Poetry

Glassmaker by Shane McCauley & Geology by Kevin Murray

May 2006, no. 281

Okay, I’ll take up Kevin Murray’s challenge in his poem ‘Freelance’ – that the reviewer is ‘a rogue knight / circling other men’s dragons’, though, like Max Richards, I reject Walter Benjamin’s Romantic formulation of criticism as a ‘fulfilment / of the artwork’. Each of these dragons has some fine points; all are modest in their own ways and illustrate Shane McCauley’s gloss of Robert Frost, ‘having the grace / to say that perhaps poetry doesn’t matter very much’. But in different ways, all three focus intently on the compelling significance of the minute, nuanced moments and details as a means of exploring big questions about ageing/mortality; the revelation and casualness of nature; the meaningfulness of history at both personal and public levels; and the functions and significance of art and writing. All are in various ways influenced by both the Romanticism of Wordsworth and Coleridge (particularly the ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’ aspect) as well as the modernist urban scepticism of T.S. Eliot. These are mannerly dragons. None will scorch the gentil reader-knight. Nor is there a hint of halitosis.

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Freehold: A verse novel by Geoff Page

by Oliver Dennis •

April 2006, no. 280

Geoff Page’s third verse novel – a form which, if we are to believe the cover puff, he has ‘made utterly his own’ – takes a broad and topical look at the problem of reconciliation in Australia. Reaching back to the 1840s, his narrative opens with an English settler’s account of establishing a successful cattle station on the Clarence River. Edward Coaldale is a liberal with an en-lightened attitude towards the local indigenous people. Employing natives as stockmen and learning their language, he soon earns the suspicion of neighbouring pastoralists, who regard such behaviour as ‘soft’. Prematurely ill with cancer and lacking an heir, Coaldale attempts to bequeath ‘Kooringal’ to the Bundjalung tribe, but is thwarted by regulations insisting the property be left to a single person. He dies leaving it to the talented Jimberoo, who, before long, sells it on to a white family.

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A Whiter Shade of Pale

by Paul Kane •

April 2006, no. 280

… although my eyes were open

In ’68 I sported a Panic Button on my blazer –

pushed, it read ‘Things will get worse before

they get worse.’ After the assassinations, I threw

it away. On edge, we were now living on the edge.

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Hunting Swans: Annaghmakerrig, Ireland

by Jeri Kroll •

April 2006, no. 280

1

Some day maybe I’ll catch them.

Across the quivering lake they float,

a trio of indistinct shapes,

but they are swans,

that much I know.

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High Wire by Adrian Caesar

by David McCooey •

April 2006, no. 280

Having taught literary studies at the Australian Defence Force Academy, Adrian Caesar is perhaps better placed than most to understand the troubled relationship between power and culture, order and creativity. ‘All Cock Red’, one of the poems in Caesar’s fourth book of poems, High Wire, attends to such a context:

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Judith Bishop on winning the 2006 ABR Poetry Prize

by Judith Bishop •

April 2006, no. 280

Life without poetry is unimaginable to me. Yet my own sense of myself as a poet has always been somewhat intermittent; or, to put it another way, I keep straying then coming back to poetry, like a prodigal child who trusts she’ll be forgiven. Those times when I’m actively engaged in writing poetry have been interspersed with quite long stretches in which I nonetheless work with language on other fronts – studying for a PhD on speech rhythms in an Aboriginal language, learning a new language (Russian being the latest) and, more recently, working on a set of prose translations from the Swiss-born French poet Philippe Jaccottet. I find there’s a wonderful sense of release and revelation in being guided by another’s voice, especially a voice as fluent, emotive and original as Jaccottet’s. My day job as a linguist with a speech-technology firm means that I also deal on a daily basis with language data – at times, two to three languages at once. I find I am a ‘globalist’ when it comes to language, and also, therefore, to poetry. I am just in love with the fact that each language brings with it a new horizon of experience; and each good poem does the same in miniature.

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The Best Australian Poems 2005 edited by Les Murray

by Jennifer Strauss •

March 2006, no. 279

Annual anthologies of Australian poetry are, or should be, a good way to get an overview of the local poetry scene, as well as an opportunity to greet new poets and to keep in touch with established ones. This selection from more than a hundred poets fulfils that function pretty well, having a range of old and new names, styles and themes, even if the sourcing of the poems does seem weighted in favour of Quadrant, of which Les Murray is poetry editor. It’s the hubris in the title – Best Poems – that makes one cantankerously inclined to point to incomprehensible omissions. Readers with a mind to play that game can scrutinise some of the contenders that Murray passed over by reading Peter Porter’s rival anthology (David McCooey reviewed UQP’s Best Australian Poetry 2005 in the October 2005 issue of ABR). We have to accept, I think, that any anthology cannot help but bear signs of its editor’s preferences and prejudices, and no anthologist can hope to read every poem of the year. What matters, bearing in mind the need to be reasonably representative, is whether the chosen poems are good ones (although Some Good Australian Poems of 2005 might not be a highly marketable title).

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Spiders

by Keith Harrison •

March 2006, no. 279

I stare from my study window into trees.
Considering all things, I watch the first snow spill
White seeds across the rubble where the barn
Towered over us with its cracked spire
For almost half a century until
Some feckless pot-head changed
The whole thing into fire.

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Back Roads, Local Roads

by Brendan Ryan •

March 2006, no. 279

canola’s chemical yellow rises above the fence line
Black Poles laze around a dam, ibis and egrets gliding overhead
wattle, casuarina, eucalypt, cypress, radiata

where the bitumen gives way to gravel
taking you deeper into shadows, ditches
tinder undergrowth of a bush block

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The Well Mouth by Jeri Kroll

by Jeri Kroll •

March 2006, no. 279

Philip Salom’s tenth collection of poems offers readers an experience akin to falling over the edge of a well into a frightening subterranean world. The Well Mouth is dark, allusive, ironic, brutal, perplexing and confronting, and so it can be alternately rewarding and irritating. Readers should not miss the explanatory paragraph before the prologue; otherwise they risk being as disoriented as the central narrative consciousness, a woman murdered by corrupt police and dumped down a well. She makes the collection cohere as a kind of ghostly medium, channelling the voices of the newly dead, some of whom are described as ‘whistleblower, brothel madam, long-distance driver, woman lost in the bush, old solider’.

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