Poetry

Peter Porter, in his introduction to John Kinsella’s new collection, notes that ‘we are all familiar with the surface details of American life. Kinsella does not have to footnote his poem: we recognise his instances immediately … We all speak American.’ Given that Kinsella now lives and works in the United States, Porter also identifies ‘the disillusion at seeing a great exemplar close up’ as one likely catalyst behind the poetic polemic that constitutes this book. Yet it is the surface, the broad impressionistic sweep that we in Australia have absorbed over decades of exposure to American life in our newspapers, magazines, television programmes and popular music, with which Kinsella often engages. One senses that the poet, whether up close or at a distance, would find much about the United States with which to take issue. Nevertheless, his engagement with, and rupturing of, surface in this long poem, or sequence of poems, seems apt. Kinsella smatters the text with allusions to film (ranging from the Marx brothers to Carrie), popular music (George Gershwin to Jefferson Airplane) and numerous other trappings of American life. In doing so, he takes popular culture’s immersion in artifice and turns it against itself.

Perhaps only John Shaw Neilson and Judith Wright have brought an equal sense of place to Australian poetry: the sense of place as a fact of consciousness with geographic truth. But in his latest collection, Biplane Houses, Les Murray considers more airy habitations – flights, cliff roads and weather – and the collection has a matching airiness that is only sometimes lightness ...

I learnt today, while being read Ken Bolton’s poetry aloud by a friend (a native South Australian), that Hindley rhymes with ‘kind’ and not with ‘wind’. My friend spontaneously started reading to me and couldn’t stop. It runs on, this K.B. speaking voice: compulsive, South Australian, poetic, paranoid, poignant, funny. One way of describing the experience of reading Bolton is that you feel like you are an outsider, looking in at the window, nose pressed against the glass, and inside are all the poet’s friends: children, loved musos, long-term waitresses, artists, favourite poet-heroes. But then K.B. tells you that he is the perpetual outsider, too, solipsistic, meditative. My friend chose, almost randomly, the poem ‘Mostly Hindley Street’, with its wide lines rolled out across the page – in turn witty, desultory, intertextual, local and cosmopolitan – each daring you to take them too seriously, to miss the flipness, daring you to take K.B. seriously, as poet, or person. He might be just like his references (he suggests) – that old prig Thomas Gray, for one, who ‘never spoke out’:

The title of Nick Riemer’s first volume of poems is taken from a piece of graffiti in a Sydney church, and the poems therein are aptly replete with a peripatetic, contemporary metaphysical wit. The volume as a whole has a sharp, cultivated air of philosophical enquiry, tending to nihilism, and is shot through with the poet’s continuous testing of the limits of language.

This is an auspicious time to reissue a book by a Cypriot-Australian in a bilingual edition. Awareness of Cyprus in Australia, and of Australia in Cyprus, is at unprecedented levels following the spectacular performance in the 2006 Australian Open Tennis Championship of both Marcos Baghdatis and his colourful crowd of supporters from the Cypriot subset of the Melbourne Greek community. Bilingual (even trilingual) editions are the hallmark of Owl Publishing, but this fifteenth volume in its ‘Writing the Greek Diaspora’ series represents a new departure in its inclusion of high-resolution artwork: section four of the collection comprises sixteen photomontages, mostly statuesque combinations of objects and body parts.

Having taught literary studies at the Australian Defence Force Academy, Adrian Caesar is perhaps better placed than most to understand the troubled relationship between power and culture, order and creativity. ‘All Cock Red’, one of the poems in Caesar’s fourth book of poems, High Wire, attends to such a context:

Geoff Page’s third verse novel – a form which, if we are to believe the cover puff, he has ‘made utterly his own’ – takes a broad and topical look at the problem of reconciliation in Australia. Reaching back to the 1840s, his narrative opens with an English settler’s account of establishing a successful cattle station on the Clarence River. Edward Coaldale is a liberal with an en-lightened attitude towards the local indigenous people. Employing natives as stockmen and learning their language, he soon earns the suspicion of neighbouring pastoralists, who regard such behaviour as ‘soft’. Prematurely ill with cancer and lacking an heir, Coaldale attempts to bequeath ‘Kooringal’ to the Bundjalung tribe, but is thwarted by regulations insisting the property be left to a single person. He dies leaving it to the talented Jimberoo, who, before long, sells it on to a white family.