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Martin Harrison

'Happiness' may seem like an odd word for the title of a book of poetry, and given the circumstances of Martin Harrison's final years – his illness, the tragic death of his younger Tunisian lover, Nizar Bouheni – the title is rather ironic, but the poems in this posthumous volume are rich, bountiful, full of the same 'worshipful attention', the same sense of ope ...

There is no sound of the sea, a long row down the mirror-like waters of Wagonga Inlet crowded with forest reflections. The wind twists and dives in the tree canopy, the soft whisper mixing with bird calls and the occasional barking of a dog from across the water. The small flower heads of clover quiver in the gulps of wind pushing the big-bellied clouds, rain stained, across the mountains. I am cosseted in a snug cottage kitchen with the smell of apples, warm milk and the sweet taste of honey on chunks of freshly baked bread. My eyes follow the patterns smudged across the mangrove flats where the tides tell me the time of day. I am holidaying on the south coast of New South Wales, the perfect place to be reading Martin Harrison’s collection of new and selected poems, Wild Bees.

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Eclogues: Newcastle Poetry Prize Anthology 2007 edited by Martin Harrison, John Jenkins and Jan Owen

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June 2008, no. 302

The moon rising ‘nicotine-stained and peaceable / into the fingers of the silver trees’, arid land freshly rained on ‘like a dark sticky biscuit’, and a cow’s head like a ‘rounded anvil’: these are images plucked from the winning and highly commended poems of Mark Tredinnick, Barry Hill and Andrew Slattery, respectively, from last year’s Newcastle Poetry Prize. Notice the bucolic theme – these top three poems are all, loosely speaking, narrative poems in pastoral settings. This is partly why this printed anthology of the prize’s shortlist has borrowed its name from the title of Tredinnick’s award-winning poem.

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Martin Harrison’s poems have a fine discursive quality, which means that they often read like essays. Take ‘Midday’, from his recent volume Summer (2002), where a hand-scythe and the ABC radio news produce a meditation on time and place not dissimilar in its conclusion to that offered on several occasions in the essays included in Who Wants to Create Australia? ‘Only a little can be added to an everyday sense of life – / a singularity, a slowed-down look, faster than light, / a sense of movement out of nowhere, now, here.’

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Blackout is a poem written (deliberately, I think) in transition – or even perhaps in transit. Structured such that it lacks a singular, personal voice, it could be read as a response to the question: What is a poem in the era of digital media? Or more particularly, more precisely –Where does such a poem start? What’s its language, how does it end? Blackout, for example, is left unfinished: after the ninth section it just breaks off with a colophon indicating that there could be more words one day, or perhaps not. It’s left unfinished too in the sense of being a work which never resolves into a coherent narrative or even a coherent thought-structure. The polyphony of the text is left jagged and juxtapositional, much in the manner of block music. Or more likely in the manner of a downloaded text where many voices have criss-crossed in a many-timed, interactive way.

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Beautiful Veins by Mal Morgan & Fighting in the Shade by Peter Kocan

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April 2000, no. 219

In a note to the reader, Mal Morgan tells us that this last, posthumous collection Beautiful Veins – it comes with a CD selected from this and other work – was written during the five months after his being diagnosed with lung cancer. They’re note-taking, note-jotting poems. A sense of someone hurriedly trying to account for and describe his response both to the diagnosis and to the radiotherapy and chemotherapy treatments which ensue is uppermost. Strong, disturbing, they’re often ‘I do this, I do that’ (Frank O’Hara’s phrase) confessional poems.

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Melbourne Elegies by K.F. Pearson & Body-Flame by Michael Heald

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June 1999, no. 211

The problem with K.F. Pearson’s Melbourne Elegies is that Goethe – on whose classic of sex­tourism, Roman Elegies 1788–1790, these rhetorical, literary poems are loosely based – is Goethe: difficult to translate, still little read in English. It gives him problems. Pearson, to my mind, is not attempting a Poundian ‘replacement’ of an ancient text within the frame­work of a contemporary poetics. That would require a reckoning with the original poem’s logistics and context similar to the way that Pound’s Propertius speaks electrifyingly in the context of an Empire much later than the Roman one he wrote for; or in the manner that Christopher Logue has recently converted excerpts of Homer into a form of late 20th century literary cinema. Such replacement requires that the contemporary poem convince us that the original work’s ‘loss’ – a ‘loss’ produced equally by its inaccessible aesthetic no less than by our contemporary lack of language-skill and culture – should matter to us.

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State of mind: it’s a simple phrase but it is one which has always interested me. ‘State of mind’ is about what? Sets of feelings? Predispositions and moods? Or perhaps more it’s a term to do with the groove which thoughts regularly follow along. A state of mind is one which makes you respond in a particular way: you tend to act in a particular way; you have recurrent feelings.

The phrase interests me because it defines a feeling so intimate – so normal and everyday. Indeed, it is so intimate that it becomes difficult to say what a state of mind is. What are its boundaries? Where does it stop? Is this mind-set just mine or is it something to do with events out there, the latest news about the economy, the extravagant telephone bill which has just arrived, the relaxed feeling of walking along a beach, a recent argument, an enjoyable dinner party? For however influential and pervasive states of mind are, they are also fluctuating, amorphous things.

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Martin Harrison’s attentive poetry must be read attentively: the snaking semi narratives move through the landscape as rivers finding their way. The tonal shifts and mixed modes are fundamental to this collection’s many middle-sized poems that are often (even more than in his previous book, The Distribution of Voice) both verse essay and lyric, as Kevin Hart has noted. Not that all this in itself makes for good poetry; there are times when the verbal constructions are a little too odd, a little too free with metaphorical bravura. Why is it that ‘The gift of tongues and sight is platypus’? Other poems play with their referents like a fisher with a fish. Even syntactically straightforward similes such as ‘Mirrored clouds spike themselves with sharp, green shoots / in paddies marked out like holding tanks or Versailles’ lakes’ take a bit of thinking over.

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