Elwood: John Leonard Press, 2008, 328pp.

(also) Jan Owen: Blackberry Season (Warners Bay, NSW: Picaro Press, 2007). First published by Molonglo Press, 1997.

Jan Owen is one of those poets who becomes progressively more interesting not because the quality of the work improves radically or because they write a breakthrough work, but because it takes a number of books before readers can see the outlines of her distinctive imagination. Such a situation is an ideal one for the publication of a selected poems such as this. It is built out of generous (and, as far as I can see, well-chosen) selections from her first five books and contains a book length new work, Laughing in Greek. Reading it enables us to see how restlessly Owen’s poems move internally from the microscopic to the cosmic; from the present to the past (and vice versa); from the local to the exotic; from the abstract to the embodied and from the act of representing to the act of meditating. Given this restlessness it is no surprise that the poems are interested in rooms, horizons and frames – all things that must be crossed or exited when one of these shifts is made.

For a critic it is nice to be able to say that much of this can be found, inchoate, in her first book, Boy With A Telescope, published in 1986. The very first poem, “First Love”, describes an adolescent falling in love with a Titian, or rather, the subject of the Titian, when she should have been attending to lessons on Archimedes’ principle: the result is “a D in Physics”. It is a poem about art and reality but also about the frames that mark them out. When,

. . . . .
Ten years later I married:
a European with cool grey eyes,
a moustache,
pigskin gloves.

the young Englishman of the painting has stepped out of the frame into reality. And when, in “The Riding Habit”, a painting of a tailor is used as the basis for an imaginative filling out of the relationship between a noblewoman and her tailor, what is this but the author reversing the process by entering through the frame into the picture and describing those components that we cannot see?

In a series devoted to the Duc de Berry’s Très Riches Heures in her second book, she describes the magical May painting at some length, seeing its picnic as an embodiment of the idealised courtly love tradition, though “torture, famine, poison, war” lie “outside the frame”. But the poems are not only interested in this move to what is outside the frame: the wonderful illuminations of this book are noted for the astronomical pictures at the head of each page. They bring the cosmos alongside the everyday in a way that Owen’s poetry often wants to do.

Her first book’s title poem, couched as a painting title, is an example of the movement from the local to the cosmic though here that is configured as the poem’s subject matter rather than as a meditative shift in the poem itself. The poet’s son surveys the stars:

Shadowy neanderthal, his silhouette
straightens to shake a fist
at the prowling clouds
then down again eagerly
to Saturn’s swirling rings
or Jupiter trailing his brood of moons.
The warm room of the family
is galaxies away;
tonight he charts the distance and the dark,
burning with a cool celestial fire;
names like charms spin in his head -
Betelgeuse, Rigel, Aldebaran -
they peal like bells in the cold air.
. . . . .

(It is probably no more than my own obsession but the conjunction of “charts” and “charms” here has always looked significant.) When, later in the poem, the poet asks, “And may he always stand so – / a little to one side of what he loves . . .” it encourages us to read the astronomy as no more than a symbol. But this is to reduce the poem to being one about motherly concern for the future growth of her offspring. What the rest of the poems in this selected teach us is that the stars and their perspective are serious matters indeed.

All of Owen’s books introduce the world of travel and the exotic about halfway through. In Boy With A Telescope we are introduced to Hungary; in Fingerprints on Light (1990) there is a suite of poems from Hungary, England, France, Israel and Turkey; in Night Rainbows (1994) there is Hungary once again and Venice; in Timedancing (2002) there are an important group of poems from Malaysia as well as some from Italy and in Laughing in Greek, poems from Holland and France. This is a long way from the world of exploiting comfortable cheap travel in poetry. It is about allowing the exotic into the frame of experience, and the frame of the book, as a balance, as a different kind of knowledge to the local. It may also explain a strange poem from Blackberry Season (1993). That book, recently republished by Picaro, has always worried me. It concerns itself entirely with the poet’s childhood past in Adelaide, providing a set of brief pictures of the child’s life. It is a warm book, nowhere exploiting any sensational trauma. In fact it is, possibly, a polemical work, objecting to the current fashion of seeing childhood as a site of abuse, and doing it by substituting loving parents and a close bond with her brother (in the first poem the child climbs into her baby brother’s cot and it is “agreed” between them that “there is room for both”). But these continual recollections don’t have the enlivening and distinctive twists that one is used to from Owen’s other poems: in other words, Blackberry Season is problematic in being the least problematic of her books. As a portrait of an Adelaide wartime childhood, there is no room for poems about travels to Hungary or Kuala Lumpur, but, in the middle of the book is a strange poem, “The Egyptian Room”, which seems to be a description of a room in a local museum. My guess is that this is, in miniature, the inclusion of the exotic, patterned to match the other books. Certainly the subject of the poem is allowed to influence the style so that it is not really like the other poems of Blackberry Season:

Stillness rose from the stone and wood
and linen here: they breathed in mysteries
lightly, carefully touching all they could -
the hunting mural, Khafra’s cold black knees.

. . . . .

The sun was high. I am Khepera at dawn Ra at noon and Tum at eventide.
They and the lotus pillar on the lawn
cast no shadows on the world outside.

In one of the most brilliant of these “exotic” poems, “The Pangolins” from Timedancing, the animal itself – and the poem devotes itself to describing it, to “capturing” it with great accuracy – does not appear until the end of the second stanza. The poem, up to that point, has focussed on the alienness of the setting in which dubious messages are read in dubious light:

Throwing the I Ching by the northern wall
(Mountain over Water: the cataract clears),
rereading the dubious message in dubious light,
dusk there is as brief as thirty years.
The dogs were off at the end of the garden, barking
at moonlight or monkeys, tenor and alto and bass.
Under the rambutans it was lighting-up time,
teetering lanterns in the bushes and grass

were practising emerald – becoming, yes, here;
the fireflies above were loopy with desire.
A pounding of fists south-east from the Surau
was the kampong boys on their Thursday drums. The air
yearned after the odd missed beat like a tired heart.
And then the stranger came. Out of the neat
fit of the dark. Self stood back. No-name
trundled up, snuffling the mulch with her slender snout.
. . . . .

The poet is as exotic a presence to the pangolin as the pangolin is to her. In other words the meeting with the exotic is far more complex than a stable self meeting something that it doesn’t usually find. The poet’s self, itself, is under pressure, surrounded by dubious messages. The pangolin is a homely, earthy phenomenon, but not a conventional one. The net of metaphor that the exotic elicits is Western: it has a scientific component (“a relaxed bell curve validated with scales / perfectly graded – 3:5:8:13”) and a mythical one, a variation of the Sphinx’s question to Oedipus (“What goes on four legs at night and none at noon?”).

Night Rainbows begins with a group of poems involving rooms and the best of them, “Left”, shows what can happen when the movements in time which are part of Owen’s poetic personality are harnessed to the image of the room:

Maybe coming late from the womb
I stayed out of sync
between is and was,
watching the ants or the clouds too long,
seeing things from behind,
tender and strange.
Days like provincial towns
with every gallery just on closing time
and the crowd streaming by
the other way.
Or the only open one
is an archaeology museum
and very quiet.
I stare alone at spearheads
and stone axes marching back
to the twenty-fifth millennium BC
with a firm declaration of war.
Four rooms ahead
the guided tour has sighted Ur.
Back here, some bungling guard
has bolted the intervening door.
I’m left in the Palaeolithic,
trying to dream up fire.

It is not a poem that covers all the issues of her poetry and of her position within it but it does, in the third and fourth lines, speak about the issue of the present and the past and of the intently local perspective as opposed to the wider one.

And so to Laughing in Greek. I don’t think this will ever be considered the most likeable or successful of Owen’s books: it is more ambitious than the earlier ones but has too many flawed poems in it for that to happen. Like all of her books it begins with a set of poems that outline the book’s themes. As with Night Rainbows, here these are room poems. Thematically, however, they want to be about philosophical – at least, both metaphysical and epistemological – issues. The first, “Room”, begins with the consequences of the Enlightenment:

Say, what went wrong
was what went right: the question mark
reared up against the word
and down that sinuous vertical doubt
abstractions slid to elbow out
visible angels, solid gods.

and goes on to consider the human response to this:

. . . . .
We’re given a little room, a little scene
to reason reason out and guess
dimensions surging from the other side.
But is there “side” beyond its word,
what deepens the abyss when we say “fall”?
Why ever call such shadows up?
Look how the night sky wheels around -
Antares, Fomalhaut, Achernar, Sol,
time-lapse traffic grave with light
like our slipstream of love and fear.
And a human hand held out is half a star.

I haven’t quoted this poem at length out of admiration. Like so many of the poems in the first part of Laughing in Greek it doesn’t seem successful in its attempt to ratchet up the level of abstraction. But it does contain the issues that I have been speaking of. Here the room represents the limits of ordinary perception, our “frame” or “horizon” – to use a word common in Owen’s poetry. Words do not invoke the dimensions beyond (a nod to the idea of humans as language and language-limited creatures) but they exist in our experience of the cosmos which is, itself, contained in magical, iconic names such as Antares. Perhaps I’m leery about this poem because I disagree with it: I think it makes the mistake of assuming that the scepticism of the Enlightenment is an attack on the notion of other dimensions whereas, at its best, the scepticism of the Enlightenment is an attack on fraudulent, superstitious and lying representations of the other dimensions.

The second poem, “Ante-Room, is as unsuccessful as the first but interesting because it circles around the issue of language. The specific issue is metaphor, one of those imaginative techniques whereby language tries to reach beyond the frame of mundane apprehensions of reality. According to my reading of this difficult poem, metaphor controls the door whereby “concepts craving life” – including, presumably, other dimensions – might, like petitioners in an ancient court, have access to an absolute ground of reality. The last part of the poem is a kind of mildly comic lament for the author’s own descent into adulthood (or into a post-Enlightenment historical period – depending on one’s reading):

Before joy tamed its alphabet to words
or peacock intellect flaunted its span,
the here and now was clearly lesson one
but all I learnt is scattered to the birds,

food for the moon and manna for the sun.
Dear drifting self, best come hard round,
your captain’s crazy and your first mate’s blind,
surly mongrels. Try a different tune.

The third of these first poems, “Corridor” is the densest of all and written in a compressed, very unattractive style. In its deliberately bathetic quatrains it sounds a bit like “The Phoenix and the Turtle” or Peter Porter on a bad day:

What helical two-step slides through us?
Hypnotized by jamais-vu
we’d strip the face off with the mask,
the mouth for me, the eyes for you.

And so on: yes it does make sense but it is not an attractive path for Owen’s poetry to trace.

Fittingly, the poems of travel-experience are prefaced by a long and very abstract meditation on the nature of travel itself, “Travelling towards the Evidence”. Like the first poems of the book, it is difficult and not really successful – though those two things are not related. What does work in the poem are the rapid modulations from meditation to moments of actual travel – there are brilliant moments in which you get the sense that the poem has suddenly set you down in the real:

Cynicism’s copper and lime

is a coin on the tongue
for Charon’s deep pockets; time
as a brief ID is the happiest fake.
What god of the unlikely gets us here?

With Pepe and Isabelle, say,
and the saturnine stare
of twelve cooked goats’ heads
watching us sip goat broth

in Jemaa El Fna . . .

The poems that follow this are more like the travel poems of the earlier books and are a mixed bag of attractive pieces. Noteworthy, perhaps, are “Levity” which records the story of the Chevalier de la Barre who, at nineteen, was tortured and killed for contempt of the church (and owning dirty books as well as reading Voltaire). In a sense, he is one of the iconic heroes of the French Enlightenment and it might be unusual to see a poet, in a book generally doubtful about that value of that historical event, celebrating him. But the poem may be more about the backpackers who, today, “size up the same scene”, the argument being that violent intolerance can exist in contradictory ideologies – the contemporary secular as well as the pre-Enlightenment Catholic. Also impressive is the last of the group, “Salt”. A brilliant poem not about arriving or experiencing but about leaving, it details all the aspects of existence that one leaves behind beginning with the “gap-toothed men untangling nets”, going on to the “windows round the waterfront” and finishing with the clock-tower spire, the last thing seen, which is “a candle for what you were”.

The best poems of Laughing in Greek are the ones that come at the end of the book, after the travel poems. “Shifting the Dark” is a kind of search for a totem. It begins with a list of creatures that have appeared before in Owen’s poetry as connected with joy: the butterflies that once congregated around her head, the gnats and the resurrection beetle, the scarab, that appears in “Beetles” (from Fingerprints on Light) and “Egyptian Room”. It then rejects the family totem, the bee, in favour of the firefly (a creature which has also appeared in earlier poems, notably in Timedancing.

. . . . .
I choose the spirit green of fireflies,

drifting afterthoughts at the river’s edge,
ghost shuttles, elf breath, nimbus of limbo.

Think of a light left on past any hope of return,
oblivion underwriting desire;

they are heart space from the void,
round trips shifting the dark

with the simplest argument,
I shine therefore I am.

Such crosslife clues for stars,
these perfect strangers do no harm.

It is no surprise that this totemic animal should be invoked in terms of movement, of shuttling between states, since that is so much part of Owen’s poetic. No surprise, also, that the second last line sees them as one of the counterparts in our lives of the cosmic.

“Touching This Matter” and “The Trellis Fence” are big, set-piece meditative poems. The former begins with detailed portraits of insects responding to the triggers of instinct and its first image, of ants crawling across a sunny patch of wall, is described in typically Owen terms so that the sun, the cosmic, has landed on the wall. Issues of instinct lead to thoughts about the status of the mind and the human:

. . . . .
Flatlandedly, I’m peering over the rim
of non-existent time and edgeless space

wondering whether it’s maths or madness or God . . .

before (always something that poetry does well) modulating to the poet in an actual, physical location but a physical location in which time is dissolved:

I fall to picking up sticks, purposeful, brisk,
as if for a fire, as if it’s getting late;

. . . . .

I’m back in my grandparents’ garden
gathering almond husks to throw at the chooks.

We’ve ample space between our ears
for time the symbiote.
“Later,” we promise Poppy, not yet two,
and she nods, “Uh,” placated. And will wait.

The last of these poems is “The Offhand Angel”, significant because it deals with poetry as well as the other issues of Owen’s work. It is significant also because it speaks in terms of balances between the perspectives that dominate the poetry and of the shuttling movement between them that is so characteristic of Owen’s method. The offhand angel is, himself, a kind of muse; a spokesman for another dimension that is, after all, perhaps no more than a different hemisphere of the poet’s brain. He begins outside of the frame but is gradually, in the course of the poem, incarnated to the point where the poet can, at the end, say “Come through . . . Come in”.

Cambridge, UK: Salt, 2007, 68pp.

Judith Bishop’s brilliant first book, Event, appeared last year and if I’ve taken some time writing about it, it is because there is a lot to absorb and it doesn’t metabolize easily. Event has a quality shared by other first books (John Tranter’s Parallax comes to mind) of being highly organized while, at the same time, being composed of different sorts of poems.

There is almost a defensive quality about this, as though the author felt that it was imperative to pre-empt any descriptions involving the word “grab-bag”. It is divided into four sections with a single poem “Interval” in the middle. Allotted to different sections are poems which clearly belong (in the sense of “were written”) in groups. These include the poems about paintings and some prose poems about relationships – all are broken up and dispersed throughout the book. Even the central narrative sequence about Cortes’ translator and mistress in the conquest of Mexico is spread across three of the sections, as though Dona Marina found her life turning up in the pages of different books. The variety of poems makes it a really difficult book to feel confident about because the reader is challenged not only by a variety of interests but also by a variety of modes.

One tactic is to step back and take a distanced, impressionist view. The common themes of these poems turn out to be love, loss, betrayal and language. At a slightly higher resolution, the things the poems seem sensitive to, and are animated by, include: visitations and arrivals (the latter being the former seen from a different perspective), links between micro and macro perspectives, and links between the animal world and the human.

Event opens with two stunning poems, either of which is enough to ensure that this is a book to be taken very seriously. The second of them, “Desert Wind”, describes an urban winter landscape which, in a powerful and (to the reader) unexpected transformation, becomes something like a painting of a
desert scene:

High, bright winter morning: the tenement’s tree-antlers
clatter on each corner and the stepping black spines are smooth
and glossy as mirages; framed, the scene shines as if transported to a desert,
and never (since this winter day will not end hereafter, having left
the field of time), will the trees
flicker leaves again or carry broods of flowers . . .

The scene may be out of time but it doesn’t preclude the book’s first “arrival” – a “random bird” which

                alights, hoarse-throated after days of luckless questing
for a moth or a spider that has cellared spring rains in its body, so honeying
the juices of itself . . .

Later in the poem a snake arrives, searching for dead hummingbirds. The poem finishes on a note of optimism when “a human voice” (most likely the lover’s but, considering the ambiguities of “yours”, conceivably the poet’s or even the reader’s) rises “like a yam tendril” to animate the objects of this strange tableau. But it is the two birds of “Desert Wind” that I want to stay with.

There are birds everywhere in Event. The book’s second section has, pretty well, one per poem. In a description of Rembrandt’s “Presentation in the Temple” they figure as a simile which concludes a poem in which we don’t expect birds to appear at all “As the child’s foot stutters / like a just-fledged bird”. But the shock of the simile matches the shock of the birth of the divine child: one disturbs the poem, the other the universe. Birds seem symbols of arrivals from different dimensions. Many other poets are, pre-eminently, poets of annunciation in that they have imaginations strongly moved by the arrival of messengers (usually angels) from other worlds. The best of such poets don’t simply let the matter rest there though. Bishop wants to explore the origins of the arrivals, their perception of the new world and the result of the clash of the worlds that the bird bridges.

Which is a clumsy segue to the central narrative poems of Event, the sequence devoted to the Spanish conquest of Mexico, seen from the point of view of the Nahuatl/Mayan/Spanish speaker who accompanied Cortes as guide and mistress, most notably at his entrance into Tenochtitlan. The arrival of the Spanish is, of course, from the Aztec perspective, the arrival to end all arrivals: it simply puts an end to their empire. I’ve always thought of it as an example (like the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem) of a consistent, mythically-oriented culture suddenly being confronted by wider perspectives: in other words, reality or history or the world comes visiting. There are birds everywhere in this story: Montezuma identified the Spaniards with Quetzalcoatl the bird-serpent god whose return they awaited (no accident, then, that the two arrivals in “Desert Wind” are a bird and a snake). In the first poem of this eight poem sequence, Dona Marina (as a child) breaks the neck of a hummingbird which has been ejected from its nest. One of the great things about reading Event is that it made me read Inga Clendinnen’s brilliant Aztec’s: An Interpretation, and I owe to that book knowledge of the fact that, in their afterlife, brave Aztec warriors returned to earth incarnated as hummingbirds or butterflies. So, symbolically, Dona Marina destroys the warrior tradition of the Aztecs. Marina’s Nahuatl name means “grass” and in the third poem she imagines the gods arriving like winds:

Something builds across the skies today: a bent
to which the maize submits. These are the wind
bridges which the gods may use to visit us.
If they should come to break us,

I’ll desire them, I’ll arch. Grass is
as grass does . . .

The ferocity of the Aztec’s pantheon of gods makes them unusually pliant in the face of the invaders.

Arrivals require translators since an arrival can also be a linguistic irruption. One of the themes of this book is the way language betrays: it forms much of the material of the poems of the third section. It is fitting then that the final act of Dona Marina’s poem is an act of betrayal. An old woman offers to marry Marina to her son and lets slip that a revolt is being prepared in Cholula. Marina betrays the revolt to Cortes, provoking the famous massacre.

Birds are also associated in this book with scale. Many of the poems relate to the idea of a double perspective. The bird’s eye view (I did try not to commit that pun) is contrasted with a sensitivity to the world at a micro-level. The fourth poem of the book, the very fine “It Begins Where You Stand”, moves like a camera lens (or flying bird’s view) from the speaker to a small bird tapping on a window pane. This bird has a message but it is not about history or betrayal: it is about the intuition of the macro-event:

. . . . .
As the boy groans, the cardinal morse-codes her intuition
that the wind, within the hour, will have turned
toward the east;
and spawned a tornado in its wake

In “Vertigo” a blackbird arrives, “swooping out of her alarm”. “What is scale?” the poem asks, why does someone anxious to welcome “injured dogs, and kids / who come with bloodied knees” not respond to the far larger scale disasters of the world occurring at a pitch “lower than the melodies / familiar to your bones”?

The book, as a whole, wants to push us towards expanding the range of the signals we can absorb. There are three poems (also spread throughout the book) which signal their relatedness by having their titles in inverted commas. The first of them, “‘And the Clouds Cleared the Sky . . .’” describes another desert wind. This wind is an arrival that does not touch the world of objects but alters our perspective of them:

. . . . .
                                        and the high,
efficient winds didn’t lift a dried leaf

or brush a sparrow’s wing, but caused a white dress and pine table
(white pine, the table dressed) to shine much more acutely, just as if

each form exploded and reformed, or blurred its outline then
resharpened at a higher resolution; or as if our

resolution was a matter of the light, or the timing of those changes
no-one owns, but all absorb . . .

The last of these three poems is the final poem of the book, “‘The Chords of Snow Melting . . .’” Although I’m not sure that I understand the last line – which signals the author’s stake in the poem – there is no doubt that the bird has a hyper-sensitivity to the infinitely microscopic. And like the bird of “It Begins Where you Stand”, the bird which is introduced to share this poem with the humans can intuit the macro in the micro:

The chords of snow melting are unheard, perhaps, by any but the bird,
attuned with all its body

to the sawings of a grass blade or a seed falling from its flower head,
meaning danger, or future,

or the wind slowly gathering in force.
But see the snow – how in melting, it clarifies.

A pitch, low or high, must be sung by water molecules uncoupling
small attractions, gaining force and mutual distance.

Restless one, I know.
The songs we’re singing are as clear.

Other poems from Event focus on this juxtaposing of the human world and the animal world. “Rabbit”, which I first met in Judith Beveridge’s The Best Australian Poetry, 2006, takes a fresh look at this trope asking from the rabbit help in the task of reclaiming the animal in the human:

. . . . .
Rabbit, laid ragged at the fold of day’s field, where the sparrow-hawk stretched
the star’s scarf across her wing: with your velvet heart, you occupied
the blood’s old theatre: with your hushed ballet of spring, you
performed the coiled rites you have taught us tonight: showed our ropes of matter cut
by the one puppet-master, hanging in his own winds.

Another, lesser, poem, “The Birds Reported from the South –”, reminds us that the hyper-sensitive world of the bird is one we can acknowledge but that ultimately there is a distance between us, even though we like to believe we are travelling in the same direction:

. . . . .
A briefly mutual gaze is the whole of our acquaintance,
my high-minded gull, my dear, quixotic mynah:
our eyes betray a knowledge of rigidity onstage,
then you turn away softly, to toss a twig or blade.

Hail, red-eyed pigeon; prancing sparrow, hail.
Tonight we file together, at some distance, to the show.

Birds and winds come from above, of course. And there is a strong sense in Event of the disposition of things on a vertical scale. The gods, in other words, do come from above rather than from the side. One of the painting-poems, “Sorretto da Quattro Angeli”, imagines the deposition as a falling from divinity to humanity and matches it against a young man suiciding by jumping out of a window during the Kosovo war. And a complicated poem, “Threnody”, begins with a mirror on a rubbish dump reflecting the blue sky and briefly connecting the lower with the upper worlds. In two poems, bees are trapped by surface tension and die by slowly giving up their body warmth to the lower world of the sea.

In this review I’ve dealt only lightly with the personal drama that underlies so many of these poems. I’m not being especially tactful here, it is more a result of an interpretive nervousness. No-one minds making a mistake about an author’s conception of, say, the animal world, but one doesn’t want to make a mistake about an author’s emotional life! Three of the prose poems are vey much about this, but “The Indifferent”, “Definition of a Place” and “Epistles” all share a sensitivity to what might be called the schematics of place: there are horizontal axes to be observed as well as vertical ones. In the first of these, the author walks the middle ground of the littoral between the low-tide sea and the high-tide detritus of “gull bones and cuttlefish blades” and in the second the lovers are at the bank of a creek with a bridge above them “holding up the shallow arc a bomb of swallows pitched under”. “Epistles”, the third, is the most complex of them but its opening – which unites virtually all of the things I have been speaking about – emphasises its importance:

Birds, insects plummet through our days like meteors, visitations, breaking the immutable glass fixed upon our sight by sunlight. It’s then we see the planets most vividly, through those quick breaches in the air: we see how terribly far from us they are. You, do you come closer to me than these falling wings, do you come, are you there, am I yours, in your own transparent orbit?

The poem finishes with a final arrival from above, a leaf which must be put on the stream and sent, against “the one direction of life”, up the stream towards the source.

As I said in opening, these poems seem to have been written over a long stretch of time. Moreover they seem (and it is only a reader’s impression) to have been written in small, consistent batches. One of the common features of first books is that they collect work from a far longer period than any subsequent book and so there is a kind of archeology involved in reading them. Bishop’s poems, at least on the evidence of those selected and arranged in Event, are very consistent in their interests and sensitivities. And these sensitivities – to arrival, to the layout of space, to translation (a word deriving from a spatial metaphor) – are engaging and rich in poetic potential. You want to see a second book, quickly.

Artarmon: Giramondo, 2008, 93pp.

To readers used to Wearne’s previous massive poems (The Nightmarkets and The Lovemakers), this new book will come as something of a surprise. It is made up of three parts. In the first, which gives its name to the book, there are four sections each of seven poems, all variously rhymed sonnets (apart from two villanelles and a set of triplets). The second part is a set of eleven “Metropolitan Poems” and the third is a seven page dramatic monologue, “Breakfast with Darky”. That is: forty short, individual, unconnected poems. The structure seems to be that the poems of the first part are inspired by the popular songs that become their titles, while those of the second part are inspired by individual suburbs in Melbourne or Sydney – generally, these suburbs form at least part of the title.

Wearne is Australia’s great master of poetic narrative, but one wouldn’t want to treat his work as a consistent whole. The monologues from his first book, Public Relations, brilliant, small poems like “A Molester’s Fortune”, “Warburton, 1910” and “After Adultery” are, in a way, closer to the monologues here than are those of his first two full-scale narrative poems, “Out Here” (of 1976) and The Nightmarkets (of 1986). But in other ways, these poems do reflect the kind of developments going on in The Lovemakers. One of the (very many) remarkable things about that enormous tour de force was the comic poem of the second last section in which the love-lifes of two of the book’s major characters were tied up. The Nightmarkets had been very serious and po-faced and would never have accommodated the kind of slightly manic grotesquerie of:

     Neil was in Melbourne attending a funeral,
he called up his old flame to check out her scene.
     She was delighted and jumped at a meeting,
before he’d fly out from Tullamarine.

And so on through twenty stanzas each finishing with the “lovely liquid” name (to quote an earlier Prime Minister) of Melbourne’s airport.

But there is a lot of this in The Australian Popular Songbook. Indeed any poem which is not a full monologue, rigidly in character, is likely to have a least a touch of this larky style. Patrick White’s typical though imaginary suburb of Sarsaparilla is celebrated by a comic poem done in calypso style (the music is included in the book):

Fifty years past, for a fact,
on some semi-rural tract,
lived a man whose prayers asked, “Boss,
what on earth can follow Voss?”
Question answered, thus he wrote
(as my ballad shall denote)
in his hardly elfin grot:
Riders in the Chariot.

Riders in the Chariot,
ev’ry page a new bon mot,
‘t’s to cross and ‘i’s to dot,
Riders in the Chariot.

and so on through eight comic stanzas. “Poem for Cathy Coleborne” an equivocal celebration of Fitzroy in the nineties is another comically rhyming piece. This process of allowing the grotesque in to what might otherwise be profound Wearnian meditations on the implications of not only what city his characters live in, but what suburb, even what street, they live in, intrigues me. While “Out Here” was done in impeccable blank verse (the default mode for the dramatic monologue), The Nightmarkets was full of different verse forms, some syllabic, some accentual. But the latter poem was never less than deadly serious. In this new book, either Wearne’s interest in odd verse forms has encouraged the humorous and bathetic, or the desire to be humorous has legitimated the choice of some challenging forms. And complicating this is the fact that for poets of Wearne’s generation, form itself is not the sine qua non of poetry. When such poets do write in complex forms – sestinas, villanelles, and the ever present and irritating (at least to me) pantoums – there is always a postmodern sense of mocking performance about what they do. It is as though they were saying: “I am writing a sonnet but I am just using the formal requirements in a mechanical way. Don’t take them too seriously, the soul of the poem does not lie in them. And expect some deliberately bathetic fulfilling of the formal rules. It’s a game”.

Although The Australian Popular Songbook seems a long way from the epic dimensions and ambitions of The Lovemakers, it does carry over a lot of its concerns. The first poem, for example, inspired by “Down Under”, a pop song even I know, is about the Mr Asia drug syndicate which figures so prominently in The Lovemakers. It also recalls The Lovemakers technically because the speaking voice hovers somewhere between character and author. One of the devices of The Lovemakers was the use of a voice which gave the impression that it had been affected by the world in which it was operating – using its slang, for example, but still with the underlying accents and syntax of the author. In “Down Under”, someone is getting inspired enough to think about importing drugs from South East Asia:

. . . . .
                               And, if here the law
Is “Fit in Western Freak”, well, a brain may yet take off
to one stoned night you tripped into their pigshit trough
but rose back grinning at the tribesmen; or that pleasing twelve hour lockjaw
session and how “With gear like this” you mused,
“not merely fortunes but our souls are made!”
     So how?
                    Well, one mate’s ex-in-law’s this dodgy nark,
whilst another (he’s fevered with the prospects!) reckons on someone who’s
“Like something someplace in some gemstone trade . . .”
     “G’day,” you’ll hear a sardonic Kiwi mutter, “I’m Terry Clark.”

Another poem about the same evil organization is “Neutral Bay” from the second part of the book. Here we are in the much more conventional world (technically speaking) of the monologue. The speaker is one of the young women who couriered the heroin back to Australia in their luggage:

      I’d get in from the airport after midnight
and wait a day, till someone came around,
unloaded me and made me Thanks sweetheart
$15,000 richer. Then I’d hardly be noticed,
not till Allison called, or Kay, and we went off to buy
all those incredible clothes.
. . . . .

Interestingly, it is this simpler mode which is the one chosen to bear the brunt of the ethical perspective on the drug syndicate. When the speaker flies home to see her parents the gossip is of how “someone’s kid was ‘into drugs’, / always someone’s kid and always drugs”. The courier, seeing the results of the trade, wants to escape but is addicted to the money in the same way that the kids are addicted to the drugs:

Who knows what The Organisation’s doing
right now: cutting, grinding and packing;
delivering, collecting and waiting
and how I never wanted to feel damn special again.
But Thanks a lot sweetheart of course I did.

“Neutral Bay” is preceded in the Metropolitan Poems section by “Chatswood: Ruth Nash Speaks”. Here the subject is, ostensibly, the notorious Bogle/Chandler murders of New Year’s day, 1963, and the speaker is the hostess of the party that the doomed pair left, never to be seen alive again. In a way, it recalls the structural techniques of earlier Wearne narratives like “Out Here” and The Nightmarkets. In both of these, there is a central narrative event, but it is no more than a focus for studies in people’s lives and how these relate to all those determining features – city, suburb, school, etc – that Wearne is obsessed by. Since the death of Bogle and Chandler is an unsolved crime, we know that this is not going to be a narrative which proposes a solution. It is not going to finish with Mrs Nash saying, “And, just to teach those randy buggers a lesson, I slipped some dog-worming pills into each of their drinks to give them the runs”. Instead, its interests are in the way that the unseen, violent future event structures everything leading up to it into a narrative:

. . . . .
so there’s Gib on arrival lightfooting it down our hall,
and there’s Gib a day later lightfooting bugger all.

We think we know the limits? We're merely to follow this text:
Lives unfold lives fold, here’s one hour here’s the next.

And where in a plot place “the heavens”, their ever expanding no?
Well you barely ask such questions of the CSIRO,

For (lab coats, leather patches, pipes and British cars)
my other half worked with boffins who rarely trusted the stars.
. . . . .

Mrs Nash’s concern over the shape of fate is given added poignancy, of course, by the fact that she died exactly on the eleventh anniversary of the murders and that her husband suicided exactly on the thirteenth – though neither of these events is foreshadowed in the poem. “Chatswood: Ruth Nash Speaks” is a brilliant meditation and might even be called a meta-narrative. Again, as in the poems I began with, this can be balanced by one with ethical considerations. “Breakfast with Darky” is a “straight” dramatic monologue whose speaker, serving out his time in a Melbourne high school in the late seventies was, in his younger days, the author of a book of stories in the socialist-realist mode. A new, young staff member recognizes his name and wants to know why there was only one book. The title of that single collection, Just Doing My Job: Stories from the Struggle, is worth pausing over for a minute. It is very funny and cruelly accurate. I’ve always suspected that novelists have a particular ability to imagine the titles of books they would not have wanted to write themselves. After all, if you can imagine an alternative reality, peopled by alternative characters, you should be able to imagine that reality’s fiction and the kinds of titles its books would have. Anthony Powell, an author whom both Wearne and myself admire, was a master of this and one of the running gags in the Dance to the Music of Time novels is the row of titles of books by a pretentious old writer of high-flown romance, St John Clarke: Dust Thou Art, Match Me Such Marvel, Fields of Amaranth.

At any rate, “Breakfast with Darky” is an attack on this particular, leftist mode mainly because it approaches reality through ideology:

Mike was so sincere, so fragile with it,
I couldn’t bother to advise:
“In the end I only wrote what the party
wanted. Quitting that much of my life
required . . . how much heroics?
Just one. One on a day I would not
be labelled. Simple? Yes, simple."

In the end, “Breakfast with Darky” is more about the ethics of writing than it is about the ethics of politics. The speaker’s unpublished second volume sees the great battle of the classes as being played out like a game. Once people accept their part, reality unrolls. I think it says, finally, that that is fine
for all except the writer.

Among the sonnets of the first part of this book there are some very fine achievements. Some are comic (the general tone is comic), like the monologue of the girl whose father has run off with her best friend. This is perfect, right down to the speaker’s high-rising terminals:

. . . . .
So, when I get to see him and he’s all earstud ’n’ lovebite
(hoho, who’s been helping you co-dependent through the night?)

and familial interaction seems the least of his chores:
“Err how’s y’mother, Princess?” Jeez Pop, jeez Pop, how’s yours?

The embarrassment! He’s fifty-one, she’s twenty-four,
so wouldn’t you move further than Maroochydore?

There’s better, it’s worse but, the Get this! fun begins.
They run this motel, see? And she’s expecting,
     she’s expecting . . . twins?

Others, like the two poems about his mother’s younger life in Brisbane during the war, or the poem about the Argonauts Club are modest and somber. I think the best of them is probably “I Go to Rio” which modulates suddenly from the mad world of Peter Allen, Judy Garland and her daughter to the real Rio de Janeiro in which the author saw, before a match at the Maracana, the players holding a banner, aimed at the police death-squads and saying “Please Stop Murdering our Children”.

Wearne is, as everybody who reads Australian poetry knows, a one-off. Better than our novelists he gives a sense of what it is like to live at one of many times in one of many places. His sensitivity to and inquisitiveness about all the issues which determine us as individuals is unparalleled. Paradoxically, he is not somebody who has radically changed Australian poetry. What he has done is stretch it by taking it into the world that novels usually inhabit: the world of  registering the infinite detail of social life. The trouble (if one wants to look for serpents in this particular garden) is that he is so good at the narrative poem or the dramatic monologue – both based on the suggestion that only a fraction of an entirely detailed imaginary world has been revealed – that it makes it harder, not easier, for any poets wanting to tag along in his footsteps. There are plenty of poems being written as narratives or monologues today but they all look stagey or coy or self-focussed in comparison to Wearne’s work. If the function of literature is to make some kind of sense of what a place is and how its people live within it, then Wearne is one of Australia’s most precious literary treasures.