Poetry

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.

This is Paul Hetherington’s eighth book of poetry, his first full collection since his selected poems, Stepping Away (2001) and his verse novel, Blood and Old Belief (2003). The publication of a selected poems can sometimes have what the poet Richard Howard refers to as a ‘tombstone effect’, bringing creative work to a pause or halt, but Hetherington’s new book is very much a carrying forward, or a further refinement, of his work.

Dimitris Tsaloumas is often thought of as a poet writing between two languages. In his English poetry, this emerges in the way that the everyday diction of Greek often functions as the learned register of English. ‘Nostalgia’, as a compound word, is a modern Western coining, but when Tsaloumas opens the volume with ‘Nostalgia: A Diptych’, he evokes the Greek components of the word, particularly nostos with its connotation of Homeric return.

Literary criticism is a rara avis in Australia’s publishing world, perhaps only to be hoped for under an imprint such as Australian Scholarly Publishing. Yet a search of its recent publications shows that among nineteen titles this is the only instance – and one facilitated by a Melbourne University publishing grant. Rightly so, for Cassandra L. Atherton’s is academic writing in the best sense of that abused adjective: argumentative, lucid, grounded in extensive research, sustained by a lively intelligence and harnessed to a bright idea. None of which means that I agree with everything she says, but then one function of good theoretical discourse is to provoke disagreement.

The title poem of Michael Sharkey’s The Sweeping Plain – his first book of poetry since the retrospective History: Selected Poems 1978–2000 (2002) – is a polemic against politically conservative suburbia. The poem portrays a desert-like ‘sweeping plain’ of insularity, never-ending and utterly homogenous: ‘They look at others like themselves / in their home entertainment centres, / knowing answers to such questions as the names / of others living in that world.’ It is a pacey and rhythmic poem, with some surprising turns of imagery. The tone is measured rather than overly rhetorical, but it’s certainly not a new idea.

Ecopoetics is tricky terrain which, in these poems of ‘forest and water’, Louise Crisp encounters sometimes with agility, sometimes faltering. Perhaps that’s intended.

The cumulative effect of this collection is one of an overland trek, gradually ascending from ‘poisonous lowlands’ to the harsher, restorative air of ‘uplands’.

‘Westering’ is a resonant archaism which makes a wittily ironic title for Peter Kirkpatrick’s new volume. This is work which has a decidedly début du siècle flavour in its hard-edged urban perspective on ‘out west’. The dialectic of city/bush, with its history from Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson to Les Murray, is voiced in several registers through these finely crafted and sharply literate poems.

These are the final lines of a poem entitled ‘Endings 111’ in Tom Shapcott’s recently published collection of poetry, The City of Empty Rooms. The poem is included in the final two sections of the book devoted to memories of a Queensland childhood, more particularly recollections of growing up in the inland town of Ipswich. As David Malouf suggests in the blurb, ‘this is a late book that sometimes sharply, sometimes forgivingly looks back, but always with the freshness of things felt and seen anew in a living present’.