Australian Poetry

This book came out last November four months after David Campbell died, and represents (say the publishers) ‘the very last of his poems’.

Although of late I’ve read just about everything he published, there’s no space here to sum up his work. Besides, Geoff Page (ABR October 1979) has already taken a keenly perceptive look at the past ten years development and has also foreshadowed my comments on this last collection. Quite rightly he points to those poets (Lowell, Hughes, Zbigniew Herbert, Vasko Popa), in whom Campbell found reminders of ‘some­thing he had long had to do’. Their poems, then, were like good parents, teaching their children not to imitate them but to assume their own identities. In The Man in the Honeysuckle, I especially note the influence of Popa: like him, Campbell in many poems cleans away all punctuation and yet the syntax sings clearly, so that we get a new version of the limpid poem we have always expected from Campbell.

The intention of this anthology is to sharpen our understanding of what was distinctive in the poetry of ‘the generation of ‘68’ (Tranter’s label).

In his introduction to The New Australian Poetry, reviewed elsewhere in this issue by Thomas Shapcott, John Tranter declares that this poetry has no allegiance except to itself. Some characteristics of works regarded as modernist are: ‘self-signature’ – the work validates its own technical innovations – and self-reference, where the ‘method’ is reflected consciously in the ‘medium’. He contrasts this modernism with such work as Vincent Buckley’s ‘Golden Builders’, which elicits a response of ‘quasi-religious rhetoric . . . a natural outgrowth of Australian university English departments’, and one sufficient to explain the ‘anti-academic bias’ evident in much of the work of the new poets.

The phenomenon of the Fremantle Arts Centre Press in Western Australia is one of the instructive publishing success stories of the past decade.

It is a frankly regional venture, and by concentrating on the local market and the immediate writing scene it has built up a secure base of interest – and sales. Out of a real or imagined (but widespread) sense of slight, or exclusion, has emerged the one thing most likely to resolve that carping insecurity: direct action aimed at self-sufficiency. It is important to recognise this motivating force. But it is important, also, to look at the consequences of that initial do-it-yourself bravado.

I think it was Judith Wright who once remarked that Lawson as a poet wasn’t important; that he seems, usually to have turned to verse as a journalistic medium or as a weapon for propaganda, and that the few of his better poems were such rather because of the intensity of feeling than through any technical or poetic gift.

Probably not too many would quarrel with Evan Jones’ light-hearted description of himself as ‘one of our twenty best-known poets under forty in some views…’ Though closer now to fifty than forty, Jones in his three books so far has shown himself to be one of those academic poets of great fluency in traditional forms, capable of whipping up a cigar-and-port entertainment at a moment’s notice – but also capable of genuinely moving poems.