Poetry

Dorothy Porter’s new verse novel, Wild Surmise, takes an almost classic form. The verse novel is now well-established as a modern genre, and Porter has stamped a distinctive signature and voice on the verse form, particularly with the phenomenal success of her racy, action-packed detective novel, The Monkey’s Mask (1994) ...

Some years ago I wrote a poem called A Table of Coincidences’, which contained the lines: ‘the day Christopher Columbus discovered America / Was the day Piero della Francesca died.’ This is a verifiable fact, unless changes in the Western calendar have altered things. Clearly, I was being sententious and reactionary: the ancient good of the world and its new doubtfulness seemed to start on the one day. A hostile reviewer pointed out that every date in the world is the anniversary of some other date, and poured scorn on my notion by suggesting that a momentous event like the Armistice in 1918 might share a date with the invention of Coca-Cola. But we still honour anniversaries, and I am only too conscious of the 365 days that have passed since 11 September 2001.

I

Dad’s new car was that Ford Customline

wide as a bed and hissing with energy.

We’ll drive carefully, we promised

and took turns to burn up the bitumen

right the way to Helidon.

It never hissed after that. It sighed.

Sometimes guilt takes fifty years

before the blister breaks.

The Ford was traded in after only four years.

Dad’s silence was the rub.

Basalt plains, sheep and beef country
drying off. The light, intense
between showers. I drive

as if my head has been opened up
through paddocks blistered
from lava flows between bare hills.

The roads dependable as elderly bachelors
take me through towns abandoned
after the storekeeper dies.

You’ve heard this story before –
becoming unravelled in Europe
or assaulted in some roadhouse
but bold as nipples and booted.
Recovering with bourbon and red wine
in a soft room with a German
dissolving somehow at right angles
and falling off the frequent flyers list.

You might expect a book of eighty-eight new poems by Les Murray to be sizeable (most of his recent single volumes run to about sixty poems each). But Poems the Size of Photographs is literally a small book, composed of short poems (‘though some are longer’, says the back cover) ...

In living there is always
the terror
of being stung

It may seem somewhat odd that I, a racketeer and gangster, was suspected of making Cuba a safe place for the National Bank. But having made such an impression with my reports, prophecies and ancillary publications that the Federal Government, aided by a sycophantic mass, had declared me likely to generate flippers, I can see why I might have been a plausible suspect – the crime, after all, was committed by sea.

In living there is always
the terror
of being stung

of something
coming for you
on the unavoidable wave.

So, little Ashenputtel & her groom
sit up in their palace,
                              growing fat
and ruling badly. Not exactly
role models for a new generation.
I mean, sure –
                        she had it rough
(her father made us realise early
how useful it would be to keep her
down)
           – but that’s no reason
to push her weight around now.
She hasn’t, it seems, thought it out
very carefully.