Australian Poetry

The Collected Verse Of Mary Gilmore: Volume 1 1887–1929 edited by Jennifer Strauss

February 2006, no. 278

Mary Gilmore is one of the most acclaimed figures in Australian writing. A cultural icon, she appears in important paintings and sculptures and on postage stamps, not to mention the ten-dollar note. Her biography has been published, her letters collected, and now the first volume of her complete poems, edited by Jennifer Strauss, has appeared in the prestigious Academy Editions of Australian Literature. No other Australian poet except Henry Lawson has received quite the degree of attention that Gilmore has been accorded. Longevity certainly had something to do with her fame: she was a living link between the colonial Australia she was born into and the Australia of the 1960s that saw her passing. Like Lawson’s, her life and work are written into Australian history; and she too is inextricably associated with the legend of the 1890s. She never quite achieved Lawson’s popularity as a writer, but this edition makes it clear that her fame was truly earned, not merely accrued. No literary reputation is ever finally fixed, or immune to criticism, but this book will help us to understand why Gilmore, Australia’s foremost woman poet during the first half of the twentieth century, came to be considered a national treasure.

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Do You Copy?

by Chris Edwards •

December 2005–January 2006, no. 277

Yes, I hear you. I hear

something else too.

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‘Europe: An Edge’ a poem by Chris Wallace-Crabbe

by Chris Wallace-Crabbe •

December 2005–January 2006, no. 277

Being from a young nation you find that dawn beguiles you

onto the exhausted saltmarsh,

miles of morose vacuity clad

in couch grass, cottonweed, random puddles, wire

and the odd, triumphant

flourish of pampas grass

featherily trying to tell dead factories,

Look here,

something fans, even at the far edge of Europe

where large gulls crowd and abruptly dip, although

the fish have all gone home to bed.

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‘Goldiluxe’ a poem by Peter Steele

by Peter Steele •

December 2005–January 2006, no. 277

After Lizzy Gardiner’s The American Express Gold Card Dress

Well, it’s been waiting all these years, like a poem

asleep in the word-hoard, its prince to come,

kiss at the ready, and bloom it forth to the world:

or like a kouros, hauled with pain

from the gnarling waters, smiling gaze intact,

its maker long put out to sea:

or like that ‘orient and immortal wheat’ that waved

before Traherne, a child bereft,

and set him claiming Paradise again:

yes, it’s here for the restless heart –

The American Express Gold Card Dress – and all

may now be well at last.

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Comfort (Hansel to Gretel in the Darkness)

by Kate Middleton •

November 2005, no. 276

Come – no grazed knee, no tears, no –

no fear of darkness in the singing wood.

Hear the threnody written on the wind:

a lament not for lostness, no, but for the slow

path homewards, the pebbles which guide us:

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Pomegranate Duty

by Keith Harrison •

November 2005, no. 276

The time’s come round again, blind pomegranates shine

In their dark bins like tawny Tuscan wine.

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Waterview Street

by Dorothy Porter •

November 2005, no. 276

In the street

of my childhood

nothing is reliable.

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The Past Completes Me: Selected poems 1973–2003 by Alan Gould

by Martin Duwell •

October 2005, no. 275

Martin Duwell reviews 'The Past Completes Me: Selected poems 1973–2003 ' by Alan Gould

Alan Gould’s writing career began in the early 1970s when he was one of the ‘Canberra Poets’. This substantial selection covers thirty years and clearly shows both the achievements and the limitations of his work: I think the former outweigh the latter. One of the strengths of his poetry is a consistent vision; thirty years gives the opportunity for that to be explored in all its ramifications. The centre of this vision is history or, in its unintellectualised form, the past. Almost all the poems relate to this in one way or another. Even the later poems of humour or love or the waiting for a child’s birth are framed by the overriding meditation on the past, so that, though they are expressions of an intimate personal life, it is one conducted on the surface of the immense, slowly changing patterns of history.

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Beach Burial

by Peter Rose •

October 2005, no. 275

for Craig Sherborne

‘Grief wrongs us so.’

Douglas Dunn

To the sea we bear our fathers in state –

or what they’ve done to them: the square conversions.

Surf mild as receding tides,

we slump in dunes with our burdens,

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Parrotology

by John Kinsella •

October 2005, no. 275

A couple of months ago, driving with my daughter just outside the wheat-belt town of York, Western Australia, we came across a ‘28’ parrot that had just been struck by a car. I scooped it up in a cloth, and my daughter held it on the back seat until we could get home. Having been bitten numerous times by those ‘strong and hooked’ beaks, I warned her to be wary. But the parrot – a splay of emerald, turquoise, black and yellow feathers – was too dazed to bite, and clearly had a broken wing. Though we’ve always called these beautiful birds 28s, technically they are a ring-necked parrot, and possibly even the Port Lincoln variety of ring-necked. The demarcation lines between varieties are hazy. The local ‘nickname’ matters as local names do. We eventually handed the injured bird over to the local ‘bird lady’, who later let me know that it had died due to massive brain damage. My daughter doesn’t know it died. She said it was the closest she’d ever come to something so ‘amazing’. I left it at that.

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