Australian Poetry

This is both an exciting and a sad collection. Kenneth Mackenzie, like those later Western Australian writers Randolph Stow and Tim Winton (and, I might add, Griffith Watkins), first appeared in print with work composed at a remarkably young age and which was extraordinary in its poetic intensity and command of language. And like Stow and Watkins (but not, fortunately, like Winton) the early achievement was matched only in fits and starts by the later work. Griffith Watkins committed suicide in his thirties, Randolph Stow has been beset by long periods of silence, and Kenneth Mackenzie drowned in a river near Goulburn, aged forty-one. He had become an alcoholic.

Mark O’Connor is a poet who has been in the news lately. Following in the steps of the ancient Greek poet, Pindar, he was appointed (by the Australia Council) as ‘official’ Olympic poet – though it seems inevitable that much of his work will concern only the Olympic flame on its way to the Games and the events to be seen on TV since neither SOCOG nor the Australia Council saw fit to give him a journalist's pass. Unfortunately, all this Olympic fuss has tended to obscure his work of three decades up to this point, a journey well represented in his recent The Olive Tree: Collected poems.

In a note to the reader, Mal Morgan tells us that this last, posthumous collection Beautiful Veins – it comes with a CD selected from this and other work – was written during the five months after his being diagnosed with lung cancer. They’re note-taking, note-jotting poems. A sense of someone hurriedly trying to account for and describe his response both to the diagnosis and to the radiotherapy and chemotherapy treatments which ensue is uppermost. Strong, disturbing, they’re often ‘I do this, I do that’ (Frank O’Hara’s phrase) confessional poems.

Ken Bolton recommends this: ‘What is most valuable in these poems, and what is rare, is Keneally’s avoidance of metaphor and of the conventionally poetic in favour of intelligence and educated plain-speak that, of course, isn’t so plain, so unitary ...’ This well-meant blurb could create some problems, as the volume is actually as metaphoric and conventionally poetic as most modern collections. ‘Plain-speak’ also has an Orwellian feel, particularly with ‘intelligence’ and ‘educated’. Many poetry conventions and metaphors are aids to communication, including their use in general speech.

While less is usually more with poetry, there’s no denying the power and even magnificence of longer pieces produced in Australia in recent years by Les Murray, Luke Davies, Geoff Page, Dorothy Porter and others. Susan Hampton’s ‘The Kindly Ones’ belongs firmly on this A-list. The title-piece comprises the second half of the book, but the shorter poems that precede it, while standing separately, can be seen as a kind of preface in their concerns. The ‘Kindly Ones’ are the three Furies – Tisiphone, Magaera and Alecto – on holiday from vengeance in contemporary Australia. Tisiphone’s narration is incisive, pacy and always underscored by irony. It is this balance of sentiment and the ironic eye that is a masterful achievement in this and various of the shorter poems. Hampton’s constant juxtaposition of the deeply disturbing and the ordinary also results in irony that ranges from the charming to the razor-edged. Much of this is achieved by her excellent control of voice. Her finely tuned ear for the vernacular sits comfortably next to layers of classical erudition, and exposition on the nature of tragedy – ancient versus modern. Hampton matches her free verse form to content quite effortlessly and Tisiphone is convincing as she seeks her better self. ‘On the Bright Road’, a shorter poem, foreshadows Tisiphone’s quest: ‘The vast erasures of the self / contain somehow in their deep hold / the – I hesitate to call it a god – / the second self, a post-colonial god, / no longer a queen or king but an acting subject / in the realm of subjectivity, where / your best god is met after your worst self.’

Judith Rodriguez deserves a guernsey for this book. It’s one of the best collections to appear in a long while. I think it’s more interesting than its companions in the UQP Selected/Collected series which is now three-all with Shapcott, Taylor and Rodriguez standing as our Living Treasures, and Dransfield, Buckmaster and Rankin among those freed from earthly care. Two chaps and one lady in each category, one observes. There must be logic in it? Poets don’t actually have to die before they get notices. But in the case of Buckmaster and Rankin it will push the reputation up a few notches. I know that’s callous, but you want the truth, don’t you?

As with the dozen or so collections of Geoff Page’s poetry that have preceded it over almost thirty years, Collateral Damage can be opened at random with the certainty that something impressive will be there. One of the most striking characteristics of his published work is its consistent high quality.

The problem with K.F. Pearson’s Melbourne Elegies is that Goethe – on whose classic of sex­tourism, Roman Elegies 1788–1790, these rhetorical, literary poems are loosely based – is Goethe: difficult to translate, still little read in English. It gives him problems. Pearson, to my mind, is not attempting a Poundian ‘replacement’ of an ancient text within the frame­work of a contemporary poetics. That would require a reckoning with the original poem’s logistics and context similar to the way that Pound’s Propertius speaks electrifyingly in the context of an Empire much later than the Roman one he wrote for; or in the manner that Christopher Logue has recently converted excerpts of Homer into a form of late 20th century literary cinema. Such replacement requires that the contemporary poem convince us that the original work’s ‘loss’ – a ‘loss’ produced equally by its inaccessible aesthetic no less than by our contemporary lack of language-skill and culture – should matter to us.

Just when you have been assured, and have believed, and have claimed in print in The Sydney Morning Herald that mainstream publishers no longer bring forth volumes of verse by individual poets, along comes Allen & Unwin to confound you. Well, it is good thus to be confounded. I might not have pointed out, but the publishers remind us, over Luke Davies’ name and over his title, running with light, that this book is ‘from the author of Candy’ (also published by Allen & Unwin). So, we have a case of prose piggybacks poetry, which is all right by me. Those who read Candy, that antipodean version of Romeo and Juliet on smack, for prurient reasons may, however, find running with light not their cup of tea or drug of choice. Those, on the other hand, who responded to Mr Davies’ absolute control over and cool towards his fevered material, will warm to this collection of poems. Candy was, assuredly, a poet’s novel.