Poetry

In his 1928 collection of poems, Odd Jobs, Ernest ‘Kodak’ O’Ferrall caricatures recitation as an onerous entertainment that has passed its use by date:

Barry Hill has written thirteen collections of poetry, including Eagerly We Burn: Selected poems 1980-2018 (Shearsman, 2019). These volumes demonstrate his interest in the natural world, Australian history, White Australia’s relationships to Indigenous and Asian cultures, and cross-cultural experiences more generally. His poetry explores politics, art and ekphrasis, literature, autobiography, and spiritual issues, including, persistently, Mahayana Buddhism and its teachings about ‘emptiness’.

Gregory Day is best known as a prize-winning novelist, but it should not surprise his readers to learn that he has, in Southsightedness, made the move to lyric poetry. The lyrical has always figured in his work, which, as well as novels, includes essays, criticism, and music. (Indeed, poetry can be found in Day’s forays into that occult genre, the artist’s book.) Day’s lyricism is not, and has never been, the breathless kind that traffics in the precious and the inconsequential. For Day, the lyrical mode attends to language’s most powerful affective and cognitive potentialities, doing so both through the linguistic intensity of the poetic idiolect, and an engagement with the daytime domains of politics, history, and the material world.

‘About Happiness’, the striking opening poem of Kevin Brophy’s latest collection, An Inventory of Longing, anticipates many that follow in the first half of this book. Empathy and reflectiveness are present in a melding of the individual with the social, with landscape, and with the enigmatic passage of time. The poem contains a moment, and it is timeless. It takes its readers on a walk along ‘the river’ in Paris where, at a confluence with a seamy canal, we meet a homeless man who sleeps beneath plastic sheets and shares his phone video of Sufi dancers, whose songs give him happiness and ‘can cure hunger’. ‘Meet’ is the operative word; this is not indifferent observation, but a human exchange. That only one of the parties can eventually walk away is troubling, for reader and speaker. The written poem is evidence of this. The encounter is humbling; the poem reflects deeply on the nature of happiness and, equally, suffering, in the broader context of time, which ‘slips ahead and past us, / pauseless as this river’s sleepless spinning onward happy rush’. In context, the final use of ‘happy’ becomes nuanced.

‘Poetry is a speaking picture,’ said Simonides of Keos, and ‘painting a silent poetry’. From ancient Greece until now, these ‘sister arts’ have been frequently conjoined, though it is most often poetry that speaks to or for painting rather than the reverse. We have come to call this interaction ekphrasis (literally, a ‘speaking out’), usually defined as ‘a verbal description of a work of art’. In Classical times it was a school exercise for developing rhetorical skills, but ever since Homer’s elaborate depiction of the shield of Achilles in the Iliad, it has been co-opted by poets, especially during the last century.

Ben Sando Ode’, the second poem in Ken Bolton’s new collection, Metropole, begins with an epigraph from Ted Berrigan: ‘My dream a drink / with Ira Hayes / we discuss the code of the west.’ The poem is pure Bolton: a jovial flâneur perambulates through both external space – Adelaide, where passers-by make ‘BIZARRE ATTEMPTS / AT NORMALCY’ – and an inner life brimming with peers and heroes, quotations, non sequiturs, art criticism, existential musings, and the hum of a poem being made.

It is worth noting that Jennifer Maiden, along with the present reviewer, seems to be one of the few Australian poets born in the 1940s who is still writing. Each of us has to be careful now (as Peter Goldsworthy wrote long ago) that we are not ‘Carving this same face / out of soap, each morning / slightly less perfectly’.

In Li-Young Lee’s ‘Furious Versions’, a poem reckoning with his family’s exile, there is a question: ‘How then, may I / speak of flowers / here, where / a world of forms convulses.’ Eileen Chong draws these lines into her sixth book of poetry as an epigraph, reorienting them to find her title, expanding Lee’s first-person singular into the plural ‘we’, its question into statement. This drawing-into-connection and shifting is central to Chong’s poetics, established in her striking début collection, Burning Rice (2011), which includes an image linking women, flowers, and power. ‘The Flower of Forgetting’ ends: ‘Women can be strong. Flowers too.’

Jakob Ziguras – widely published in Australian literary magazines and the recipient of prestigious poetry prizes – was born in Poland and came to Australia as a child with his parents in 1984. He studied fine arts before completing a doctorate in philosophy, which he teaches (he is also a translator). Much of this background is in evidence in his poetry. In recent years he has lived in his birthplace, Wrocław, Poland, translating contemporary Polish poets while working on his third book of poems, Venetian Mirrors.