Australian Poetry

Gina Mercer is not a prolific poet, and reading her latest collection it is evident that her poems are not written in haste. It has been eight years since her first, well-received book Oceans in the Kitchen (1999). More recently, she was featured in the Wagtail booklet series, where it would seem that many of the poems in Handfeeding the Crocodile have already appeared, in addition to their original publications in literary magazines.

Barry Hill’s latest collection is both delightful and substantive. Australia has a minority tradition of the urbane, exuberant, even bouncy poet – Andrew Sant, Peter Porter. It is a constant in American poetry – early John Hollander, Frederick Feirstein, L. E. Sissman, John Frederick Nims, X.J. Kennedy – with the difference that, as the above examples show, urbanity in the United States would be less romantic and would have rejected romanticism outright, severed, as it were, Ezra Pound’s famous pact with Walt Whitman.

Reading Paul Mitchell’s second book of poems during a bout of insomnia seemed apposite not only because of its title but also because Mitchell’s poetry occupies a strange middle place, somewhere between dream and reality. Awake Despite the Hour illustrates Mitchell’s interest in occupying both the ‘real’ (politics, family and the quotidian) and the extramundane (imagination, the surreal and the metaphysical).

The eponymous poem in Caroline Caddy’s latest collection Esperance captures a breathtaking glimpse of a bay on the Western Australian coast. Immediacy epitomises Caddy’s poetic gift. In deft strokes, she provides a vivid land/seascape, compressing an astute reflection on history, geography, and humanity’s irrepressible need to explore beyond known boundaries. The language is physical and sensuous: ‘the snowy beaches / lapped by the cold clear bracelet / that’s there then not there / around our ankles.’ There is also a metaphysical dimension, ‘with everything falling away behind / with everything falling away ahead’ mirroring ‘esperance’: a quality of hope and faith in the future.

The production of literary magazines is a collaborative effort, and small ones tend to bring together people who are united in an enthusiasm that transcends financial aspiration. Translated, this means there is no money in it. The editorial notes for the rejuvenated Blast reveal what seems to be a family affair at work: the publisher–editor is Ann Nugent, and the person responsible for design and layout is Peta Nugent. Issues 4 and 5 appeared for review, but I have concentrated here on the first of these.

Gaius Valerius Catullus (c.87–54 BC) may have died young, but his limited output (only 113 poems and some fragments have survived) has immortalised him as a writer of erotic and satiric verse and savage portraits of contemporaries, so frank sometimes that, until recent decades, editions of his work were customarily heavily expurgated. Innumerable poets through the ages have kept his flame burning. Ezra Pound peppers the opening cantos with references to Catullus. Ben Jonson’s famous ‘Come, my Celia’ is a version of Catullus 5.

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.

Dimitris Tsaloumas is often thought of as a poet writing between two languages. In his English poetry, this emerges in the way that the everyday diction of Greek often functions as the learned register of English. ‘Nostalgia’, as a compound word, is a modern Western coining, but when Tsaloumas opens the volume with ‘Nostalgia: A Diptych’, he evokes the Greek components of the word, particularly nostos with its connotation of Homeric return.

‘Westering’ is a resonant archaism which makes a wittily ironic title for Peter Kirkpatrick’s new volume. This is work which has a decidedly début du siècle flavour in its hard-edged urban perspective on ‘out west’. The dialectic of city/bush, with its history from Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson to Les Murray, is voiced in several registers through these finely crafted and sharply literate poems.