Poetry

In these lines, taken from ‘The African Spider Cures’, Judy Johnson might almost be describing her poetics. Nomadic, Johnson’s second poetry collection, consists of well-made poems that combine objective views of the world with snippets from the poet’s personal life. In the title poem, which centres around a recent separation, Johnson compares her experience of finding an illicit love letter with a Bedouin shepherd-boy’s chance discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls: ‘There is no connection between the two events,’ she writes, ‘[…] Yet I encounter coincidence.’

Jennifer Compton creates uneasy feelings. Her monologues come from desperate people: frantic, locked out, locked in. They all have some secret and are going to tell us, if it takes subtlety or no subtlety. What saves their querulous, impossible concerns from turning into rants or whinges is Compton’s actorly control of voice. These are poems of original intent and purposive control. The shocking ideas at the centre of her poems are tempered by a voice trying to master the extreme reality they relate. Her dramatic proclivities inform her work at every tum: characters are usually in places they don’t want to be, new circumstances have to be negotiated with an old map of the mind. On occasion, Compton even writes directions straight into the verse (‘I’ll shift from my mother’s voice and just give you the gist’), an unashamed member of theatre workshops.

For some reason, I have always been mildly resistant to the poetry of Andrew Sant. It is hard to know why. At its best, it is thoughtful, sensitive and intelligent. You get a sense of the poet poised with antennae aquiver for the vibrations of an invisible world. A poem from The Flower Industry (1985) describes a radio receiver ‘selecting a loose vibration from the taut air / and threading it through the wired network’ and concludes with an image of the poet travelling ‘in a car at high speed where the mind / is a curious receiver, exposed, intent / on that which is always about to be revealed’. As a poet, he is sensitive to what is often just out of sight or out of consciousness. His best book, Brushing the Dark (1989), contains a poem about the work of an early Hobart photographer but moves on, characteristically, to speculate on ‘what he missed or narrowly missed’: a man with his back to the camera, almost out of the frame. Here the camera, another black box, acts as a receiver. Another poem, also about a photograph, speaks of wanting ‘the energy behind the shimmering gleam of appearances’.