Poetry

Anthony Lawrence is a brilliant poet whose books are surprisingly uneven: this new volume, Bark, though, is a decided success. The best of his poems are usually those which are built around a confrontation between poet (carrying a fairly heavy backpack of personal trauma) and the natural world. This can be quite explicit, as in the fourth poem of a generally comic suite, ‘Bestiary in Open Tuning’, in which a ‘five metre white pointer / ... made a pass’ at the poet swimming in ‘over a thousand, sun-shafted feet / of Great Southern Ocean’. The double meaning of ‘made a pass’ is significant: there is an erotics involved here, as well as the simple evaluative movements of a predator.

Poems 1980–2008 selects from Jan Owen’s first five collections and adds eighty pages of new poems. This is an accomplished, playful, intelligent collection which confirms Owen’s status in the front ranks of Australian poets (why is there so little criticism or commentary on her work?). It is full of angels, goddesses, older men, iconic art, imagined sex, strange fruit, flowers, trees, birds, travels through Europe and Asia – encyclopedic ideas and sinuous, crafted language.

Lucy Dougan’s recent collection of poetry, White Clay, demonstrates a considerably wider range than her first collection, Memory Shell (1998), while reaffirming how centrally preoccupied her poetry is with the potency of lost time, and also with finding the truth behind appearances, locating what is hidden or marginal and tracking down family ghosts.

Another poet might invoke Edmund Burke’s famous treatise on the Sublime and the Beautiful as a piece of phraseology or a pleasing adornment, but with John Kinsella, such a title is dead serious. Elliot Perlman’s superb novel Seven Types of Ambiguity (2003) ingeniously makes the reader think of William Empson’s, and the idea of plural signification it evokes, but not instantly to reread it. Kinsella’s use of Burke’s title prompts one to reread the original – ideally, in a Kinsellan métier, on the internet, late at night. Additionally, the ‘shades’ in Kinsella’s title is an important supplement – shades as variations, colourings, but also shadows, undertones.

Having spent two decades or more writing massive verse novels – The Nightmarkets (1986) and The Lovemakers (2001, 2004) – it may seem that Alan Wearne, with his latest book of poetry, The Australian Popular Songbook, has finally returned to smaller forms and, as suggested by the title, a more lyrical idiom. But, as always with Wearne’s work, things aren’t that simple. The smaller forms were already present in the verse novels in the form of sonnets, villanelles and other verse forms buried in the sprawling architecture of the works’ narratives. The ‘lyrical idiom’ of The Australian Popular Songbook is ambiguous at best, offset as it is by Wearne’s characteristic attraction to the dramatic monologue, satire, vernacular culture and wrenched syntax.