Poetry

Thirty years have passed since Richard Ellmann’s magisterial New Oxford Book of American Verse: a hard act to follow. Now David Lehman – poet and founder of the Best American Poetry series – has produced a successor. It is even longer than the Ellmann, and similarly generous in its individual choices. There is no stinting here, no mark of the tyranny of permissions that blights so many anthologies. Walt Whitman gets seventy poems; Emily Dickinson (who published a handful in her lifetime) has forty-three, including the cautionary ‘Publication – is the Auction / Of the Mind of Man’.

Fancy an editor in this post-whatnot era using the word ‘great’ to describe the poems he publishes. Lord save us! It is almost as though recent decades hadn’t been, and we still wore the mild woolly clothing of the postwar years. But here is the Canberra poet and longtime schoolteacher Geoff Page offering us a high road through poetry in English: a series of touchstones, as our serious uncle Matthew Arnold might have said.

A Poet’s Life is a selection of Marjorie Pizer’s poetry that covers forty-two years of writing and the filaments of love, grief and quotidian beauty that are emblems of her work. Drawing together poems from fifteen previous volumes, A Poet’s Life merges this Sydney poet’s characteristic themes and styles, fulfilling its promise to be the ‘definitive collection’. Throughout her career, Pizer writes of hidden worlds where ‘invisible rays’ bind microcosm to macrocosm, and where individuals are gently fused in an interdependent unity. However, she frequently returns to hidden disunities: wars, stolen children, environmental calamities and emotional wounds. Pizer offers up poetry as the keeper of the dead; the keeper of those questions and answers bequeathed to us by our ancestors and our descendants.

People outside Australia are struck when Bruce Dawe is described as Australia’s most popular poet, just as people outside Ireland are struck when Paul Durcan or Brendan Kennelly is described as Ireland’s most popular poet. What about Les Murray, or Seamus Heaney? Are not these world-class poets ‘of the people’? Even more puzzling is that Dawe, like Durcan and Kennelly, is not necessarily an easy poet. Is their domestic popularity tied to how they seem to be ‘not for export’?

Recipient of the 2005 Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize, Nathan Shepherdson’s surrealist, free-verse début, Sweeping the Light Back into the Mirror, is to be commended for its emotional bravery and its originality. At the collection’s Queensland launch, Shepherdson described what he had hoped to achieve in writing an extended elegy to his mother, Noela Mary Shepherdson. The poems were to be seen as gifts or letters – one for each of Noela’s seventy-two years – and represented a son’s attempt to honour his mother’s life.

Folly & Grief, Melbourne poet Jennifer Harrison’s third collection, reads on one level as a playful enquiry into the centuries-long association of folly with innovative live performance. Lizard men abseil down gallery walls; an extreme body artist creates a living sculpture of bees; a ventriloquist’s dummy stirs to life; New Age travellers toss firesticks, knives and chainsaws high into the sky. While the danger lurking in such displays is often what retains our interest (‘He juggles a chainsaw … even the fine patinating rain / feels like sprayed blood on my face and lips’), Harrison is equally concerned with the challenging apprenticeships these unusual skills demand. The road to becoming a master entertainer is explicitly connected to the craft of writing: ‘a juggler first conquers clumsiness / then writes the same poem, over and over.’