Antechinus by A.D. Hope

The acknowledgements included in the Preface to this collection name some of the most common places for poetry to be published in Australia, but by chance few of these poems seem to me familiar. That of course makes it more interesting to see them individually; and also makes the whole thing easier to see at large. The first thing to say, then, I suppose, is that this does not offer itself as a unified collection. As Hope explains, instead of being arranged chronologically, it falls into four groupings. The first and third of these might very well have gone together, the first being distinguished merely as the set of poems printed by a small press with illustrations by Arthur Boyd: it is therefore allowed to include two poems, ‘Country Places’ and ‘Hay Fever’, from Hope’s last Angus & Robertson volume, Late Pickings (I shall say something about this later). Like this section, ‘The Drifting Continent’, the third, ‘The People of the Pale’, consists of what we might safely call Hope originals. The second and fourth sections of the book are more problematical. Of ‘Poems from Pausanias’, Hope says in his Preface that they represent ‘my part in a Sunday evening radio program, planned, written and performed jointly with Rosemary Dobson’, and out of context it is not clear what these poems are for or about. This might be clearer of course to readers of Pausanias, whom I take to be The Oxford Classical Dictionary’s traveller and geographer of the second century AD. Indeed, Hope’s notes (never advertised in the text, and generally quite inadequate) make it clear that we can read Pausanias in a Penguin translation by Peter Levi; I haven’t done this, and I shall say nothing more about these poems except, later, to remark very briefly on the poetic style Hope thinks appropriate for them. I shall say equally little about the fourth section, ‘Homage to Akhmatovna’, though here the case is a little clearer: as Hope makes plain, he is reliant largely on a biography of Akhmatovna by Amanda Haight, to whom the whole sequence is dedicated; and actual translations are distinguished. Beyond remarking that the cityscapes of Akhmatovna’s Leningrad – which he has never seen – engross Hope’s imagination in a way that no familiar city could hope to do, I shall only say that again Hope here commands a style other than that which prevails in the ‘original’ Hope sections. These two sections are given not exclusively to, but are dominated by, what I shall call the ‘late Hope satirical style’. Let me save confusion at once by saying that here ‘satirical’ is as far from common usage as is Hope’s style. Whatever the modern dubieties as to what ‘satire’ is, I use the word in a way that Hope the language scholar might approve: from Onions’s Oxford Etymological Dictionary, ‘verse composition treating of a variety of subjects... (cf. phr. per saturam in the lump, indiscriminately)’. There is no great point in overplaying my scholarly hand here, but it does seem to me that the older Hope is intent less on shocking us than boldly overriding us by a sort of lumpishness, an indiscriminateness whose first intention is simply to jar loose all modern (and I mean post-sixteenth&shy;century) senses of decorum, and then – or rather, simultaneously – to say rather baldly, the flim-flam counting for nothing, what he has to say. So, in the last of ‘Four Epigrams’ (characteristically not very sharp: being clever has long since ceased to be one of Hope’s aims), ‘Reply to a Critic’, he says: ‘You fail to keep up with the times!’ I quite agree.Let the times change course and try to keep up with me. It is wrong, therefore, to think of Hope’s increasingly unrepentant formalism as simply reactionary, or indeed conservative, though it might be allowable to think it so eccentric as to escape not only criticism but also comprehension. The title-poem, ‘Antechinus’, is perhaps exemplary. Antechinus stuartii is a mouse-like marsupial some of whose peculiarities are described in Hope’s notes; for the main point, I shall refer abruptly to a Mary Martin bargain, John Sparks’s rather vulgar The Sexual Connection: ‘So it was concluded that the sex act itself somehow killed them. Copulation triggers a fatal surge of corticosteroids …’ Hope properly makes play of the solitariness, indeed the fugitiveness of the male’s life-cycle, its extraordinarily savage behaviour to conspecifics, and of course its ‘dying for love’. An earlier Hope, we might reasonably imagine, would have turned all this into a ribald, swift and hilarious black comedy, its parallels with the human comedy merely hinted and jibed at throughout. Now, instead, we find a more-or-less full-blown meditative poem whose tones are always uncertain. It begins, safely enough, with mock-heroic: Antechinus, my hero, small furred friend,I come to bury, not praise you... but by the fourth stanza, it has moved to a stark Hopean rhetoric: That copulation, charged with love and death,May last ten hours and even more, they say:And, though it trips the trap that stops your breath,Does that supreme delirium repayThe solitude, the darkness, the blind strifeOf this short, savage irony, your life? If that phrasing invokes Hobbes, Hobbes emerges four stanzas later, still not much more than half-way through the poem. As the reader must have guessed, Hope is away into a ‘philosophical’ poem in the old sense, in which any ruminations might be vented, and in which – with Hope – all styles are not so much dared as wantonly displayed – the bizarrerie of How would I cope with that compulsive forceIn time’s black frost, when to her fire of coalsOur naked Venus beckoned, with her fullBreasts and bold thighs, and on her neck, a skull... and, in the next stanza, the reckless syntactical incoherence of: Would love with us by now have grown a deedDared gladly for continuance of the raceAs bearers of that sole immortal seed,Through which if my own species has forgotThe River of Life still runs - though yours has not? It would, one thinks, have been nicer if Hope had kept his eye on the object: but that, too, is a modern criterion that Hope has a last laugh at. The poem ends with this, the thirteenth but not altogether unlucky last stanza – Antechinus, my friend, almost forgotIn such reflections, let us reflect again,Since life presents each absolutely andnotAs rival species, from amoebas tomen,Which has achieved the best that lifecan give?We do not know; we accept our lotand live. What, after all, should we make of this kind of thing? By any standards, anyone might muster the poetry is spasmodic at best, the wisdom banal. Yet there is something more to it than this: and that is the ruthless confidence which commands such different and jarring tones to such a modestly prosaic and spiritually modest end. Not for the first time, certainly, the Hope who so commonly used to be called ‘Augustan’ turns out Romantically and sedately to be on the side of the greenies. This, I suppose, is even more marked in a poem of twice the length, ‘The Cetaceans’, where an even more indefensible mixture of high style, doggerel, and sheer prosiness comes up with ill-informed but entirely predictable save-the-whale sentiments. What is peculiar about these poems, I suppose, is that their entirely trendy stalce (which I should say at once I find sympathetic) I embodied in a manner that – as I suggested at the start – refuses to recognise any compatibility with the way other people might now speak about these things. and also with any forebears that Hope might be supposed to find sympathetic. The idiosyncrasy of his style finally suggest that he chooses to be seen as utterly sui generis: a voice free of all modes, unique, great – or nothing. Time-bound myself, I don’t think that Hope’s kind of anachronism in this book makes for very good poetry. Hope’s earlier poetry, I think it goes without saying, make it always interesting to see what he is doing: to put it abruptly, I don’t think that this is a good book for any reader to discover Hope in. Nothing that I’ve said, of course, is meant to suggest that there are no other veins of Hope to be mined in this book. The opening poem, ‘Beyond Khancoban’, must be added to one’s private hoard of the best poems he has written: composed as if driving to Cooma (his birthplace), it manages more tactfully and elegantly in its use of landscape to intimate his sense of the music of all things than he has done before. That is a clumsier sentence than I meant to write; to make amends for it, let me quote the last four lines: Man is made by all that has made the history of man,But here Monaro claims me; I recogniseBeyond Khancoban the place where a mind beganAble to offer itself to the galaxies. It is not often that Hope has allowed a poem to end on a line so rhythmically unassertive as that: a line which achieves, after all, a more resonant closure than the rhetorically triumphant lines with which for so long he sealed poems, as with a trademark. The cover of this book talks of ‘a series of dialogues with the spirits of Banjo Paterson and the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatovna’. The reference to Paterson, I can only suppose, directs us to ‘Three Songs for Monaro Pubs’, which might readily be characterised by a couple of lines: But have it your own way, have it the other,She’d end up flat on her back. Shearers and rouseabouts and whatever, the figures of these three songs seem even further from the academic Hope – for all his well-known interest in the ubiquity of sex – than they do from the decorous lawyer-squatter Paterson. It seems likely that they are meant to go with particular old tunes; it seems unlikely that they will ever be sung at all. It is not to these but to the unoriginal&shy;Hope poems that readers of this book might turn to see the renewing variety of Hope’s poetic command. And to the poem ‘Hay Fever’, which is not after all new, not after all very characteristic of Hope, but which finally must rate among the best things he’s written. It ends like this: well, no: it doesn’t chop off easily, you must read the whole thing; and if it’s still in print, A Late Picking is probably a better buy than Antechinus. If you are interested enough in Australian poetry to have read to here, no doubt you will want Antechinus, live or die.

Evan Jones

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