Poetry

The selected work of a long-lived poet presents the reviewer with so much to consume. A long life and career give a poet plenty of time to make their way through different styles and themes and, perhaps most importantly, to witness moments in history and shifts in culture. In this case, we have a career spanning fifty-something years and a life that ended in 2021.

David Stavanger’s third collection of poetry, The Drop Off, disintegrates binaries and social expectations with post-structuralist fervour, occupying and exploring the liminal space of broken families, neo-liberal cultures, mental health and, of course, language. Stavanger’s poetry is both pithy and undercutting, anathematic and loving, political and personal – and often, as is the case with such duplicitous poetry, these themes express themselves simultaneously, almost co-dependently.

For almost fifty years, Alan Wearne has been one of Australia’s pre-eminent users of dramatic monologue. Since The Nightmarkets (1986), he has also become one of our most persistent and accomplished writers of verse novels. It is a form which to many seems paradoxical (how can something be two contradictory things at once?), and yet it is undeniably capable of producing fast-moving and powerful narratives which remain vividly present in the mind.

In his 1928 collection of poems, Odd Jobs, Ernest ‘Kodak’ O’Ferrall caricatures recitation as an onerous entertainment that has passed its use by date:

Barry Hill has written thirteen collections of poetry, including Eagerly We Burn: Selected poems 1980-2018 (Shearsman, 2019). These volumes demonstrate his interest in the natural world, Australian history, White Australia’s relationships to Indigenous and Asian cultures, and cross-cultural experiences more generally. His poetry explores politics, art and ekphrasis, literature, autobiography, and spiritual issues, including, persistently, Mahayana Buddhism and its teachings about ‘emptiness’.

Gregory Day is best known as a prize-winning novelist, but it should not surprise his readers to learn that he has, in Southsightedness, made the move to lyric poetry. The lyrical has always figured in his work, which, as well as novels, includes essays, criticism, and music. (Indeed, poetry can be found in Day’s forays into that occult genre, the artist’s book.) Day’s lyricism is not, and has never been, the breathless kind that traffics in the precious and the inconsequential. For Day, the lyrical mode attends to language’s most powerful affective and cognitive potentialities, doing so both through the linguistic intensity of the poetic idiolect, and an engagement with the daytime domains of politics, history, and the material world.

‘About Happiness’, the striking opening poem of Kevin Brophy’s latest collection, An Inventory of Longing, anticipates many that follow in the first half of this book. Empathy and reflectiveness are present in a melding of the individual with the social, with landscape, and with the enigmatic passage of time. The poem contains a moment, and it is timeless. It takes its readers on a walk along ‘the river’ in Paris where, at a confluence with a seamy canal, we meet a homeless man who sleeps beneath plastic sheets and shares his phone video of Sufi dancers, whose songs give him happiness and ‘can cure hunger’. ‘Meet’ is the operative word; this is not indifferent observation, but a human exchange. That only one of the parties can eventually walk away is troubling, for reader and speaker. The written poem is evidence of this. The encounter is humbling; the poem reflects deeply on the nature of happiness and, equally, suffering, in the broader context of time, which ‘slips ahead and past us, / pauseless as this river’s sleepless spinning onward happy rush’. In context, the final use of ‘happy’ becomes nuanced.

‘Poetry is a speaking picture,’ said Simonides of Keos, and ‘painting a silent poetry’. From ancient Greece until now, these ‘sister arts’ have been frequently conjoined, though it is most often poetry that speaks to or for painting rather than the reverse. We have come to call this interaction ekphrasis (literally, a ‘speaking out’), usually defined as ‘a verbal description of a work of art’. In Classical times it was a school exercise for developing rhetorical skills, but ever since Homer’s elaborate depiction of the shield of Achilles in the Iliad, it has been co-opted by poets, especially during the last century.