The final poem of Laurie Duggan’s new book is a long set of diary-like entries made while based at Griffith University (it’s called “The Nathan Papers”) and it concludes with Duggan’s arriving in Kent. This pivotal event took place in August, 2006, and produces the title of the second book under review, Leaving Here. Despite visits back to Australia, England has been Duggan’s home since then. Someone who seemed to have such an ability to see Australia whole and dispassionately looked as though he might be headed for a period of disorienting exile (often defined as the quintessential condition for a contemporary poet). It says a lot about Duggan’s poetics that this hasn’t occurred at all and the years since his leaving have been poetic anni mirabiles for him. His reputation is, justifiably, higher than it has ever been and all would expect him to be one of the first chosen in any anthology of post-war Australian poetry. His publishing output seems also to have blossomed: The Collected Blue Hills was published in Australia last year and a small volume of the first of their English equivalents, Allotments, has also been released; Shearsman Press, in England, have brought out a selected poems (Compared to What), a reissue of The Ash Range, the important Crab & Winkle, (reviewed on this site in February, 2010) and now this new collection, The Pursuit of Happiness. Reading Duggan’s weblog, Graveney Marsh, gives you some sense of the reasons for this comparatively smooth adjustment to England, beyond a new, supportive publisher. You get a sense of the vitality and openness of the Post-Poundians in England (Duggan has always been an admirer of Bunting and Roy Fisher); poets searching for a way in which to register the real – the actuality of landscape and cityscape as well as the complex social situations that the English have a reputation for being especially sensitive to. It seems, to an outsider looking at the blog, to be a “scene” full of fertile discussion and possibilities, far richer than one might meet in Australia.

The Pursuit of Happiness has, on its cover, a reproduction of a painting by Stella Bowen called Flight From Reason, showing the statue of a periwigged man of the Enlightenment among houses bombed-out in the Blitz. This, together with the book’s title, suggests that it will join in the critique of the “Age of Reason” and its projects. But, although this may underlie many of Duggan’s attitudes (especially towards all-embracing cultural and intellectual perspectives) you still feel that this is a poetry of detail and the frameworks of placing that detail. Significantly, it begins with a wonderful poem whose main aim seems to be to position the poet himself. “Letter to John Forbes” is Janus-faced in that it is, at its beginning, addressed back to Australia (and backwards in time) and, at its conclusion, forwards to something which will, in at least a small way, celebrate poetry: “the buses all head north / to Clapton Pond, / but I’m southbound / for The Cut, Southwark, // poetry, spotlit / on a tiny stage”. The opening of the poem is all about placement:

lit up in a window
with a burger & glass
of African chenin blanc

I’m reading the later Creeley
on Charing Cross Road

you, ten years back
in limbo (Melbourne)
of which you made the best

I inhabit an England
you mightn’t recognize
though you would have read
the fine print that led here . . .

We might, initially, think that the “fine print” of that last quoted line could refer to a personal knowledge of Duggan and the intimate details of those features of his situation which have meant that he has finished up in a London cafe. It may well do so, but it also refers to the cultural currents that have produced contemporary England. The more you are familiar with Duggan’s poetry which, though it does introduce the poet’s self, tends to do so in a casual way as though he were no more than an (admittedly important) detail among details, the more you are likely to see the second implications as the important ones (although later Creeley is very personal, it still resists making the history and experiences of the “lyric ego” central). At any rate, I prefer to keep both readings present especially, as I’ll explore later, because Duggan is present in The Pursuit of Happiness in ways that are untypical for him.

In a sense “Letter to John Forbes” could be described as an elegy, though it certainly isn’t in the “Lycidas”, “Adonais” mode. A more overt elegy is “Written in a Kentish Pub on Hearing of the Death of Jonathan Williams” but though it is more overtly an elegy it isn’t in any sense formulaic. The title itself (like the book’s title) has a deliberately archaic, almost eighteenth century, quality and the poem reflects how memories of Williams (an American from the south who lived in England) interact with the pub environment and with Duggan’s response to it: “this Thatcherite / province, its // councils / comprised of / Tory / stayputs // the idiots / of small business?”. It’s a poem that wants to know how an elegy for a friend might be made, asking “for J.W. / what?”. And at least part of the answer is to take those elements of Williams’s verbal playfulness that Duggan himself has responded to over the years and highlight them in the poem.

Duggan’s obsession with place isn’t entirely confined, in The Pursuit of Happiness, to the place where much happiness is usually sought – English pubs. “Oxenhope Revisited” – another very English title, this time sounding more Georgian than eighteenth century – is ten short views of Bronte territory; “Exeter Book” – a medieval title this time – is a poem devoted to Exeter and “The London Road” is devoted, I think, to his “home” town of Faversham, in Kent at the end of Watling Street. There are short poems about Granada (“Grenadines” – “Baroque is / ‘shock and awe’ // you see the virtues / of Rococo”), Milan and Cyprus (“Paphos”). What strikes me about these is how flexible Duggan’s sense of observation is. I probably have developed a tendency, over the years, to see it as composed of two elements. The first is a painterly registration of sights and lights – “the sun at an angle / manages the northern window”, “Darkness across the water, before which / lightning, hail against windows”, “after the Great Storm a broken crown / wild anemonies under the lip of the hill”, are examples though dozens of others could have been chosen. This kind of observation seems to be dominant in the two sets of “Angles” included in this book, all thirty-two of which a quick and accurate “views” though they are sometimes sociologically slanted.

The second component is a sensitivity to signs, especially those where, as I have said in other places, aspects of the world being observed are revealed. Thus the letter to John Forbes with which the book begins cannot help recording the shop sign, “BUDWEISER, / ENGLISH BREAKFAST / ‘OPEN’” and there is something satisfying about a dry-cleaning shop (in “Angles 4”) being called VOLTAIRE as there is of CHRIS HOLIDAY RENT A CAR in Paphos . But there are other elements. There is, for example, throughout Duggan’s work, an interest in verbal signs. “Looney Tunes” and “Bin Ends” in The Pursuit of Happiness are made up of these. Sometimes they are just puns – “Old Speckled Hen / (for old speckled men?) – but in a poem like “An Italian Lake” the visual registration of the place which opens it and the tart social comment which derives from this and concludes it, bracket what would have to be called an “aural sign”. It’s odd the way sound appears in what would otherwise be a visual setpiece:

one side shaded
for months; the other
plentiful olives, a house
on a steep hillside.
this is “a speechless place”
says the guide: meaning
neither incomparable
nor unspeakable;
“sightless” perhaps;
a wall of shuttered villas
owned by footballers
and movie stars

This is only one example of the way in which the elements of Duggan’s poetry might be more varied than at first appears. It may be that the real energy in this poetry comes not from observation but from the placing of those in a poem. The tensions that make a Duggan poem “work” as some kind of aesthetic entity (I’m aware that this might beg questions) may well lie not only in the way observations are placed next to each other but also in the way different sorts of observations impinge on each other.

“Oňati Notebook” is the only example in The Pursuit of Happiness of Duggan in his more extended “anthropological poetic” mode – “”Milan” and “Paphos” are more compressed, condensed and allusive examples. And yet, at the same time, it still has its origins in personal diary-keeping and the author is very much a presence. In fact read singly, rather than as part of a set (including, say, “British Columbia Field Notes” from The Passenger), “Oňati Notebook” is full of intimations of a tense, uncomfortable observer. The tour of Oňati in the Spanish Pyrenees (Basque territory) is interrupted by “intermittent heavy rain” and the forced spells of interior living bring out doubts and fears, as in the second poem:

Coats dance on the coat rack
noises off from a billiard room

a rip in the table’s baize,
a warp towards one pocket.

“Poetry
is all you need to do”
says Pam

and, I guess,
“It’s my job”

Euskadian rhythms,
pinxto:

the mysteries
of 2009

Much of this discomfort can be put down to the experience of the signs of an alien culture, but Duggan has always thrived on the notation (and, sometimes, exploration) of such signs. My reading of the poem stresses that it is the unease that the poet has brought with him, rather than anything specific to Basque culture, which produces this tenseness:

. . . . .
My hands, the hands of a very old person,
rest on the arms of an ergonomic chair
(of Bauhaus design: Marcel Breuer?).

All this takes me away from what’s out there:
a black square (homage to Ad Reinhardt)
inflected by pointillisme

The end of “Oňati Notebook” brings a lot of this together. It finishes not with any kind of summation of the culture but with the bewilderment of the poet. And this bewilderment is visual and linguistic (and, thus, aural):

Is it? could it be (the peak)?
Landurratzko Punta,
with Klabeliňaitz (or Marizelaieta)
a little to the left?

the contours are about right

it would have to be
unpronounceable

right on the border of this province/region

Oňatiko

It might be going too far to see “Oňati Notebook” as being the closest Duggan’s poetics can take him to confessional poetry but it is consonant with the elegiac elements of the letter to John Forbes and the elegy for Jonathan Williams. The final sequence of The Pursuit of Happiness, “The Nathan Papers” is also full of an uneasy self. Since this is really a set of diary entries made in the period leading up to leaving Australia for England, this dis-ease might be understandable. On first reading it seems less consequential than the other poems of the book but rereadings alter this judgement. The first page, in particular, is one you would want to see in any selection of Duggan poems because it deals with so many of the issues crucial to his poetry. It begins with a view of the eucalypts – in which the Nathan campus is set – seen after rain. I think this is an iconic image for Australians. Winding paths full of the litter of stripped gumbark among the great trees themselves have always seemed symbolic of Australia, opposed to the carefully defined edges of European privet hedges. Needless to say, Duggan’s view is rather less essentialist than my own and he quickly moves a seemingly natural environment into a created one:

eucalyptus after rain, even this, trunks straight or sinuous, reminds of Sydney Long. art has made this environment, its pathways, marked, curve toward the dormitories
*
red mahogany (not “real” mahogany, just a variety of eucalypt). and in the low-lying areas stringybark and needlebark, the path goes up the ridge. underbrush. a side track revegetating
*
forest on a hill
small brush turkey with undeveloped tail
furiously running
the science of this?               mound building?
*
I never wanted to be a poet. not like some people want to be one now. it just happened. and then it was too late to do otherwise
*
the template is buried (or burned), the elsewhere to this this for which I function (among others) as an as if. “imagine that all these things you’ve been taught are meaningless”. or slide into pure consumerism

And so forth until the final section which is actually set in England. It’s a poem with a lot of important material in it, prompted by the imminent fact of leaving (“We will be leaving all this behind”) that brings a new perspective to landscapes and objects.

This tone of a distinctive, almost confessional air in some of the poems of The Pursuit of Happiness extends into Leaving Here, a beautiful, large format, thirty page, limited edition book produced by Light-trap press with a cover by Angela Gardner. There are three poems: “Thirty Pieces”, “One-Way Ticket” and “The London Road” – the latter also appearing in The Pursuit of Happiness. The outside poems are about locations – Brisbane and Faversham – and the central poem is, like “The Nathan Papers”, about the process of leaving, especially that of going through one’s property to see what should be kept. For a poet that means revisiting a lot of writing and documentation about writing:

what I have written
I have lost

what’s recorded
so much paper and celluloid

the 1974 of desire moves
through its lack of movement

a moment
a memento

amen
a memory stick

a stack
of disks

a pile
of maps . . .

Many of the parts of this poem detail objects and scenes (“circular paths / a wrought-iron gate . . . / distant apartments / pipes, wind-vanes / funnels // walking figures / backwash / along the rocks // old military medals / account books / chess pieces . . .”) in a way which Duggan’s poetry of place has made us familiar with. But, unusually in this poem, they are places and objects left behind and are thus imbued with an emotional burden that the other recorded items do not have.

The way the self appears in the poetic traditions to which Duggan adheres always seems problematic. This is largely because these traditions reject the possibility of the revelation of the self being the central act of poetry. In this they betray their origins both in time and place. But the self is always there, perhaps the more so the more it is hidden or suppressed, and in the case of these two books we feel are engaging with something new in Duggan’s now extensive output: a different, rather uneasy self.

Brook Emery’s previous book, the excellent Uncommon Light, explored with great subtlety and precision questions which are usually considered to be the provenance of philosophers of the mind: What is consciousness? How does it relate to the body? What is memory? And a host of other implicated issues: What is thought and how does it relate to meaning? It considered these by bringing to them a poet’s skill, an ability to speak about difficult-to-describe states in a tactile way (while always being aware of the paradoxes of “poetic” methods such as metaphor). The essential movement of the poetry is to undermine whatever solutions or certainties emerge as a result of meditation and when one thinks of Emery’s poetry and the way it is almost always “grounded” at the sea’s edge on the west coast of Australia, it is hard not to think in terms of the way sand shifts continuously beneath our feet, seeming to be both supporting and unstable. This position seems, at first, quite conventional for our time in that it rejects any transcendental ground of being and is highly sensitive to observed processes and interactions but I think it also rejects the Buddhism that might offer it a comfortable home since the virtues of those beliefs and practices are, after all, tied to a baroque theology involving vast imagined cycles of history and processes of rebirth. “That Beat Against the Cage” is a multipart poem from Uncommon Light that hammers away at such issues and its final stanza concludes on a note of dissatisfaction:

It’s untenable, this drifting that sees the world as drift.
The fantasy should ebb, become the half-recalled
calling of the sea, or else lifetimes will be spent meandering
self-consciously through the matter of the day,
shuttling back and forth as if transience
could be a domicile, fearful that to stray too far,
stay too long, is to change the story
for an understory, the agreed accepted world
for a thesis of perplexity: a conclusion there is 
no evidence to decide, or that the evidence
leads to thoughts the thought cannot sustain.

I’ve read this as a rejection of Buddhism but it might also be simply a rejection of a poetically convenient way of living in a liminal state, exploiting borders and uncertainties and using uncertainty as a stable ground on which to erect poetic structures full of the gestures that arise from certainty. At any rate, the poem seems to be saying that although uncertainty is a state, it isn’t one to feel comfortable about: transience can’t be a domicile.

But the book isn’t entirely about such matters: woven throughout Uncommon Light were a group of poems addressing a question that usually derives from the philosophical vectors of ethics and religion rather than from those of the nature of consciousness: what is the nature of evil and whence does it come? They weren’t the best poems in the book but their attempts to deal with the issue – significantly they were strongest when they dealt with the poet’s inability to deal with the issue! – were a welcome widening of perspective. This direction isn’t continued in Emery’s new book Collusion, but if it seems to abandon the question of evil it does have some poems about personal guilt.

Above all things, one’s first sense of Collusion is how organised a book it is, how little like a conventional collection of poems. If it keeps a narrower focus than Uncommon Light, it also experiments with a variety of tones, even of types of poems, and places them carefully. The first, last and central poems (they are all untitled) are done in epistolary style, addressed to K. At the moment we think of Kafka and start to explore the possibilities involved in writing to such a figure (or perhaps his protagonist), the middle poem carefully corrects our course:

. . . . . 
Dear K, I tire of the apparatus of my brain.
I fear that you (my interlocutor, my will,
my conscience) may also tire. The thoughts I think
have passed their use-by dates, are petals tossed
in Burnt Norton’s dusty wind. We could,
we probably do, lead many lives even as
an inoffensive clerk or as a monstrous insect
squirming on its back, feet and feelers wildly
seeking purchase on the air. We stand accused.
We answer allegations we make against ourselves.
                                        *
Someone finding this will think I’m corresponding
with Franz Kafka (it could be Kierkegaard
or Krazy Kat). I’m not that mad, and besides,
Kafka had too many problems of his own (migraines, boils,
constipation, tuberculosis, a certain paranoia). . . .

Although this invokes Eliot (twice) as well as Kafka, a book containing poems as imaginary letters, or letters to imaginary recipients (“corresponding” is an interesting pun) recalls the work of Bruce Beaver, especially his Letters to Live Poets, and reminds one that that poet, too, was an inhabitant of a Sydney beach surrounded by an environment which both thrust particulars at you while at the same time reminding you of their essential instability all in a sharp, crystal clear light. I can’t remember any earlier poems by Emery which are homages to Beaver but one of the groups of poems which are carefully interspersed throughout Collusion are clearly done in one of Beaver’s styles, probably that of the “Days” sequence of Odes and Days, the third of Beaver’s great central triptych of books. I’ll quote the first of them in full (it’s the fifth poem of Collusion):

It’s almost spring in our neglected hemisphere.
As yet no indication we’ve tilted far enough
to receive the annual, waited-for reward.
The sea and sky volley what there is of dusk
and a peevish wind plays nip and tuck
to irritate the waves. In its own good time
the sun will be here and the sea all aquamarine
as if, overnight, spirit could manifest as light
and just this startling colour. Then morning warmth,
leaves on imported trees, poems (God help us!),
and mothballs for our heavy winter clothes.
And are we lighter too. Do we deserve it?
No. But the punishing and forgiving world
will give it to us anyway and I’ll give thanks
though to whom or what it’s useless to inquire.

This is such a good approximation of a Beaver poem that it could actually be one and if I had had my Beaver collections at hand while writing this I would have nervously checked through them to make sure that it isn’t a quotation, perhaps from a late book like The Long Game. At any rate it catches the Beaver tone perfectly with its sudden unusual perspective (“our neglected hemisphere”), its sense of the world as a place to be lamented and celebrated, its tremendous drive that spills across into (and weirdly animates) a bathetic conclusion. The only thing that doesn’t seem Beaverish is the pun on “lighter” in the twelfth line. There are another six poems in this mode. If I had to guess the impetus behind them I would say that they experiment with inhabiting Beaver’s approach to living in the world. They temporarily eschew the elegant and subtle exploration of mind, thought and the real (and the balanced states of their inter-relationship) which mark most of the Emery poems, for an attitude of sudden brusque involvement resulting in a short, sharp lyric poem but one in which wider perspectives are included, not in a solemn, gestural way (as though a profundity were being offered, gift-wrapped, to the reader) but in a casual, tossed-off one.

There is another group of poems spaced through the book which identify themselves not only in that they are all ten lines long but in that all begin with ellipsis points and an indented first line – a clear indication that these are to be read as snapshots of process, though they might also be rescued fragments of one single long poem. The first two are memorable for their presentation of differing but equally symbolic scenes. In the first the author and (presumably) partner are placed between “the receding arcs of sea and sky” in front and “the green and terrible forest” behind. The two exist, of course, on the liminal sand (described here, with a nice example of that distinctive kind of pun which I think is called paronomasia, as “the intervening sleight of sand”) but they aren’t static: “our feet / lifted and set down, lifted and set down . . .”. In the second poem, examples of hard-nosed industry “three men in hardhats / and orange coveralls” on a bridge (already established in the book’s first poem as being in opposition to the flowing element beneath) are contrasted with a mannequin “forty feet below in a pink gown / and imitation pearls”.

The other poems of Collusion continue to recall Beaver in that they seem to be diary-like meditations, occasioned by living in the world: “All morning it’s been difficult to settle, difficult to harness / energy or purpose for all the things / I have to do.” Their distinctive movement is to be strung between relentless denial and tentative affirmation. A couple of them describe dreams and three, late in the book, deal with memories. One of these latter is prompted by a bicycle ride (and contains the clause “We can’t go back” which is surely an allusion to Beaver’s novel) another by an old photo and the third by recurrent domestic guilts induced by the humming monotony of an aeroplane flight. Compared with the issue of the monstrous evils explored in Uncommon Light, these guilts seem very minor: burying a younger brother up to his neck in the back yard, losing him at the Show, having a near disaster with his children in the surf. As the poem’s last stanza says: “This light-weight guilt is carried on the wind, along with doubt, / longing, nothing more than dust, clouds, rain, squall after squall, / as if wind intended to drag the whole Antarctic north . . .” But despite visits to the worlds of dream and guilt, these poems seem, essentially metaphysical in their obsessions.

One late poem works hard to describe a state of what might be called “significance”, experienced physically:

I almost understand this resonance, this hum
or echo which I can only picture as a frequency,
oscillations expanding and diminishing
from a single source. And the sometime static
which crackles and interrupts, which implies
another source, another thought or possibility. . . .

There is a central statement, “It’s not persistent but too here and now / to be dismissed as fleeting”, and then life returns to the commonplace – a grandchild sleeps in the back of the car and the poet reads Mark Strand. Fittingly, exactly as many stanzas are devoted to the everyday as to the definition of the barely describable state.

And this state, or something like it, is familiar from many of Emery’s poems. In one of them it appears at dawn in hypnagogic and liminal guise and demands consideration despite the cruder intrusion of early-morning sexual desire: “No. Not here. Not now. There’s so much to consider. The sequence of sounds, the unknowable and what it means, the time it takes // to cross an interval between two spots or states . . .” One of the best poems is an extended attempt at description culminating in metaphors deployed as expression of both difference and similarity:

. . . . . 
                                        My mind is silent too
and still. I can’t describe it. Not empty
like some vessel, not grey and wispy
like a fog: something more substantial,
not set and settled but curiously serene,
like breathing starlight . . .

Perhaps, ultimately, a metaphor like this final one is the most powerfully descriptive mode though it is hedged about with problems.

Above all, throughout Emery’s poetry and repeatedly here in Collusion, there is a refusal to locate in this state some kind of transcendental ground. There is also a refusal of the next level of stasis whereby the refusal to accept a transcendental ground becomes a ground in itself. There isn’t any celebration of uncertainty here, more a process of living attuned to what is happening as one’s mind engages the manifold dimensions of reality. As the first poem in the book says:

. . . . .
                                        The glimmerings are flecks of time.
          I can’t decide whether they are truly in the moment or
          moments out of time, essence or deviation from the path.
There’s no conclusion here, no resolution myth. Things rise up
          and fall away as if they never were, rise up again. I like the
          dancing light,
the scattered cloud, the river that lies potentially between its banks,
          the speeding train. I reach for them. They reach for me.

Despite the increasing frequency of narrative poems, the work of Alan Wearne is unmatched. Nobody has even begun to approach the complexity of his portraits of life in post-war Australia and this most recent book adds another group of poems to the overall corpus. If, on the surface, it appears to be something of a miscellany, a closer look shows it to have a lot of internal coherence about it, both thematic and tonal. For one thing many of the poems – and especially the longer sequences – gravitate around school years in Melbourne in the late fifties and sixties. The second section of the book, for example, is the thirty-five page sequence “Operation Hendrikson” which charts the life of one friend met accidentally after ten years: “And then, this warmish winter day in mid July, / here at the corner of Orchard Grove and Canterbury Road / (territory I haven’t really known since school) / Wearney invites me to his thirtieth”. It is intriguing to see the author making a guest appearance in what is really somebody else’s poem (it is a first person narrative) and I think this is the first time that this has happened in Wearne’s extensive body of narrative. All we really learn about him from this brief appearance, by the way, is that he is the author of a school paper felicitously titled “Proper Gander” and has, as one might expect, a watching brief being simultaneously one of the group but also distanced: “In our concert he plays the butler, / who sees it (and I mean it) all”. Hendrickson recounts his history which is also the history of a large number of other friends and aquaintances at school. The result is a set of pretty lurid portraits: Hendrickson himself is in care with a foster family (“that two that five percent in cottages and homes”) and is chiefly remembered for having an underage girlfriend when he was twenty and being charged with “carnival knowledge”. A row of other “characters” is described and what is known of their fates – revealled when Hendrickson runs across them again in the dozen years after school – filled in.

It isn’t a very optimistic canvas: several are dead, a semi-psychotic minister’s son is stacking trolleys, a Vietnam-vet lives in a haze of drugs. But though the result is a set of portraits and thus might look like an attempt to portray one generation in one suburb you feel that Wearne is driven by an interest in character rather than environment. The fundamental question is: What became of these people, how did they evolve within the parameters of the school personalities? rather than: What kind of world are these people part of? In narrative terms everything is dependent on chance, the occasional flashes produced by chance meetings of which the most important is the meeting, in 1978, with the poet who is prepared, finally, to act as a kind of biographer. Wearne’s monologue technique has evolved, over the years since poems like “Out Here” in his second book, into a less doughy, far more flexible instrument, attuned to fragmentariness and accidental illuminations of character. This is evident in The Lovemakers and continued in poems like “Operation Hendrickson”.

The Blackburn South of Wearne’s own childhood and those of so many of his characters forms, as I have said, the focus of this book. It is introduced in a quite surprising way in a rather wonderful first poem which sketches in the generation before, “A Portrait of Three Young High School Teachers”. This – as does the immensely sympathetic portrait of the Liberal Party matriarch, Elise McTaggart in The Nightmarkets – shows Wearne to be alert to older generations (just barely “older” in this case) and particularly to the world the women inhabit:

. . . . . 
And if like the nation this school seems
on better days almost miraculously do-it-yourself,
doubtless that's because who else is there to do it?
(Then, if you wish to appear old-fashioned
it's all like a "courtship", or what you're discovering re marriage.)

Whilst "This", waves forth your supercilious headmaster,
"all this is how we like our things round here . . ."
He reminds some of Raymond Huntley, pauses and nods
as he calls you by the collective "Mesdames"
and laughs, never at himself, only at his quips.

"Indeed," comes Ruth's later response, "how we like our things . . ."
"I'm sure we'll work around it," says Yvonne
. . . . .

The tone here is light and the conclusion is a tentatively optimistic one in which friendship forms the beginning of some sort of bulwark:

friendships can at least delay these dour, sour uncertainties
of annihilation and damnation, can't they?

They better. So, walking to their staffroom
Ruth, a young woman at her most formally informal
tells Frances, "A few folk are coming over
this Saturday. Yvonne and her fiance will be there.
You and your husband are very, very welcome."

This tonally delicate and yet precise poem is followed by “Dysfunction, North Carlton Style or, The Widow of Noosa” an example of Wearne working in his comic/crude mode: “Long-haired, even-featured, an absolute Ali / (is it any wonder she looked like MacGraw?). / On their sundeck each summer how Bob’s loins would rally / at the sight of his missus, spread out in the raw”. It is such a contrast to the first poem that it gets one thinking that perhaps this first of the book’s sections is organised in sonata form which in turn, of course, makes one want to read the entire book’s four parts in terms of the movements of a classical symphony. At any rate the third and fourth poems of the first section – which would be developments of the themes of the opening two poems – are “The God of Nope” and “‘All These Young Australianists . . .’” The former is a Wearne dramatic monologue about the Nugan Hand Bank scandal of the seventies though it is seen through the perspective of a young banker rather on the fringes of the affair (“One part vocation matching nine parts lurk”); the latter is a comic double monologue making fun of young academics at conferences overseas. The pattern isn’t perfect – it seems a long way from the poem about the teachers to the poem about the CIA’s money laundering, though Wearne’s interest in the way characters develop out of their schools, observed by the teachers of the previous generation, brings these two poems closer together than you might have thought initially – but the tone of the second and fourth poems is almost identical. “‘All These Young Australianists . . .’” exploits all the features of serious comic verse and you feel that the figure of Byron isn’t standing too far behind. This is especially true in the sort of poetic one-up-manship involved in the search for the most extreme of complex and bathetic rhymes and it climaxes in one most impressive stanza:

And though I call him Ted the Handful soon he was off delivering a paean
at some fortnight long colloquium on I believe Musil or Mahler;
whilst beside the Baltic or was it the Aegean,
I chanced upon these wonderful Finno-Ugrianists all dissecting the Kalevala!

According to the model of the classical symphony, the third section of the book would be its minuet and trio or its scherzo – at any rate, something lighter in tone. In Prepare the Cabin for Landing we get a return to the idea of basing poems on Australian songs, a process that produced many of the poems in the earlier The Australian Popular Songbook. These are all sonnets (including a Meredithian one) and come in various complex stanza divisions and rhymes. But they also relate to the poems of the first two sections. The first sonnet, for example, “Waiata Poi”, describes two young women, an Australian and a New Zealander who, immediately after the war, head to New Zealand by flying boat (“Let’s scoot across ‘the dutch’”) for a golfing and skiing holiday. It is hard not to think of the three teachers of the book’s first poem here, especially in the celebration of innocent friendship as something that can be counterposed to events at the macro level. The next sonnet is the monologue of a stoned, escort-accompanied businessman and, at least to some extent, is written in the crasser language of “Dysfunction, North Carlton Style . . .”. In other words the tonal juxtapositions here match those that can be found throughout the book, but especially in the first section. The themes match as well: in “Love is in the Air” a young woman, twenty-five years in the future looks at a photograph of her parents’ wedding, looks at our present, in fact, “Filled with our future, Red Bull and Champagne!“, and asks herself about the way in which she developed out of this. And the last of these sonnets, “My Home Among the Gum Trees” takes us back to the post-war period of the first sonnet and deals with the setting up of the Melbourne suburbs after the war from which Wearne (as well as Hendrickson) emerged. And just as the poet himself makes a guest appearance in “Operation Hendrickson” so here he is introduced at the end of the poem:

For later on the bus, seeing a copy of The Age or The Argus
          bordered in black, I'll be asking my mother "Why?"

Friday February 8 1952. "The King has died."

All of which prepares us for the book’s most ambitious and successful achievement, “The Vanity of Australian Wishes”, a thirty page reincarnation of Juvenal’s Tenth Satire with a nod to Johnson’s “The Vanity of Human Wishes”. (In a sense the second-last of the sonnets, “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda”, is also a preparation in that it deals with developments in a second-hand, image-ridden Australian nationalism that is going to figure largely in “The Vanity of Australian Wishes”.) Unlike the poems of Juvenal and Johnson, Wearne’s poem contains a good deal of personal involvement, a personal involvement which, I’ve been arguing, the other poems of the book prepare us for. It begins with two deaths occurring almost simultaneously: that of John Forbes and that of Alphonse Gangitano. The chiming between these deaths is more than one of time, however. Gangitano’s death is described as that of “an over / underachieving Lygon St lulu, / whose killing kick-started a decade plus / of Melbournian mayhem, and ultimately its mini-series” and it’s the second of these two results that engages Wearne’s anger since it shows images spawning a kind of cut-price reality:

                                                  O Gangitano!
So needing us to pretend you were our De Niro:
no mere gangster but the movie star who,
on those occasions when paid to,
pretends he is one (though when one imitates
the imitations just how many deluded layers
is that?).

And this, of course, is John Forbes aesthetic territory, especially in his notion that images only ever drain creative energy rather than fuel it. And the poem introduces Forbes’s description of the new discipline of Cultural Studies – often driven by an infantile desire to walk large on the stage of those images which they are analysing – as “The Kids in Black”.

The evil of images is a long way from the comparatively simple evils of the worlds of Juvenal and Johnson – “those grand distillers of bemused despair”. And Wearne introduces a framework metaphor that makes the distance greater. Whereas Johnson spoke for a god’s-eye view that surveyed mankind “from China to Peru”, Wearne imagines us all sitting on a long-haul commercial flight imagining what other passengers are travelling towards:

          And maybe when an aircraft seems to distil
not merely time and space but where you're heading
and what you're heading to, the novelty, the romance,
the deal, the con, the climax, the start of it,
and end of it . . .

And in this symbolic world, the poet is the plane’s captain who, at the end, will tell the cabin crew to prepare for landing.

Juvenal and Johnson are careful to anchor their critiques in real people or, at least, imagined individuals. Wearne adopts the same approach using, as an epigraph, Pope’s comment that “General satire in times of general vice has no force . . . and ’tis only by hunting one or two from the herd that any exampes can be made”. His individuals are an unlovely and occasionally interrelated group:

Diggah, a multi-substanced sportzstar, V'roomv'room
some ex-ex would be-would be supermodel,
Annabel-Kate this very former CEO turned opinion-piecer,
and Chad: that bankrupted motivational speaker poised
at the edge of the slammer. Plus big-noter, small-timer
. . . 
our very own self-proclaimed King o' th' Rooters
Ssssnowy! 

The case of the first of these is a compressed and, it turns out (given recent revelations of the intimate involvement of the underworld in sport), prophetic study of the interaction of sport and crime:

It's just (big just) the lowlife they're required to befriend:
sniffed, swilled or shot maaaaate maaaaate
isn't it understood, the only guys that can
flog you this are criminals? They never get it.

The way these individuals inhabit their world of day-time and “reality” television forms the bulk of the poem but they are all portraits with very specific interests to the poet. An important early section describes the way Wearne’s own Grade Five and Six teachers – “those edgy-wise suburban prophets Mrs Samson / and Mr Kavanagh” – could have organised their ten-year-olds into a cruelly revealling hierarchy:

first, those kids (who'll always have the jump on anybody)
with Smarties in their play-lunch/
then those who want to be them/
who want to be their friends/
who want to beat them up/
who want to beat up those who want to beat them up/
and then the very worst, the theorists, the ideologues,
those who urge the beatings, all the beatings.

It’s a bleak picture but, as in “Operation Hendricksen” the reader gets a strong impression of Wearne’s interests being in development and the way this is a hierarchy of potentialities that will blossom in its own grotesque way. Everything, in other words, spins out of our socialisation in school.

The poem ends, as do the Juvenal and Johnson, on as positive a note as the poet can manage. For Juvenal it was the limited wish (which we all might share) for “mens sana in corpore sano” – a healthy mind in a healthy body in old age. For Johnson, himself pathologically afraid of the judgement of God, the way for a person to avoid swimming “darkling down the current of his fate” was to “leave to heaven the measure and the choice”. For Wearne there is clearly a comfort in those passengers who are not part of the insubstantial world of image, status and celebrity. They can be seen in the group of

                          smart-suited women and men
heading in easy phalanx towards the departure lounge,
that kind of quietly anonymous professionalism
plenty still retain, set to neither con nor big-note
nor indulge . . .

Analysis, too, has its virtues and to be able to say of one’s unnattractive passengers “We may not be them but they are surely us” is some kind of achievement. And it’s an achievement of poets like Wearne but especially John Forbes for whom this entire poem can be read as a memorial. Analysers and debunkers of those desires which arise out of television images are to be valued: “Ehrt eure deutschen Meister” – “honour your local poets” – is always a recipe for sanity in a mad world.

This book gives us an opportunity for a second look at the challenging and sophisticated work of Graeme Miles, his first book, Phosphorescence, having been published in 2006. In one sense nothing has changed: he remains a powerful lyric poet – his poems almost always have enough self-confidence to stay upright as well as walk with their own gait – the exact nature of whose poetic sensibility is very difficult to grasp. The first poem of that first book, “Nest”, is an introduction to at least part of the Miles method:

The wasps are making a nest on the weight
of the wind-chime, deaf, I think, to its sound,
and undisturbed by its sometimes swaying
for no reason. They build a paper house
as a launching pad for violence in a calm. 

I’m thinking of a final call, when waiting,
feeling like the luggage is packed, the phone
will ring, be answered. The house will be locked
already and it’ll be time to go.

The problem for a reader isn’t so much of guessing the intended (and thus structuring) meaning so much as choosing between all the possible meanings since the poem is dense with allegorical possibilities. Somewhere in here is a kind of Frostian poem about the nests that creatures make, usually in inappropriate places, and how humans have to leave such havens. By a further Frostian shift, the “final call” can be read not as the language of airlines but as the final summons of death. The fact that the wasps build “paper” nests suggests that the whole poem might be read as an allegory involving poetry since a poetic career is, in a sense, a “paper house”. The first stanza is full of noise and movement – both of which the wasps are insensitive to – whereas the second stanza, though it is about a noise (the telephone) and a movement (the leaving) is, as a stanza, full of a kind of calm stasis. And that is reading the poem as though it were anonymous; Miles’s poems tend to be full of houses, places stayed in and places left, not to mention places revisited just as they are full of movement.

When I reviewed Phosphorescence on this site I clung rather desperately to an extended poem, “Circle and Line”, which looked as though it might provide some clues about its author’s views as to what poetry was doing. In retrospect I’m not sure that that was the correct procedure; one ought to able to work out such things by looking carefully at the poems. In Recurrence Miles has gone some way towards mapping at least a part of his poetic by dividing the poems into three sections: “Down”, “Across” and “Up”. It is in the first of these where the significance of the titular direction is least obvious. True, a poem like “Libations”, traces the downward path of water, milk, honey and wine – conscious or unconscious offerings – through the earth to the point where “the only way to go on forever / is to become as small as nothing at all” and “Mineral Veins” explores the way that, in sleep, the self gravitates downwards towards its natural home:

. . . . .
                             Then sleep
is only half-sleep. Better to turn down,
find you can breathe easily under a world’s weight
of earth, and that air was no more your element
than the endless vacancy it fades to.

Gravity, the prevailing god of downwards, is in fact celebrated in a poem of the same name. A large part of the expressive side of Miles’s worldview is made up of mythologies, especially Classical, Norse and Indian, and so it isn’t especially surprising that such a poet should begin with Hesiod’s locating of Heaven, Earth and the Underworld on a vertical axis and then work through the idea of the gravity of an extreme mass as a “Samadhi of space”. The conclusion of the poem also makes a distinctive move, slipping effortlessly from the macro-physical to the inside of the brain: “she’s all herself / fixing and destroying, like the colourless dot / at the beginning of migraine / that grows to swallow the world.”

Down is allegorised out in other ways too. In “The Problem of Other Minds” (the second poem of a fine sequence with the ambiguous title “Causes”) the movement downwards appears as a pit into which our life experiences are thrown. Again the shifts of this poem are distinctive. The initial image is an interesting one and you can imagine most poets being happy to explore it. Each of us carries a kind of black hole which is being continually stocked by our experiences as they sink into the past:

. . . . .
All the toys I could find
didn’t fill it up. My thin books just lined the bottom.
Put in my friends and they were small 
down there, craning their necks up
to see what I’d done to them.

Put in all the houses I’d lived in, so I wouldn’t
have to see them again, then left my grave
with a last house-load of furniture . . .

But this poem goes on to ask about the pits of others, especially those who have disappeared into the author’s own pit. It is, as its title says, really a poem about the inter-relationship of the experience of subjectivities; we are experiences for others as they are for us. Continually meditating on what we are to others – apart from our usual egoistic obsession with what we are to ourselves – shakes our sense of our own identity. After returning to his own pit (he hears it “slurp as something else fell in”) he sees flecks on the surface spelling out a message, “’What’s it like / to be you?’ And when you looked closer, / ‘Is it like anything?’”

The same sequence has a descent poem, “Forgetting to Laugh”, in which “When you’ve drunk the water to remember, / and the water to forget, they slide you down / into a dug-out cave”. What follows is a kind of cross between a Mithraic rebirth initiation, an MRI scan and the act of dreaming, followed by the everyday – but still mysterious – process of waking. What is typical here is the way in which mythical, allegorical and metaphorical meanings, distinctive to Miles’s cast of thought, are held in suspension.

The book’s final section (to proceed out of order) ought to be a simple inversion of the first but turns out to be rather different. Certainly, in Miles’s poetry, the view upwards doesn’t involve any simple-minded transcendence. When the eternal is considered, as in “Two Guesses at Immortality”, there is no superior, heavenly reality. The two possibilities are either a kind of eternal present containing all the past (“Everything is here and everyone. / You’re home once and for all / at the moment when it’s all new again.”) or a kind of Groundhog Day endless recurrence (“the one day repeats itself / with its long night to be slept through”.

In other poems, like “Dioscuri”, the emphasis is on the reciprocity between the upper and lower worlds though “Above, Below” contradicts the old relationship of as above so below to contrast the love of the immortals for mortals (“a gold-haired boy or girl . . . too squeamish to stay / for the squalid fact of your death”) for that of mortals for mortals – in this case parents for children:

But the ones who wait below
will only be as frightening as necessity,
quiet farmers keeping their kids
from the dangerous machines and the gun.

One of the metaphoric associations of downwards in the earlier poems is the idea of descent through the family line and so it is, in a kind of way, logical that a poem about the poet’s parents and grandparent should be associated with a look upwards. “Verandah” is a really fine poem, familiar from its appearance in John Leonard’s Young Poets: An Australian Anthology, and though verandahs – the quintessential Australian liminal space – might suggest movement across, there is a certain rightness in this poem’s appearing in the final, Up section. It is also, of course, an example of a modern version of a classical invocation, summoning mother and father out of the past into the present.

Ultimately the vision affirmed is a humanist one and two poems, “Shivery to Think of the Long Spaces” and “Ascesis” make this fairly clear. The former begins as a view upwards to the stars, recalling Pascal’s or perhaps Slessor’s poem ‘s fear of the spaces between the stars, spaces which have become even more mindboggling vast since the twentieth century’s development of cosmological measurement. The result of this perspective is described as “shivery while it’s measured / by this piece of skin” but the poem goes on to imagine a perspective beyond humanism where there is “object with no subject” where “the suns flame silently” in their death throes “and don’t return from their last / going under, don’t care to”.

The book’s final poem, “Ascesis”, seems to have an unequivocally humanist perspective as it mocks the results of labouring to be released upwards into the cosmos, free of the earthbinding sins of the body:

They let go,
lift clear of weather,
soil’s vapours
that tint the mind like plot.
. . . . .
             Free of conversation,
the long dispute of history, language
is crisp as salt, and with no air
to talk through their words are flawless,
discrete and unanswerable.

Both of these poems casually mention orbits and straight lines and one can’t help feeling that this interest derives from “Circle and Line” in Phosphorescence. Miles’s poetic world, as readers who have got this far will register, is a complex one.

A reader who expected the Up poems to be about transcendence might well come to the book’s middle section expecting poems of narrative and Ovidian transformation and, it is true, there is a lot of that to be found there. It begins with “Photis”, a suite of poems (also familiar from Leonard’s anthology) that form a narrative about an artist inclined to bring out animal shapes in the bodies of those who sit for portraits. A lover whose self-image is that of a hawk finds through the process of art that his totemic animal is, instead, the ass (for those of us who missed it, the book’s blurb points out an allusion here to Apuleius). When a baby is born – going through its own metamorphoses in the womb and then outside – it becomes an anthology of animals:

Your soft skin is full of animals. There are
fishes in the movement of your sucking cheeks, reptiles
in the glaze of your eyes overtired, the stillness of a kangaroo
when you watch light slide
over the ceiling . . . . .

And the artist’s work undergoes an equally profound metamorphosis, focussing on the world her child might live in rather than the animals under its skin: “she paints the night as a newsreel of frightening things, / waters above and below”.

“Ariadne on Naxos”, based on the version of the story found in Plutarch’s life of Theseus, focusses on the way an individual can transform into a complicated set of rituals; “Aggregore” revisits the idea of a child’s evolution in the womb; “At the End of the Seventies – Streets in Marmion” reproduces the way in which a beachscape is transformed when it is seen by moonlight; “Chennai” looks at the way individuals (or families) are always the centre of their own universe and carry their own gods and experiences with them in environments that are utterly different and a related poem, “Diminuendo”, imagines, from the distant location of India, all of the houses previously lived in since birth as a concertina opened out into one of those medieval maps.

This threefold division of the book is useful, but I cannot help feeling that it isn’t much more than a guide, uncovering only a small portion of what is in these poems and what animates them and gives them their integrity. If I had to focus on a single poem as an entrance into the poems of this book I would choose one from the first section, “Purusha”, which links the Norse proto-god Ymir with a similar figure from Indian mythology:

Ymir, who is Purusha, the Person, is sacrificed
but goes on. Its skin is cinematic, the light
breaks through it. Endless eyes watch it
sliding by. Its body is standing waves
frozen, and it crinkles with crystals of ice,
empties into the roaring absorption, the nuclear
introspection of suns. Its sound is the crowd
roaring in Geiger-counters, it goes on forever
and mostly is invisible.
                                         Moves down
and down is the static blur of sandgrains, the place
that barters crops for corpses.
                                                    Moves across
inventing plot, walks on or runs
forever in Zeno’s physics.
                                              Moves up
spies out the thinning, the spinning direction
of vertigo.
                  It’s promiscuous and virginal, celibate
and incestuous. It’s family at war with itself.
When a standing ape looks up it sees
air catch fire, water
thicken with mud, harden to land.
Objects are smashed in the slow riot
and the prickling of skin when reading a poem
is each pore expecting a bruise
to cover it. And the poems fit together
like a dry-stone wall, jagged edge
to edge, just making do.

Perhaps this should be thought of not as poem-as-key but as poem-as-digest (or, anatomy) since one can hear nearly all of the poems in Recurrence in this single work. The central section is a compressed explanation of the three directions and the over-riding image of the fate of Ymir (whose blood becomes the sea, whose skull becomes the sky and whose bones and teeth become rocks) as a sacrifice whose body goes on changing and expressing itself in the activities of the humans who live on and within him echoes throughout the book, down even to the poem about the child’s cutting his first teeth. Even the interest in light in the second and third lines recalls a number of poems.

Recurrence certainly complicates the world of Phosphorescence (itself complicated enough) and it would take a review longer than this to go back to that first book and reread it in the light of this second one. Eventually it will have to be done but I will leave that for the appearance of Miles’s third book – something that admirers like myself will hope happens quickly.

One’s first impression of this first book is that it is devoted to (in both senses of the phrase) its poet’s home suburb, Macquarie Fields, situated to the west of the Holsworthy Army Barracks in Sydney’s south-west. It begins with a diptych, a portrait of this suburb in spring and in autumn: the former is rhapsodic (“Give me corrugated iron & grinning billboards . . .”) but the latter darker as the stain of the 2005 Cronulla riots spreads into neighbouring suburbs. Significantly Brown concludes by asking about his own position as suburb-dweller, observer and poet, and he decides that he is “somewhere / in between” the “hooded kids” who throw rocks and the “members of the gated community . . . on the other side of the tracks” – the pun in this cliche is significant. “Twenty Sestets” is an attempted portrait of the place largely constructed out of fragmented character studies. Although many of these are rather unsuccessful – you feel that people are not the items that Brown’s poetry is most comfortable with – those which yield to an inbuilt pressure toward abstraction do succeed in making a kind of composite picture. Number 5, for example:

The lawnmowers are calling from suburb to suburb
and fences click in the heat, 
                                                                     as though the sun
were a meter, slowly ticking
                                                   through the earth's final minutes.

He stops and considers all this,
                                                          the grass-stained afternoon,
the air thick as engine oil,

a complaint of dirtbikes skidding across the reserve.

Though it is not as good a poem as its avatar, Dawe’s “Homo Suburbiensis”, you do get the sense that the distinctive life of the suburb, if entered into fully, can generate a distinctive kind of poem, attuned to unusual but telling elements. “Petrol Stations, or Nine Vouchers Without the Optimism” is another composite portrait, this time of an iconic suburban feature, and “Poem for a Film” is a five-part meditation on aspects of life in “this weatherboard valley / . . . six degrees from the // city.” I like the last of these which, set at noon when “the eucalypts / point their leaves toward hard ground”, deals with stasis and change:

                                            . . . it's like a gate

that's been welded shut because you know
we're not in Vaucluse or near some beach

where they film iconic Australian TV. You
know that within these cul-de-sacs you

have to earn any hint of breath or change. You
have to pay with sweat, with grease on

a two-stroke, with teeth set like wire cutters,
ready to meet the fenced-edge of the landscape. 

It doesn’t take any great critical insight to register this book’s desire to celebrate and explore one particular suburb, but I can’t stop being interested in Brown’s obsession with the railway that connects Macquarie Fields to central Sydney (via, amongst other stops, Sydenham, Revesby, Glenfield) – I don’t know if it is called the “City Limited” but if it isn’t, it should be. It seems, at the poetic level, a profounder and more valuable image. A sceptical reader might think that the rhythmic rocking of the train on its daily journey to the city and back is the place where the author’s meditating and writing gets done and thus this writing is predisposed to celebrate the train, but I think the importance of the train is more than this. It is valuable partly because it enables contrast (still the best rhetorical trope for defining something) but mostly because of its possibilities as a metaphor for life as a lived process (rather than where it is lived).

The process of contrast can be seen in “darling.city.friday.harbour” where the poet finds himself momentarily “citied” in an environment where the artificial replaces the natural (“cast brolgas gasp in their metallic / permanence”) in what ultimately becomes a perpetual and perpetualising loop symbolised in the city’s roadways. The central question, “What region is this?” is posed, punningly, in a DVD store where “recreations of immense television events / appear on shelves”. The secret of this world, whose mercantile imperatives hang over innocent suburbs like Macquarie Fields, is that “dumb permutations / engineer most details, like pokies / & genetics & search engines & / personalised plates on a fleet of / nissan skylines.” A later poem, “Evensong”, is essentially about this comparison, celebrating being “back in the suburbs at dusk”:

. . . . . 
Don't you know that winter means
passing houses during the family meal,
each hallway bathed in a television's blue?
Don't you know that we must live in the shadows
of great financial institutions? . . .

But the suburbs, with their expanses of low-level housing don’t obscure the night and the glories of the universe:

. . .  But this pinstriped night
where stars bleed into city lights,
where planes could be writing
the evening sky somehow,
here each constellation scaffolds the canopy,
allowing the universe to find its breath
in imperious and strange relations.

This is a loaded and slightly gestural comparison, placing city and suburb alongside each other, but in Brown’s poems there is more likely to be a focus on the act of transitioning from one to another: that is, the act of travelling by train with emphasis on departures and arrivals. I have a soft spot, among these train poems, for “Lullaby” though I would have to recognise that it is a poem that doesn’t exploit Brown’s distinctive perspective. In fact, in a way, it is yet another rewriting of Slessor’s “The Night-Ride”, focussing on contrasting the inner world of the train with the outer world of the dark, rather than concentrating on the termini. I think it is the only one of the poems to visualise the train in any way – here it is seen as “a string of lit / beads”. It emphasises the living human beings inside the train – the poet’s “companions” in the journey of life – all of whom are surrounded by a sinister cold darkness that has no interest in the human:

 . . . . .
          A palm is placed upon the 
glass, and the window speaks its warning.
There is a chill that threatens to pour into
all of life: your limbs, this carriage, the
tracks of steel that disappear behind us.
All of us know the evening is vast.
It stretches into the distance, claiming every
space that exists outside whispered words.
And now I must sink lower in my seat, and 
draw the sleeping world about my ears.

The train as an image of our human surroundings appears in the second of the “Twenty Sestets” in which a woman who “loves the commute” watches, together with her fellow-travellers, a boy spinning a plastic biro in his fingers. “And the universe is here”, the poem says as though “Lullaby”‘s sinister exterior had appeared inside. But, at least as I read it, it is the human universe, the counterpart or rival to the cosmos, which is present in the carriage and it is this which sustains her: “She tries to remain still, to focus, / but it won’t stop rocking, / the carriage, this world.”

Train journeys have a role to play in the larger, more abstracted sense of what this poetry is trying to do. Trains, after all, move horizontally and their imagery is that of a single plane. But this poetry is also interested in vertical perspectives: it is notable how often the suburbs are celebrated in terms of the sky above them whereas the buildings of the city seem to be engaged in an attempt to, if not blot out the sky, then at least to continuously frame it so that it appears within controlled and human dimensions. Sydney is not the only city in this book; there are a number of poems written about Paris, for example, and their tendency is to look upwards: “Numbering the Days” – a sequence of seven sestets counting down until returning home – speaks, for example, of lying on the grass in Place des Vosges, “where the rooftops frame / an empty blue canvas”. But, in abstract terms, the vertical is conventionally the axis from which intimations of the divine arrive, and this is an issue that I am not entirely confident about in Limited Cities: is there a transcendental perspective? how does it relate to the human and does it come from a God outside or from human beings living within their social context – huddled together on the brightly lit train of life, living in susburbs where the cosmos is more than a patch of sky framed by buildings? Answering this question is not made any easier when a poem with the important title of “Epiphany” – it is the sort of title which makes one seek it out immediately – turns out to be the slipperiest of all the poems and, though I’ve read it many times, I wouldn’t feel at all confident about making any sort of paraphrase.

More helpful might be the two sequences either side of a poem I have mentioned already, “Evensong”. They are called “Advent Poems” and “Lent Poems” respectively and have a Parisian setting. The latter group, in keeping with its title, seems inclined to focus of the mercantile and cultural aspects of the city but one turns to the former group to see if they contain any conception of a Christian transcendence and any conception of how this might be made manifest in the world. The results are suggestive even if they aren’t unequivocal – at least to my blunt reading abilities. Certainly there are examples of an almost continual disruption of surfaces, of contradictions one must “live within”: in an outer suburb “a burnt out apartment / becomes a gash of black against / a massive salvific block and as / you walk it flares again in mira- / culous afternoon light”, elsewhere a statue of the virgin “sits beneath a / spinning disco ball”. But surface contradictions are not the same as intimations of the divine or, even, intimations of the infernal: Antonioni’s Blowup treated the London of the 60s in exactly the same way and I don’t think it has any pretensions to a perspective involving transcendence. Perhaps the most suggestive of the sequence is the third in which one of two kids who are watching Piaf and Charles Dumont singing on TV “starts to echo / mon Dieu in a high-pitched / voice” and the poem ends with a reference to “all those in icy bus / shelters who stare into the dis- / tance awaiting an appearance”.

Despite my carping sense that something crucial might be being fudged or gestured towards or not developed fully here, there is a lot to admire in Limited Cities. I’m always attracted to intelligent rhapsodic celebration and the poems which are devoted to Macquarie Fields can have this quality. At the same time it would be unfair to see the book as in some way a study of the suburb and its inhabitants: that would make it look gestural in comparison to the poetry of Dawe and Wearne. I think the best way to read it is to see it as using the suburb-city axis as a kind of lyric focus or, at least, a framework for a lyric poetry. What happens, when you do that, is that you realise that there is something quite distinctive here and that Limited Cities announces a new, accomplished and confident voice.

Most double-authored books of poetry have a contingent feel about them: two manuscripts, when edited down, are not long enough for a single volume and get yoked together, not necessarily by violence but not necessarily profitably either. Radar is distinguished by the fact that, no matter what the processes were which have produced this final result, there are interesting connections and oppositions between the two poets’ work and each makes a rather interesting background to the other. Kevin Brophy has a substantial publishing record – about which I have made comments in an earlier review – whereas Radar is Nathan Curnow’s third book if we include the thirty-two page No Other Life But This in Five Islands Press’s New Poets Series.

Curnow, whose fifty page collection appears first despite the order of the names on cover and title page, is probably best known for his The Ghost Poetry Project. In that book he writes seven or eight poems about the experience of staying overnight in each of ten of Australia’s most haunted locations: these include predictable places like Norfolk Island and Port Arthur but also a Cadillac hearse brought to retirement in Sydney from Pennsylvania and, perhaps more surprisingly, the Fremantle Arts Centre (which turns out to be a convict-built ex-lunatic asylum). On the surface Curnow’s first two books seem at odds. The title of the first, alone, suggests a perspective commitedly materialist with precious little tolerance of either religious views or the more downmarket otherworldly which appears in UFO sightings and experiences of the supernatural. And yet the obsession that seems to drive his verse revolves exactly around this issue of the status of the otherworlds that many people sense impinge on our more mundane experience of life. And this is approached with a pleasant openness that carefully avoids being naive or gullible on the one hand and closed-minded on the other: a sort of poetic equivalent of Louis Theroux.

The title of the first book, No Other Life But This, is so pointed that one goes to the title poem expecting a celebration of family life, perhaps – something that Curnow does well – or a polemic against various beliefs. The actual poem is rather a surprise:

The bird comes to ground at twilight,
thirsty for a drink. She hops across the grass,
staccato fashion, hops, stops, watches:
movement as a flash of fear. Caution
has a rhythm, she plays it precisely,
every two-legged jump potential take-off.
Eyes sharp, head tilting, her tiny, peanut brain
drawing angles into comprehension.

The children's containers are water collectors
that have littered the back lawn for days.
She springs to a lip, quizzes the threat,
surprises come with a puff of feathers.
Bowing to drink she considers again,
every twitch revealing her secret,
the hunch that fits inside her head:
there is no other life but this.

This takes a while to assimilate. On the one hand it could be an assertion that life is driven by instincts (especially fear-driven ones) rather than beliefs. It could be a celebration of the extraordinary grace of the natural world: a later poem, observing a baby daughter’s sliding off into sleep says, “Grace is found in such simple mechanics; / the way wings work a bird without it knowing”. But it might also be saying that there is “no other life” apart from the kind of open-minded attention to detail out of which the poem is constructed. However we read it, though, there is no lack of engagement with the problems of beliefs in the poems of this first book. The very first poem situates the author in conversation with a woman who has a child with a serious heart defect. The discussion revolves around “portals” – presumably a way in which more lurid notions of the supernatural are making their way into traditional Christian beliefs – and this, to any poet or reader of poetry, chimes with her son’s problem. In the second poem, a little daughter, wrapping herself in a bathtowel so that she seems to have angel’s wings, talks to her father about death:

. . . . . 
I tell her that I love her but she's heard it before.
She wants to know where we go after this.
She believes in Santa. I can't let her trust Jesus.
Yes, your heart stops working and your lungs.
I want to tell her that life gets busier
which means there is less time to worry. . . . . .

These two poems demonstrate that Curnow has discovered, early on, that the domestic is one of the best settings for the sorts of issues he wants to deal with, and he does write brilliantly about family life.

But the material of the visits to haunted sites in The Ghost Poetry Project is made from the uncanny. For this to work at all the poet has to have some degree of receptivity to the idea of haunting even though the the sum total of unnatural experiences attributed (by the eyes and ears of faith) amount to not much more than strange tappings and reported ghostly figures. (The cynic in me can’t help but feel that if the world of the “beyond” wants to make an impact that would be taken seriously it needs to do something radical at these sites – scare some people to death as in Ring, for example – just as those claiming to talk to God or to be incarnations of past lives need to tell us something about the cosmos or the past that we don’t already know.) The true impulse behind the book probably lies in the biographical note which says: “As a child Nathan Curnow suffered ‘night paralysis’ He could barely breathe due to an overwhelming sense of terror”. The “project”, lurid but trivial at first sight, is really an attempt to induce and thus cure (as an adult) the terrors of childhood. This is made clear in a group of poems, distributed among the visits, which deal with the mythical bunyip. Here his own childhood fears and those of one of his daughters are allayed by the mantra that “bunyips only eat avocadoes”. The final section of the introductory poem makes the aim of the project clear:

Because the night is an eight-ball eye of a cow,
dark as the sludge inside your bones, fear locking
your delicate limbs deep beneath a tent of blankets.
I am returning as if I conquered the Butcher, as if
he lost his grip at last, descending with language,
my only defence, the one shot to defuse myself.

Because the nights are long, I will find new words
to pluck the eyeball out, testing them like avocadoes,
light or a picture card of Jesus. Let us reach together,
touch the monster's face, decipher the walls of the cave.
I will be calling your name. Call back to me.
There is always space for courage.

Parenthood has many responsibilities but re-inducing and facing one’s own childhood terrors so that you can help a child overcome hers is an unusual and unusually difficult one. In the night-time experiences of the “haunted” places little important occurs beyond the experience of actually doing it and the poems make clear that in Curnow’s view hauntings begin inside our own brains and are then – in a phrase that makes one think again about the book’s apparently innocent title – projected into the outer world. The visit to Tasmania’s convict-built Richmond Bridge (where the ghosts of a vicious overseer, his dog, and an old man with a walking stick and straw boater, occasionally pushing a wheelbarrow, occasionally headless, have been seen) produces a moment of generalised scepticism in the poem “Introduced Species”:

Always these ghost stories of introduced species
a phantom dog, black cat, a spooky goat

Instead there should be tales of evil brush-turkeys
of posties swooped by ghoulish magpies

Sightings reflect the culture of the witness -
ghosts are no longer wearing chains

Mary only appears in Catholic countries . . . . .

At any rate, all this makes a kind of necessary introduction to Curnow’s poems in Radar. Here the aim, at least of the first poems, is to revisit not night-time childhood terrors but the experience of childhood itself. It takes place in Pinnaroo, a small town in South Australia near the Victorian border, and many of the poems focus on the parents – the father a minister in what seems like a pentecostal sect. The very first poem, “The Curtain”, has, as an epigraph, the address of the church in Pinnaroo on which the poem is based as an inviting Google Earth reference: I recommend following it. The poem itself justifies its pre-eminent position by being a complex meditation about the way in which we emerge from childhood into public life and the way in which the history of places can induce responses in us. In other words, I read this poem as a transition between the world of The Ghost Poetry Project - the internal horrors which make us receptive to suspicions of new, external horrors – and the world of being a public, performing writer who both exploits and exorcises these demons. At the conclusion of the poem, the curtain that the child is wrapped in (“I looked like a crimson bell, or a strange reminder / of my own breech birth . . .”) opens out:

I belonged to the boards, to the fabric that slipped
away from me once again, turning until it spread itself wide,
introducing me to the world. Who would be there?
What to say? A yearning I understood - the magic burn
of anticipation bound in faith, belief and trust - to convert
an audience, to be converted by the strength of a fallible dream,
hoping that what will be revealed is worthy
of the curtain opening.

Perhaps the perspective in these poems is that of revisiting the experience of one’s parents – something that is always prompted by the arrival of our own children. In “The Curtain”, Curnow discovers connections with his father the minister in his own need to perform and convert an audience. There is a fine poem, “Those Adamant Shapes”, that recognises the passed-on genetic material between the generations calling it, memorably, “the deep cargo that refuses to come unstuck”. And it seems fitting that the structure of Curnow’s contribution to Radar should be a movement from his parents to his children. There is an especially wonderful description of the moment when one of his daughters has an injection: “you turn away from your arm, the needle / coming, your shoulder bared for // the pinch, the plunge, a foreign wave tightens / the little face you held so bravely . . .” All parents will remember things like that and be glad they are so accurately and beautifully expressed.

If Nathan Curnow’s poems are committed to understanding the world we all know and inhabit – and thus have a sturdy, almost conventional poetic quality, deploying metaphors for their illuminative value, for example – Kevin Brophy’s contribution is a set of seventy prose poems. The prose poem is a much loved form in which the oppressive quality of the “real” can be left behind in favour of imaginative possibilities. It is the home of otherworlds. In Brophy’s poems we meet a family in which the busy father hires a replacement for himself and the replacement energises the wife and constructively puzzles the son; a man, newly dead, who remains suspicious that the odd place in which he finds himself is not really paradise; an Australian suburb in which the street-planting of scrubby natives eventually takes over, and re-australianises, houses and inhabitants; a man who decides to live a “less personal” more antlike life; a hole in the ground near the Fawkner Cemetery which grows by absorbing objects of guilt and so on. We also meet Robert O’Hara Burke whose attitude to life – as well as the events of that life – is so surreal that it only needs to be described objectively to seem like one of these otherworlds.

Why do this and run the risk of confirming ordinary innocent Australians in their suspicion that serious literature doesn’t engage with the pressing questions (about love-affairs, football teams or cars) that oppress them? The answer is usually that these sorts of meditations reveal the shape of the writer’s psyche rather as dreams might to those skilled enough to read them. It is as if, to borrow from Eliot’s Prufrock, “a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen”. Some of Brophy’s narrative prose poems, “The Secret Theatre of Home”, for example, do seem to have their origins in dreams but more derive from exploring metaphors. Take “On Reading Virginia Woolf’s Sentence, ‘Undoubtedly there is a dullness in great books’”, for example:

If it is true that dullness is what distinguishes lasting literature from the “bleak shorthand” of contemporary writing, then dullness is the freight we readers also bring to books, mental half-realms where every stone has been turned, and every stone has been beaten into agreement that it is a stone, and every stone has vowed silence, every stone has agreed roundness or sharpness will be its predictable gift. Handle this stone, then, every day, and offer its dullness to the sky, sense its vigilance. This is the only way.

Here the poem deals with a fossilised metaphor – “no stone unturned” – which introduces the idea that the creativity of metaphor is very close to the dullness of cliché. The poem which follows begins with a cliché, “taking a pig to market”, and goes on to use the lively and observant pig on its unknowing way to slaughter as a metaphor for our own voyage through life. “Anxiety” plays with the mysterious metaphor of “falling” asleep whereby in dreams the sleeper “actually” falls into water and “Against Falling” (were these originally conceived as an alphabetically organised group?) has the writer scaling an almost impossible mountain called syntax. A really satisfying poem follows a woman returning home with a plastic canister containing her mother’s ashes. Her mother was a master (or mistress – it depends on how alive the metaphor is) of the cliché:

. . . . . Her mother’s birthmark on her left shoulder, the small tattoo of a lily on her ankle, and those retorts of hers, those reminders that education did not come her way, that money never drops from the sky, that men are to be managed not trusted, that women can never be friends, that televisions, like all other inventions, will one day be quaint forgotten things, these are all there in the canister, locked in, burned into ash so that not one word will ever escape again. She is sure her tired mother would be pleased to be silenced. Words, she used to say, are never enough.

Once we accept that this eloquent style of meditation and narrative, surreal in the sense of not being limited by the ordinary, everyday, “real” is a projection of the poet’s psyche we are left with the issue of how this psyche is structured. Here it’s a matter of choosing your ideology. We could emphasise dreams, language, metaphor, creativity or culture and then relate the others to the dominant one. I’m not an expert on this issue, but I recognise that in last century’s great students of the structure of the mind – Freud, Jung, Lacan et al – there is an overwhelming preoccupation with this. I’m not sure what Brophy feels are more essential elements than others but if I had to guess I would expect them to be the language features.

Which brings me to the book’s structure. As I said in the introduction, what makes Radar so interesting is its conjunction of the two kinds of poetry. True, they are not two kinds of poem by a single poet: but then that is not uncommon and always seems rather stagey. At the same time if they were “unconnected” poets they would just be representatives of two different approaches to dealing with the world in poetry. There is something finely tuned and right about the fact that the two poets have a mentor/student relationship as well as a friendship one. Radar’s unusually valuable blurb expresses the book’s structure and achievement perfectly: Curnow says to Brophy. “My poems are (seemingly) conscious, direct confessions and yours are unconscious waking dreams” and Brophy replies, “This world always senses another world. Maybe your poems rescue mine while mine throw a life line to yours”. “Unconscious waking dreams” is a fine description of the seventy prose poems though it opts for seeing the dream as the dominant feature in the structure of the poet’s creativity. I would have felt it truer to say that Brophy’s poems were inclined to live in the otherworld of language and its strange, expressive offshoot, metaphor.

Although it is always an unhappy task to be looking at a posthumous book, it is also a pleasure, after focussing on books of poetry for the first six years of these reviews, to be able to review a book of criticism. In point of fact the proportions are about right: somewhere between fifty and seventy-five books of poetry are published annually in Australia but one could probably count the books of poetry criticism in the last six years on one hand. In a healthy literary culture, of course, poetry is always recognised as far more important than the criticism which accompanies it but you don’t want too great an imbalance lest critical instincts atrophy irrevocably. The fact that this is, in a sense, a memorial volume is a painful reminder that one of the always small company of good critics has left us and a source of good critical judgement has disappeared. But one still wants to congratulate the John Leonard Press for publishing a book which will have, at best, a small readership and, through the quality of their design and materials, making such a fine job of it. It’s also a book that looks as though it might have some kind of extended physical life: my copy of Steele’s earlier critical book, Expatriates, though, admittedly, getting on for thirty years old, has pages that look like frames from early acetate silent films. Braiding the Voices is a physical pleasure, as well as an intellectual pleasure, to read and if readers of these reviews were to buy, annually, one of the books reviewed, I would probably hope that it would be this one.

Peter Steele’s critical instincts are finely honed and I have always found that reading him is an introduction to admirable and often surprising insights. So I want to celebrate his work as that of an elder statesman of criticism. If Australian poetry critics often seem to me like a small, hungry, cold band of outcasts huddling around a fitful campfire in the middle of a great and partially derelict cathedral, then Steele would, in recent years, have been voted first choice when it came to portioning out the scraps of food. But being a respected elder statesman doesn’t mean that your method and interests are in any way representative. Those of you who follow up Steele’s book after reading this review won’t find many similarities in our methods though that can always be interpreted as evidence of a desirable polyvocality in the way Australian critics look at Australia’s poetry.

And that reveals one of the distinctive features of Braiding the Voices almost immediately: it doesn’t limit itself to discussing Australian poets. There are important essays on Peter Porter (whose poetry is the subject of a small book by Steele in the Oxford Authors series), Les Murray and Vincent Buckley but also on the poetry of Anthony Hecht and Seamus Heaney (Steele favourites). Perhaps the Australian poet most likely to appear is Steele himself but this is a result not of self-centredness or self-promotion but rather, as I’ll explore later, of the very genre of the book. At any rate, Steele in his criticism was no critical nationalist and it is interesting to look at the ambit of his interests. The first surprise is the extent to which he focusses on poets who are of his generation, or close to it: he is most comfortable with the poems of people like Heaney, Porter, Buckley and Hecht. Expatriates was focussed around individual poems by Hecht, Merwin, Wilbur and others born in the twenties as well as poets like Bishop and Moore from slightly earlier. I don’t think I have read anything by him which is about poets markedly younger than he is. These poets of his generation form a kind of community – an essential word in the Steele ethos – that he is very good at exploring. When his critical mind goes back in time, uncovering or claiming traditions, it tends to go on recognisable stepping stones: Hopkins, Smart, Swift, Herbert, Donne and Milton all figure regularly. In terms of what is called “secondary material”, Steele is very widely read and one is as likely to find references to contemporary social analysis as to the church fathers. Overall one gets the impression of a man at home in an immensely rich European tradition with those descended from the Greek Orthodox imperium, Russia and Greece, making occasional appearances. There is an essay on Dante in Braiding the Voices but, usually, Steele confines himself to English language literature.

The role of art is important in both his poetry and criticism. In one sense, it provides something that I want to argue might be lacking in Steele’s approach: an external yardstick. Two of the essays in Braiding the Voices are about art and poetry and the value of this exploration, you feel, is that the visual arts represent an otherness as against the verbal ones: they serve as a way of measuring the generalisations we make about poetry as well as revealing surprising new aspects of it. This seems to me an essential balance in criticism: it has to bring the outside to bear as well as evolving a vision which comes, internally, from an empathic response to the works being considered. On the other hand, it could be argued that the visual art which fascinates Steele is, by and large, an expression of European culture, with an emphasis on late medieval religious experience, and thus stands in for an area where the literary arts are weak. All of this is by way of observation rather than objection; the same could be said of the critical writing of Auden, a better critic than either Steele or myself. But I can’t help but feel – and it may be a personal rather than a true epistemological objection – that the very best criticism would also be familiar (and intimate) with a completely different culture, literature and language – Mandarin, say, or Hindi, or even Inuit – in order to see one’s own tradition from the outside. How else will we see it clearly? In other words it is a moot, and important, point whether Steele’s engagement with European culture is minutely and thus preciously informed and or just cosily intimate.

The feeling that Steele is happiest when he is most “at home” emphasises how communal his readings are. One of the features of this is a kind of intimacy and the virtues of intimacy – as well as its problems – are present in the style and structure of these essays, too. The tone, for example, is always intimate, often even avuncular but it doesn’t invite disagreement. In fact a reader is inclined to feel that disagreement would be, in some way, rudely disruptive. I’m not suggesting that Steele’s prose contains a suasive or controlling element, even in disguise, and his discussion of Murray’s poetry shows how well he understands that, under the relaxed intimacy of a poem like “The Quality of Sprawl”, there is a very unrelaxed desire to command both poem and reader. It is more that you get the sense that in his work, the placing of observations against their very opposite (either in debate with others or in internal debate with oneself) in order to determine which is more accurate is not the essential method of moving forward. Steele’s critical mind (as opposed to his poetic one) seems to work by generalisation, association and the exploration of subtle differences. The essential subject, I always feel, is not a single work, a single writer’s works, a generation’s poems, or a national or linguistic tradition, but poetry itself, dignified almost to the extent of being capitalised.

Structurally, Steele’s essays are of a piece with his style. His most common method is to explore a particular facet of this subject – Poetry – by looking at a number of poems (usually three or four) that illuminate this in some way. One of the finest essays in Braiding the Voices is “Still Moving: Variations on a Theme”, and it’s a good example of his method. It begins by looking at the issue of whether poetry is more concerned with the particular than with the general and then modulates (through speaking of “primordial questions”) to the contrast between “what might be called the Still One and the Moving Many”. The essay goes on to look at some poems – by P.J. Kavanagh, Deborah Randall (in her mid-forties an exception to my comment that Steele doesn’t deal with poets younger than himself) and Peter Porter – not as overt discussions of the issue but as sites where the issue is given “imaginative play”. The reading of Kavanagh’s “Autumn” (which is based on the situation of “Gawain and the Green Knight” but with a strong element of Browning’s “Childe Roland”) is a brilliant analysis of that poem’s ”dramatic suspension”s and describes Kavanagh as a poet “of moments and situations waiting to discharge their often striking energies”. It is the kind of observation that comes from intimacies, intimacy with an individual poet’s work but also an intimacy with the subtler features to be found in poetry itself. The analysis of Deborah Randall’s “The Hare” begins by finding in the poem the double image of an animal which is all movement and must be described both as movement and as frozen movement “the palpable and the fugitive” and goes on to discuss the opposition in poetry between the spoken and the unspoken before finishing up with the Navajo’s Coyote which occupies several planes of reality at the same time.

The final poem discussed in the essay is an ekphrastic one, Peter Porter’s “The Lion of Antonello Da Messina” a more difficult poem and one which provokes a subtler analysis. Steele responds to Porter’s transmutations and by beginning with a discussion of this he develops the issue at the core of his essay into movement between states rather than simply stasis and movement. And that’s just the beginning. I’ll content myself with quoting a compressed version of what follows since trying to paraphrase it will probably produce only a wordier summary:

Whatever the theoretical fortunes of mimesis these days, Porter’s poetry is incessantly mimetic, insofar as energy itself is up for imitation. The disconcertment which some readers experience upon exposure to his work comes less, I think, from what they take, sometimes correctly, for esoterica, than from the leaps and plunges of Porter’s associative mind: it is as if the many hundreds of poems are tantamount to an advanced course in metaphorical intelligence. Canetti wrote that “A great many ideas want to remain like comets”; Porter’s ideas and images are more often than not comet-like, but “remain” does not seem to be the right word.

Not the right word in part because, in the midst of remarkable intellectual fertility, Porter is an impresario of loss. The medieval philosophical dictum, made over from Aristotle, that “the generation of one thing is the destruction of another”, has a kind of aching cogency in his imagination. One of his first instincts in the face of the given is to see that it can be taken away and probably will be. The predicament is handled, commonly, with a blend of unillusioned trenchancy and stoical finesse, but handled it is, pretty well unremittingly. . . . . The truly extraordinary thing is to see this combined with imaginative vitality, not by concession or exception, but as if that were the norm in such things. Every church or theatre in which Porter contemplates complexity, every field or bay, seems indeed to be part of the great Globe itself, an instant before evanescence: but at that terminal moment insight is profuse, association emphatic, and imaginative mobility heightened.

That is such good criticism, such a subtle teasing out of the intellectual fluidity of Porter’s poetry and its connection with what seems to cruder readers merely a morbid imagination, that – I’m ashamed to say – it makes me envious. Of course, one can console oneself with the observation that it’s going to be a pretty irritating essay for undergraduate readers who are looking for some help with essays of their own and who are not at all sure even who the speaker is in Porter’s poem: Steele tends to speak at what is – or should be – the level of his community.

Intimacy encourages, among other things, playfulness and Steele isn’t above enjoying the complex structures of his own essays which are often deliberate floutings of the academic template. In Expatriates, there is an essay on Robert Huff’s poem, “Blue”. It is an essay full of delightful, writerly jokes, beginning with the contrast between the four-letter title of the poem and the length of essay itself – some eight or nine thousand words. The short poem which forms the opening of the essay is itself a complex affair dealing with the Huff’s role in a bombing raid over Germany in the Second World War. It is so densely interwoven with allusions that the ethical issues underneath are obscured as they become made complex. The central figure is Faust whose pact with the Devil perhaps makes such high-tech warfare possible and the plane is, in a way, bringing this process back to its origins: “As though I had been turning through the stars / For ages on my way to Germany. / Down in the ashes that were Wittemberg / The blue flames cough up black geraniums.” And the entire poem – not only the inside of the bomber’s cockpit – is bathed in “blue”. It’s a poem that you would like to see teased out but Steele’s essay begins with a passage which I will quote:

Poetry is among other things language making a nuisance of itself. Some poets are applauded for their pellucidity, for giving tongue as though they were giving explanations; but even these poets are less likely to be delivering the goods than delivering the baby – things are off to a new start with them, and language is given the cross-hatching of the personal. The night comes when no man can work, but the words can play their way along quite as well then, better in fact. The marche militaire is a skater’s waltz in disguise, the uniform a camouflaged motley.

This is a nuisance for the preliterate, many of whom are not illiterate. Many indeed traffic much in books, cracking their codes, as they suppose, alembicating poetry into diurnal meanings: beyond the Hyades they find the Ephemerides. Of course such is not the Kingdom of Heaven, but they often suppose that it is, or at least that if that starry zone is not yet theirs for the having, they may sponsor, now, the Good, or the Good Life. Petulant moralists, soi-disant analysts, unfrocked legalists – these fragments of our usually fragmentary selves maraud around the poem, as around the arts at large, and proclaim with the tireless, heedless insistence of somnambulists what the poem means. “For every complex problem”, announces a poster, “there’s a simple solution. And it’s wrong.” The poet may forget his other words, but that one he knows.

Or knows after a fashion. It is in his hornbook, but only imperfectly in his heart. Bad company does odd things to our ideals, and we are in part all bad company to ourselves. There is a perverse streak in us which leads us to want to take wooden nickels, want to be snowed by the offer of Brooklyn Bridge. A human being is an angular thing, more like a question mark than an exclamation mark. . . . .

And so on for another twenty pages. It’s Steele at his most Delphic and inspissate. Most of it I don’t follow despite having reread it many times but I quote it to point out the extent that it is also a set of gags. Many of these derive from the method of obliqueness. There is a wonderful essay by Greg Dening, “Sharks that Walk on the Land: The Death Of Captain Cook” in which the reader has to face two pages of anthropological analysis (admittedly very lucid and not especially forbidding) until the curtain goes up, so to speak, and Captain Cook appears. Part of the fun of Steele’s essay is that the appearance of the poem itself is delayed for about fifteen hundred words and the first thousand words devoted to it are a long meditation on the colour blue. It has the same structure which underlies most of Steele’s essays (none in Braiding the Voices are as extreme as the essay on “Blue”) in that a poem is subsumed into a general theme which is then engaged obliquely. But the fact that the subject of the poem is a bombing raid (certainly not a “raid on the inarticulate” though that theme appears in the essay) and is treated in such a less than full frontal attack, is part of the joke, as is the fact that a poem with a four letter title is surrounded by such an extensive meditation. The fact that it begins with an attack on a certain kind of poetry analyst (with an asperity rare in Steele’s writing) is also something of a joke in the light of the poem under consideration. I’m sure there is a lot more subtle humour of this sort in this weird essay but it would take a lot of work to tease it out. At any rate my point is that Steele’s intimate, “at home” approach to criticism includes a playful element.

But, of course, Expatriates is not a series of scholarly analyses of poems: it is a set of meditations about poetry itself, roughly constellated about the idea of expatriation and exile. In a sense it is belletristic but it is also, obliquely perhaps, a challenge to scholarly analysis of poetry to match its quality and insight. Braiding the Voices is in a more recognisable mode: that of the collection of poet’s essays. Behind it (and often quoted) stand similar collections by people like Hollander, Jarrell, Merwin, Nemerov, Heaney, Auden and many others. In the absence, in Australia, of a strong tradition of literary journalism, it is a book genre that needs to be encouraged. As I said before, the genre is the reason that Steele and his own poems make so many appearances: in Expatriates he appears incognito as Michael Kent, the author of a sestina. Braiding the Voices concludes with six final poems. The first of these is set, sinisterly, in the oncology ward but you feel that rampant confessionalism was never going to be Steele’s way and so the final poems, about eating and proverbs, are about community.

This book, together with Anthony Lynch’s excellent Night Train, comes from an imprint that I haven’t previously been familiar with but if someone new is entering poetry publishing in Australia then I wish them nothing but success. Both of them are first books and there is a lot to like about each, especially Electricity for Beginners which is likely to attract words like “charming”, “lively”, even, heaven forbid, “sparky”. In a sense they are all accurate: it must be one of the nicest of debut volumes and includes poems about youth, love, rural upbringing, urban young-adult life (Melbourne and Brisbane). But you would want to avoid being patronising. These poems are as tough-minded and intelligent as they are sensitive and winning. And the book itself is so tightly organised that it’s a moot point how best to open up a way of describing it. I’ll start by talking briefly about two extended “set piece” poems, “The City Gauge” and the significantly titled “Intimate not Monumental”. The former is set in a wooden house in Brisbane during the recent flood. As the waters rise at night, the poet and her partner are progressively cut off and, like everybody in that situation, pile their belongings ever higher to escape the rising waters:

.  . . . .
Why does the darkness make voices more likely
to win or break our hearts?

Soon it will be dawn, soon it will be
weirdly beautiful - the water a foot from the floorboards,
high-set verandahs kissing their reflections,
six-foot fences vanquished - and soon we'll realise
          we're trapped.

But for now, it's night, and there's just
the torchlight, and the radio voices
and the raising things up, the lifting that is like belief:
the best we can do
          but never high enough.

It is such a pregnant and suggestive experience that it is almost a kind of shell situation for a poet. As a result, it’s a poem type where a lot of themes, attitudes and interests are revealled, both conscious and unconscious. In Dicinoski’s version the piles of precious objects become “telling storeys of desire”, the loss of electricity to the house is balanced by an internal lighting up as “our nerves turn electric with news from the west” and the isolated being is not a poet driven to solipsism but a couple: this, like most of the poems in Electricity for Beginners, is, at heart, a poem of “we”. And speaking of “we”, this might be the right time to bring up this book’s exellent cover design. Covers of books of poetry (like football referees) are usually in what is called a “fail only” situation: if the cover is good we don’t notice it, if it is twee or inappropriate we do notice it. The cover of Electricity for Beginners has a wonderful photograph of two little girls in wellington boots, holding hands and standing on an insulated mat. The girl on the left has her other hand on a Wimshurst machine and the static electricity passing down and between the girls is starting to make their hair stand on end. It’s a perfect image for the book although it leads me to think that I should be able to answer the question, “Which of the two girls represents the poet?”

If  “The City Gauge” responds to a situation experienced by many at different times, “Intimate not Monumental”, certainly the most striking poem in the book, responds to one of those once-in-a-lifetime pieces of magic that the universe can grant us. The poet and partner are standing on the fourth storey of a city carpark looking down at a crowd watching a band. A girl throws confetti and the body heat of the crowd is enough to suspend the confetti in space:

. . . . . 
I know some things about gravity,
I know some things about bodies and heat
but I don't know this -
the confetti doesn't fall, but floats in space
in the air just beyond us.
Lit by streetlights or some
internal spark it's a star cluster
a confetti constellation
that hangs together for long fat seconds.
The crowd below points up
as we point down and grin
at this simple wonder, this one fixed thing:
a careless paper galaxy
a monumental fling.

There are some interesting connections and oppositions here. The crowd and the couple are separate with the galactic confetti floating between. The confetti, lit up as though by electricity, defies gravity but so, symbolically, do the couple. The body heat of the crowd is different to the body heat of the couple – and so on. Most important is the title which reminds us that this is a poem about love and people rather than about moments when the cosmos reveals itself. The book’s first poem, “Arterial”, focusses on the lover/world opposition. At night, in a Brisbane wooden house, everything moves either in response to the individual’s heartbeats, the settling of the house on the stumps, the vibrations of sex in a neighbouring room or even the vibrations of the “midnight trucks / that speed west two streets away”. The poet forms a kind of single self with her partner (it makes you think of the Symposium):

Beside me you sleep
moving only your breath, your blood,
your fierce heart. Beside me you sleep
as the dark house shifts around us.

Again, outer and inner electricities are invoked, as they are in “The City Gauge” and these consistent oppositions form the fabric of both the book and the poems. “Rounds” wouldn’t make much sense, or would at best seem superficial, if it wasn’t seen in the light of the other poems of the book. Poet and partner – “trivia savants” – earnestly “talk shit like it matters”. The list of facts moves towards “elite archers shoot between heartbeats” before the band strikes up and “we form a rowdy chorus / of toora loo rye, toora loo rye ayes”. The point is, I presume, that poet and partner inhabit a world of isolated intimacy (as they do in “The City Gauge”) as well as the raucously, crudely electric social world. In “the Heart of a Comet is Blacker than Tar” it is the people gathered to watch the comet, rather than the comet itself which interest the poet. Rather than being a messenger of the gods the comet’s splendours are merely reflections.

There are poems in which Dicinoski is shorn of her partner. Most of these involve earlier, life in rural Queensland and include “Turf” in which poet, brother, father and mother steal turf for their garden from a golf course on the coast. It’s a comic narrative but begins with a comment about her genetic inheritance, “Like my olive skin and my ring finger’s kink, / I got a knack for crazy schemes from him”. But the self at the heart of most of these poems is a double self, a tribute to love. It’s hard to forget “Prayer Flags” in which the “dafter butterflies” (a very beautiful adjective) mistake the flags for flowers while both the partner’s flags and the poet’s “tea-towels and undies” on the washing line are “a prayer and a flag”. And there is also “The Live Arts”, the book’s final poem, which recalls the great 1893 flood while describing the partner’s breathing

crazy but true, it sounds
               like anew, anew, anew
as though you're exhaling code
or gospel. . . .

There is so much to admire in Electricity for Beginners. It does that urban canniness well but is never mere gesture. The poems have their own complex understanding of their creator’s inner life and the oppositions that it is sensitive to are complex and generative. And finally, as all readers and reviewers of the book will recognise, they are full of that electricity that comes from the genuine as opposed to the posed or self-regarding. In a sense the heat might come somewhat from the compression of the focus. There are no poems here that are not wired in to personal experience: no poems about world events, no poems inspired by wide reading or even second and third hand anecdotes. In many ways that’s good: we’re spared lectures about the author’s understanding of public matters, for example. The important question is where Dicinoski might go next, because at some point, most of us feel, a good poet has to leave the known for the imaginatively apprehended.

This second book by A. Frances Johnson (her first, The Pallbearer’s Garden, appeared in 2008) is as intricately designed as some of the strange mechanical birds with which it begins. Its three parts: “wind-up future”, “wind-up present” and “wind-up past” seem a more than satisfying way of grouping poems that are very different but which share the same voice and the same intellectual and ethical preoccupations. As its title suggests, it owes a lot to Murakami’s The Wind-up Bird Chronicle (a book I have never read but which I seem, by osmosis, to have accumulated a lot of knowledge about!) and one of the epigraphs “Why not write a poem about the wind-up bird?” seems almost to have been taken as a challenge.

And we meet wind-up birds immediately in “Microaviary”, the first poem of the first section. “Microaviary” is devoted to contemporary developments in the military science of unmanned surveillance and attack drones. In mode it hovers between the realistic and the surreal and thus nicely mimics the world of these technical developments where one is never sure where reality ends and dottiness begins: something which, come to think of it, is nicely in keeping with our attitudes towards the future generally. The whole sequence of poems ends up with a Raven drone gone AWOL through a computing glitch “attempting to build a nest out of nails in the forest of Odin”. It isn’t so much the military brutality that seems to worry Johnson (after all, drones, like “smart bombs”, can always be sold as a humanitarian development on the grounds that there is less “collateral damage”) or even the possibilities for unprecedentedly invasive urban surveillance but rather the perverse interaction with the natural world: the ethical issues are closer to those of Jurassic Park, in other words, than those of Avatar. But there is another theme running just underneath the surface of “Microaviary” and that is poetry itself. When the poet is struck by nostalgia for secret places which have been exposed by a world of surveillance drones, she includes in the list of what is lost a certain kind of poetry:

. . . . . 
Think of the kindness of dentists
in small, featureless rooms,
airports at 3am, half-remebered raves.
An old grief rises up:
in the absence of bird-egg blue, cubbyholes,
antiquated soaring lyrics
I must admire
new foxholes,
a terrifying ability to see.
. . . . .

This strikes me as an unusual and interesting development, the kind of thing that The Wind-up Birdman of Moorabool Street is full of. When a PR man speaks of “unmanned drones” we are told he speaks in “unmanned couplets” and the poet finds herself missing even the “soldiers with guns, / the rat-a-tat-tat of older kinds of verse”. Song, she says, “is not part of the technology”. The status of poetry in a future world is taken up in an important poem, “Listen Century”, whose title might just be an inversion of “Speak Memory”. It’s written in four line stanzas which often have bathetic rhymes (in the manner of early Eliot) and recreates the experience of students of poetry listening to recordings of the great poets of the twentieth century, “intoning the images / of their lost century / to the next lost one in kind”. What the old know is that the weightless horrors produced by the scientific developments of their age - mustard gas, fall-out, napalm (a list in precise chronological order) – require “heavy lyric states” as a kind of human response. Modern, virtual wars, full of unmanned (it’s a powerful and suggestive pun) drones don’t “recruit words” and thus we are left with the question of the function and status of poetry in the twenty-first century. The students’ experience of the great modernists is a virtual one:

Meanwhile we sit in heated halls
straight-backed, well-fed and watered in row G
surviving or awaiting aftermath
listening to poetry

“Coal and Water” is another poem operating in the future of ecological disaster and a set of metaphors run through it, including a number of allusions to poetry. It is also sensitive to the fact that water provides a number of metaphors for “development”: “Meanwhile the press’s compound eye / hallucinates a Chinese-invested coal station / mid-stream, when mid-stream is simply an illusion / of a liquid past / something the doctor asks you to save / in a bottle”. This relates to that odd experience whereby the reality that provides the metaphors has disappeared leaving only dead or dying metaphors whose origins are incomprehensible. But “Coal and Water” also wants to talk about the responsibilities and torments of a culture’s poets:

Some poets have forgotten
to ask what it is
they are burning in the grate
On a cold night I am one of them
- the coal-fired heart
the pathetic revenge of the powerless
bringing paper fuel to the table
to burn and burn again
Is that all that's left?
The restive recitals
the pained nostalgia for trees and rivers . . . .

The book’s middle section is devoted to the present and includes many poems from Johnson’s Whitmore chapbook, The Pallbearer’s Garden. The poems are more personal in that they are likely to derive from experiences such as personal loss and intimate guilt. But these things are all woven tightly together throughout the book merely showing a different face in different sections. The totemic birds are omnispresent –  hawks, galahs, cockatoos and blackbirds – but the poems that impress include “Pallbearer” where, at a family funeral, the poet, watching the male pallbearers lift the coffin, instinctively raises her own arm to share the load in a fine and believable reaction which symbolizes the preparedness to take on the sort of responsibilities which the book’s first section worries about. There is also the very beautiful “Fontanelle” which deserves quoting in full, partly because the complexites of the poem’s structure, which are luminously clear, take longer to explain in critical paraphrase than they do in the poem itself:

Not a complicated rhyme scheme like a villanelle
nor a beautiful rural city in France famous for armistice signing
Not a small fountain, nor a lyrically high bogan name
whose owner dreams of it
as her own distinctive line of underwear
A fontanelle is the gentling seal
between two halves of a newborn cranium
a membraneous groove that accepts
a stroking or a crushing hand
The chance for either
before two hemispheres knit and fuse
Human hair seeks to camouflage it
in the most tender wars of concealment
(notice the onset of braids and curls and rigid hair parts)
And if this worlding is a form of closing
it is also an opening
The first wageless wager of the bones
that suddenly makes possible
complicated rhyme schemes
rural cities in France
the idea of peace and that which comes before
small fountains
lines of underwear
foolish and foolishly beautiful names
tender wars of concealment
stroking and crushing hands
the opening and closing of things

I’m not sure that this limpid lyricism is entirely natural to Johnson and I feel that she is more drawn to tense, complicated, wound-up poetic modes. But it doesn’t prevent “Fontanelle” lying close to her preoccupations,  suggesting as it does a host of binaries contained by the closing hemispheres, including the human and the world, the inner and the outer, war and peace, and even the first world and the third.

There are no birds in “Fontanelle” but they have the last word in this section which finishes with “Moonlight, Rental Farm”. The poet, looking for something calming, steps out into a moonlit night, hoping that the estranging light provided by the moon might “calm and touch us equally”. This works up to a point but the blackbird intervenes:

Only the blackbird's call centre note
chastises, as if to say
moonlit semaphores
from behind clouds
look much the same as artillery
flash-dancing on the rim
of any tired century
That there is no bright or easy clemency
only waning signals that you and I live on . . . .

And, unsurprisingly, it is a bird which announces the final section of The Wind-up Birdman of Moorabool Street, when the Black Cockatoo is seen as a bird with a mythical past as a survivor of catastrophe, an animal which has demonstrated its tenacity by escaping extinction. Its message is a bleak one:

. . . . . 
Not for them to be the bird of Hope
to mourn the marshlands of Baghdad
A thousand seed-gutted cones bomb the dry earth
The stripped, cratered hills will be theirs
no matter how we foul them, no matter how we die.

Although this final section is devoted to the past, like the other sections it does not interpret its provenance in time in any predictable way. It does deal with a colonial past and a family past but it also deals with the mythical past (at least in the case of this opening, black cockatoo poem) and a geological past (including a poem about a letter from Darwin to Wallace which takes us into the world of the nineteeth century discovery the geological past in the sense at least of an evolutionary past). The twin themes are guilt and responsibility and you feel that the author will be very sympathetic to Judith Wright’s position since that poet was obsessed by her family’s mistreatment of native peoples, by ecological disasters and by the shadow of a new, nuclear, war. Wright provides one of the book’s two epigraphs and significantly she, together with her “shadow sister”, Oodgeroo, is invoked in a poem called “We are So Far South of ‘South of My Days’”. The distance spoken of in that poem is, superficially, geographical (the Wright poem dealt with New England) but has a number of symbolic possibilities, including, I think, “south” in the sense of “far worse off”. (The lines about Oodgeroo, “We are light years distant / from Noonucal fanning tinder phrases / in unseasonable island heat / to save blue-ringed Minjerribah / from the perfect orthodontal / bridge of progress” have a particular resonance since I write this review on the island only a few kilometres from what was once her home.) Guilt for the horrors of a colonial past is a complex phenomenon and I don’t think it makes for the best poetry in this book, though the poems that deal with it are as complex and many-faceted as the others. “Monument: To Isabella Dawson of Kangatong” celebrates a person and an act which are obviously close to the author’s heart: a white woman who insisted on erecting a monument in memory of the massacred aboriginal people of Victoria’s Western Districts. But even this poem concludes in a complex and elusive way, invoking the moon last met in “Moonlight, Rental Farm”:

. . . . . 
You stayed rocking there like a young ladies' metronome
until the moon, resentful of your pale grief
refused to loan its pitted light

And you saw that things were needlessly backwards
The moon told you so as it traded sides
eyeing your big skirts jealously
knowing that you could never wait the vandals out
for they were you, all of you

The poetic consciousness that lies behind The Wind-up Birdman of Moorabool Street is a complex one and shuttles between the personal and the macro. It isn’t at any level a simple or simplifying book and rarely falls into gesture instead wanting to understand the immensely complicated mechanisms that underlie pasts, presents and futures especially when the futures seem so bleak. At heart I think the perspective is an ethical one: what part do we have in this and how can we make amends – does “making amends” have any meaning? But there is also a poetic component in that so many of the poems concern themselves with the question of how poetry is engaged with these processes and how it might address them. As a result this is a complex book, intricate like the mechanical birds which figure so largely in it, and one which is challenging in the best sense.

Among all the new poets emerging at the moment I’ve chosen these four though I might have looked at others and, in fact, hope to do so in later reviews. Unfortunately the last two of this group are represented by “micro-collections” of only a few poems and thus resist any confident description but the same can’t be said of Eileen Chong and Mathew Abbott. The saddle-stitched books of Australian Poetry’s New Voices series look minuscule but they have the standard dimensions of, say, a Penguin paperback and run to thirty-five pages or so of poetry. They are, in other words, roughly two-thirds of a conventional volume and are thus quite long enough to get some kind of provisional sense of how the creative part of a poet’s mind is working. Among the four poets you can detect two fairly conventional poetic approaches and two that are, in some respects at least, unusual.

Eileen Chong’s book is “conventional” to the point where, on initial acquaintance, you are likely to miss its virtues. It does look, at first, as though a Creative Writing supervisor had said to a prospective student, “Look: you’ve had an interesting life with an interesting background that will be exotic to Australian readers. Why not write a series of family poems? And then you can fill out the MS with some monologue poems where you enter the characters of women in Chinese history. It can’t fail.” The great virtue and charm of this book is that its poems go far beyond these expectations and grow on the reader – well, this reader at least – with each successive reading. I’m not sure that I can specify with any exactitude why this is the case but it is worth the effort to try. To begin with, there is a level of certainty about both tone and technique: if they seem, initially, unadventurous poems then they are also fully-achieved. Secondly, they never give a sense of being exploitative, of focussing on the gap between the perspective of the writer and that of the Australian reader to the point where it can be used for effect – especially for melodramatic effects. So the poetic cast of mind seems calmly inward-turned and explorative rather than showily dramatic even though the poems have conventionally dramatic shapes. “My Hakka Grandmother”, celebrating a Chinese ethnicity noted for its migrations, its extraordinary domestic architecture, its separate language, and the comparative freedom of its women, can stand as an example of this poetry:

If time could unwind for you
yet be still for me, we would run
through the fields, feet unbound
and pummelling the ground towards

the earth-house. I read about it once:
its architecture unique to the Hakka people
in Fujian. Dwellings like wedding rings
stacked and interlinked. You would lead me

through the building's single gate
and show me where you slept, above
the communal granary. It would smell
of rice husks, like your dark hair

in the mornings before we'd braid it
long and sleek. I would speak
in your tongue, but we would not need
words. The lines on my palms mirror

yours almost perfectly. I wonder where
our bloodline begins. We are guest people
without land or name, moving south and south,
wild birds seeking a place to call home.

Thematically, like so many poems of Burning Rice, it focusses on links, especially generational links. This poem is, in those terms, mildly disruptive in that it wants to shortcircuit the generations and let the poet live alongside the grandmother as a coeval. The poem is strengthened and held taut by a subtext of images deriving from the idea of lines so that time is imagined unwinding, feet are unbound and identity is expressed in matching lines of the palm. This sets up a nice conclusion whereby it is lines of blood – bloodlines – which have put the poet where she is today, Sydney. Contrasted with this are the circular images: of the Hakka houses joined like rings and the symbolic braiding of hair.

All of this is predictable enough and doesn’t account for more than a well-made, thoughtful and successful modern lyric poem but somehow the poems of Burning Rice are a lot more than this. Asian sensitivities to family history and the loyalties and respect within the generations of those families is a familiar enough trope in twenty-first century Australian poetry (there is also Miriam Wei Wei Lo’s 2004 book, Against Certain Capture) for there to be no especial frisson of exotic otherness and so the answers must lie elsewhere. Perhaps it’s a matter of the tension between the calm of the poems and the blandness they would fall into if they were not as structurally animated and woven together as they are. Somehow they have to be perfectly achieved not to be faux-oriental banalities and they are perfect of their kind (though one might quibble at the last five words of “My Hakka Grandmother”). I’m not expressing this at all well but I’ll resort to the defence that it is a complex issue.

There are also poems in Burning Rice which are, in terms of lyrical tactics and disposition, more ambitious than the calm quatrains of these family poems. The book’s first poem – as though to demonstrate that there is more to the author than well-made Austral-S.E Asian poetic pieties – is a surrealist love poem influenced by Joseph Pintauro: “. . . . . You’ll simmer a cauldron / of silver stars and I, I will weave / you stories from gossamer / and dew. Wait now – the cat’s / coughed an elf. Wake now.”  And there are a group of poems in the middle of the book which deal with great personal pain and which evolve their own complex strategies for doing this. The best of these is “Chinese Ginseng” which fools us into thinking that it is a “memories of Singaporean life” poem activated by the smell of the ginseng before revealling that it is really about the inadequacies of the poet’s mother’s traditional medical suggetions in the face of an acute problem:

"Try ginseng," my mother says. "Must be Chinese,
not Korean or American." I remember the ginseng's
bulbous head, its desiccated torso, smaller roots

for arms and legs - bound with red string to cardboard backing,
displayed in boxes stacked for sale. Panacea, tonic, necessity.
The medicine man extols the virtues of each unique root,

then shaves the ginseng into slices so thin
I could melt them on my tongue. He weighs them
on a brass scale pinched between forefinger and thumb,

then wraps portions into paper packages. There is no point
in telling my mother what she doesn't want to hear: polycystic ovaries,
endometriosis, infertility. Instead, I just listen - I can almost taste

her soup: sweet dates and wolfberries, smoky angelica and lilybulb,
but above all, the unmistakable bitter-sweetness of Chinese ginseng.

That’s a sophisticated poem because its structure is evolved to deal with a personal issue whose pain is increased by the emphasis, in the other poems, on family links. Finally there is the second last poem of the book, “Lunch”, which adopts what one would think of (I’m on shaky and potentially ethnic-essentialist grounds here) as a very un-South-East Asian referential structure. The poet and friend go shopping after lunch:

. . . . .
Your basket is half-full. We are mirrored
in the glass-walled fridges when I tell you
about the time a man tried to pick me up

by telling me how much he liked
the way I shopped. "Like an animal,"
he'd breathed, "smelling and touching."
Put that in a poem, you said. I have.

I’m always attracted to this kind of elegant self-referentiality which I think (although I’m not at all sure about this) occurs first in Western poetry in the wonderful Catullus VI. One problem is that, having used this structure, you really can’t repeat it.

Mathew Abbott’s poetry is a different phenomenon and poses entirely different questions for the reader. Even at its most concretely visual – in a set of comparatively approachable poems devoted to the western states of the USA – you want to say that it remains highly abstract. But “abstract” is a dangerous word with many subtle colourings and one wouldn’t want to give the wrong idea. “California” is different to conventional poems of place because it doesn’t seem to separate its interests (what the place is and “means”) from its conception. It certainly isn’t one of those poems that begins with some poetically concrete description and then moves onto understandings in the back half of the poem. It seems to be a poem trying to embody, rather than stand outside of, the Romantic question of the relationship between observer and observed:

the field out there
is that expanse

hazed in glary
tired light

          the field
          gone to yellow
          at the endings

birds are out in it
and too much with us

the passing of our train
indistinct to them

                    they know
          in the upwash
                    finding shapes
                              to split the flow fields

the towns
have the sense
of being paraded

          the life in them
          stripped back
          to glint

                              the turbines

                    turn the head
                    anemotropic

                    hum the skull
                    to juice the mind

          the field out there
          meets the field of the mind

at the horizontal

          the faked water
          of the heat
          the turbines cut

Here is a poem about the American state which is simultaneously the home of the “field theory” of postwar American poetry and the home of popular visual culture and an actual, non-metaphorical field is seen as a set of flickering images from the inside of a train carriage – as though the characters of a film were animated into observers. Although the idiom is difficult and its fractured quality foregoes the relaxed rhetorical sweep of philosophic meditation, it certainly has to be counted, at the very least, as an example of organic form!

Two poems of Wild Inaudible, perhaps the next most approachable after these “travel” poems, are list poems: “Twelve Surfaces” and “Ten Maladies”. Again, there is nothing new in this structure – it recalls Stevens, a poet who atttracts and explores the word “abstract” – but it is always an intriguing one. The individual examples cluster around the theme and lead us to wonder how exhaustive the catalogue is, whether they point towards a definition of the central term, what is the principle of ordering, and so on. The twelve surfaces of the former poem are: word, shrill, copper, bribery, kubrick, god, comedic, bad, gnomic, bug, doggy, and surface. There is no doubt about its reasons for beginning with the first, a call to reading, “look at this / word surface // gets you to look / at this word here” or for concluding with the last “surface surface is / all the way down surface”, which recalls the famous William James story and has its inevitable paradox, but I can’t proffer any reasons for the selection and ordering of the others: it might be thematic or aesthetic (in that it responds to internal juxtapositions which seem to “work well”) or it might be deliberately aleatory. At any event, it’s an engaging poem.

Other poems seem to focus on physicality, the status of our corporeal existence in the world. “Attenborough” concludes by speaking of the “wonky natural 2 / -step of the animal / human heart” while “Wetware” uses (I think) the physical situation of being caught in very heavy rain to play against the idea of the body as “wet”-ware (as opposed to “soft- ” or “hard-”). It is hard not to connect this with a later poem, “Rain”, which seems to be a meditation built around the linguistic phenomenon of our use of an impersonal verb (“it rains”) in this situation and to ask the question of what this “it” actually is, suggesting that it is, perhaps, the “rain” of events and experiences. At the same time, to read it in conjunction with “Wetware” is to invite the idea that it connects to our physical selves.

These rather ropey readings get even more provisional when Abbott takes as his subject liminal states of awareness. These seem often connected with poems about love and relationships so that the fine first poem, “Good Morning” is simultaneously about being next to a state of awakening and being next to the loved-one: 

 there's a plateau in the night
                  learnable in surfacing

          to wake is this one thing
          the arrival is peripheral

as i turn up
you move to speak

                   asleep
                   asleep to it
. . . . .

And the book’s final poem, “Cusp”, is, well, about cusps and rather beautifully and richly lyrically connects the loved-one with a liminal state that – though I can’t follow the philosophy of it exactly – is a highly significant one in terms of imaginative expressiveness:

i wake to the good
of the small of your back

                    heat at the skin's hand

          your breath
          is the fall
          of sleep in you

grace of arms
               and rift at heart

points of fact
               abstracting the line

the cusp of the world
curves at the touch of you

That is a very fine poem, very beautiful in structure, very intriguing in its meanings and in no way related to any existing formula. Wild Inaudible is a really impressive debut collection and, if I have made it out to be “difficult” intellectually, I should also point to the grace and attractiveness of individual poems. The New Voices format seems almost too humble for something as good as this.

The same, rather shaky distinction between a poet who explores and exploits conventional structures and one who seems, from the outset, to be doing things in his or her own way is re-enacted in miniature with the two poets of  Brisbane New Voices III. Vanessa Page’s poems tend to focus on emotional states: the first, “Five fifty-three am” is about happiness, and its structure – a set of rhapsodic metaphors (“It’s the morning rubbing the last of a dream from its eyes / as day-broken birds open their throats to the light”) – mimics the way the state lends itself to imaginative celebration rather than, say, sceptical analysis. A more common state in these poems is loss and separation from the loved-one. This seems a state more easily connected to exploration and one really fine poem, “Chrysalid”, does this within the metaphor established in the title:

This day is made for breaking.

I lie awake inside the shell of sleep.
Outside my window, agapanthus
heads invite deconstruction

There are only incidental details left.

I inhabit shadows like silk-sheen
resting my fingertips on your detritus . . . . .

The poems of Carmen Leigh Keates have an eerily individual quality which derives not so much from their subject matter – though that is often disturbing enough – as from their disjunctions. Some times these disjunctions are stylistic: in “Leaking Through” it seems as though the the world of dream (at least I think it’s a dream) dominates and the disjunctions are a mimetic way of conveying the weird logic of dreams. In “Out There By the Airport” which “tells the story” of the experiences of a Salvadorean hospital cleaner there is a disorienting and very unusual juxtaposition of direct and indirect speech.  But the title poem uses this technique in the most radical way. It begins with a domestic enough set of comments about the use of knives which modulates to:

It is the twin of a knife
found in the grave
of someone you used to be
in the fourth century.

before beginning the next stanza, even more radically:

Radio feels mysterious.
You walk about
listening with your eyes . . . . .

Disjunctions and unexpected movements such as this between the domestic, the sinister, and the analytical, give these poems a tremendous internal drive. It is not a rhetoric but a very distinctive way of exploring the different levels on which we live – domestic world, dream world and intellectual world – and their collisions and interactions. It’s full of possibilites and one wants to see a lot more of it.