Jennifer Rankin: Collected Poems by Judith Rodriguez

Judith Rodriguez deserves a guernsey for this book. It’s one of the best collections to appear in a long while. I think it’s more interesting than its companions in the UQP Selected/Collected series which is now three-all with Shapcott, Taylor and Rodriguez standing as our Living Treasures, and Dransfield, Buckmaster and Rankin among those freed from earthly care. Two chaps and one lady in each category, one observes. There must be logic in it? Poets don’t actually have to die before they get notices. But in the case of Buckmaster and Rankin it will push the reputation up a few notches. I know that’s callous, but you want the truth, don’t you? Putting it another way, hands up all those who can remember Charles Buckmaster’s poetry from a time when he wasn’t past caring? People in Melbourne, please sit down: what does the rest of Australia say? Who can remember Jennifer Rankin’s first collection? Do you recall her ‘Koan’? Ania Walwicz never seemed quite so exciting while ‘Koan’ stayed in mind. And it does stay in mind. There wasn’t much of Rankin’s poetry about until this collection arrived. Her writing was scattered to billy-oh or part-collected in one slim volume from Makar (Ritual Shift, 1976) and a rather fatter effort from Secker and Warburg (Earth Hold, 1978). The first is worth revisiting, the second more so. Why didn’t we hear more from her? Ah, many reasons. A little digression. The Australian poetry ‘scene’ has resembled many things. In earlier times, I tender as models the corroboree, the kangaroo battue, a Boer War Kommando, a gentleman cricketer’s outing, a Sunday School Recital Group, a Stalinist Boy Scouts troop and Bulldog Drummond’s Black Gang. And that’s only the twentieth century. In the late 1960s and through the 1970s, if we are to believe the beer-garden chat of the ageing players, it resembled nothing so much as a football grand final. No prize for nominating the Old Boys’ side. The New Boys had a great scrum. Nigel Roberts, Bob Adamson, and Les Murray in the front row. Second, Rae Desmond Jones and John Forbes. Lock Forward, John Tranter. Props, Alan Wearne and Kris Hemensley (on loan from Another Place). Right wing (or was it left wing?), Robert Gray, Geoff Lehmann and, discovering Ned Kelly knew his father at halftime, the Adelaide reserve Richard Tipping. Half-back, PiO (Honorary Balmain player). Full Back, Tim Thorne. Back line, Geoff Page and whatever you fancy: fill in the names yourself, but don’t go over the class-lines. Oh yes, the football. There, as they say in lawn-bowls, is the rub. Cheryl X. Adamson. Debra Adamson. Jennifer Maiden. Vicki Viidikas. Robyn Ravlich. Antigone Kefala. Jennifer Rankin. I thought you’d never ask. When they weren’t being the football they were being the bucket of oranges. That’s how it looked to me when I popped back to the natal country in 1977 and 1978. You say it’s all changed? Now everyone’s doing aerobics? Exactly so. Where is Jennifer Rankin now that we need her? Jennifer Rankin wrote poetry that had guts. I respond to her writing with utter pleasure. I can’t read her poems in long bursts: they’re dense meditations which repay a lot of attention. Taken in large quantity, Rankin’s poems knock you about. So does forty-year-old Macallan whiskey: better to treat it with respect and let it work on you gradually, so you get some idea of the care that went into the making. What did she write about? Answer: she writes about anything at all. There are lots of things here about nothing at all except that act of perception, and the relation between the perceiver and the perceived. And speculations on what the relationship signifies. It’s too corny to say this is celebratory stuff, but there is a sense of triumph in getting the perception down on paper, ‘developed’ as in a photograph or worked on until the image leaves you fascinated with the process: the image represents the process. There’s quite a conceptual edge in Rankin’s verse: her poems often work through narration to a brilliant epitomising image. The narration is sometimes minimal, an assembly or catalogue of things, including people and events. The technique owes something to montage and collage: a ‘Poem for Hans Arp’ suggests how early Rankin got onto this ‘method’. At the end of ‘Cicada Singing’ comes the crisp encapsulation of fragile wings which ‘tear like a child’s first transfer in the air’. Yves Bonnefoy would have given much for that image. Rankin is preoccupied with poetry, with making the model of the process right. Sometimes she shows traces of influence and at times I wonder, considering all those male poets and artists to whom Rodriguez refers (see for yourself), who was influencing whom. Her ‘Forever the Snake’ could be commentary on Ted Hughes: I wouldn’t say it’s imitation. It makes D.H. Lawrence’s ‘Snake’ look pretty twee. Rankin’s ‘Mound poems’ also seem to be gauging a manner of saying, a style of seeing: we’ve all heard rocks moving but she has heard ‘the cackling of stone’. Such blithely Surrealist effects seem perfectly right. Here is a superb singer. In Rankin’s practice, words can sing as well as make allegations and inquiry. Some phrases are lapidary, like her landscapes: she seems to image herself at once floating (flying) over and moving in and under the earth. The perfect image of the latter, the wombat, occurs in her ‘Mud Hut’ poems: posthumous things, these works convey her bravery, fascination with life and death, and sense of a self ‘not eager to dance to jut out from the rim’ in any sense. ‘I lived for a year’, she says, ‘and it had no number’. Elsewhere, ‘I hang in my white sargasso’. The hitherto uncollected works, which make up the greater part of this book, will expand horizons. Rankin’s cool intelligence is absorbing. I admire her for her essential paring away of clutter to get to real dilemmas involving people. It is good to see pain looked at so hard, to see children and lovers come under such scrutiny while remaining intact – which is not to say ‘appropriated’ or arbitrarily co-opted. Some are superbly honest in their revelation of diffidence. What she lived through at times drove Rankin mad and she examines herself brilliantly in the throes of illness and death. The book’s a marvel.

Michael Sharkey

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