Five Islands Press

There has been something of a fashion in recent years to dismiss what might loosely be called ‘rural’ poetry because the vast majority of Australians live in cities near the coast. Nevertheless, ‘rural’ poetry keeps appearing, and not just in the works of Les Murray. A considerable number of Australian poets are only one generation away from the land (even John Tranter was born in Cooma), and their childhood memories can often be a rich resource. Admittedly, there are not many actually working it; the reasons for this are often at the core of their poetry. A few perhaps are inclined to be nostalgic (even sentimental) but there is also, as Craig Sherborne has observed, an ‘anti-pastoral strain in Australian poetry’. Among the more recent exponents of this tradition are the late Philip Hodgins, John Kinsella (in his wheat belt poems) and, to judge from A Paddock in His Head, the Victorian poet Brendan Ryan.

Geoff Page’s latest poetry collection is a wide-ranging survey of some of the issues affecting contemporary Australian life. Underpinning Page’s poems of cafés, apartments, classical music, outback murders and domestic violence is a meditation on approaching mortality and the very idea of belief. In Page’s previous collection, Darker and Lighter (2001), the troubling nature of belief was hinted at in ‘Credo’: ‘The dark-night-of-the-soul-agnostic / prefers the right to doubt. / The world’s too much beset by those / who know what they’re about.’ Five years later, Page’s reflections on belief and the loss thereof return like echoes from a bell. In the fine poem ‘At Tosolini’s’, Page contrasts the diners’ penchant for coffee with the sound of bells ringing at a nearby church: ‘The sound of bells in autumn air / has long since been a thing / that we can never quite believe / and yet we don’t despair.’ Page’s use of the inclusive pronoun ‘we’ assumes much, and perhaps speaks for those who no longer believe.

What shapes might poets use to house and craft their various perceptions? Given the absence of a narrative framework, particularly within lyric poetry, what are the possible images and contents through which poetry might weave its insights, and thereby build a tangible structure able to communicate the ephemera of experience and idea? In her most recent collection of poems, M.T.C. Cronin, surely one of the most significant poets writing in Australia today, works explicitly within the artifice of a given structure – a series of poems, titled for alphabetically organised flowers, each with its own specific dedication.

John Mateer’s fifth poetry collection confirms him as a poet of considerable assurance and originality. The Ancient Capital of Images is, in a sense, a metaphor for the poetic imagination – the entity formerly known as the Muse. The terrain ranges from South Africa to Australia to Japan. It is in the latter section that his achievement is most impressive. There is little here of the travelogue, the sense being rather of an inward journey.

These two new collections are both by, and maybe for, believers. They contain passionate and interrogative poems that argue for and celebrate their respective views of the world. Both poets are, to quote Rosemary Sorensen’s term for Goodfellow on the cover blurb, ‘evangelists’ who wear their respective hearts on their sleeves and who urge or invite assent.

Fontanelle, Andrew Lansdown’s seventh collection, is concerned with the almost ineffable immanent design and intricacy of the natural and experienced world, especially of birds, insects and a young family. The role of the poet here is to explore, describe and celebrate the (almost) sacred in the mundane: ‘The words I’ve been working with / are like running water. All afternoon / I’ve been trying to scoop out / a place for them to settle …’ (‘Home’). Lansdown’s voice is earnest, reverent, wonderstruck. These are Romantic imagist poems in which the poetry defers to the empirical and ontological world: ‘Cicadas have left their cuticles / clinging to the daisy stems: / brown shells, burst at the back / of the thorax’ (‘Emergence’).

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.’

Robyn Rowland and Jeri Kroll write what you might call anecdotal poetry: simple, intimate and direct. Kroll, for instance, writes about her dogs, doing her taxes and sleeping in, with the sketchy, conversational tone of someone thinking out loud: ‘Does age smell? The older the dog grows, / the more he smells like a labrador, / though he’s a border collie and blue heeler.’

Alex Skovron has always been a clever poet, sometimes playfully so, more often seriously so. Skovron, who was born in Poland in 1948 and came to Australia, via Israel, in 1958, is steeped in the European intellectual tradition, though he wears his erudition lightly. Like almost everyone else, Skovron is troubled by the twentieth century: it seems to hang over the horizon of this book. He is also concerned about the nineteenth. As he says in ‘The Centuries’: ‘It is necessary to remind oneself / that the nineteenth century has never really left us: / it has been here all along, biding its time.’