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Poetry

The three books under review here promote no generalisation about the condition of poetry, the health of the beast, unless they call to mind the difference between poems which are interesting from line to line and those which somehow resonate as wholes. R.H. Morrison, the eldest of the three poets, is the one who most often produces whole poems, at least to my ear.

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The Typewriter Considered As Bee-trap by Martin Johnston & Fast Forward by Peter Porter

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December 1985–January 1986, no. 77

I have sat on these books longer than is reasonable for a review, yet have to confess that I am not satisfied with the readiness of what follows. I got the Porter first, but receiving the Johnston thought that they in some ways offered similar difficulties, perhaps similar rewards, to the reader, and that it might be neat to review them together.

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Selected Poems 1971-1982 by Pamela Brown & Manners of an Astronaut by Gig Ryan

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June 1985, no. 71

All three poets use a personal voice to summon forth their immediate universe. Ryan and Brown are very much entrenched in their respective sub-cultures whilst Burke is essentially the polemicist, the observer of life in her native Newtown.

Ryan’s collection is permeated with the language of a very bold imagination: “As a brain leaks out from its tiny emotional field”; “Smile like a white ladder. That’s their famous trick”; “His straight and yellow skin steers his parents’ car”.

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Tsaloumas is not a poet of the migrant experience. He does not evoke nostalgia for a homeland out of some experience of anguish as a stranger in a foreign culture. He defies such narrow limits. If some of his poetry refers to his homeland it is within the broader framework of nostalgia, of a feeling of loss or rejection, of Mneme.

His poetry in this collection encompasses a multiplicity of subject matter and style. He looks at the past through what remains of it in time present, yet time present in its own right cannot retrieve the past (‘Morning Start’). He avoids prophesying about the future, which he says is the domain of the representatives of the people with their brassy voices – politicians. He precludes the possibility of a vision of the future being created conclusively by looking through the “lookouts” of today or the past. He might well say, leave that to the enigmatic oracles and the exhortations of the politicians – to Messianism.

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Just over a year ago a group of Melbourne poets who all had manuscripts ready for publication discovered the urgent need for a press devoted entirely to poetry.

The major publishers were booked out several years ahead just dealing with their regular authors, and as their poetry lists were limited to a handful of volumes each year the chances of acceptance were minimal. Moreover, these publishing houses are commercial ventures, and the need to show a return prevents them from taking too many risks.

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Thoroughly researched, well ordered, factual biography like Doherty’s Corner appeals to me. If, as is usual with a life-history, there is occasion for reading between the lines, I’m left alone to do it unhampered by authorial speculation. It often happens that when subjects of biographies live into the era of the writer of the book, facts emerge during research that might offend the feelings or sensibilities of still-living people. Burke has excluded anything of this order. In other words the book is very interesting and a model of usefulness and good taste.

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Outbreak of Peace by Wendy Poussard & At the Institute for Total Recall by Michael Sariban

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May 1985, no. 70

Poussard’s Outbreak of Peace (Billabong Press, $3.95 pb, 44 pp) is a personal record of the women’s action at Pine Gap in November 1983. It is difficult to say precisely how Poussard achieves the fine balance of political and personal commentary that she does, but her introduction provides a clue. ‘Australians are an urban, shore-hugging people,’ she writes, ‘but in the middle of our urban, shore-hugging consciousness there is a space, a desert. For a people with few myths, the openness and vastness of the Centre holds a hint of liberation.’

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Three new books of poetry, significantly from three different publishers, are thankfully diverse. It is not that volumes from particular publishers are predictably the same but that they do have family resemblances; this is to be expected as publishers’ editors, like reviewers, will have particular tastes. Especially in a non-popular area like poetry it is good that a number of publishers should co-exist to keep have possibilities in the art.

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The Way It Is by Michael Sharkey

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May 1985, no. 70

On page 87 of Michael Sharkey’s The Way It Is, there is a photograph of the poet reading the National Farmer (a weekly rural newspaper), which shows what happens when you lock up the well-read in a small rural town. Armidale mightn’t Pontus or Bandusia, and you don’t have to have crossed Augustus or have been befriended by Maecenas to get there, but once you are, it certainly changes your idea of ‘the way it is’. Drought, rain, frost, journeys, and drunkenness, obsession with the weather in general, and an almanac of solar and lunar occurrences becomes the raw material of your verse – as it was for those other rural exiles in the Tang dynasty, Li Po and Tu Fu.

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It was my good fortune to be born into a family for whom books and paintings had a central place. My parents subscribed to an excellent lending library and were adventurous readers of novels. During the Depression they could not often afford to buy a painting, but they went to art shows and Sunday visits to the Art Gallery of New South Wales were frequent in my childhood.

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