Helen Gee’s new anthology of Tasmanian poetry is purposefully rather different in approach to its much-admired predecessor, Effects of Light (1985), which was edited by Vivian Smith and Margaret Scott. In her introduction to River of Verse, Gee describes the selection process – somewhat naively – as a ‘personal indulgence’; her criteria for including a poem were, she explains, straightforward, and seem to have been based on private feeling rather than intrinsic merit: ‘if the verse was essentially Tasmanian and I really liked it, I included it.’ The result is a more laid back, more democratic volume. There are, for example, more poets and fewer poems per poet; there is a wider if at times repetitive range of nineteenth-century verse; and, as might be expected, Gee makes greater acknowledgment of colonial injustice and the rights of indigenous people, opting to open the book with a pair of traditional ‘palawa’ songs, as sung by Trawl-wool-way elder Fanny Cochrane Smith. In common with the Smith and Scott anthology, River of Verse comes with useful, well-researched notes and biographical information. The fact that Gee is not a poet herself goes some way to accounting for the kind of choices she has made, a point of view Coleridge would have endorsed (see his Anima Poetae). Of course, it is reasonable for an editor seeking broad representation to include work by Bob Brown and Sudanese folk singer Ajak Kwai, but surely not at the expense of increased coverage for high calibre poets like James McAuley, Gwen Harwood or A D Hope, all of whom are represented only sparingly. By far the most baffling of Helen Gee’s editorial decisions, however, is her omission of Tim Thorne, who has long been at the forefront of the Tasmanian poetry scene. In the acknowledgments section, Gee pays homage to Thorne as ‘our great poet’, but doesn’t shed light on his exclusion, saying only: ‘By his very absence from these pages, Tim dares us to question.’ It is hard to know what that statement actually means.

Gee looks to have done her best work when choosing the early material. A particular joy are the non-literary ballads, which include ‘Martin Cash’, ‘The Seizure of the Cyprus Brig’, ‘Van Diemen’s Land’, with its familiar opening, ‘Come all you gallant poachers’, and two whaling songs, ‘The Loss of Mahoney’ and ‘The Waterwitch’, the latter’s buoyant refrain as follows:

Other poems from this period are full of praise for Tasmania’s natural beauty, which, for some, could appear in stark contrast to the barbarous conditions experienced by many of its newly arrived inhabitants. As one William Smith O’Brien wrote of the penal settlement at Maria Island: ‘Here nature formed a paradise / But man hath made a Hell.’ Of the more recent work on offer, Hope’s recollection of childhood magpies crying ‘Ethiopia!’ stands out, as does Anthony Lawrence’s virtuosic single-sentence narrative ‘The Rain’.

Regrettably, River of Verse shows little evidence of having been proofread. Helen Gee has a carefree regard for the accurate wording of titles (her inconsistencies can be truly alarming) and more than once misuses the past tense of ‘to hang’ – the capital punishment.

OLIVER DENNIS is a Melbourne reviewer.