauty’s palace). The quality of this image, and its symbolic significance, could almost act as an introduction to Brooks’s prose fictions. Above all, what makes “The Magi” worth rereading is the certainty that, at the conclusion, the speaker is the poet himself, lamenting that, in a world which has undergone vast changes, he speaks only of himself:

It seems the air
lamenting in the empty traps.

It seems
the light
like manna on the fields.

Slowly, slowly
it is happening
the resistance
the rising
the cohesion of husks.

If only a firm, clear line
could enter from the nearest thing

or we could be
less like the cuckoo
in leafless vines
singing its own song regardless.

The final poem of this section, “The Horsemen” opens suitably apocalyptically:

From the far end of the bible
four men ride out
through the burdock
in the vacant lot off Phoebe Street.

and goes on to affirm the need for poetry to face up to its responsibilities:

we should have said
without action
there can be no true adoration

we should have explored
the full possibilities of language
which include responsibility

risking harshness
risking poetry
risking ultimate simplicity

but we had been sitting
too long by ourselves in the sunset
and a great distance was leaning from everything

as if
while we slept
the hooves could go without answer
. . . . .

Well this is harsh and simple but I resuscitate it to make the point that Brooks has these issues on his agenda as early as the poems of his first book.

Walking to Point Clear is, as I said, light years beyond The Cold Front in terms of poetic sophistication. It, too, has five sections though I suspect the poems are generally arranged chronologically. It begins in strict lyrical mode, relying on luminous yet open conclusions. But, since the poems are written with a gorgeous responsiveness to syntax we meet the effect – familiar in good lyrics – of the shape of the sentence closing down at the very instant that the meaning opens out. “Waking, Lumeah Street” is a good example:

4am

the sound
of traffic
on the far margins
a high, thin wind
herding the night clouds

as I move about the house
I can hear a tap dripping,
water
passing through a neighbour’s pipes

and if I stand
stock still
the soft sound
of my daughter’s breathing

even
with my eyes closed
the sound of the blood
flowing down its ancient corridors

currents,
oceans without end.

One sentence (or conceivably two: there is a syntactic break at the end of “clouds” in the second stanza), a single comma to prevent an ambiguity, and a lovely shape that descends through the pattern of its own meaning. And that meaning moves from the carefully noted particulars (in Brooks’s poetry the senses become more acute as the scene moves towards stasis) out in a double direction so that the individual’s blood is both part of the huge salt water world of all the oceans past and present and, at the same time, all the genetic history contained in any individual.

This kind of accomplished lyricism is at the heart of Walking to Point Clear (whose title nicely suggests that each poem moves in its syntax towards a point of clarity) and one could cite any number of examples. In “Possum” the creature introduced in the title is never mentioned but is a solution to a kind of riddle:

. . . . .
                              someone

beating a huge
                              cyclone fence
coming closer

no such fence for miles

It’s a homely and unambitious sort of poem but then so is its subject. So, for that matter, is the subject of “Bush-Mouse”:

Night-stirrer,
raider of cupboards and open drawers,
skater across polished floorboards, relentless
worrier of barricades, gnawing itself bloody
for the skerricks of humans, the bush-mouse
likes Easter eggs, pistachio nuts, tubes
of Deadant, the cardboard and plastic
of tack-packets, parcels of screws,
but, most of all - true
bastard of Irish
convict stock - potatoes, new
potatoes, small
and round
and hard enough
to hold in its determined paws
and crunch as, intently, passionately, ears
cocked wide for a movement from the bedroom,
it stares out of the window at the giant moon.

The opening at the end here is visual. One could allegorize it out as affirming that this small creature engaged in a continuous assault on the human world belongs to the class of natural phenomena – as does the moon. One could even, stretching things a bit, see the animal as the poet’s comic totemic beast (an inversion of the book’s first poem which establishes the owl as the poet’s totem), engaged in ordinary consumption but staring at the moon. But I think, without any evidence, that this is an attempt at an oriental lyric. The poem’s true tension is that between the conclusion and the finicky particularities of the mouse’s activities. These are expressed as a list (and a very homely list at that). There is also the tension of tones: something like “true / bastard of Irish / convict stock” is unlikely to turn up in a poem by Li Bei or Basho.

Walking to Point Clear is full of satisfying poems of this type. The tensions that make the poems live are rarely repeated and can be quite complex – “Mangoes” and “People Sleeping Beside Each Other in Their Beds” are good examples. And yet, running throughout the book is a note of worry about poetry itself and about what kinds of poetry should be written. In “The Sawmill” the idea is floated that poetry relates to living by being a daily activity much like cutting and stacking firewood:

. . . . .
I’ve done the same
in Vermont
twenty years ago
and here before with Bob, and Frank,
or by myself
in Westgarth or Lumeah Street
more times than I can remember
and will not say
that writing isn’t something like it
sawing each day
into different lengths
carrying them from one place to another
stacking them up
when people’s backs are turned

This might be called the Snyder-solution to the act of writing though it is significant that the poem still wants to exploit the possibilities of a surprise (and, in terms of meaning, fairly open) ending. Related to this are those poems which see words as objects – things to be handled in the normal processes of living. In “Back after Eight Months Away” two stanzas of living (moving back to a damp holiday house on the NSW southern coast) are followed by two stanzas which affirm that speaking is one of the acts of living and that the words used are objects and, like objects, have their own (albeit slightly solipsistic) sense of existence:

no point
in saying this - only
to say,
feel
the cold syllables
as they pause at the mind’s tip

rain, silt
turning solid
as beach-pebbles, polished
and flawless,
dreaming only of themselves.

The poem most connected with these thoughts about the status of words and poetry is “The Cormorant / Elegy for R.F. Brissenden”. Elegies for poets always have an especial piquancy for writers since one of your own has gone before you into the darkness and been silenced. Brooks’s poem begins with a sly joke and an affirmation that words are objects and do not produce resurrections:

Words fail
or drown in darkness,
so much
goes without saying

here is grass
with the black showing through
here is mutton bird
with a cold wind
ruffling its wings
out of the mind’s reaches.

And it ends, five sections later, with the idea that the use of words is not so much a part of the dailiness of living with objects, but rather a defensive song in the dark as we hug ourselves to ourselves:

. . . . .
As if there were anything other
than being what we are

anything
other than uttering
over and over
the sounds we make out of love for our being

saying bird, grass, night
as if they could actually be those things

saying here, saying now, saying this
in its thousand forms,
its hundred thousand forms,
this

“The Cormorant” is not an easy poem to get to grips with but, at least in my tentative reading, it connects the twentieth century’s old obsession of the gap between signifier and signified with death and with a depressed sense of the self as alone, as “singing the one-sided song”. But if words are not conduits to transcendence, this throws a lot of doubt over the status of those luminous endings of the conventional lyric model. Walking to Point Clear, in other words, worries about its own methods and the question of whether poetry points us down to our irreducible, inner selves or up towards the stars.

One solution is that of this new book, Urban Elegies. And that is to embrace the public sphere of poetry and leave the sensitive inner world (and its tendency towards a static solipsism) to shift for itself. It is worth noting that the first elegy occurs not in Urban Elegies but in Walking to Point Clear. “Depot Elegy” has all the features of the poems of the second half of Urban Elegies, including an opening line that infringes notions of linguistic decorum:

The retired sawmiller, great arsehole,
has ploughed a road through the cycads
and that is the beginning of an end to it.
His three-story brick-and-tile monstrosity
cranes out of the hillside
and the whine of his chainsaw or grind
of his four-wheel-drive as he hauls
his fourteen-footer from the boat ramp
can be heard any day of the year.

The poem goes on to become a meditation on extinction “devoured by such sudden parasites / (and I am one”). As with “A Curse” the energizing force is fury and just as in that poem fury produced a spat-out list, so in this poem it fractures style. In the first sentence the final word, “it” can only refer to a non-existent word “forest” – it should have been replaced by “them”. Deliberate or otherwise, it’s a good technique because it signals the anger of someone whose poetry is always shapely and whose prose is “lucid and elaborate”.

The first section of Urban Elegies is very much about visitations. Visitations play their part in the poems of Walking to Point Clear but they are often subsumed there into the canny structure of the lyric. Here the visitations are framed in rougher poems and there is no doubt that Brooks is experimenting with the idea of opening the poems to the force of the world rather than reducing the world to the point where it can provide a shapely conclusion for a poem. Does this strategy work? Generally yes. Although, in a sense, all of these poems (all poems) are about poetry, there are three here which are quite overt about it. One of them, “Golden Tongues”, deals with visitation in the form of poetry:

Poems
come and go like a once-
or twice-a-year season

four or five
in a rush
and then nothing

you think
they’re easy
and get careless

but then
you turn around
and the words aren’t there

as if you’ve had your chance at Pentecost
and blown it
and the golden tongues are gone

then
out of the blue
it happens again

life
rising out of nowhere
needing you for something - an errand - urgently

The second of these poems, “Ars Poetica”, opens the book and is a much more slippery affair. The visitants are birds, initially exuberantly misidentified by the poet:

When I woke first I imagined it was starlings
mid-demonstration on the galvanised roof,
a thick forest of chirpings,
claws like the scratching
of a thousand sharp pencils

then, waking again, thought
swallows
. . . . .

eventually they are fixed as rainbow lorikeets, significantly from Beaver’s suburb of Manly “covering the gum with raucous blossom / like a sudden daylight phosphorous, / turning the morning to a drunken boat”. The poem concludes with a student asking “What is poetry?” and the poet’s response is “I think of all the old things”. There are many ways of reading this conclusion: the old things might be anything from old theories rehashed for students to old poems by the same poet. Conceivably they are the old techniques of intense metaphor – something the poem is full of. I like to think, admittedly because it suits my argument, that the poem wants to distinguish between a scholar’s mechanical discussing of the nature of poetry with the violent, raucous visitation that represents poetry itself. In other words this is a poem that wants to experience visitation without thinking too much about it.

The final of this group of poems is the comic “Barnyard Revelation Poem”. The poet meets another poet (significantly described as “an academic poetician”) who objects to poems of revelation with a rural setting – “barnyard revelation poems”. The poem then launches into a pretty accomplished parody of the post-modern before asserting the essential basis of human experience:

I suppose, instead, I should be producing
postmodern supermarket odes, or linguo-spatiological
poematographs of the
secret life of words - the kinds of things
a close analysis of “intimate” might intimate, or the way
“impact” can become “impacted” - as if
the post-modern supermarket were anything much other than
sawn-up, mashed, sliced, bottled or deep-
frozen barnyard
or the forms and paraforms, the traces and
fathomless abysses of words were any more
than the cum- and pain- and joy-cries
of farmers and their
wives and children, buried under
layer upon layer of the tangled Western Mind.

Sometimes the visitations are unwanted or at least unpleasant. In a fine poem, “Head Lice”, the poet searches his school-age daughter’s scalp for lice when, with some very complex syntactic shifts, memories of the past intrude as well as an understanding of the central tragedy of parenthood that lurks as though in ambush:

. . . . .
     I run my fingers
through her fine, soft hair, searching it
strand by strand
to find nothing
but the occasional abandoned egg-case
clinging to the root,
or freckle
on the snow-white scalp
amongst my own sudden memories
of childhood on the Cotter River
or birch-trees in a Cleveland winter,
or, waiting in ambush, the fought-
back, un-
thinkable certainty
that such moments must end
all too soon now
and will never come again.

Sometimes the visitations are ecstatic and in “Continuance” they are recalled as arguments in defence of the world against the charge that the stretch of living ahead of us will be just as dreary and uncomfortable as the traversed plain of already-lived life behind us:

wasn’t it in February
that a great moon filled the garden half the night
with light so strong you could read by it?
wasn’t it September when the honeyeater
built in the vine outside the window
and the strange birds came
singing all day in the fig trees
and all the night also?
wasn’t it only a week ago, for reasons
you could not explain at the time
or even remember,
you turned, and smiled a particular
smile as you entered, and your face
and your hair smelt of rain?

There are plenty of visitations, too, in the “Urban Elegies” section of the book. “No Angel” deals with the doubled nature of visitations. An “I do this I do that” poem, it details the events of 11 September, 2003 – exactly two years after the best-known visitation from the air in modern times and eleven days into a new spring. In the central section the poet returns to his office

to face the usual menagerie
of thoughts and emails, visits
to my door: a few
gnats, some
beasts of burden, one
storm-damaged petrel,
no angel, no
panther yet.

This stresses the absence of Rilkean incursions but the poem concludes at night

A glass of wine, a meal, some
conversation - all in all
a good day, quiet enough: no
accident or injury, no
illness, no
phone-call in the heart of night, no
flood or
fire this time,
no death.

This is a reminder that the angel of inspiration, the angel that carries the message of the world and the angel of death all share the same celestial apartment.

The final elegy of Urban Elegies is also a visitation poem concerning itself with accidentally touching a live powerline. When a poet does it it might feel as though he had

     grasped a tendril of his Al-
mighty God
or at the very least connected, as
a television connects to the evening news,
to the entire seven-suburb grid of
sub-station 40C . . . . .

But when a flying fox does the same thing, the poem asks what kind of transcendent reality it connects with momentarily, what

vast
grids and
networkings of night, what
chittering labyrinths of
tree and
air, what
soundless shrieks of
pain or
joy or
prophecy are
there?

It is not an empty question because it asks whether this sort of transcendental visitation is a uniquely human experience. Flying foxes, as part of the natural world, are usually, in Brooks’s poems, visitors themselves disturbing humans in the case of the possums and bush-mice of earlier poems. In “Rat Theses” and “A Dog at Fifty” from this section of Urban Elegies, rats and dogs create a kind of modus vivendi with humans when we see parallels between them and us. But this poem, in asking about the consciousness of animals, does move away from the slight tendency to see the world as a grand abstraction whose function, from our point of view, is to inspire or crush us with its vast otherness. You get the feeling that this book may lead to a perspective whereby we are seen as animals among other animals.

Urban Elegies is a terrific book but it does need to be seen in the context of Brooks’s other work rather than as a breakthrough volume that renders the earlier poetry irrelevant. The question of the nature of poetry, its relation to our humanness and to speech, whether its correct stance towards the world should be passive or active, are issues that go back to Brooks’s earliest poems. I would rather see these new poems as exciting experiments in a productive mode rather than as a finally achieved style. They certainly experiment within the mode: “America: A Cigarette Ode” is in the style of comic exaltation just as “Andre Agassi Bows Out of the French open, 4th June, 2003″ is in the tone of comic despair. But, most of all, they manage to harness anger to make poetry while remaining receptive. It is no coincidence that the author’s portraits on the covers of the three books – an intelligent student, a thoughtful and sensitive scholar and a shaven-headed, angry man – while radically different are still recognizably the same person.

Dimitris Tsaloumas: Helen of Troy

St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2007, 99pp.

In Falcon Drinking (1988) and The Barge (1993), Dimitris Tsaloumas produced two of the most remarkable books in Australian poetry. He had arrived in Australia in 1952 at the age of thirty-one and settled in Melbourne. After a career as a Greek-Australian poet writing in Australia in Greek and publishing in Athens, he switched languages and began to write in his second language, Australian. The full effect of these first two books is hard to detail but has at least two components. Firstly there is a sensibility that is simply not Australian (at least not in any normative sense: since Tsaloumas is an Australian how can his sensibility be anything but Australian?).

It is not merely a matter of cultural references, or of the density and allusiveness of the Greek literary tradition that stands behind Tsaloumas and is imported willy-nilly into the poems, it is also a certain personal stance towards the world that seems if not “unAustralian” at least very unusual in Australia. Prickly, aristocratic (in the looser, not “class” sense), exiled, inclined to nostalgia (though resistant to it), contemptuous of much of the present, often unremittingly bleak, sometimes lavish – especially when celebrating the erotic or the onset of creativity – hieratic, formal etc etc are all valid components of this stance and yet don’t describe it fully.

The second component relates to language. Tsaloumas’ English has the sensitivity and fluency that is needed before anyone can write in a second language. That goes without saying – his work is that of a major poet. But it is a slightly unusual English as is, I suppose, that of Conrad and Nabokov. Take, for example, the opening of the first poem in the final section of this new book, Helen of Troy:

In childhood’s long-drawn days
I conceived ambitious schemes
soon lost, meshed with the night’s
general dreaming.

I love this idiom, but it is the slight strangeness of it that gives it much of its magic. What are “long-drawn” days? Are they days which are “long drawn out” or days in which the child spent his time drawing rather than making boats or days that the poet has often returned to and hence “drawn” regularly in his art? It is probably the first of these, at least as the initial meaning, but “long-drawn-out” is a pretty grotesque phrase ending in an unsatisfactory preposition and I like the verbal adjustment that most English language poets would not make – not because they don’t dare but because it would never have occurred to them. And then there are the ordinary ho-hum dreams that fill much of the theatre of our heads at night. Who would have thought of referring to this as “the night’s / general dreaming” where the power is not in the expressiveness or vividness of a metaphor so much as the unexpected quality of simple words? Tsaloumas’ English poetry is full of such surprises. The effect is like seeing one’s language from a slight angle and the results – if you are open-minded enough – are exciting.

Helen of Troy is Tsaloumas’ seventh book in English. It has much of the character of the earlier books, though I don’t think it reaches their heights. Falcon Drinking and The Barge were animated by two quite separate modes: the celebratory (lush) and the bleak (stony). In the poems the latter probably worked best because it seemed to fit into English language idioms more easily. After all

Winter was late in coming this year
but now he’s here, for good.

He’s settled in the lounge and rocks
like a Talmud scholar in his chair

legs wrapped in a blanket, stern.

was easier for someone new to Tsaloumas’ poetry to assimilate than was

Swan-tough, like a ship’s bow-scroll
heaving through saga mists
she came this autumn morning.

These two modes (and it would take a lot of work to determine exactly how themes were divided between them) no longer seems the generative core by the time of Helen of Troy. In the earlier books the lush was generally used in moments of genuine celebration of everything enjoyed in God’s creation. It was also used in the important Tsaloumas trope of the entrance (as in the three lines quoted above) but though there are plenty of entrances in Helen of Troy they are rarely unequivocally joyous events. True “A Song of Welcome” celebrates a new season but it is significant that the season is not spring but autumn. “Hung-Over” is more typical. Here we have a typical Tsaloumas entrance complete with inverted syntax so that the simile precedes the announcement of the identity of the visitor:

Walking gingerly like a girl
barefoot along the stony path
of vaulting withies and rank weeds,
I saw from my kitchen window
Hope coming.

But, as the title suggests, there is no epiphany that will result from this visitation and the poem ends in bathos by returning to the dreary and corrupt world of the everyday:

Buttering toast, I scanned
the day’s black-banner news and spread
the purple plum jam.

In this book the entrances are often made by the dead. I suppose that when you have reached your mid-eighties it is the dead who, by their number and insistence, you are most likely to find talking to you. In “A Noonday Visit” the old man coming to sip coffee and seek advice from Tsaloumas’ father is, like the father himself, long dead. In “In the Well” a voice “like a father’s”, (perhaps, but probably not, that of Tsaloumas’ actual father) penetrates a siesta with interesting advice:

“There’s no point in reaching out
for a horizon that shifts with you.

Nor is it profitable to sit
under the vine in the cicada’s noon

and wait for the breeze to stir,
up from the sea below.

Go down and clean the well.
It’s cool down there and not so dark.”

The descent into the well in Tsaloumas is either a descent into the stored memories of the past or into the unconscious world of dreams (in this poetry the two are not so different and the complex idea of “nostalgia” could be seen as a way in which these two, usually very different activities of the mind, can become very close). In “Solicitude” the poet’s fair-weather friends continually advise him to “stop going down to the mine” and wells, like the spring of the title poem of Falcon Drinking, are also symbolic sources of inspiration. “In the Well”, however, ends in nothing but despair for irretrievable rhythms:

                                   The other day,
maybe long ago, I heard a lute there,

a tune sprung like a rose from fat soil -
the death fields of holy wars,

and a sob rises in my throat as I grope
seeking the plucking hand,

the old nostalgic tune sunk since
in the stormy dimness of the mind.

In “Incubus” it is the dead mother’s voice that oppresses the sleeper like the weight of a stone when it speaks from what she calls “this side of the dark river” and in “The Unrepentant Dead” (translated by the author from one of his much earlier Greek poems) a dead neighbour confronts the speaker, presumably in a dream.

The two most interesting visitation poems are “Watching the Rain” and “An April Night’s Progress”. The former begins with the distinctive Tsaloumas inversion:

Swaying drunkenly in water-haze
like stormy cypress shadows
over a country churchyard’s flags
on wintry full-moon nights, they came.

The “they” of course are the dead and the poet watches through a window as they sit in the rain, thus emphasizing that the living and the dead inhabit different, even if contiguous, worlds. We don’t know how specific the identity of these five dead are but, since one of them is “very young”, one suspects that the poet is thinking of family or close friends rather than a more generalized group of representative dead. This is significant as the poem concludes not on the bathetic note we have come to expect from the poems of Helen of Troy, but with a joyous transformation:

I tap again. But they rise
and go, not as they came, but shaped,
bodied in recognition.
And I see our lemon tree now shine
with golden fruit by the steps
as they go, the vine with grapes.

Playful screams and words
struggle to my ears from the shore
through a cicada noonday storm -
the hiss of rain on our terrace flags,
on the waterlogged garden.

Recognition (if I read the poem correctly) is a way we can speak to the dead through the impenetrable windows and it not only transforms them but us as well. The way the sound of rain transmutes into the sound of summer cicadas is a subtle and clever one because we are not exactly sure which one is reality and which is dream-metaphor. Did all this take place as a siesta dream by the seaside with the sound of the cicadas prompting a dream involving rain?

Finally, in this survey of “visitation-poems”, there is “An April Night’s Progress”. Here the full panoply of Tsaloumas’ “lush” effects are deployed to introduce Night herself. She walks

into the garden
where the Persian rose blooms
and nightingales wait polishing their song.

The ambience is Middle-Eastern because the poem goes on to arrive at the Gulf War in which

between
two ancient rivers, she lends majesty
to a righteous thunder of guns
and vast illuminations where pyres consume
a city of tale.

Here is a Tsaloumas poem which is about the contemporary political events that he is so scornful of but which is couched in the mode of one of his romantic visitation poems. The picture of Night, trapped between “latticed balconies by raging flames” is the poet’s contribution to the Thousand and One Nights. Technically it is an example of bathos, but is not a verbal or tonal bathos so much as a modal one.

The overwhelming tone of Helen of Troy is valedictory and the characteristic move is one of making final journeys. There is no doubt that we are to read “Old Man’s Last Pilgrimage” as, if not precisely point-to-point allegorical, at least a transposition of the poet’s own experience:

On this my last pilgrimage
I travel by what light and signs
the sky affords. I do no penance
seek no remission of sins.
. . . . .
On this my last pilgrimage
I seek no evidence of fact
but firmer certainties, not hope
but truth of nobler substance
where, in secret folds, the mind
still dreams of wings.

This movement forwards counteracts the way in which memory and its partner, nostalgia, move backwards. It is significant, though, that “Old Man’s Last Pilgrimage” is not the last but the second-last poem in the book. The final poem, “Objection”, is entirely one of summation and justification. Don’t advise me as to how I should live, it says, unless you have heard the boots of the occupying forces coming to your house to arrest you and don’t tell me how to die unless you are one of those

who knew no excess of happiness
when on the crest of fortune
nor bitter grief in its deep troughs;
who from the crow’s-nest
spied the last meridian and tacked about
lest he should rob of its dark fire
the truth of his living.

These final words are not entirely unequivocal but I read the description of tacking in the face of the last meridian as being a refusal to suicide in the deepest “troughs” of despair.

The most ambitious poem in Helen of Troy is the fourteen part narrative, “A Winter Journey”. It is an account of an allegorical pilgrimage, against the speaker’s will, summoned by “unknown spirits” to a place “beyond the range / of my tutelar gods”. Interestingly the sequence describes the wait for the kind of visitation that so many of the book’s other poems are structured around. In this wait for a message from the spirits, the speaker is visited instead by wolves (who wait for spring to reveal where the dead bodies are buried so that they can be eaten). He is also visited by his dead mother and others “from albums / of yellowing years” – an experience I take to be essentially nostalgic. In the thirteenth poem the spirits eventually speak to the solitary and their message is that “the wolves won’t have their dead / the spring shall fail for ever”. It is a very difficult, spare sequence which I might be guilty of misreading but I see the spring as the arrival of that poetic ability which enables the figures of the past to be buried properly, by being “dealt with” (an unpleasant metaphor) in poetry. In Tsaloumas’ earlier poetry the arrival of spring and creativity was celebrated in a lush and rather exotic poetic idiom. Here, in a much stonier poem, the protagonist learns that, eventually, such renewals will cease.

Philip Hammial: Sugar Hits

Woodford: Island Press, 2006, 79pp.

Philip Hammial’s first collection, Foot Falls & Notes, was published in 1976 and Sugar Hits, thirty years later, is his nineteenth. He still has the capacity to polarize audiences but one senses that he has more admirers than detractors among serious readers of Australian poetry. I have always thought he was an exhilarating poet and I have no doubt that he is a very major one. He is also fantastically enjoyable to read – and I always approach each new book with an anticipatory thrill. The keynote to his work is energy. On the crudest level it takes a lot of energy to sustain a nineteen book career in a generally blase literary culture like Australia’s. But at a more significant level, energy is what animates the poems. They have a life and intensity that makes them crackle for the reader despite the inevitable frustrations of our “irritable search after meaning”.

Where this energy comes from is a matter of theory. Arguments derived from non-representational art say that once the poem is forced to sustain itself, rather than draw energy (usually considered to be inauthentic energy, or at least, non-poetic) from the event it records or the scene or experience it conveys, the standards are cranked up considerably and weaker, flabbier works are more easily seen for what they are. Related to this is the idea that language is the true source of the energy of poetry. And then there is the entire conspectus of the literary history of surrealism. Unfortunately there are so many kinds of surrealism that the category is as unhelpful, in its way, as a term like “non-surreal” or “mimetic” would be when considering other kinds of poetry.

Hammial’s career begins with a number of different kinds of poem. At one extreme is something like “A True Story”, the final poem of Foot Falls & Notes:

1. quoit, soporific: you’d rather
2. Chez Vous, hide what you want, each other
3. the you in seeming, the flat one
4. of mixed conclusion, like bibles
5. you contain, others purloin, such
6. always follows, on paper
7. good heart, bad blood, moving
8. in recognition/resignation
9. never clear: the boons, the duets
10. you’d romance, make them heady, like blue streaks

and so on, as far a line number 20. It’s hard to say much about it since it resists any teasing out of meaning and retains only the status of an experience, albeit an intriguing one, for the reader. “Oel”, from Chemical Cart (1977), is a different sort of thing, however:

1
if
you’re stuck
use the mouth.

2
be gentle
with the unconfessed mouth. never use
the shoulder, the knee, the
bruised limelight
of the snowballing knuckle.

3
the surly vaudevillian
hath no application.

4
nor the mute seamstress
who closes things.

5
any small
caterwaul, dancer’s
nibble, fairy’s foraging
is a good start.

6
go on
with the arabesque
of a fledgling war whoop.

This is the kind of poem that other poems by the same author teach us how to read. It’s subject is the mouth, the organ of ingestion and expression both of which play a large part in Hammial’s poems. The mood is imperative, another favourite Hammial mode of address and the poem is a set of injunctions. The fifth and six stanzas want to be read as a memo to the poet himself – find a way to begin your poem by “any small caterwaul” and let it develop into (at least) a “fledgling war whoop”. What makes a small caterwaul, of course, is a complex issue. Sometimes it is simply an odd and exciting collocation of words – the kind of thing you find in the first lines of early poems by John Forbes. “Rabid Thrashing // has its advocate & a pink / prodigious trunk . . .” or “I’m crannied, I’ve got / the sorrow . . .” or “Your itch, Adabble, / is peristaltic . . .” are examples, though it would take a lot of time to tease out whether the interest derives from the image or the sound. Most often in Hammial, however, the start is likely to be some trick played on an existing structure in the language, often a cliche. Thus “Strangle the Projectionist” from Swarm (1979) begins “if moles / are mountains; if the sun wants / a good killing; if the sentry / is opposed to the eagle . . .” so that the initial reference to mountains and molehills leads us to believe that cliches underlie the next lines. A poem from Chemical Cart, “Roses For Fourtille”, is made up of delphic utterances, one sentence per stanza (a form common in Hammial), many of which, like my favourite “Goose, but greece is grandeur”, are distortions or blending of cliches while others take a familiar syntactic shape and fill it with unexpected words.

This brief look at what generates a poem verbally is a bit of a digression. I want to contrast a poem like “Oel” with a poem like “A True Story” in terms of the ways in which one absolutely rejects any attempts to prise a conventional, paraphrasable meaning from it while the other, perhaps coyly, suggests that our instinctive efforts to make sense of it are not entirely misplaced. If we read enough of Hammial, these seem to say, we will learn how to unlock the meanings hidden inside their distinctive exteriors. Is this nothing more than the familiar heresy whereby unskilled readers of the various kinds of surreal poetry attempt to impose conventional interpretations on the uninterpretable, thus making fools of themselves and showing how little they understand of the poetics and hermeneutics of surrealism?

Well not in Hammial’s case because there are poems far more “accessible” than “Oel”. To take an extreme example: pretty much in the centre of Hammial’s career as it now stands is a book called Travel published in 1989. It is made up of prose poems which are not remotely surreal. They are stories of harum-scarum adolescent adventures (burning down deserted farmhouses seems a common experience in post-war Detroit) and of travel – Hammial is an indefatigable traveller. Though the mode of writing is simple the material is pretty outrageous. In fact one is tempted to call this (a la Marquez) the realistic description of a surreal reality. One of Hammial’s early jobs was as a warder in the Athens State Hospital and this weird environment is surely responsible for the references to asylums which form a kind of ground bass to his poems. Not many other poems in Hammial are autobiographical and denotative like these but there are autobiographical elements that poke through and Travel enables readers to identify many of these elements.

The first poem of Travel, incidentally, is as clear a statement of poetics as one could hope for. It is called “The Owl”:

Always the youthful experimenter and already convinced that true  poetry doesn’t come from the conscious mind, I’m looking for ways to  project myself into “altered states of consciousness”. I have a  brainstorm. Under a full moon I follow the railroad tracks out into the  country. When I hear the whistle of an approaching freight train, I  place my pen and notebook on the cinders and lie down on my stomach  beside a rail, about six inches from it. Moments later the huge cars are  roaring and shaking and screeching and thundering over me, around me,  through me. My experiment is more than successful. I rise shakily to my  feet and begin hooting, over and over at the top of my lungs. I’ve  discovered my totem bird, the bird that will give me my poems.

“The Owl” locates Hammial, within the many-doored mansion of surreal verse, as what I would call a “totemic surrealist”. Derangement of the logical mind allows uncensored images of a state of being which is possessed of great power. It is no accident that Hammial has long been interested in Art Brut (or Outsider Art), works produced by disturbed people with no access to artistic “training”.

Finally, in this list of Hammial modes (with digressions) are the surreal narratives. These are almost always expressed as prose poems and are reasonably denotative. Unlike the poems of Travel, however, they are not at all mimetic. The earliest is “No One Knows I Do This” in Foot Falls & Notes:

I send the string (every Thursday) to a sick girl. I coil it in  the bottom of a small box & wrap it in brown paper & mail it . .  . It’s Friday, & the now-opened box sits in the palm of her left  hand & (1) she pinches the end of the string between the fingernails  of her index & second fingers (right hand) &, while she pulls  it up slowly, she whispers hush; (2) she wets her thumb with her tongue,  places it (thumb, right hand) on the coiled string & pushes it out  through the bottom of the box while she says very matter-of-factly cup  of tea; (3) she tosses the box (the string is still inside) into the  waste-basket shouting brew; (4) a pencil is a good flute, & it  charms the white snake from its basket; but now the nurse is here &  she’s taking the pencil away; (5)

There is a strong sense here of a tremendously important ritual which is logically quite meaningless and this is both a theme of these prose poems and a mode – because the language in which the ritual is conveyed has to be as simple and unequivocal as possible. This seems dreamlike and suggests that this and others of the prose poems are based in dreams, a suspicion confirmed by two from Chemical Cart which begin, “I call the scape like I see it” and “The dream is pure kitsch”. Many of these poems involve contraptions with wheels and their interaction with humans. Vehicles (1985) is a collection of these but “Automobiles of the Asylum”, the first poem of Chemical Cart, is the best example:

I pull the huge book down from the bookcase. Rich, full-color  photographs of the cars & their drivers, page after page. But first  the text: it seems the inmates have races in these vehicles; they start  on the roof & roll down a spiraling ramp to the ground floor. No one  knows when or how these races originated.

Each vintage car is a true work of art: magnificent chrome-plated  radiators through which (so one of the captions says) only the rarest  blood can circulate; huge highly-polished brass head & tail lamps,  their wicks trimmed by special attendants; brass horns that curl to  animal & vegetable bulbs with the scaled reality of the mermaid;  spoked wheels with the shimmering complexity of fire-rimmed, god-filled  mandalas . . .

And the bodies of these small vehicles - no larger than go-carts -  each one is shaped like the torso of its creator-driver, a fur or  silk-lined outer skin into which the limbless inmate may be comfortably  placed for his or her one-way roll at dazzling speeds down, always down  the ever-narrowing ramp to the shock-rooms.

This is an interesting example because instead of simply describing the dream or vision (“I call the scape like I see it”) it includes the processes of transformation from picture of vintage cars to a progressively more manic metaphor for life.

And so to Sugar Hits. It is hard not to think of Hammial’s career as being in two parts and Sugar Hits is an example of the kind of poetry he has written since With One Skin Less (1994). If I had to characterize this poetry of the last fifteen years or so, I would say that although the familiar modes remain (Swan Song of 2004 is entirely prose poems, for example) the status of meaning has relaxed somewhat. We meet surreal poems but ones which clearly want to allow the world (especially that part of the world – such as injustice, cruelty and political stupidity – which arouses anger) into their text. One of the poems, “Flag”, is clearly about these new poems and how they relate to reality. It’s opening, especially, is revealing.

Significance to the fore
as we come of age: you count
to red & I’ll to blue & between us,
if it’s posterity, we’ll offer it up
to Uncle. Uncle 
of the stick that never fails 
to fiddle! Uncle 
of the seven-tiered absence! May his star 
always twinkle. May what we read 
into his book be in the style to which 
he’s accustomed. What
claptrap! Any significance here
will be beaten just the way we like it, have always
liked it, no change at this late date, thanks
all the same, & as for Uncle, what
I’ll read him back if he rings, if
he dares to, is a round of righteous belief hot enough
to confuse his death with someone else’s, Ms
Nightingale’s, say, by
natural causes, hers, & up
in smoke, his.
                       Leave
the flowers on the table, thanks, &
piss off - pieces of poetry gathered while we may
no longer on our agenda, the star-spangled series
an abject failure. Fatuous formalities 
foraging for a fault according to the only reviewer
who condescended to read them. So why
did we bother? Just to let the bastards know
that we’re still here, I suppose, & certainly not, as some
might suppose, for the sake of some posterity, red, blue
or white.

What seems like a furious assault on someone who (as I am about to do) has suggested that with age the more unyielding elements of surrealism have lost their charm and the author has found a pressing need to say things about the world and his experience of it is here mixed up with (in ways I don’t really understand, though the lack of understanding derives simply from ignorance of autobiographical factors) references to nationalism. The Uncle (of the “stick that never fails / to fiddle”) is Uncle Sam and the flag is the US flag.

But despite the aggression of this poem (it’s energy clearly derives from anger and frustration), I want to stick with my sense that these are more engaged, less “pure” poems. A number deal with poetry itself. “Swap”, for example, engages with comments by Martin Langford and continually revises a poem so that it submits to the idea that whatever pleasure poetry gives lies in its meaning and the way that meaning “dances”:

. . . . .
So let’s be brave
and try again: “The mace gun in her handbag for
the flag of a defeated army rescued from the mud
& given a good scrub, as good as new.” Now
we’re getting somewhere. But is Martin ready
to come to the party yet? Who would want to live 
in a country where meaning did not dance? He’s
right of course. So one last try, fingers crossed: “That
voice he found in Potsdamer Platz just after the war for
from top gun to philanthropist in less than a week, what
in Christ’s name is going on?” What in Christ’s name
is going on? Have I missed something? Is there
meaning here? And if there is is it dancing? It seems
to me (& no doubt would to Martin too) that it’s
stomping on the Queen’s toes & she, poor thing,
is too well bred to say anything to this king-pretending
stumblebum. Alas. The hands at the keyboard 
still dream of the touch they evolved for. 

This is a lot of fun especially as it metamorphoses what is probably more anger and frustration into humour. Above all we know where we, as readers, are positioned: reading a poem which is about the status of meaning in a poem. Confusing and paradoxical but full of fun and energy.

“Muse” is about that problematic character – the surrealist muse. I think (and there is a lot of tentativeness about this reading) that two muses are contrasted. One is a kind of nature spirit embodied in Asian rain “a timely strafing / or a soothing voice, a ubiquitous crooning / that dilutes the toxins” and the other, representing, I suppose, the meaning-centred western tradition, is a widow whose “practiced smile / in the oval mirror in the vestibule” is an antidote to the poet’s “perpetual frown”. The poem concludes with the widow absconding with the kind of poet she prefers: a “conceited crooner / with a carpet bag”.

Other poems recycle autobiographical elements that we have met in Travel or in other, less surreal, poems. “Uncle Stan”, for example, describes the lawyer uncle who prescribed for the young Hammial a spell in the navy. And “Pearls” is a poem made up of memories, most of which we can trust. It is called “Pearls” because the story has no pearls of wisdom, only goatskins:

A truck full of goatskins - no
pearls here - brakes to a halt
while she hobbles across - an old woman
with a huge key. Key
to a house in Detroit . . .

and so on through memories of a long life punctuated by the refrain “no pearls here”. But despite all the lurid details it is still the life of a poet and has to end with the poetry:

No
pearls here: pretty books all in a row - 1, 2, 3, 4 . . .
9, 10 pins bowled over by peers with friends
in the right places. O pomp
& circumstance, this getting of wisdom
a sorry affair, poetry with its tar, feathers
everywhere.

Finally, there are a number of brilliant poems that seem to belong together. They are in the mode I have been speaking about, the mode more directly engaged with the world and perhaps drawing energy from anger and frustration. In a sense they seem like a cross between the earlier surreal poems and the narratives. They are marked by the sorts of unusual transitions and transformations that we expect in surreal poetry but they have a very strong sense of form in that they conclude by some kind of return – like a return to an original key. “Water” is one of the best of them and will also serve as a good example:

Die as much as you want. An inch at a time
or all at once, it doesn’t matter. Your conviction
that the new Human Tissue Bill will somehow
protect you is a delusion. Take it from me, I know. It’s
not for nothing that I’ve been an envoy to the Mahdi
for the past two years. Here to save us
from ourselves, his army’s contribution
to our once-beautiful city is, according
to a recent poll, extremely disappointing, that
contribution having been, to date, one point two
million black parasols, one
for every male citizen. If only
it would rain. What a sight for sore eyes
it would be to watch those parasols blossoming
up & down the length of the Avenue Foch. Fat
chance. The drought
is here to stay. It’s only a matter of time
before we pack our bags & head inland
to the great fresh water sea that supposedly covers
the heart of our continent. A rumour? Do you
know anyone who has actually seen it? I don’t. Harry
Kline in his seminal work, Paradise Now, describes
that sea in detail - abundant with fish, barges poled
by djinns who are delighted to attend to your every need,
etc. But is Harry to be believed? What if he’s sold out,
become another of the mahdi’s innumerable stooges?
Considering how quickly his book rose (was pushed)
to the top of the best-seller list, I’d say he probably is.
All things considered, if I were you
I’d do it all at once.

This is, of course, a meaningful poem, and one could imagine lengthy po-faced analyses of its contribution to (or dependence on) the colonial experience. The invaders always bring what they want us to want – parasols instead of water – and always impose their own visions etc etc. But the real pleasure is the way the tight (and tightly enjambed) syntactic structure holds together sudden and unexpected narrative shifts. I couldn’t think of a better example of meaning dancing than “Water”. In the same mode is “Merchandise”. Here the shifts are even more unexpected as a “waltz / of merry widows” is disturbed by a frantic search for merchandise:

Common graves pan out
in a felicitous escapade - a waltz
of merry widows, their gigolos done up
as clockwork thugs. Six bells
& all is Not well. There’s this little matter
of the merchandise. One would have thought
that at your age you’d know enough to keep
your hands to yourself, but there you go. Down
with all hands, your mates making digging motions
on the tablecloth while you, on your hands & knees
under the table, can’t
come up with the goods - the lost ring
that you found in a cereal box & had the gall to give
to your third wife . . .

And so on through transformations involving Louis Quinze , an image of a “new, safe family” and a new messiah whose ride into town on a white stallion the poet has mimicked. These and their like – “Invited”, “Air Raid”, “Books”, “Djinns”, “Protocol” etc – are exhilarating poems in a mode one looks forward to enjoying for a good time yet.

Fay Zwicky: Picnic

Artarmon: Giramondo, 2006, 79pp.

The floor plan of Fay Zwicky’s poetic house was described brilliantly by Ivor Indyk in an article in Southerly published nearly thirteen years ago (54:3. 33-50). Her position as poet derives from her position in a moral universe and Indyk quotes an essay from her collection, The Lyre in the Pawnshop:

There is a whole way of being at home in the world that is best described by the word “reverence” which accords life meaning in terms of  debt to something. One is what one owes, what one acknowledges as rightful obligation, what one feels about the taking of responsibility for oneself and for others.

She inhabits what students of religion would call a Levantine culture as distinguished from Greek or Oriental. It is a hierarchical universe dominated by a grotesque old father-God who is so powerful and so demanding that even in his absence he is a demonic presence – in other words, he is not diminished by absence. He is manifest in all transactions in which one person wields power over another but the universe he has set up is one in which obligations move up and down the hierarchical scale: even the god of the Old Testament made contractual commitments to his people. Little wonder that reverence (whose model is surely submission to the father) and obligation are the crucial terms.

But, as Indyk points out, there is nothing demurely accepting about Zwicky’s attitude to obligation and reverence. She is quarrelsome and the drama of her poetry is to be found in the chafing that the bonds of duty cause. More interestingly, she is adept at those strategies which remind God (or his relevant manifestation) of the situation (and rights) of the servant while accepting the servant’s obligation to serve. The central text here is “Ark Voices” from Zwicky’s second collection, Kaddish, especially in the dramatic monologue of Noah’s wife who has a wonderful way of accepting her lowly role in the great drama of the Lord’s destruction of the world while at the same time reminding God that he may not be behaving towards his tiny creatures with quite the required sensitivity to obligation:

Noah is incorruptible and good, a large
sweet soul.
Sir, I have tried to be!
But does the frog whose home was in a well
assail an ocean?
How does the summer gnat approach the ice?

It’s an old, probably pre-Deuteronomistic, Jewish position – you can hear it in Abraham’s arguing with God about how many righteous men it would require for him to spare the cities of the plain.

Is this a common or even familiar Australian world-view? I’m not so sure (coming from the Germanic inflected Greek end of the religious/philosophical spectrum, myself) and it is always difficult and dangerous to make generalizations about a culture’s perspective on the cosmos. But it is a perspective that makes for a good kind of poetry because it shuttles between the small and the ever-looming large. Individual things are always simultaneously dead particulars and part of a divine creation. And there is room for a lot of drama that can be expressed in the human – ie poet’s – voice, adrift in this cosmos. There is less doubt than in the Greek-based tradition and a lot more than in the oriental. You can hear it, in a very different form to Zwicky’s poetry, in Islamic mystical poetry where God is continually upbraided (in a properly cloaked allegorical way of course) for being absent, or at least for being unprepared to show his face. As a quatrain from Baba Taher, a contemporary of Omar Khayyam, says: “Separation made me like a bird without feathers or wings / You say to me: Be patient, be patient / But patience is like dirt thrown on my head.”

We meet this world of mutual obligation in Picnic in a fine and moving poem, “The Young Men”. At one level it is one of those poems in which the dead rise up in dreams and demand to be heard, to enter our lives. But it is a more complex and challenging poem than that suggests. The dead, when they speak, are positively hostile to the poet’s infantile world of book, candle and night light. I think the suggestion here is that, while they were dying in the Second World War, the poet, born in 1933, was living a happily protected innocent life of reading. This literary life has continued and retained its otherworldliness. The poem’s conclusion is both an admission of this and a promise to change:

“You’ll sleep all right with us
and never never wake. Night lights,
books and candles lost the war against our
childhood, growing, long ago, their power
to charm away the everlasting dark a myth:
silence lasts forever. Listen, while you can,
to unseen saplings somewhere falling.”
Young men, you dear young men, I’m listening.

Another poem, “No Return”, perhaps more clever than moving, deals with the paradoxes of loyalties to grandparents and parents – those “once-/huge troubling presences”:

Standing on the stump
of the self I might have been,
I crane to catch
call back those once-
huge troubling presences
receding down the road
of memory, the dearest
and the worst for whose
going I was never ready
whose end I hastened
as a child forever
waving them off, ready
to leave, always leaving
whose every footfall
kicked off avalanches
of grief in the place
I have stood upon,
am still standing,
stumped.

There is a large sequence in Picnic devoted to the psychotic Chinese founding emperor, Qin, he of the wall, the tomb, the terracotta army and the burnt books and butchered scholars. It belongs to that usually unpromising genre where a group of dramatic monologues allow all levels of an organization to speak and be heard. But in “The Terracotta Army at Xi’an”, Zwicky is so aware of the mutual obligation that stretches across all levels that the sequence is never mechanical. In fact the China of just over two thousand years ago is a pretty good metaphor for the contemporary universe, ruled by a god who greedily devours the devotion of others but who is the only being capable of appreciating the lives and skills of those others. Of the six figures it is the potter who is most important in this sequence. As a creator (though he describes himself as “more artisan than artist”) his role in this mini-universe is one that the poet responds to. It will come as no surprise that he is the most quarrelsome of Qin’s subjects:

                                   Qinshihuang just happened by
as I was casting a horse’s rump,
history’s enemy arrested by an old man’s fragment.
I assumed – wrong again – my audience would detect
the rippling tremor of irony behind my stance,
refused to bow. He laughed to show how deep his tolerance,
how insatiable his curiosity for what is commonly
passed by: the common touch indeed . . .

My rage touched off a burning energy,
muscles bulging over the mould, enough to
make him start.

What we have here is a poem about that strange relationship between the artist and the great-in-the-world. It is Napoleon and Goethe; Tamberlane and Hafez. They recognize themselves in the other – they are both creators of worlds – and also recognize that, though they need each other (artists created both Qin’s tomb and his army), they are also opposed to each other.

Picnic is full of poems about poetry, or about the role of the artist in the universe that Zwicky inhabits. A long poem, “Makassar, 1956”, chosen in Peter Porter’s Best Australian Poetry 2005 (I mention this because it is not included in the book’s acknowledgements), seems like a fragment of autobiography but is really a portrait of the artist as a young woman and it concludes, as such things should, with the first intimations of vocation. It begins with severance from the world of obligation:

. . . . .
Parents, relatives and friends cried and waved,
the streamers strained, snapped, collapsed
in lollypop tangles on the wharf. Pulling away
from the tumbled web, we didn’t care about
falling behind, getting ahead, dry-eyed and
guiltless went as everything was happening
somewhere else. I wouldn’t have seen the signs.

and concludes with a wedding and three veiled women seen from a shop in Jakarta:

                                                                      Their burning eyes
arrested me, speaking soundless of an older, fiercer order
of things. Haunted eyes that followed me in dreams – I see
them still – their black concealment hinting how
it’s possible to be in one place, also somewhere else,
possible to let things happen over and over, possible
to stick in silence to pain’s colours and, if it’s in you,
transmit poems: . . .

It shouldn’t surprise that this sounds not unlike Qin’s potter for Picnic’s obsession is with the position of the artist inside the strange universe Zwicky describes. True, this was a dominating issue in the previous book, The Gatekeeper’s Wife, but there was a touch of the theatrical in poems like “Triple Exposure & Epilogue” and “Banksia Blechifolia” that the poems of Picnic avoid. I think this was a wise decision as lines like

              Neither daffodil nor
delphinium, poets project
no soft transports from

my fire-forged speech.
Barely exotic since I’m born here,
bearer of crueller histories

than your burning fields recall.
Seeded by typhoons, I’ve waited
years to raise my barbed and desperate

flower, colourless, odourless
and armoured. But reaching
reaching always skyward. My way

you might say, of letting you know
death’s around and ready.
. . . . .

just seem too over the top – though I admit that it is a shrub not a poet who is supposed to be speaking.

Picnic’s final two poems are both about poetry. The first, “Genesis” is about where it comes from whereas the second, “Poetry Promenaded”, is about how it is incarnated and situated in the modern world. As with “The Young Men”, “Genesis” is not quite so simple as it appears on first reading when it seems to be asserting, unremarkably enough, that phrases and images are kickstarted not by a “fixed notion” but

Rather something stumbled on at night
(the dark is best for stumbling),
chancing it blind, spoiling for a fall.

Will it be one more bulletin from the zone
of dread? Another bleat of unbelonging?
Or some grim soot-faced riff on the long-dead,
the incantatory singsong of nostalgia 
serial murders, violated wombs, decay,
the foot-in-mouth neuralgia of our days?

This stresses that the poem’s beginning will be in something which is stumbled on but which is also cliched. That is interesting in itself, and a countervoice to all the other poets’ predictable obeisances to the unconscious, but the poem goes on to speak in more detail about the “stumbling”:

The ground can cave in anywhere, undreamt-of
mystifying shifts and gaps, like waking up
one day without your face to say
I cannot recognise this life as mine.

and then tell an Irish joke – admittedly apposite! The conclusion takes the idea of genesis by stumble into much more uncomfortable territory than we might have expected:

                                                  It’s what
you can’t trim down to the manageable that
seeds the poem, keeps the poet sparked
awake to what could be, to what might
fan him into flight. Better not to know
but stumble unawares on randomness,
like walking mapless in an unknown town,
get recklessly resiliently lost without
your face or life you thought you knew.
The poem will either find
or find you out.

“Talking Mermaid”, whose subject is poetry, seems in a quite different style to the other poems of the book. To begin with it is a symbolic narrative where the speaker, a mermaid, watches a man swim out to sea with dolphins, “They tease and lollop close in chorus file: his path’s / presumptuous, chancey, stretching things beyond / his lineage. There is no lyric in the human stride.” The lyric voice is, in other words, pitched between the natural and the human. The mermaid speaks of two “natural” people, a man and a woman: “they lit my life” but “were they ever trouble!” and how she now inhabits both sea and land. This poem is intriguing because the poem that precedes it, “Push or Knock”, a comic but significant tale about being visited by a Chinese translator, contains a critique of “Talking Mermaid”, whose drafts are dragged out when the visitor wants to see the poet at work:

I tell him that the poem’s fighting decorative
scrolls, rhetoric’s fancy needlework,
the sequinned tale. Does he know what memaids are?
He says he does.
Seduced by metaphor, I wither into pedagogic prose:
“The lyric voice is struggling with the ordinary,
seams are showing, do you understand?” He does
he says.

I like this idea of what can be read as a two-part poem: proleptic and oblique critique followed by the poem itself.

Two of the book’s early poems, both about poetry, can be read in a similar way. “Close-up” is about Lowell’s “Epilogue” written shortly before his death and brutally criticizing his own early poems and asks “If this comes from the best / of us, what future for the rest of us?” The answer is

Burn-out blues for big note orphics,
small-pond croakers brought to heel;
batteries out of juice, that’s what.

But, like so many of Zwicky’s poems, this poem moves in unpredictable directions. If poetry’s pretensions are easily exposed, surely it can provide an ideology-free account of its world. Not so:

So “why not say what happened?”
What makes you think we’d know?
Know thyself? A bad Socratic joke
from bearded know-alls handy with
the blanket rules. Like God,
A CEO without the common touch,
not one can help at crunch-time,
tell you how to pass for decent,
tell you why your life is skewed,
why your poems stall in scavenged diction,
stick contraptions held by string and glue.
. . . . .

“Hokusai on the Shore” is not so much an answer to this as a counterpart. It is not an answer because it doesn’t remove the pain of “Close-up” but it does provide a bleak but comforting counter. Hokusai’s great wave paintings came after the age of seventy “old, ill, destitute / your money gambled away by your / grandson, your name forgotten / by the world you’d survived.” Hokusai’s comment ends the poem:

“Until I was seventy, nothing I drew
was worthy of notice. When I’m eighty,
I hope to have made progress.”/pre>
Written by a poet turning seventy, this is a heartening realization that what you know is your craft and that this is the last (in both senses) that you need to stick to. It is also tempting to allegorise out the wave simultaneously into one of god’s random acts of brutality (of the kind that caused the flood that left Mrs Noah in her predicament) and into the tsunami of 2004.

But finally, in this consideration of the poems about poetry in the book, I need to look briefly at a strange poem, "World Cup Spell, 1998". It interests because it is a mock magician's spell (perhaps based on lurid accounts of the kinds of questionable befeathered shamans that African national football teams are inclined to bring with them so that they can perform curses between the goal posts before matches) designed to secure victory for the Brazilians (Taffarel et al) over the French (Lizerazu, Barthez et al) in the World Cup Final of 1998. Because it is a spell, even though it is only a comic parody, it raises the spectre of another kind of poetry altogether - much more primitive, pre-literate and chthonic - and not, generally, Fay Zwicky territory. Judith Rodriguez's wonderful "Eskimo Occasion" does something very similar. The problem of course is that, as everyone knows, not only were the Brazilians defeated but they played with such a bemused, frustrated air that it appeared to all observers as though they were under some sort of spell. The awful possibility is that charms uttered by Australian poets with a Jewish perspective and an allegiance, however tentative, to the angry great father in the sky, always work in a counter way. I would think very hard before I allowed this poem to be printed in Brazil.

Jennifer Harrison: Folly&Grief

Melbourne: Black Pepper, 2006, 133pp.

One of the features of Jennifer Harrison’s work is the way that the themes are consistent and the styles change. Folly&Grief is, quite simply, a brilliant book. To get a sense of what it is doing and where it is positioned, though, it is more than helpful to look at her previous work. Her first book, Michelangelo’s Prisoners (published in 1994), began with a group of poems about the body which position the author both as external analyser and participant ; that is as body-owner.

The first poem, “Imaging the Brain”, looks at that unknowable entity in terms of the traces it leaves, one of which is the very poem we are reading:

. . . . . 
The scan declares a brain is free
Of tumour or haemorrhage
But doesn’t comment on the mind’s possibility.

Idle, industrious, the faint white streamers
Which streak the filmy cortex
Must be sentences.

Other poems (such as “Cancer Poem”, “Chemotherapy”, “Outrider” and the title poem) seem based on a personal experience of the body going wrong and so have a less-removed, occasionally nightmarish quality. Nevertheless they are still defiantly analytical in mode.

The second section of Michelangelo’s Prisoners is called “The Sea”. Here, especially in the last poems, it foreshadows the next book, Cabramatta/Cudmirrah. The central poem of this section is a sequence of seven sonnets called “Maturana Songs”. It is central because the biologist/epistemologist figure which it celebrates provides a philosophy which seems to underpin much of Harrison’s work. Since Maturana’s work gravitates towards the image of “drift” for the way in which human and non-human systems inhabit an environment, we can expect that seas in Harrison’s work will never be simply seas. Insofar as the sea is opposed to the body then it does inevitably symbolize the mind but the conventionality of this image (with its attendant symbols of fishing, drifting etc) is complicated by the addition of the idea that it also represents the medium that we inhabit and never control.

If each observation is a system
each thought an adaptation, then we drift
upon a spacious sea.
Slippery meanings flash through weeds . . . . .

So the sea poems at the end of Michelangelo’s Prisoners, like those in Cabramatta/Cudmirah, have a decidedly equivocal quality: they describe a medium which can represent the brain, the house of memories and creativity, but which can also represent a kind of primal medium out of which observers produce what they imagine to be solid “objects” and experiences but which don’t in fact have any “objective” status though they do serve to obscure the fact that they have been created. It recalls Tarkovsky’s Solaris though that wonderful film never appears in any Harrison poem that I know. To put it mildly, a lot of things are happening when this poet goes down to the sea.

Cabramatta/Cudmirah is a book of memories: the titular suburb and coastal town being the twin poles of the poet’s upbringing. But memory for Harrison is far more than the re-creation of old, loved places. The first section is obsessed by fast travel and roads, symbols of the passage of time, and makes no bones about its interest in the very act of observation:

but this isn’t how you remember it
now that the highway by-passes
everything that is ordinary
you see only the ordinary invisibility of speed
you are unsure which cows
are trees, which trees are people
the anabolic blur flattens the lot
until you are driving fast into your own history
and digging deep into the eye within
which is the only place you see it

The second section takes us back to the sea which is looked at through all the possible symbolic filters. It is the medium, it is also process, the natural world, the unconscious mind, the meaning-laden underside of a poem, and all human bodily fluids. There are two major human figures: a wise gypsy and a grandmother. Since the latter is suffering from Alzheimers she is a place where memory is slipping into the dark and her character is the reverse of the poet who pulls memories into the poems. Poetry is always responsive to this central human dilemma: the almost infinite details of life (the exact call of the local currawongs outside my study as I write this, for example) slip continuously into the irretrievable. Those things that are retrieved – chance items in a vast shipwreck – can be fixed in a poem but they do no more than remind us of the enormity of what has been lost. At any rate, one of poetry’s functions is to be aware of its power to fix: as Yeats says in “Easter 1916”, “I write it out in a verse” and that poem celebrates poetry’s transforming power while seeming to record a transformation wrought by political commitment. One of Harrison’s poems, “Thermocline”, sets up a three-layered sea. There is the surface (the world of phenomena), the deep ocean (the world of forgetting), and between them the thermocline where memories are preserved and have an influence on the waves and currents of the surface. It seems schematic but it is a good poem:

. . . . .
Lying between the eye’s horizon
and the eye’s blindness
the thermocline hoards memories that do not fade

for without light, without heat
the sea would be an infinite homogenous
forgetting.

Cudmirrah Shoalhaven Swan Lake Ulladulla.

Waves are never one colour -
they inhabit space not place -
they’re in the sea’s lung
then they’re out in the open
mouthing the smoke of Bherwherre -

then they curve to the shore
taking the ship’s dog with them.

Girls lie nearby
rubbing hot-noonday suns
into their skin’s cool echo.
I must think of the wave as a diary.
Scarcely daring to read
what I have written the day before
in case I edit what I mean.

There are enough surprises here to overcome the schematic quality. I like the unexpected ending and I really like the listing of the towns in the middle – it is as though a list will re-establish the power of the poem to fix particulars. Another poem, “Sea Eagles”, seems to suggest that a list of remembered items can have an incantatory quality as though each object became sacred:

. . . . .
See grandmother - we
are recording the swimmer
the cry, the unexplored X, coloured red

meaning this is where
we will go without finding
the village of strange implements and boasts.

There is a way of touching the dreams of another
of calling when you have no voice.
We make a tower from sticks
and hang it with feathers, funeral stones
rubber thongs, whelks, a wind-chime.

There is a lot that is relevant to Folly&Grief in that image.

Poets develop and change in their own ways and are not required to please their readers, but it is hard not to think of Dear B as a disappointing book. The bulk of the poems seem extremely gnomic and don’t – unlike the poems of the first two books – suggest approaches that a reader might take. What are we to make, for example, of “Husk”?

Your nervous heart insists
that lightness makes sense of grace
that boneless time weighs the seed and
spills its morse as choreography
now prisoner stammering
in the breathless crevice - fly fly
across flagstones: smooth
tumbling brief - pinned now
to the ragged branch
you disappear longing to see.

Yes it is about the seed which carries its plant’s DNA across cracks in stone and paving and ends up in a tree and it is also about the heart’s desire to approve of the weightlessness of the seed but it is hard to determine the poet’s stake in all this: what makes it a necessary poem instead of a merely incidental one. The same could be said of the bulk of the poems in the book although occasionally, in poems like “Local Astronomy” and “A Serious Case”, familiar themes (memory, system-identity) push through. And the poems are not necessarily bad. Everything I have said in a way applies to “Out of Body Experience” which is, in its own way, a tour de force:

Last night I lay above myself in the dark
looking down upon a stranger beside him.
Momentarily, in the moonlight, she was that person
I am no more, the one seen from far away
who cannot be regained or changed
and whom the dawn will not unite.
The two women who lie awake beside him
cannot speak or touch each other.
One is made of earth and blood, the other
of air and moon-frost. All the night between them
is past and future night
so that everything I have done, everything she watches
becomes a memory, now passing
as I sleep and wake outside her, inside myself, beside him.

The brilliant opening works by quickly and unexpectedly introducing a third person as a kind of marker point so that the spectral self looks down on “a stranger beside him”. But even this poem despite its personal theme has an impersonal quality, almost as though its ideal housing would be some kind of anthology where poems don’t need to be read through their individual author’s obsessions and thematic and stylistic quirks.

And so to Folly&Grief. At the simplest level we can see that, like the first two books it is in two parts. It is also a long book, each of the parts being as long as a conventional book of poetry. Each section ends with a diary-like poem that represents something that is, as far as I can see, new in Harrison’s work – though Dear B does contain a diary section in one of its longer sequences. But the overwhelming impression that a first reading of Folly&Grief makes is of the almost all-encompassing symbolic set-up built around commedia dell’arte, mime, clowning and funambulism. You can get the wrong initial impression – as I did – that this is a kind of got-up research project that a poet might put to an arts-funding body: promising to write a sequence about the circus world. In fact the obsessions of the earlier books are here and the magic of Folly&Grief is that these obsessions find a natural, logical home in the world of the clown and the mime. In fact the nature of these obsessions becomes so much clearer when they are opened out, so to speak, into a different symbolic realm.

When discussing the earlier books, I have already spoken about the features of memory and the way a poem can fix them. Sometimes these memories actually are embedded in objects inherited and kept. It is no accident that the word “heirloom” occurs so frequently in Harrison’s poetry. We meet these pregnant objects in the first poem of Folly&Grief, “Funambulist”.

Coins fill the busker’s hat;
it’s true, a thief will steal from the blind.
Satellites spin delicate journeys
in the woods above.Space

the guestroom we never had.
Malleable, down below,
in the mute neon between streets,
we’ve touched only the details of maps.

Believing ourselves beamed upon,
we script new mercy themes
and here are the things I carry:
a silver bell, a desk, a lock of hair,

some laurel flowers, a lantern,
a bonbonniere, three scarves,
a black cat, a peacock, a box of rain,
a streak of lightning,

a ladder, a pipe, a coffin, a fan,
a pumpkin, a skull, a book of law.
Believing myself beamed upon,
I carry one clap of thunder, some shrimps

and a globe, a bag of nails, a carton of crème,
a rolypoly of doves.
I carry the city, the cleft mirror,
the faked fight of the fist on the drum.

Part of the magic of this initially strange poem is its movement into list. Instead of fixing one item by focusing on it, it provides a list which suggests the infinite number of possible items for the character to carry and, at the same time, takes over the poem: a really fascinating structure. The list itself is an abbreviated version of the one provided in Kay Dick’s history, Pierrot, as an account of the property of the greatest of the Pierrots, Gaspard Deburau, who flourished in Paris in the first half of the nineteenth century.

It is tempting to look back to the idealist position of Maturana and to begin to make symbolic connections. If the world of objects is essentially illusory then what better expression of this could be found than the world of fixed-role comedians and, above all, mime. I think it would be reductive to see this as the essential principle behind the poems of the book but at the least it can be said that the circus world is one whose thematic possibilities chime well with poet’s obsessions. “Ringmaster”, for example, is the monologue of a character reluctant to be a mere clown, one who wants to seize the key to Rimbaud’s “barbarous sideshow”:

. . . . .
But I went inside the rough sketch of a woman
to find the dice’s grace -

to find hail drubbing on an old Zephyr sedan
a ringmaster’s whip scything the air.

I went to the circus to take charge;
to remove blouse after blouse.

I went alone
because to master the sanded weights

a juggler first conquers clumsiness
then writes the same poem, over and over.

Sometimes it is possible for the power of memory-objects to be overwhelming. The first prose poem of “The Feminine Sublime: Two Briquettes” treats heirlooms as dangerous:

Should I open this pressed metal trunk with a surface like  crocodile skin - should I fall in - I might not return. Crocheted into  doilies, the dead wait with powdered faces, bleeding floral lips and  sometimes with kind, eccentric maps. However kind they may be, they lure  you into memory, there to tangle their perfumes through your own until  you cannot resist the past’s vigilance. And what you find is a caravel  treasure: satin pennants, third place, lace, the cigarette box your  father made from matchsticks . . .

But there is more going on in the book than an exploration of the theme of memory through the image of the clown and the collection of heirloom-objects. “Cochlear Implants”, a poem – obviously – about an operation that will stop the world being an experience of mime for the sufferer, focuses rather on the heightening of the visual sense over the auditory:

. . . . .
You believe the ear is Orphean -
I treat it as an appendix in the mirror.
Before I take the bee inside

give me time
to memorise the poem I’ve seen:
the red hibiscus in bloom

my street without shadow -
outside my window, men in mime digging
with their jackhammers at noon.

Another theme related to the idea of the world as shadow, playacting and illusion is the mirror. A fine and very complex poem, “Fauna of Mirrors”, explores this at length, using both the ancient Chinese idea that mirrors harbour their own creatures (not necessarily well-disposed to the watchers on the other side) and the idea that the mirror contains our entire past. The world of Cudmirrah recurs:

. . . . .
Starlight twists inside the mirror
and an old woman wades barefoot across the moon, later
washing towels of blood to hang between the fibro houses
clutched around a shore. Children there, too, shaking the sand
from polished bones - a bird’s skeleton, its stutter raked
by storms . . .

And it reminds us that the gypsy character from Cudmirrah, Moss Wickum, is celebrated in a poem in Michelangelo’s Prisoners as “a man who threw shadows / on a fibro wall: a rabbit, a parakeet, a balloon twisted / into a giraffe”: he too inhabited the world of illusion and a kind of mime. And it reminds us of an earlier poem in that book which concerned itself with sign-language: “and foam, rubber, snow and glycerine / seem softer in the fingering span / than spoken words falling short of what they are”.

“Fauna of Mirrors” concludes not with the French priest’s catalogue of the Chinese notions of what inhabits a mirror but with an allusion to Borges, that connoisseur of objects like books and mirrors which trouble us by suggesting the infinitely multipliable nature of reality. Borges’ “baldanders” – “soon something else” – in his Book of Imaginary Beings can teach us how to converse with objects and becomes the subject of a sequence in Folly&Grief in which the figure of the poet becomes his partner. This first section also contains two fine poems, “Glass Harmonica” and “Chinese Bowl” which seem (at least in my inadequate readings) to focus on the positive, creative aspects of objects and art. In the former the artist playing on the instrument conjures up images far beyond those imagined by the inventor and players of this exotic eighteenth century instrument and in the latter the artwork contains in itself, and makes available, the entire cultural history that went into its making.

References to the world of professional illusion become a little sparer in the book’s “Grief” section although there is a poem about Antonioni’s Blow-up (a film which includes a mime troupe as a framing symbol) as well as poems about dancers, musicians and statue-mimes. Overall these poems seem, true to their title, darker and, above all, obsessed by loss. In “The Steyne Hotel” it is a friend suffering from cancer and in “Birthday Poem” it is the poet herself accommodating herself (at least in my reading) to the stream of time symbolised in a strangely clarifying rainstorm and the fact that “more bark has fallen from the gum tree”. “Soiree at Black Lake” is a complex poem about the attempt to find a place outside of time:

. . . . .
A man stroked my hair
and said, memories are grasses; 
flax, hay, lawn - a little traffic 
a bicycle bell - all is at it was. 
There is nothing to fear.

But I didn’t believe that lullaby
. . . . .

And I knew, then,

that the cruel hours spring back
when the hay is cut, the lawn mowed.

And “Fathers” has one of the books finest treatments of memory – though also one of the darkest. The poet is reading the work of Li-Young Lee:

Tonight when I read your poems, I think
nothing in you grieves that should sleep, nothing
hungers that has not been fed, nothing glimpsed
through a door or feinted by a corner of light

has been lost. Memories corner us
into type - and the untidy ghosts are arriving
by later, less punctual trams. Outside ourselves,
then, are the essential moments

not here in these poems, these crowfolk
of the streets, each dressed in invisible black
each hurrying beside the traffic
bird-poised ahead, buoyed by life’s recompense.

Finally there are the two sequences, “Folly” and “Grief” which end each section – one of ten pages the other thirteen. It is difficult to know exactly what to make of them beyond saying that they are clearly movements into new territory. They have something of the cast of those psychological/autobiographical sequences of the seventies – Andrew Taylor’s “The Invention of Fire” and Jennifer Rankin’s “The Mud Hut” are two very different examples. They are odd sequences and it is hard to judge how successful they are. They certainly represent yet another kaleidoscopic retreatment of previously met themes and images and we know immediately that we are in familiar territory when the first poem of “Folly” speaks of the ability to

. . . dip my hook
over the side
and retrieve deletions
that have left my mind

this theatre more tawdry

than last year’s

. . . . .

and the second poem establishes a riverscape

where shallow swamps
are littered with memorabilia

possessive
as the sea hoarding its wrecks
art folds back on itself
. . . . .

But familiarity with the poet’s thematic material only goes so far. Beyond saying that “Folly” is centred on a return home, or movement to another home (it concludes with another reference to the sea: “ . . . marshlands / reclaimed by the sea / leave no trace of nests”), and that “Grief” is about treatment for cancer and is built around the equation of the body with the land and recalls the poem “New Road In” as well as the much earlier “Cabramatta” in its interest in the metaphorical possibilities of the road, I am not sure I would trust myself much farther. This does not mean, though, that I think they are failures as poems or are modes that the poet will not profitably explore. In fact it may not be the case that Harrison’s future books work through this diaristic-imagistic-unconscious-oneiric quality. There are, however, a couple of other poems in Folly&Grief which are open, relaxed and celebratory. I am thinking especially of the second of “The Feminine Sublime” prose poems which is a celebration of the act of childbirth and of “Tamagotchi Gospel”. This poem is about experiences of childhood and the natural world and has an expansive, relaxed, long-breathed quality which is a long way from the delphic images of “Folly” or “Grief”:

It may be nothing more than a faded awning
tilting in oleander sun,
or the way someone rings on the mobile
at just the right time, someone
who might not have noticed
your regard for their humour,
or the way you admired the coral torque
against their skin last spring.
And see how happy you are
when alone in the bush,
the others ahead as mossed voices,
you arrive at the fern-lit pool
where the bird of long wings and hard eyes
dips to drink from the creek’s sigh?
. . . . .
There is no freedom from change
but it is quiet, words nowhere to be seen -
quiet as your father’s favourite silence:
the psh!psh! of waves softening the shore,
the silence of bush bees
chiming hard and bright
against the earlier time you were here
dressed in a costume of leaves.

I am easily entranced by this poem – by this kind of poem – but somehow so much intelligent analytical material has to be left out to say these simple things that I can’t think of it as a model for Harrison’s future poems.

Laurie Duggan: The Passenger

St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2006, 89pp.

Even a poetry as distinctive as Laurie Duggan’s is not easy to describe without being reductive. Crudely put, we are operating in a poetic world that is, to most readers of Australian poetry at least, surprisingly dispassionate. This is not the world of expressive effects running the usual danger of deteriorating into a rhetoric. Yes, the tone is wry but tone is not really what the poems are about: it is simply an adjunct. There is nothing confessional and in the occasional poem about the self (like the earlier “Adventures in Paradise”) the self seems to be examined as a kind of comic, almost fictional, device in a poetic experiment. Duggan’s poetry is not sui generis though and a lot of time and labour could be spent sketching in his poetic forebears, mentors and “classmates”: Jonathan Williams, Ed Dorn, Roy Fisher and an almost unlistable cast. Among Australian poets he is closest to Ken Bolton and Pam Brown but I have never felt that any of these three are at all interchangeable. And there is no secret about Duggan’s literary references: they appear constantly as references and dedicatees throughout the body of his work.

The Passenger is Duggan’s latest book. It is his second (after Mangroves) since an extended poetic silence although those wanting a sampling of early and new work might well consult the new selected poems wonderfully titled, Compared to What (Shearsman, 2005). The first poem is a good introduction to Duggan’s poetry though it should not be seen as typical since, as I will say later, the essential stance manifests itself as a wide variety of poems. It is a seven page, fourteen poem sequence, “British Columbia Field Notes”. The title is a useful cross-genre joke because it invokes anthropology, a discipline that Duggan’s poetics often brings him close to. The poem has that typical quality of “Here I am. This is what I see and hear. Why is it like this, what does it mean and what lies beneath it?” and it is the last question which usually produces the challenging part of the poem. The very first stanza derives from watching a Japanese wedding at the University of British Columbia:

Japanese brides drink red wine in the rose garden;
patches of snow (all the way from here to Hokkaido).

It seems at first no more than an odd conjunction that any culturally-oriented poet might use as symptomatic of the bricolage quality of an ex-colony. But more striking and less obvious is the fact that it points to a connection rather than a disjunction: Japan is just across the north Pacific and may well share much of the weather patterns of western Canada. From an Australian’s perspective, these places are comparatively close. Other parts of the sequence, such as the ninth, link history, ecology and a visual image to reflect on the way that a timber-based community destroyed its timber housing and reduced wood to comfort stations for the affluent:

Apartments date mainly from the 1950s,
an erasure of wooden housing from the city to Stanley Park.

Burrard Inlet is still a working harbour
(containers, sulphur and woodchips)

logs chained, floating downstream
the odd escapee beached and weathered

fit for sunbathers to shelter, leeward from ocean wind
or rest a bicycle against.

Another poem (the fourth) is museum-based placing events next to each other so that they go backwards in time: the suppression of potlatch in the 1890s, introduction of Christianity, the smallpox epidemics and, in the final line, the arrival of the whites. It will come as no surprise that the museum is a crucial site for Duggan and the assumptions behind its choice of exhibits and the patterning of the display is one of his obsessions. But he is equally obsessed by the art gallery. This can be because in a sense a gallery is a kind of museum reflecting the assumptions of its culture, but it is also likely to be because it houses the work of local artists (in the case of British Columbia, Emily Carr and Bill Reid) and Duggan generally trusts their view of things – they are the equivalents of the anthropologist’s trustable intepreters).

There are two poles to the various ways in which this poetic anthropology can work: the world can reveal itself or the poet can analyze. “British Columbia Field Notes” is balanced in the structure of the book by “Ten Days”, a record of Greece made before the Athens Olympics, and here the method is generally to allow the landscape to speak to the antipodean traveller:

Anavissos
                            40 degrees
a cool wind under the awning
and a late lunch

                       were cicadas the sirens?

Cape Sounion
                                      language
plays over the beach
under the temple of Poseidon

One wouldn’t want to over-emphasise the difference between the poems though. The third section of “Ten Days” gets us into a museum and the kind of editorializing we meet in “British Columbia Field Notes” emerges almost immediately:

The English and the Germans
furnished a Greece of their own:
the eminence denuded by accretions
(Byzantine chapels, a small mosque)

Schliemann edited the layers,
Elgin robbed the grave
(a diagram shows which caryatids went where):

casts substituted keep the Erechtheion upright.

“Things to do in Perth” (recalling that wonderful title “Things to do in Denver When You’re Dead”) is largely made up of propositions (“aspects of natural vegetation may be the same as Sydney (ref. Seddon) but the foccacia are entirely different”) but it, too, has examples of those moments when the world reveals itself without any analytical help from the poet: as in the “stanza” “CHURCH OF CHRIS”.

Duggan has always been especially good at recording those moments when the world seems miraculously to reveal itself without anybody’s assistance. “Animal Farm” – itself a mixture of found statements and poet’s comments – contains a wonderful definition of poetry produced entirely accidentally:

A Near Perfect Definition Of Poetry Supplied by a Queensland Police Traffic Officer
Describing with a Double Negative a Major Cause of the Christmas Road Toll

"momentary lapses of inattention"

Two kinds of Duggan poem are extended exercises in letting the world speak for itself. The first of these is, rather surprisingly, those poems like “A Conscious Citizen” and “September Song” which are, in a way, autobiographical in that they have an “I do this: I do that” structure. But these poems use the self and its experiences as a way of focusing on the latter rather than the former. There is a sense that the poet, for all his strong tastes and opinions, is a vehicle whereby the truth of how we live in the world can be explored. Perhaps this derives from the fact that the self is seen as an unpretentious but complex phenomenon filled to the brim with knowledge about music, writing, friends, the visual arts etc but no more outstanding than any other self, filled to the brim with other things. This self is complex but not necessarily important or “poetic” because of this – the pleasantly egalitarian assumption may be that all selves are complex. The experiences, day to day, of this self are, thus, ordinarily unique and the task of the poetry is to record them. One could imagine Duggan being very impatient about poets with vatic assumptions. “A Conscious Citizen” is very much about poetry and how larger structures can be made out of the recording of material of a life lived. The great Americans from Pound to Ashbery are good here and a long passage deals with Williams’ Paterson:

I open the revised Paterson
for clues
                             (the older cover was better:
a painting by Earl Horter
of the Passaic falls,
                                                 but don't think
the river here is usable
as mythic connection.
                                                 It wasn't
for Williams either
                                the poem written in its spite
(what is the meaning of a route
between the University and the container docks?
not, certainly the "life of man".
Williams wanted to continue
beyond the frame Book 5
jumped out of.
                                                And that's just it.
We all want the poem to escape
from our lives
                                       iridescence
on the bathroom wall;
news on the radio
                                        or at least
our lives to escape from the poem

(Help! I'm trapped . . .
                                                          in a barrel
passing over the Prosaic falls
butcher birds, resonant
all morning
                                     the bougainvillea
bursting out.

The second kind of poem which eschews editorializing in favour of allowing the world to speak for itself are the Blue Hills poems. This series began as long ago as 1980 and the current volume contains numbers 52 to 60. One way of describing them would be to say that they are largely visual and usually impersonal and are often almost verbal sketches for imaginary paintings. A better way, though, might be to think of them in terms of the structural issues of recording the world. These are self-contained “capturings”, part of an infinitely extendable series. They are one stage up from the kind of brief squibs to be found in this book in the “Animal Farm” sequence. They are not blocks which will require a complex structure to support them. But if they are treated as imaginary paintings, then the Blue Hills poems in The Passenger are decidedly minimalist with an oriental quality – as can be seen in No. 54:

lit clouds
electrical storm
over Moreton Bay
later, the moon
yellow on
Bulimba reach

Duggan is a fascinating poet and by now has clearly joined the ranks of major Australian poets (a crude working definition of which might be “people a serious poetry reader has to read whether you like what they do or not”). His (in Australia) unusual poetic practice raises a lot of questions. He makes you think carefully about the pretensions that often come as a necessary part of being a poet: pretensions about the relative significance of what poets do and the status of their notion of the self. But the same applies to Duggan in reverse. If we ask “Why is this stuff so good? What exact pleasure does it give me?” the answers can become very complicated. For minor poets, it is enough to say that they do something other poets don’t do and thus challenge us to widen our notion of the possibilities of poetry. But a major poet has a kind of stand-alone capacity. Why, in Duggan’s case, does a dispassionate intelligence, hyper-aware of the visual and of cultural implications make for such a compelling poet? Would one want all poets to be like this? I don’t know the answers to these questions but I do note that there is no nationalist dimension to Duggan though his landscapes are often wonderfully Australian – especially from the South-East corner. Perhaps he represents an Australian implementation of ideas of poetry generated elsewhere, perhaps overseas readers can detect something uniquely Australian in his responses to environments (both Australian and non-Australian). Perhaps it doesn’t matter: perhaps poets should be a caste of individuals sensitive to environment and its cultural underpinnings and should be part of a pan-nationalist project.

These issues will concern writers about poetry in the future. For the present it is enough to affirm that The Passenger is a wonderful book profound and entertaining in equal parts. It is graced by a stunning cover reproducing a photograph by Jack Cato in which a vaguely sinister 1930s car pulls away from the curb in front of a formal colonnaded building. Without wanting to play with the core of the picture in a trivial way, it is tempting to read the slight angle which the car makes with the curb as a reference to Duggan’s own slight angle to Australian poetic practice.

Graeme Miles: Phosphorescence

Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2006, 80pp.

This is an attractive and intriguing debut collection whose strengths are sensitivity, openness and intelligence. Like many such collections it has, at its heart, an important poem which gives a lot of clues about its author’s attitude to poetry and prepares a little for what we might find in the rest of the poems of the book. In the case of Phosphorescence, the poem is “Circle and Line” an ambitious sequence based on the story of Aristeus in Virgil, Georgics IV. Typically of such cases it is not the best poem in the book and its extended mode (it is six pages long) is not something that Miles seems to do superlatively well, but there is no doubting its significance.

It’s essentially a contrasting of two different kinds of poetry: respectively the straight line and the circle. Virgil’s story gives an account of how bees can be produced when all the breeding stock have been destroyed. A bull is suffocated, its orifices sealed and it is virtually buried underground. Bees spontaneously generate inside the dead and semi-liquefied animal. Don’t try this at home. The fourth Georgic provides a mythological origin for this process: the bees of Aristeus have been destroyed and seeking the source of this curse he approaches his mother (a nymph) who tells him how to extract information from the shape-changing Proteus. Proteus reveals that Aristeus has been cursed because it was while fleeing from him that Eurydice was bitten by a serpent and the poem goes on to give one of the many ancient versions of Orpheus’ descent into the underworld and eventual death. The curse is lifted by the correct sacrifice of bulls, at the end of which bees are found emerging miraculously from the rotted blood of the slain animals.

In Miles’s poem, Aristeus is associated with the “straight” and Orpheus with the “circular” in poetry. The totemic animal of the latter is the tortoise who rolls the eggs of her future offspring, whose shell provides the basis of the first stringed instruments and who inhabits the circular world of water. The totemic animal of the former is the cicada:

the cicadas speak straight lines.  Their uncurved poems
move forward restlessly.  Their bodies
are age-shrivelled, film-winged,
wrapped around their metrics.
Their song, like the music of machines,
claims to live forever.

When Aristeus is associated with the cicada we are told that he is:

A singer of cicada songs, endlessly
repetitive, songs where no verse
can be allowed to fall away,
where nothing can easily come in
or out . . .

This seems to refer to the idea that in oral cultures the function of strictly metrical verse is to record events and genealogies and preserve them over the coming years by having such a strong matrix of formal features that any corruption of the text is minimized. Later on “Circle and Line” connects “straight” poetry with the epic (“bronze-throated: tongues a hundred / throats a hundred”) though as far as I know the classical epics were fairly free semi-improvised narratives and not at all the same as the poems of record.

The problem with “Circle and Line” is really twofold. We have to work out what the exact nature of the binary is and then we have to work out what kind of poetry the book is recommending. The first could be, for example, an opposition between formal and free verse (the cicadas are “wrapped around their metrics”), ultimately favouring the latter as an instrument flexible enough to record life in its various and unpredictable movements and transformations and also allowing the alternative realities (“alternative daylights” one poem calls them) of dream and myth to interpenetrate with the everyday. It could be an opposition between quiet and loud verse (Shaw Neilson’s “Let Your Song Be Delicate” is a kind of answer to the “noisy”, public poetry of empire, embodied in Kipling). Or it could be an opposition between the elegant, thoughtful relaxed poetry possible in free verse and the driving, male, consonant-based poetry of rhetoric – “A brackish reach of shoal off Madaket”. It could even, conceivably, be an opposition played out in the poetic self of Virgil himself, marketed (and marketing himself) as an epic poet of the Roman empire (“Imperium sine fine dedi”) but in reality more on the supersensitive side (“sunt lachrimae rerum”).

At any rate, the book’s other poems want to be sensitive to the body, to the way the individual consciousness interacts with the world, and to be sensitive especially to the dream world and the way in which sensation is processed. The opening stanza of “Circle and Line” seems unequivocal here:

A voice that can speak about the circle and the line,
the straight march forward and the curved unwind.
One that carries with it the shape of lips,
tongue and throat, and where saying
and singing are not divided, the border-stones
between them ground down to roll
in undertones. It carries with it
how its owner feels in dreaming, in envy,
and in eating with friends, when it tastes endlessness.
One to listen to in private or the dark.

This is a wonderful stanza not the least because it is saved from any hint of being an elegantly vapid way of stating something many poets would endorse by the wonderful specific image of the border stones. It establishes that there is a poet behind this with a distinctive intellectual apparatus.

There are a couple of other poems “about poetry” in the collection. One, which I am not sure that I understand, is called “Ars Poetica”. On the surface it seems to use a kind of biological evolutionary metaphor for the development of poetry “A cell split / and poems began / in even stanzas” but it may not be metaphorical: it may actually be trying to hammer out an origin for poetry in the biological (in much the same way that people whose sense of form never gets beyond English language poetry metrics claim that the iambic is the beat of the mother’s heart heard by the child in the womb). At any rate, “Ars Poetica” stresses poetry’s ability to bridge and connect all dimensions of reality:

The polished dark embraces image
like bringing down the moon
into a glass of water,
reflecting its cellular face.

It also stresses the importance of gaps and absences, as does “Silt and Green” which begins by telling us that

Poems resist explaining
since they’re dipped in void,
nothing that isn’t nothing.

It goes on to investigate the personality of the writer of these things that are dipped in void and, as in “Ars Poetica”, uses an image which is simultaneously cosmic (black holes), biological (inside the eye) and evolutionary:

All of them are dipped in void
and the one who writes is no one,
mind fading down from daylight
through layers of silt and green
to the pupil-black places
light can’t reach.

The final poem in the book revisits this notion of absence and the nature of the poet. It is simultaneously a found poem and a really clever restatement of Keats’s negative capability. I laughed out loud when I read it (an event – the laughing while reading, not the laughing – so rare it is worth recording).

“More skilled vacancies on offer”

And I aspire to be a skilled vacancy,
always to know the right thing not to do,
just how to side-step a problem
or guide it over my shoulder
like a well-mannered boy practising ju-jitsu.
A skilled vacancy will reply to
“Occupation?” that it’s a “black
hole” and that even that is two words
too many.

The rest of the poems in the book work on the materials that we might expect from the author of “Circle and Line”: dream and waking consciousnesses, the body, perception, memory and sensation. One of the best is a two part poem called “Some Things the Body Knows” and there is a sequence, “Alternative Daylights” that explores yawning, sneezing, falling asleep and orgasm as states of reality, or perhaps doors to different and valuable realities. The fourth poem sounds like one of those marvellous Les Murray meditations which penetrate and define a state while simultaneously coating it with deliciously baroque images.

Orgasm floats in taboo and consequence
though Sex Ed. likened it to a sneeze.
Like falling asleep and waking at once,
both entry and exit,
a slow motion flash
that’s separate from the merciless attraction,
separate even from bodily art and love.
The quiet moment after two buildings fall together
with nobody hurt, another luminous object, perishable thing.

At the same time there are plenty of more outward looking, almost social and certainly sociable, poems. What makes these poems striking is that they are so often concerned with the interlacing of their themes. This is reflected in the high degree of formal organization of the book. It is in two parts and the poems are often grouped in pairs so that we are invited to consider the interaction of the poems themselves.

So Phosphoresence is a book of fine poems that has thought a lot about what it is doing. If I have a reservation about it, it is that delicateness and sensitivity can undo themselves by closing off the rougher, cruder areas of human experience and just might not be a good approach for the long-term. One thing that traditionally protects this kind of hypersensitive free-verse from vapidity is a touch of angst inside a generally autobiographical cast. I’d like to feel that this lies behind the interesting opening poem, “Nest”. Here, after a stanza describing wasps building a nest on the weight of a wind-chime, there is a massive disjunction to:

I’m thinking of a final call, when waiting,
feeling like the luggage is packed, the phone
will ring, be answered. The house will be locked
already, and it’ll be time to go.

As with any such disjunction, our brains are challenged to make a connection with the world of the wasps on the wind-chime who “build a paper house / as a launching pad for violence in a calm” and this second stanza. But it seems, more importantly, a poem in which the self is suffering (even scarred) rather than being simply sensitive and this will always help to give this sort of poetry the edgy, committed quality that it might otherwise lack. It takes the poet away from the role of sensitive experiencer, recorder and builder of subtle organic structures and gives him a true, even desperate, stake in what he is writing. When someone in a P.G. Wodehouse novel gets sacked or, in some other way, tossed out, the person doing the sacking invariably utters the cliche, “I shall watch your future career with great interest”. In the case of the poetry of Graeme Miles this will be true for me – and without any sarcastic overtones.

Luke Beesley: Lemon Shark

Brisbane: papertiger Media Inc., 2006, 80pp.

This first book by Luke Beesley is the product of a deeply unusual poetic sensibility and it says something about the power of the book that it leaves a reader wondering what, if such an approach to poetry were to become endemic, Australian poetry would look like and whether or not it would be a good thing. If I wanted to describe it crudely I would say that it is a hyper-sensitive poetry that does not seem especially neurasthenic. The sensitivities are sometimes in conventional areas: lovers, films, weather, coffee-cafe life etc. Sometimes they are in less conventional areas: colour, the appearance of the dustjackets of books, the shape of letters and the tactile quality of individual sounds. All in all, the latter redeems the former, I think.

Lemon Shark is really a book of registration and placement. It is not strong on either intellectual analysis or its friend, syntax. You just aren’t going to find the tensions between sentence-construction and the displacement of lines that can give such exquisite pleasure in conventional lyric poetry both formal and free-verse. Lemon Shark simply does things in its own way. Take, for example, “Ink on Your Ankles”:

The angel architect made
you a kaleidoscope of pretty fame

Now arching over harmony
widening the canopy of the room
 the way you stand apart I thought

with a laugh that enters
like breeze to spinnaker. Suddenly a hug.

You walked through a rainbow you said
and a butterfly landed on your nose. Fancy

the depth of field
your exquisite world.

(Let’s not try to be truthful anymore. Make it all up.

Collapse all night.
Never faint again.)

This seems one of the less ambitious poems, a “couple” poem which is conceived almost entirely visually. Although the title recalls tattoos, most likely it is there because of the way it sounds or, even, looks: “ink” and “ankles” rhyme mysteriously visually as well as aurally. The girl is a kaleidoscopic and multicoloured intervention in an harmoniously shaded room and enters like someone who has walked through a rainbow and found pieces of colour sticking to her. She also seems three-dimensional in otherwise two-dimensional space – her “exquisite world” requires good depth of focus.

The poem next to “Ink on Your Ankles” is one of a series of prose-poems that are, by comparison, reasonably straightforward. It describes an architect who, in response to a storm darkening outside sets up his tools of trade under his desk. There he focuses on the patterns in the carpet –

Also little things in the carpet. A grain of sugar. A fraction of a leaf. The smell of owls, he thought.

His  eyes fell again on the bookshelf. The nurse-blues and nativity greens  of the spines. Poetry and a collection and fictions. A book Black Sea  and he imagined the sky splitting form the window and falling in a shard  of blue pool to the carpet.

Although this is not one of the major poems in the book, it is tempting to make it into a programmatic one. It moves from some sort of engagement with (or at least an irritable response to) the outside world to a disengagement whereby the arrival of the outside world is imagined. It seems to be saying that the creative concentration can (or should) be transferred to things within the immediate visual vicinity. More significantly these things have their conventional meaning stripped away – a process that is the dominant feature of Beesley’s poetry – so that books are reduced, not to their paraphrased meaning, or even effect on the reader, but rather to the colours of their spines and (though it is not specified in this poem) the shape of the letters on their cover. Even more worryingly, though this may not be deliberate, there is a sense of this process being one of infantilization since the colours of the spines recall nurses and nativities.

There is no excuse not to be prepared for this experience because Lemon Shark’s epigraph is a quotation from Clement Greenberg that recalls “The Architect”:

The  intuition that gives you the colour of the sky turns into an aesthetic  intuition when it stops telling you what the weather is like and becomes  purely an experience of colour.

This method removes meaning from the poems and making them essentially visual or, sometimes, aural experiences. I’m not sure about this as a long-term aesthetic program. Stripping out prose-meaning may be a good thing but the history of poetry teaches us that there are many kinds of poetic meanings, or ways in which poems can mean in a non-prose way. At any rate, the aestheticization of words to the point where it is their shape, and the colour of the covers of the books they arrive in, that matters is, it has to be admitted, a very unusual poetic.

What kind of visual experiences are we dealing with here? The cover suggests that we should be alert for trompe l’oeil effects since what appears to be the rump of a dalmation turns out to be a woman’s shoulder from a Gerhard Richter painting. In practice the poems seem to focus on shapes and surfaces. “My Compliment is not a Tulip” seems to be about the interaction between shapes and other, more practical, calls on the attention.

The taper of a cup
sitting pretty in a circle -

there are shapes everywhere

The shape of sunlight cutting up your arm
The shape of stone
The shape of things to come
an owl’s rug-coloured call

One of the most attractive poems in the book “Happy Together (16 Poems)” is a response to the Wong Kar-Wai film, In the Mood for Love. It does not repeat many of the images of that film but does rejoice in its intensely visual approach to the couple’s relationship. In its obsession with the shapes of the woman’s body, with rising smoke and patterned walls, I read this poem as a mimicking of the film’s method: what might be sixteen scenes become sixteen poems though, interestingly, we are never quite sure where the dividing lines between the poems are. I hope this is deliberate and not just a result of the processes of typesetting the book because uncertainty about the beginnings and endings of scenes is one of the features of In the Mood for Love. The poem’s emphasis is on surfaces:

A red sheen trickles across
your shoulders as you move

your waist
it spills

It is no accident that a review of this film speaks of “a near constant state of ellipsis” and of how “a great deal is felt but very little is said” – that might itself be a description of Lemon Shark.

Finally there are aural shapes. A high degree of sensitivity to shape and surface is allied to a similar sensitivity to sound – and what is the sound of a word but the experience of it stripped of meaning. The book’s first poem speaks of “the noticeable twist / of sunlight in resist” and both “Fell” and “Eulila” are sound-driven poems. Probably the poem which addresses this issue most is “Juice”:

Listen,

- Je ne peax pas me faire comprendre

I have no idea what that means
but the important thing is to pronounce it perfectly.
This is all poetry is for me:
vague lessons in the pronunciation of a beautiful language,
and then a run into town to meet with the native tongue,
hoping to fluke conversations with everyone.

But that sounds superficial, almost.
It’s the opposite, actually.

Without spoiling it I want to know no French
but dress the absence, spray it with the tongue’s recipes
and let history emerge in the mind

like the swell of colour
happening in a fresh Polaroid.

“It sounds superficial, almost” is a brave admission and the idea that the meaning of events, “history” can emerge from this is an optimistic one but, as Auden said, perhaps we have to learn that surfaces need not be superficial nor gestures vulgar. Luke Beesley’s book may well turn out to be, in retrospect, one of the most ambitious books of recent Australian poetry

At any rate, as an object, Lemon Shark is, like the other books in this new series by papertiger (Brett Dionysius’ Universal Andalusia and Billy Jones’ Wren Lines), a thing of beauty in itself and all congratulations go to the team which has produced them. There is nothing superficial about the beauty of a well-made book.

MTC Cronin: The Flower, The Thing

St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2006, 122pp.

At first sight a book of one hundred and twenty poems each devoted to a single flower and each exactly the same length looks like an attempt to expand (by half), or even to answer, Louis Zukofsky’s 80 Flowers. At second view however The Flower, The Thing is a long way from inhabiting Zukofsky’s weirdly hermetic universe being, in most respects, a talkative and engaging book.

The book’s final poem – a kind of addendum – suggests, at least on a superficial reading, that the book might be an attempt to capture the “thisness” of each individual flower:

Urgently, now,  before us, the flower, the thing,
entered before any window would allow it,
always living, always posthumous, breached
by the world and unabstracted.

Again, this seems an error. Many of the poems glance only superficially at their flower which acts as little more than a host. Of course the poetic function of “capturing” essences is one that involves complex questions about the status of the world, the status of the mind and the status of poetry and these turn out to be major Cronin themes throughout her extensive and prolific career.

Complicating the issue is the fact that this is a book of dedications as much as it is a book of flowers. Each poem has a dedicatee: some are dead poets, some currently alive poets, some family members, some friends, one is a fictional character (Peter Henry Lepus) and one is the kind of philosopher (Descartes) who might have been alarmed to find himself in a book of poems. Indeed the essential structure of this book, as so often is the case in highly formal constructions, is the variety of the ways poems of the same length can be constructed bringing in both title-flower and dedicatee. It is a great pleasure to read it in this way and it reveals much of its undeniable charm but it does mean, of course, that a review of it is likely to be taxonomic. Bear with me.

Some poems are fairly straightforward narratives, very often based on stories which, one presumes, the dedicatees have provided. “Strawberry”, dedicated to Christine Hearty, tells the story of children in Ireland thinking that they were picking strawberries only to discover, after the uncle’s death, that he bought the fruit and, during the night, scattered it over the ground for them to “find” the next day. Yes, it is about the unexpected and often inauthentic origins of revelation (it would have appealed to Patrick White) but the pleasure of reading it arises to a large extent from the often much more intractable meditations in which it nestles. “Leis”, dedicated to Stuart and Vivian Saunders, describes a lei-decorated pair of octogenarians falling backwards into a flower patch while having their photographs taken and, essentially, laughing until their death and burial:

and what a wonderful way
to die on a day completely
devoid of good sense (thrown into the water &
goodbye ha ha hello drifting back to land)

Some of these narratives are family based anecdotes. In “Stone Flower” the breaking of a stone ball during a game (I think this is what happens) provokes the poem to deal with the theme of worlds inside worlds (flowers hidden inside the stone matching flowers in the outside world) and the image of stone which regularly recurs in this book:

Their game has caused
the flower to bloom
at the heart of the stone

. . . . .

But the stone cracks and releases
a world to orbit the sun
The green grass grows greener
and rushes to the drop of rain
that contains the day
The jeroboam tips night to the lawn

Other family-based poems like “Blackberry”, Sweet Violet”, and “Calendula, Like Cleopatra” tend to focus on the child-parent bond and the inevitable and necessary future separations. The last of these (dedicated to the poet’s daughter, Agnes Mohan) is interesting in that, in recalling Cleopatra’s dissolving of the pearl for Mark Antony, it repeats the image of “Stone Flower” in that the frozen world of the pearl is released:

Like Cleopatra,
I dissolve my pearl for you.
I take the flower
from the earth
and make it happy
in your hair.
Everything has a life.
The rock wakes from darkness
and turns its heart
to fire.
Colliding planets
enter a new age of faith.
I hold the serpent
daily to my breast and daily
I die.
Life is a wound
made by your love
tunnelling to my heart . . .

Sometimes the interactions of narrative, flower and dedicatee get quite complex. Following “Calendula, Like Cleopatra”, for example, is “Calla Lily” dedicated to the Cuban poet, Dionisio D Martinez. On the surface it is a simple enough poem about a friend suffering from breast cancer and the complex effect of this on their relationship:

. . . it is not your teeth I fear
when you part your lips but that you
might speak a fact we would be
demanded by instinct to dispute
past midnight to four a.m. and then fall
asleep upon as if it’s both death
and life that support the breathing
unconscious head for the eternal
moment of its vulnerability.
then at tomorrow there will be a point
like a small smile where the mouth
does not open where unspokenly
we choose to go on with the cancer
between us like a new garden
we have stumbled into and must tend.

This is a terrific poem as it is but why the Cuban poet and why Calla lilies? It turns out that Martinez is the author of a poem, “In a Duplex Near the San Andreas Fault”, in which a woman tells her partner that she has a lump in her breast and, in the background ,“Calla lilies bloom / like some glorious, abandoned music out on the lawn” (this knowledge derives not from my own wide reading but from Google, I’m afraid!). The poem either alludes to this in its title and dedicatee or, conceivably (though it is unlikely), invents a scenario which is an extension of the Cuban poem.

A number of the poems whose dedicatees are poets could be described as homages. Even within such a tight subgroup, however, there is a lot of variety. “Afton Blommor” is dedicated to the Swedish poet, Par Lagerkvist, and praises the man who

. . . asked our questions
When we could not have asked them
Because we did not know what would fulfil us
Because we did not know what to ask . . .

“Reed” recalls Rumi’s great poem but is not an imitation of it and “Midsummer Flowers”, while very Rilkean in its interests, is not at all a poem one could imagine Rilke writing with its assertive opening:

I am too young to die
yet have set my foot
on the journey that goes
deep in the soil of fact
and condition to find
the jewel to arrest me!

The only time these homage poems seem to come close to the style of the dedicatee is in “Mayflowers, Hyacinth & Dead Anemone” which is very much in the mode of Gatsos’ “Amorgos”. I think this is because the style of that poem is closest to Cronin’s own preferred utterance. It is a kind of rhapsodic, Spanish (as opposed to French) surrealism focussing either on love or on social justice. We can see this style at its best in a section from “Late Rose 2″ the second poem dedicated to Judith Beveridge (each of which, by the way, has a very difficult tone to grasp – I’m not at all sure what the poetic and personal relationship between these poets is):

There are new words for happiness.
Have you heard them?
They sound like the snapping of a stem
or the silences here and there
in crowds which have become too great
for even the cities’ shoulders.

We also hear this style in the single-sentence-per-line poems like “Dead Fuchsia” (for the Lithuanian writer, Oscar Milosz), “Fifteen Chrysanthemums” (Proust), “Three Pear Trees” (John Berger) and, perhaps best of all, in “Blue Flower Second Version” (for Trakl):

Landscapes occur as if they were limits.
Repentance seeps from the body in breath.
Winds have speech with shadows.
Paths break into infinity along their sides.
Autumn again after the last autumn.
Beyond, a man’s back.
He is always walking away.
He turns many times to glimpse his executions.

Essentially the structure of this book involves a continuous set of variations playing with flower, dedicatee, tone and theme. The Cronin themes are not so different from those of her earlier work. The first of these is the sense of there being a language of muteness in which the great truths (necessary for true justice) can be spoken. Parallel to this is a distrust of conventional poetic styles and a preference for surreal utterance. This extends to narrative and when, in “Impatiens”, she says:

But do not search in what this story
is about for what it is about, for those
thoughts that slip cleanly and smoothly
from one to the next are for stories
themselves. Life is not a novel; life is like poetry!
Tight and ready, like the ripe capsules of the impatiens,
to burst at a touch. Completed and completely
out of practise with time!

she is echoing sentiments found in most of her books but especially in Bestseller – which still remains, in its focus on the nature of language and poetry – the most accessible of her earlier books. It is also there in the opening poems of Beautiful, Unfinished:

There is not one thing I will say
outside of parable
For in the mind is another mind
one as far back
as you have not yet reached
It chuckles like the one who
invented laughter

and in a little poem, “Searching” from Bestseller:

Too many times
I find myself searching my poems
To see if they make sense

When will I learn
That joy has its own logic
Shaped like a sunburst!

Combined with this view that language and narrative must be disguised and apparently meaningless to speak true meaning is the sense of the true world as a closed phenomenon which it is very difficult to break open. The dominant images here are of irruption and breaking into. The flowers of stone need to be released to match the flowers of the world and “Saxifrage” begins by asking:

What breaks the rock
with such delicate insistence,
moves the stone to open its silent dwelling
to the universe of melodious worlds?

Perhaps a recent poem says it most clearly:

The Law of Wine

Is not in the grape
or the earth
in the nose or time
or beauty of words
unable to describe the wine
but in cracking the heart loose
at its edges
just enough to let sunlight
beneath its serious face
to illuminate the smile within
the glass’s umbrous curve
the little bit of rest
that moves us towards chaos
and acceptance
towards the slight opening
in the clenched world.

In this poetry, the inner world, though infinite in its possibilities, needs to have its heart cracked if it too is to effect a similar breach in the hard, permanently “clenched” external world. This is probably the significance of the conclusion of the final poem, “The Flower, the Thing”, in which the world asks us for commitment before it reveals itself as a seemingly endless set of individual items:

. . . The flower says
I have believed enormously, have you? And so,
the vulture, the hat, the hand, the cobra, the dog,
the sand, the arm, the trail, the reed, the two reeds,
the foot, the bone, the leaving, the basket, the back,
the folded cloth, the jar, the stand, the gold, the rope,
the tether, the sound, the viper with horns and the
sound of these like pins in the throat which are eased
by water . . . and always now, before us, the thing . . .

Les Murray: The Biplane Houses

Melbourne: Black Inc., 2006, 90pp.

Les Murray’s total-poems-thus-far has an elephantine size and is a collection rich beyond normal readerly expectations. Future critics will need to work hard to follow and to try to describe its exact shape though already a basic pattern seems to have been laid down, one which culminates in Fredy Neptune and the bitterer poems of Subhuman Redneck Poems as a kind of catharsis. Whatever the accuracy of this, there is no doubt that The Biplane Houses forms a group with the previous Conscious and Verbal (1999) and Poems the Size of Postcards (2002). They inhabit the same corner of Murray-land and speak the same language. Perhaps it might be better to say that they inhabit the same micro-climate. There is a relaxed quality about the poetry though the themes and abstractions are recognizably those of Murray. They all post-date Murray’s catastrophic mental and physical illnesses and – what reader can say? – may reflect a kind of convalescent, “I really shouldn’t be here” calm.

There are great pleasures to be had reading Murray’s poems. Just as he has been in the past the most combative of poets he is also one of those who gives most pleasure. And the pleasures come in recognizable modes, modes which circulate throughout Conscious and Verbal and Poems the Size of Postcards as well as this new volume. I’d like to focus on these poetic modes rather than the evolving panorama of Murray’s complex views on Australia, religion, the human race etc. After all, the modes form the arsenal for the poet’s multi-pronged response to existence.

There are the cryptic squibs, for example. The Biplane Houses is framed by two of them, “The Averted” (“The one whose eyes / do not meet yours / is alone at heart / and looks where the dead look / for an ally in his cause” and “Industrial Relations” (“Said the conjuror Could I have afforded / to resign on the spot when you ordered / me to saw the Fat Lady / in half before payday / I would have. I find wage cuts sordid.”) Neither of these is quite as simple as it appears on the surface or as expectations based on a previous experience of this genre in the work of other poets might lead us to expect. Usually the pleasure comes immediately from the recognition of a deep truth placed in a beautiful syntactic shape. Think of Auden’s “Private faces in public places / are wiser and nicer / than public faces in private places”. Murray’s two squibs are predicated on his complex analysis of the world (that is, they are not derived from a widely-held but perhaps not understood or rarely expressed view of things) and, I have to say, really resist interpretation. Is sawing the fat lady in half to be seen as a punning example of a “wage-cut” – ie an operation paid for? I can’t help feeling that the resistance to interpretation is deliberate and that Murray’s squibs are half riddle though I could be being particularly interpretively obtuse here. There is nothing cryptic about “The Test”, however, and “Blueprint II” makes sense to anyone who has ever thought about what a Christian heaven might actually be like “Life after death / with all the difficult people / away in a separate felicity”. Here everything depends on the last word’s unspoken chiming with that coldly bureaucratic word “facility” and might well open out into a comment on the current government’s movement of people it considers difficult out to an off-shore “facility”. At any rate, the meanings here open out rather than try to close themselves off.

“The Statistics of Good” is a kind of extended version of “The Test”. A very beautiful sentence extended over two stanzas recalls Archbishop Mannix’s successful attempts to defeat the conscription campaign in the first world war. Then the final stanza returns to the proposition that Mannix saved the lives of perhaps half “the fit men of a generation”:

How many men? Half a million? Who knows?
Goodness counts each and theirs.
Politics and Death chase the numbers.

Even here, however, it is not immediately obvious why “theirs” is included.

Murray’s witticisms are thus unusual in demanding that we are familiar with the Murray interpretation of the world. We can follow the rest of the book through by looking at the kinds of poems Murray deploys and the relationships between them. The second poem, “Early Summer Hail with Rhymes in O” begins:

Suddenly the bush was America:
dark woods, and in them like snow.
The highway was miles of bath house,
bulk steam off ice shovelled over blue.

If one of Murray’s signatures is his invention, and special use, of abstractions, another is his distinctive syntactic shifts. The prose version of this opening might run “Suddenly the bush looked like something you might find in the north-east of the United States and being in the bush was like being in a snow storm in those woods”. In the first line the shift from simile to metaphor twists the meaning rather than simply intensifies it and the second line works by intense and distorting compression to produce “and in them like snow”. It looks back to an early poem “Once in a Lifetime, Snow” and thus connects up with other Murray poems and it also of course pulls Dante and Frost into the picture. The tone, though, is light and celebratory more than anything and concludes in a typically Murray way by associating delight with exhaled breath (as well as punning on “hail”):

Hills west of hills, twigs, hail to Dubbo,
all dunes of pursed constraint exhaling Ohh.

I think of this poem as being, if not exactly in a celebratory mode, at least in a mode which is open to the amazingness of the world. In this kind of poem the issue is not of language “capturing’ reality so much as dancing at fever pitch to keep up with the natural world. “Airscapes” is a good example as are “An Acrophobe’s Dragon” and the extraordinary “A Levitation of Land”. It is perhaps significant that two of these poems deal with the sky. This mode is both intense syntactically and also disjunctive – as though a set of verses were being thrown at a subject. Three stanzas from “Airscapes” for example:

The bubble-column of a desert whirlwind
fails, and plastic-bag ghosts
stay ascended, pallid and rare.

Over simmering wheat land,
over tree oils, scrub growing in rust
and way out to the storeyed forties.

Here be carbons, screamed up
by the djinn of blue kohl highways
that have the whish of the world
for this scorch of A.D.

These poems submit to reality rather than interpret it, or map it against a pre-existing interpretation. Other, less elevated poems, like “Travelling the British Roads”, “The Domain of the Octopus”, “Melbourne Pavement Coffee” (“Storeys over storeys without narrative / an estuarine vertical imperative / plugged into vast salt-pans of pavement”) and “Sunday on a Country River” share this disjunctive approach to their subjects. Perhaps the aim is a kind of cubist multi-perspectival view, perhaps it is a desire to write short poems and connect them into a buzzing whole. If it is the latter then a collection poem like “Twelve Poems” may be closer to Murray’s essential methods than it seems on the surface. Certainly “Lateral Dimensions” is a group of separate poems made into a whole:

haunted house -
one room the cattle
never would go in

mowing done -
each thing’s a ship again
on a wide green harbour

and so on through fourteen similar poem/sentences.

A little poem, “Winter Winds”, shows how good Murray can be at the virtues of a traditional lyric where syntax falls beautifully through line breaks:

Like applique on nothingness
like adjectives in hype
fallen bracts of the bougain-
magenta-and-faded-villea
eddy round the lee verandah
like flowers still partying
when their dress has gone home.

Yes it is slight but lyric poems of this kind always are – they don’t rely on the support of allegory or ideas to keep them upright – and there is something appealing about a very large poet with very large ideas treading so light-footedly.

Other poems do want to be interpreted as allegories, especially a number of the narratives. In “Upright Clear Across” children recall acting as guides on the old Pacific Highway when it flooded. They walked across the submerged road to show that it was still there and that its depth was something the waiting cars could cope with. In exchange, “every landing brought us two bobs and silver”. The situation here, children sure-footed in a flood, must have a symbolic significance: the flood is the weight of the world or of experience or it could be the pressure of the conformity demanded by the adult world. At any rate it is an ability that the passage of time renders irrelevant:

and then bridges came, high level,
and ant-logs sailed on beneath affluence.

“The Shining Slopes and Planes” describes a carpenter fixing up the Murrays’ tin roof. In a way it is a hymn to the stylish simplicity of anyone who is an expert in their field – in this case a tradesman: “Peter the carpenter walks straight up / the ladder, no hands, / and buttons down lapels of the roof”. But it is also clearly a poem about living on the ground and living in the sky – the roof is full of grass and miniature trees which have grown in the gutter. The fact that its last line produces the book’s title is also a clue to its significance.

If there is a stylistic feature that unites these modes it is Murray’s love of the pun. The title of the poem I have just mentioned refers to slopes and planes and perhaps generates the final image of “the biplane houses of Australia” through a pun on “planes”. This punning drive is not just a matter of verbal over-excitement, it is more a case of the poet seeing connections at a verbal as well as a visual level. We know this because “Black Belt in Marital Arts” faces up to the issue. It looks at first a minor, joke poem, but turns out to be crucial:

Pork hock and jellyfish. Poor cock.
King Henry had a marital block.
A dog in the manager? Don’t mock!
denial flows past Cairo.

A rhyme is a pun that knows where
to stop. Puns pique us with the glare
of worlds too coherent to bear
by any groan person.

Nothing moved him like her before.
It was like hymn and herbivore,
Serbs some are too acerbic for -
punning move toward music.

A rhyme is a pun that knows where to stop because it connects words (through sound) that otherwise have no connections (“stars”, “cars”, “jars”) but to someone seeing connections everywhere a rhyme is just a reminder of some of the less obvious ones. Puns reveal these connections to a greater extent thus creating a world of overwhelming coherence, far too much to bear for “any groan person”.

Thus the Murray world is full of symbolic correspondences. As a result riddling and punning are more than stylistic tics. There is a Murray mode though where meaning remains elusive though it is not at all like the riddling and punning modes I have been writing about. This might be described as the formal, “panel”, lyric. In a way they recall the early poem, “The Princes’ Land”, which was a formal, allegorical narrative in a very faux-medieval mode. These too look medieval in their appearance in blocks with refrain. “On the Central Coast Line” is one of these, its refrain mutating from a simple “a head ahead” (presumably to recall the sound of the train lines) but concluding, cryptically:

We knock inside a tunnel
and are released to wide chrome
to jelly-sting wharf towns -
if that head turned 
to show one certain face 
this would not be now 

It is as though a fairly standard Murray poem has been crossbred with a poem about what occurs inside someone’s mind as they look at other passengers in the train.

And what are we to make of “Leaf Brims”?

A clerk looks again at a photo,
decides, puts it into a file box
which he then ties shut with string
and the truth is years away.

A Naval longboat is rowed upstream
where jellied mirrors fracture light
all over sandstone river walls
and the truth is years away.

A one-inch baby clings to glass
on the rain side of a window as
a man halts, being led from office
but the truth is years away.

Our youngest were still child-size when
starched brims of the red lotus last
nodded over this pond in a sunny breeze
and the truth was years away.

I won’t bore readers with my cogitations about this – plainly a poem in which justice occurs in the sacral future – but its difficulties lie not in the ideas which form its context (the sort in which a smiling author seems to say, “You need a course in Murray”) but in its internalness. It is almost a very private poem.

Finally in The Biplane Houses are the narratives. These cover a wide variety of modes ranging from allegory (“Upright Clear Across”) to family experience (“Me and Je Reviens”) to personal experience (“The Succession”). But the one which is most intriguing is one which doesn’t deal with narrative meaning in a way which we are familiar with in Murray’s work. This is “Through the Lattice Door”:

This house, in lattice to the eaves,
diagonals tacked across diagonals,

is cool as a bottle in wicker.
The sun, through stiff lozenge leaves,

prints verandahs in yellow Argyle.
Under human weight, the aged floorboards

are subtly joined, and walk with you;
French windows along them flicker.

In this former hospital’s painted wards
lamplit crises have powdered to grief.

Inner walling, worn back to lead-blue,
stays moveless as the one person still

living here stands up from reading,
the one who returned here from her life,

up steps, inside the guesswork walls,
since in there love for her had persisted.

Though this has the familiar Murray graces (the floorboards, creaking, “walk with you”) it is hard to determine the author’s exact stake in the poem. It doesn’t seem to be making a point, in other words. As a result there is a kind of luminous quality about it as though Murray had given up his position as controlling author (almost always, in Murray’s poetry, tenaciously held on to) and allowed the poem to speak for itself as the poem of this woman’s life. I like it, though, of course, there is no way of knowing whether it will be a one-off of the harbinger of a new, relaxed mode where the authorial control over meaning and significance is loosened a little.

Meeting Gisli

Written 2001

 

 

Almost certainly, somewhere in the seventh decade of the tenth century, perhaps in 963, Gisli Thorbjornsson killed Thorgrim Thorsteinsson on a farm on the southern shores of Dyrafjord in the north-west coast of Iceland. Although violent deaths were common in Iceland in the period, and in fact even more so in the centuries that followed, this must have been a killing of particular significance. The victim, Thorgrim, was an important man. He was the grandson of one of the first settlers, Thorolf, who had taken land on the great peninsula of Snæfellsness which juts out west into the Atlantic below the Western Fjords; he was significant enough to be a goði – an untranslatable term meaning both priest and chieftain – and he must have seemed essentially aristocratic. He was married to Gisli’s sister, and her brothers, Gisli and Thorkell, may well have been forced to contribute their existing farm as part of her dowry. Equally certainly, the cousin of Thorgrim, Eyjolf the Gray, avenged Thorgrim and the family’s honour by killing Gisli after he had survived as an outlaw for fifteen years.

Three hundred years later an Icelandic writer made out of these facts, out of surviving poems said to be by Gisli Thorbjornsson but probably composed a hundred years or so after the events, and out of surviving oral traditions, one of the great examples of the genre known as the Family Sagas. Though only a very short work, Gisli’s Saga stands alongside masterpieces like Njál’s Saga, Egil’s Saga, Laxdæla Saga, Eyrbyggia Saga and Grettir’s Saga, and it is worthy of the exalted company it keeps. Although all the authors are anonymous, each of the sagas bears the imprint of a distinct set of concerns: Laxdæla, for example, is the saga most influenced by the contemporary European code of courtliness and it is no accident that, as it proceeds on its narratively complex way, a woman emerges as the dominant character – a character with whom the author is manifestly besotted. Gisli’s Saga, on the other hand, is thematically obsessed by loyalty and the complex ethical dilemmas that are involved when different loyalties conflict; especially when loyalty to lover or spouse conflicts with loyalty to family. Aesthetically it is obsessed by balance. It is a saga which has been an important part of whatever imaginative life I have had for over twenty years. I don’t know exactly why it should exercise the hold that it does, but as I enter middle-age, Gisli’s story shows no signs of loosening its grip.

On the surface the narrative is not complex , not complex at least for a Family Saga. There are three siblings: a woman, Thordis, and her two brothers, Thorkell and Gisli. They are the children of a Norwegian, Whey-Thorbjorn (Súr-Thorbjorn in Icelandic), and they arrive in Iceland, after some messy killings, around 952 after the end of the “Landtaking” period when Iceland was settled from Norway and the British Isles. They are given land in Dyrafjord and farm at a place called Sæbol where the valley, Haukadalur, runs down to the fjord. Thordis marries Thorgrim goði from Snæfellsness, Thorkell marries a local girl called Asgerd, and Gisli marries Aud the sister of a man called Vestein Vesteinsson who lives by the fjord to the north. Gisli and Thorkell make over the farm of Sæbol to Thorgrim and his new wife and build a separate, adjoining farm for themselves called Holl, about two hundred and fifty metres up the valley.

The core of the events derives from the relationship between four men: in order Thorgrim, Thorkell, Gisli and Vestein. Thorgrim is the brother-in-law of Thorkell and Gisli; Vestein is Gisli’s brother-in-law but has no close relationship with either Thorkell or Thorgrim – they are, after all, only the brother and husband of the sister of Vestein’s sister’s husband! At the opening of the major part of the story, however, the tensions are, if anything, strongest between the two brothers. In Norway a friend of Thorkell’s had been seducing Thordis and Gisli killed him (with their father’s approval). Thorkell left home to live with the kin of the murdered boy – an extraordinary course of action. Their characters are entirely in conflict as well. Gisli is a straightforward man who lives by an inflexible and slightly old-fashioned moral code: there is a touch of John Wayne in The Searchers about him. Thorkell, for whom the author doesn’t have a great deal of sympathy, is embroiled in ethical conflicts as complex and harrowing as those of Gisli. Temperamentally, we feel, Thorkell is aristocratic: lazy, ill-adjusted to the hard life of an Icelandic farm, desirous of being with powerful men as a friend or, if necessary, a mere hanger-on.

For a while everything goes well between the four men, Thorgrim, Thorkell, Gisli and Vestein. They travel together to the local Thing – a kind of regional legal assembly – and overhear a wise man say that they will not be such close friends in three years’ time. Gisli has the idea that they should swear blood-brotherhood. This is not a thing to be undertaken lightly since it binds the participants to the responsibilities of true brotherhood: avenging a brother’s death, for example, or supporting him physically and financially when a law court exacts a fine from him. If we can believe the author – and I suspect that, by the mid-thirteenth century, the blood-brotherhood ceremony was as exotic and vague to him as it is to us – the procedure involved cutting a semi-circular strip of turf free but leaving the ends attached to the earth. The turf was then lifted up through ninety degrees by a spear to make an arch under which the participants passed. Clearly it is a rebirth ritual in which close friends are born again as true brothers. At the last moment, having gone through the other parts of the ceremony – the mixing of blood etc – Thorgrim pulls back; he cannot bring himself to become family with someone as remote from him as Vestein. Gisli, in response, pulls back as well: “I will not bind myself to a man who will not bind himself to Vestein, my wife’s brother.”

The conflict is brought to a head when Thorkell, who doesn’t do farm work, overhears his wife talking to Gisli’s wife, Aud, as they work in the women’s bower. They reveal that Asgerd rather likes Vestein, and may have been involved with him in some compromising way, and that Aud rather liked Thorgrim (though not, she says, after her marriage to Gisli; Aud is as ethically proper as her husband). Horrified when they know they have been overheard, each woman works out a plan. Aud confesses all to her husband, who receives the information fatalistically, but Asgerd, who knows how to deal with her man, waits till Thorkell is sulkily lying in his bed and then climbs in as well. When Thorkell turns away she offers him the choice of divorce or letting her into the bed. When he chooses the latter, “they were not side by side together for long before they settled the matter between them as though nothing had happened”. Afterwards, however, Thorkell insists on his share of the estate from Gisli and, much to Gisli’s distress, moves over to live with his sister, Thordis, and her husband, Thorgrim, at Sæbol.

In autumn Gisli holds a feast. Knowing how explosive the tensions are, he warns Vestein away by sending messengers to Vestein’s farm in the north but the messengers are too late and do not find Vestein until he has gone so far toward Dyrafjord that he cannot turn back. During the night there is a storm and someone enters the house and stabs Vestein. The murderer leaves the weapon, a family heirloom called Grásiða (Greyflank) in the wound. Gisli removes it and throws it in a box. He sends a girl over to Sæbol to tell his brother and Thorgrim what has happened and she reports their compromising behaviour: she found them sitting up, fully dressed with weapons at the ready. At the burial of Vestein, Thorgrim, as the most important man in the area, ties shoes on the corpse – a tradition which enabled the dead man to walk into Valhalla. But as he does so he says, “I cannot tie on Hel-shoes if these come loose”. The author doesn’t tell us who killed Vestein, but it is clearly either Thorgrim or Thorkell. There is a touch of exciting mystery about this and it may be that its author intended his saga to be the world’s first who-dunnit: it is usually assumed that Thorgrim was the killer, but a good case can be made for Thorkell and it changes how we interpret Gisli’s behaviour. There is a magnificent scene after the killing in which Gisli talks to his brother and Thorkell repeatedly asks how Aud takes the death of her brother: “Does she weep much?” He cannot tolerate the knowledge that Aud should know of his sexual humiliation and be unpunished.

Exactly twelve months later, in the following autumn, the families hold separate feasts. Gisli asks a boy of his household who had moved to Sæbol with Thorkell to leave the doors unbarred. He silently enters Sæbol and kills Thorgrim using the same sword and leaving it in the wound. Afterwards, at the burial of Thorgrim, he places a boulder in the ship in which the dead man is being interred and says, matching Thorgrim at Vestein’s funeral, “I cannot make fast a boat, if the weather moves this one”. Thordis, the widow, marries Thorgrim’s brother, Bork the Stout, a figure not much loved in Family Saga literature. While games are being played in winter on the iced-over rush-pond which lies at the mouth of Haukadalur, Gisli makes up a riddling poem which, when decoded, acknowledges that he is Thorgrim’s killer. Thordis hears it and betrays her brother by telling her new husband that Gisli killed his brother. Gisli is outlawed, a twenty year sentence during which he can be killed with impunity, and the second half of the saga follows his increasingly desperate attempt to stay hidden from his pursuers and retain his good spirits. Eventually he is hunted down and killed by Eyjolf the Gray in the fjord south of Dyrafjord near a hideout which is in the mountains above a farm he has built for Aud.

* * * * *

Iceland converted to Christianity in the year one thousand. In typically Icelandic fashion the issue was discussed at the Althing – the annual, national assembly – and a decision to convert was reached which was binding on all. Christianity brought with it literacy and, by the twelfth century, Icelanders were writing histories, including histories of the kings of Norway. To do this they evolved a kind of writing usually called “saga style”. It is a beautiful, flexible, prose instrument, that is in many ways extraordinarily modern; it is a long way from the flowerier excrescences of medieval Latin. It is highly denotative and fixes its eyes resolutely on the external – it deals with interiority only with the greatest reluctance, usually transferring interpretive comments to some hypothesised individual or group: a sentence like “Some people say that x was greatly upset by y’s behaviour” is about as far as it goes. But since, in the greatest of the Family Sagas, intense emotions are boiling volcanically underneath, the reader is required correctly to interpret the surface. Saga style ought to be easy to translate and usually is, though saga translation into English has its share of duds. The sagas also often include poetry which is usually in a very difficult verse form and is the opposite of the prose: it is riddling, highly allusive and thoroughly ambiguous.

Gisli’s Saga was translated into English by George Johnston, a Canadian scholar and poet, in 1963. It is a most unconventional translation and deserves a chapter to itself in the history of translation theory. It belongs to that kind of translation which creates a new style in the target language by retaining aspects of the source language. This can be an unsuccessful ploy because, while it continually reminds us of the sexy otherness of the original, the features it retains are usually the ones which readers associate with the source language. This mires the translation in the prejudices of its own time. In the various translations of the sagas in the nineteenth century – by people like Dasent and William Morris – the retained features are a number of archaisms which are brought across in accordance with the expectations of Victorian readers approaching these texts. A century and a third later these are pretty unattractive if not downright silly – “Flosi busked him from the east when two months were still to winter . . .” The alternative approach, used in the recent retranslation of the entire Family Saga corpus (Reykjavik: Leifur Eiriksson, 1997), but also best known in pioneering translations by people like Magnus Magnusson, Hermann Palsson, Denton Fox and Paul Edwards, uses a neutral contemporary English, with, in the case of Magnusson and Palsson’s translation of Njal’s Saga, a bit of what might be called “interpretive pointing” in the prose. Johnston’s translation is quite different to these. The stroke of genius is to avoid archaising but to bring across syntactic features of the Icelandic – such as the subtle shifts into the present tense which Icelandic narration uses – which are close enough to English syntax to be nothing more than unusual variations. Actually to describe it as a technique is really an over-simplification. Johnston’s is really a very free translation and many of the examples of the most memorable un-English phrasing are not direct translations of the Icelandic. Johnston’s achievement is more to create a foreign style which always sounds eloquent – he is obviously a man blessed with a sure verbal touch.

Just how good the results are can be seen from Johnston’s translation of the great scene in which Gisli kills Thorgrim. It occurs at the double Autumn feast held exactly one year after the killing of Vestein. Bork, Eyjolf, Thorkell and a young boy sympathetic to Gisli, Geirmund (whom Gisli has asked to unlock the doors), are at Sæbol; Gisli and his friends, including another Thorkell, Thorkell the Rich from the northern shore of Dyrafjord, are at Holl. The farms are built alongside a small creek which runs down Haukadale and into Dyrafjord. Those whose readings of medieval narrative are derived from poetic and prose versions of the Arthurian material are in for a surprise.

Bork and Eyjolf come in the evening with sixty men; there were a hundred and twenty men altogether at Sæbol, and half that number at Gisli’s. They started the drinking during the evening, and then they went to bed and slept. Gisli spoke to Aud, his wife: “I have not fed his horse for Thorkell the rich. Come with me and lock the door after me, and stay awake while I go out, and unlock the door for me again when I come back.”

He takes the spear Greyflank from the chest, and is wearing a blue cape over his shirt and linen under-breeches, and he goes now to the stream which runs between the two steadings, and from which water was taken for both. He goes by the path to the stream, and then wades down the stream to the path which led to the other house. Gisli knew the lay-out at Sæbol because he had put up the buildings; there was a way in through the byre. This is where he goes; thirty cows are stalled on either side; he ties the cows’ tails together and closes the byre, and fixes the door in such a way that it may not be opened from the other side. Then he goes to the dwelling-house; and Geirmund has done his work, because the doors were not barred. He goes in and shuts the door after him, in the way it had been closed up during the evening.

Now he takes his time over everything. After shutting the door he stands and listens to hear if anyone is awake, and he finds that all are asleep. There were three lights in the room. He takes the sedge from the floor and twists it together; then he throws it on one of the lights, and it goes out. He stands again and waits, in case anyone wakes up, but he hears nothing. He takes another twist of sedge and throws it on the nearest light and puts it out. Then he knows that not all are asleep, because he sees that a young man’s hand reaches for the third light, and pulls the lamp down and snuffs it. Now he goes farther into the room into the bed closet where Thorgrim slept, and his sister [Thordis], and the door was ajar, and they are both in bed. He goes up and gropes about inside and puts his hand on his sister’s breast; she was sleeping next the outside.

Then Thordis spoke. “Why is your hand so cold, Thorgrim?” and she wakes him.

Thorgrim asked: “Do you want me to turn your way?” She thought he had put his arm over her.

Gisli waits yet for a while, and warms his hand in his shirt, and they both go to sleep; then he takes hold of Thorgrim gently, so that he wakes up. He thought that Thordis had roused him, and he turned to her. Gisli pulls back the covers with one hand, and with the other he thrusts Greyflank into Thorgrim so that it goes through him and sticks in the bed. Then Thordis calls out and says, “Wake up, men in the room! Thorgrim is killed, my husband!”

Gisli turns away quickly towards the byre and goes out as he had intended, and makes the door fast behind him; he goes home then by the same way as he had come, and his tracks could not be seen. Aud unlocks the door for him when he comes home, and he goes to bed and behaves as though nothing has happened, and as though he has done nothing. But the men were still full of drink at Sæbol and did not know what ought to be done; this caught them unawares, and because of this nothing was done that was either fitting or useful.

To most readers the virtues of this passage will be obvious and medievalists will have an even better idea of just how extraordinary it is. It is a punishment killing – though whom it is punishing, Thorgrim or Thorkell, will depend on whom we think killed Vestein – and has an acute sense, as the Family Sagas so often do, of the aesthetics of behaviour. Gisli exactly matches the actions of Vestein’s killer, even to using the same weapon and leaving it in the wound. Then there is the unprecedented, amazingly intimate speech of the sleep-befuddled couple (Thordis is near the end of a pregnancy) who do not realize that the killer stands just next to them. Of course it also has its difficulties for readers trying to work out exactly what Gisli is doing, where and when. Why does he tie the cow’s tails together, for example, or exactly which doors are bolted and unbolted? Serious saga readers also know that this killing is remarkably similar to a killing in an interesting but far less overwhelming saga, The Sons of Droplaug, and that there all the preparations make more sense. We might also ask what one hundred and twenty men are doing in Sæbol in the late tenth century as minor players in what is, essentially, a domestic murder. Numbers like this might well have been possible in the continuing semi-civil-wars of the thirteenth century when the saga was written but are unimaginable at the time the saga is set. But, all in all, I don’t think medieval narrative, even passages as celebrated as Inferno V and Purgatorio V, has anything to equal this. I first met it more than twenty years ago and, as seems to happen with those special moments occasionally granted to readers, I can remember exactly where I was sitting when I read it.

* * * * *

Meeting the ghost of Gisli, his doomed family and his friends and enemies is not easy. In literary terms you have to acclimatize yourself to the conventions of saga-style; magnificent as they are, these are not texts to be simply picked up and browsed through. You also have to learn something of the strange world that engendered them; a feud culture in which one’s honour is more important than one’s life but in which desperate aspirations towards unity and peace are discernible. It is a world where the social and legal codes and practices can seem dauntingly complex just because they are so unfamiliar and it is not easy for contemporary readers to get emotionally close to a protagonist who kills as regularly as Gisli does.

But even at a simple physical level, it is not easy to get to Haukadale, especially if you are enough of an obsessive to want to see it in autumn – the time of the killings of Vestein and Thorgrim. In summer it is a matter of driving all the way into the Western Fjords or taking a ferry across Breidafjord to the Fjords’ southern coast and then working one’s way over the highlands between successive fjords before arriving at Dyrafjord. In late autumn, with the temperature generally just below freezing, this is not possible.

So after many false starts influenced by the weather, Kari Gislason and I flew from Reykjavik to Isafjordur, the main town of the Western Fjords, hired a car and drove south to Dyrafjord. Not all of this went smoothly. On the eve of our flight the weather, very changeable in Iceland, turned bad and we suffered a frightening gale: strong enough to shake the house we were staying in in Reykjavik and drive a trawler aground in a fjord just south of Dyrafjord. The flight was canceled. Next day the weather was fine but our plane wasn’t: it was delayed for three hours, irreplaceable when you have only six or seven hours of light. The Isafjordur hire car, booked the week before, turned out to be unavailable and only good luck meant that the representative of another company happened to be at the airport and happened to have an available and affordable (by Icelandic standards) substitute. None of this dented our good spirits and we were able to absorb it – slightly hysterically, it is true – as part of the gorgeous comedy of travel.

The next fjord south after Isafjord is Onunarfjord. Vestein’s home, the place from which he rode south to Dyrafjord and to his death, is on the inner north shore. On the map the road from Isafjordur to Onundarfjord looks daunting. It is a high heath which in early November is snow-covered. It was, then, a pleasant surprise to find that a six kilometer long tunnel through the mountains had thoughtfully been provided. How a country with a population of less than three hundred thousand people can afford to do this in such an out of the way place is a visitor’s mystery. Coming down, out of the tunnel, to Onundarfjord, we found the site of Vestein’s farm, “undir Hesti”. The Hestur, or “horse”, that it is under is a massive slab of rock of the kind not uncommon in Iceland, formed where two steep valleys meet. Here the valleys are very close together and so their mouths meet in a sharp V. We thought we found, without much confidence in the result, the place where the men sent by Gisli to warn Vestein not to attend the feast, miss him. They ride at the top of a ridge while he passes below them at river level. By the time they have got to his farm, learned that he has left, doubled back and caught up with him, it is to late. As Vestein says, “but now the streams all run towards Dyrafjord”. The current road exactly retraces Vestein’s path.

The first sight of Dyrafjord comes when our road emerges from the valley which has enabled us to cross the heath on the northern side. It is mid-afternoon, the day is cold and clear, the light is good and we have at least another couple of hours before darkness. Directly across the calm waters we can see, on the southern shore of the fjord, the tiny town of Thingeyri, itself only a short distance from Haukadale. Dyrafjord is a classic Icelandic fjord. A U-shaped valley, scoured out in the last Ice Age by a glacier, has been flooded but not to any great depth. There is a stretch of reasonably level ground for farming extending from the shores of the fjord to a point where the slope of the valley wall becomes too steep and grass is replaced by detritus eroded from the mountains. Again, typically, the walls of the fjord, far from being remorseless curtains of rock, are interrupted regularly by the mouths of valleys running at right angles to the fjord itself. These valleys slope upwards and are probably formed by erosion as millions of litres of water run continually off the high heath into the fjord through waterfalls and then, as the land levels out more, through streams. The road follows the shore and we have to take a long circular trip to the head of the fjord before getting around to the south side. Haukadale is the third valley on the left past Thingeyri.

You know you are there immediately. The road is only a few metres from the shore but there, between the two, is a pond with reeds in the clear ice of the surface. This is the seftjörn (reed-pond) of the saga where Gisli and Thorgrim played a kind of ball-game at the Christmas festivities after the murder of Vestein and where, when Thorgrim was knocked down on the ice by Gisli, he said, looking up at Vestein’s burial mound:

Spear in the wound sharply
sang, I feel no anguish.

Of course, in this saga, one admission on the ice requires its double and it is here, one year later, where Gisli, stopping to repair one of the players’ bats, recites the verse which admits his guilt as the murderer of Thorgrim. Thordis, sitting on the high ground above the pond with the other women to watch the men’s game – presumably near where the road now passes – hears, understands and betrays her brother to her new husband. It has been said, in her defence, that she wants her husband to kill her brother so that her new-born son will be spared this task. Attempting to kill one’s uncle would be not only ethically unpleasant but, in Gisli’s case, extremely dangerous. But Gisli himself is not so forgiving. When he discovers what she has done, he makes up a brilliant verse contrasting her to the great Germanic heroine, Gudrun the daughter of Gjuki, who, when she discovered that her husband, Attila the Hun, had killed her brother, killed her sons by Attila before killing him.

To the left is the valley, sloping up, away from you, to meet the snow covered heights of the heath. Haukadale is not a small valley, but it does convey an impression of constriction and oppression: the ideal setting for a pressure cooker of emotional and ethical conflicts. Obviously, neither Holl nor Sæbol survive, but there is a new farm next to the road on the western end of the valley’s mouth. Both the rivers are there: the major one and the stream alongside which both the farms were built and down which Gisli waded on his mission of revenge. All farms in Iceland grow grass, as they have for a thousand years, and, though it is late in the year, there are a dozen or so small Icelandic horses grazing at different parts of the valley.

What do you do at moments like this? You potter around, take photos, stare at the valley, stare at the horses (who stare back at you with that canny expression that Icelandic horses have), talk excitedly and sense, perhaps, that some part of you has briefly touched something that the unknown and unknowable author of a great work touched. But what sort of magic is that? Somehow no rationalization describes either the desire to experience this or the experience itself. I don’t actually know what I am doing here, anymore than I know why Gisli’s Saga affects me as much as it does. And is such an experience available anywhere but in Iceland? Is there, in the world, any country which possesses a great medieval literature, and which has remained essentially untouched by seven centuries of the usual changes: the invention of towns, dams, new methods for the business of agriculture? Of course where the actual, tenth century, murder of Thorgrim took place we will never know – it might have been in a drunken brawl or an ambush anywhere – but there is no doubt that the author of Gisli’s Saga set it here, in Haukadale, in a place he knew intimately.

* * * * *

Gisli’s Saga has a head and a tail that should not be lightly passed over. The opening pages, as often in the Family Sagas, describe the generation preceding the one central to the narrative and, in this case, the early events are set in Norway. There are three brothers named Ari, Gisli and Thorbjorn – the Gisli is of course not our hero, but his uncle. The former is married to a woman named Ingibjorg. A wandering berserk challenges Ari to a duel and kills him. Ingibjorg then tells Gisli – in Johnston’s rather beautiful prose – “when I was married to Ari, it was not because I would not rather have been married to you” and that she has a thrall who has a magic sword which will win the battle. Gisli borrows the sword and fights and kills the berserk but is killed when he and the thrall fight over the sword (Greyflank) which he is reluctant to return. Ingibjorg’s betrayal of her husband – she never told him about the sword when he was waiting to fight for his life – is not commented on specifically in the text and this not only sets the tone of the saga’s obsession with betrayal but also tells us how to read the saga: we will only understand what is happening if we read carefully between the lines.

The Gisli of the saga survives as a outlaw for fifteen or sixteen years, time for his nephew (Thorgrim and Thordis’ son) to grow up. This boy was originally called Thorgrim in memory of his father but he is such a difficult child that Thordis and his step-father Bork change his name to Snorri – which has connotations of “stormy”. Bork, Thordis and Snorri live at Helgafell, the holy mountain of Snæfellsness consecrated by Bork and Thorgrim’s grandfather, Thorolf. One of the saga’s concluding scenes describes the day when Eyjolf the Gray (a relation of Bork) arrives to announce Gisli’s death. Bork is delighted and tells Thordis to prepare food to celebrate. Thordis brings only gruel and when she puts Eyjolf’s plate in front of him, reaches down to pick up his sword (left peaceably on the floor) and stab him. But the hilt of the sword catches on the edge of the table and Eyjolf is merely wounded. (Thordis, in keeping with the saga’s structural obsessions, is the second woman to strike out at Eyjolf.) It is an expensive wound as the miserly Bork is forced to give Eyjolf “self-judgement” – the right to set his own value on his injury and receive it as a fine. Snorri protects his mother from her husband’s fury and she eventually declares herself divorced from him. Snorri goes on to trick Bork out of the ownership of Helgafell and to become the most influential character of the Saga Age – his dealings are described in a number of sagas, most importantly, Laxdæla Saga and Eyrbyggia Saga – a clever manipulator and a really dangerous man to have as an enemy. What should we make of Thordis’ behaviour? Is it done out of the sense that, though the revenge was important for her dead husband’s honour, it does not imply that one need have anything more than contempt for the avenger? Or is Thordis trying to make a final reconciliation with her brother by behaving instinctively as he would have done, for, as he says at an earlier point in the saga, “I think I have shown more than once that her honour was as important to me as my own”? The romantic in me hopes that it is the latter and that, in some way, it is a gesture that enables Gisli’s ghost to rest in peace.

Meeting Hafez

Published in AQ: Journal of Contemporary Analysis, 71.1 (Jan-Feb, 1999), 14-17.

 

 

Each Thursday morning I pick my way across a familiar Brisbane landscape to my Persian lesson. Sitting across from my teacher, who is an Iranian refugee, I work through primary school textbooks from Teheran. These resemble the School Readers that people in Queensland remember with some affection: each chapter consists of a reading, sometimes a retold classical story, often a pointed story from the history of Shi’ite Islam, sometimes a poem, followed by an explanation of difficult words, some questions, some homework and perhaps some grammar. My lesson lasts two hours and inevitably includes conversation – in Persian wherever possible. It is intellectually about as exhausting a thing as I ever do. When the conversation is one-to-one in a foreign language there really isn’t anywhere to hide and, although Persian is morphologically simpler even than English, it still feels like two hours of the mental arithmetic that I was subjected to on Friday mornings at primary school. I am half way through the Grade Five reader.

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One of the paradoxes about learning a language is that the romance of exotic otherness which excites us and gives us the energy to begin, is something that is lost as we are able to speak more fluently. And it has to be lost since a marker of fluency is that we articulate immediately and unreflectively. As a child beginning to learn German at high school I discovered an almost erotic excitement in being able to go around saying “Guten Tag” to myself as well as, for some unaccountable reason, “Die Westdeutsche Bundesrepublik”. This excitement scarcely lasted a week. As an undergraduate and would-be medievalist, I had studied both Old and Middle English as well as Old Icelandic. But I knew enough to be depressed by the insularity of these studies, by the knowledge that the westward movements of Islam contained the most important literary and intellectual activity of the time and by the suspicion that the Islamic influence on the remote west (ie on France and England) was barely understood. No doubt this has been rectified by scholarship done since then. In fact, for all I know, it might well have been done long before I was a student and lack of interest or skill or luck had prevented me finding it. What was clear was that three languages formed the centre of the European middle ages: Latin, Greek and Arabic. I managed to learn some Latin (up to about matriculation standard) with a retired elderly colleague but by this time my aspirations to be a medievalist had mostly melted away. I retained, however, a desire to speak Icelandic and to be able to read Arabic.

At about this time I met Icelanders whose language I could read (to some extent) but not speak and Germans whose language I could read at a reasonable level but whose spoken language I was pathetically inadequate in. I grew to feel, in other words, that my language abilities were merely bookish and would thus be exposed as a sham by any native speaker. It was fine to discuss Heine with visiting Germans but only in English! Some time in this period a Swiss visitor revealed that as an undergraduate he had studied Arabic, Persian and Turkish. I felt, not for the first time, that pang of anguished jealousy that those of us nurtured in rigidly mono-lingual cultures feel when we meet the polyglot. Presumably Swiss know enough about modern European languages as children to have a taste for more exotic linguistic fare. When I told my new friend that I had always wanted to learn Arabic but had found the various grammars for the self-taught got me nowhere, he gave me a valuable piece of advice: I should learn Persian or Turkish first. Both are drenched in Arabic vocabulary but each is easier than Arabic. Turkish is a difficult language as language but has, thanks to Ataturk, the Roman alphabet. Persian uses the difficult Arabic alphabet but is, at heart, a simple and familiar Indo-European language.

At about the same time I found myself with an Afghan refugee as one of my composition students. He promised to teach me the Arabic script and at the same time I began to learn a little of his own language – Persian. This was great fun and, knowing very little about Persian language and culture apart from the doings of the Achaemenids, I decided to learn it from a purely communicative point of view, even though this was exactly the opposite of my original, literary, intentions. I read nothing and simply focussed on evolving some kind of pidgin with him. After he left Brisbane I tried out my minimal skills on a family of Iranian refugees. They were astonished and, I think, both horrified and amused though they took care not to let it show. Iran and Afghanistan are the only contemporary countries that speak Persian but the Afghan dialect, Dari, is considerably different and, like it or not, looks to be somehow backward, compared with urban, Teherani Persian. The differences are in vocabulary, vowels (Iranian seems to have undergone a consistent vowel shift) and intonation – Dari is spoken in a rather flat, English-like, manner while Iranian is deliciously sing-songy to English ears. To these educated Iranians I must have sounded like somebody who had learnt English in the docks of Liverpool or, perhaps more accurately, in a medieval monastery. Eventually, after a bit of persistence, I found another family of Iranian refugees in which the wife, Mehri, had been a primary school teacher. She has been my patient teacher and forgiving native speaker ever since.

******

The poems of Hafiz, considered the finest of the Persian poets, are often extremely disjunctive. They do not translate well since the very act of making an English poem out of one of them encourages a spurious meditative consistency that the originals simply don’t have or want. Even Sir William Jones, who in his A Grammar of the Persian Language of 1771 translated and helped to popularise one of the most beautiful of these poems, couldn’t escape this distortion. The individual pairs of lines of the ghazal form are linked in that all the second lines rhyme or are the same word and, since Persian is a verb-final language, this produces a kind of linked, discrete assertiveness that is difficult to approximate in English where the core of the utterance comes at the beginning. When you read Persian you are like Mark Twain’s group of German speakers: you have to wait for the verb. Western European poetries when they use metaphors for the act of making poetry, often have recourse to the notion of constructing something or of shaping a unified whole, but in Persian the metaphor is of threading pearls. The task of the reader is, often, to intuit the single theme that generates these couplets but, at other times, it seems to be to appreciate the way in which different themes are interwoven.

The man himself – usually known as Hafiz of Shiraz – was born in that city of southern Iran around 1320. His name was Khoja Shams Al-din Muhammad and the name Hâfez, taken as a pen name, is a traditional cognomen for a person able to recite the Qur’ân by heart. He died in his beloved Shiraz at probably the same time that a young Richard the Second was trying to deal with the Peasants’ Revolt. Legend credits him with meeting Teimur (Tamerlane) shortly before his death and this meeting, apocryphal or otherwise, belongs to that fascinating tradition of meetings between the great of the world and the great poets whose territory is the world of language and the inner life. Pasternak spoke to Stalin on the telephone, Pushkin was kept in the court of Nicholas I, Ovid was probably banished personally by Augustus, Napoleon made a point of meeting Goethe. We are told that Teimur, the epitome of the central Asian conqueror and a true psychopath’s psychopath, after he had captured Shiraz in 1387, sent for Hafiz and upbraided him over one of his most famous and beautiful poems, “Agar ân turk-e-Shirâzi”. This ghazal, which begins, “If that Turkish woman of Shiraz would take my heart into her hand / For her Indian mole I would give Bokhara and Samarqand”, is said to have offended Teimur because the two most precious cities of his domain (Samarkand was his home and base) were being offered for a single woman (or man – Persian has no gender). Hafiz, befitting a literary man, saved himself with a quick wit and a quick turn of phrase by apologising with, “I am an over-generous man, sir, that is why you see me as poor as I am.” Teimur, alongside his capacity for extreme cruelty, possessed a refined aesthetic sense, which he was to pass on to his descendants who established the Moghul empire. He had enough respect for the great poet of the city to be placated by this reply.

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If you are a literature scholar and a poetry critic like myself, the process of learning a language to speak rather than read has special difficulties and a special tension. You have to force yourself to ignore the literature to prevent the project becoming merely a part of your reading activity for, if this happens, you will quickly lose impetus at about the point where you can work through a poem in the original. And yet, while you go on week after week in a deliberately blinkered way, the literature sings its siren song at you all the time. You meet simplified passages of classic prose in the reader or some children’s poems that, as you progress through the school grades, slowly metamorphose into snippets from real poems by real poets like Sa’adi or Ferdowsi whose names are familiar. The experience is rather like climbing a ladder inside a long vertical drainpipe of competence. You know that there is a world outside that you can access through doors in the shaft at any point. But you know that the more you resist the temptation and the higher you climb, the better the view will be when you do open the door. It is not for nothing that the great metaphor of literary discovery is the geographical, imperial and visual one that we know best from Keats’ realms of gold.

Hafiz is not an easy poet for a beginner in Persian though the language change that has gone on since the fourteenth century is not as profound as a parallel case in English would be. Also, without knowing that it is doing it, the West prepares itself for Hafiz. This is because Persia, despite its location east of Iraq, is really a border country whose religion is Islam and whose formal vocabulary is Arabic but whose language is, at heart, western and whose gaze has, historically, been to the west as well as the middle-east: in Christopher Sykes’ memorable phrase, it is “a fragment of Europe fallen into Islam”. Modern Australian poets write ghazals. Edward Fitzgerald made a masterpiece from free versions of an infinitesimally minor Persian poet. Goethe read Hafiz in translation and mimicked the Persian spirit in the West-östlicher Divan. One of these poems, “Selige Sehnsucht”, I had read as an undergraduate studying German. It speaks of the great Persian theme of “Flammentod”, flame-death, the death of the moth in the fire of the loved-one, or Loved-One if we allegorise out the lover as God. And so when I was no longer able to resist and, with the help of my teacher and her husband, opened my first door, the view was not entirely of unremitting otherness. There were some eerily familiar features in the landscape of this first, magnificent poem about centres and edges, about truth and illusion:

Last night I saw angels knocking at the door to the tavern.
They kneaded the clay of Adam and threw it onto the wheel.

Inhabitants of the sanctuary and sanctity and chastity of heaven,
They shared the wine of drunkenness with a poor man like me.

Praise be to that which caused peace to fall between Him and me.
The dancing angels also drank thankfully from the cup.

The heavens themselves could not bear the burden of Amânat .
The lot fell to the name of a madman - me.

The fire is not where the candle laughs in its flame.
The fire is that which burns the harvest of moths.

Forgive all the fights of the seventy-two sects.
Because they do not see the truth they make a fable of it.

No-one knows better than Hafiz how to expose the thoughts which lie behind the mask of the face,
The better to comb the most beautiful tresses of speech with a pen.

But we only do things for a first time once. When I first read this poem I was entranced by the couplet of the laughing candle and the harvest of moths. Now, over a year (and several more poems) on, this already seems the most conventional of the lines. The mysterious tavern, visited in the opening line by the angels, is now firmly meshed in a regime of interpretation that is very difficult to withstand – it is the place in which God’s grace is dispensed.

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We do strange things to ourselves when we learn languages as adults especially when the aim is to communicate rather than passively access a new literature as readers. A great deal of scholarly linguistic activity is devoted to the mysterious process of language acquisition by children: their ability to absorb, apparently effortlessly, the structuring rules of their language. I’m not sure if adult language learning isn’t an even greater miracle. For a start adults know, as children do not, how vast and impossible is the task of achieving even a satisfactory fluency, a forgivable accent. Everyone knows that the word “mastery” is absurd when used of a second language. We set sail, to use another spatial metaphor, on an expanse of water and we already have a clear idea of its overwhelming, oceanic dimensions. Children say the little they want to say or need to say, paddling about in a rock pool of language, not knowing how limited its dimensions are. We stand in the same pool knowing that the ocean continues kilometres deep, thousands of kilometres wide: tens of thousands of words and idiomatic constructions.

Secondly we make ourselves vulnerable and expose ourselves to the abrasion of a continual embarrassment that can take its toll of our egos. Adult language learning, which often seems the provenance of the school and university – with perhaps the adult education class of people wanting to expand their horizons by travel thrown in – is really more likely to be the fate of the poor and dispossessed, the refugees for whom a country of refuge represents the imperative to learn yet another language in order to function. To learn a foreign language in Australia as an adult is, momentarily, to inhabit that nightmare world. With my grade five Persian, I wouldn’t want to be dropped into Teheran as a refugee and forced to make my own way. So much of what we consider our intelligence is actually our facility with our first language. So much of what we consider necessary charm, the ability to extricate oneself from awkward situations, is really exactly the same facility. To speak a language you are learning with a native speaker is to know that you sound like a fool and that you can express nothing of the complexities of your experience of the world.

Finally and most mysteriously we begin, despite ourselves, to make another self. This second self lives inside us but is more an alternative than a complementary one. A linguist, faced with comments about her ability to speak three languages, said “Rather than trilingual, I prefer to think of myself as monolingual in three languages.” And this new self has a mysterious relationship with the native speakers we learn from. They have to learn another version of their own language – one which matches our competence – so that they will speak using mainly words we know. In a sense they watch our other self grow up, though it must be a grotesque process in which the tongue that forms their own selves is constantly mangled. But apart from native speakers it is a self cut off. The self that speaks bad Persian is incomprehensible to my children, for example, who are irritated beyond belief by my tendency, at home, to test whether or not I can “think Persian” yet by saying something in Persian. It is even worse if I burst into what I like to feel at the time is finely articulated Persian poetry. For them my Persian self is beyond comprehension, beyond communication and thus beyond sympathy. And I know that it is this second self – a shambling, semi-articulate, Frankenstein monster of a thing – which sets out each Thursday morning on its way, trying to make itself more fully articulate, more fully human.

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The tomb of Hafez lies in the outer suburbs of his beloved Shiraz. It is in a beautiful garden made all the more beautiful by the way it contrasts with the hot and dusty surrounds. The tomb itself is simply a block of sandstone surmounted by a small baldacinno. On my first visit I was prepared for the practice of sortilege – you place a collected Hafez on the tomb and pick a verse at random – it will mark both your character and your fate. I had imagined joining a queue of Iranians to do this. In fact nobody seemed remotely interested but, having come this far, I had no intentions of backing out just to prevent myself looking a fool and so, to the bemusement of other Iranians, present I put my finger on a verse at random from a cheap collected Hafez. My friends recorded the moment on film.

A few years later, on a second visit, there were many more people present, mostly relaxing and soaking up the atmosphere. They walked, as we did, through the gardens. On the ground, in one corner, were two lovers reading Hafez to each other. It was a reminder of the centrality of poetry, at least their own poetry, to Iranians. It was not a scene one could imagine occurring in Australia.