Peter Boyle

If Peter Boyle’s new and selected, Towns in the Great Desert (which I reviewed in ABR, March 2014), was a tour de force of the imagination, and a book of stunningly strange ...

Towns in the Great Desert, a New and Selected, may be the collection that defines Peter Boyle. Among Australian poets, Peter Boyle is an exotic, one who is likely to be read far into the future.

‘His poems, now more and more exclusively in prose, have become taut and aphoristic, for he seeks patiently to release energy potential in language, and to make of poetry an instrument of revelation, indeed a close ally of philosophy.’

These words, by R.T. Cardinal in The Penguin Companion to European Literature (1969), in fact gloss the poetry of René Char. They could be taken as an apt description of Peter Boyle’s fourth collection, Museum of Space, which represents a subtle but significant shift in his oeuvre since the virtuoso What the Painter Saw in Our Faces (2001). These are sparer, more abstract poems, less cluttered by competing images – deft, attenuated and often written in a lean, delicate prose, as if having left some of the mechanical devices of poetry behind for something more suggestively metaphysical.

These two new collections are obverses in contemporary Australian poetry and show the opposing, but often interlocked, tensions between modernism and postmodernism. The poems in both books concern themselves with art’s capacity to create or suggest other worlds. Both use painting and the visual arts in dramatically different ways as metaphors and motifs. Both collections fragment and project the perceiving self into alternative ficto-autobiographies, but with different expectations of resolution. Both conjure up real worlds of political and institutional corruption on an international scale and pit moments of fragile subjectivity and domestic harmony against grubby injustice. Both register their authors’ age at around fifty. Caesar hankers after an ethical response; Boyle juxtaposes aesthetic possibilities. Caesar’s poetry is restrained, measured, spare; Boyle’s is crowded, insistent, histrionic.