Salt Publishing

Poetry is a form of resistance to loss, death and oppression. But, like any communication channel, it has its own resistance. Poetry does not simply communicate experience or presence. This resistant quality of the medium has often attracted attention. The opening of Wallace Stevens’s ‘Man Carrying Thing’ is a famous example: ‘The poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully.’

Lawrence Bourke’s A Cold Touch begins with a poem called ‘Advice to a Failure’. Expressed with such force as to render grammar a secondary consideration, its argument is hard to grasp al first, but the poem is only technically meaningless: it contains, I think, an important truth:

The committee can stick
their mate with medals until the man’s all brass
but his brilliant chest will never help him frame
a line to shine like those of poets who came
to nothing but writing well writing for themselves
and us the simple truths some call fiction.

The line that shines, in other words, is a prize that outshines the brass and medals. Few, I suspect, would disagree with Bourke on this specific point. But why is something so uncontroversial expressed with such conspicuous force? Is Bourke, I wonder, as baffled as I am as to why certain books get medals at all?

As one of the few Australian poets with an extensive publishing history overseas as well as in Australia, John Tranter suffers from the problem of what might be called parallel publishing. His UK books are often built out of selections from his Australian books. Just under half the poems in his new book, Studio Moon (published by Salt, and distributed in Australia by the Fremantle Arts Centre Press), have appeared before, notably in At the Florida (1993). But the best from that book has been chosen, the new poems are exciting, and the result is a book that manages to be simultaneously powerful, entertaining and revealing.

Like M.T.C. Cronin’s earlier collections, beautiful, unfinished is characterised by a mixture of mystical awe and formal restraint. The collection is subtitled PARABLE/SONG/CANTO/POEM’. As this suggests, it consists of a parable of sorts in verse, a sequence of songs, a set of cantos ‘minus melody’, and some poems. But in Cronin’s hands, these various forms seem based upon haiku. She writes sparely in short-lined stanzas, and she undercuts her own rhythms until it seems as if almost every poem might end in an ellipsis.

It is a Pam Brown moment when, flicking through her Dear Deliria, I read of ‘historic butter sculptures’ and hear at the same time David Bowie on the stereo singing ‘yak-butter statues’. It’s a Pam Brown moment because her poetry is one of incidents and coincidence. In its interest in both the quotidian and in critique, Brown’s poetry illustrates the endless interplay between texts and contexts, between art and life. These latter categories are most vivid in Brown’s poems when they are collapsing into each other – like drunk friends at a party.