Toby Davidson
This week on The ABR Podcast, Toby Davidson marks the centenary of Francis Webb with an essay on the poet. Toby Davidson is the editor of Francis Webb’s Collected Poems and a senior lecturer at Macquarie University. Listen to Toby Davidson with ‘The gold standard: The centenary of Francis Webb’, published in the January-February issue of ABR.
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February 8 will mark the centenary of the birth of Francis Webb (1925-73). Many will ask ‘Francis who?’ as I did at the start of my PhD on Christian mysticism in Australian poetry, when Petra White told me, ‘You have to read Francis Webb.’ I soon found myself reading the 1969 edition of Webb’s Collected Poems in a Richmond café. It was a sturdy, well-thumbed Angus & Robertson hardback with a purple, pink, and white cover bearing a quote from British poet and critic Sir Herbert Read: ‘A poet whose power, maturity and universality are immediately evident.’ In his five-page preface, Read examined Webb’s debts to Robert Browning, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Kenneth Slessor, before concluding:
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Freaking twice, in real life by a grey-green beauty
with sapphire eyes;
their rockpool laboratory ankle-deep under a headland
in a state of collapse.
Beneath the Creator’s reach, the Golden Ratio / of tourist thrum stirs guards to the mike. / Silenzio. Silence. No photo. No video.
... (read more)Toby Davidson’s first collection, Beast Language, was published nine years ago. That feels surprising: its freshness then makes it feel more recent now. Much of the movement in that book is present in his new collection, Four Oceans (Puncher & Wattmann, $25 pb, 93 pp), literally so, as we begin with a long sequence aboard the Indian Pacific from Perth to Sydney. It’s his younger self again, leaving home for the ‘eastern states’, but with an esprit de l’escalier twist, as that younger self gets to see and describe everything with the eye and language of the older, freer, more assured Davidson.
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