{"id":302,"date":"2014-03-05T23:21:14","date_gmt":"2014-03-05T23:21:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/?p=302"},"modified":"2014-03-05T23:30:11","modified_gmt":"2014-03-05T23:30:11","slug":"young-poets-an-australian-anthology-reviews","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/?p=302","title":{"rendered":"Young Poets: An Australian Anthology: Reviews"},"content":{"rendered":"

From Christopher Bantick,\u00a0The Australian,\u00a0<\/em>March 24, 2012:<\/p>\n

JOHN Leonard is one of the few publishers left in Australia with a belief in poetry.<\/p>\n

Since 2006, he has published work from seasoned voices including Vincent Buckley (edited by Chris Wallace-Crabbe), Peter Steele and Mark O\u2019Connor, along with newer poets such as Dan Disney and Elizabeth Campbell.<\/p>\n

This anthology of seven youngish poets \u2014 the age range is 28 to 35 \u2014 showcases a lively Australian verse.<\/p>\n

Certainly, the poems collected underscore how traditional forms have knelt to the dominance of free verse. Poetry that comments on the personal mythologies of the poets may disengage readers, and there is some of that here.<\/p>\n

In his lively and assertive preface, Leonard writes that there is a \u201cfair amount of puffery\u201d in the poetry industry. Read this as indulgent lauding over trifling ability. He attempts to set a benchmark: all the poets in this anthology have published their second volume of verse or are at the point of completing their second manuscript.<\/p>\n

Given this serves as a kind of quality control, it is unusual that Leonard feels he must offer a defence of free verse: \u201cThe dance of free verse has always been consciously reassessed and reinvigorated by its best writers in succeeding generations.\u201d Robert Frost was of a different mind. His withering return of serve, \u201cI\u2019d as soon as write free verse as play tennis with the net down\u201d, is perhaps out of play in this company.<\/p>\n

The seven poets \u2014 Campbell, Bonny Cassidy, Sarah Holland-Batt, LK Holt, Graeme Miles, Simon West and Petra White \u2014 dance on common ground: how to quantify contemporary experience and explore its emotional seepage.<\/p>\n

Collectively, their poems are full of youthful energy and the vibrant language of a restive generation trying to make its mark. There is also more than a little resonance of Michael Dransfield\u2019s quip: \u201cTo be a poet in Australia is the ultimate commitment.\u201d<\/p>\n

But if youth\u2019s remit is to question, then Campbell takes up the challenge in Inferno: \u201cWhat is a soul made of\/ when it is made? Each soul an image\/ of its poet, test-run.\u201d There\u2019s a similar searching in Longitude when she asks: \u201cWhere does a child learn to die for love?\u201d<\/p>\n

Cassidy is perhaps the most adventurous poet here. Her elasticity with line lengths and structure challenges readers to stay with her. We do. The reason is found in a poem such as Range. We want to know how a bird can \u201cbreak itself down\u201d and \u201ctie its tune into a knot\u201d. How different is Holland-Batt\u2019s assured confidence in her sense of the everyday. Juxtaposing ideas and the reality of found objects in a poem such as The Art of Disappearing, she moves where \u201cThe moon that broke on the fence post will not hold\u201d and declares: \u201cIt is an art, this ever more escaping grasp of things.\u201d The clarity of Holland-Batt\u2019s observations sit comfortably with the poignant imaginative discourse of Holt\u2019s timely Douglas Mawson Nearing Base-Camp, in which she reflects on \u201cman\u2019s proneness to die, in the name of survival\u201d, only then to remind us that Mawson\u2019s steps are a \u201chistory of the honour-weary foot\u201d.<\/p>\n

Judith Wright once said poems need to be as \u201cfunctional as an axe\u201d. Miles shows this to be so in his deft combination of the everyday with the miasmic. Vapour trails of the classical world become something solid and permanent in Night Breathing. This slightly nostalgic recounting of the closeness of father and son is deeply affecting.<\/p>\n

So, too, is West\u2019s prose-like free verse, reaching for an explanation, in Marnpi Rockhole by Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri: \u201cSomewhere among the shifting sand hills there is a fold\/ a slit where the mind\u2019s eye\/grafts dimensions that have no horizon.\u201d<\/p>\n

A similar kind of evaluation is present in White\u2019s encounter with the notions of desert. In Kangaroos, for example, roadkill becomes a catalyst for ruminations on the transience of life and one decision that makes all the difference: \u201cBut each death looks momentary, one wrong leap against\/ thousands of right ones.\u201d<\/p>\n

James McAuley\u2019s sagacious advice in To Any Poet seems apposite to these young poets: \u201cTake salt upon your tongue.\/ And do not feed the heart\/ With sorrow, darkness or lies:\/ These are the death of art.\u201d<\/p>\n

While this anthology may not quite herald a generational shift, it nonetheless announces the readiness of these poets to take centre court, with or without a net.<\/p>\n

Christopher Bantick is a Melbourne-based writer and critic.<\/p>\n

From Fiona Wright,\u00a0Sydney Morning Herald<\/a>\u00a0,\u00a0<\/em>April 7, 2012:<\/p>\n

John Leonard states in this new anthology of young Australian poets that he sees the book as a companion to\u00a0The Puncher and Wattmann Anthology of Australian Poetry<\/em>, which he edited in 2009. Indeed, there has been no shortage of poetry anthologies published in the past few years, nor is Leonard new to the anthologising game. This collection is intended as \u201da starter for discussion\u201d about the poetics of a new generation of poets \u2013 selecting from the work of Elizabeth Campbell, Bonny Cassidy, Sarah Holland-Batt, L.K. Holt, Graeme Miles, Simon West and Petra White.<\/p>\n

Leonard has chosen poets younger than 35 who have at least two collections of poetry either published or nearly complete. But the selection is far from demographically diverse. All but two of the poets live in Melbourne and many have existing connections to John Leonard Press and to each other. But the anthology doesn\u2019t claim to be representative, with Leonard noting that he has chosen the poems because \u201dpersonally, they move me\u201d. It\u2019s also delightful to see evidence of the close collegiality among the writers and their shared interests.<\/p>\n

One of the common threads is a probing of the space between the human and animal worlds. The anthology opens with two powerful poems by Campbell about horses, in which the rider\u2019s striving for connection to the animal is raw, sublime and almost sexual. A different kind of longing and desire operates in poems by Holland-Batt, which circle out from descriptions of birds found in a museum, or a galah skull found in a field. Here, it is the human desire to know and to contain the animal world that creates the delicate sadness in the poems, a sense of loss expressed in their still figures.<\/p>\n

Related to this is an exploration of landscape and the place of humans and language within it. In Holland-Batt\u2019s work, this, too, is expressed most often through things lost and ruined \u2013 an ancient monastery, a passing season, pressed flowers.<\/p>\n

Cassidy\u2019s poems, however, offer an engagement with landscape, and with landscape writing that is fresh and startling.<\/p>\n

Her\u00a0Final Theory<\/em>\u00a0is a spare and haunting sequence, set in an apocalyptic future and ruined world, where the human relationship with nature has become suddenly and necessarily fraught:<\/p>\n

When we lay<\/em>
\nabove that crater<\/em>
\nits roots and iris<\/em>
\nwe saw how we were built for ruin<\/em>
\nlike sand for glass.<\/em><\/p>\n

This charting of human experience over a vast landscape and time frame is echoed in West\u2019s\u00a0A Valley<\/em>. Here, though, it is a more personal history, an interest in landscape that is almost architectural \u2013 his other poems have a focus on houses and backyards.<\/p>\n

Similarly, home, childhood and inheritance recur throughout the book and are particularly important in many of White\u2019s poems. The selection of White\u2019s work includes the remarkable and strange\u00a0Older Sister<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0The Poem<\/em>, both concerned with the complex relationships, interdependencies and slippages between the lives of mothers, daughters and sisters (\u201dTheir future tantrums wait inside her throat\u201d). White\u2019s poem\u00a0Southbank<\/em>\u00a0is one of the standout pieces in the anthology, an extended and wickedly satirical portrait of a government office:<\/p>\n

Our little day is rounded with<\/em>
\na commute and a sleep<\/em>
\na spend and a keep.<\/em><\/p>\n

Alongside the barely suppressed hysteria of\u00a0Southbank<\/em>\u00a0are poems on illness, ageing and damage. Miles\u2019s sequence of haiku-like prayers,\u00a0The Hours<\/em>, is constantly disturbed by recurring images of threat, fragility and death. Similarly, Campbell writes about madness, paralysis and epilepsy, Holland-Batt about a sprain, White about depression. Holt\u2019s poems dramatise the illnesses and madnesses of writers and artists \u2013 including Goya, Durer, Kafka, Lorca and Chekhov \u2013 often through the voices of their mistresses, sisters or assistants. Holt is a master dramatist, imaginative, theatrical and fascinated by fetish \u2013 these qualities underpin her terrific poem\u00a0Unfinished Confession<\/em>, a series of monologues about gender reassignment that are startlingly direct, witty and brittle.<\/p>\n

The poets featured in this anthology are adept at taking up masks \u2013 writing from perspectives and voices outside their own \u2013 and this is one of the great delights of the book. It makes for a supple and shifting reading experience and brings vibrancy and variety to the collection as a whole, despite the small circle from which the poets have been selected. These are, as Leonard intended, very moving poems, and the skill and dexterity of their poets is plain to see.<\/p>\n

From Martin Duwell,\u00a0Australian Poetry Review<\/a>\u00a0, April 1, 2012<\/p>\n

If Felicity Plunkett\u2019s\u00a0Thirty Australian Poets\u00a0<\/em>gave a large number of poets a brief, walk-on appearance, this anthology of John Leonard\u2019s presents far fewer poets at much greater length. The generation reflected here is also slightly younger than that in\u00a0Thirty Poets\u00a0<\/em>since Simon West, the oldest, is a venerable thirty-seven. Presenting only seven poets has both advantages and disadvantages. On the debit side the selection of the poets to be included becomes less inclusive and hence more contentious. Leonard deflects this courteously in his preface by implying that his choice is one of informed subjectivity \u2013 \u201cthe poems in this anthology impress me as having a true distinction in quality and, personally, they move me\u201d \u2013 and avoiding any comments about omissions or about the way this group might realte to other groups of poets of a similar age which could have been chosen. The enormous advantage is that readers get a twenty-page slab of poetry by each of the poets, enough to get some kind of idea as to what their poetry is actually like.<\/p>\n

This leads me to the first of a couple of issues. The first is: Who exactly is the book for? At first I thought of it as a generous sampler for the John Leonard Press since three of the poets \u2013 Elizabeth Campbell, LK Holt and Petra White \u2013 have each had two books published by that valuable enterprise. But the tone of the Preface, focussing on the experience of reading contemporary poetry, looks very educational and it may be that this is a book imagined for undergraduate or better high school students. It would be nice for it to be successful if that is the case since what is happening now amongst writers young enough to be an older brother or sister of their reader is always more enticing for that reader than what has been done by generations before. The problem is, of course, that the contemporary is always difficult since it hasn\u2019t had time to be fitted into a reading culture. The other objection to choosing a book like this as an educational text is that students need to be exposed to a full tradition, but this is nicely deflected when Leonard points out that this generation of poets, more perhaps than most, is informed by the poetry of the past and the possible connections it can make with that poetry. At any rate, this would be a good project to repeat for the next generation of poets, perhaps in ten or fifteen years.<\/p>\n

The second issue doesn\u2019t so much relate to the book\u00a0per se\u00a0<\/em>but is a reviewer\u2019s problem. How does one deal with a selection made up of few poets and large selections? Anthologies like the recent\u00a0Australian Poetry Since 1788\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0Thirty Poets\u00a0<\/em>ask to be considered externally. They are not really reading experiences so much as constructs that one wants to explore. If the reviewer is good enough, there will be some generational or national generalisations to be made. But you aren\u2019t likely to find yourself talking about individual poets, let alone individual poems. The emphasis in\u00a0Young Poets\u00a0<\/em>is squarely upon the output of seven poets and one is, at least at some stage, going to be talking about poets and their poems. Since I have written elsewhere on this site about all of these poets apart from Bonny Cassidy and LK Holt, I have used this opportunity to do some revisiting and some rethinking. I suspect that, as I write, the book in which they appear will melt away in favour the poems and poets which appear in it, almost as though it were no more than a group of pamphlets.<\/p>\n

To begin with the first of the two poets I haven\u2019t previously written about in detail, the poems of Bonny Cassidy are probably the most challenging in the book. They are in what is usually called a \u201cpost-Poundian\u201d mode that is always going to be at odds with the kind of explorative free verse of contemporary Australian poetry, reflected in the work of the other poets of this book. In fact \u201cpost-Olsonian\u201d might be more accurate though the amount of personal detail would have irritated a man opposed to the \u201clyrical ego\u201d. You might find a connection with some of the poems of Laurie Duggan but his is really a kind of poetic anthropology, absorbed by cultures and their signs and seeing geology, say, more as a determining frame than a subject in itself. At any rate,\u00a0Cassidy\u2019s poetry\u00a0is marked by its experimenting with an unusual mode and I am, consequently, on its side. This kind of poetry never takes itself for granted and so, whether it is talking about Margaret Stones\u2019s botanical art or about the \u201crecent\u201d geological history of New Zealand, it will always have, as an undertone, the theme of what it is doing, how it is seeing. \u201cRange\u201d is a good example of this, beginning with sight and sound and quickly moving into a kind of self-directed imperative:<\/p>\n

A bird breaks<\/p>\n

itself down, ties<\/p>\n

its rune into a knot.<\/p>\n

Always begin with a bird, like ruling a line<\/p>\n

that stretches into angles . . .<\/p>\n

This five-part poem is about the act of describing (it ends, \u201cdescribing what you have seen\u201d) and as such is about \u201ccreativity\u201d. But even more it is about profoundly metaphysical issues since it seems to presume a particular relationship between the natural world and the observer. On the basis of the twenty pages of poetry here, it seems to reflect that American perspective of the way the self interacts with nature, but Australia has no tradition of transcendentalism or\u00a0even of the kind of observer represented by someone like Ammons, so one wonders whether it is a model that\u00a0has been, can be, or was intended to be, transported across the Pacific. Certainly the long\u00a0section fom \u201cFinal Theory\u201d included here (a Prologue and the first of four parts) seems quite distinctive, largely because it contains such a personal element \u2013 in fact, in many respects it seems as much a love poem as a registering of the geography, culture, botany and geology of New Zealand. The dynamism of the poem seems to derive from its exploration of scales, the delicious disjunctions between geological time-scales, for example, and the lives of the couple which the poem traces. It is certainly an issue that the poem returns to regularly:<\/p>\n

That new space was dense with actuality. Its absurd<\/p>\n

dimensions<\/p>\n

became acceptable, for instance, everything was middle<\/p>\n

ground.<\/p>\n

Distance arrived from above and stayed until cloud locked us<\/p>\n

in.<\/p>\n

. . . . .<\/p>\n

And, inevitably, like \u201cRange\u201d we expect it to foreground the processes of its own creation. When it does this the self is there again, not a purified self or an observing infiltrator but a \u201cfull-scale\u201d emotionally-engaged-with-one\u2019s-partner self:<\/p>\n

Here is the poem, slowed by oil and grit,<\/p>\n

to be shed and worn<\/p>\n

as a skin.<\/p>\n

Form may once have had some salvaging power,<\/p>\n

but these days we let form whirl out of hand<\/p>\n

like a camera in a Frisbee;<\/p>\n

and see that order and delay cannot be made from space<\/p>\n

and time,<\/p>\n

how could they?<\/p>\n

All my words are gunning for extinction, all they can tell<\/p>\n

us is:<\/p>\n

live more.<\/p>\n

The photos you retrieve are a scream –<\/p>\n

heart-battering reams of fortune, shadow and sleep,<\/p>\n

as if \u201cthe sun fell . . . or leapt.\u201d<\/p>\n

Your fidget-bone shrinking the aperture,<\/p>\n

the flint of your lens against glacial gates<\/p>\n

impose a double: lichen and hubcap<\/p>\n

printed across one another<\/p>\n

like two hands braced against the light, a herald for the<\/p>\n

Anthropocene.<\/p>\n

I like \u201cFinal Theory\u201d as I do the other poems in this twenty-page selection. I can understand that many readers won\u2019t and would prefer poems more like those produced, say, by Caroline Caddy\u2019s trip to the Antarctic. I can also understand that many readers will, sourly, claim that an extended sequence like \u201cFinal Theory\u201d, as well as the longer sequences here by Elizabeth Campbell and Simon West are part of the corruption of the modern world in which poets need to write long sequences either (a) to meet the (understandable) requirements of valuable prizes (b) make a coherent\u00a0project for a Creative Writing higher degree dissertation or (c) make a coherent project that will attract (what a mysterious metaphor that is!) Literature Board funding. But there is a lot of intriguing puzzling about poetry itself in \u201cFinal Theory\u201d\u00a0– not only covering how it should be done but also what it is and how it is generated by the cultures of the people who come after the geology is, more or less, completed. I find it challenging and exciting and want to see the other three parts.<\/p>\n

Reading the two books of LK Holt is quite an experience. On the surface all one can see is the enormous confidence in her own poetic processes. She is the kind of poet for whom dramatic monologues or narratives from the point of view of an engaged and dramatically conceived narrator seem the natural habitat, possessing, as they always seem to, a Browningesque rhythmic drive and a fullness of poetic imagination and empathy. In a series of sonnets here, taken from her second book, we meet the Kafka of \u201cMetamorphosis\u201d just waking, a drunk who has walked into a door, a protestor who has just been struck in the head by a rubber bullet, someone beginning work in a ship-breaking yard, Lorca at the moment of execution, a boy\u00a0out of control with rage who is shot by police and Douglas Mawson at an especially sticky moment. There is also a poem from a sequence spoken by Goya\u2019s housekeeper and a long sequence, \u201cUnfinished Confession\u201d,\u00a0spoken by a pre-op sex change patient.\u00a0I\u2019ll quote the opening lines of the first of these \u2013 the Kafka poem \u2013 as being in some way typical of what I\u2019m trying to describe:<\/p>\n

It is a mandible language, ours; one of release<\/p>\n

or grasp; a byzantine binary of yes, no (yes);<\/p>\n

the shellac click of stag beetles all het up.<\/p>\n

Dear Franz you should love whom you want to<\/p>\n

and hard \u2013 forget about the world\u2019s wanton<\/p>\n

fathering and mothering . . . both will bear on<\/p>\n

past your little momentous death.<\/p>\n

Our parents always outlive us in a sense . . .<\/p>\n

This is terrific stuff \u2013 I especially like \u201cyour little, momentous death\u201d \u2013 but sheer confident monologic energy like this always induces doubts in the reader and leads us to wonder whether it might not all be just a particularly impressive kind of dramatic rhetoric. What we need is some kind of indication of what the poet\u2019s stake in these monologues is. Or, at least, the conviction that somewhere underneath there is a stake. It is hard to imagine a biography which is in some way engaged with all the poems I\u2019ve sketched in above. I\u2019d like to believe that the tension beneath them is not one of content but rather of form: that they represent a kind of public face to a poet who does actually have doubts. Perhaps they are doubts about the very ease with which they seem to have been written. We know in the case of other poets \u2013 I\u2019ve already mentioned Browning \u2013 that the poems of most certainty are often the poems of most doubt. But you would have to know a lot of a poet\u2019s biography before you could speak cponfidently about generative mechanisms as profound as this.<\/p>\n

All this will lead to the fairly obvious conclusion that I like best those poems of Holt\u2019s which are personal and slightly weird. Amongst the sonnets there is a lyric (which I deliberately omitted in my list) describing how an old door is transformed to a table and then a garden bench. It has the same confident assertive style as the monologues and is, I suppose, not much more than a brief allegory (what was recently marked out as a feature of contemporary poetry: \u201cthe significant anecdote\u201d) but it still has resonances and intriguing tensions (between, for example, denotative description and a rather more high-flown conclusion) that are harder to find in the monologues. Two poems, \u201cPoem for Nina\u201d and \u201cPoem for Brigid\u201d seem to me to stand out in this selection. They are personal poems about the author\u2019s very stake in the friendships they describe and they are complicated and not at all predictable: always a good sign in a poem.<\/p>\n

I have looked at length in past reviews at Elizabeth Campbell\u2019s poetry. She looks strong no matter how or where her poems are presented. Here, by virtue of the fact that the poets of the book\u00a0are organised alphabetically, she is the lead-off voice and her poems look more than comfortable in that responsible position. Given that\u00a0Error<\/em>, her second book, was published last year, it\u2019s reasonable that only one of these poems is new. That poem, \u201cBlack Swans\u201d, is intriguing because it is a meditation on error \u2013 in the sense of inheriting a way (through ideology or cultural tradition) of seeing things which determines what we see \u2013 that takes one of the most famous of the Ern Malley poems as its core context. This, of course, is yet another testimony to the unkillableness of an imaginary\u00a0poet who died\u00a0thirty-seven years before Campbell was born and Campbell\u2019s generation is one of the first (of many, presumably) for whom the story of Ern Malley, Max Harris and the hoaxers will not be one soaked in the irritations of literary polemics.\u00a0The Ern Malley poem in question here, \u201cDurer: Innsbruck, 1495\u2033 is, itself, a version of a poem of McAuley\u2019s which he was unhappy with, a poem which is about a painting and in which the poet finds himself a \u201crobber of dead men\u2019s dream\u201d. If this poem is about artistic revenancy then \u201cBlack Swans\u201d is about conceptual revenancy for although she is an avenging angel, coming to destroy:<\/p>\n

we still hope<\/p>\n

to cut her open and find bedded neatly inside<\/p>\n

goose, duck, chicken, quail: all the known unknowns.<\/p>\n

Poetry, philosophy, economics: the mind<\/p>\n

repeats, in its ignorance, the vision of others:<\/p>\n

all swans are white, all swans are white.<\/p>\n

The other poems selected include two of the horse poems from\u00a0Letters to the Tremulous Hand<\/em>\u00a0as well as two of the best poems in\u00a0Error<\/em>, \u201cThe Diving Bell\u201d and \u201cBrain\u201d \u2013 both strong poems about various glitches in body and brain. These two poems, together with the sequence, \u201cInferno\u201d, lead one to think that Campbell (together with West and White)\u00a0might be trying to\u00a0work out answers to the question of what a body\/soul distinction for the twenty-first century\u00a0could look like. We also get a chance to revisit that difficult sequence, \u201cA Mon Seul Desir\u201d, based on the famous series of late fifteenth century tapestries. It is a far from straightforward\u00a0sequence\u00a0and, as I\u2019ve labored over it in\u00a0my earlier review, I\u2019ll spare readers a revisiting. John Leonard\u2019s comment in the introduction, perhaps concerned that readers might run aground on the sequence which, after all,\u00a0appears quite early in the whole book, recommends reading it as a poem about love, rather than an exploration of obscure late medieval art, and I suspect that that is a good tactic, at least for initial readings.<\/p>\n

Sarah Holland-Batt is the author of perhaps the most likeable set of poems in this book, though that adjective has no implications, good or bad, about quality. It\u2019s just that her work seems to be nicely pitched between accessible and questing. She also has (together with Graeme Miles) the highest percentage of new work after her debut volume\u00a0Aria<\/em>. If I had to hazard a guess as to the direction of this newer work \u2013 always dangerous when based on such a small sample\u00a0– I\u2019d say that it is definitely less emotionally expressionist than the earlier. Many of the complex poems inAria<\/em>\u00a0seemed at heart, either opportunities for lament or opportunities for celebration. The self is present in these new poems but not at such a dominating level. An exception is \u201cRain, Ravello\u201d which seems in the earlier mode: a long description of rain eventually establishes itself in the reader\u2019s mind as a sympathetic exterior response to internal misery and the poem finishes, \u201cArt is not enough, not nearly \/ enough, in a world not magnified by love\u201d.<\/p>\n

The other poems seem a lot breezier, focusing on life sciences and art. \u201cOrange-Bellied Parrot\u201d is like a cross between a Robert\u00a0Adamson bird poem and Bruce Dawe\u2019s \u201cHomecoming\u201d, enacting an imaginary return made by a stuffed parrot in the British Museum (surely the ultimate in exilic misery) to his homeland. \u201cBotany\u201d recalls the school experiment of mapping the spores of various mushrooms, while the poet interprets the results differently, seeing \u201ca woodcut winter cart and horse \/ careen off course . . .\u201d But one wouldn\u2019t want to take these too sunnily. A brilliant poem, \u201cThe Quattrocento as a Waltz\u201d celebrates the freedom of a new art style in abandoning the tyranny of the religious \u2013 here a sun-dominated, top-down world of stiff madonnas \u2013 and celebrating the real of the world, even if that real is a world of misery:<\/p>\n

Let the darkness shake out its bolt of silk.<\/p>\n

Let it roam over us like a blind tongue.<\/p>\n

Let it bury its razorblades in the citrons<\/p>\n

and its hooks in the wild pheasants.<\/p>\n

Open the window: outside it is Italy.<\/p>\n

A fat woman is arguing over the artichokes,<\/p>\n

someone is dying in a muddy corner,<\/p>\n

there\u2019s a violin groaning in the street.<\/p>\n

And other poems such as \u201cPrimavera: The Graces\u201d and \u201cMedusa\u201d slide the poet into the poems as an allegorical and not necessarily positive figure \u2013 here too the emphasis is on suffering and death. \u201cPersephone as a Whistling Moth\u201d, far from the best poem in the group, is perhaps the clearest in that it takes a mythological figure who oscillates between the dark and the light (as so many of the poems of\u00a0Aria<\/em>\u00a0do) and crosses her with another poetic myth of the moth and the flame.<\/p>\n

The poems of Graeme Miles seem a long way from those of his first book,Phosphoresence<\/em>, though, probably, there are evolutionary links I can\u2019t, from a superficial rereading, trace. He seems a poet anchored in the mundane, especially the mysterious mundane of family and ancestors, but at the same time obsessed by the presence of things within other things. A fine sequence, \u201cPhotis\u201d, deals with a painter in whose portraits animals continuously seem to emerge and from whose body a child eventually emerges, whose \u201csoft skin is full of animals\u201d. Ghosts of relatives past emerge from the liminal spaces in \u201cVerandah\u201d and in \u201cAt 30 Clifton Street\u201d, the house seems to induce visions of its own ghosts. As one can imagine, dreaming is an important part of this world since dreams are yet another sort of poem with a complex and usually unresolvable relationship with the waking world and a poem about sleep, \u201cMineral Veins\u201d, concludes with:<\/p>\n

Better to turn down,<\/p>\n

find you can breathe easily under a world\u2019s weight<\/p>\n

of earth, and that air was no more your element<\/p>\n

than the endlesss vacancy it fades to.<\/p>\n

As one can also imagine there is a lot of interest in transformation, Ovid\u2019s obsession: it occurs at the level of myth in \u201cIsis and Osiris\u201d and at the level of a kind of humorous surrealism in a poem like \u201cTalking Glass\u201d (I went to find pasta for the wary \/ to prepare their pianos. I tried to speak, \/ knowing that I\u2019d spoken pasta \/ in the past, but now there was broken glass \/ between my teeth . . .\u201d
\nSo in the case of this poet, ordinary events in life are likely to produce poems whose interests and structures are not at all obvious ones. A good example is the final poem, \u201cWhere She Went\u201d, which is about the death of his grandmother (at least I assume it is: one has to be careful about making casual unequivocal assumptions about relationships. It is a marker of how young these poets are that the deaths which occur to them are those of their grandparents. Very soon it will be the deaths of parents and, in no time at all, the deaths of friends and contemporaries!):<\/p>\n

Shade inks a human on the surface of the water,<\/p>\n

brings it from a lostness so complete<\/p>\n

that only this skeletal light<\/p>\n

and athletic paperbark are lean enough to reach it.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s reformed by remotest coincidence of lines,<\/p>\n

dreamed by shade from the bones up<\/p>\n

replaced where it never was.<\/p>\n

Skinny land and paperbark<\/p>\n

are the brassy echo of a wooden room<\/p>\n

beside a deeper lake,<\/p>\n

where the same figure saw her face shift in the mirror<\/p>\n

like a friend she couldn\u2019t trust.<\/p>\n

Rooms were closed then and vigils sat through.<\/p>\n

Strangers covered the mirrors she\u2019d left<\/p>\n

and motes of dust fell one by one<\/p>\n

precise as the knife-thrower\u2019s act in a circus.<\/p>\n

They waltzed the wardrobe back from the doorway<\/p>\n

and sold her clothes.<\/p>\n

And she passed the white rock<\/p>\n

which some said was a headland<\/p>\n

too steep for goat\u2019s feet,<\/p>\n

and some said was a marker stone<\/p>\n

set into grey soil dry as ash,<\/p>\n

a white stone just big enough<\/p>\n

to overfill palm and fingers,<\/p>\n

cool as liquid overflowing<\/p>\n

and with weight to make you think of fractures.<\/p>\n

This a poem that moves in four magical stages from the shadows on the water suggesting the woman (not in a simply Rorschach way, but in a much profounder movement from the deeps to the surface). Then it moves to the woman\u2019s room and her funeral and then, surprisingly, to a description \u2013 which sounds like the Classical world \u2013 of moving beyond a boundary stone. But it doesn\u2019t end there because the stone is imagined declining in size from\u00a0 headland to marker to fist-sized. These are unusual emphases and markers of a very distinctive poetic mind.<\/p>\n

Simon West is a tricky but impressive poet who seems highly sensitive both to dislocation and also its opposite: the moments when \u2013 and processes\u00a0whereby \u2013 we emerge from a dislocated state. It\u2019s a poetry where we always seem to be crossing thresholds. \u201cOut of the Woods of Thoughts\u201d \u2013 whose title\u00a0seems to allude simultaneously to Dante\u2019s\u00a0selva oscura\u00a0<\/em>(an image that recurs in this poetry) as well as the wood of the suicides of\u00a0Inferno<\/em>\u00a0XIII \u2013 is a good example.<\/p>\n

We woke with the crook of our arms empty.<\/p>\n

Each morning the triple-cooing turtle-dove<\/p>\n

would probe about our yard,<\/p>\n

\u201ccoo-ca-cai?\u201d A nag and clamour<\/p>\n

I couldn\u2019t help but hear as \u201ccosa fai<\/em>?\u201d<\/p>\n

Mostly summer turned away, tightened<\/p>\n

to a knot of roots at river\u2019s edge,<\/p>\n

where earth erodes from a red gum,<\/p>\n

unable to grip things, and strangely exposed.<\/p>\n

No use saying \u201cit was him not me\u201d,<\/p>\n

or \u201cdispel the senses and repeat,\u00a0The mind lies<\/em>\u201c.<\/p>\n

Even the faintest trails led back to that weight<\/p>\n

cradled in the stomach\u2019s pit.<\/p>\n

What was\u00a0it<\/em>\u00a0doing? What did\u00a0it<\/em>\u00a0have to say?<\/p>\n

These seems an excellent introduction to the West-world especially its quality of being simultaneously precise and yet slippery. It\u2019s a world where we move from sleep to waking, dreams to everyday, from natural speech into language, from the constructing, rational mind to the immanent natural.<\/p>\n

A precious eight pages of the allotted twenty are devoted to a long and difficult sequence, \u201cA Valley\u201d, which is obviously central to where West\u2019s poetry is at this point and which recalls many of these processes. It is not an easy sequence to get a handle on and consequently \u2013 if a reader is honest \u2013 not an easy set of poems to like. It is, like \u201cOut of the Woods of Thought\u201d about emerging from a dark wood, an emergence that happens in the last two poems. But the nature of the valley in which the protagonist is trapped for the other fifteen poems of the sequence is difficult to feel confident about. To what extent it is a conceptual one, and to what extent it is emotional (even, allegorically, personal) is really difficult to determine though, if Dante is the model, I suppose the same could be said of theCommedia<\/em>. It is perfectly possible that it is imagined to be a\u00a0valley of monolinguality broken out of by mastering a second language.<\/p>\n

\u201cOut of the Wood of Thoughts\u201d contained an odd middle section where the roots of a red gum are \u201cstrangely exposed\u201d by\u00a0erosion and West is very sensitive to the texture and grain of wood.\u00a0 \u201cThe Apricot Tree\u201d seems on the surface a poem about childhood where the environment is symbolised by a rather grotesquely split apricot tree used as a set of cricket stumps by the boys. It begins, significantly, \u201cI try to home in on this\u201d but the poem\u2019s conclusion takes it away into the inner life of the split and exposed wood:<\/p>\n

I\u2019d seen that wound open in wood. Under<\/p>\n

a hard rind the core\u2019s gore colours<\/p>\n

lay like a deep bruise: a reversal<\/p>\n

or confirmation from within<\/p>\n

of stone fruit, and equally alive.<\/p>\n

In \u201cDoor Sill\u201d, another childhood memory poem,\u00a0that piece of wood is an unpainted slab of redgum which marks the boundary between the domestic house and the outer world:<\/p>\n

It was a threshold we loved<\/p>\n

to tilt ourselves on the rim of,<\/p>\n

leaning forward on tiptoes . . .<\/p>\n

The selection includes \u201cMarnpi Rockhole by Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri\u201d from West\u2019s first book. On first reading that looked very atypical, even positively out of place. But now seems more central because it concerns art and the way art deals with the conceptual maps we put over the endless flux of the universe. As such, this genuinely incomprehensible painting seems like a gateway to a quantum world and reflects West\u2019s interest in the texture of the worlds revealed by the dissolution of surfaces.<\/p>\n

Petra White seems to be a poet who continually wants to connect a fraught self with the outside world. From the poems in this anthology we can sketch in a childhood amongst people at the dottier end of protestantism, depression and despair, and a seriously sick lover. The first of these appears in the first poem, \u201cGrave\u201d, but also in \u201cTrampolining\u201d where\u00a0the speaker\u00a0and her brother save for a trampoline while the adults take part in a suburban prayer meeting. The experience of the trampoline is one of ecstatic movement in the world, significantly oscillating between\u00a0earth and sky,\u00a0taking place \u201cin the present-tense, \/ cast off by the adults for the kids to play with\u201d.\u00a0 The desire to connect self with the world raises a lot of issues. Like Elizabeth Campbell, she is interested, for example,\u00a0in the relationship between the self and the natural world. \u201cOde to Coleridge\u201d deals with the body\/soul distinction but not in any academic way: the issue of whether a sick soul sees the world only as dull and lifeless (Coleridge\u2019s position) or whether the world can heal the soul (Wordsworth\u2019s) is a crucial question in White\u2019s poetry.<\/p>\n

The poem which engages with the world at its most \u201csocial\u201d is \u201cSouthbank\u201d an eleven part sequence based in a Melbourne work situation. At first it seems a minor piece of social recording but rereadings show it to be far more complex and engaging. Amongst the parodies of business-speak \u2013 \u201cI am pleased to announce that\u00a0Wayne Loy\u00a0<\/em>\/ joins the\u00a0Networks &<\/em>\u00a0\/Infrastructure Team\u00a0<\/em>to give cover . . .\u201d \u2013 there is an examination of what it means to be a suited worker in an industry designed to provide aid to people in need \u201cout there\u201d. The answer, I think, lies in the Heidegger comment, included in the poem, that we only see how things work when they break down (a statement that expresses, after the event, the entire rationale of Modernism as a broad cultural phenomenon). The Melbourne office is, in the last poem, \u201ca portal, \/ point of stillness from which the world extends\u201d and many of the poems want to explore this movement from a shakily-secure self into wider worlds of experience. We see it schematically in both \u201cWoman and Dog\u201d and in\u00a0\u201dKangaroos\u201d. In the latter poem the rows of dead kangaroos by the roadside are tribute to the fate of those moving through experience who make the wrong choice, \u201cone wrong leap against \/ thousands of right ones; thousands of hours \/ lived hurtling through space with no notion of obstacle\u201d. They act, finally, both as guardians of new worlds and as psychopomps\u00a0for humans:<\/p>\n

Always turning to leave, wider to go –<\/p>\n

they emerge in dissolving light as if they carry<\/p>\n

the Earth in their skins, as if they are the land they inhabit . . .<\/p>\n

it stares at you through them, looks through you<\/p>\n

in the shared-breath stillness, their telepathic here now<\/p>\n

group hesitation. As if something\u2019s deciding<\/p>\n

whether to let you in\u00a0or through. As if there was an opening,<\/p>\n

a closing. Then turning away again, loping off<\/p>\n

into that open where death stands to one side (you imagine)<\/p>\n

and each leap is a leap into deeper life, deeper possession.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a constant movement in this poetry to desire a deeper life, starting, as it does, from a vulnerable self. There is a profound difference between the young girl in \u201cRicketts Point\u201d who, playing at the water\u2019s edge \u201csuddenly marvels at how the world \/ tips open to a broad deep space, not fearsome\u201d and the damaged self of \u201cSt Kilda Night\u201d for whom the beach is a nightmare experience:<\/p>\n

Stripped to the soul, squatting at the shoreline,<\/p>\n

thoughts prey like sharks but never bite,<\/p>\n

no voice inside the skull sounds right.<\/p>\n

O listen to the tiny waves crash their hardest,<\/p>\n

as a lap-dog yaps its loudest to be loud.<\/p>\n

Pitched past pitch of grief<\/em>: how far is that?<\/p>\n

. . . . .<\/p>\n

Whereas many of the poems in this anthology derive their strength from complex conceptual approaches to life and writing, White\u2019s are strong because of the fractures that generate them. There is nothing sensationally \u201cconfessional\u201d about them but the underlying dis-ease makes all the issues \u2013 self, world, society \u2013 crucial ones.<\/p>\n

From Geoff Page,\u00a0The Canberra Times<\/em>, June 18 2011:<\/p>\n

John Leonard has long been Australia\u2019s most fair-minded and substantial anthologist. Two years ago we had his The Puncher & Wattman Anthology of Australian Poetry and now we are offered his latest \u2014 Young Poets: An Australian Anthology. Leonard has also, since 2006, been an important poetry publisher and it is no surprise that three of the seven poets presented here are from his own \u201cstable\u201d. There could have been more without dilution of quality.<\/p>\n

More significant, however, is the contrast this new anthology makes with one which, back in 1983, attempted to cover the same ground \u2014 as it was then. Robert Gray and Geoffrey Lehmann\u2019s The Younger Australian Poets (Hale & Iremonger) had 29 poets of whom only 20 per cent were female. John Leonard\u2019s new anthology (likewise edited by a male) has only seven poets \u2014 of whom five are women (i.e approximately 70%). Clearly something has happened in the past twenty years which goes beyond the predilections of individual anthologists.<\/p>\n

A comparison of the contents of the two anthologies shows how much else has changed too. The Gray\/Lehmann anthology had a healthy swag of poems set either in the \u201cbush\u201d (from which quite a number of its poets derived) or in inner-city Sydney or Melbourne with its distinctive mores and its habit of looking to New York or London for inspiration. In this new anthology, there are only three poets whose work one can imagine fitting at all comfortably into the Gray\/Lehmann anthology i.e. some (and only some) poems by Graeme Miles and Simon West and a number by Petra White, with her interest in Melbourne workplaces and suburbia.<\/p>\n

The other four poets (Elizabeth Campbell, Bonny Cassidy, Sarah Holland-Batt and L.K. Holt) all belong to the highly metaphorical school, marked by great sophistication of language and vocabulary (sometimes more than is necessary) and the frequent use of mythology and material from earlier historical periods, particularly the Middle Ages and Renaissance.<\/p>\n

Of this quartet the most frequently stunning is Sarah Holland-Batt whose memorable skills with imagery and sound are always at the service of the poem itself (normally only a page or so long) rather than diffused into long sequences investigating a somewhat arcane phenomenon from a variety of angles. The eleven pages from Bonny Cassidy\u2019s long poem, \u201cFinal Theory\u201d, \u201ca broad geology of the last sixty million years\u201d, are a case in point. No matter how expertly done, there\u2019s a considerable likelihood that the poet\u2019s ambition in any such poem will outrun the reader\u2019s staying power. There\u2019s lots of metaphorical energy here, and no little skill, but the sequence is a highly demanding \u201cread\u201d. A few lines perhaps will suggest both its virtues and its limitations. \u201cWhite heat rolls against scoria \/ and smokes the early afternoon.\u00a0\u00a0It fingers the gape. \/ It blinks where footsteps were cased in ash; \/ tumbling glares ring \/ with bright drip of oyster and acid \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

By contrast, in Holland-Batt\u2019s \u201cPrimavera: The Graces\u201d the rhetorical energy is more clearly directed towards a final effect. Spoken by what seem to be Botticelli\u2019s Three Graces, the poem concludes: \u201cOnly the birds hurtling \/ through the air like flung stones \/ know the truth: it is in the tiny fandango \/ of their pulse, in the leaves scratching \/ them through the air, in their descent \/ which is short and unspectacular \/ and spills out of them like wine. \/ Fear it: your lives are short too.\u201d<\/p>\n

These two excerpts suggest the poles between which the poems of Campbell, Cassidy, Holt and Holland-Batt operate. It\u2019s a very different world from those which prevailed among the \u201cyounger\u201d poets of 1983.\u00a0Petra White, too, at times has been considered as part of this group but she is much more often inclined towards more \u201ctraditional\u201d poems about \u201creal people\u201d in contexts which readers can readily recognise. Her \u201cSouthbank\u201d is the most persuasive meditation on office work you are likely to read. Her \u201cRicketts Point\u201d is a deservedly well-known classic of tender observation.<\/p>\n

The two males in this book share something with the Campbell, Cassidy, Holt and Holland-Batt group i.e. metaphorical energy \u2014 but, like Petra White, they are more likely to put these skills to work in a more \u201ctraditional\u201d poem. Graeme Miles short piece, \u201cNight Breathing\u201d is a good example. In nine lines he gives us both a powerful and an affectionate meditation on mortality, built around both his now-dead grandmother and his very much alive young son. Simon West\u2019s \u201cAfter a Self-portrait\u201d shows a comparable vulnerability in lines such as \u201cThe skin of my face is taut, just earth \/ at the end of summer.\u201d<\/p>\n

One over-all virtue of the Leonard anthology is that it gives the reader roughly twenty pages in which to get to know the poet more deeply.\u00a0\u00a0In Felicity Plunkett\u2019s competing anthology of the younger generation, Thirty Australian Poets (University of Queensland Press, 2011) each poet gets only five or six pages. Only two of Leonard\u2019s seven poets are not in Plunkett\u2019s thirty (Bonny Cassidy and Graeme Miles). Plunkett\u2019s age cut-off is 43; Leonard\u2019s is 36. Gray\/Lehmann\u2019s was 45 \u2014 which did stretch the word \u201cyoung\u201d a little.<\/p>\n

For those who have been following developments in Australian poetry over the past fifty years or so, the advent (even the excesses) of these adventurous and highly-talented young poets will be more or less reassuring \u2014 even though quite a few readers may actually find themselves preferring the \u201cyounger\u201d poets of 1983.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From Christopher Bantick,\u00a0The Australian,\u00a0March 24, 2012: JOHN Leonard is one of the few publishers left in Australia with a belief in poetry. Since 2006, he has published work from seasoned voices including Vincent Buckley (edited by Chris Wallace-Crabbe), Peter Steele and Mark O\u2019Connor, along with newer poets such as Dan Disney and Elizabeth Campbell. This […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=302"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":303,"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302\/revisions\/303"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=302"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=302"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=302"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}