Poetry

Australian Poetry Journal, the flagship publication of Australian Poetry, contains a veritable who’s who of Australian poets. However, this doesn’t mean that the journal is part of the poetry gangland to which some other contemporary Australian journals belong. This is a testament to editor, Bronwyn Lea, who must disappoint many poets – possibly even poet friends or acquaintances – in order to maintain the journal’s impressively high standard. While there are a bevy of famous names on the contents page, Australian Poetry Journal only publishes the best work from these poets and scholars. But it is not just a journal for established poets and poems; emerging poets Davina Allison and Carmen Leigh Keates effloresce in this vaunted company.|

Although the Melbourne publisher Black Pepper has a stable of major Australian poets (Stephen Edgar and Jennifer Harrison among them), it is also a house that likes to take chances. The favourable reception accorded Homer Rieth’s 359-page epic poem, ‘Wimmera’, in 2009 was definitely a punt that paid off. The book was shortlisted for The Age Book of the Year and became an ABC television program. Rieth’s new book, 150 Motets, though shorter, may be even riskier.

First, I will bore you with some Chris Wallace-Crabbe statistics. Born in 1934, he has thirty-three ‘new’ poems in his New and Selected Poems, which is an average of about seven poems a year since his last volume, Telling a Hawk from a Handsaw (2008). That is a lot of poems for the second half of a poet’s eighth decade, a time when many run dry. The ‘selected’ part of this volume draws from fourteen volumes (he has 681 poems on the Australian Poetry Library website). With earlier volumes, he has sometimes selected as few as two or three poems from each. With later volumes he has been less strict. For example, from the forty-three poems of For Crying Out Loud (1990) he has included eleven in New and Selected Poems. But in making this selection he has omitted some very good poems, which are worth preserving, such as his ten ‘Sonnets to the Left’ from I’m Deadly Serious (1988).

Geoff Page’s 1953 is set in the town of Eurandangee, which, we learn, is about 650 kilometres north-west of Sydney ...

Lime Green Chair, which is Chris Andrews’s second book, won in manuscript form the Anthony Hecht 2011 Poetry Prize. Andrews is also a prize-winning translator from the Spanish of Roberto Bolaño, César Aira, and others. Lime Green Chair translates and transforms everyday moments into auguries of time disappearing. Each of these mostly 21-line poems is finely patterned with unexpected rhyme and vowels that ring into a following line, as if directed by some hidden constraint: ‘Sounds that came into the world in my lifetime / already sound old-fangled: dial-up modems, / the implosion of a television tube / in a set dropped from a high window ...’ (‘Sonic Age’). 

The house is up for tender and will be sold.
Houses always sell – in the end. Even if it is
for the land. Smoking out or treading down
the haunts takes three days, or even longer.

The octopus is dead
who lived in Wylies Baths
below the circus balustrade
and the chocked sea tiles.

‘T his is a book for anyone,’ begins On Poetry, by the English poet Glyn Maxwell. It is a bold gesture, returning an ancient art to ‘anyone’ interested in it. Inasmuch as any book can be for everyone, On Poetry is such a book. It is funny, original, and doesn’t presuppose expertise on the part of the reader. It is the best book on reading and writing poetry for a general audience that I have ever read.

W ordsworth – poet–walker par excellence – had the best legs in the business. As his friend Thomas de Quincy noted: ‘Undoubtedly they had been serviceable legs beyond the average standard of requisition. For I calculate, upon good data, that with these identical legs Wordsworth must have traversed a distance of 185,000 English miles.’ In contrast, Simon Armitage’s legs, by his own admission, generally ‘do very little other than dangle under a desk’ or propel him from the multi-storey car park to the railway ticket office. ‘Even if I’m writing about the Sahara or the Antarctic,’ he confesses, ‘I’m usually doing it in a chair, in a room, behind double glazing.’

Jennifer Maiden has for a long time been one of Australia’s most politically engaged poets, a commentator on the local scene and the international set alike. With her new volume, Liquid Nitrogen, Maiden continues on from her previous books Friendly Fire (2005) and Pirate Rain (2010), with more poems centred on the journalist George Jeffreys, and further poetic conversations between Hillary Clinton and Eleanor Roosevelt, as well as new partnerships between Kevin Rudd and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Julia Gillard and Aneurin Bevan. These poems fold into a volume that also includes more of Maiden’s ‘diary poems’ and a number of smaller, non-sequential poems that nonetheless match the volume’s tone and may well contain the seeds of Maiden’s next book. The liquid nitrogen of the title appears first in George Jeffreys’s waking, and later in the poem ‘Diary Poem: Uses of Liquid Nitrogen’. Such echoes recur as Liquid Nitrogen conducts conversations not just within its probing poems, but also across the collection as a whole. The book is at once political and intimate, full of the real world and marked by the oneiric tone of conversations that cross the threshold of death.