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Tumbling and Balancing – Susan Johnson’s A Big Life

Susan Johnson: A Big Life, Macmillan Australia. Published in Overland 135, Winter 1994.

In many respects, The Big Life is Susan Johnson’s ‘big novel’. Published by Macmillan in Australia, it was picked up by Faber in the UK and the US and received some enthusiastic early reviews. While Johnson has established a reputation as one of the more interesting emerging novelists with her first two novels, The Big Life represents a number of important departures for her. It is, for example, her first novel where the central character is male and where most of the novel is set outside Australia.

The novel’s main character, Billy Hayes, is an Australian tumbler who works the variety stages of England during the 1930s and 40s. A Big Life opens with his birth during World War I. The youngest of six children, Billy spends the first few years of his life without his father, who left for the war before his wife knew she was pregnant. Billy’s mother Sapphire Hayes runs a happy, loving house full of laughter. She feels Billy to be special, if a little fragile: “Out in the open this baby needed all her comfort, for there was something too tender about him”.

Just before Billy turns five his father returns and takes an instant dislike to the son he didn’t realise he had. This dislike grows to hatred when Billy meets the young Chinese acrobat Reg Tsang. Eventually Billy’s father sells him to a tumbling act returning to England. His ‘big life’ really begins on the ship on the way to England. He becomes part of ‘The Wallabies’ with Veron Rome and Connie Connor (who are also his legal guardians). Later he meets and marries Bubbles Drake and leaves ‘The Wallabies’ to set up his own act with Reg Tsang. After the war Billy produces The Hope Show’, briefly capturing the imagination of a war-weary nation. Just as his career appears to have reached its climax, however, Bubbles sues for divorce and for the first time in his life Billy has to deal with failure.

There is a naive simplicity to Billy’s character which is both endearing and infuriating. He has no sense of direction but, like the tumbler he is, always seems to land on his feet. But while Billy may be able to balance perfectly on stage, in real life he is too self-obsessed to consider the feelings of those around him. So while he obviously loves Bubbles, he is incapable of reconciling his own desires and ambitions with hers. He is continually demanding more of her and when she finally lets go he overbalances.

In his search for ‘the big life’ Billy lives the life of an exile. At one point he asks, “How had he ended up so far away? Only economics, politics, or disaster were supposed to force people into exile: no one willingly chose it, or at least not ordinary men like himself.” But Billy isn’t really in control of his life: he leaves Australia because his father sells him and he stays in England because nobody arranges for him to return to Australia. Bubbles organises his domestic life and his agent organises his professional life. Billy’s passivity has effectively made him as much of an exile as any refugee.

The impact of A Big Life lies not in the narrative of Billy muddling through his life, but in the strength of Johnson’s writing. There is an economy of style which perhaps owes something to her journalistic background. But it is a deceptive economy for, as the narrative progresses, the complexities are building up under the surface. In the same way that Billy can keep tumbling while a depression and a world war unfold around him, the reader can easily find they are being seduced by the carefully understated descriptions so that the border between stage and reality begins to blur.

A Big Life is certainly an impressive novel but it is not without flaws. I found Billy’s character to be a little too unsympathetic and, towards the end, I didn’t really care what happened to him. As a result the novel lost some of its impact in the final chapters. Nevertheless, The Big Life is a major achievement which should serve to further enhance Susan Johnson’s reputation.

Tags: Billy Hayes, Faber, Macmillan, Overland journal, susan johnson

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Categories 1994, A Big Life, Australian Novel, Mark Roberts, Overland, Susan Johnson

Two Anthologies: EDGE CITY ON TWO DIFFERENT PLANS Inversions 1983 & NETWORK/EXILES IN PARADISE Fringe Network 1983

29 Feb

Two Anthologies: EDGE CITY ON TWO DIFFERENT PLANS, edited by Margaret Bradstock, Gary Dunne, Dave Sargent and Louise Wakeling, Inversions 1983 & NETWORK/EXILES IN PARADISE Fringe Network 1983. Published in P76 Issue 2 1984.

In a recent interview (Image Vol.6 No.3), John Tranter talks of the progression of contemporary Australian poetry in terms of a “pendulum swing reaction” against what is seen as the ‘accepted’ or ‘established’ mode of expression. Such a comment, of course, refers back to the “generation of ’68” and the break that many writers felt they were making from the established, conservative forms of writing which had predominated during the fifties and sixties, but it also implies a conservative backlash which, Tranter suggests, will “swing” the writing scene back to something resembling the pre-’68 situation. On a similar note, Kris Hemensley, reviewing Ania Walwicz, Dimitris Tsaloumas and Mary Fallon (Syllable No.1), talks of the “rut” in which contemporary Australian writing “had become stuck” by the beginning of the eighties. One possible explanation for this is that the writers who saw themselves as the poetic revolutionaries of 1968 now feel quite comfortable with the way Australian writing has developed during the seventies and no longer feel it necessary to question or challenge the prevailing mood of the literary establishment.

There are, however, many writers who aren’t satisfied with the ideology which underlies much contemporary Australian writing. The strength of Women’s Writing at the moment (as witnessed by the, No Regrets anthologies, Frictions, the large number of Women’s Writing Groups and the Faceless Woman Readings in Melbourne) can be seen, in part, as a reaction against the subtle, and often not so subtle, repression of women writers throughout Australia’s history, and which is still prevalent in the post ’68 writing scene.

Two recent anthologies, Edge City on Two Different Plans (a collection of Lesbian and Gay writing from Australia) and Network/ Exiles in Paradise (An anthology of new writing from the Melbourne Fringe Arts Festival 1983), highlight further problems with the Tranter pendulum. Both anthologies can be seen as jerking Australian writing, out of its rut, though in quite different ways. Edge City confronts the masculine tone inherent in much Australian writing which was left virtually untouched, and in some cases actually strengthened, by the “generation of ’68”, while Network/Exiles in Paradisehas combined an ‘open access anthology’, a fringe arts festival and collective production so that the writers become responsible for, and learn the skills necessary to compile and produce the anthology.

In other ways Edge City and Network/Exiles in Paradise are very-different anthologies. The editors of Edge City, in a lively forward, discuss the history of the anthology and attempt to place it in an historical context. They make it clear, for example, that they are in debt to the women’s writing movement:

“We also thought, like the editors of earlier anthologies of women’s writing which explored areas of specifically female experience, that it was necessary to counterbalance the heterosexist and masculinist literature which still predominates in Australian culture.”

But they point out that the aim of the anthology was not to set up an ideological framework but to present us with “an important expression of the diversity of the lives….. of homosexual women and men.” Over-all, the Introduction and Forward compliments the work of the 43 writers in the anthology and it seems that Dennis Altman is correct when he claims that Edge City’s importance lies not only in the creative work it contains, but equally “as the foundations for what is the long overdue emergence of a literary voice of lesbian and gay men in Australia.”

Edge City attempts to highlight what it sees as the diversity of lesbian and gay writing by collecting work by 43 different writers (25 men and 18 women), ranging from fairly traditional short stories and poetry, to more experimental prose and poetry and a number of song lyrics. Although there are a few well known names among the 43 contributors, one of the most refreshing aspects of the anthology is the amount of interesting and exciting work by writers who have had little or nothing published in the mainstream literary magazines.

A number of prose pieces deal directly with aspects of a lesbian lifestyle. Jane Eliot’s ‘Holiday at the Parm’, for example, examines a woman’s reaction when she returns to the country town where she grew up. Her friends are married and living conservative country lives, while she has returned from the city a feminist and a lesbian. Eliot effectively combines a slight feeling of nostalgia with the underlying political conflict which affects the way the woman reacts to people in her past. Geraldine Mecredy’s piece ‘Journey’, like ‘Holiday at the Farm’, uses a central theme of a woman analysing her past. She has recently ended a heterosexual relationship and she reflects upon aspects of it – how it started, conflicts, sexuality and so on. Running throughout the pieces are the fragments of a dream, of being in s waiting room waiting for a train. The heterosexual relationship becomes the world outside the waiting room, the train a method of escape and a means of personal transformation.

The songs tend to be more obviously political than either the poetry or prose. Phillip Stevenson’s ‘Thank you Lord for Gay Liberation’ (which has been performed widely around Sydney by the Gay Liberation Quire) satirizes the church’s approach to homosexuality while, at the same time, asserting the strength of the gay movement. Alison Lyssa’s songs also approach important issues with humour. ‘There are lights sweeping over the city’, for example, sees the nuclear threat as a part of patriarchal society:

“My brain can’t believe how they got there

‘Those billions of dollars of toys;

Do they fire them in circles like marbles

To keep up with the rest of the boys?”

Other pieces which I felt stood out were the poems of Margaret Bradstock, Mary Fallon, Tony Page and Elaine Byrant. Gary Dunne’s story ‘The Tyranny of Distance’ and Nicholas Thomas’ prose piece ‘Contradictions and Peripheries’ and Judy Small’s song ‘The Festival of light’,

The importance of Edge City is that it has focused attention on lesbian and gay writing in Australia and has been responsible for stimulating quite a lively discussion. On a purely literary level, Edge City introduces a number of exciting writers whose work may have never been accepted by the mainstream literary scene but who, it is hoped, now have the confidence to continue writing without having to compromise in an effort to be published.

Compared with Edge city, Network/Exiles in Paradise appears quite uneven. Among some exciting pieces of writing there are some almost total failures. Network/Exiles in Paradise lacks a unifying theme and is without Edge City’s encompassing introduction. Network/ Exiles in Paradise is, in fact, two different anthologies, separated not by theme, but in the way each was produced. We are told simply “the editing, compilation and lay out of ‘Exiles in Paradise’ was performed by the writers themselves;. ‘Network’ drew on writers within the book and Fringe Network for its production.” So Network/Exiles in Paradise has taken the idea of an open access anthology a step further to collective production. One of the stated aims of the anthology is to “encourage writers to be responsible for their work beyond its actual creation.”

Overall I found the poetry, with the exception of Cliff Smyth, Pete Spense and John Anderson, quite disappointing. Daniel Keene’s piece, ‘Echoes of Ruby Dark’, was for a while interesting, but because of its length, rapidly lost much of its impact. I found the length of many of the poems irritating. It is extremely difficult to maintain a poem through four hundred or so lines, and unfortunately I don’t believe any of the poets who attempt such a task in Network/Exiles in Paradise quite succeed.

On the other hand, prose is definitely Network/Exiles in Paradise’s strength. Ania Walwicz’s work is already fairly well known and her four prose pieces highlight the conservative approach some of the other contributors adopt towards the language. Raphael Pomian’s prose has, at times, a feeling similar to Walwicz’s. Both use uncluttered language but manage to create an overall richness. For Walwicz it’s predominately sound patterns and rhythms, while Pomian’s prose is extremely descriptive, at times almost to the point of being languid. Moya Costello’s ‘The Usherette’ is a realistic portrayal of working as an usherette at a concert hall. Periods of boredom, flustered activities and flights of fantasies are undercut by a sarcastic humour directed mainly at the patrons who she directs to their seats. Berni Jassen’s untitled prose piece, which is the account of the beginning of a relationship, is perhaps, the most powerful in the anthology. Her skilful use of short sentences and clear language gives an intensity and urgency to her theme.

The contrasts in Network/Exiles in Paradise are, in themselves, quite illuminating. The successful pieces tend to be fairly short,or at least concise and uncluttered, while some of the longer poems and stories I found extremely difficult to get through, Fringe Network apparently intends to publish more anthologies and “self-devised books by groups of writers”, the results promise to be interesting.

I found little evidence in Edge City and Network/Exiles in Paradise to suggest a movement towards a more conservative writing in Australia. Tranter’s pendulum is, of course, a gross over simplification. Seeing writing as a movement back and forth between two points is extremely limiting and excludes the possibility of development in other directions. It suggests a ‘establishment’ view of literature operating ‘like clockwork’ to predetermined rules. Projects like Edge City and Network/Exiles in Paradise disrupt the equilibrium by questioning the dominant ideology of Australian literature and suggest new directions in which it could move.

EDGE CITY ON TWO DIFFERENT PLANS inversions (Sydney Gay Writers Collective) P.O. Box 158 Leichhardt N.S.W. 2040. NETWORK/EXILES IN PARADISE Fringe Network 201 Brunswick Street Pitzroy Victoria 3065

– Mark Roberts

Tags: Alison Lyssa, Ania Walwicz, Australian culture, Australian Literature, Australian Poetry, Berni Jassen, Cliff Smyth, contemporary Australian poetry, Daniel Keene, Dennis Altman, Dimitris Tsaloumas, Elaine Byrant, Faceless Woman Readings, Friction, fringe arts festival, Gary Dunne, Gay Liberation Quire, generation of ’68, Geraldine Mecredy, Image, Jane Eliot, John Anderson, john tranter, Judy Small, Kris Hemensley, lesbian and gay writing, literary establishment, Margaret Bradstock, Mark Roberts, Mary Fallon, Moya Costello, Nicholas Thomas, No Regrets, Pete Spense, Phillip Stevenson, Raphael Pomian, Sydney Women Writers’ Workshop, Syllable, Tony Page

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Categories 1983, Dave Sargent, Edge City on Two Different Plans, Gary Dunne, Journals, Louise Wakeling, Margaret Bradstock, Mark Roberts, Network/ Exiles in Paradise, P76

Towards a New Diversity: Martin Johnston and the New Australian Poetry

25 Feb

Towards a New Diversity: Martin Johnston and the New Australian Poetry. By Mark Roberts. Published in Island 58, Autumn 1994.

Shortly before I received my copy of John Tranter’s latest collection, At the Florida, Mick Jagger turned fifty. Television marked the occasion with old Rolling Stones film clips and numerous minor musical celebrities emerged to describe how Jagger had influenced their own musical careers. Later, while glancing through Tranter’s biographical data, I realised that he too was celebrating his fiftieth birthday in 1993. So where were the “minor” Australian poets lining up to explain Tranter’s influence on their work, where was the TV news item, the magazine articles. I had in mind one of those celebratory volumes the English are so good at: A Collection of Poems dedicated to John Tranter on the Occasion of his Fiftieth Birthday.

There is a certain symmetry here. Not only does 1993 mark Tranter’s fiftieth birthday, it also represents twenty-five years since 1968—a year that Tranter helped make a milestone in the development of contemporary Australian poetry. These factors, together with the publication of Tranter’s ninth collection of poetry and the Tranter-edited Martin Johnston: Selected Poetry and Prose, provide us with the opportunity to look back and perhaps begin a reappraisal of the new Australian poetry as it begins to take its place in Australia’s cultural history.

The starting point for any study of contemporary Australian poetry over the last twenty-five years is the Tranter-edited anthology The New Australian Poetry (NAP) (Makar Press) in 1979. Tranter was not, of course, the first to recognise the major changes taking place in Australian poetry during the late ’60s and early ’70s. The label “New Poetry”, in its Australian context, probably owes much to the takeover in 1969 of the established Poetry Magazine by a group of young poets including Robert Adamson and Martin Johnston. Renamed New Poetry, its success over the next decade signalled the movement of the poets associated with the magazine into the literary mainstream. Five years later the term “New Australian Poetry” was also used by Kris Hemensley and Robert Kenny in the introduction to an anthology called Applestealers, edited by Robert Kenny and Colin Talbot (Outback Press 1974).

In many respects Applestealers is as important an anthology as The New Australian Poetry. Although the two anthologies share many of the same poets, they are very different. The most important difference, I believe, lies in the five years that separated their publication. In 1974 there was an immediacy to the essays that Kris Hemensley and Robert Kenny contributed; they are a call to arms, a rallying cry against the “abdication of poets from poetry to careerism”(Kris Hemensley ‘The Beginnings—A note on La Mama’ Applestealers page 9). Whereas, by 1979, Tranter was looking back and documenting the movement. Although many of the poets were still writing, one senses in the introduction to The New Australian Poetry that Tranter was attempting to confirm the New Australian poetry’s place in Australia’s cultural history.

It is ironic then, given that in his introduction Tranter identifies that one of the features of the new Australian poetry was its “freedom from the handcuffs of rhyme and the critical strictures of English departments”, that one of the great successes of The New Australian Poetry was the influence it had upon the teaching of Australian poetry in university and college English departments. This influence, I believe, was not unintentional. In his introduction to the anthology, and in a paper he gave to ‘The American Model Conference’ held at Macquarie University on 1979¹, Tranter carefully argued the importance of his “generation” and forcefully outlined the social, political and cultural factors which he believed helped propel a group of young poets to make a radical break with Australian poetic tradition.

In this respect, then, Tranter’s anthology marks the end of the main period of dynamism of those poets he grouped together as the “Generation of ’68”. By 1979 many of the poets in The New Australian Poetry had become part of the poetry establishment—or rather they had created their own establishment. New Poetry magazine had become one of the most influential poetry magazines in the country and small presses like Island Press, Makar Press, Outback Press and Rigmarole of the Hours (among many others) had produced an extraordinary number of impressive titles.

By the early ’80s, however, things had begun to change. The Australia Council’ and, in particular, The Literature Board were beginning to feel the effect of Fraser’s razor gangs and an economic recession made it even more difficult for poets to produce collections or for small presses to publish them. New Poetry magazine faltered, then folded, but by then many of the poets it had earlier championed were being published regularly in the mainstream literary journals. Given such a context, many poets would have been more than happy to look upon Tranter’s Generation of ’68 as a sort of lost golden age of contemporary, experimental/radical poetry.

So then, who composed the Generation of 68? The easiest answer is those poets Tranter included in his anthology. But, as with every anthology, questions immediately arise as to why particular poets were left out. It is probably safest to look to Tranter’s own explanation. Tranter lists a number of factors which helped shape the generation: the baby-boomers of the postwar years who came of age in the late ’60s, advances in printing technology which made it cheaper and easier to publish magazines and books, and, that adjunct to imagination, drugs. But the most important influence was the new poetry of the USA which emerged in the late ’50s and early ’60s. While these factors may effectively include all the poets within The New Australian Poetry, it does remain a somewhat limiting definition if we are to attempt to understand the developments which took place in Australian poetry during the ’80s.

Perhaps a better starting point is to identify those poets who were excluded from Tranter’s anthology. As Livio Dobrez has pointed out, it must be remembered that The New Australian Poetry “represents, after all, Tranter’s taste, his interpretation of the nature of the New Poetry, and one may well query the centrality of this”². Of course the near absence of women in The New Australian Poetry has been a point of discussion ever since its publication. In fact both The New Australian Poetry and Applestealers each contain the work of only two women writers. Writers who I would have thought fitted Tranter’s description of a Generation of ’68 poet, such as Jennifer Rankin, Dorothy Porter, JS Harry, Pam Brown, Lee Cataldi and Kate Jennings, aren’t even mentioned.

The Generation of ’68 has come to dominate discussion of Australian poetry over the last twenty-five years. But while the movement Tranter effectively analyses did make a profound break with tradition there were other poets who were also smashing their way through Australia’s poetic orthodoxy. Kate Jennings’ 1975 anthology Mother I’m Rooted had an enormous effect on Australian poetry in general and on Australian women poets in particular. Nine years later Susan Hampton and Kate Llewellyn, in their introduction to The Penguin Book of Australian Women Poets (1984), looked back over “fifteen well-known collections of Australian poetry since 1970” and found that on average women poets made up only seventeen percent of total contributors. They went on to claim “this may not be a problem of deliberate critical neglect, but a problem of consciousness—until recently most anthology editors, literary historians and critics have been male, and their gaze was unconsciously focused on other men”. Hampton and Llewellyn’s anthology sparked a debate which ran for years in the book pages of the weekend papers and the review pages of literary journals as anthologists attempted to justify the ratio of female to male poets, and conservative male writers pulled out their old rusty quality/excellence shield and attempted to take shelter behind it.

But if the Generation of ’68 broke with a British-based poetic tradition, the women’s writing movement of the ’70s swept away traditional notions of poetic excellence. The sales figures for both Mother I’m Rooted and The Penguin Book of Australian Women Poets suggest that both anthologies gained a readership far beyond the traditional poetry-buying public. In a review of Hampton and Llewellyn’s anthology, first published in The Sydney Morning Herald 13 September 1986, Martin Johnston, one of the “chosen” referred back to the critical reaction which greeted Kate Jennings’ anthology: “It sold a lot of copies and caused a lot of consternation, notably among (male) reviewers who thought it had something to do with bra-burning and were incapable of seeing that their own notions of ‘quality’ were—as Jennings had argued all along—socially constructed, not delivered from on high.”

Rather than view the Generation of ’68 as a coherent movement, it is, perhaps, more useful to see it as part of a larger cultural movement. Such a stance would acknowledge that, while the influence of American poetry and the political upheavals of the ’60s gave an impetus to a group of young, predominantly male, poets to break from what was seen as an Australian poetic tradition, there also existed a more traditional poetry as represented by poets such as Les Murray and Geoffrey Lehmann. At the same time the ’60s was also the period that the women’s movement was reborn and it was only natural that women writers would quickly gain the self-confidence to broaden our notions of poetry even further. One could, at this point, also look at the development of gay and lesbian poetry during the mid-to-late ’70s which culminated in another influential anthology, Edge City on Two Different Plans, or the rapid growth of Aboriginal writing during the ’80s.

Tranter himself seemed to be arguing something similar in the introduction to The Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry (1991) which he edited with Philip Mead. More ambitious than The New Australian Poetry, this anthology attempts to define “what is the ‘modern period'” and what poetry has been important to its development. In their introduction Tranter and Mead are, in effect, placing the Generation of ’68 writers in the sort of wider context which I have just outlined: “But our readings of the past keep changing. It seemed to us that modern Australian poetry needed to be looked at from a perspective that took in not only the issues of the ’60s, but those of the ’40s and the ’80s (and now the ’90s) as well”. Tranter and Mead go on to claim that “if the modern movement has a major theme, it must be the constant questioning of older ways of looking at things”. While such a definition can, of course, be applied to the writers in The New Australian Poetry it can equally be applied to Hampton and Llewellyn’s attack on the marginalisation of women poets or Kevin Gilbert’s reaffirmation of the strength of Aboriginal poetry in the face of two centuries of white cultural genocide.

It was important that Tranter and Mead acknowledged the important role that women poets played in the development of contemporary Australian poetry. Even more satisfying is the strength of this acknowledgment:

The roles of gender, race and ethnicity are crucial in any act of reading. While this (collection) doesn’t claim to be a feminist or a multicultural anthology, the selection from recent women’s and multicultural poetic writing has a strategic place in our understanding of modernity in Australian poetry… Poetry by women… has claimed a powerful role in postmodern developments in Australia over the last two decades.

Mead and Tranter seem to be moving towards a view of contemporary Australian poetry which is more inclusive than Tranter’s New Australian Poetry, and they have indeed thrown a much larger net than Tranter did back in 1979. Their catch includes many of the poets who appeared in the Hampton/Llewellyn anthology and Kevin Gilbert’s Inside Black Australia (Penguin 1988). Interestingly it also includes poets such as Les Murray, Robert Gray and Geoffrey Lehmann who have commonly been regarded as the natural antithesis to the Generation of’68 poets.

While the anthology has embraced the women’s writing movement and the diversity of multicultural and Aboriginal writing, there are, no doubt, those who can argue that The Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry excludes their poetry. On one level The Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry is refreshing because it appears to be retreating from the confrontationist approach which has marked poetry criticism in Australia for many years. On a closer reading, however, the anthology can be seen to be building on the foundation of The New Australian Poetry. Tranter’s Generation poets emerge as central to the editor’s concept of “Modern Australian Poetry”. While the collection begins with Slessor, one is left with a feeling of the centrality of poets such as Tranter, Adamson, Johnston, Dransfield, Forbes and Duggan. These are, according to the anthology, the real groundbreakers, the poets who dragged Australian poetry into the modern world. They helped to created a climate in which women’s writing, and writing by non-Aiglo-Celtic poets could be critically accepted. The inclusion of poets such as Murray and Lehmann in such a context serves to place them in a hierarchy of modern Australian poetry where they can perhaps see the peak but have little hope of scaling it.

The futility of an approach which seeks to categorise poets, or to claim them for a particular movement, is clearly illustrated by the publication of Martin Johnston: Selected Poems and Prose, a posthumous collection edited by John Tranter. One of the strengths of the collection is that it brings together Johnston’s critical writing, journal entries and interviews, as well as his poetry, so that we begin to have some sense of the complexity of this remarkable writer.

Introducing the writer and the work, Tranter refers to the unique place Johnston held among the poets of his generation, for while he was very clearly identified with the Generation of ’68 poets he did not fit easily into the new poetry pigeon hole. The son of authors George Johnston and Charmian Cliff, Martin had a childhood which was anything but conventional. He spent the first seven years of his life in England where his parents were working as journalists. They then moved to the Greek island of Hydra where George and Charmian attempted to make a living as fulltime writers. Following the success of the George’s autobiographical novel My Brother Jack the family moved back to Australia when Martin was seventeen. In many ways Australia remained a foreign country to him and he maintained a strong interest in Greek culture and politics for the rest of his life.

The Greek influence on his work at once placed him outside the mainstream of the new Australian poetry, which looked towards the USA for its poetic models. Tranter highlights lines from ‘Gradus Ad Pamassum’ in his introduction: “And the groovier modern Americans? They seem to be the context I’m supposed to work in, though I mostly haven’t read them.”

In an unpublished essay on John Berryman’s elegies Johnston directly comments upon the Australian poetry scene when he talks about the way Australian poets approach elegising other Australian poets: “Australian poets, in their relations with each other, either snipe or huddle: and neither attitude is a convenient one from which to undertake genuinely to memorialise the target.” A little later on he refers directiy to the influence of modern American poetry on Australian poetry:

how pitiful, how second hand, how weedy all our sub-O’Hara, sub-Ashbery, sub-Creeley and sub-Ginsberg; how ill fitting the borrowed clothes; how sadly comical the attempt to set up our rag-and-twig lay figures against the overwhelming weight of this century’s dominant body of English language verse.

Johnston’s solution is not to ignore contemporary American poetry, which is precisely what some more conservative Australian poets did, rather it is “to set out to discover just what is being done, rather than pursuing our general custom of imitating the most facilely imitable… aspects of our models”.

More than anything else, what emerges from this collection is a sense of Johnston’s erudition. He was, arguably, the most widely read poet of his generation and his work clearly shows the influence of European, and especially Greek writers as well as the more common Americans. Johnston was also a critic of some standing and he obviously brought to his own work the same critical intensity which he used on others. At the beginning of his essay on John Berryman’s ‘Elegies’, for example, he writes: “When an Australian poet dies there is, invariably, an almost instant exudation of rich—not to say overripe— elegiac verse from large numbers of his colleagues. The process is, it would seem, purely reflexive and quite, quite unstoppable”. In a poem from his 1978 collection The Sea-Cucumber, Johnston returns to a similar theme:

Death and rebirth myths are made by poets, and no wonder:

one Dransfield can feed dozens of us for a month,

a Webb for years. And they’re fair game, we can plead continuance,

no poet ever died a poet: as the salt filled Shelley

the empyrean gave way to the nibbling fish and the cold.

(In Memoriam’)

‘In Memoriam’, which is dedicated to John Forbes, illustrates the range of Johnston’s technique. He is, for example, quite at home with a playfulness which is influenced, if not by the Americans, then at least by the work of the other “new poets” around him:

O’Hara, Berryman, Seferis, Pound

have a lot in common. Not only are they all dead poets

but they make up a metrically perfect line

Johnston’s reputation as a major poet will rely I believe, to a large extent, on his longer poems, such as ‘The Blood Aquarium’, ‘Microclimatology’ and ‘To The Innate Island’. This last poem, although perhaps one of Johnston’s most difficult, is also one of his most rewarding. Johnston almost assaults the reader with details of Greek history and geography, relenting at the last moment by providing incredibly detailed notes which help to place the poem into context. For example the lines:

The island in the lake

scatters itself just below the surface in sherds and ash,

the trout feed on seventeen dear dead ladies.

take on meaning when we read Johnston’s notes: “Kyria Frossyni and her sixteen attendant ladies, drowned in the lake in 1801, for erotico-political reasons, by the then tyrant of Epirus, Byron’s good mate Ali Pasha. Ballads about this are still sung (and postcards sold).” A poem such as this is obviously far removed from the influence of the “groovier modern Americans”.

Martin Johnston: Selected Poems and Prose can only enhance Johnston’s already considerable reputation and emphasise the fact that Johnston’s early death was a tragic loss to Australian poetry. What emerges from a review of Johnston’s work, however, is not an overriding sense of his role as a part of the Generation of ’68. Rather I was left feeling the inadequacies that result from attempting to understand contemporary poetry through a study of different movements or groups. The closer we examine individual poets the more blurred the boundaries and definitions become. As Johnston wrote:

Coloured inks will soak through the best bond paper

in a soft fuzz of amoebas, a sunset blur

of fruit-coloured clouds, a weak ambiguous vision.

(In Memoriam’)

*****************************************************************************

Mark Roberts is a Sydney critic currently undertaking post graduate study at the University of NSW.

*****************************************************************************

NOTES

1 See John Tranter ‘Anaesthetics: Some Notes on the New Australian Poetry’ in Joan Kirkbv (ed) The American Model: Influence and Independence in Australian Poetry Hale and Iremonger 1982.

2 Livio Dobrez Parnassus Mad Ward: Michael Dransfield and the New Australian Poetry UQP 1990.

Tags: Applestealers, At the Florida, Australian Poetry, australian poets, Charmian Cliff, Colin Talbot, collection of poems, Dorothy Porter, Generation of’68, Geoffrey Lehmann, George Johnston, Island Press, J S Harry, Jennifer Rankin, John Forbes, john tranter, Kate Jennings, Kate Llewellyn, Kennth Slessor, Kevin Gilbert, Kris Hemensley, La Mama, Laurie Duggan, Lee Cataldi, Les Murray, Makar Press, Martin Johnston, Michael Dransfield, Mick Jagger, New Australian Poetry, New Poetry, Outback Press, Pam Brown, poetry and prose, Poetry Magazine, Rigmarole of the Hours, Robert Adamson, Robert Kenny, Rolling Stones, Susan Hampton, The American Model Conference, The Australia Council, The Literature Board

The Alphabet of Pain – Two books by Jenny Boult

18 Feb

“i” is a versatile character WAV Publications, 1986. Flight 39, Abalone Press. 1986.. Both by Jenny Boult. Reviewed by Mark Roberts. First published in Tribune 23 July 1986.

Jenny Boult’s sixth book.”I” is a versatile character, is also her first book of prose. It follows her play, Can’t Help Dreaming, which was performed by the All Out Ensemble in Adelaide, and four books of poetry. The stories in this collection vary greatly in form and content, but they share a particular “poetic” style of writing which is rare among contemporary Australian prose writers. Although Boult is by no means the first Australian poet to publish fiction, she has been more successful than most in bringing to her prose many of the skills she has developed writing poetry.

The narrative structure of the stories also relies on a poetic model. Boult builds her stories around a series of images which eventually build into an extensive over-view encapsulating the whole story. The most successful example of this can be found in the title piece ‘”i is a versatile character”, and the impressive longer piece, “no room at the top”.

After this sense of freedom it comes as something of a shock to realise that many of the stories are. structurally, fairly disciplined. In “no room at the top”, for example, it is not until the final section that we realise that the piece has been loosely structured around the alphabet, “this is the last letter in the alphabet of pain, the final broken rung on the ladder, the damaged knee and the whiplash of intention.” It is not an easy alphabet, nor is it a heavy handed one. But it firmly anchors the story and allows the 26 sections to fall into place.

In “TWENTY QUESTIONS”. Boult uses a similar device, only this time the anchor is the title. We expect twenty questions, and. in a way, that is what we get. The only direct question, however, comes in the final section. In the preceding 19, the questions rise from the images, the pieces of the collage which Boult presents us with. We try to piece them together, looking for the answer as we go. But. Eventually, like Estragon and Vladimir Waiting for Godot, we are returned to the beginning: “The audience asks, “who is she?” The woman invites them to look again.

In contrast to the fantasy and experimentation in “I” is a versatile character. Boult has returned to her ‘roots’ as a performance poet in Flight 39. Boult has performed many of the poems in this collection to audiences around Australia over the last few years. Most of the poems are clearly meant to be read aloud, indeed, many of them sit somewhat uncomfortably as words printed on a page.

The song-like quality of much of Flight 39 gives the collection an accessibility which is rare among contemporary poets. Boult’s accessibility, however, is never patronising. Her appeal comes from her lyric style, the experiences she writes about and her wonderful black sense of humor.

There are poems about love (of course), housework, shopping trolleys, poetry and the British miners’ strike. In a series of “3 poems for mary kathleen”, Boult looks at nuclear war from a child’s point of view. One poem begins,

the cat’s going bald mum

the puppies are dead & dad’s called the vet for the old dog

there aren’t many birds.

This innocence disappears in the final poem when the child passes judgment on the post-holocaust society:

the grown ups are going to

patch things up &

pull the pieces together

but i don’t want to live

in a Frankenstein world.

But perhaps the strongest poems in this collection are the two poems grouped together under the title, “in solidarity with the british mine workers 1984-5”. In the first poem. “September 1984” Boult, who grew up in a British mining town, describes how she felt as she watched the attacks on the picket lines on television in Adelaide.

The second poem. “4th march 1985” is written on the day that the strike collapsed. One can sense the fury which is only just below the surface, but there is also the grief that this story will be repeated again and again:

I cried for the end of one struggle & the beginning

of the next.

You may have a little trouble getting these books from your local bookseller, but it is well worth the effort. You can also order the books directly from the publishers: WAV Publications. Box 545 Norwood South Australia 5067. and Abalone Press PO Box 2(12 Cheltenham Victoria 3192.

Mark Roberts

Tags: Abalone Press, All Out Ensemble, Australian Literature, australian poet, Australian prose, Can’t Help Dreaming, in solidarity with the british mine workers 1984-5, no room at the top, TWENTY QUESTIONS, Waiting for Godot, WAV Publications, writing poetry

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Categories 1986, “i” is a versatile character, Flight 39, Jenny Boult, Mark Roberts, Tribune

A NEW ROMANCE: Beth Yahp, Margo Daly & Lorraine Falconer, eds. My Look’s Caress: A Collection of Modern Romances

11 Feb

Beth Yahp, Margo Daly & Lorraine Falconer, eds. My Look’s Caress: A Collection of Modern Romances (Local Consumption Press, 1990). Published in Southerly No. 4, 1991.

Although I have avoided reading any of the plethora of recent anthologies of “erotic writing”, I have followed the debate which has grown up around them in the review pages of the various magazines and journals with some interest. The debate has, predictably, focused mainly on the meaning of the term “erotic” and, in particular, the difference between erotica and pornography. There also always appears to be someone or some group whose sexuality is ignored or misrepresented. The truth, of course, is that “erotic” writing is one of those genres which becomes more elusive as you attempt to pin down a meaning for it.

My Look’s Caress: A Collection of Modern Romances falls just outside the rapidly burgeoning erotic anthology market, although some definitions of the erotic would view a number of the pieces collected in My Look’s Caress as a perfect example of the genre. While there is a lot of sex in the anthology, the editors, Beth Yahp, Margo Daly and Lorraine Falconer, were concerned with much more than the purely sexual. Romance, they point out in their introduction, ranges from the popular image of Mills and Boon to feminist analysis which sees romance as pure escapism which “reflects the dominant masculine ideology”. The editors, however, attempt to open the genre up even further: “When we thought ‘romance’ we thought: Confession. Intensity. Obsession. Hysteria. Passionfruit. The romantic sensibility. Longing. Exotic places. The forbidden. The erotic. Nostalgia, loss, regret. Pulp romances. Repulsion/attraction. Ecstatic revelation. Power. Sexual politics. As well as plain old love.” All this and more is indeed contained in the stories in this collection. In the end, however, the editors prove as elusive as their genre when they refuse to commit themselves to a definition. “And what is romance? The stories in this collection do not provide concrete examples, or try to. Instead they provide clues.”

Prewarned, I approached the anthology as a detective would a crime. I quickly discovered that if the editors did not attempt to provide us with a single definition of romance, the anthology provided us with a multitude of meanings. In addition to their story, each writer is given the opportunity to discuss their “thoughts on romance” at the back of the anthology. In many cases these “thoughts”, when read in conjunction with the corresponding story, provide us with at least a personal view of romance and romance writing.

In Sandra Bridekirk’s and Sandra Dunlop’s piece, “The Disappearing Act”, we have what at first appears to be a fairly typical Mills and Boon romance. Rosemary Hammond fits the formula of a major female character in a romance “tall and slim with long, wavy dark hair and smooth, soft skin. Her features were delicate but striking, with cool blue eyes offsetting the darkness of her brows and lashes . . . Many men had been interested in Rosemary since she was fifteen years old. But she laughed off their attentions, preferring to spend time with her friends and her mother.” Into her life steps Mr Morrison the new marketing manager for Intimacy Romances, the publishing company Rosemary works for.

Both players in this romance know the rules but, unlike the women in the manuscripts which pass across her desk, Rosemary also knows how to use the rules to suit her own purpose. For a while she plays the game but, just before she is supposed to melt into Mr Morrison’s arms, she throws the formula out the window and Mr Morrison is left grasping at thin air. The strength of this story lies not just in its success as parody. Some serious research into the genre of romance writing has obviously gone into it. Sandra Bridekirk, in her notes at the end of My Look’s Caress, speaks of the need to “give voice to the women who read romance and obtain a great deal of satisfaction from it.” Indeed, she argues that to some extent it is the escape value that many women find in romance fiction that many men resent. When read in this way “The Disappearing Act” takes on another meaning. Not only does Rosemary physically disappear at the end of the story, emotionally she has never really “appeared” as far as Mr Morrison is concerned. When faced with an obstinate Mr Morrison she disappeared into her romance manuscripts and used them as a tool to gain her revenge.

Beth Spencer also attempts to locate romance fiction/fantasy as an act of “resistance”. She points out that romance as a genre can be seen as an attempt to fabricate “a cultural milieu—a fiction world—in which the woman is centre stage and a woman’s desire and feelings are valued and openly acknowledged.” In her story “My Look’s Caress” Spencer, while acknowledging the possibility of resistance, also highlights the contradictions which occur when fantasy dissolves into real life.

Spencer juxtaposes a dating ritual—Mary and John going to the movies—with a young girl’s romantic/sexual fantasy. Deirdre, the young girl “is at the start of her quest for sexual knowledge.” Boys, sex and romance become linked in her developing fantasy. She is centre-stage, her desire/desirability is the catalyst for Alister’s passion until, in her fantasy, “he covered her open mouth with his own, each kiss lasting longer, desire blotting out everything.” From a position where she has control—where she “creates” Alister’s lust—Deirdre has become its victim. Her fantasy has placed her as a woman into an increasingly powerless position. For Mary and John the fantasy is concealed as they act out a ritual. But like Deirdre’s fantasy the ritual becomes a device to prolong desire or, as Spencer puts it, “a kind of extended foreplay.”

While the stories by Bridekirk/Dunlop and Spencer highlight the diversity of styles in My Look’s Caress, one of the most refreshing pieces in the anthology is Barbara Brooks’ “Journal of the Parts of the House”. Brooks has approached the notion of romance from a completely different perspective to every other writer in the collection. While most of the contributors base their attitude to romance on inter-personal relationships, Brooks speaks of her “romantic attachment to the bush.” This romantic attachment is similar, in some ways, to the romantic fantasies that some of the other contributors write of. Brooks’ romanticism is the romanticism of possibilities, of an ordinary object becoming the stimulus for the imagination to expand. “Journal of the Rest of the House” contains some of the most evocative and sensual writing in the anthology, yet Brooks is writing not about an affair or a fantasy but about three rooms in her house. The opening of the story sets the tone: “The door opens, you close it behind you and come down the dark hallway. The house is cool and empty. It opens out for you, your presence spills down the hall like water and the small adjustments start.”

A number of other writers also stand out in My Look’s Caress. Janie Conway’s story “Snaps”, Gillian Mears’ “Cousins” and Susan Hampton’s “Lace” are all pieces which stay in the mind long after you have placed the anthology back in the bookcase. Another interesting feature of the collection is that, while the majority of the contributors are women, there are a few male authors scattered through its pages. Interestingly, in general the male writers don’t seem quite as comfortable in the genre as the majority of the female contributors. Nevertheless it is encouraging to see male writers being included in a genre that many regard as pulp writing for women.

My Look’s Caress contains some fine writing and introduces a number of promising young writers. The fact that the theme of romance does not emerge as a single unifying thread is perhaps indicative of the genre as a whole. In the final instance, however, the diversity of style and content of the work collected in My Look’s Caress would suggest that one of the major constraints of romance writing has been our preconception of what romance writing actually is.

Tags: Barbara Brooks, Beth Spencer, beth yahp, Gillian Mears, Janie Conway, Local Consumption Press, margo daly, Mills and Boon, modern romances, Romance, romantic sensibility, Sandra Bridekirk, Sandra Dunlop, Sexual politics, Southerly, Susan Hampton

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Categories 1990, Beth Yahp, Lorraine Falconer, Margo Daly, My Look’s Caress: A Collection of Modern Romances, Southerly

Confronting Racism on Film – Dennis O’Rourke’s ‘Couldn’t Be Fairer’ (1985)

6 Feb

Published in Tribune – Summer Reading Issue (no 2406), 11 December 1985.

Mick Miller (right) and Dennis O'Rourke during the filming of 'Couldn't be Fairer'.

The Northern Territory’s recent campaign against the return of Ayers Rock to its traditional owners underlined the racism inherent in large sections of the white community in Australia. The “Ayers Rock for all Australians” (sic) campaign was not an isolated incident. Attacks on the basic human rights which Aboriginal people have gained through years of struggle are under attack across Australia, from both governments and corporate interests. But nowhere is it as vicious, or as overtly racist, as it is in Queensland and the Northern Territory.

Couldn’t Be Fairer, a new film by Australian filmmaker Dennis O’Rourke confronts the racism of the Queensland government and the white community of Northern Queensland. What emerges is a powerful statement, graphically illustrating the hypocrisy which seems to be the cornerstone of race relations in Queensland. O’Rourke has been internationally recognised as one of the most perceptive filmmakers on tensions between western and traditional culture. His films include Yumi Yet (1976) and Ileksen (1978) about the granting of independence and the first election held in Papua New Guinea. Yap … How Did You Know We’d Like It (1980) examined the effect of American television on the small Micronesian island of Yap. His most recent film, Half Life, which will be commercially released early in 1986, is a devastating account of the US nuclear weapons test program on the Marshall Islands. It concentrates on the effects exposure to highly radioactive fallout from the tests has had upon the inhabitants of the island.

O’Rourke was originally commissioned to make Couldn’t Be Fairer for the BBC program Third Eye, which is a series of programs designed to allow people from the third world to describe their conflicts with western culture. As O’Rourke told Tribune, “North Queensland, for Aboriginal people, could be regarded as the third world. What exists there is basically a colonial situation, both on and off the reserves”.

A major strength of the film is the power and commitment of its narrator, Aboriginal activist and chairperson of the North Queensland Lands Council, Mick Miller. The film follows Mick through Northern Queensland as he talks to his own people and discusses the effect that commercial development, such as mining and tourism, has had upon Aboriginal communities. We see how white Queenslanders effectively marginalise Aboriginal people, pushing them to the outskirts of white society. The alcoholism, sexual exploitation of Aboriginal women, and the degradation which is the result of two centuries of white oppression is in sharp contrast to the glimpses we are allowed of white Queenslanders in the film.

Joh Bjelke-Petersen, and members of the Queensland government, feature prominently in the film. In fact, the title comes from a statement from the Queensland premier regarding his government’s treatment of Aboriginal people. “Treat them the same as everyone else — couldn’t be fairer.” Mick Miller, time and time again, emphasises the hypocrisy and racism which underlies such a statement. Unfortunately, Couldn’t Be Fairer shows that Bjelke-Petersen’s racism is shared by many whites in Northern Queensland. Hotel workers, white drinkers, police, mining companies, even workers in the tourist industry show, by their statements and actions, that Aborigines are not treated the same as everyone else in the Sunshine State.

As Mick Miller says in the film, “We are living on the fringes of a white affluent society, treated as fourth and fifth class citizens …. We are truly strangers in our own land.” For Mick, Couldn’t be Fairer is an important and timely film, Speaking recently to Tribune, he said, “A film had to be made to show that in the little outback towns, nothing has really changed. Blacks are still being bashed and arrested for minor offences and it’s very difficult to lay charges against those responsible. “We wanted to show that, in Queensland, Blacks are still being treated the way they were 30 years ago, and that in some of the pubs in the little towns there are still separate bars for Blacks and whites. We Blacks still aren’t allowed to drink with the local ringers and land owners.”

It was an important film for Dennis O’Rourke as well. Although he had built up a reputation as a leading documentary filmmaker, until Couldn’t be Fairer he hadn’t actually made a major film in Australia. He had, however, been interested in making a film about racism in Queensland for some time. As he told Tribune, “growing up in a number of Queensland country towns, I was exposed to various forms of racism from an early age. “I didn’t understand it then, but there was obviously something different about the relationship between the Aboriginal kids and the white kids at my school. I remember feeling that it didn’t seem quite right. “Later, I decided that I wanted to make a film that was not so much about the ‘Aboriginal situation’, but rather one which attempted to pin down the nature of this sort of racism.”

Couldn’t be Fairer was filmed over a period of three months in late 1984. Dennis travelled around northern Queensland with Mick and members of the North Queensland Land Council, filming and interviewing people both on reserves and in towns. Later, when the film was being edited, Mick was often in Canberra in his various official capacities, so he was able to take an active part in the cutting of the film.

Problems arose, however, when the final version of the film was delivered to the BBC. It was decided that sections of the film were “too shocking” for English TV audiences. As a result, scenes dealing with drunkenness, the sexual oppression of Aboriginal women, and the degradation which many Aborigines had been forced into, were cut from the version which went to air in England. In all about half the film was edited out without the permission of Dennis or Mick.

Although Dennis told Tribune that there wasn’t anything which he actually found objectionable in the BBC version, he believes that the film lost some of its impact and many of the major issues had been subtly avoided. Mick believes that the BBC decision to cut the film reflects the naivety of the British. ‘They simply couldn’t believe that a state in Australia could have laws, or could subject its Black people the way Queensland does.” Mick saw the BBC decision as symptomatic of the attitude of many whites when confronted with the facts about racism — they simply don’t believe it exists or that it is as bad is you make out. “They say ‘We’re not all racist’, but lots of them still scream and oppose the little bit of help the Aboriginal people do get.”

Couldn’t be Fairer illustrates powerfully that the gains made by Aboriginal people in Australia are the result of years of struggle against deeply ingrained racist attitudes. As Mick told Tribune, ‘The system is designed to pull us down and keep us in the muck, but we fought it. That’s how we got to where we are today. Nothing would have changed through the goodwill of the government.”

Tags: Aboriginal documentary, bbc program, Documentary films, Film, Half Life, Ileksen, Joh Bjelke-Petersen, Mick Miller, North Queensland Lands Council, Racism, Third Eye, Tribune, Yap … How Did You Know We’d Like It, Yumi Yet

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Categories 1985, Couldn't Be Fairer, Dennis O'Rourke, Director, Film, Mark Roberts, Tribune

The Ultimate Commitment – Michael Dransfield: Collected Poems

22 Dec

Michael Dransfield Collected Poems Edited by Rodney Hall. University of Queensland Press 1987. Southerly Volume 48. No 4. 1988.

When Michael Dransfiled died on Good Friday, 1973 at the age of 24 he had already published three collections of poetry and established a reputation as one of the most successful and popular of the new wave of young Australian poets who had emerged in the late 1960s. Since his death a further four collections have appeared, culminating in the Collected Poems (UQP 1987). When one considers Dransfield’s rapid rise to prominence, together with the attention focused on his lifestyle and the tragedy of his early death, it was almost inevitable that, to some extent, his life would come to overshadow his poetry. In fact, in the fifteen years since his death, the ‘Dransfield myth’, together with the decline in fashionably of the romanticism at the heart of much of his poetic imagery, has meant that his reputation as a poet has been attacked by a number of critics. In such a context, the publication in one volume of all of Dransfield’s published work, provides us with the opportunity to review his overall achievement and, hopefully, to reach a more realistic assessment of his work.

One cannot begin to examine Dransfield’s career, however, without noting the important role Rodney Hall has played over the last twenty years in bringing Dransfield’s work to the poetry reading public. It was Hall, then poetry editor of The Australian, who first ‘discovered’ Dransfield’ in 1967. It was Hall who passed Dransfield’s work onto Tom Shapcott who was then putting together an anthology of contemporary Australian poetry for Sun Books which would eventually become Australian Poetry Now. Shapcott and Hall also helped Dransfield prepare his first two published collections, Streets of the Long Voyage (UQP 1970) and Inspector of Tides (UQP, 1972). While Hall encouraged Dransfield during his life, Dransfield’s death revealed the extent of Hall’s devotion to the younger poet. Hall took on the task of collecting all of Dransfield’s unpublished poems and prepared a selection for publication. The result were the two posthumous collections, Voyage into Solitude (UQP 1978) and The Second Month of Spring (UQP, 1980).

Hall has organised the Collected Poems so that the volumes in which the poems first appeared are mostly kept intact. As a result the poems appear in rough chronological order beginning with Streets of the Long Voyage (containing poems written between 1964 and 1969), The Inspector of Tides (1968 to 1971), Drug Poems (1967 to 1971), Memoirs of a Velvet Urinal (poems from mid 1971), Voyage into Solitude (a posthumous collection of unpublished poems from 1967 to 1971) and The Second Month of Spring (poems from 1972). Not all these volumes, however, have been left intact. In the introduction Hall argues that where a poem has been published in more than one collection, he has chosen to leave it in the ‘large book’. As Hall believes that Drug Poems was an anthology of “pieces addressing a particular subject”, a number of poems that had previously appeared in Streets of the Long Voyage and Inspector of Tides, and others that would later appear in Memoirs of a Velvet Urinal, have been left out of the Drug Poems section in the Collect Poems. While Hall’s argument for this exclusion is, of course, perfectly reasonable, it means that the overall effect of the Drug Poems section in the Collected Poems is reduced.

Reading through the poems from streets of the Long Voyage and The Inspector of Tides I was once again struck by the balance Dransfield is able to find between the apparent simplicity of his individual images and the overall complexity of his most successful poems. This can be clearly seen in one of his best known poems, ‘Pas de deux for lovers’, which begins

Morning ought not

to be complex

The sun is a seed

cast at dawn into the long

furrow of history

A seed is, of course, a simple object. But it contains the potential to be something far more complex. So Dransfield’s morning sun becomes a planted seed and, as it sprouts, the day suddenly becomes far more complicated until we reach the final line:

…………Day

is so deep already with involvement

This overall richness of imagery, achieved by selective use of language and a careful juxtaposition of individual images, is one of Dransfield’s great strength in these first two books. One can recall numerous poems where he achieves it – ‘Chris’, “Surreptitious as Desdemona’, ‘Linear B’, ‘Death of Salvatore Quasimodo’, ‘Bum’s Rush’, ‘Ground Zero’, ‘Geography’, ‘Loft’ and ‘Inspector of Tides’ among others. While Dransfield, of course, was not the only one of his contemporaries to achieve this, the ease with which he achieved it again and again in these first two books, both of which were published before he was 22, is an indication of just how early he matured as a poet.

Dransfield was a self-declared romantic and the richness and delicacy of his imagery was an important part of his romanticism. The poems in his first two books are filled with what might be called clichéd romantic symbols – magic carpets, crystal wine glasses, Greek mythology, Vincent van Gough, ruined mansions , fallen aristocrats, candles and dukes. But Dransfield’s romanticism was not confined to his poetry. He increasingly attempted to live the romantic image of the ‘suffering’ artist cut off from mainstream society because of his/her sensitivity. This can, perhaps, be best seen in his drug poetry. Streets of the Long Voyage, The Inspector of Tides and Drug Poems contain some very powerful and moving drug poetry. ‘Bum’s Rush’, for example, is one of Dransfield’s best poems. But as his addiction deepened, drug related imagery began to dominate his poetry more and more.

In his earlier poetry drugs became a vehicle for his romanticism:

Becalmed now

on Coleridge’s painted sea in Rimbaud’s

drunken boat. High like de Quincey or Vasco

I set a course

for the Pillars of Hercules, meaning to sail

over the edge of the world

‘Overdose’

Even death, if it was surrounded by drug imagery, took its place in Dransfield’s iconography of romanticism:

last week, I think on Tuesday,

she died

just gave up breathing

toppled over

a big smashed doll

with the needle still in her arm

I made a funeral of leaves

and sang the Book of Questions

to her face as white as hailstones

to her eyes as closed as heaven

‘For Ann so still and dreamy’

Dransfield, in fact, clothed the life of the poet and the junkie in the same romantic imagery;

Once you have become a drug addict

you never want to be anything else

‘Fix’

to be a poet in Australia

is the ultimate commitment

‘Like this for years’

The inference here is clear, poets and junkies are really two sides of the same coin. This sense of the suffering individual artist/drug user, while clearly growing out of the milieu of the late 1960’s, has come, in time, to represent the less successful aspects of Dransfield’s romanticism.

On the acknowledgement page of the original Sun Books edition of Drug Poems, Dransfield states that a number of the poems “will appear in Memories of a Velvet Urinal to be published in the USA in 1972.” This was an overly optimistic note. According to Hall, Geoffrey Dutton had promised to take the manuscript with him to the US but, as it turned out, it was not accepted for publication. Memories of a Velvet Urinal was, in fact, to remain in a number of different manuscript forms until Maximus Books in a Adelaide published a version in 1975.

Shortly before his death, Dransfield gave Hall one of the manuscripts of Memories of a Velvet Urinal which Hall then sent to a British publisher. As this was clearly a later version of the manuscript than the one eventually published by Maximus Books, Hall has used it in the Collected Poems. The differences between the two versions are quite important. Dransfield had actually discarded a number of poems which appeared in the Maximus edition – “madness systems parts one, two, three, four and the last”, “Making it legal 1 &2”, “Flametree” and “To the great presidents” appear only as appendices to the Collected Poems. The situation is complicated by the appearance in the Collected Poems of another poem with the title “To the great presidents”. In the Maximus edition this poem appeared under the title

were                  no

           mar

no   more   war

Hall argues, and the evidence would appear to support him, that this actually represents a separate concrete poem and not a title. At this point I would have appreciated a further note of explanation from Hall concerning the transfer of the title “To the great presidents” from one poem to another.

The Collected Poems version also rearranges the order of the poems so that the book is now divided into four sections. This is, in fact, the most important change as it brings Memoirs of a Velvet Urinal into line with both Streets of the Long Voyage and The Inspector of Tides, both of which were divided into sections. The Maximus edition has the feeling of almost being thrown together. It begins with ‘Epitaph with two quotations’, a poem which is physically difficult to read and one of the weaker poems in the book. The Collected Poems version, on the other hand, opens with the title poem, ‘Memoirs of a velvet urinal’, a striking poem about a homosexual encounter. Dransfield, by regrouping the collection, and rejecting a number of poems, has tightened the book considerably. Whereas it was quite easy to believe after reading the Maximus edition that all the poems had been written in the four-month period between May and August 1971 (which, in fact they had), the Collected Poems version has a much more crafted and professional feel to it.

There is also a tendency in Memoirs of a Velvet Urinal for Dransfield to move away from the heady romanticism of his earlier work. In a poem like ‘Play something Spanish’, lines like:

planes of light. yes. they were effective. yes. you

are lost in them, their obvious coast

led you away to a place you cannot identify. spain?

never. play something metaphysical…..

suggest that contemporary American poetry was beginning to have a greater influence on his work. Unfortunately, there are also poem, such as ‘Poem started in a bus’, which depends upon a heavily clichéd, moralist ending:

…..Its easy

to forget violence while violence

forgets you

It’s difficult to escape the feeling that Dransfield could still have done more to the manuscript of Memoirs of a Velvet Urinal. The evidence suggests that, in the face of a number of publishers’ rejections, this editorial process was well underway at the time of his death. If he had lived, Memoirs of a Velvet Urinal, in time, may have been shaped into a volume which surpassed the achievement of his first two books.

Voyage into Solitude is the first of two collections of unpublished work which Rodney Hall edited after Dransfield’s death. In this first collection Hall assembled his selection from the period 1967 to 1971. In effect this represents the material that Dransfield, and those who helped him, rejected when editing material for those books he did publish during his life.

Overall it is probably fair to say that Voyage into Solitude is a tribute to the editorial process which went into the first four books. There are only a few poems in this collection which I would have been prepared to argue for. These would include ‘Sonnet’, ‘The sun but not our children’ and the wonderfully descriptive ‘Pioneer Lane’. For the most part, however, it is easy to see why these poems were left out. Many seem incomplete, an image doesn’t work properly or, as is more common, is too clichéd to be effective. Though it was obviously important for Hall to collect and publish these “rejected” poems, in the context of the Collected Poems, Voyage into Solitude remains a book primarily for the Dransfield scholar or enthusiast.

While Dransfield seemed to be developing, almost organically, away from the lush romanticism of his earlier work in Memoirs of a Velvet Urinal, the poems in Hall’s second posthumous collection, The Second Month of Spring (UQP 1980), marks a dramatic change in both style and content. All the poems in this collection were written during the last year of Dransfield’s life. In April 1972 Dransfiield, while riding his motorcycle, was run off the road south of Sydney by an off-duty policeman. Besides some serious injuries to his head and leg, the pethadine he was given in hospital undid months of effort put into overcoming his addiction. As might be expected, the accident figures prominently in these last poems:

used to get through

three five six

books a day

now can’t read

much more than

one short poem

or an article

blame it on

medication

happens to all who happen here

it was the same

in darlo

months ago

since my last

accident

april

in fact

i write

cannot revise

they also serve

‘October elegy for Litt’

Dransfield stopped referring to his work as poems during this final period, preferring to call them raves. In effect the work in The Second Month of Spring can be likened to the final explosion of light a star gives off as it starts to collapse in upon itself. These last poems are, in fact, intensely personal, almost to the point of being a diary in verse.

As far as style goes they are poems cut back to the bare essentials:

even an

ugly joint

will get you high

as afghan

hills

‘imports’

Word plays often become an end in themselves, and even his earlier work is not safe:

look ahead

straits of the long

voyeur

‘cadlike’

While this is not great poetry, it is difficult not to be moved by the extremes of emotion – anger, hope, resignation – and, at times, the intense physical pain, which these poems highlight.

Rodney Hall, in his introduction to Voyage into Solitude, made the point that Dransfield is one of the few Australian poets to ever have “a genuine popular following….among people who do not otherwise read poetry”. The sheer size and scope of the Collected Poems, I believe, illustrates why Dransfield was able to build up this following.

Dransfield may have felt that being a poet in Australia was “the ultimate committment”, but there is no doubt that the late 60s were an exciting time to be a young poet in Australia. While most of his contemporaries saw themselves as “modern” poets, breaking the hold of the conservatives on Australian poetry, Dransfield was reading the romantics as well as contemporary American and European poetry. Though critics may disapprove of Dransfield’s romanticism, there is little doubt that, during the late 60s, it tapped a feeling among young people and, as a result, can be said to lie behind much of Dransfield’s initial popularity.

Perhaps, in the final instance, Dransfield’s greatest strength can be seen in the development we can trace in the Collected Poems from the early, richly romantic poems, through to the more hard-edged poems of Memoirs of a Velvet Urinal. Sadly, his tragic death in 1973 cut short this development. We should be grateful to Rodney Hall for editing this collection because, if nothing else, it has helped focus attention back towards the poems and away from the “Dransfield myth” which has come to dominate his reputation since his death.

Tags: Australian Poetry, Australian Poetry Now, Drug Poems, Geoffrey Dutton, Inspector of Tides, Mark Roberts, Memoirs of a Velvet Urinal, Michael Dransfield, Rodney Hall, Southerly, Streets of the Long Voyage, The Second Month of Spring, Tom Shapcott, Voyage into Solitude

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Categories 1987, Michael Dransfield, Michael Dransfield Collected Poems, Southerly

Susan Hampton COSTUMES – P76 Magazine Issue 1 1983

1 Dec

Susan Hampton COSTUMES Transit Poetry 1981

Over a number of years now Susan Hampton’s reputation as a poet of a consistently high standard has been steadily increasing, largely as a result of the considerable body of her work which has appeared in various literary magazines and journals. It comes as a surprise, then, to realise that Costumes, her first complete volume, has been greeted with almost two years of critical neglect.

If we turn to the book itself in an attempt to find reasons for this neglect, we quickly find ourselves disappointed for Costumes is, in many ways, a virtuoso debut, as Hampton shows herself to be in control of many different styles and techniques. One has only to compare the surrealist prose piece ‘Catalogue of Five Words at an Exhibition’ with the apparent autobiographical detail of ‘In the Kitchens’, to be aware of the range and scope of her work.

Throughout the volume, Hampton is always conscious of being a poet, both in the way she observes what is happening around her, and how she relates it to her own emotions. We become aware of the importance she attaches to individual words in a ‘Catalogue of Five Words at an Exhibition’; here Hampton describes a method of memorising single words which she has taken into the country:

We begin at the Angel Islington in a pub, looking at ourselves in the mirror. As we looked, she told me the first word. We walked from then pub to a phone-box, to the supermarket then to the tube station, the flowerseller with his red blooms, past a hoarding, then along Upper Street to the doorknocker on her house. At each of these stops she gave me a new word, and I was to recall them by walking this journey until I could do it in my mind, associating each word with an object on the way. It proved successful, and I wondered whether this was how Mandelstam’s wife memorised his poems to bring them out.

Words are obviously important here, and a close relationship exists between the individual words and the associated objects. It is no co-incidence that ‘Catalogue of Five Words at an Exhibition’ opens Costumes, for through it we are introduced to the poetry that will follow. The idea of a “Museum of Words” recalls the various museums in Murry Bail’s Homesickness, but Hampton sees little point in museums themselves:

The Museum of Words. I think this is a bad idea. Leave

these in the gallery for a while, and then give them

to people walking by.

The poems that follow are definitely not intended to hang in a gallery. Although our first reaction may be that Costumes consists of a number of very good, but also very different poems, as we progress further we become aware of a number of subtle but important ways in which poems of opposing techniques and styles are, in fact, related to each other. This can perhaps be best seen if we look at the way a number of Hampton’s best poems grow directly from everyday incidents. Early in the title poem ‘Costumes’, for example, we read:

Waiting for a bus, I rock gently on the edge

of the footpath, all manner of people coming past me

the ones in green dresses the ones with very short hair

In ‘Costumes’, and other poems such as ‘Jubilate Sydney’, ‘Ode to the Car Radio’ and ‘Waiting for Rain’, we see emerging a particular way of looking at the city, and, more importantly, the poet’s relationship to that city. The concluding lines of ‘Jubilate Sydney’ reflects one manifestation of that relationship:

For tenthly there’s a cloud accompanying me

my windscreen is better than the latest Italian movie

The same sentiment appears in ‘Waiting for rain’:

& yes, life’s an Australian movie just now, no plot

but some very taking shots

Although part of the attraction of these poems lies in the way the actual incidents are described, their real strength is Hampton’s ability to suggest an inter-relationship between many apparently trival observations. In a comparatively simple poem, such as ‘Waiting for rain’, this is achieved by the way the richness of the first section, where the poet is riding a bike across the campus of Sydney University, is contrasted with the sterile second section, when she has arrived at work. The poem works towards its final statement in the same way that a skillful scientist might support her/his theory, for when the poem concludes:

I want to go out into the rain.

there seems to be no other possible conclusion.

‘Costumes’ can be seen as an extension of ‘Waiting for Rain’. It is a far more ambitious poem, and structurally more complex, but again it relies upon the poet’s observation of her surroundings. This time, however, she is still and watches the city move around her. Her passiveness, though, is only physical, for the way people “narcissistically half-watch” themselves in the numerous mirrors of the MLC Centre becomes a metaphor for the shallow nature of the glamorous image they seek to buy:

And the mirors say, you have bought something from us,

look at us and see how you shine as you move, buy more

look more, shine more, buy yourself from us we have

a big range of styles.

The poem becomes increasingly ironical so that when the people leave the mirrors and walk into the street past

cripples with badges

fat girls from out of town, warehouse clerks with sore legs

and white noses, past all the losers.

the glamour and shine has all disappeared.

The five poems grouped together in ‘In the Kitchen’ also appear to be largely autobiographical, describing the poet’s childhood in Inverall and Newcastle. There is a gentle feeling of progression about the sequence. Each poem seems immediate and important, perhaps because with the exception of ‘Invererell’, they are all written in the present tense. They reflect a child’s growth, from early memories of an insurance sales and amateur magician, to bars in Newcastle and writing poetry imitating Eliot. The sequence appears almost crafted, for while it has at its centre, the memories of different kitchens, each poem expresses a mood unique to a particular period of growing up.

On e feature, then which runs through an unites Costumes is the way in which the majority of the poems have, as their centre, the poet herself. The best poems in the collection, however, use this as a starting point to make statements which transcend the personal. This is true not only of those poems which deal with the external world, but also those which concentrate on the personal or physical subjects. ‘It’, for example, begins by describing the feelings, both physical and emotional, associated with menstruation:

It grabs from behind &

whomp! you’ve gone mad again tonight, despite Vitamin B

& the gynaecologist’s plan for sanity.

As the description continues, the poet’s anger grows until, in the final lines, it overflows into violence:

Now the world’s

a different place, malign for sure, & we’re crying

(big girls do) about nothing, we know its nothing,

but we really want to kick the shit out of something

tonight, we’re violent, & we’re tired of making

little parcels & putting them in the cupboard.

In the final instance Costumes is true to the criteria that Hampton herself stated at the beginning of the collection in ‘Catalogue of Five Words at an Exhibition’. The majority of the poems refuse to be “hung” for an length of time on the gallery wall. Rather we find ourselves recalling the way we have felt in a particular situation,or perhaps see elements of ourselves in the poetry, so that seemingly personal statements suddenly take on a much wider significance. Costumes confirms Hampton’s standing as a poet of exceptional ability, and establishes he position as one of the best writers to emerge over the last few years. The fact that this collection has passed almost unnoticed by the majority of critics (there have been a few exceptions) is a sad comment on the quality of contemporary criticism.

Mark Roberts

1983

Photograph of Susan Hampton in 1981 by John Tranter. Thanks to http://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/

Tags: Murry Bail, Susan Hampton

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Categories 1981, Mark Roberts, P76, Susan Hampton

POETRY REVIEW. Scarp 23 October 1993. Craig Powell, Gary Catalano, Jill Jones and Martin Harrison.

22 Nov

Minga Street: New and Selected Poems, Craig Powell. Hale & Iremonger 1993. http://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poems-book/minga-street-0075000

Selected Poems: 1973-1992, Gary Catalano UQP. 1993. http://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poems-book/selected-poems-1973-1992-0054000

Flagging Down Time, Jill Jones, Five Islands Press 1993. http://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poems-book/flagging-down-time-0135000

The Distribution of Voice, Martin Harrison, UQP 1993. http://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poems-book/the-distribution-of-voice-0648000

(As these books are out of print I have provide links back to the Australia Poetry Library were the books reviewed are now online).

In the closing scene of Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint are battling the forces of evil on top of the Mount Rushmore monument. Saint falls and Grant scrambles down to save her. He is holding her with one hand while the other hand grips the cliff top. Just as the bad guy is about to crush Grant’s fingers under his boot, a shot rings out the bad guy falls dead. The camera then zooms onto Grant’s arm as he strains to pull Saint to safety. As the camera tracks back the scene has suddenly changed to the interior of a railway sleeping car. Rather than pulling Saint to safety, Grant is helping her up to the top bunk. Suddenly the scene changes again and we see the last shot of the film which shows an express train plunging into a tunnel.

Such symbolism, while very obvious and heavy handed, works because Hitchcock had his tongue very firmly in his check. In Craig Powell’s poetry very similar symbolism appears again and again, but there is no undercurrent of humour to relieve the ever thickening emotions. In fact the very image of a train plunging into a tunnel appears in one of the newer poems in Minga Street: New and Selected Poems, a volume which combines a number of new poems with a selection from his previous four collections of poetry:

miners or fetlers

With calcium grins and sooty jowls

A child knows they are cheering for him

Coalcliff now the deepest tunnel starts

And, just in case the symbolism of the tunnel escapes you, the poem concludes

And a cello sings in his throat

Of the shadow immense womb of rock

Where he sleeps with his eyes white and wide

‘In the Presence of Paul Tortielier’

Powell’s professional background as a psychoanalyst has obviously been one of the major influences on his writing. In ‘Visitors’, another recent poem, he writes of the fragile nature of a family’s perceived history:

whose mother’s lover fumbled at her at nine?

She is easily wiped out you being her only

witness and I don’t always want to hear you

And your mother’s friend plucks another scone and simpers

‘You must be very proud of your mother’

You smile you ask politely ‘How long have you known her?’

‘Visitors’

Throughout his work Powell continually attempts to break through the mental barriers to explore what David Brooks has called ‘the psychic depths’. Unfortunately, far too often, these depths are populated by the overused imagery of Freudian psychology. This is not to say that Powell has not written some very fine poetry. Rereading some of the Canadian poems which were written during the mid to late seventies, I was impressed by the intense lyricism of the best of Powell’s poetry. In ‘Canada Geese’, for example, Powell uses the image of geese flying south to suggest absence and renewal:

Some evening    when we are

Unaware      they will beat southward

invisible by the windy

stars    and frost will affect

our teeth

‘Canada Geese’

As a record of Powell’s work over the last twenty-five years Minga Street is, in the final instance, a frustrating collection. I was continually drawn towards Powell’s gentle lyricism which creates some memorable images. At the same time I found it difficult to accept the overuse of psychoanalytic imagery where, for example, old mens bodies “glimmer with the sperm/of sorrows” (‘Spoken to Women’), and where

the pure horses half-sleeping rise

from the earth so high

and so quiet their eyes gentle

upon us searching towards

a distance emptied of images

where they sway our seed in their thighs

‘in Spruce Woods’

or where trees are:

like women

sheathed in bark to their navels but

their eyes and breasts fervent and lovely

‘Lessons at Collaroy Plateau’

Gary Catalano’s Selected Poems 1972-1992, like Powell’s collection, also contains some previously uncollected poems. But while Powell delights in a poetry dense with imagery, Catalano, for the most part, is a far more subtle poet. At times, particularly in his early work, the simplicity of his imagery suggest the influence of haiku, Poems such as ‘Tree’, ‘The Blizzard’, ‘Against the Thunder’ and ‘The Exploration of a Continent’ from the 1973 collection ‘Remembering the Rural Life’, are short, simple poems whose impact is much greater than one would expect at first glance:

A horse

Shaking the dust

From his coat

flies

Noon heat.

In the clear

blue sky

no cloud to

expunge our defeat.

‘The Exploration of a Continent’

Complementing these short poems in the selection from his from his earliest work is a long poem ‘Remembering the Rural Life’. In this impressive poem Catalano recreates the landscape of his youth, a landscape lost to him both by time and the spread of suburbia. In the Parramatta of the late fifties and early sixties Catalano draws together the threads of his background – his family’s Italian heritage, his adolescent bravado and the growing conflict between a father’s vision of his son’s future and the son’s interest in art and poetry. The strength of the this poem is that it avoids slipping into sentimentality; instead Catalano has utilised an economy of image which is apparent in his shorter poems to create a narrative about memory and growth which effectively sets the tone for much of the other work in the collection.

Catalano is one of the few Australian poets to work extensively with the prose poem. Selected Poems brings together a handful of prose poems from Heaven of Rags (1982) (http://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poems-book/heaven-of-rags-0359000) and a selection from his book of prose poems Fresh Linen (1988) (http://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poems-book/fresh-linen-0360000). Catalano’s style is ideally suited to the prose poem as he is easily able to avoid the poetry being subsumed by the structure of the prose. In one of his best prose poems ‘At the Source’, Catalano uses water flowing from the source of a creek to the ocean as a metaphor for speech:

It is here that we find our clearest

image of speech. They taste so clean,

these syllables of the dark, and they

make us realise that all our words

should be pitched at a whisper.

But, once speech, “these shy waters’ flow into the ocean, their nature changes:

Here it bends

itself on the ear like a sheet of fresh,

unscored linen…and here it offers an

escape from the inchoate music of

the world.

‘At the Source’

There are also a number of prose poems among his new work including the very brief poem ‘Silver and Gold’ which once again highlights the beautiful simplicity which Catalano can achieve at his best:

The waves look like silver-foil. But

when they break on the shore, I hear

the sound of a hand sifting through a

bag of grain.

‘Silver and Gold’

While Jill Jones has not yet reached that point in her career which would justify the publication of a volume of selected poems, at her current rate of production she could very soon reach the milestone which Powell and Catalano have just achieved. In fact, the success of her first book, The Mask and the Jagged Star (1992) http://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poems-book/the-mask-and-the-jagged-star-0062000 has ensured that her second collection, Flagging Down Time, will attract more than its share of critical attention.

As the title would suggest, Jones’ book is concerned with the concepts of time and change. For Jones, time represents the potential for both growth and decay, and among the images that recur throughout the book is that of the garden. Grass seeds in the desert, for example, lie dormant until rain falls:

She’s like plants at ground level

surviving as seeds through dry periods –

tough outside while inside

she’ll grow the grasslands of dreams.

This poem concludes with one of the most striking images in the book:

that road where past and future meet

only at the horizon

and there’s all that walking between

‘The Desert’

The idea of time running from the past through the present to the future is reflected in the title poem where time is a taxi that can be flagged down:

the meter is silent now

but just as inexorable

as the ticking of my plastic watch

‘Flagging Down Time’

Flagging Down Time concludes with the impressive longer poem ‘Eleven fifteen’. While time can be a road which runs from horizon to horizon, one has to remember that the horizon also runs in an arc which joins the two ends of the road. This sense of the cyclic nature of time is picked up in ‘Eleven Fifteen’ where the final line of each stanza becomes the first line of the next. Such a structure reflects the repeated rituals which seem to merge days together while, in fact, weeks, months and years may pass:

……fantasies

which take on a stranger syntax as I travel

through the midnight hour that has always stood

like a dark faery nought, round zero of change

‘Eleven fifteen’

Flagging Down Time should confirm Jones’ reputation as a major new voice in Australian poetry. It will be interesting to see how much longer we have to wait for her third collection.

Martin Harrison’s poetry can appear difficult to come to terms with on a first reading. It is a dense poetry with rich images overlapping and merging, driven by an often sensuous use of language which at times seems almost ready to rebel being restricted to the page. Indeed, to appreciate Harrison’s work, the reader must realise that often the sound of the language is as important as the meaning of the word.

As well as being a poet, Harrison has a background in sound/text performance and is a teacher of sound composition. While his poetry may not be performance pieces in the way Amanda Stewart’s work is, the influence of sound and film in his work is obvious. At times, for example, Harrison’s descriptions are so intense they are almost filmic:

You want it all to come back –

April’s sharper lights,

Light-grids, networks, windows off

A shady green

‘Beauty Line’

But it is a film with a distinctive sound track. The best poems in this book seem to invoke an image which is aural as well as visual. In ‘Meeting’, a poem within the long sequence of poems called ‘Films’, Harrison captures the sound of the wind rustling through the grass:

Wind jiggles the shell-grass

Making itself visible

Like someone brushing a mobile

‘4. Meeting (from Films)’

In another poem, ‘Marriage and Soundscape’, Harrison takes great care in describing a sound:

Then a shag took off from these waters, making an interval, a year,

My wife has just seen it – calling it ‘hair on a lens’ and ‘shadow noise’.

(There is green, there is a clapping-Sound, there is wind.)

‘Marriage and Soundscape’

Harrison’s imagery often flows together in the same way that a sound can gradually be transformed into a completely different sound without a casual listener being aware of the change. In ‘Then and Now’, for example, a description of the wind blowing leaves in a tree becomes, within the space of four lines, a lion and the entire poem moves off in a completely different direction:

Late wind arrives, shakes the leaves

in a porridge of shimmers, like a mane-

A lion gets up, wlks about

Caged. foetid, in a fitful mind

‘7. Then and Now (from Films)’

Mark Roberts 1993

(Note: the layout of the quoted in poems in this review in Scarp was a little problematic. We possible I have gone back to originals poems to try and ensure the layout is correct in this version. From memory I also beliee there was a final paragraph to this review. But as I no longer have the original copy I have left the last section as it appeared in SCARP)

Tags: Amanda Stewart, Australian Poetry, Craig Powell, Gary Catalano, Jill Jones, Martin Harrison

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Categories 1993, Australian Poetry, Craig Powell, Gary Catalano, Jill Jones, Mark Roberts, Martin Harrison, Scarp

Peter Carey’s First Novel

17 Nov

Review of Bliss, By Peter Carey, University of Queensland Press, 1981. Going Down Swinging Issue 5 Spring 1982.

Peter Carey’s first novel, Bliss, must have been one of the most eagerly awaited books of last year. Its publication was preceded bu profiles of Carey in both The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, both of which later gave the book good reviews. But even before the literary establishment began its fanfare I was suspicious of Carey’s novel. I have never been able to fully reconcile his role in advertising with his reputation as one of Australia’s leading younger writers. Despite this I enjoyed his first two books of short stories, though at times I doubted his motives. As a result I approached Bliss in a critical frame of mind. It lasted twenty pages. Once again Carey won me over in spite of myself.

The novel is basically the story of Harry Joy who, like Carey, is in is late thirties and involved in the running of a moderately successful advertising company. Harry, however, suffers a heart attack and lies in his backyard, clinically dead for nine minutes. During his ‘first death’ he discovers:

“That there were many worlds, layer upon layer, as thin as filo pastry.”

For a time he is completely at peace, but the possibility that a corresponding world of terror may exist sends him fleeing back to his body as it is being carried out the front gate. The rest of the novel is concerned, min the main, with Harry’s response to his new found insights into the evil and hypocrisy which everyone else takes for granted. To add to his confusion Harry actually believes that he has died and the new world which he is discovering is, in reality, hell.

Bliss adopts a far more rigid moral and political stance than any of the earlier stories. Of course Carey’s work has always been political in a sense, one only has to look at the title stories from The fat man in History and War Crimes for evidence of this. What I am suggesting, however, is that in Bliss Carey is being more directly political than before, and, particularly in his portrayal of the advertising industry, manages to make quite strong moral judgments.

One of Harry’s most disturbing discoveries in Hell is the fact that many of the products he has been involved in advertising are strongly carcinogenic. Worse still, he realizes that he was perhaps the only person who wasn’t aware of it. Carey also hints at a cancer epidemic which, we are told, will sweep through the West and most of the industrialised East within a few years.

It is interesting, while still on the political aspects of Bliss, to look at a comment Carey made in an interview with Kate Ahearne, Stephen Williams and Kevin Brophy (Going Down Swinging No. 1 1980). When questioned about Craig Munro’s doubts about his role in advertising, Carey answered that it had given him a chance to work with other people, and also that it had given him a solid political education. It is possible to apply this statement to Harry Joy, though perhaps his ‘political education’ is a little sudden. For most of the novel Harry has to struggle with his political consciousness, his desire to produce a ‘good ad’. The conflict is only finally resolved when Bettina, his wife, finally gets the chance to fulfill a lifelong ambition of designing and producing her own ads. She is blind to everything but the beauty of her ads and her desire to break into the big New York ad houses. Her dreams though, are shattered by her discovery that she is suffering from incurable cancer, probably as a result of long term exposure to petrol vapours. Bettina turns against the petrol company for which she has been designing ads, destroying both herself, and the entire Board of the company with a petrol bomb.

Despite the ‘political realism’ of Bliss it is, in the final instance, far more optimistic than most of the stories. Carey himself admits (GDS, No1, 1980, p.46) that his early stories are, essentially, fatalistic. In the second collection, War Crimes, stories such as “He Found Her in Summer”, and “The Puzzling Nature of Blue”, are at least moving towards a position where the possibility of optimism is admitted. Bliss, however, concludes on a note of ecstasy. Carey refers to the unqualified happy ending to Bliss in the interview by commenting on Harry’s development from total innocence to a point where he confronts “the shit out of the world and comes to some real positive conclusions about it.” I agree with Carey when he says that this represents a big development (movement is probably a better word) on his earlier work.

Bliss, both in its language and content, is a very crafted novel. Although primarily the story of Harry Joy, all the other major characters dominate sections of the novel. This I had a feeling that hidden within the novel were a number of individual stories, cut up and distributed carefully throughout the book. Or perhaps this is coincidental, a result of the method of narration that Carey has employed. We learn, in the last lines, that the narrator’s voice in fact belongs to Harry and Honey’s children, who have obviously grown in a up in a tradition of storytelling, a profession that Harry adopted after his arrival at Bog Onion Road. So finally the novel turns a complete circle. Harry finds that the Bliss that was suggested in his ‘first’ death finally in his third death, after he has returned to the childhood memories of a guru-like father. The ending maybe, as some critics have noted, simplistic and contrived; nevertheless it still managed to move me on the two occasions I read it.

Of the many diverse influences on the novel, perhaps the most surprising, as far as I was concerned, was the apparent debt Carey owed to Tom Robbins of Another Roadside Attraction and Even Cowgirls Get the Blues fame. The major areas where this becomes obvious is in the method and style of narration and the character of Honey Barbara. In both of Robbins’ early books one of the minor characters later identifies himself as the narrator, explaining both the insights and the asides which characterize the narrative style. In Bliss, the revelation of Harry and Harry’s children as narrators can perhaps help to explain a similarity between Carey’s and Robbins’ narrative voice. The character of Honey Barbara also appears to owe much to Robbins. The similarity between Honey and many of Robbins’ female characters is particularly noticeable in small details such as the way she walks and her often impulsive, but enlightened dialogue. This became for me the weakest aspect of the novel, perhaps because the flaw was so unexpected and because Honey Barbara is the bridge between the cancerous city world and peace of the alternative life-style at Bog Onion Road. This Honey, who eventually becomes the most important character after Harry Joy, becomes, at times, almost contrived, and disrupts the smoothness which characterizes the rest of the novel.

The publication of Bliss came at a time when Carey’s earlier stories were being published overseas in a variety of different forms. It remains to be seen how many readers in America and England will react to the Carey novel. For me, despite a few flaws, the hype that surrounded its publication and my own doubts about Carey’s 9decreasing) role in advertising, Bliss was one of the more impressive novels I read during 1981.

Mark Roberts 1982

Tags: 1982, Australian Novel, Peter Carey

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Categories 1982, Australian Novel, Going Down Swinging, Mark Roberts, Peter Carey

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