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Australian Poetry

There are not many ways, I imagine, in which Vivian Smith puts one in mind of Walt Whitman, but one which occurs to me is that Smith’s successive volumes, at least since Tide Country (1982), have been, like Leaves of Grass (1855), a work in progress, in which previous poems reappear, sometimes in modified form, and new work is added, so that the whole corpus is re-presented in different ways over time. Along the Line is the latest, and welcome, incarnation of Smith’s oeuvre. 

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Blessings and praise

to the dark entanglement of caught branches

I continue to see,

after years of crossing the causeway,

as a black swan

holding her place in the current, her head

held resolute and serene,

her cygnets the shadows that advance and recede

in the eddies she makes going nowhere.

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The body’s peasant workers – hands –
daily toil in the fields of light.
They never question our wishes.
They can fail, but not misunderstand.
They are our strangeness that we are blind to.
At night they lie like maimed spiders
or star fish swept to shore. They know
about love as much as mouths and eyes.
Throughout the day, they give the mouth ... (read more)

David Campbell published a dozen volumes of poetry between 1949 and his death in 1979, as well as joint selections of Russian translations, collections of short stories and anthologies. Perhaps the purest lyricist of his time, he remained faithful to the few literary forms – the ballad, the song, the sonnet – that first engaged his attention, and never tried to force his range beyond its limits. There was no verse novel, no historical narrative, no extended satires or epistles. But he was not unresponsive to the debates that enlivened Australian literary discussion during his lifetime: A.D. Hope’s advocacy of the discursive mode finds its influence on one phase of his work, as does a highly individual use of neoclassical references. His short poems explore the whole range of Australian history from a variety of angles and, for all their brief and fragmentary forms, build up a narrative that is just as impressive as some of the more popular sequences of the 1940s. In the 300 pages of his Collected Poems (1989), not many go over the page. His poems might seem small in scale, but his collected work has a greater impact than that of many of his more ambitious, heavyweight contemporaries.

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Nebuchadnezzar by Shelton Lea & Poetileptic by Mal McKimmie

by
October 2006, no. 285

Nebuchadnezzar is Shelton Lea’s ninth and last book. Sadly, this colourful poet, a well-loved stalwart on the Melbourne reading circuit, died of cancer in May 2006, shortly after its publication.

The book begins by surveying a ‘land of fences and diatribes’ (‘1988’). It describes the inhabitants of Koori streets: ‘old men with no tomorrows / who rock on broken chairs / and stare at a bitumen sea’ (‘fitzroy’). Lea was an advocate for Aboriginal causes, and his poems often celebrate marginalised people who must summon the desire to survive. This burden of grit grounds life in harsh experience, before a remarkable lift-off.s a sort of coda, and satisfyingly resonates to the final page, in this assured début collection.

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Approaching a new book by Sydney’s Peter Minter, we are afforded the opportunity to see where a maturing poet is headed. A few years ago, he was very much identified with cutting-edge poetics. More interested in the epistemology of language than most of our poets, he could be seen as an experimental ally of, say, Michael Farrell and the American, Andrew Zawacki. Yet there was sometimes a whiff of the academy about his projects, a certain cerebral coldness. The poems kept holding us at a slippery arms’ length. Cunningly though, he opens the main flow of his new book with Ed Dorn’s concise observation that ‘All academics are hopeless’.

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All regions being regions of the mind, ‘Asia’ has had an especially unsettled and unsettling place in Australian thought. Australia has, in part, defined its own ‘occidental’ status with almost hysterical reference to its many ‘oriental’ neighbours. The putative border crisis of recent times, for instance, involved representing (mostly Middle Eastern and Asian) refugees as cashed-up ‘queue jumpers’ and potential terrorists who were ready to swamp our shores.

Asian ‘hordes’ have long been spectres haunting the Australian imagination. We see them in Windchimes, a marvellous anthology of ‘Asia in Australian Poetry’. But all of the usual suspects are present here, too: Asia as feminine and erotic; as terminally superstitious or spiritually enlightened; as a realm of pure aestheticism; as timeless or primitive; and as a region of war and warriors. All of these tropes, like the idea of ‘Asia’ itself (a region that supposedly ranges from China to Turkey), are as factitious as the notion that Asia is even a distinct continent. So far, so Edward Said, whose Orientalism (1978) made such observations postcolonial clichés. But if we consider the poetry of Australia as it reflects upon the idea of Asia, then we find an exciting literature that both maps and exceeds such tropes.

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You set down orange, with a dab of blue
and this grows into art
of a non-offender’s kind,
innocent as a fart in the footy crowd.
Meanwhile, the killing stumbles on

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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.

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I learnt today, while being read Ken Bolton’s poetry aloud by a friend (a native South Australian), that Hindley rhymes with ‘kind’ and not with ‘wind’. My friend spontaneously started reading to me and couldn’t stop. It runs on, this K.B. speaking voice: compulsive, South Australian, poetic, paranoid, poignant, funny. One way of describing the experience of reading Bolton is that you feel like you are an outsider, looking in at the window, nose pressed against the glass, and inside are all the poet’s friends: children, loved musos, long-term waitresses, artists, favourite poet-heroes. But then K.B. tells you that he is the perpetual outsider, too, solipsistic, meditative. My friend chose, almost randomly, the poem ‘Mostly Hindley Street’, with its wide lines rolled out across the page – in turn witty, desultory, intertextual, local and cosmopolitan – each daring you to take them too seriously, to miss the flipness, daring you to take K.B. seriously, as poet, or person. He might be just like his references (he suggests) – that old prig Thomas Gray, for one, who ‘never spoke out’:

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