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Australian Poetry

When I was a student, the professor used to say that Australian literature had no intellectual content. That was the way professors spoke back then. He might have had A.B. ‘Banjo’ Paterson in mind; Paterson was an enormously popular writer, who didn’t let difficult ideas get in the way. Paterson is the sort of writer who goes straight to the sentimental core of his material. He does not chase after profundities or wrestle with conceptual difficulties.

Paterson could not care less about professorial pursed lips and all that. When, in 1895, his first volume, The Man from Snowy River, and Other Poems, was published, it sold out within a week. Paterson was a sensation, both here and abroad. The Times enthused, and Rudyard Kipling, with whom Paterson was immediately compared, congratulated Angus & Robertson, the publishers.

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The publication of John Kinsella’s The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry is a major event in Australian poetry. It offers a powerful, large-scale vision of Australia and its poetry. Reading Kinsella’s anthology during the great southern heat-wave of 2009 (before the week of Black Saturday), my understanding of both things became coloured by their accidental intersection. On the second night of the heatwave, Australian poetry buzzing in my head, I took my dog outside for his usual night-time wander around the front yard. The suburban streets were deserted, as they had been in the scorching heat of the day. But at night, this desertion, coupled with the unusual nocturnal heat, gave the suburb an uncanny quality, simultaneously familiar and strange. The only human sounds were the ghostly hum of air conditioners and, in the distance, the mournful noise of someone bringing in a wheelie bin.

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The Best Australian Poems 2008 edited by Peter Rose & The Best Australian Poetry 2008 edited by David Brooks

by
December 2008–January 2009, no. 307

A poet friend, getting wind that I was reviewing the two latest ‘Bests’ and wishing to satirise the reviewing platitudes that sometimes greet the arrival of such anthologies, offered the following advice: ‘Remember to say that both collections are a welcome addition to the literary landscape and that both editors have included some welcome new voices in Australian poetry.’ Peter Rose’s The Best Australian Poems 2008 and David Brooks’s The Best Australian Poetry 2008 provide commendable surveys of a year in Australian poetry. Both include ‘new voices’ as well as sonorous old ones. Variations in quality inevitably occur, but many of the ‘new’ offerings are excellent and few, if any, are duds. This can only be welcomed.

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Everyone seems to be writing about ‘light’ at the moment. It is currently an all-purpose metaphor, the intangible symbol for all intangibles: mental, physical and emotional. With Brook Emery, it is far more precise. The ‘Uncommon Light’ of Emery’s title poem comes from St Augustine, and ideas of ‘common’ and ‘uncommon’ light recur throughout the poems, but are re-defined, flipped, turned and re-examined throughout this thoughtful and sustained book.

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John Jenkins (especially in his collaborations with Ken Bolton) is normally thought of as an ‘experimental’ poet, but in Growing up with Mr Menzies he is on more traditional ground. Born in 1949 in Melbourne, Jenkins has created the fictional character Felix Hayes, who was also born in 1949 in Melbourne. In a series of poems, he traces Felix’s life from birth through to early adolescence. Rather neatly, this period of his life fits with the so-called ‘Menzies era’; Robert Menzies returned to power in 1949 and left it (voluntarily) in 1966. It is thus the parallel story of two characters, one large and looming, the other small but getting bigger.

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Blue Dog, the Journal of the Australian Poetry Centre, has a democratic approach to Australian poetry. Submissions are judged anonymously by a team of editors from each state and territory. The journal, as the two reviews of small-press publications reveal, shows no preference for big names. The results, however, are mixed.

Highlights include Andy Jackson’s ‘Severance’, which provides a measured expression of nostalgia. The poem reflects on a childhood marked by sexual misadventure – ‘You and I were the first in our group to buy porn, / though it took us two attempts – we’d assumed Playboy / couldn’t cost much more than TV Week. Honestly, / it was the soft light palming pale curves / that drew us, not the shock of shallow gynaecology’ – and loss – ‘Years before, / our legs patterned with gum tree shadows, / we sat on either end of a bench, waiting for your mum / to come again to comfort you in your homesickness’.

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From his first book Canticles on the Skin (1970) to his twelfth, The Goldfinches of Baghdad (2006), Robert Adamson’s poetry has undergone many transformations, but The Golden Bird, his new and rather large Selected Poems, modifies or disguises those changes by arranging the poems thematically, not chronologically, except for the last section, which contains new poems. Many of Adamson’s early themes have remained throughout his career. Strangely, the sharply witty ‘Sonnets to be Written from Prison’ (‘If I was in solitary I could dream – a fashionable bore, / writing books on drugs, birds or revolution’), from his third book Swamp Riddles (1974), are excluded along with other fine poems, such as ‘Sibyl’ and ‘The Thoughtless Shore’, his elegy to Michael Dransfield, as well as the chapbook Theatre (1974), a response to Yves Bonnefoy’s work of that name.

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There are times when I read a book that reinvigorates important questions for me – such as how language carries and creates meaning, and what, after all, is the function and force of poetry. Usually, such a book is a creative work and I like to imagine that the first readers of volumes by George Herbert or John Donne responded with such questions – to poetry that consistently registered a persuasive complexity and which, while emotionally restrained, carried a pithy emotional charge.

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There’s a sleechy smell here, grey frogs on the bank
like slurried earth, rotund toads hopping across lily pads,
grunting like sultans trying out cushions. Fish mouth
the surface with so many unsinkable O’s, and the larval

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She trawls through reams of paper pinned in files,
stacked on shelves, heaved into the corners
of this study and other, larger rooms;
wades through spilling, perforated sheets
of printed data she cannot decipher
that concertina on the wooden floor,
stained with jam, sprinkled with old crumbs
and marked with tags that indicate some pattern
to his vanished thought – pained, slow research
that saw two hundred articles appear,
three or four a year, in august journals.
She knows the faintly sour smell of absence
that rooms so often hold after a death –
even a lonely life sweetens the air –
how furniture seems fixed when someone dies

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