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Poems

Glassmaker by Shane McCauley & Geology by Kevin Murray

by
May 2006, no. 281

Okay, I’ll take up Kevin Murray’s challenge in his poem ‘Freelance’ – that the reviewer is ‘a rogue knight / circling other men’s dragons’, though, like Max Richards, I reject Walter Benjamin’s Romantic formulation of criticism as a ‘fulfilment / of the artwork’. Each of these dragons has some fine points; all are modest in their own ways and illustrate Shane McCauley’s gloss of Robert Frost, ‘having the grace / to say that perhaps poetry doesn’t matter very much’. But in different ways, all three focus intently on the compelling significance of the minute, nuanced moments and details as a means of exploring big questions about ageing/mortality; the revelation and casualness of nature; the meaningfulness of history at both personal and public levels; and the functions and significance of art and writing. All are in various ways influenced by both the Romanticism of Wordsworth and Coleridge (particularly the ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’ aspect) as well as the modernist urban scepticism of T.S. Eliot. These are mannerly dragons. None will scorch the gentil reader-knight. Nor is there a hint of halitosis.

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Annual anthologies of Australian poetry are, or should be, a good way to get an overview of the local poetry scene, as well as an opportunity to greet new poets and to keep in touch with established ones. This selection from more than a hundred poets fulfils that function pretty well, having a range of old and new names, styles and themes, even if the sourcing of the poems does seem weighted in favour of Quadrant, of which Les Murray is poetry editor. It’s the hubris in the title – Best Poems – that makes one cantankerously inclined to point to incomprehensible omissions. Readers with a mind to play that game can scrutinise some of the contenders that Murray passed over by reading Peter Porter’s rival anthology (David McCooey reviewed UQP’s Best Australian Poetry 2005 in the October 2005 issue of ABR). We have to accept, I think, that any anthology cannot help but bear signs of its editor’s preferences and prejudices, and no anthologist can hope to read every poem of the year. What matters, bearing in mind the need to be reasonably representative, is whether the chosen poems are good ones (although Some Good Australian Poems of 2005 might not be a highly marketable title).

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Philip Salom’s tenth collection of poems offers readers an experience akin to falling over the edge of a well into a frightening subterranean world. The Well Mouth is dark, allusive, ironic, brutal, perplexing and confronting, and so it can be alternately rewarding and irritating. Readers should not miss the explanatory paragraph before the prologue; otherwise they risk being as disoriented as the central narrative consciousness, a woman murdered by corrupt police and dumped down a well. She makes the collection cohere as a kind of ghostly medium, channelling the voices of the newly dead, some of whom are described as ‘whistleblower, brothel madam, long-distance driver, woman lost in the bush, old solider’.

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The tough and rumble of the schoolyard
is always welcome relief from a room
papered with whispers, where every night

he must taste the salted honey of his pain
or else listen to the chorus of lies
that they hiss at one another in the dark.

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Max remembers the first time they made love
when she arrived travel-dusty & sweaty
after complications
getting from Basrah to Baghdad. Much afterwards
while they were lying together very close
she’d told him of a pet she’d had, when small:
had given it its scientific name – Macropanesthia rhinoceros.

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Mary Gilmore is one of the most acclaimed figures in Australian writing. A cultural icon, she appears in important paintings and sculptures and on postage stamps, not to mention the ten-dollar note. Her biography has been published, her letters collected, and now the first volume of her complete poems, edited by Jennifer Strauss, has appeared in the prestigious Academy Editions of Australian Literature. No other Australian poet except Henry Lawson has received quite the degree of attention that Gilmore has been accorded. Longevity certainly had something to do with her fame: she was a living link between the colonial Australia she was born into and the Australia of the 1960s that saw her passing. Like Lawson’s, her life and work are written into Australian history; and she too is inextricably associated with the legend of the 1890s. She never quite achieved Lawson’s popularity as a writer, but this edition makes it clear that her fame was truly earned, not merely accrued. No literary reputation is ever finally fixed, or immune to criticism, but this book will help us to understand why Gilmore, Australia’s foremost woman poet during the first half of the twentieth century, came to be considered a national treasure.

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The Universe Looks Down by Chris Wallace-Crabbe & Read It Again by Chris Wallace-Crabbe

by
February 2006, no. 278

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.’

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Yes, I hear you. I hear

something else too.

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Being from a young nation you find that dawn beguiles you

onto the exhausted saltmarsh,

miles of morose vacuity clad

in couch grass, cottonweed, random puddles, wire

and the odd, triumphant

                     flourish of pampas grass

featherily trying to tell dead factories,

                               Look here,

something fans, even at the far edge of Europe

where large gulls crowd and abruptly dip, although

the fish have all gone home to bed.

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After Lizzy Gardiner’s The American Express Gold Card Dress

 

Well, it’s been waiting all these years, like a poem

            asleep in the word-hoard, its prince to come,

kiss at the ready, and bloom it forth to the world:

            or like a kouros, hauled with pain

from the gnarling waters, smiling gaze intact,

            its maker long put out to sea:

or like that ‘orient and immortal wheat’ that waved

            before Traherne, a child bereft,

and set him claiming Paradise again:

            yes, it’s here for the restless heart –

The American Express Gold Card Dress – and all

                        may now be well at last.

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