Poetry

Each of these three books is its author’s first, and each carries a cover endorsement by two distinguished poets. You can tell a lot about the books from looking at who endorses whom before you need even to read one of the poems.

The rear cover of Aidan Coleman’s Avenues & Runways (endorsements by Kevin Hart and Peter Goldsworthy) describes him as an imagist. Whatever the exact significance of that term, there is no doubt that this poetry belongs to the class that has slight outward show and rich implications. And the pleasure of reading them is the shuttling between the two. There are at least two important requirements here: the surface has to be elegant and engaging without being slovenly or cute (ah, if you only knew what treasures I conceal!); implications must be intense and never clichéd.

Since a new book by Peter Porter is, though precious, also a complex phenomenon, one is stuck with the question of where to begin. The title poem, ‘Afterburner’, is perhaps as good a place as any. It is one of those poems (‘Clear Air Turbulence’ is another in this book) that speculates autobiographically and revisits youth looking for patterns and understandings:

Under a Medlar Tree is Syd Harrex’s fifth slim collection since his first, Atlantis, came out twenty years ago. With connections to both Tasmania and South Australia, Harrex has travelled widely and appears to be one of those poets who has made that Faustian bargain with academia where Mephistopheles says: ‘I will deliver you much material (but not the time to use it).’ Such a trade-off seems to ensure that its signatory will be an occasional poet, a poet of travel pieces, of dedications and elegies, of small moments saved and treasured between bouts of academic writing. As befits a man under such pressures, much of Harrex’s poetry has been about love and death. With Under a Medlar Tree, this is even more the case.

Rodney Hall has always been a professional poet in the sense that he professes and declares – indeed, almost seems to make himself – in his poetry. The poetry seems to become a means of coping with experience; more, it becomes perhaps the central part of the experience. So it is in Black Bagatelles. But here, art and its expectations become less something for living than for dying by. Not that this book marks any great break with what has gone before, any rupture of identity. On the contrary, implicitly or explicitly, death has always been a major presence in his poetry. Its preoccupation with art and artifice represents, amongst other things, an attempt to give himself alms against oblivion. But in these poems the note of doomsday, sounded in the title of his first collection of verse, Penniless Till Doomsday; rings out, not portentously, but wittily, with immediacy and perception. Hall has always been concerned with masks, poses, the dance of experience. Now, the ‘masks compose themselves tableau-still’ and the source is revealed of the ‘desperate rustlings going on behind’. This source then is death, but not death majestical and metaphysical as Donne and the seventeenth century ‘knew him, not moralising and the servant of the mighty God as in the middle ages, but jester and joker, the one who calls the tune to life’s comedy, to

 … the hold of

heart

on heart the band

of gristle the bloodtie

just

waiting to be

bled to death by a clever cut

Luke Davies is best known as the author of Candy (1997), a novel about love and heroin addiction. His poetry, meanwhile, has attracted attention for its characteristic interest in how we relate to an unknowable universe; it is also unusual in that it draws on a more-than-everyday understanding of theoretical physics. In this latest volume, which comes in two parts – a long meditative poem followed by forty short lyrics, both celebrating love – an awareness of the vast reaches of space remains, although its expression is now less factual and has acquired a new subtlety.

The word ‘collected’ on a book of poems has its embedded dangers. Collected Poems are like autobiographies: they encourage readers to confuse them with the writer’s flow of life. And we can all see what’s wrong with that, I hope. That cagey old player, W.H. Auden, issued this injunction:

Great writers who have shown mankind
An order it has yet to find,
What if all critics say of you
As personalities be true?
You had the patience that survives
Soiled, shabby, egotistic lives …

He also refused to write an autobiography.

‘His poems, now more and more exclusively in prose, have become taut and aphoristic, for he seeks patiently to release energy potential in language, and to make of poetry an instrument of revelation, indeed a close ally of philosophy.’

These words, by R.T. Cardinal in The Penguin Companion to European Literature (1969), in fact gloss the poetry of René Char. They could be taken as an apt description of Peter Boyle’s fourth collection, Museum of Space, which represents a subtle but significant shift in his oeuvre since the virtuoso What the Painter Saw in Our Faces (2001). These are sparer, more abstract poems, less cluttered by competing images – deft, attenuated and often written in a lean, delicate prose, as if having left some of the mechanical devices of poetry behind for something more suggestively metaphysical.