Where Have You Been? (26 page)

 

AUSTRALIAN POETS

Stumbling round the house at moments of absentmindedness or in the off-hours, I wonder where the economy-sized fish tank came from, or the dictionary of some unexpectedly eloquent Oceanian language, or the errant slab of copper sulfate (did some friend or enemy leave it?). Then I remember, it's the new Australian poetry anthology I am reading, the thick end of eleven hundred large pages—is it the format called royal? or republican?!—and I am in for another round of sleeplessness. It's even possible that, in the States, I've read and written about the book mostly on Australian time.

Of course, I know anthologies aren't for reading straight through, any more than cars are for test-driving or cosmetics are for lab mice, but what else can you do? The thickness
is
alarming, but the fear gradually abates, as your marker moves forward and you yourself grow stronger from toting the book around. In fact, all nonsense and whimsy aside,
Australian Poetry Since 1788
is a compelling book and a quite exemplary anthology. I wish the poetry a large domestic and a long overdue international readership in the rest of Anglophonia. Australians have been kept—or kept themselves—to themselves for too long. An anthology is a shop window, and there are some 180 styles on view here. I don't have the background to comment on individual omissions and inclusions, but let me just say that here you will find David and Elizabeth Campbell; Kevin Hart and William Hart-Smith; the Joneses Emma and Evan; Harley Matthews and Jack Mathieu; the Porter ménage of Dorothy, Hal, and Peter; Philip Neilsen and John Neilson; Adam Gordon and Lisa Gorton; Bruce Beaver and Barcroft Boake.

I approve and endorse all the formal decisions taken by the editors, who have dealt fairly, generously, interestingly, and inwardly with the material (with which, and in which, as they say, they have lived for upward of fifty years, and this is their third anthology together). An anthology edited by poets rather than academics (they get to have their say on reputations later—why should they be present at the christening as well?) is increasingly a fine thing and a good start. Despite its length, there is actually a just proportionality and progress to the book; true, there are thirty-three poets born in the 1940s—the decade of both the editors—as many as the decades before (thirteen) and after (twenty) put together and very nearly a fifth of the total, but probably that's to be expected, and more disturbing would have been something like the opposite: a blind spot or immunity to one's direct contemporaries. Though ranging across time, an anthology almost inevitably remains
of
its own time; as one curious instance of this, the first reference to computers (from Gwen Harwood) is less than half the way into the book. A general introduction is kept very short (two pages); there are detailed—and often brilliantly lively—biographical notes on each individual poet, so that even someone represented with just one or two poems is firmly and incontrovertibly
there
; and there is an unusually hospitable approach to long poems. Fifty- or hundred-line poems are ten-a-penny here (they are only a page or two in this large format), but also included are John Farrell's wowingly macabre foundation myth “My Sundowner” at over five hundred lines, twenty-two of the twenty-seven sections of the sumptuous and sexy Aboriginal “Goulburn Island Cycle,” all eight pages of Les Murray's dazzling lyrical celebration of backed-up traffic, family outings, delighted dogs, and tremendous water-skiers called “Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle,” and so on and so forth.

Not that short poems and light verse are neglected either: there are Harold Stewart's couplet versions of haiku, and saucy limericks by Slessor and others, the four-line anthem to “Stringy-Bark and Green-Hide,” Robert Gray's “Sixteen Short Poems” (there is no falsely modest nonsense about the editors excluding themselves; they were poets before they were editors, and they are here as poets as well as editors; each selects from the work of the other; each gets twenty pages, which is plenty but not at all excessive; fair play to them). There is Jennifer Compton's winningly persistent “Electric Fan (
from
Rome)”:

The obedient fan

turns his blind face

to me—with interest.

The obedient fan

turns his blind face

to me—with interest.

There are convict ballads and songs, some simple, some more sophisticated (I love the line, “we were all associated round the old keg of rum”), pages and pages where, as much as tales of titanic labor, or skullduggery, or heroism, or stupidity, rising anapaestic rhythm settles in your acoustic brain.

Banjo Paterson's heartbreaking “Waltzing Matilda” is here, as is the anonymous “Wild Colonial Boy”; there is both “The Captain of the Push” and its parody—or possibly original—version, “The Bastard from the Bush.” The great literary hoax, “Ern Malley” (“I am still / The black swan of trespass on alien waters”—doesn't it sound like a confession?) figures, as does a goodly portion of C. J. Dennis's wonderful skit on
Romeo and Juliet
, affectionately known as “The Bloke.” There is Vicki Raymond's sonnet “On Seeing the First Flasher” and Bruce Dawe's lament “At Shagger's Funeral.” There is Kenneth Slessor's “Country Towns” and Bruce Dawe's “Provincial City” (“Saturday night, in the main street kerb, / the angle-parked cars are full of watchers, / their feet on invisible accelerators, / going nowhere
fast
”). There is Jamie Grant's “Social Behaviour of Minted Peas” and Les Murray's “The Broadbean Sermon.” There are poems of flood and poems of drought, Harley Matthews's and Leon Gellert's poems of Gallipoli and Eric Rolls's poems of World War II in New Guinea; Ada Cambridge dreams of Venice, and Dorothy Hewett has complex memories of the USSR; there is Jan Harry's “Page for a Lorikeet,” Caroline Caddy's “Squid,” and David Campbell's peculiar and lovely macaronic “Le Wombat.” C. J. Dennis celebrates “One of those great lords of language gone for ever from Out-back,” while Robert Adamson (same difference?) recollects his brothers “biting the heads off words.” Elizabeth Riddell and Barry Humphries both have poems about Patrick White (and I was almost surprised there weren't more). Rhyll McMaster writes about her mother's stroke (“Her brain is stripped / to its inessentials. / She's disposed of the gears”), Robert Gray—in “In Departing Light,” one of the outstanding poems in the collection—tenderly details his mother's dementia, Anthony Lawrence describes his bipolar disorder, Francis Webb his schizophrenia. There is Charles Harpur's “A vagrant mass / Of sunshine, falling into some void place,” and Chris Wallace-Crabbe's—corroborative, dissenting?—“We just don't live in a hard intellectual glare.” David Malouf has “Brisbane ladies, rather / the worse for war” and Anthony Lawrence has things going “prickly pear-shaped.” And the best (comic) rhyme? Probably a toss-up between Barry Humphries's “misery/pat-isserie” and Alan Wearne's “Werribee/aromatherapy.”

In ethnosociobiographical terms, the array of Australian poets is quite astounding—perhaps unrivaled anywhere for now. What the American poet laureate Philip Levine once called “stupid jobs” are here in wonderful profusion: Bellerive “sold brooms from door to door without much success,” while Roland Robinson “was a horse-trainer, jockey, fencer, dam builder, factory worker, railway fettler, cleaner, art school model, ballet dancer, dance critic” and “caught crocodiles and snakes for a menagerie.” One poet is of English and Icelandic background, and there are others whose first language was Greek or Polish, or who were Hungarian and dreamed in German; one born of Irish parents in Buenos Aires and another who remained “a real Corkonian in his speech”; one failed English grammar while another “came second in the State competition”; many had next to no formal schooling, others were dux and prefect of their expensive select schools; there were solitaries and symposiarchs; Communists and Catholics; sports buffs and
Sportmuffel
; larrikins and unrepentant members of the squattocracy; some died having put together manuscripts to send halfway round the world to England, others lost their jobs when they popped a love poem instead of a business letter into an envelope; many grew up in houses without books, others were novelists, journalists, memoirists, publishers, edited anthologies, edited each other, founded Penguin Australia, founded the
Australian Book Review
; one was professor of Zulu in London, another went to Paraguay to join a utopian Socialist community called New Australia; the early work of one was destroyed by a mice plague, another was blackballed for an acrostic that read “FUCK ALL EDITORS” (a sonnet, eh, thinks the reviewer, with his best po-face on). One was advised to leave school and go into shoe repairing, another ended his days as ambassador to France; a friend's obituary of one was turned down, another's death made front-page news; one's body lay unclaimed (all his life, he had known only poverty and poetry, it was said), another was buried in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.

From lively folksy balladry on one side and a slightly anxious, etiolated literariness on the other (“even though there be / Some notes that unto other lyres belong,” writes Henry Kendall), Australian poetry has come not so much into its own as into everyone else's own. (Hence my previous paragraph's reveling in the historic variety of Australian poets' lives and work; nowadays, one way or another, most poems are literary, and most poets teach.) American and British, Aboriginal and Oriental influences balance out. There are the usual mutually opposed strivings to keep standards high and to carry on a live communication with a readership; one consequence of the latter is that Australia seems to have many more verse novels than other countries. An unease, almost an embarrassment, about language and a stern desire to name and describe specifically Australian realities continue to fight each other. The ballads and the two Aboriginal song cycles were a revelation to me. Those pages are certainly the most highly flavored here. And otherwise? Eric Rolls's “Bamboo” (“But I sing of the quality of bamboo”) is sly and wonderful; Douglas Stewart's brilliant “Two Englishmen” is as good an anatomization of the hapless auld enemy as I have read: “But in their own small island crowded thickly, / Each with his pride of self and race and caste, / They could not help but be a little prickly / And in their wisdom they evolved at last / This simple code to save them from destruction— / One did not speak without an introduction.” Robert Gray stands out to me for having devised a calmly luxuriant manner of reminiscing: “He often drank alone / at the RSL club, and had been known to wear a carefully-considered tie / to get drunk in the sandhills, watching the sea.” Gig Ryan's “If I Had a Gun” is memorably ferocious, but still, in its way, in the line of Geoff Page's paean to Australian womanhood, “Grit.” I was impressed by Emma Lew's spaciously dissociated lines: “Rounded forms of crockery gleam in the great hall / The Führer's pockets are always filled with chocolates.” Philip Hodgins is a real loss (he died in 1995, just thirty-six years old), but before that he was an immense gain: his hard, sad, often violent poems are both plainspoken and intense: “There wasn't much else we could do / that final day on the farm. / We couldn't take them with us into town, / no-one round the district needed them / and the new people had their own. / It was one of those things” (from “Shooting the Dogs”).

 

KAREN SOLIE

Introducing Karen Solie, I would adapt what Joseph Brodsky said some thirty years ago of the great Les Murray: “It would be as myopic to regard Mr. Murray as an Australian poet as to call Yeats an Irishman. He is, quite simply, the one by whom the language lives.” Solie is Canadian (born in 1966, in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, of Norwegian immigrant stock), the author of three previous books of poems,
Short Haul Engine
(2001),
Modern and Normal
(2005), and
Pigeon
(2009), and now
The Living Option: Selected Poems
, and, yes, as we embark on the third millennium of our so-called Common Era, she is indeed the one by whom the language lives. I wonder, a little bitterly, what the point of English as a soi-disant world language is if our smug maps have only the UK and the US on them, and everywhere else is apocrypha or appendix, the province of specialists or pity. Enormous credit goes to Bloodaxe for commissioning and bringing out this exhilarating volume, Solie's first book publication outside Canada.

If I wanted to show someone—an agnostic—what a modern poem can do, I would show them something by Lawrence Joseph, or Frederick Seidel, or Karen Solie, all different but all modern, all
modo hodie
, all fresh today. A poem of Solie's is sentences in unpredictable but deep sequence in unpredictable but braced lines. It seems out of control, but isn't; it exhibits grace while falling, which is perhaps what grace is. It runs the gamut from nervous, garrulous charm to the glory and shear of impersonal style: it is idiomatic splicing in one voice. It offers wisdom, fact, and bitter experience (yes, it is pessimistic, or negative, or critical, or ironic, depending on what one word one wants to use, but then so would Whitman be if he were back among us: in Musil's
The Man Without Qualities
, Ulrich says, “The man of genius is duty bound to attack,” and Brecht wrote in “To Those Born Later,” “Truly, I live in dark times! / A bland word is foolish. An unlined brow / Indicates impercipience. The man laughing only / Laughs because the terrible news / Has not yet reached him”). It is a noticing, a naming and a connecting, an electric errancy. It is round-the-corner knight moves in a world of pawns, or almost worse, rooks; googlies and chinamen among dobbers. It is a widening and widening optic that returns us unexpectedly (“the variable / when the outcome is unknown, / as always the outcome is unknown”—take that, Mr. Rumsfeld!) to the place we began. It may be to comic or grievous effect. It is an adventitious gallivanting movement across country that makes denser, bunched sense than any more rational or measured or predictable progress. It looks baroque, but actually it's stringent, and vice versa. (I've come to think you can't actually have poetry without dandyism, and that includes all those I've mentioned: Frederick Seidel self-evidently, but also those seemingly austere figures Whitman, Brecht, Murray, and Brodsky. As Wallace Stevens said, “It must give pleasure.”) It looks random, but like Thom Gunn's “blue jay scuffling in the bushes,” it “follows some hidden purpose.” Other things, set beside it, look lame and tedious—like prose. It reminds me of another axiom of Brodsky's, that poetry is a function of speed: it gets there faster than prose, and goes farther.