Chris Wallace Crabbe

The legendary Dylan has now been dead for a century and his fumy glitter has probably faded a little. But then, how far do any poets these days really have glamour to show for themselves, no matter how hard they drink? Very few, in the Anglophone world at least: there’s nobody around like Wales’s roaring boy.

What you say
about poetry
could very well
be stone-
cold factual

Simonides of Ceos is said to have declared that ‘Painting is mute poetry, poetry a speaking picture.’ All of us know something of what he means, about our thirst for information from the arts: and, if you like, our scrabbling for the visible within a text. One half of his mirrored pronouncement is verified by those people who, in an art museum, hurry to the curatorial information alongside a picture. They want to discover what the painting is about. But the sought-after ‘aboutness’ keeps slipping away from the viewer, much as the point – but is it a point? – of a poem does.

First, I will bore you with some Chris Wallace-Crabbe statistics. Born in 1934, he has thirty-three ‘new’ poems in his New and Selected Poems, which is an average of about seven poems a year since his last volume, Telling a Hawk from a Handsaw (2008). That is a lot of poems for the second half of a poet’s eighth decade, a time when many run dry. The ‘selected’ part of this volume draws from fourteen volumes (he has 681 poems on the Australian Poetry Library website). With earlier volumes, he has sometimes selected as few as two or three poems from each. With later volumes he has been less strict. For example, from the forty-three poems of For Crying Out Loud (1990) he has included eleven in New and Selected Poems. But in making this selection he has omitted some very good poems, which are worth preserving, such as his ten ‘Sonnets to the Left’ from I’m Deadly Serious (1988).

State governors hold a curious role across Australia, one that will be called into question when – one of these fine days, but none too soon – our nation becomes a republic. There will be lots of fine-tuning to be done before that, from the roles of Her Majesty’s representatives here all the way down to Royal Park, Royal Melbourne Golf Club, and the RACV. But this book is the biography of a state governor, one who was also an influential minister of religion, among other things. Above all, he was Master of Ormond College, at Melbourne University.

At the dangerous time when Sir Thomas Wyatt and the earl of Surrey were around, the sonnet sprang into English from Petrarch’s Italian. A constant cuckoo, it has stayed in our linguistic tradition ever since. It is an odd verse form to have done so, regular, yet in one way asymmetrical. Moreover, this cuckoo form has long stood at the heart of what we mean by ‘lyrical’. As Wordsworth quotably if unsubtly wrote, ‘With this key Shakespeare unlocked his heart.’ Borges was to see through that romantic sense of the poet-dramatist in his mini-story ‘Everything and Nothing’, where God and the playwright eventually come face to face: that is if they have faces at all. Or hearts.

Those who write about poetry these days don’t go in much for lightness. More often their solemnity springs from the need to score research points or from their front-line positions in gang wars. If only the verbal art could have a critic who trod as lightly as the epigrams of Laurie Duggan or the juxtapositional poems of Jennifer Maiden. But wishes are not horses, and we must be grateful for what we’ve got. Recently to hand is an agreeably jaunty book of essays from the Oxford poet John Fuller. He certainly likes to keep it light and clear: pedagogical in the gentlest way. As critic he reads hard, but writes soft: a close reader with a free rein, we might say. And he knows that any modern poem is, metaphorically, a hybrid between layered onion and head of broccoli.