World Square, NSW: Pitt Street Poetry, 2026, 91pp.

Everybody knows that the current age is marked as being one in which we experience – and can expect to experience in the near-future – situations which have never occurred before. We are the first people in history, to take an obvious example, to know something of the dimensions of the known universe and the disposition of galactic clusters. We are also the first generations, to choose a humbler example more relevant to these reviews, to be exposed to the idea of a truly extended creative life for poets, novelists, artists etc. Tolstoy seemed a freakish figure when he died in 1910 because he lived and produced – admittedly spasmodically – to the age of eighty-two. But advances in medicine make that an unexceptionable age for us and it’s possible for a creative life to last for up to seventy years. All this is something utterly new under the sun unless the antediluvian patriarchs like Methusaleh or Lamech produced a lot of poetry. At any rate it changes features of the field. Whereas in the past, poets might have yielded to the oedipal desire to do something very different from those poets of their parents’ generation, a youngish poet today might find three or four older generations of poets still – according to the view of the young – doggedly producing, clogging up the airwaves, magazines and publishers’ schedules. In 1983, Robert Gray and Geoffrey Lehmann produced an anthology called The Younger Australian Poets. It seems reasonable now to think that somebody ought to produce an anthology called The (insert a publisher here) Book of Elder Australian Poets containing perhaps only poems written after the author had turned, say, seventy-five. It would be a good way of monitoring what this substantial change has produced. It might contribute perhaps to the debate about the existence or otherwise of a “late style” although I suspect that late style is not really the same as “elders’” style. Unfortunately, I have to accept that such an anthology would be unlikely to sell well: most readers are more interested in what the new and young are doing. And that’s reasonable enough, I suppose.

At any rate, a candidate for inclusion in this imaginary anthology would be Peter Goldsworthy who was born in 1951 and published his first book of poems, Readings from Ecclesiastes in 1982. He would also be accompanied by Geoff Page whose most recent book is also published by Pitt Street Poets and who, born in 1940, is considerably older. Goldsworthy is far from a prolific poet but late in his career has produced two important books: The Rise of the Machines and Other Love Poems in 2015 as well as this new book, Tomorrow. His overall creative output is surprisingly large for someone who made a living as a GP: someone who, in other words, has lived an extremely busy professional life. It consists of novels, short stories, libretti, essays and a brilliant non-fictional book about his experience as a cancer patient: The Cancer Finishing School. One of the experiences of age is that sudden shift whereby the future, which before had been something vague that we prepared for as best we could while going about our lives of the moment, becomes a stopping point that affects everything. It’s what Kermode meant by his much-repeated phrase, “the sense of an ending”. It probably induces less panic in the elderly than it might in a young person suddenly diagnosed with a life-threatening disease, but it is a radical shift of emphasis. In the past, in periods with less precise medical diagnoses, creative lives were cut short ridiculously early, too early for this shift to happen. To speak of Shakespeare’s or Beethoven’s late period is to credit them with a perception that they didn’t have long for this world, perhaps an intuition felt by their bodies at a subliminal level. At any rate, I want to claim that the different perspective of a sense of an ending is something new in creative lives.

All this is really a long introduction to the title of Goldsworthy’s book and its title poem, “Tomorrow”, which is built on the simple metaphor of tomorrow as a lover:

I loved Tomorrow
from the first day we met:

her secret promises,
her sweet backward glances . . .

Tommorow and the poet have, as in a marriage, some stormy moments and eventually Tomorrow is taken for granted although,

. . . . . 
    when I needed a hand
hers was always there for me,

reaching back over difficult
midnights, hauling me across.
When did we begin to grow apart?
When did she start telling me lies?

When did I wake to find
Tomorrow had no time for me at all.

Another reason for looking at this poem specifically is that it encapsulates the strengths and weaknesses of Goldsworthy’s poetic style. His poems are always elegant and conceptually striking. But their strongest point, despite the fertility of linguistic invention, is the strength of this conception. All the poems go towards a resolution and it’s a resolution that the poet has worked out. (In a weird way, this makes his poems rather like an expression of “the sense of an ending” that I have been speaking about: they tend to be closed poems.) You feel that the author is never surprised or puzzled or challenged by the way the poems develop and that the hard work of writing is devoted to making that conceptually satisfying whole. Obviously, there is nothing wrong with this, probably many poets work in this way, but it does eliminate a lot of poetry’s possibilities especially for those crying for a madder music.

Although this is a sympathetic reader’s response, there is considerable evidence that it is something that Goldsworthy himself has at the forefront of his mind. His position is laid out in a passage from The Cancer Finishing School,

Poetry erupts from a deeper, more volcanic part of the brain than prose: it’s closer to the preverbal mix of image, metaphor, music, feeling and sensation that is how our brains actually think; it’s the closest we can get to any concept, or impulse, or thought, before it simples into words.

	It’s often a creature of the night – hyperaware, as if in cave-dweller times, of nocturnal dangers and predators. If the conscious mind is an Earth, its hemispheres rotating through moods alternately light and dark, then the subconscious is a Moon, with a permanently dark side that never sees the sun. If it has a sense of humour, it is black. It occurs to me that poetry, like some winking orbiter, is best able to map the hidden terrain as it passes overhead.

	No surprise, then, that the journal I compose by daylight is largely rational, stoical and optimistic, while the poems that I try to grab and pin down like bats in a cave are more aware of, or open to, emotions that have been suppressed and unacknowledged.

The emphasis here is on poetry as providing something emotionally darker than a new kind of knowledge, and that is in keeping with Goldsworthy’s interest in the effect that his various medications are having on him, but it isn’t unfair to point out that the material of poetry is still seen as something rational, as a part of the sunlit world we inhabit.

When Goldsworthy’s poems do concern themselves with an altogether elsewhere it tends to be with the familiar world which we can only partly perceive. There is an early poem, “Gecko”, for example:

Summer nights it trembles
at the edge of consciousness,

in the corners of flyscreens,
in the corners of my eyes.

Almost certainly it exists:
a tiny, nervous dinosaur,

leather spider on a web
sticky with electric light,

clutching moths in its gums
just out of sight.

The idea that there is a reality “just out of sight” implies a totality of the world which isn’t apprehensible. All we see, as another, similar poem, “Skink” says, is “identikit parts / for a description // that is never / complete”. A poem from the volume if, then, dedicated to Gwen Harwood and reproduced, slightly altered, in Tomorrow as part of a suite of poems dedicated to dead friends (another reflex of the creative elderly, a genre which would bulk large in my putative anthology) is called “The Dark Side of the Head” and begins;

Just around the corner of the eye,
at every reach of its big screen,
there is a magic which is neither
black nor white, but only absent:
the disappearance of all world. . .

The expressed desire in this poem is not to see another universe, or an otherworld or a hidden world – the ghayb of classic Persian poetry – or even a magically restored self recovered from the attritional editing processes which we unconsciously initiate to enable us to deal with the world, but rather to see our world as a complete phenomenon:

. . . . .
I sometimes hope that if
my head jerks leftwards, quick
as warp, I might just catch
the edge of right side visual field,
as if there is no dark side of the head
but one world only, seamless,
like the small curved universes
painted on the Grecian urns,
or like a Mercator projection
of the globe, that having mapped
itself, bent weirdly at the polar
ends, for flat-screen eyes,
now unmaps in reverse, becoming
whole again and full and round
and as satisfactory as heaven.

The ways in which poetry might expand out consciousnesses – I’ve listed a few above – are many and varied, but this is surely the most minimal. I’m sympathetic to it because it comes out of a humanist, logical, empiricist perspective and doesn’t require any especially dotty religious background as in the case, say, of the poetry of Blake. But it is surprisingly modest.

A sequence of poems about numbers, also from if, then, becomes more interesting as it moves from simple numbers – 1, 2, 3 and so on – to the great irrationals Pi and e, and then to that magical number i: the impossible square root of -1, a number which logically cannot exist but which patently does so and can be crucially important in calculations. The aim in these poems is to explore worlds which don’t comfortably fit into our perceptions of the real but which obviously exist: no-one knows why God – or whatever created the universe – should have made the relationship between a circle’s radius and its circumference an irrational rather than rational number, that is, a number which is infinitely undefinable.

Some idea of the centrality to Goldsworthy’s poetry of this concern with the nature of what it is that our “rational, stoical and optimistic” self doesn’t see and doesn’t experience, is the existence in Tomorrow, of a long sequence called “Anatomy of a Metaphor”. The title, itself, points towards a logical, scientific approach to the issue in that it recalls Burton’s exhaustive categorisation of melancholy as well as the clinical analysis of the components of the human body. The poems of “Anatomy of a Metaphor” operate, like the heart, between a rest (the diastole) and a pump (the systole). At rest, there are calm, comparatively rational poems about the heart conceived as a metaphor. And so the first:

Packed in a chest
cavity, proximal

to the diaphragm,
immediately posterior

to the sternum,
sits the metaphor,

slightly off-centre
but seldom off-

beat, the original
heart of the matter,
 
this larger matter
of our bespoke gift

wrappings, our first
best birth day suits.

The “systole” poems, on the other hand are a riot of metaphor:

Energizer bunny jumping nowhere in its walled-up burrow,
caged fledgeling dreaming of flight on soggy wings of lung . . .

and

Fat controller of very thin train-lines, fast-track junction
of a billion driverless micro-vehicles of futuristic design,
one-way stop-start dual-lane over-under freeway intersection
for streamlined red cabs picking up the same passenger
from the same two windswept departure lounges . . .

At one level the contrast is between metaphor used as a conceptual framework and metaphor used as an over-the-top exploration of possibilities overwhelming its subject. The “diastole” poems are very much in Goldsworthy’s style and the “systole” ones certainly aren’t. There are other relationships though. I can’t help but feel that underneath the “systole” poems is a sense of “I can do this virtuosic metaphorical stuff just as well as Les Murray does in poems like “Bent Water in the Tasmanian Highlands” or “The Craze Field”. It’s just that I choose not to”. They introduce and demonstrate a poetic method which is within the poet’s reach but rejected for poetic reasons.

My approach to Tomorrow has been inclined to look at the poems from the point of view of a tension that I think exists in almost all of Goldsworthy’s poetic output. I think the question that underlies poetry for him is something like: What is the nature of the world that poetry’s magic can unlock? And the answer is a logical, sane but ultimately restricted one: it can give us a clearer vision of what is. In a way it’s what one might expect from a scientific mind: a number of times in his prose writings Goldsworthy emphasises his faith in “evidence-based medicine”. It’s a liberal, humane position, averse to the wilder possibilities of the unrestricted human imagination. I’m both attracted to this and, at the same time, worried that it might impose limits. I have a worrying image of Dr Goldsworthy sitting in his rooms, listening with emotional sympathy, but not with intellectual sympathy, to William Blake – perhaps there because of a dicky knee or a strained back – telling him that when the Sun rises he, his doctor, sees a round disc of fire, somewhat like a guinea, whereas he, Blake, sees an innumerable company of the heavenly host, crying Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty.