Poetry

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.

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”.

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.

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.

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.’

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.