Peter Kenneally reviews '101 Poems' by John Foulcher, 'Small Town Soundtrack' by Brendan Ryan, and 'Ahead of Us' by Dennis Haskell

Reading these three books in April, it was impossible not to see in them flashes of what Ross McMullin has described in war artist Will Dyson's drawings from World War I: 'He sketched Australians waiting, resting and sleeping. He captured them stumbling out of the line, drained and dazed. He drew weariness, perseverance, fatalism.' Ordinary and terrible: in poetry, as in war, whichever side the coin lands on, the other is always beneath it. Dennis Haskell's Ahead of Us (Fremantle Press, $27.99 pb, 108 pp, 9781925163285), almost banished from the comfort of the ordinary, focuses unflinchingly on the death of his beloved wife, Rhonda, after six years of pain and struggle. The cancer, the medical interventions, all take their terrible course, and Haskell regards them, in the poems, with a kind of helpless revulsion, whereas death is addressed, challenged, interrogated. The conversation allows the poetry to hold everything still long enough to comprehend something about the process. Haskell tries to personalise death: 'You never see him move / but now he sits silent / in the expectant corner / of every room you enter' ('Belief'). He tries to pass off death as a kind of allegory: 'The word / will be a visa, in your passport / an indelible stamp, and your passport / now full of pages that you will never use' ('Another Country'). This is all rearguard stuff, and it is in the slow, clear narrative of the particulars of Rhonda's own, idiosyncratic, passing that Haskell puts himself, and us, on a level footing with death. The real benefit (because nothing changes) is that we can look it in the eye, so that any reader who has already done so will be able see how precise Haskell is, and how thankless his task. Grief, easing into the place of dying, is quite another matter: 'I wondered / where to go / and all these months later / I still do.' Haskell's grief washes back and forth through the book, colouring everything a deep blue, from his present, pointless life to earlier memories, because his new 'title' of widower, 'this pathetic run / of weak, short syllables / says nothing about me / or everything, catching on / my every breath / the low, dark afternoon of death' ('Widower'). One poem, though ('No one ever found you', from 1993), seems to stand against grief and redeem every thing: the wave breaks on it and then there it is, still shining in the sun: 'it matters little where we go, / how little we know / and how much our lives have passed, our days will be filled with green / and we grow together like the grass.' Brendan Ryan's Small Town Soundtrack, (Hunter Poets, $19.95 pb, 89 pp, 9780994352828) continues his attempt to inhabit in poetry the hardscrabble dairy farming districts in south-west Victoria, between the Grampians and the coast, around the town of Panmure, where he grew up: 'Out here where land and water meet / two lakes almost kiss, separated by a road under repair // banks of grey silt and a sagging fence line. / There are no trees, no speed cameras, no escaping the idea / this is a country to pass though' ('Road Works'). City dwellers wonder how people can go on living in drought-stricken bush towns, or why they do. Ryan has to imagine why too, even though he knows, and he gives the landscape the gift of poetry with which to answer the question. In the section 'Towns of the Mount Noorat Football League', he takes us on a tour of colonial dispossession, decay, history, religion, fellowship, delivered in a laconic, 'anti-guide book' tone. 'Each time I pass through / I commit to a roll call of buildings that remain / houses that have outlasted marriages, / the smell of paddocks softening the faces of locals / histories that blister / the way a Premiership holds a town together' ('Panmure') Ryan's landscape is both cinematic and musical. 'Intimidating flatness, mocking blue skies, orange gravel. / I'm sitting on 115 clutching the steering wheel. // A Harry Dean Stanton landscape of wandering, regret, / returning' ('Hurtle'). Ambivalence about family, about going away and returning, thrums through the book with almost intangible modulations – like an album by The Necks, one might say, because music is as important to him as place. 'It awakens something within me / some inner core that has its own language / its own beat. It's the rhythm of a recognition, / a place that can't be disputed – / the way quiet rain falls on shade sails' ('The Songs I Need to Repeat'). When a poet can describe so exactly what happens in his verse, it is no wonder the poetry just keeps on driving, getting to places, moving on, working. John Foulcher's personal selection of 101 Poems from thirty years of poetry (Pitt Street Poetry, $32 pb, 166 pp, 9781922080424) is more eclectic and wide-ranging than the other two books here, but it touches on many of the same concerns. There is rural life, filial feeling, mourning (in his case the death dealt with efficiently by poetry is that of his mother). There is even the Notre Dame Cathedral, as premonitory and significant as Haskell's version of it. Foulcher has been more inclined in recent years than the other two poets to throw his voice beyond his own concerns, to dramatise – imagining Stuart Diver's experiences at Thredbo, Keats in Scotland, even a whole school of teachers and pupils (in his book The Learning Curve, 2002). This doesn't tend to work all that well, and there is a sense towards the end of the book of casting around, trying things on for size. But then, almost at the last, he casts his line over the life of Robespierre, not ventriloquising but capturing, filming, interrogatively, documentary-style. He writes in an earlier poem ('Touching the Names'): 'I want / these old lives / to go with us // as if we could be nothing more / than words, / and live / forever // in a world of sentences', and finishes by fulfilling his own desire: a fitting end for any poet.

Peter Kenneally

From the New Issue

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‘Portrait of a friendship: In memoriam Katerina Clark (20 June 1941–1 February 2024)’ by Sheila Fitzpatrick

Tremor by Teju Cole

Thunderhead by Miranda Darling

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