Andrew Taylor

Andrew Taylor has been an important figure in the Australian poetic landscape since his first book, The Cool Change, appeared in 1971. Identified with no particular group or aesthetic tendency, he has worked as poet and academic in Melbourne, Adelaide, and Perth, and is now retired from teaching and based in Sydney.

In a talk she gave recently at Writers’ Week in Adelaide, Dorothy Hewett praised Gwen Harwood as:

Working in isolation as the woman hero, charring like a cartographer the uneasy, shifting, violent, broken world of Australian women and finally, in the teeth of all opposition. proclaiming the right to love and be a hero.

Dorothy Hewett identified several other roles or figures for women writers of poetry in Australia, most particularly:

The woman as loser, lover, bleeder, the victim figure, at once perverse and self-exacting, who refuses to be second-best.

But it’s clearly Harwood’s heroic proclamation of ‘the right to love’ that Hewett admires.

Reading these three collections, I was struck by the recurring feel of travel and the great and traditional themes of love, death, and history. These books would not yield much for a study of regionality! As two of the books are selected poems and include work written over nearly thirty years by poets who have spent a lot of time overseas, the sense of history is perhaps not unusual. All the poets have spent time in Europe and America. But the way they view history shows how they differ as poets. Philip Martin seems constantly to feel the history of Europe and Scandinavia in his blood, both in his references back to origins and customs and in his exploration of love and mortality through these.

On my most recent visit to Warrnambool in December 1994, the newspapers carried a tragic story about some local youths who had been digging in the coastline dunes and sandstone cliffs outside the town. One of them had died when their cave collapsed. It is this wild, unpredictably dangerous but attractive coastline that features in the title sequence to Andrew Taylor’s new book. In Sandstone, the blurb on the back cover tells us, Taylor returns ‘to the sight [sic] of his childhood’.

Andrew Taylor’s latest book reprises themes common to many of his earlier poetry collections – movement between the antipodes and Europe; the natural landscape; affinities with music – but also, as the title suggests, themes of haunting and unhaunting, visitation and absence. Taylor was ill with cancer in 2003, and his confrontation with death has strongly informed The Unhaunting. The book is divided into five sections, and while the trajectory is far from linear, a sense of moving from darkness to light, from threat to release, unfolds.

Andrew Taylor’s Collected Poems is framed by the weather. Indeed, the first poem is entitled ‘The Mere Repetition of Weather’. Weather runs from the ‘Prologue’, to The Cool Change (1971), in which ‘the weather like an alchemist / turns into gold the matter of my arm’, to the last poem in New Poems 2000-2003, ‘The Answer’, in which the poet has ‘come back to the swamp.../ after three years of drought the drenching rain/...flushing green clots of algae’. In another century, this might indicate a Romantic poet, attuned like an Aeolian harp to the motions and stirrings of nature. But this is a poet in whose work can be seen influences of Wallace Stevens, Jonathon Culler, Vincent Buckley, Chris Wallace-Crabbe and John Tranter – an entirely different sugar bag of marsupials.