Poetry

This volume of Southerly, combining the first two issues for 2007, is a celebration of Elizabeth Webby’s contribution to Australian literature. Noel Rowe and Bernadette Brennan, the editors principally responsible for this issue, describe it as ‘a tribute to a brilliant career’. There are contributions from academic colleagues, generations of poets and writers of short fiction, and a number of ex-students, many of whom ‘have gone on to distinguished academic careers’.

The opening poem in Petra White’s first collection is a modest, tantalising, somewhat mysterious poem called ‘Planting’. A metaphor, you might think, for the inspiration and growth of a poem – much as Seamus Heaney’s famous ‘Digging’, also the first poem in a début collection, established a link via the rhythm of digging, between the act of writing and the act of cultivating land, in a particular place and culture. But this is not so. White’s poem is an aside, takes pleasure in evoking the senses’ responses to a fleeting experience, and coolly resists specific interpretation. Who is it about? Where?

Toward the end of his life, Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–98), French poet and founding father of Symbolism, published the prose collection Divagations (1897). This highly ambitious, eclectic work, a repository of Mallarmé’s aesthetic, revitalises the critical enterprise and shakes the very foundations of the literary act. His practice is inaugural, effecting a critique of the subject and of poetry that is unprecedented. Divagations shows the mature Mallarmé at the height of his achievement, inventing a new form of poetic journalism. From the outset, we are invited to read differently. These consummate, diverse pieces, comprising prose poems, lectures, journalism and portraits, are truncated from their original context and strategically redeployed. They illuminate each other differently and acquire a new potency, in tune with the poet’s vision of words in verse interacting like reflective jewels. The dazzling pieces on dance and current events provide a radical critique of contemporary values and show a sense of humour more familiar to readers of Mallarmé’s fashion journal. High and low interchange as the apparently trivial or frivolous acquires seminal status. The ‘Important Miscellaneous News Items’ offer some of the greatest examples of the new ‘Popular Poem’, celebrating the insight and autonomy of the modern reader.

Barry Hill’s latest collection is both delightful and substantive. Australia has a minority tradition of the urbane, exuberant, even bouncy poet – Andrew Sant, Peter Porter. It is a constant in American poetry – early John Hollander, Frederick Feirstein, L. E. Sissman, John Frederick Nims, X.J. Kennedy – with the difference that, as the above examples show, urbanity in the United States would be less romantic and would have rejected romanticism outright, severed, as it were, Ezra Pound’s famous pact with Walt Whitman.

Reading Paul Mitchell’s second book of poems during a bout of insomnia seemed apposite not only because of its title but also because Mitchell’s poetry occupies a strange middle place, somewhere between dream and reality. Awake Despite the Hour illustrates Mitchell’s interest in occupying both the ‘real’ (politics, family and the quotidian) and the extramundane (imagination, the surreal and the metaphysical).

There has been something of a fashion in recent years to dismiss what might loosely be called ‘rural’ poetry because the vast majority of Australians live in cities near the coast. Nevertheless, ‘rural’ poetry keeps appearing, and not just in the works of Les Murray. A considerable number of Australian poets are only one generation away from the land (even John Tranter was born in Cooma), and their childhood memories can often be a rich resource. Admittedly, there are not many actually working it; the reasons for this are often at the core of their poetry. A few perhaps are inclined to be nostalgic (even sentimental) but there is also, as Craig Sherborne has observed, an ‘anti-pastoral strain in Australian poetry’. Among the more recent exponents of this tradition are the late Philip Hodgins, John Kinsella (in his wheat belt poems) and, to judge from A Paddock in His Head, the Victorian poet Brendan Ryan.

The eponymous poem in Caroline Caddy’s latest collection Esperance captures a breathtaking glimpse of a bay on the Western Australian coast. Immediacy epitomises Caddy’s poetic gift. In deft strokes, she provides a vivid land/seascape, compressing an astute reflection on history, geography, and humanity’s irrepressible need to explore beyond known boundaries. The language is physical and sensuous: ‘the snowy beaches / lapped by the cold clear bracelet / that’s there then not there / around our ankles.’ There is also a metaphysical dimension, ‘with everything falling away behind / with everything falling away ahead’ mirroring ‘esperance’: a quality of hope and faith in the future.

The production of literary magazines is a collaborative effort, and small ones tend to bring together people who are united in an enthusiasm that transcends financial aspiration. Translated, this means there is no money in it. The editorial notes for the rejuvenated Blast reveal what seems to be a family affair at work: the publisher–editor is Ann Nugent, and the person responsible for design and layout is Peta Nugent. Issues 4 and 5 appeared for review, but I have concentrated here on the first of these.

Gaius Valerius Catullus (c.87–54 BC) may have died young, but his limited output (only 113 poems and some fragments have survived) has immortalised him as a writer of erotic and satiric verse and savage portraits of contemporaries, so frank sometimes that, until recent decades, editions of his work were customarily heavily expurgated. Innumerable poets through the ages have kept his flame burning. Ezra Pound peppers the opening cantos with references to Catullus. Ben Jonson’s famous ‘Come, my Celia’ is a version of Catullus 5.