Poetry

Blow Out is Rae Desmond Jones’s first collection of poetry, punctuated by novels and plays, since The Palace of Art (1981). His prominence during the 1970s is evinced by his publishing four books of poetry within eight years and by his inclusion in John Tranter’s The New Australian Poetry (1979). This is a long silence, but Jones, now in his late sixties, has filled it with political activism, serving as mayor of Sydney’s Ashfield Council from 2004 to 2006. So much for unacknowledged legislators.

Alberto Dominguez identified himself as un Australiano de habla hispana – a Spanish-speaking Australian. As such, he gave enormously to the Spanish-speaking community of Sydney. Dominguez was a radio broadcaster with SBS and community radio stations in western Sydney, and a founding member of several Latin American cultural organisations. For many Spanish-speaking Australians who came as refugees from Latin America, Dominguez’s radio-voice provided them with essential information and helped them settle in. Yet when he died as a passenger aboard American Airlines flight 11, which struck the northern tower of the World Trade Centre in September 2001, most media in Australia identified him only as an Uruguayan-born migrant, a father of four and a Qantas baggage-handler. There was little mention of his work in radio, or his prominence amongst the Spanish-speaking community. Bel Vidal, whose essay opens this anthology of stories, essays and poems, asks that Australians remember Dominguez – the first Australian to die in the World Trade Centre attacks – as more than a migrant who, decades after his arrival, still lacked fluency in English. Vidal, herself a migrant from Bolivia, argues that the civic contributions made by Dominguez in his first language deserve a place in Australian history and culture.

In 1950 a friend presented the young Welsh poet T.H. Jones with a hand-made, leather-bound octavo notebook, the ‘Black Book’ into which he subsequently copied every completed poem he wished to preserve until shortly before his untimely death in 1965 at the age of forty-three. The Collected Poems of T. Harri Jones (1977) included a brief selection of unpublished poems from this notebook, as well as the poems from Jones’s four published volumes. Now, some thirty years later, we have a collection of all the poems from the notebook, as well as those from earlier preserved manuscripts, some only recently located. It also includes a handful of poems completed between the filling of the Black Book in 1964 and the poet’s death, and some additional poems that the poet considered ‘too “occasional” for preservation’, thus making it the first complete gathering of his large and impressive poetic oeuvre. The editors include a biographical introduction and extensive notes dating the poems, identifying first publications, and explaining literary and personal references.

When Petrus Borel led Victor Hugo’s private ‘claque’ into the theatre of the Comédie-Française in 1830 for the opening performance of Hugo’s play Hernani, he and the others of the Romantic ‘push’ fully intended their actions to precipitate the death of classicism in French theatre. They succeeded. Had Peter Porter been in the audience, one wonders where he would have positioned himself between the Romantic shock troops (in part driven by the compulsions of the Petit Cénacle) and the classicist critics who panned the play and all it stood for in the press the next day. The performance and the attendant conflicts became known as ‘La Bataille D’Hernani’.

Michael Farrell’s a raiders guide has no page numbers and no index, indicating that it is to be read as one. Farrell’s work, like that of the Language poets, draws attention to language itself rather than emphasising content or emotion: that is, language is at least temporarily estranged from meaning. Yet, like most attempted definitions, the same could be said of most poetry. Farrell’s work follows in a line from Mallarmé, some Futurist and Dadaist poets, Gertrude Stein and James Joyce, and more recent Language poets such as Ron Silliman and Bob Perelman. While another Melbourne ‘experimental’ poet, ΠO, often emphasises through vocal performance the component parts of words, Farrell illustrates this visually, often using some self-imposed constraint that calls for repeating lines and words that, in turn, break up until poems almost bubble into a centrifugal chaos. As in the language of text messaging, abbreviated words are nevertheless usually clear.

The publication of John Kinsella’s The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry is a major event in Australian poetry. It offers a powerful, large-scale vision of Australia and its poetry. Reading Kinsella’s anthology during the great southern heat-wave of 2009 (before the week of Black Saturday), my understanding of both things became coloured by their accidental intersection. On the second night of the heatwave, Australian poetry buzzing in my head, I took my dog outside for his usual night-time wander around the front yard. The suburban streets were deserted, as they had been in the scorching heat of the day. But at night, this desertion, coupled with the unusual nocturnal heat, gave the suburb an uncanny quality, simultaneously familiar and strange. The only human sounds were the ghostly hum of air conditioners and, in the distance, the mournful noise of someone bringing in a wheelie bin.

There is no sound of the sea, a long row down the mirror-like waters of Wagonga Inlet crowded with forest reflections. The wind twists and dives in the tree canopy, the soft whisper mixing with bird calls and the occasional barking of a dog from across the water. The small flower heads of clover quiver in the gulps of wind pushing the big-bellied clouds, rain stained, across the mountains. I am cosseted in a snug cottage kitchen with the smell of apples, warm milk and the sweet taste of honey on chunks of freshly baked bread. My eyes follow the patterns smudged across the mangrove flats where the tides tell me the time of day. I am holidaying on the south coast of New South Wales, the perfect place to be reading Martin Harrison’s collection of new and selected poems, Wild Bees.

Andrew Sant’s tenth book of poems marks a new, welcome direction in his work. Many of his signature flourishes are still here: intimate, detailed observations on domestic life, travel, relationships, history, and popular music. But he has added something special: strange, unpredictable associations and a willingness to break free of the constraints that kept much of his formal, lyrical earlier work too circumscribed by its subject matter. It is hard to know if Sant has made a conscious decision to confront himself stylistically, or whether it has been an organic process. Perhaps it is a combination of the two. Whatever the case, it has worked. This is the book I have been hoping Sant would write.