Salt Publishing

I have commented before in ABR that literary criticism is a rara avis in Australia’s publishing world, so perhaps it is not surprising that Ann Vickery has had to find an overseas publisher for this important contribution to Australia’s literary and cultural history. Whatever its provenance, I have a particular reason for welcoming this contextualising study of the work and times of six women poets of the early twentieth century: Mary Gilmore, Marie Pitt, Mary Fullerton, Anna Wickham, Zora Cross, Lesbia Harford and Nettie Palmer.

The title of this rich and varied collection of poetry by Philip Neilsen comes from a poem entitled ‘First Creative Writing Class’:

I have only just begun to know
what a cloud is and could be.
Poetry comes without an alibi,
in lightning flashes of sanity.

Seriatim, the poems are in order, though not subdivided into marked divisions indicating common themes with some compelling logic to them, but a series of observations, dot points, which may or may not be part of a larger argument. It is like a conversation. No one knows exactly where it will end when it starts, but it goes on with an order, sometimes determined by logic, otherwise by association, free and not so free. The book is one long poem; the poet’s consciousness explores ageing, place, time, poetry itself, language, and emotion, taking on whatever life throws up. So we start with reflections on Australian history, very old age (parents), old age (the poet himself), poetry and its practice, places here and abroad, and finally Islam and its extremists. It is a conversation between poet and reader in which there is no lofty conclusion, no stunning revelation or gesture, but a sharing of thought and emotion, which ends with the threads to be picked up later.

In her other life, Judith Bishop works as a linguist. A passionate concern with the intricacies of language, with the visceral effect of words on the tongue, aurally, and as they are knitted and unravelled on the page is manifest in her first collection of poems, Event. These poems are deeply immersed both in a complex observation of, and engagement with, the natural world, in particular with the ways in which poetic language can intervene in the world of perception, experience and desire. ‘You have to lean and listen for the heart / behind the shining paint’, Bishop writes in ‘Still Life with Cockles and Shells’, which won the 2006 ABR Poetry Prize and which Dorothy Porter included in The Best Australian Poems 2006. Like the beautiful illusions of the still-life painting, Bishop’s poetry creates an aesthetic surface which mimics the stasis of death and also harbours the ‘flutter in its flank’, the pulse of possibility visible to the attentive reader–observer. Look closely, her poetry exhorts, yield to the currents of language and image, become witness to death and life in intimate and endlessly renewing ‘events’ of struggle and embrace.

This is Paul Hetherington’s eighth book of poetry, his first full collection since his selected poems, Stepping Away (2001) and his verse novel, Blood and Old Belief (2003). The publication of a selected poems can sometimes have what the poet Richard Howard refers to as a ‘tombstone effect’, bringing creative work to a pause or halt, but Hetherington’s new book is very much a carrying forward, or a further refinement, of his work.

These are the final lines of a poem entitled ‘Endings 111’ in Tom Shapcott’s recently published collection of poetry, The City of Empty Rooms. The poem is included in the final two sections of the book devoted to memories of a Queensland childhood, more particularly recollections of growing up in the inland town of Ipswich. As David Malouf suggests in the blurb, ‘this is a late book that sometimes sharply, sometimes forgivingly looks back, but always with the freshness of things felt and seen anew in a living present’.

There are not many ways, I imagine, in which Vivian Smith puts one in mind of Walt Whitman, but one which occurs to me is that Smith’s successive volumes, at least since Tide Country (1982), have been, like Leaves of Grass (1855), a work in progress, in which previous poems reappear, sometimes in modified form, and new work is added, so that the whole corpus is re-presented in different ways over time. Along the Line is the latest, and welcome, incarnation of Smith’s oeuvre. 

Chris Wallace-Crabbe’s essay ‘Poetry and the Common Language’, in his collection Read It Again, begins: ‘If there is one thing we can say about poetry, it is this: like it or not, poetry turns out to be something special, an intensified bag of tricks with certain rules of its own.’ The deceptively casual style of the writing underscores its argument about the centrality of ‘voice’ in any poem (or essay) worth its salt: ‘interest, in poetry, is not only interesting, to put it very mildly; it also adds value. It lifts the game; often because it artistically combines an air of untidy casualness with lightly strategic effects which displace or realign us as we read.’

If I hesitate to declare delight in Blister Pack, David McCooey’s first volume of poetry, it may be because McCooey himself casts a shadow over the word in ‘Succadaneum’, a sequence of sardonically sad glimpses of the failed love that constitutes the theme of Part II of this collection – ‘Delight, it turns out, / is a lawyer / staying back at work / kicking off her shoes / and opening a bottle of red’, abandoning clients’ disasters to files ‘locked / in metal cabinets’.

Like M.T.C. Cronin’s earlier collections, beautiful, unfinished is characterised by a mixture of mystical awe and formal restraint. The collection is subtitled PARABLE/SONG/CANTO/POEM’. As this suggests, it consists of a parable of sorts in verse, a sequence of songs, a set of cantos ‘minus melody’, and some poems. But in Cronin’s hands, these various forms seem based upon haiku. She writes sparely in short-lined stanzas, and she undercuts her own rhythms until it seems as if almost every poem might end in an ellipsis.