Poetry

John Jenkins (especially in his collaborations with Ken Bolton) is normally thought of as an ‘experimental’ poet, but in Growing up with Mr Menzies he is on more traditional ground. Born in 1949 in Melbourne, Jenkins has created the fictional character Felix Hayes, who was also born in 1949 in Melbourne. In a series of poems, he traces Felix’s life from birth through to early adolescence. Rather neatly, this period of his life fits with the so-called ‘Menzies era’; Robert Menzies returned to power in 1949 and left it (voluntarily) in 1966. It is thus the parallel story of two characters, one large and looming, the other small but getting bigger.

Blue Dog, the Journal of the Australian Poetry Centre, has a democratic approach to Australian poetry. Submissions are judged anonymously by a team of editors from each state and territory. The journal, as the two reviews of small-press publications reveal, shows no preference for big names. The results, however, are mixed.

Highlights include Andy Jackson’s ‘Severance’, which provides a measured expression of nostalgia. The poem reflects on a childhood marked by sexual misadventure – ‘You and I were the first in our group to buy porn, / though it took us two attempts – we’d assumed Playboy / couldn’t cost much more than TV Week. Honestly, / it was the soft light palming pale curves / that drew us, not the shock of shallow gynaecology’ – and loss – ‘Years before, / our legs patterned with gum tree shadows, / we sat on either end of a bench, waiting for your mum / to come again to comfort you in your homesickness’.

From his first book Canticles on the Skin (1970) to his twelfth, The Goldfinches of Baghdad (2006), Robert Adamson’s poetry has undergone many transformations, but The Golden Bird, his new and rather large Selected Poems, modifies or disguises those changes by arranging the poems thematically, not chronologically, except for the last section, which contains new poems. Many of Adamson’s early themes have remained throughout his career. Strangely, the sharply witty ‘Sonnets to be Written from Prison’ (‘If I was in solitary I could dream – a fashionable bore, / writing books on drugs, birds or revolution’), from his third book Swamp Riddles (1974), are excluded along with other fine poems, such as ‘Sibyl’ and ‘The Thoughtless Shore’, his elegy to Michael Dransfield, as well as the chapbook Theatre (1974), a response to Yves Bonnefoy’s work of that name.

There are times when I read a book that reinvigorates important questions for me – such as how language carries and creates meaning, and what, after all, is the function and force of poetry. Usually, such a book is a creative work and I like to imagine that the first readers of volumes by George Herbert or John Donne responded with such questions – to poetry that consistently registered a persuasive complexity and which, while emotionally restrained, carried a pithy emotional charge.

Philip mead’s Networked Language: Culture & History in Australian Poetry is an extraordinary piece of scholarly writing: large, ambitious, meticulously researched, brilliantly written and quite original. It is laudable not only for these inherent virtues but also, it has to be said, because of its very existence. Australian Scholarly Publishing is to be commended for publishing such a work. If poetry is marginal to Australian public culture (as we are routinely told), then works about Australian poetry are all but invisible. It is all the more notable, then, that Mead’s work should join another recently published, large-scale work on modern Australian poetry: Ann Vickery’s Stressing the Modern: Cultural Politics in Australian Women’s Poetry, published by Salt in 2007. Both Mead’s and Vickery’s books use Australian poetry as a way of intervening in, or instigating, debates in modern politico-cultural history. (And to these studies we may also add another ambitious piece of poetry criticism, John Kinsella’s more globally focused Disclosed Poetics: Beyond Landscape and Lyricism, Manchester University Press, 2007.)