Arc Publications

Katherine Gallagher, who has lived in London since the 1970s, has now published six books of poetry, all but two of them with British or American publishers. This book selects poems from her earlier books, together with twelve new poems. As a whole, it gives the sense of a writer’s development over a period of thirty-five years, with some slight shifts of style over that time.

Katherine Gallagher’s is a poetry of small spaces and objects, tiny hollows of memory that momentarily glow, incandescent, in the imagination: ‘knotted roots / reaching down into the riverbed’, ‘faces mottled in eucalyptus shade’, that place ‘beside the pond, in foaming clusters / creamy flowers of meadowsweet; / and there’s goatsbeard (‘jack-go-to-bed-at-noon’) / bird’s-foot trefoil, majoram and reeds.’ These latter lines are from the poem ‘Summer Odyssey (Railway Fields, for D.B.)’, an occasional poem for a small piece of land ‘Between Green Lane and the New River’s / four hundred-year-old waterway’. The poet spins from the ordinary and the overlooked a world of intricacy and quiet sensual power.=

Peter Porter, in his introduction to John Kinsella’s new collection, notes that ‘we are all familiar with the surface details of American life. Kinsella does not have to footnote his poem: we recognise his instances immediately … We all speak American.’ Given that Kinsella now lives and works in the United States, Porter also identifies ‘the disillusion at seeing a great exemplar close up’ as one likely catalyst behind the poetic polemic that constitutes this book. Yet it is the surface, the broad impressionistic sweep that we in Australia have absorbed over decades of exposure to American life in our newspapers, magazines, television programmes and popular music, with which Kinsella often engages. One senses that the poet, whether up close or at a distance, would find much about the United States with which to take issue. Nevertheless, his engagement with, and rupturing of, surface in this long poem, or sequence of poems, seems apt. Kinsella smatters the text with allusions to film (ranging from the Marx brothers to Carrie), popular music (George Gershwin to Jefferson Airplane) and numerous other trappings of American life. In doing so, he takes popular culture’s immersion in artifice and turns it against itself.

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’.