David McCooey

Alan Wearne’s The Lovemakers is a book about overdoing it. Its characters have unwise love affairs, dream foolish dreams, drink too much, engage in criminal activity, amass (and lose) vast wealth, and talk incessantly (usually about themselves). Wearne’s characters usually deal with obsession and with the places you get to in life if you overdo things. Few characters in this second part of Wearne’s epic verse novel age gracefully, and some don’t get to age at all. But The Lovemakers isn’t just about over-doing it: it performs overdoing it. Wearne’s aesthetic is one of excess, of conspicuous idiosyncrasy. Part of its excessiveness and oddity is its oxymoronic status. Wearne’s books are simultaneously poetic and prosy, realistic and outré, stylistically heterogeneous and tonally homogenous.

Poetry is a form of resistance to loss, death and oppression. But, like any communication channel, it has its own resistance. Poetry does not simply communicate experience or presence. This resistant quality of the medium has often attracted attention. The opening of Wallace Stevens’s ‘Man Carrying Thing’ is a famous example: ‘The poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully.’

Writing this on the first Tuesday in November, I am struck by how different contemporary Australian poetry is from the Melbourne Cup. There is no money in poetry, of course, and in horse racing everyone, even the horses, are much better dressed. What’s more, despite complaints to the contrary, the returns are usually better when it comes to reading poetry than spending your days at the TAB. Martin Duwell’s The Best Australian Poetry 2003 and Peter Craven’s The Best Australian Poems 2003 are dead certs, compared to the boundless unreliability of horses.

Zoltan Torey’s Out of Darkness begins dramatically in Sydney. On a winter’s night in 1951, Torey, a refugee from Hungary studying dentistry, is on night shift at the battery factory in which he works to support his studies. When he moves a drum of acid, the plug blows off, ‘sending a massive jet of corrosive liquid at my face’. The acid eats into Torey’s eyes, blinding him for life. In addition, he swallows some acid, damaging his vocal cords. Torey describes this event twice: the second time, he emphasises how the event was experienced. ‘The last thing I saw with complete clarity was a glint of light in the flood of acid that was to engulf my face … It was a nano-second of sparkle, framed by the black circle of the drumface, less than a foot away.’ As this suggests, Torey’s prose has moments of extraordinary power.

It is a Pam Brown moment when, flicking through her Dear Deliria, I read of ‘historic butter sculptures’ and hear at the same time David Bowie on the stereo singing ‘yak-butter statues’. It’s a Pam Brown moment because her poetry is one of incidents and coincidence. In its interest in both the quotidian and in critique, Brown’s poetry illustrates the endless interplay between texts and contexts, between art and life. These latter categories are most vivid in Brown’s poems when they are collapsing into each other – like drunk friends at a party.

Samuel Johnson once wilfully said, ‘Sir, we know our will is free, and there’s an end on’t.’ One can understand Johnson’s sentiment. Talk about will can be interminable. If we feel our will to be free, does it matter if it really is? Right now, I’m willing myself to write this review, instead of having dessert or watching Big Brother (‘Will to Power in Big Brother: Or, Are You Smirking at Me?’ would make an interesting paper). But my will is weak. I’ve just returned from making a cup of tea. Writers – like everybody else – are notoriously good at finding distractions. But what does it mean to say that my will is ‘weak’? How much am I willing my writing of this review, and how much am I forced to write it? Is writing determined by economics (need for money), psychology (desire to see one’s name in print), or class (aspirations learned through upbringing and education)? And yet I’m free, am I not, to pass my own judgment on the book? Sooner or later, we give up and go to the pub with Dr Johnson.

A Geelong psychiatrist once asked someone very like me, ‘What’s the opposite of love?’ It was a bit like a question in a tutorial (psychiatrists and academics do have a thing or two in common). The answer, of course, couldn’t be so obvious as ‘hate’. It was ‘indifference’.