Poetry

American/Australian poet, David Mason, is also a verse novelist, librettist, and essayist. His latest collection of essays, Incarnation and Metamorphosis: Can literature change us?, is clearly the work of a man who enjoys literature as he finds it rather than as he is told to see it. He is not afraid to declare in his introduction that ‘[s]ome literary works are better than others’. It is the works themselves, rather than the author’s origins or identity, with which he is concerned. In the first half of Incarnation and Metamorphosis, Mason concentrates on the issues that the phrase ‘better than others’ implies. The second half is devoted mainly to a number of writers whose work currently risks being undervalued or misunderstood to their disadvantage. 

Ron Pretty has published eight collections of poetry and five chapbooks over his long career. His latest and perhaps last book, 101 Poems, from Pitt Street Poetry’s Collected Works series, includes pieces from his previous collections, as well as some new work. We start with The Habitat of Balance (1988) and go all the way through to his most recent collection, The Left Hand Mirror (2017), before encountering a selection of new poems.  

The Australian photographer Frank Hurley, who accompanied Antarctic expeditions led by Douglas Mawson and Ernest Shackleton, proved to be an able diarist as well as a skilful and adventurous photographer. While Hurley participated in a number of expeditions – as well as serving as an official war photographer in both world wars – the late and much missed poet Jordie Albiston has drawn on Hurley’s diaries from Mawson’s sledging trip of November 1912 to January 1913 and Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of November 1914 to September 1916 for what has become her fourteenth and final poetry collection.

A six-year-old in Canada memorises a poem written by Li Bai in the eighth century. She recites its twenty syllables perfectly in the Mandarin she studies at Saturday Chinese school, but beyond a mechanical conversion into English, makes little sense of it. Murmuring the poem’s words then holding her breath as though waiting, her mother tries to help.

In a world both foul and fallen, where delusion, death, and unassailable Dummheit seem to wait on every corner, what can poetry do that warrants our rapt attention more than every other kind of distraction? Justin Clemens voiced the common lament when he wrote, ‘No-one reads poetry anymore, there being not enough time and more exciting entertainments out there.’ The issue, he said, is ‘a materialist problem that has always proven fundamental for poets: how to compose something that, by its own mere affective powers alone, will continue to be read or recited’ (‘Being Caught dead’, Overland, 202, 2011). That clinches the dilemma rather well. And yet, entertainment or not – and effective or not in their affective power – poetry collections seem to endure as a place, of Lilliputian dimensions, to encounter other worlds and world views.

In one way, this is a book to unnerve the teaching academic: it is so eminently cribbable. As a ‘handbook’ of Wright’s poetry, it ranges widely rather than intensively, offering lucid expositions and firmly delivered judgements. If these latter are sometimes, by the nature of the book, more asserted than demonstrated, they nonetheless seem usually sound and sensible: the lines quoted from ‘The Watcher’ do indeed ‘attempt, and fail, to wrest a response from the stereotyped symbols of the matriarchate’; ‘Christmas Ballad’ is banal; Fourth Quarter does represent ‘a newer and more vigorous poetic world’ than Alive.

Paul Hetherington’s Ragged Disclosures (Recent Work Press, $19.95 pb, 112 pp) choreographs its prose poems carefully, which is unsurprising from the co-author and co-editor, respectively, of a scholarly book on prose poetry and Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry (both 2020). His new collection employs a lyric-dramatic mode, which Fernando Pessoa described as ‘lyric poetry put into the mouths of different characters’. It features a ‘he’ and a ‘she’ with a ‘shared / Australian vernacular’, in a long, glancing dialogue. These appear most direct in nine ‘Ragged Disclosures’, each comprising three square poems which are bordered and interlinked. ‘Ragged Disclosures 1’ offers a clue to the text: ‘Their ragged / intersections make an unjoined, / searching rapport.’  The poems between these seem to represent this ‘searching rapport’ through shared experience in Rome, Venice, and various other locales, with pronominal shifts to ‘I,’ ‘we’, and ‘you’.

This is Sarah Day’s ninth collection and one of her most thematically diverse to date. She brings to the poems a thoughtful mix of environmentalism (particularly the unruly yet quiet presence of Tasmania’s natural beauty), her British roots (some of the best poems in the collection refer to the poet’s grandmother’s incarceration in an asylum), and a teacher’s precision with free verse. The poems are not overly experimental in terms of lineation, metre, language, or punctuation, and yet freshness of perspective and authenticity arise inevitably from the poet’s liquid observational engagement with the world’s affairs, whether this be with landscape, the global pandemic, racism, or science (planetary, oceanographic, microscopic).

In a talk she gave recently at Writers’ Week in Adelaide, Dorothy Hewett praised Gwen Harwood as:

Working in isolation as the woman hero, charring like a cartographer the uneasy, shifting, violent, broken world of Australian women and finally, in the teeth of all opposition. proclaiming the right to love and be a hero.

Dorothy Hewett identified several other roles or figures for women writers of poetry in Australia, most particularly:

The woman as loser, lover, bleeder, the victim figure, at once perverse and self-exacting, who refuses to be second-best.

But it’s clearly Harwood’s heroic proclamation of ‘the right to love’ that Hewett admires.