Barry Hill

'The point is to deal with the stuff itself,’ wrote John Berryman. He was referring to Randall Jarrell, paragon of mid-century poet-critics – one who did, indeed, deal with the stuff itself, writing of poetry with the practical competence of a mechanic who knew his way around an engine, having built a few himself – but he could just as easily be speaking of Barry Hill. 

There is probably no book in a poet’s career more important than his or her first Selected Poems. It is here that poets have the opportunity to display the best of their work in all its variety over several decades. Individual collections are a mere step on the way. Collecteds tend to be posthumous and of interest mainly to scholars, reference libraries, and a cluster of devotees.

Meredith McKinney, our pre-eminent translator of Japanese classics – among them Sei Shōnagon’s The Pillow Book, the poetry of Saigyō Hōshi, the memoirs Essays in Idleness by Yoshida Kenkō, and Kamo no Chōmei’s Hōjōki (Record of the Ten Foot Square Hut) – has delivered another marvel of absorbing, elegant scholarship. Travels with a Writing Brush crosses the country of old Japan, from north to south and from east to west, and is a quintessential travel book. It goes to places, and shows them – except that the latter is not quite true; you would not go to this book to see things objectively so much as to cue to them imaginatively.

Barry Hill’s collection of essays from the last four decades is commanding and impressive. Few could match his range of subjects: from Tagore to John Berger, Lucian Freud to Christina Stead – all, for the most part, carried off with aplomb. He catches the ‘raw’ edge of Freud’s studio – ‘worksite’ as Hill calls it ...

With his new volume of poetry, Barry Hill has set himself the challenge of writing a book focused on the visual art of the recently deceased Lucian Freud without, excepting the cover image, accompanying reproductions of the paintings to which he responds. Naked Clay: Drawing from Lucian Freud is a collection of ekphrastic poems born out of the obsessive return to a body of painting that spanned much of the latter half of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first.

Australia is supposed to have a knowing relationship with East Asia, but the embarrassing truth we keep under wraps is that you can count on one hand the number of first-class translators we have produced. There are no doubt complex cultural reasons for this, but it is hard to escape the impression that many academics teaching Chinese and Japanese have not been earning their keep.

The painter and outdoor draughtsman John Wolseley is utterly unusual among artists in this country. Marvellously accomplished yet old-fashioned, he could be seen as an artist who cheekily leapt from  traditional to postmodern without passing through any of the intermediate stages. His deeply natural pictures can’t be categorised easily, for all that they are entrancing. In Lines for Birds, they are reproduced side by side with the comparably responsive poems of Barry Hill.

Helen Vendler, a supreme partridge among American critics of poetry, has written a third shining book on style – which she has made her métier, rather after Theodor Adorno, the philosopher-critic of music and the aesthetic high road. In her first, The Breaking of Style (1995), about Hopkins, Heaney, and Graham, she revealed how poets ‘can cast off an earlier style to perform an act of violence on the self’ – extending mastery. Coming of Age as a Poet (2003) was about the mature self-making of Milton, Keats, Eliot and Plath. Both books delivered the pleasures to which we have become accustomed: the feeling that we are in the company of a most brilliant undresser of poems, a critic who knows their stitching so well that she can lay their song and soul truly bare. Her powers of elucidation, with its enshrining of techne, have long brought joy to poets and their readers.

Chinese poetry has long been lost in translation. You only have to look at a line in an ancient Chinese poem and its inscrutability is plain to see: four or five characters across the page, each with several venerable meanings and without markers of tense, speaker, conjunctions or prepositions. Every translator becomes an adventurer, one who can only haul the poem onto the shores of difference.

This sixth poetry collection by Barry Hill is a fine, intense book of journeying and returns. Poems are based on pilgrimages made in the flesh (to Carrara, to Assisi, to Kyoto) and on those made in the mind as we visit works of art. But there is nothing blandly celebratory about these pilgrimages: the focus is always on the self of the journeyer. Indeed, at a deeper level, its poems are really about the experience of becoming, of being ‘drawn’. And one of the book’s central metaphors is the way there is a double process going on in the creation of the self: we emerge as human beings out of inchoate experience in the way that a sculpture emerges from stone; and, at the same time, we are shaped by the loved ones who surround us.