Poetry

The title of this rich and varied collection of poetry by Philip Neilsen comes from a poem entitled ‘First Creative Writing Class’:

I have only just begun to know
what a cloud is and could be.
Poetry comes without an alibi,
in lightning flashes of sanity.

This sixth poetry collection by Barry Hill is a fine, intense book of journeying and returns. Poems are based on pilgrimages made in the flesh (to Carrara, to Assisi, to Kyoto) and on those made in the mind as we visit works of art. But there is nothing blandly celebratory about these pilgrimages: the focus is always on the self of the journeyer. Indeed, at a deeper level, its poems are really about the experience of becoming, of being ‘drawn’. And one of the book’s central metaphors is the way there is a double process going on in the creation of the self: we emerge as human beings out of inchoate experience in the way that a sculpture emerges from stone; and, at the same time, we are shaped by the loved ones who surround us.

John Leonard Press produces beautiful books of poetry. Proof of the editor’s precise standards, L.K. Holt’s Man Wolf Man features a fine, bullet-sized insignia of a wolf man’s head after the title page. But as Leonard has shown in publishing three (out of four) first books by young Australian women poets, he is not bound to tradition. Holt’s book, with its combination of formal style and feminist obscenity, and Elizabeth Campbell’s Letters to the Tremulous Hand, which includes poems about medieval scribes and human trafficking, suggest that Leonard’s aesthetic is more radical than most. Could it be time for young Australian women poets to shine? Are these two poets among the bright young things of a Generation of ’08?

David Malouf’s Typewriter Music (2007) recently reminded readers that Malouf is a masterful poet. It was also evidence of an especially successful period in Malouf’s glittering career, appearing only a year after the highly praised collection of short stories, Every Move You Make (2006), and in the same year as The Complete Stories (2007). Now with the publication of Malouf’s latest Selected Poems, Revolving Days, we can see that this late efflorescence of poetry and short fiction suggests what might have been evident all along: that Malouf works best within a small frame. Malouf, who began as a poet in the 1960s, has – despite some flirtation with the epic mode – consistently shown himself to be interested in compact forms: the lyric poem, the short story, the essay, the libretto, and the novella.

Gary Catalano was, by profession, a writer about art. But he was also a fine poet with a distinctive style. On no account was he neglected – he appears in most anthologies that ought to include him – but he often seemed to be writing in an entirely different idiom from that of his contemporaries. He was difficult to place and thus, perhaps, difficult to appreciate.

In Lisa Gorton’s first collection of poetry, somewhat ambiguously entitled Press Release, light, absence and doubt are major preoccupations. The poems speak of ‘a weight of light’, ‘neon expectation’, ‘ruined cities overrun with light’ and ‘all that falling light’ – in just the first of this volume’s four sections. Light, for Gorton, is a sometimes mesmerising and often overwhelming force. Among other things, it is the illumination of nostalgia, the halo of memory and the shining-out of presence. Interestingly, it is also about culmination, often standing for various forms of – usually problematic – realisation and achievement. For example, in ‘Scald’, the poem’s persona speaks of ‘light drawn in to the idea of light, all-eye and all / forgetting, more entire than perfection’; and in ‘Guns I / Major Mitchell, 1836:’ wild birds ‘are tearing the blueblack / shadows out of the river’, as if light and life are joined in defying the ruination of death and the depredations of time. But in Gorton’s poetry light never fully escapes the dark, and in ‘Scald’ the ‘sheer of light’ is also a ‘shining blank’, while the poem’s speaker represents herself as a ‘bright / dark torso’, images in which absence, darkness and light are inextricably connected.