ABR is paywalled, so I am just putting the reviews I had printed there over a decade or so here, for archival purposes, mainly! There are some more here
Prepare the Cabin for Landing by Alan Wearne
by Peter Kenneally •
In Alan Wearne’s new collection, his not-quite-self-appointed role as chronicler of Australian mora et tempores continues, more overtly than before. Prepare the Cabin for Landing pays homage to the Roman satirist Juvenal and his eighteenth-century heir, Samuel Johnson. Both shared what Wearne describes as ‘that combination of bemusement, annoyance, anger and despair to which your country (let alone the country of mankind) can drive you’.
What is satire, anyway? N.S. Gill, an Internet classicist (cue a Wearne grimace), defines Roman satire as ‘personal and subjective, providing insight into the poet and a look (albeit, warped) at social mores’. As good a definition as any, and one that suits Alan Wearne’s book to a T. He seems, though, in his rumbling, rambling, stone-kicking way, more Johnson than Juvenal, and the more he rhymes the more eighteenth century he appears.
‘All these young Australianists’, for example, is a broad, vaudevillian sally aimed at all those intellectually charged artistic tyros that Australia disperses around the world on fellowships or to workshops, conferences, and festivals:
I am Janice Y. Wilde critic and poet / whilst he (my ‘partner’) is the critic, essayist, novelist and naturally / poet Ted Tucker / Euro-conferencing doubtless gives one, though I’m sure you know it, / mind-enhancement, network-enlargement and dollops of let’s-just- / call-it succour.
Plenty there to be going on with (who could he have in mind?), but, as usual with Wearne, it’s just the start. Most of the poem is rhymed in a loose-limbed but exact way, until the middle section, when he calls in the metric equivalent of an airstrike: ‘We reckon you can’t beat a system / that buys time to travel and write, / the advantages bloom so we’ll list ’em / for edification, delight.’ Wearne’s delight is obvious: it’s so cheerful the late Ian Dury could have written it.
He is just as rousing when romping through the lives of North Carlton boomers Ali and Bob, in ‘Dysfunction, North Carlton Style’, who are everything you would expect them to be and have the satirically inevitable turncoat materialist children. Wearne draws quickly and broadly, more in the style of Gillray or Rowlandson than of an argumentative satire: ‘An architect, Bob possessed mighty dimensions: / a proud blooming afro, a grand frontal lobe. / He designed half of North Carlton’s extensions. / She lectured in Ethics, out at La Trobe.’
All this is great fun, and self-aware fun at that: but Wearne works harder and does better when he deals with particulars. The rhyming triplets in ‘The God of Hope’, which recounts in oblique fashion the story of the Nugan Hand Bank in the 1970s, are precisely syncopated, making the eye and ear pause long enough to comprehend a deliriously plausible tale of excess and corruption.
Wearne is present in these opening poems largely by inference, in his style, in the language of the characters: but at the heart of the book, in the forty-odd pages of ‘Operation Hendrickson’, he is right out in the open. In a Wearnian remix, we are once again back in a lowly high school in a suburb in the 1960s, with our protagonist Bob Hendrickson and his motley group of mates, as they fall through life. ‘Nasho’, drugs, pointless, existential deaths, all bounce off Hendrickson’s faintly bathetic anti-heroism, until he and ‘Wearney’, the intellectual of the bunch, with his rag called ‘Proper Gander’, are the last two standing, and Wearney ruefully accepts the role of Henn’s biographer.
For the most part it is unrhymed and, though one feels at times as if the world has stopped forever somewhere between 1963 and 1978, it is all portrayed with complete conviction, as if there’s no hindsight to spoil things. One night Hendrickson meets up with his old schoolmate, Vietnam veteran Johnny:
He gave me one small tab and that night / I was walking north where Punt Road overpasses / Dandenong Road at St Kilda Junction, / pushing myself into the warm spring air as it kept folding around me. I was so pleased, / nothing would stall wherever I went.
This is what is important: not the ills of the world and the vexations of society, but friendship. In the book’s final poem, ‘The Vanity of Australian Wishes’, this is even more evident. It self-consciously shadows Johnson’s ‘The Vanity of Human Wishes’, which, in its turn, imitated the Tenth Satire of Juvenal, and cuts a wide swathe through Just About Everything Since The War, with Hogarthian caricatures popping up at every turn. Is that Hawkey? That’s definitely Howard! A footy player: but which one?
The ‘bemused despair’ Wearne is drawing on feels a bit forced here, almost making a satire of the satire –a postmodern exercise one wouldn’t usually suspect him of undertaking. We soon find out why: around all this he has interwoven the deaths of gangster Alphonse Gangitano and Wearne’s great friend, the poet John Forbes: ‘John at fourteen, intending to be a poet / told himself how that would be the finest way / to spend a lifetime. We are glad he did. / He was our conscience, the voice announcing / ‘Near enough isn’t even remotely near enough.’
Now we have it. All the book’s dialectical clash of rhyme and distemper has been in the service of this very well-tempered truth: Alan Wearne is not a Johnson, but a Boswell, and a fine one too.
Exile: The Lives and Hopes of Werner Pelz by Roger Averill
by Peter Kenneally •
In 1985, at La Trobe University, a sociology undergraduate is in a tutorial with his supervisor. He has chosen to write 6000 words on the role of art and the artist in capitalist societies and his sixty-four-year-old tutor has, rather surprisingly, encouraged him.
In fact, as the student, Roger Averill, comes to know the older man, he realises that ‘for him, my over-reaching was a promising sign’. The two men, one a young Australian, the other, Werner Pelz, a Jewish exile from Nazi Germany, became great friends. This friendship was an extension of the gift, Averill says, that Pelz, a charismatic teacher from a different time and place, offered his students. ‘Unlike most erudite people, Werner seemed as eager to listen as he was to teach. In time, I came to realise that this, his emphasis on listening, was one of the things he was teaching.’
In this same tutorial, Averill is somehow able to divine and restate the older man’s unspoken grief in terms of his own experience. Next page, he is at Werner Pelz’s house in Eltham, eleven years later, grief-stricken, to collect the letters and papers that he will use to piece together his dead friend’s life and to fill in the gaps Werner’s account of himself. These two vignettes, tender and sad, inform the whole book. Averill manages, with great skill, to build around them and within them a rich and detailed account that neither obscures nor exaggerates them.
Born in 1921 to wealthy Jewish parents, Pelz escaped from Nazi Germany, alone, on the last kindertransport in 1939; his parents later died in Auschwitz. He was one of the ‘Dunera boys’ interned in Australia, before returning to England and becoming an Anglican vicar in Lancashire. As an anti-nuclear activist and questioner of the church’s role during the war, his time in the church was strained, but his philosophical and political writings and thoughts gained a wide audience, on radio, television, and in the Guardian newspaper for several years before he moved to Melbourne in 1975 to teach in the sociology department at La Trobe, until his retirement in the mid-1980s.
Flight from persecution and death made Werner Pelz an exile in the most literal sense, but the book’s title implies more than this, for he was a person most often at a remove from something. His oldest friend, Peter Dane, tells Averill at one point that ‘Werner, in spite of his depth and sincerity, lived to some extent, averted from life, and his own life, and his own being’. This separation is summed up in the sad image of his father’s last letter, a short, stark farewell that followed Werner around the world, postmarked Berlin, Switzerland, Tatura, and the Isle of Man.
Pelz’s reaction to the Holocaust was remarkable. Rather than denying the existence of God, he became an Anglican vicar. It is no clearer to us than it seems to have been to him whether this was to build a new future or escape the past. Certainly, his reaction to the news that his sister was still alive was a strange one, blank and unhelpful, as if, Averill suggests, it would have been psychically easier for Werner if she had died, and he could have closed off his past life completely.
Dane’s assessment, and revelations like this, so at odds with the author’s experience of Pelz as teacher and friend, make Werner recede somehow, and he only comes sharply into focus when the two of them are together in the present, or rather, sadly, the recent past. The biography is interwoven with short descriptions of visits to the dying Werner in his nursing home. These are almost unbearably poignant, but they give the historical account, and Averill’s search for Werner, both life and weight.
This is important because at times the quality of the writing, and the singularity of the characters, make Werner’s life seem like a well-constructed fiction. One example is Pelz’s version of Anglicanism: a long way from orthodox, to say the least. He entered into his ministry with a wife who was his intellectual equal and partner, but who was also socially awkward and depressive, with obsessive-compulsive tendencies, and a young son whom neither parent really knew what to do with. In his first service in the small Lancashire mill town of Lostock, Pelz told the congregation of about fifty not to come to church unless they had a real reason to do so. The following Sunday, his son Peter later recalled, ‘there were only three people at the service. Father was thrilled.’
Pelz galvanised his flock, briefly, with drama and anti-nuclear campaigning, but Averill makes no bones about his loss of interest in his congregation once they lapsed back into prosaic Lancastrianism. Writing became more important than ministry, and his ecclesiastical career limped along, ending abruptly in 1964 at an interview for the curacy of a parish in Hampstead. One of the panel felt obliged to ask him, given his questioning approach to religion, whether he believed in God, at which his wife Lotte blurted out, before he could reply, ‘Of course he doesn’t!’
Pelz’s searchingly philosophical books, such as God is No More (1963, co-authored with Lotte), were at the forefront of religious opinion, well received if not widely read, until, in the late 1960s, changing intellectual tastes left his kind of heartfelt, essentialist ruminations behind. Averill conjures this period in English cultural life, from the end of the war until the mid-1960s, with a sure and gentle hand. One can hear in these pages, beyond all the mockery of the years between, a Church of England vicar on the radio discussing a moral issue, saying something of consequence – and not sounding at all like Alan Bennett.
Averill is a constant but discreet presence throughout the book, as he meets and gets to know Pelz’s friends and family, visits his old home in Berlin, and tries to work out what his discoveries are telling him, if anything, about Werner, and where the boundaries of biographical decency lie. The prose is as clear as Orwell’s pane of glass, though he knows how to use a good anecdote, and the book flows evenly, deeply through Werner’s life.
As Pelz’s influence faded in England and his last collaboration with Lotte, in 1969, I Am Adolf Hitler, purporting to be the last thoughts of the doomed Führer, was another worthy failure, his life shifted to a different gear. Especially in the last years in Australia, everyday sorrows outweighed existential questions: divorce, guilt, undeniable guilt, the loss of the women he loved.
Averill’s quest for the truth about Werner Pelz begins with questions: Can you really understand someone without knowing much of their past? What happens when you do know more? ‘Might I know more, yet understand less?’ he asks, and in the spirit of his beloved teacher and friend he has no answer, except perhaps the one that Werner gave in a radio interview not long before he died: the most important thing is simply to go on thinking.
Vanessa Page ‘Confessional Box’
by Peter Kenneally •
It’s simple. A young woman, her love for her partner slipping away, looks at their suburb, and him, and their relationship, and writes bronze-clad poetry about it. Then she takes to the bush, describing its towns and picking at its history with the same clear eye she uses to examine her lost love. She combines a photographic exactness with a resounding turn of phrase and an ability to use a refrain just enough and no more.
People often say of a child that they are ‘an old soul’. At the risk of patronising Vanessa Page, author of this adamantine, lyrical first collection, she has ‘an old eye’, which she trains on her experience and surroundings. In five lines in ‘Sanctuary’ she does everything that Sappho does: elsewhere, many lines echo Brecht’s mimetic gestures. None of this feels deliberate, and it is wonderfully encouraging to find a young Australian poet who can traverse and claim terrains so apparently foreign and unforgiving.
Brett Dionysius, launching this book, said that Page had ‘foregone 20 years of writing juvenilia to spring from the forehead of the Queensland poetry scene as a fully-fledged post-Athena poet’. He was almost right, except that in the final section, with new love and a guarded happiness in play, Page lets her Cyprian rigour slip. It may simply be that sadness is a more contemplative state than happiness – in the same way that pessimists are said to be those who see the world most clearly – but the book ends on an artless, breathy note, and now the verse has a more obviously youthful feel to it. The poet’s attention, her language, undergo a carefree diffusion, but, after so much control and clarity, acquired at such cost for our benefit, we should take pleasure in it, as she does.
Toby Davidson, ‘Beast Language’
by Peter Kenneally •
‘Poetry is a long apprenticeship,’ says Toby Davidson at the start of his first collection. He is certainly a poet who has mastered far more than the basics. Beast Language is only seventy-seven pages long, but feels far more substantial. Davidson has travelled a long way: from west coast to east, from novice to scholar, and the book has much of this movement in it.
It is not unusual to find this in Australian poetry, or to find mythical and spiritual elements everywhere, mirage-like, in the landscape: but Davidson takes it to a new level. The sequence ‘Religion: Road’ takes us from oil-refinery ugly in Kwinana, Western Australia through Canberra, Melbourne, and up the Hume to Sydney, taking in St Augustine, Homer, and Egyptian ritual, lightly and energetically.
‘To the Guide’, for instance, takes Homeric hymns, packs them into a car, and takes them on a wild ride, ‘nocturnes nitrogen-furious / in the rear view, log trucks punching through hairpin and moss / where you were a ute, tail-lit serotonin in cloying like fence fog / yet single-minded’. Elsewhere the brooding elemental aspect is put to gentler use in a lovely poem for his grandfather, ‘The News’, that radically recasts Roy Harper’s elegiac song ‘When an Old Cricketer Leaves the Crease’.
Importantly, he also has the ability, the wit, and the heart to be able to aerate all this with simple, observed pieces like ‘Skyshow’, in which bogans frolic at the Australia Day fireworks in Perth, or with a lyrical view of his baby nephew in ‘Three Months Old’.
But that’s not all. Nestling in the book is something vanishingly rare: a perfect villanelle. ‘The internet came,’ it begins, ‘created by porn / and unto porn did it go, / the next occupation from the oldest born’. But for us, lasting delight.
Australian Love Poems 2013 edited by Mark Tredinnick
by Peter Kenneally •
Some things just don’t appear to go together, unless you are good at puzzles. A fox, a goose, and a bag of beans, for instance; or maybe a wolf, a goat, and a cabbage. Then there are Australia, love, and poetry. Australians and poetry can’t be left alone together, can they, and don’t expressions of love lose something when uttered out of the side of the mouth?
Donna Ward, publisher of Australian Love Poems, and Mark Tredinnick, its editor, reject both propositions. Part of the problem, Tredinnick writes in his introduction, is that ‘there has been a good deal more head than heart in Australian poetry for a while, a good deal more mind than body, more wit than wisdom’. This project, he suggests, allowed poets to bring forth work they might previously have felt wasn’t quite acceptable in the rarefied world of poetry publishing.
He is right, of course, up to a point. It is true that in many a fine but challenging poetry volume it is the moments of unmistakable emotion that provide a footing and a sense of direction for the reader. This collection, so unambiguous in its concerns, is almost unsettling, because you know in advance what every single poem is about. Exactly what aspect of love a given poem sees, and from which cultural or personal slant, takes longer to divine, but the book is free of the rudderlessness that afflicts so many anthologies, and yet is fabulously various. Tredinnick deserves great credit for this, and for his inspired idea to use lines from within poems as titles for the various sections (‘You and I sitting out the world’; ‘I’ve been drunk with you for millennia’). Such a simple notion, but it makes the book into a creation of the poems, and it is almost a sensual moment when you come across such a line within its poem.
Naturally, even inevitably, the sections deal with falling in love, passion, partnership, unfaithfulness, loss, grief, more or less in that order. Nearly all books of love poetry do – Dorothy Porter’s posthumous Love Poems being the gold standard – and it would be perverse not to. So Tredinnick’s selection gets off to a vibrant start, full of joyful play and a kind of desperation, as in Jodie Lee Martin’s ‘Love Affair’: ‘I’m having a love affair with my neighbour / but I don’t think she knows / I fondle her misdirected mail / And redeliver it with pleasure and / A dash of scented oil.’
‘…if you want to get close to love, analyse it, capture it, only poetry will serve.’
However, because poets take poetry (and/or love and/or themselves) entirely seriously, it’s not a romantic collection, but moves with a deliberate, antique passion, even when aroused, ‘… when my tugging oil-slick fist / has you tumescent and butting at my lips; / when every nerve’s erect as Spinifex / and our skins fluoresce like sand at dawn / on the kind of beach you find up north- / but I digress / the way we do in sex / where the metaphors overlap and mix.’ Fearless, shameless, knowing, those lines from Lisa Jacobson sum up poetry’s challenge – how much are you prepared to see? Brecht, in his last poem, wrote: ‘when I say what things are like, people’s hearts should be torn in two.’ So they should, and Australian Love Poems, rather surprisingly, says what things are like. There is some dissembling – rather a lot of classical and historical camouflage, a few Robert Herrick/Andrew Marvell moments, but mostly a clear, probing gaze, falling on contentment or abandonment, possession or loss.
One thing is clear from this book: if you want to get close to love, analyse it, capture it, only poetry will serve. Both Tredinnick and Ward, in writing about the book, flounder prosaically around the topic of love and poetry, and say various things about both that didn’t need saying and aren’t confirmed in any of the actual poems. There is also an outbreak of wishful thinking about spreading poetry ‘far beyond poetry’s borders’, and a desire for the book to be a resource of ‘Australian love’ material for when people get married, or someone dies, and a poem is felt necessary. Ward has said that she wanted ‘to create books that people could turn to when they are in love and lost for words and want an Australian voice to guide them’. This is either a noble aim or a deeply depressing one – I cannot tell which – and raises the ghastly question of how Australian the poetry in the book is and what ‘Australian love’ means. Thankfully, such questions are always rhetorical.
These are minor annoyances, though. What matters is that visually the book is elegant, simple, and apt, and the poems generously set; that the use of different verse forms constantly surprises, and hardly ever goes astray or becomes heavy-footed; that the array of contexts and metaphors for love is endless. There is, towards the end of the book, a lingering sadness, as everyone seems to die, leave, or lose their love, and poetry has its own, self-fulfilling solutions: ‘Love, when rain has gathered / when rain is falling, think of me and whisper / nothing but rhymes for poems that don’t exist’ (Philip A. Ellis). But the sadness is real: it isn’t a Four-Weddings-and-a-Funeral-Auden-poem confection, and the emotion in it is exactly the same as in the wanting, wooing, fucking, settling, sharing, befriending poems. You fall in love with someone; you watch them leave, or you leave; you watch them die; life goes on: that is what things are like.
Bowra
by Peter Kenneally •
Australia is one of the most urbanised and docile societies on earth, but its cities are hemmed in by a vast, poetry-laden hinterland. There is Kinsella in the west, Adamson on the Hawkesbury, and, in this book, the western Queensland of B.R. Dionysius. No one ever seems to be matter of fact about the landscape in Australia. It is politically charged, or Gothic, or, most often, mythopoeic. Dionysius’s book is all of these but mostly mythic: it is a murky, flooded, uninsurable world that he depicts, with the Bremer River as its resident deity.
It is an archaic enterprise in some ways: sonnet after sonnet, laid out, equally weighted like so many sandbags, with the capitalisation at the start of each line adding to the weight. The Bremer River, in ‘A Strong Brown God’, tells us its story, a kind of seduction by European settlers that becomes a sour marriage, full of vengeful floods and drownings. There is a definite undertow, and Dionysius makes a great character of the river: not wise, really, just old and sick of humanity: ‘But I wait for the day my real father surfaces again, when / His tide washes over your homes & I join eternally within. / His long navy cloak will wrap around me, my brown robe will soak into his salty dye.’
Later, Dionysius shows us the river and urban man in full conflict, from the human side in ‘Ghouls’, with its a marvellous mixture of rubbish, silt, and social observation. Throughout, Dionysius’s language plays at the very edge of its capacity, with quite a few unwieldy, distracting similes and misjudged solemnities. But his metaphors are something else: and the final poem sequence, ‘Cicada’ employs a sustained, intricate metaphor that takes the book somewhere else entirely, drily and unforgettably.
Ephemeral Waters by Kate Middleton
by Peter Kenneally •
December 2013–January 2014, no. 357
‘As if cuffed by the ear, the Colorado river pulled me onward.’ The current that seized Kate Middleton can be felt throughout Ephemeral Waters,as she takes us from the headwaters of the Colorado, through the Grand Canyon, over the Hoover Dam, until the great river, all its water plundered along the way, expires a hundred miles from the sea. The fate that the ‘mighty Murray’ has barely avoided is accepted for the Colorado, with a few crocodile tears, because all the water stays in the United States, while the dried up ex-river is in Mexico.
The tamed, drained Colorado is in danger north of the border, too, and it was hearing an Australian oceanographer in Washington say that the river has ‘a guillotine hanging over her at every dam, every diversion’ that made the homesick Australian want to explore it poetically, to tell its story, learn its history. ‘I found,’ she writes, ‘that the idea of this great river pushing through an arid landscape became a dream, a substitute homeland.’
Middleton flows with the Colorado across five states, and at every point exploration, myth-making, wildlife, tourists, locals, geology, and an undeclared and unpretentious psycho-geography bubble along together in a stream of verse that is sometimes silty, sometimes clear, but always unified. If Ephemeral Waters had been written in prose, it would have been a discursive, philosophical, charming doorstop, of the kind with which we are perhaps too familiar. The content, the different voices, the amount of information conveyed so lightly do give it the peregrinatory feel of a work such as W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn (1995),while with its sheer weight of Americana it rivals Jonathan Raban’s epic Mississippi journey in Old Glory (1981).
Thankfully, it is a book of poetry, one that clings to its subject like a rafter on a Colorado rapid. In one marvellously dramatic section, we tumble along, with John Wesley Powell’s expedition – the first to navigate the Grand Canyon – and emerge smashed but triumphant. We watch a giant condor glide through the canyon and overhear a conversation between tourists, straining to see the river from above. This kind of mélange would seem too artful in prose, but in Kate Middleton’s poetry it is effortless and natural.
Although she travelled along its whole length, she says ‘I have lived with the river much more in imagination than in reality’, and thus draws in the ideas others have had of the river, and of the West – ideas we all share, courtesy of Hollywood and of innumerable television documentaries. In John Ford’s Rio Grande,for instance, ‘the opening reel shows us horses / easing their black and white bodies / into the waters, muddy and green // of not the Rio Grande – no – / – they’re pushing their bulk / into the silt-laden, untamable Rio Colorado’.
At times, the book has very much the look and feel of other poetic explorations of American legend: Michael Ondaatje’s Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970),or Paulette Jiles’s astonishing Jesse James Poems (1988). John Wayne strides by; Charlton Heston, climbing out of his crashed rocket ship, is far from New York, in Lake Powell, on the Colorado above the Glen Canyon Dam.
Despite, or even because of, all the engineering and the thousands upon thousands of tons of concrete restraining and cajoling the river, the Colorado is fading. The massive Lake Mead, sitting behind the heroic Hoover Dam, gets lower every year. In one of the book’s most affecting sequences, the town of St Thomas (submerged by dam waters in 1938, its last stubborn inhabitant stepping from his front porch into a boat and rowing away) has re-emerged, a ghost town of foundations and vague shapes. Nearby, the bathos of Las Vegas, and the river below the dam declines into canalised utility.
There are so many names and places that it can be hard to keep track, though the book is self-annotated; with a glance at the margin we always know where we are, what nature has wrought, or if someone has spoken. The pages are so complete a landscape that to quote from them would hardly do them justice; better to just roll through them, skirting the typographical boulders and eddies. As Philip Glass says of Einstein on the Beach, the work teaches you how to read it. Wikipedia and Google maps help the reader to make sense of the scale, and one interlude, at the toxic, unnatural Salton Sea, puts the reader at the mouth of a fabulous rabbit hole that’s well worth diving into.
There is always more to find out, always another tributary to explore, but as Middleton says: ‘There are many more conversations I have not had, that I wish I could have had, and many things I have experienced, read, heard, imagined that I could not include here. No matter. This is the poem that could be written.’
No matter. So it goes. These are the poet’s refreshingly laconic judgements on the genesis of her work, and they fit in with the frontier, with the desert life all around her in bones, rocks, and people, as well as being typically Australian, if that is what you want it to be.
The Best Australian Poems 2013 edited by Lisa Gorton & Now You Shall Know by Hunter Writers Centre
by Peter Kenneally •
The end of the year tends to bring a small and exquisitely formed avalanche of Australian poetry, including Best Poems from Black Inc., Best Poetry from the University of Queensland Press, and the Newcastle Poetry Prize anthology. Sadly UQP gave up the ghost with its annual after 2009, but we have already had Australian Love Poems.
Black Inc. shows no signs of abandoning Best Poems: in fact it goes from strength to strength. It has had a run of editors lately who have made each iteration distinctive and differently weighted: Peter Rose, Robert Adamson, John Tranter, and now Lisa Gorton. Gorton, in her introduction, says that ‘Poetry, whose forms close in time, is a kind of writing that justifies the printed book – an artefact.’ That being the case, Best Poems has, since last year, had a vibrant new design that gives it a real identity as an annual object. On the shelf it is like that other regular pleasure, the Bedside Guardian, while inside the poems are beautifully set in a clear font on crisp creamy paper, and easily scanned and investigated.
This may seem superficial – surely the quality of the verse is the main thing? – but on opening Now You Shall Know,this year’s Newcastle anthology, it is clear why design matters. Faint type, on cheap paper with a grey tinge, almost defies the eye. The poetry just seems to be dumped on to the page. The contrast is shocking, and also of course unfair. Best Poems is produced by a commercial publisher which values design highly and is prepared to support it (and for the moment can afford to).
Now You Shall Know, on the other hand, is a prize anthology, published by the Hunter Writers Centre: all their money goes, rightly, to help writers, prize winners and otherwise. They simply don’t have the resources to produce typographic eye candy. But previous anthologies have been neutral, plain, and legible. Something seems to have gone amiss this year.
Best Poems has an élan, almost a swagger, that’s invigorating. There are newish faces here, but what’s perhaps most enjoyable is the way the seasoned players step up on the stand and show that they have their chops. John Kinsella, writing a poem while a bushfire approaches, does narrative and literary reference as only he can: ‘The breeze blows / from the east, but is ambivalent and could swing / about. There are no semantics in this. And Paul Auster / is right where William (the lumberman) Bronk was wrong: / the poem doesn’t happen in words, but “between seeing / the thing and making it into a word.”’
Jennifer Maiden offers up a riff on Frank O’Hara that plays with that ‘Forbes said to me and Tranter said’ mode that can be infuriating, but here is nostalgic and spirited. When a poet is enjoying herself as much as Maiden is here, and so surefootedly, there is hardly any more pleasure to be had from verse.
More soberingly, Clive James, in the face of death, abandons all his orotund autodidact armour to be heartbreakingly honest: ‘All of my life I put my labour first, / I made my mark, but left no time between / The things achieved, so, at my heedless worst, / With no life, there was nothing I could mean / But now I have slowed down. I breathe the air / As if there were not much more of it there.’
Best Poems regularly reminds you of those poets whom you have missed during the year, includingKen Bolton, Peter Bakowski, and π.O.Poets that one feels should be there this year are there – Kate Middleton, Toby Fitch, Michael Farrell, Pam Brown. However subjective this may be, it does give the ‘best poems’ aspect more weight.Gorton takes the eloquent-shrug approach to the unanswerable question: ‘I hope the experience of reading this anthology will bring into question how far those abstractions – “best”, “Australian”, “2013” – exist in fact, and what end they serve as one thinks about the poems collected here.’ Although, sadly, Gorton cannot be in this anthology, her spirit is. The poems are set out alphabetically ‘to bring home the ritual and music of language, always more at play in poetry than in prose’.
Gorton looked for poems that seemed to her ‘surprising, generative, memorable’, and notes that after all the ‘transactions with possibility’ involved in writing a poem, some seem to ‘hold like an electric charge the trace of all those forfeited possibilities’. That is the feeling her anthology generates, and by and large it is a modern, metropolitan one, knowing and reflexive.
Now You Shall Know is utterly different. Putting aside its aesthetic failings (as one owes it to the poets to do), it still has a character all its own. For one thing, as a competition collection, it tends to longer poems, as the poets have stretched out toward the word limit, and also, one feels, toward the discovery of something rather than the display of something. It’s not always so, but this year the result is a biographical, familial, anti-rhapsody of a book. Parents die (as in the winning title poem by Jennifer Compton), partners lapse into dementia, lives go by, and are remembered, amid landscapes that refuse to be fully known. Tony Hancock dies in his hotel room in Sydney.
The anthology is remarkably unified, despite the competition not having a defined theme. The judges do say that ‘playfulness can have its own wisdom and can dance with profundity’, but if there is play here it is very muted. John Jenkins’s ‘Diary of a Missing Poem’ does its best to be picaresque and personifying, but rings flat, while John A. Scott’s poetic recasting of ‘Hancock’s Last Half Hour’ would need a lot more play and invention to justify its existence than is on offer.
However, in these poems there is always the land and family, and no time or need, in the end, for playful display. Mark Crittenden’s ‘Red Soil Elegies’ have all the intelligence required to dazzle, but instead meditate ideas into stillness. The poet knows his place, in every sense: ‘I have been out into the carbon-black night, / trusting my way from page / to wire barbs. Mostly I find myself // a little afraid, enlarged upon the landscape, / dwarfed at first light. / I travel less and less, preferring // local roads. Imagination’s international. / A vast itinerary awaits me at the desk. / At home, my family / are the earthwire and fire inside my words.’
This feeling has echoes throughout the collection. Third-prize winner Mark Tredinnick, as ever, fuses rural life with culture and intellect by sheer force of will, and defies the sadness such an enterprise inevitably brings with it. ‘Sorrow is happiness grown wise / after its own event,’ he says, from his tractor, with Debussy in the background.
Everything seems to be getting its eulogy in this anthology: a parent dying; a partner losing memory and life; family life and freedom from it. Even writing, in Dylan Gorman’s ‘Seasonal Work’, is given its threnody: ‘The nib of my fountain pen has developed a bias, an edge / worn down over the years by the pressure I bring to bear on paper. / This morning I am aware of the sound it makes.’
Now You Shall Know seems to exist far from the bright metropolis, in a quiet valley where there is still an unrecorded folk tradition, its songs full of death and strange companions. It tends towards a low drone, but the keening and the scrape of discordance, once heard, are there all the time, even back in the well-dressed world of Best Poems, and give that world a whole new tuning.
The glorious mess of Sydney Road
by Peter Kenneally •
Melbourne often seems an indeterminate place, with one flat suburb leaching into another. Writers tend to use place as local colour, the places themselves having little to say, in most cases. Kevin Brophy is an exception, and, especially in this ‘new and selected’ collection, a revelatory one. John Leonard have done great work in putting so many of Brophy’s poems back into print, alongside new work. (For typography buffs, ‘Walking,’ also has a superb cover, looking at which has exactly the same effect as reading the poetry.)
Brophy has lived his life, for the most part, in a corridor barely ten kilometres long, stretching from unlovely Coburg in Melbourne’s inner north, through Brunswick to the leafy precincts of Melbourne University. It is a world that inhabits his poetry, and the poetry in turn beats its bounds and treads its laneways, by turns discovering and adding layers of meaning. It is also, in his work, strangely timeless, so that it is a surprise to realise that the earliest poems here date from 1992 – it all feels much older.
This is partly because Brophy reaches back through time via his family, who seem even more rooted in the Coburg dustiness than he is, and partly because his vocation as a poet seems so old-fashioned. In an early poem, ‘Why I became a poet’, he is the bookish son, the failed priest, the puzzled parent. In other hands this might have been clichéd, but here is a brave attempt to explain the inexplicable. ‘Letters black as priests press themselves against pages stripped from trees. I order and reorder the words to find the patterns that recall a miracle.’
In later poems, the poet is more worldly – metaphorical and metaphysical, to be sure, but less god-bothered. Death, dying, the dead are increasingly present, but unreligiously, in the same way that poetry is, in unexpected scenarios. So the dead wake, in their suburban way, as ‘they come down the middle of the road / to the railway station at the end / and there they flick their hands at shadows. / Flies drift through them.’
Flies drift through them. The book is filled with arresting moments like that. Clever conceits usually deepen, rather like Larkin’s continental shelf, but without the misery. Brophy knows why he is a poet now, but still asks, ruminatively, what a poem is for, and what it is like. An unoccupied house perhaps, he suggests in ‘Difficult’: ‘The lived in emptiness of every room / makes it hard to choose a reader for this poem. / No meal has been prepared and no money has been left / in an envelope with your name on it.’
Shades of Gil Scott-Heron there, and much of Brophy’s poetry has a declamatory rhythm to it that a beat, were he that kind of poet, would naturally cleave to. There is an increasing force as the years go by, so that in a recent ‘love poem’, two all-too-recognisable but wondrous teenagers lie on a beach, the girl with the future in her eyes ‘like fresh gum in her mouth, like a shirt begging to be taken off. While the boy, the boy is an old story with its own new beginning. He drove her here past the dead dog dumped at the end of the road.’
‘Brophy always finds the blue note that prevents any stiffness creeping in.’
‘Dead Dog Dumped’ is a prose poem, from the new collection, Walking, and echoes those in Radar (2012), hiscollaboration with Nathan Curnow. Brophy’s prose poems are surreal, but only up to a point, and without the distancing, faux-elegant strangeness prose poetry often affects. Brophy always finds the blue note that prevents any stiffness creeping in. For example, in ‘Australian Street, Summer’, nature is reclaiming the suburbs, as a resident watches, but then, in the relentless blue of the afternoon, ‘He wished he had a job to go to. No one should have to witness this kind of transformation in their own street. What had the council been thinking?’
Radar acts as a kind of hinge in this collection, as if Brophy’s imagination has since then been redirected, distilled. His parents are, in Walking, present as they have always been, but more conditionally: ‘At 86 and 91 they are still together / more or less / and greet me at the door / as if I am the punch line to a joke / they were just recalling.’ Love and desire are much more intense and direct, and Brophy is abroad more, not quite knowing what to make of it all. In ‘London’, he writes of ‘puzzled archaeologists / who might as well be poets / for all they know about the past’.
But through this increasingly contingent world the glorious mess of Sydney Road still runs, connecting everything. In 1992, ‘when my nephew visits from Doncaster / he asks me why there is so much broken glass on my footpaths. / “This is Brunswick,” I tell him, / where life is as fine as rail yard dust.’ In 2013, ‘We walk to wooden steps above the rail track, / stand with broken glass, abandoned bottles’, while ‘just behind Brunswick, as it always does, the old sun rolls /into that dark slot in the far horizon’. The hipsters may come and go, but the broken glass and the sun are forever.
Everyman
by Peter Kenneally •
Seeking perfection or ‘enlightenment’ requires a monastic devotion to the life of the spirit and a rejection of material comforts. Judith Beveridge’s writings about the young Buddha and his cousin Devadatta bring out all the intricacies and contradictions inherent in such a quest.
This new volume, Devadatta’s Poems, holds up a kind of mirror to ‘Between the Palace and the Bodhi Tree’, the middle section of her book Wolf Notes (2003), which depicted Siddhārtha Gautama’s travels and contemplations before he became the Buddha. The earlier work is marked by its quiet determination, matching Siddhārtha’s, to look precisely, without wanting, and to be simply an existence among all the others.
Beveridge seemed to share the belief that there is such a thing as enlightenment and that Siddhārtha found it, which gave those earlier poems an almost aristocratic clarity and certainty. Being the son of a king and born to rule, Siddhārtha was calm and sure of his power throughout ‘Bodhi Tree’, even when that power was renounced.
For lesser mortals, life is altogether more complicated, and Siddhārtha’s cousin Devadatta is, in this book, marvellously and emphatically lesser. He joins the new Buddhist order, but is in every way unsuited to it. Like a disgruntled infantryman, he revels in and yet complains about the discomfort, the lack of food, the peasants: ‘I want to tell these miserable, skinflint, pinch-fisted folk / to stop tossing us husks, rinds, cores, thorns, rats’ tails …’ He is, it seems, only a monk in the first place because he is jealous and power hungry: ‘… what I’ll never do, is stop planning / how to run Buddha out of his tidy squat, how to get / the townsfolk and monks to curse him from his top-knot / down. Ah, I can almost smell it in the air now – / that scent when something sweet moulders and rots.’
At times Devadatta approaches the heightened awareness and humility of Siddhārtha’s ruminations, but for the most part his gloriously truculent verses reveal a man hopelessly trying, for all the wrong reasons, to be something he is not. Ascetic he certainly is not: he spends an inordinate amount of time engrossed in lubricious daydreams about Siddhārtha’s wife, Yasodharā. He even exhausts himself: ‘I sigh, look away. / I’m weary of trying to turn everything into a fantasy; // weary of trying to set down my load and staring into / the abyss.’
The Buddha, of course, was utterly singular, and Beveridge, in writing about his quest, had to imagine what that experience might be like and somehow convey that singularity. The experience for the reader in ‘Bodhi Tree’ is of being taken outside and beyond oneself; it is slightly icy, even at its most limpid and beautiful.
Devadatta is an everyman, and so the poems are more rambunctious and discursive. It is actually all rather good fun. He is recognisable and unchanging – there must have been Devadattas in every monastery in medieval Europe, in every 1960s commune. Judas Iscariot. Salieri. It is an old story, possibly the oldest. And universal: Devadatta even has a Wile E. Coyote moment as he attempts to drop a huge boulder on the Buddha, and fails yet again.
Interestingly, though, the cause of Devadatta’s angst is not really power or inadequacy, but a woman. He and Siddhārtha, in this version of events, competed in a test of arms for Yasodharā’s hand. Not only did Siddhārtha win, but infuriatingly, he won effortlessly, as a sort of add-on to being Ghandian and nobly Christ-like (the template fits anywhere you place it).
Yasodharā, perhaps surprisingly, has the traditional role in both sequences, that of absent desire object. For Siddhārtha it is loss, as his abiding love for his wife pulls at his resolve, is acknowledged, and, with sadness, placed to one side again. ‘Yasodharā, when your image appears, / I vow with all beings / to shatter the mirror / and bury the pieces with care.’
For Devadatta there is endless defeat, mostly self-inflicted, and frustration. His hopeless position is portrayed in ‘Tailspin’, as the lines turn over and around on themselves, the changes hardly perceptible: ‘I sit and muse on Yasodharā, / I smell her hair, her scent of jasmine. I want / to hear the Buddha’s doctrines. I want to say my prayers / and mantras, but I smell her hair, her scent of jasmine. I sway / about like a flute-charmed cobra, but my head aches, my legs and / my back again.’
It is hard not to feel a certain sympathy for Devadatta. He is like that famous Athenian citizen who, Plutarch says, asked Aristides the Just to write ‘Aristides’ on his ostrakon so that he could vote to banish him, simply because he was sick of hearing about how great and just he was. Beveridge herself is quite like one of those classical historians: ‘I have used a great deal of poetic licence, inventing characters and scenarios, and at times being deliberately historic-ally inaccurate. I have interpreted the character of Devadatta through my own lens. This sequence has been highly fictionalised and dramatized.’
This sensual, supercharged book crackles and teems with all the licence, sensation, and desire, that we, the unenlightened, enjoy, and with Judith Beveridge’s delight in Devadatta. ‘All they’ll think about / will be that Devadatta has come back and about how / their lives, at last, feel as precious as silk / pulled through a ring.’
Indeed.
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