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Peter Steele
Peter Steele (1939–2012) was a poet, academic, Jesuit priest, and Professor Emeritus of English literature at the University of Melbourne. His publications included seven books of poetry: Word from Lilliput (1973), Marching on Paradise (1973), Invisible Riders (1999), Plenty: Art into Poetry (2003), The Whispering Gallery: Art into Poetry (2006), White Knight with Bee-Box: New and Selected Poems (2009), and The Gossip and the Wine (2010). He wrote for ABR many times between 1982 and 2012.
Ter Borch would know him, this latter-day companion of the cavalryman bowed on his mount,shoulders and haunches sapped with exhaustion: and Sherman, bright-eyed, red-handed, a hellion to order:and the mailed believers of Krak.
They’re less to him than the chevrons, the emu cockade, the ... (read more)
Reading Luke Slattery’s Dating Aphrodite, I was reminded of dining once with the classical scholar Bernard Knox and the poet Anthony Hecht. Neither man was young: each had experienced remarkable and appalling things during World War II: and both had found ways of transposing those experiences into the register of art. They were at once unillusioned and instinctively creative.
Slattery invokes K ... (read more)
Here is an entry in one of A.D. Hope’s notebooks: it is from 1961: ‘Ingenious devices for letting in the light without allowing you to see out, such as modern techniques provide – e.g., glass brick walls, crinkle-glass, sanded glass and so on – remind me very much of most present-day forms of education.’ This is a representative passage from the notebooks. Lucid itself, it bears on eleme ... (read more)
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This is one way of doing it:
No New Thing
No new thing under the sun:The virtuous who prefer the dark;Fools knighted; the brave undone;The athletes at their killing work;The tender-hearts who step in blood;The sensitive paralysed in a mood;The clerks who rubber-stamp our deaths,Executors of death’s estate;Poets who count their dying breaths;Lovers who pledge undying hate;The self-made ... (read more)
Some years ago, at a busy intersection in Chicago, Popeye’s Fried Chicken sported a notice saying, ‘Now Hiring Smiling Faces’. It seemed to cry out for a poem, or at least a memory. If Angus Trumble’s A Brief History of the Smile does not allude to it, this is not for want of curiosity or vivacity on his part.
Trumble’s book comes out of the same stable as Diane Ackerman’s A Natural H ... (read more)
Born in Perth, I came as a boy to think of myself as a Yorkist: my summer holidays were often spent in that glittering town, and the first sound I can remember is the intransigent call of crows over the road there from the city. For entirely good reasons, the place is almost a myth to me.
In deeper and more complex ways, that territory is mythic to John Kinsella. His Peripheral Light would look v ... (read more)
Bowed from the supermarket, a week’s rations jumbling the plastic, I saw in shadowmy dead father. He crept the pavement, burdened as I am not by a lost country.
... (read more)
In an essay on the poetry of George Crabbe, Peter Porter wrote, ‘It is a great pleasure to me, a man for the littoral any day, to read Crabbe’s description of the East Anglian coast.’ Happily, there is by now a substantial and various array of writings about Porter’s work, and I would like simply to add that his being, metaphorically, ‘a man for the littoral’, with all its interfusions ... (read more)