Poetry

Melbourne often seems an indeterminate place, with one flat suburb leaching into another. Writers tend to use place as local colour, the places themselves having little to say, in most cases. Kevin Brophy is an exception, and, especially in this ‘new and selected’ collection, a revelatory one. John Leonard have done great work in putting so many of Brophy’s poems back into print, alongside new work. (For typography buffs, ‘Walking,’ also has a superb cover, looking at which has exactly the same effect as reading the poetry.)

Twenty pages from the end of his New Selected Poems, Geoff Page imagines being ‘an heir of Whitman’, and muses that ‘I think I could turn awhile and write like the Americans, / they are so at ease in their syllables, irregular as eyelids, / various as the sea’. These lines are so cleverly Whitmanesque that the idea seems momentarily plausible. Only an astute reader will stop to think that the sea is hardly various at all – and how irregular are eyelids? Page’s poem, we might realise by this stage of the book, is presenting wry, understated humour, and this is one way in which he seems a deeply Australian poet, utterly unlike the Americans.

Towns in the Great Desert, a New and Selected, may be the collection that defines Peter Boyle. Among Australian poets, Peter Boyle is an exotic, one who is likely to be read far into the future.

David Malouf turns eighty this month, improbably. To mark his birthday, UQP has published a new poetry collection by Malouf. ABR Poetry Editor reviews Earth Hour in this issue.

Graeme Miles, born in Perth in 1976, has lived and studied in India and Europe, and now teaches Classics at the University of Tasmania. His work, though various, is highly distinctive. Much of it exists at the difficult-to-imagine intersection of philosophy, mythology, and surrealism. Its rhythms and cadences are highly accomplished; its erudition effortless and unpretentious.

A signal flare, known mostly for its use as a maritime distress signal, has the ability to illuminate a disproportionately large area for what can also seem, given its intimate, hand-held origin, an unnaturally sustained time of several minutes. It is also the title of Anthony Lawrence’s fourteenth collection of poetry. While the phrase itself is not to be found in any of the poems, the poetic idea offered by ‘signal flare’ is powerful and lights its terrain.

It is reasonable that poets, by the time they reach their mid-seventies, should be involved in projects which re-evaluate their current lives and poems in the light of early experience and expectations. This most recent book of Ron Pretty’s – and it is by some distance his best – is built around the Swedish proverb, ‘The afternoon knows what the morning never suspected,’ treated not as an opportunity to gloat over the wisdom which age is supposed to bring but instead to puzzle out the weird discrepancies and disjunctions between the two states of ‘what-I-was-then’ and ‘what-I-am-now’.

The end of the year tends to bring a small and exquisitely formed avalanche of Australian poetry, including Best Poems from Black Inc., Best Poetry from the University of Queensland Press, and the Newcastle Poetry Prize anthology. Sadly UQP gave up the ghost with its annual after 2009 ...