Poetry Review

In ‘Glenlyon’, the opening poem of his most recent collection, Tremors: New and Selected Poems, Andrew Sant provides readers with clues about his approach to poetry. ‘Glenlyon’ speaks of the ‘cool light’ of the page and ‘my shadow’s / hovering vague shape’. Certainly, Sant’s presence is invested in much of his work and his poetry prizes coolness and clarity. While he is sometimes a passionate poet, this passion is rarely overt and it is balanced by a determination to make good argument out of his poetic material and by a characteristically reasonable tone.

A number of the poems in Lidija Cvetkovic’s first book stem from revisiting places and people in the war-torn country of her birth, the former Yugoslavia, but the poetry springs from an interrelated heritage. An Eastern European sensibility guides this poetry, informing and being informed by laconic Australian understanding. Poems that speak of ethnic and regional conflict, and of self, lovers and family in two continents, are woven into the same breath; and as the inexplicable in human experience is measured, a quiet celebration of human resilience can be heard.

These two exceptional books should be sent to every household in Australia free of charge. They would be a perfect curative after the federal election. The campaigns of the conventional parties demonstrated how far indigenous Australia has fallen off the political radar screen. Fortunately, the independent creative work of Aboriginal thinkers, writers and artists continues to set high standards and often leads the way in the exploration of social, political and philosophical issues that many in mainstream culture are still unable to face.

Since a new book by Peter Porter is, though precious, also a complex phenomenon, one is stuck with the question of where to begin. The title poem, ‘Afterburner’, is perhaps as good a place as any. It is one of those poems (‘Clear Air Turbulence’ is another in this book) that speculates autobiographically and revisits youth looking for patterns and understandings:

Publishers and the publics they serve seem enthralled by the idea of ‘the best’. The best of what is ultimately less important than the superlative itself, which implies a rigorous screening process to isolate the most worthy material. Never mind that magazine and book publishers have already put writing through a brutal screening process with acceptance rates from .01 to 1 per cent. For readers whose schedules or temperaments prohibit them from doing the work themselves, a collection of ‘The Best’ can be useful and appealing.

In these lines, taken from ‘The African Spider Cures’, Judy Johnson might almost be describing her poetics. Nomadic, Johnson’s second poetry collection, consists of well-made poems that combine objective views of the world with snippets from the poet’s personal life. In the title poem, which centres around a recent separation, Johnson compares her experience of finding an illicit love letter with a Bedouin shepherd-boy’s chance discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls: ‘There is no connection between the two events,’ she writes, ‘[…] Yet I encounter coincidence.’

Jennifer Compton creates uneasy feelings. Her monologues come from desperate people: frantic, locked out, locked in. They all have some secret and are going to tell us, if it takes subtlety or no subtlety. What saves their querulous, impossible concerns from turning into rants or whinges is Compton’s actorly control of voice. These are poems of original intent and purposive control. The shocking ideas at the centre of her poems are tempered by a voice trying to master the extreme reality they relate. Her dramatic proclivities inform her work at every tum: characters are usually in places they don’t want to be, new circumstances have to be negotiated with an old map of the mind. On occasion, Compton even writes directions straight into the verse (‘I’ll shift from my mother’s voice and just give you the gist’), an unashamed member of theatre workshops.

For some reason, I have always been mildly resistant to the poetry of Andrew Sant. It is hard to know why. At its best, it is thoughtful, sensitive and intelligent. You get a sense of the poet poised with antennae aquiver for the vibrations of an invisible world. A poem from The Flower Industry (1985) describes a radio receiver ‘selecting a loose vibration from the taut air / and threading it through the wired network’ and concludes with an image of the poet travelling ‘in a car at high speed where the mind / is a curious receiver, exposed, intent / on that which is always about to be revealed’. As a poet, he is sensitive to what is often just out of sight or out of consciousness. His best book, Brushing the Dark (1989), contains a poem about the work of an early Hobart photographer but moves on, characteristically, to speculate on ‘what he missed or narrowly missed’: a man with his back to the camera, almost out of the frame. Here the camera, another black box, acts as a receiver. Another poem, also about a photograph, speaks of wanting ‘the energy behind the shimmering gleam of appearances’.