Poetry

In 1950 a friend presented the young Welsh poet T.H. Jones with a hand-made, leather-bound octavo notebook, the ‘Black Book’ into which he subsequently copied every completed poem he wished to preserve until shortly before his untimely death in 1965 at the age of forty-three. The Collected Poems of T. Harri Jones (1977) included a brief selection of unpublished poems from this notebook, as well as the poems from Jones’s four published volumes. Now, some thirty years later, we have a collection of all the poems from the notebook, as well as those from earlier preserved manuscripts, some only recently located. It also includes a handful of poems completed between the filling of the Black Book in 1964 and the poet’s death, and some additional poems that the poet considered ‘too “occasional” for preservation’, thus making it the first complete gathering of his large and impressive poetic oeuvre. The editors include a biographical introduction and extensive notes dating the poems, identifying first publications, and explaining literary and personal references.

When Petrus Borel led Victor Hugo’s private ‘claque’ into the theatre of the Comédie-Française in 1830 for the opening performance of Hugo’s play Hernani, he and the others of the Romantic ‘push’ fully intended their actions to precipitate the death of classicism in French theatre. They succeeded. Had Peter Porter been in the audience, one wonders where he would have positioned himself between the Romantic shock troops (in part driven by the compulsions of the Petit Cénacle) and the classicist critics who panned the play and all it stood for in the press the next day. The performance and the attendant conflicts became known as ‘La Bataille D’Hernani’.

Michael Farrell’s a raiders guide has no page numbers and no index, indicating that it is to be read as one. Farrell’s work, like that of the Language poets, draws attention to language itself rather than emphasising content or emotion: that is, language is at least temporarily estranged from meaning. Yet, like most attempted definitions, the same could be said of most poetry. Farrell’s work follows in a line from Mallarmé, some Futurist and Dadaist poets, Gertrude Stein and James Joyce, and more recent Language poets such as Ron Silliman and Bob Perelman. While another Melbourne ‘experimental’ poet, ΠO, often emphasises through vocal performance the component parts of words, Farrell illustrates this visually, often using some self-imposed constraint that calls for repeating lines and words that, in turn, break up until poems almost bubble into a centrifugal chaos. As in the language of text messaging, abbreviated words are nevertheless usually clear.

‘Urgent things to say’ in the Calibre Prize

The competition was keen, the field unprecedentedly large (almost 200 entries), but after main readings and much discussion Kevin Brophy’s and Jane Goodall’s essays struck the judges of this year’s Calibre Prize for an Outstanding Essay (Gay Bilson, Peter Rose and Rebecca Starford) as being in a class of their own. It was impossible to split them. Both writers share the third Calibre Prize for an Outstanding Essay, and each will receive $5000.

That’s all they have in common, though. It would be difficult to find two more dissimilar essays, a measure of Calibre’s versatility and the diversity of the writers who are drawn to it. Jane Goodall’s theme, like her succinct title (‘Footprints’), has a kind of suaveness and urgency as she explores ideas about ecology and personal responsibility with reference to Kate Grenville, Mrs Aeneas Gunn, Nevil Shute and a sublime short story by Leo Tolstoy.

Kevin Brophy’s fruity title (‘“What’re yer lookin’ at yer fuckin’ dog?”: Violence and Fear in Žižek’s Post-political Neighbourhood’) introduces an amazing tale of domestic mayhem and incivility in present-day inner Melbourne. Kevin Brophy’s tormentors may have been the neighbours from hell, but what a tale it is. To make sense of this five-year drama, Kevin Brophy draws on the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek and his theory that violence – ubiquitous violence, as he sees it – is the very basis of late capitalist ‘post-political’ life.

Freefall
must be like this,

The publication of John Kinsella’s The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry is a major event in Australian poetry. It offers a powerful, large-scale vision of Australia and its poetry. Reading Kinsella’s anthology during the great southern heat-wave of 2009 (before the week of Black Saturday), my understanding of both things became coloured by their accidental intersection. On the second night of the heatwave, Australian poetry buzzing in my head, I took my dog outside for his usual night-time wander around the front yard. The suburban streets were deserted, as they had been in the scorching heat of the day. But at night, this desertion, coupled with the unusual nocturnal heat, gave the suburb an uncanny quality, simultaneously familiar and strange. The only human sounds were the ghostly hum of air conditioners and, in the distance, the mournful noise of someone bringing in a wheelie bin.

There is no sound of the sea, a long row down the mirror-like waters of Wagonga Inlet crowded with forest reflections. The wind twists and dives in the tree canopy, the soft whisper mixing with bird calls and the occasional barking of a dog from across the water. The small flower heads of clover quiver in the gulps of wind pushing the big-bellied clouds, rain stained, across the mountains. I am cosseted in a snug cottage kitchen with the smell of apples, warm milk and the sweet taste of honey on chunks of freshly baked bread. My eyes follow the patterns smudged across the mangrove flats where the tides tell me the time of day. I am holidaying on the south coast of New South Wales, the perfect place to be reading Martin Harrison’s collection of new and selected poems, Wild Bees.

Andrew Sant’s tenth book of poems marks a new, welcome direction in his work. Many of his signature flourishes are still here: intimate, detailed observations on domestic life, travel, relationships, history, and popular music. But he has added something special: strange, unpredictable associations and a willingness to break free of the constraints that kept much of his formal, lyrical earlier work too circumscribed by its subject matter. It is hard to know if Sant has made a conscious decision to confront himself stylistically, or whether it has been an organic process. Perhaps it is a combination of the two. Whatever the case, it has worked. This is the book I have been hoping Sant would write.

The Cambridge Companion series has been a very successful venture, presenting readers with handy, up-to-date collections of specially commissioned essays by leading scholars on a wide range of authors and topics. This co-edited volume on British Romantic poetry encompasses many of the key topics in Romantic literary studies of the last two decades: historicism, canonisation, antiquarianism, Gothicism, the lyric, the rise of standardised English, women’s writing, colonialism, poetry’s relationship with the novel and with philosophy, and the legacy of Romanticism in contemporary poetry. There are also several essays which, in their originality and complex argumentation, cannot be so easily summed up and labelled: a brilliant reading by James Chandler of Wordsworth’s ‘Intimations of Immortality’ Ode as an important continuation of the eighteenth century’s ‘progress of poetry’ theme; an analysis of Romantic-era poetry which argues that the study of Romantic poetry belongs as much to media history as to literary scholarship; and an essay by Kevis Goodman which, by tracking the discursive migration of nostalgia from medical discourse into the heart of Romantic aesthetics, challenges the usual clichés of this period’s poetry as a de-historicising ‘exile from the present’, a poetry of return and retreat.

These are witty, sometimes boisterous, and meditative poems. There is a consistency of craft but an intriguing variety, and perhaps even contradictoriness, to their desires. Each poem is a little box of longing: for courage, for calmness, for love, for transcendence. Equally, the poems are often pleas for the self to abandon desire in its grasping forms, ‘to be whittled down to a twig & grow again into a tree’.