OLIVER DENNIS
POETRY SURVEY
JOYCE LEE – IT IS NEARLY DARK WHEN
I COME TO THE INDIAN OCEAN:
COLLECTED POEMS 1965-2003
Aged ninety, Joyce Lee occupies a unique place in Australian letters.
Having grown up in the Wimmera district of northwest Victoria and worked
as a pharmacist in Melbourne, she did not turn to poetry until well
into her fifties. But as Chris Wallace-Crabbe remarks in his generous
introduction to this Collected Poems, a voice was in evidence
from the outset, sounding the blend of lyricism and metaphysical enquiry
that has sustained Lee’s writing for nearly forty years. These
lines from a recent poem, ‘Lodestar for Jordie’, for example: ‘In
the everlasting stream, / alive in all being, / I am beyond dying.
// Lured by exploding furies, / ready for another chaos, / I step off
the world.’ Not surprisingly, Lee’s earlier work tends
to focus more on particular occasions and places, mostly in recollection:
there are poems about family life, a first visit to the seaside, schooltime
experiences, travels abroad and the deaths of parents. Yet always with
Lee there is a sense of somewhere ‘other’. It is especially
noticeable in the way she writes about the sky: ‘Flat-footed
plainschild / I’m lifted / through sunlit air / to the Grampians,
/ a million miles of sky, / blue forged and folded into rock’ (from ‘Granite
call’). Also worthy of note is her delight in the sound of unusual
place names (‘Swayed by rail-music / we pick our favourite mountain,
/ Picaninny, Sturgeon or Abrupt’); so too her knack for finding
the perfect adjective: consider ‘pink excitement’, ‘untidy
legs’ and, best of all, ‘fool-proof weather’. Ultimately
the value of these poems seems to lie in their deep and uncommon humanity.
Occasionally, however, one longs for a dose of offensiveness.
MTC CRONIN – beautiful, unfinished
SALT PUBLISHING, 2003 [Link
to publisher's site]
There is reason to suspect that M T C Cronin’s ninth book of
poetry may be, in part, a response to serious illness. At one point,
Cronin refers briefly to a ‘tumour they tossed out in a bag’,
and the collection as a whole is much occupied with matters of death
and corporeity. These poems have a certain rawness about them. Elliptical
in phrasing yet inclusive of the world, they sometimes appear to come
to us direct from the unconscious: ‘The growl fucks the word
/ “What is hell?” / In fifty words or less / No correspondence
will be entered into / Still fucking / This is nature’s unholy
tomb / Its gambling house’ (from ‘Parable On the Erotic
Struggle with True Muteness (How We Speak)’). Admittedly, Cronin
has always been a poet with a lot to say in a short space of time,
having produced above a book a year since 1995. As she declares in ‘Better,
Everything’: ‘I want this beautiful hand to have written
/ more than I have time to read in a lifetime.’ Inevitably, many
of the poems in beautiful, unfinished seem to be valuable merely
as gestures, providing Cronin with the means to make sense of her experience.
Of course, this is how poetry must begin, but, as an end in itself,
such an approach necessarily remains personal.
ANDREW HARDY – HIGH IN THE PAWPAW
TREE
CORNFORD PRESS, 2003 [Link
to publisher's site]
Still in his early twenties when he died, Andrew Hardy wrote sensitive
and intelligent poems whose main subjects are love and love’s
breakdown. Here is ‘Insulation’, for example: ‘The
microcosm / Of love / Left us little room / For the six o’clock
news. // So we played Bach / In the mornings, / Under the smell / Of
frying bacon and // Left the washing up / (Which I wrestled you for
later) / Until the fire smouldered.’ The poem’s obvious
faults – including the nonsense of that ‘under’ and
the penultimate line’s clumsiness – are of a sort that
Hardy would have surely outgrown; its pleasures, on the other hand,
like those of the book generally, derive from the frank and genial
character of the writing, its sense of youthful wonder at new experience. High
in the Pawpaw Tree is also enjoyable for its wit. Hardy has an
ability to turn the most ordinary situations into something comical: ‘Our
landlord / Believes we owe him / Four hundred dollars. // He comes
to collect / In a waistcoat stained / By a thousand Rotary meetings,
/ Two marriages and / Regular Golf’ (‘In Arrears’).
Some of the best poems here include ‘Close’, ‘Under
This Sun’ and ‘Car Journeys’ with its free associations
on childhood: ‘It was always a dream, to be eaten softly / While
turning left toward heaven.’
MIKE LADD – ROOMS AND SEQUENCES
SALT PUBLISHING, 2003 [Link
to publisher's site]
At close to 150 pages, Mike Ladd’s fourth collection is copious
and varied. Ladd has produced formally interesting poems, ranging from
prose pieces and typographical experiments to antique versions of John
Gay’s fables. The book opens with a series of so-called translations
from the work of an imaginary Roman official stationed in Adelaide
during the first century AD. Complete with ‘scholarly’ notes,
these ‘anachronisms’ comment on the transient and seemingly
absurd nature of human existence: ‘This life is no more / than
a day by the sea: / you come, you go, / the beach remains’. Conceptually,
the work is obviously impressive; but, too often, the poems themselves
say little: ‘Adonis lays tiles. / Dressed only in shorts, / he
walks to his van / parked in the side street’. While the banality
of such lines is perhaps part of the joke, it can be hard not to wish
that Ladd had uncovered a more ambitious talent. The real highlight
of Rooms and Sequences is a sort of adult fairytale-cum-fable
entitled ‘The Bird in the Park’. This is such a delicate
and finely balanced piece of writing that an extended description would
risk breaking its spell. Briefly, the story concerns a talking seabird – a
messenger – which comes into the life of a single, middle-aged
man. (One immediately thinks of Coleridge’s albatross, but, with
the words ‘Don’t fall for clichés’, the bird
is quick to refute that comparison.) Ladd writes with tender sophistication
and universal reach to create what is – despite appearances – a
genuine poem. An ideal syllabus work, ‘The Bird in the Park’ should
be compulsory reading for anyone who has lived alone.
NICOLETTE STASKO – THE WEIGHT OF
IRISES
BLACK PEPPER, 2003
The robust maturity of the poems in The Weight of Irises suggests
that Nicolette Stasko may be working at the height of her powers. Particularly
impressive is Stasko’s careful handling of words, her instinct
for knowing when to stop and when to keep going. Take the concluding
lines from ‘Ashes’, for example, which mourns the declining
influence of poets: ‘who will be here / to help us see? / to
be the mole of the wind / reminding us of death’s bright clothes
/ pointing out / where the stars used to be / from under the glare
of so many / busy street lamps.’ And there is her startling description,
in ‘A Single Ascension’, of a visit to an Italian tourist
site: ‘cathedral steps / are an alabaster bed / of chambered
ammonites / curled like ladies’ ears.’ Elsewhere, Stasko’s
phrasing is equally pregnant and memorable: her
response to her young daughter, for instance (‘a small white
owl / sits lightly / on your breast’), and the glorious understatement
of ‘complicated shadows’ in ‘Plaza en la Colonia
del Sacramento’. Very often, Stasko contrasts personal feelings
of emptiness with the abundance of the natural world: her poetry has
a marked rueful quality. Yet, there is still much in the book celebrating
life’s pleasures, in particular those of food and good living.
JOHN WATSON – A FIRST READER
FIVE ISLANDS PRESS, 2003 [Link
to publisher's site]
John Watson’s A First Reader brings together poems from
more than a dozen volumes, and contains the best of a career that has
spanned forty years. Excluding the versions of sonnets by Lope de Vega
at both ends, the book appears to be arranged chronologically, allowing
readers to trace Watson’s poetic development from observant list-maker
(‘A bleached branch / Like a stick-insect, / A stone like a moth,
/ A bird like a stone’) to playful intellectual (see ‘The
Paris Review Interview’). As a rule, the list poems tend to convince
more, being less self-conscious: ‘The wrens make sounds as one
/ Who has an axe to grind. // Others disputing among the leaves / Sharpen
old saws. // At dusk these flying scissors / Hang arcs between trees’ (from ‘Sea
Pieces’). Watson looks to be at his worst when most thoughtful – he
is sometimes in the irritating habit of thinking out loud: ‘But
what is the purpose of these repeated / Attempts to put you, O Reader,
here, / In the picture ...?’ (‘Honey-eaters’). The
strength of the book is its great formal variety: whatever the constraint,
Watson can usually produce an accomplished poem.
GEOFF PAGE – DRUMMING ON WATER
BRANDL & SCHLESINGER, 2003 [Link
to publisher's site]
That most hermaphroditic of literary genres, the verse novel, suffers
on account of its confused identity, convincing neither as poetry nor
fiction. At least, such is the impression generated by Drumming
on Water, Geoff Page’s second undertaking in this form.
The book’s narrator, Emma Patching, who plays drums with an all-female
jazz band on the Sydney ferries (circa 1938), tells a simple tale concerning
the disappearance overboard of the group’s lead singer, Lizzy Rivers.
Emma is certain their manager, the smooth Sam Dillon, has murdered her friend
and, before long, devises ways of bringing the truth to light, at one point
visiting him with a rifle concealed within her baby’s pram.
Over the course of the work, Page develops themes to do with trust, forgiveness
and the nature of perception.
As has been noted elsewhere, Drumming on Water is really a
ballad, having more in common with Paterson’s ‘Clancy’ than
with Pushkin’s ‘Onegin’. Unfortunately, although
he shares an enviable ability to sustain a narrative, Page writes with
little of the Banjo’s music. Some of his lines can be intolerably
flat: ‘She told us she was in a group / and said she’d
talk to Ivy. / Took our numbers then and there / and said she’d
let us know’. Other disappointments include wooden characterisation,
some rather clunky dialogue (‘“Now hang on, Emma. Let’s
be sure / we don’t risk friendships here”’) and a
dependence on clichéd representations of class bitterness. The
following account of Lizzie’s funeral, for instance: ‘The
chapel ... / was full of daddy’s friends / with quite
a few for mummy also, / sherry guests or tennis fours’.
Possibly the most attractive aspect of the book is its warm and compassionate
conclusion. Here, Page creates a passage that manages to be both moving
and unexpected.
ROBERT DRUMMOND – SHIPS ON FIRE
ARDENT SUN PRESS, 2002
One of the most arresting passages in Robert Drummond’s first
book of poems is a description of war’s atrocity: ‘my father
talks to me of New Guinea / 1943 / how the dead bodies of soldiers
blew up like bloated pigs / in the heat & the stink of the jungle
/ how the burial party / went out into the heat and stink of the jungle & bayoneted
/ the dead bodies in their bloated guts / the guts / that squirted
all over the faces of the burial party’ (‘The Artist and
His Father’). Drummond is especially interested in the politics
of war, criticising, indirectly, the ethics of allowing governments
to put people’s lives at risk. In a long sequence entitled ‘Last
Days of Hedon’, he presents an apocalyptic scenario that appears
to be the work of councillors, mayors and parliamentarians: ‘they
spoke to each other / from leather padded crypts in the bottom of ten
storey buildings / hidden under the ground.’ Drummond – who
is also a painter – goes on to promote the artistic response
as a means of undermining these powers. Certainly, his own expressions
can be subversive and challenging; at times, however, they seem better
suited to the performance venue than the page.
KATHRYN LOMER – EXTRACTION OF ARROWS
UQP, 2002. [Link
to publisher's site]
A poem about mangoes sets the tone of Kathryn Lomer’s first
collection: ‘I remember eating like this in a cold bath / under
a baking roof, remember licking juice / from your chest, smearing it
on your mouth.’ Unashamedly a sensualist, Lomer filters experience
of the world through her skin – a word that occurs repeatedly
throughout Extraction of Arrows. Charting European travels,
relationships and griefs, her early farm life, and, most extensively,
the intimacies of pregnancy and motherhood, she builds a narrative
of her emotional development. Much of the writing conveys a sense of
fragility and wonder: ‘I’m learning the names of whales,
/ seahorses, sharks and frogs, / parts of insects, leaves and fish,
/ all about waves and why there are rainbows; / everything is suddenly
equally important’ (from the title poem). And Lomer frequently
moves from the actual to the figurative. In ‘Dismantling’,
for instance, she gives an account of penguin mating habits before
observing the inevitable loss of connection with her child following
birth: ‘my son drops into estuarine days, / a happy killick to
this shore’. Lomer’s poetry is always astute and well crafted;
it doesn’t suffer from the awkwardnesses which can characterise
the beginnings of younger poets. Taken collectively, however, the pitch
of the work seems a trifle monotonous, and readers may find themselves
wishing for greater formal and stylistic variety.
OLIVER DENNIS is a Melbourne reviewer.
Last modified
22 June, 2004
