Poetry

Broken/Open, Jill Jones’s fifth book of poems, explores the meanings of breaking and opening partly through an exploration of memories where the past is more accessible than the unexpected shocks of the present. Jones’s previous book, Screens Jets Heaven: New and Selected Poems (winner of the 2003 Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize), contained many poems that hinted at abstraction. Broken/Open, divided into eight sections, furthers that abstraction. Journeying through sites of childhood and memory, the book’s forays into the past open out the present, particularly in the last epiphanic section. Unlike in some earlier work, where social and political comment were overt, opinions are often relegated to phrases to make context for the main drama, although one poem mirrors the plight of asylum seekers with its rudimentary finish: ‘Because I don’t belong here – being from the State of Flux – my / papers do not rhyme … // Because I don’t belong here, I know it is better and I know it is / worse’ (‘Refrains on Sand’).

In ‘Glenlyon’, the opening poem of his most recent collection, Tremors: New and Selected Poems, Andrew Sant provides readers with clues about his approach to poetry. ‘Glenlyon’ speaks of the ‘cool light’ of the page and ‘my shadow’s / hovering vague shape’. Certainly, Sant’s presence is invested in much of his work and his poetry prizes coolness and clarity. While he is sometimes a passionate poet, this passion is rarely overt and it is balanced by a determination to make good argument out of his poetic material and by a characteristically reasonable tone.

At first, many of these forty-eight poems from two decades struck me as almost self-indulgent and mundane: short lyrics about family life, eating, drinking, dreaming of Valparaiso, lemons, the Molonglo River; though there was often an underside of premonition, discontent, and a stillness that made me think I hadn’t really understood. In the first group, ‘One Hundred Nights’ bothered me: ‘When will it end / this waking / while others sleep, / this herding out on the ghost fields? / the flesh / whispering / its impossible desires / the bones / murmuring their Kali mantra / love, emptiness / love, emptiness.’ However, on my next reading, some of the second group struck me with autumnal clarity. From ‘Brown Pigeon’: ‘eyes / plucked out, feathers / scattered, / maggots / when I turn it over / writhing in the black mess near the heart’, where the image of the dead bird is an iconic memento mori.

If I hesitate to declare delight in Blister Pack, David McCooey’s first volume of poetry, it may be because McCooey himself casts a shadow over the word in ‘Succadaneum’, a sequence of sardonically sad glimpses of the failed love that constitutes the theme of Part II of this collection – ‘Delight, it turns out, / is a lawyer / staying back at work / kicking off her shoes / and opening a bottle of red’, abandoning clients’ disasters to files ‘locked / in metal cabinets’.

The Sydney poet Bruce Beaver died in February 2004 after a long struggle with kidney failure that kept him on dialysis for more than a decade. He was seventy-six years old. Beaver was seen as a sympathetic older figure by many poets of my generation, born a dozen years later. I met him when I was in my twenties, and found him to be a generous friend. When the poet Michael Dransfield, younger still, called on him in the early 1970s, it was a natural meeting of minds. In one poem in The Long Game and Other Poems, Beaver says that ‘poor Dransfield draped / me with a necklet of dandelions / once and kissed my forehead / in what must have been / a satirical salute’. I have a feeling that the salute was heartfelt, but Bruce was painfully modest.

Putting together a collection or anthology is not as easy as it looks. There are decisions to be made about theme, order and intent, which are often based on the intended audience. Three recent anthologies for children show that, in children’s literature at least, originality and diversity are achievable.

These two exceptional books should be sent to every household in Australia free of charge. They would be a perfect curative after the federal election. The campaigns of the conventional parties demonstrated how far indigenous Australia has fallen off the political radar screen. Fortunately, the independent creative work of Aboriginal thinkers, writers and artists continues to set high standards and often leads the way in the exploration of social, political and philosophical issues that many in mainstream culture are still unable to face.

In the opening poem of Virgil’s Eclogues, a shepherd newly dispossessed of his farm by a soldier returning from war exclaims: ‘There’s so much trouble everywhere these days. / I was trying to drive my goats along the path / And one of them I could hardly get to follow; Just now, among the hazels, she went into labor …’ (trans. David Ferry). More than 600 years later, Poussin’s painting, Les Bergers d’Arcadie, dit aussi Et in Arcadia Ego (1638–40), takes up the theme of dispossession in a more radical key: even shepherds in Arcadia must die. The pastoral mode (taken broadly to include anti- and post-pastoral) has always enveloped threats to the pastoral idyll. John Kinsella’s The New Arcadia – with Poussin’s painting on its cover – is the final instalment of an ‘anti-pastoral’ trilogy initiated by The Silo: A Pastoral Symphony (1995) and followed by The Hunt (1998). In The New Arcadia, as in its prequels, we find the pastoral mode in full-blown crisis: in modern Australia, nature’s small misfires (viz. the goat’s ill-timed birth) have escalated into ecological disaster. In The Hunt, the farmers and their families are killed by their own tools, dying in accidents, falling under tractors, shooting themselves; in The New Arcadia, on the other hand, most of the victims are native birds.