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Black Pepper

Award-winning Louis de Paor, in the spirit of many of his literary compatriots, has produced his best work out of being away from Ireland. Cork and Other Poems, a bilingual collection, celebrates the presence of memory, the confrontation of points of departure. Although his luxurious rhymes in Irish are lost in English, his similes (‘The back of the car’ ‘watertight as a fish’s arse’) and kennings (‘sky-horse’, meaning plane) maintain a resilient life even in translation. Some images are plainly original. Others are held up by mythology, as in ‘The Pangs of Ulster’ and ‘Heredity’. De Paor’s poems remind me of what Bernard O’Donoghue and Chris Wallace-Crabbe said, respectively, of Seamus Heaney’s poetry-steeped in ‘northern Bog-myths’, ‘notably muddy’. This is a remarkable world of rain and birth, fetches and the supra-natural, marsh and sinking. But in this book, his third collection, de Paor’s startling, terse narratives have ‘sweetened the underground dark’ of family, love and homecoming. The language is fluid and urgent, exemplified in ‘Oisn’ and ‘Nanbird’. While he considers the particular through the lens of myth, his true ground is the specific, the faith in individual comprehension, where, when I ‘set foot on the ground / I [see] my reflection / brought down to size.’

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The Hanging of Jean Lee is the third verse novel I have reviewed recently, except that this one is closer to the verse documentary.

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Toby Davidson’s first collection, Beast Language, was published nine years ago. That feels surprising: its freshness then makes it feel more recent now. Much of the movement in that book is present in his new collection, Four Oceans (Puncher & Wattmann, $25 pb, 93 pp), literally so, as we begin with a long sequence aboard the Indian Pacific from Perth to Sydney. It’s his younger self again, leaving home for the ‘eastern states’, but with an esprit de l’escalier twist, as that younger self gets to see and describe everything with the eye and language of the older, freer, more assured Davidson.

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Stephen Edgar, over the past two decades or so, has earned himself an assured place in contemporary Australian poetry (even in English-language poetry more generally) as its pre-eminent and most consistent formalist. His seemingly effortless poems appear in substantial overseas journals, reminding readers that rhyme and traditional metre have definitely not outlived their usefulness.

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Sarah Day’s début collection, A Hunger to Be Less Serious (1987), married lightness of touch with depth of insight. In Towards Light & Other Poems (Puncher & Wattmann, $25 pb, 108 pp, 9781925780024), Day continues this project in poems concerned with light, a thing presented as both ...

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After Stephen Edgar’s nine collections of poetry, the last seven of which are distinguished by an extraordinary control over metre and rhyme, a reviewer feels bound to ask how this new book ...

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Exhibits of the Sun is Stephen Edgar’s tenth collection of poems. Born in 1951, he is now ripe for a major Collected Poems. With careful pruning of some lesser pieces, such a book will display the full range of his work, which marries virtuosic technique with powerful emotion and intellect.

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Todd Turner’s first collection, Woodsmoke, evolves intriguingly. It starts in the ‘anti-pastoral’ mode founded by Philip Hodgins. Here the poet, long since relocated to the city, looks back with tellingly evocative detail but a divided sensibility on the life he (it’s normally a ‘he’) has now abandoned.

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There are some poets whose works only seem to come alive when seen in the light of their other poems. Andrew Sant may well be one of these. A Sant poem, read on its own, can often seem thoughtful but rather lightweight; embedded in one of his books, given a context by the surrounding poems, it becomes animated by a set of consistent themes and obsessions.

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150 Motets by Homer Rieth

by
April 2013, no. 350

Although the Melbourne publisher Black Pepper has a stable of major Australian poets (Stephen Edgar and Jennifer Harrison among them), it is also a house that likes to take chances. The favourable reception accorded Homer Rieth’s 359-page epic poem, Wimmera, in 2009 was definitely a punt that paid off. The book was shortlisted for The Age Book of the Year and became an ABC television program. Rieth’s new book, 150 Motets, though shorter, may be even riskier.

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