Poetry

Comedy isn’t the only art that requires good timing. Poetry also requires it. Indeed, poetry might be partly defined as the art of giving things away at the right moment. Illustrating this we have The Best Australian Poetry 2005. In this elegant anthology, we find Peter Goldsworthy’s inspired description of our planet: ‘Our earthen dish is seven parts water / one part china, and a tiny bit japanned.’ We also find Brett Dionysius on the 175-year-old tortoise Harriet, which, having outlived Charles Darwin, thinks: ‘Now I’m with Steve Irwin at Australia Zoo. / I Harriet, time-lord tortoise: outlive him too.’ We find Jennifer Harrison’s arresting description of ‘grammar’s lovely utterly cold snow’. We find Keith Harrison’s ‘kind of stretched villanelle’ (as he describes it), which begins: ‘The summer night is dangerous and deep.’ We find the unsettling climax of Aileen Kelly’s ‘His Visitors’, in which ‘fetid ivies’ ‘reach up and suck out the light’. We find Anthony Lawrence’s poem about the Wandering Albatross, with its reference to ‘the compass glass of its eye’. And we find the terrible, uncomic climax of Judith Beveridge’s powerful poem ‘The Shark’.

One of the things Rod Moran is good at is an oxymoronic tenacity – a kind of deliberate insouciance, a restrained violence – due to his embrace of metaphor. His best poems articulate disturbing comparisons and create surreal hybrids. You can see this in some of the early poems from High Rise Sniper (1970–80) selected for this new collection, such as ‘Chemical Worker’: ‘this pure acid, like some cruel psalm, / gives us daily bread ... [the living] / have a place in the maggot’s equation.’ Or, from ‘Cross Country’: ‘half a galah flock/ is spattered in its own pink / feathers and gore in mad array, / swimming down the highway / like grotesque fish / in the heat’s bright lagoon.’ The poems have an intensity that demands considerable attention and makes every line count.

Alan Gould’s writing career began in the early 1970s when he was one of the ‘Canberra Poets’. This substantial selection covers thirty years and clearly shows both the achievements and the limitations of his work: I think the former outweigh the latter. One of the strengths of his poetry is a consistent vision; thirty years gives the opportunity for that to be explored in all its ramifications. The centre of this vision is history or, in its unintellectualised form, the past. Almost all the poems relate to this in one way or another. Even the later poems of humour or love or the waiting for a child’s birth are framed by the overriding meditation on the past, so that, though they are expressions of an intimate personal life, it is one conducted on the surface of the immense, slowly changing patterns of history.

If I hesitate to declare delight in Blister Pack, David McCooey’s first volume of poetry, it may be because McCooey himself casts a shadow over the word in ‘Succadaneum’, a sequence of sardonically sad glimpses of the failed love that constitutes the theme of Part II of this collection – ‘Delight, it turns out, / is a lawyer / staying back at work / kicking off her shoes / and opening a bottle of red’, abandoning clients’ disasters to files ‘locked / in metal cabinets’.

The Sydney poet Bruce Beaver died in February 2004 after a long struggle with kidney failure that kept him on dialysis for more than a decade. He was seventy-six years old. Beaver was seen as a sympathetic older figure by many poets of my generation, born a dozen years later. I met him when I was in my twenties, and found him to be a generous friend. When the poet Michael Dransfield, younger still, called on him in the early 1970s, it was a natural meeting of minds. In one poem in The Long Game and Other Poems, Beaver says that ‘poor Dransfield draped / me with a necklet of dandelions / once and kissed my forehead / in what must have been / a satirical salute’. I have a feeling that the salute was heartfelt, but Bruce was painfully modest.

In the opening poem of Virgil’s Eclogues, a shepherd newly dispossessed of his farm by a soldier returning from war exclaims: ‘There’s so much trouble everywhere these days. / I was trying to drive my goats along the path / And one of them I could hardly get to follow; Just now, among the hazels, she went into labor …’ (trans. David Ferry). More than 600 years later, Poussin’s painting, Les Bergers d’Arcadie, dit aussi Et in Arcadia Ego (1638–40), takes up the theme of dispossession in a more radical key: even shepherds in Arcadia must die. The pastoral mode (taken broadly to include anti- and post-pastoral) has always enveloped threats to the pastoral idyll. John Kinsella’s The New Arcadia – with Poussin’s painting on its cover – is the final instalment of an ‘anti-pastoral’ trilogy initiated by The Silo: A Pastoral Symphony (1995) and followed by The Hunt (1998). In The New Arcadia, as in its prequels, we find the pastoral mode in full-blown crisis: in modern Australia, nature’s small misfires (viz. the goat’s ill-timed birth) have escalated into ecological disaster. In The Hunt, the farmers and their families are killed by their own tools, dying in accidents, falling under tractors, shooting themselves; in The New Arcadia, on the other hand, most of the victims are native birds.

Each of these three books is its author’s first, and each carries a cover endorsement by two distinguished poets. You can tell a lot about the books from looking at who endorses whom before you need even to read one of the poems.

The rear cover of Aidan Coleman’s Avenues & Runways (endorsements by Kevin Hart and Peter Goldsworthy) describes him as an imagist. Whatever the exact significance of that term, there is no doubt that this poetry belongs to the class that has slight outward show and rich implications. And the pleasure of reading them is the shuttling between the two. There are at least two important requirements here: the surface has to be elegant and engaging without being slovenly or cute (ah, if you only knew what treasures I conceal!); implications must be intense and never clichéd.