Paper Bark Press
Second thoughts on quiet things
Summer
by Martin Harrison
Duty
by Geraldine McKenzie
Reviewed by Peter Rose
Readers of Australian poetry have reason to be grateful to the enterprising people at Paper Bark Press, who have gone on publishing handsome and rewarding volumes in an age of pressing economy and circumspection. These two new collections attest to the energy and diversity of contemporary poetry in this country.
Martin Harrison's voice is the more familiar: he has been a notable contributor to our poetic life, as a teacher, broadcaster, interviewer and practitioner. His new book, baldly titled Summer, is an attractive digest of his poetics and preoccupations. This is a poetry of middle life: watchful, ruminative, unassuming, with a loping rather than hectic gait. The syntax is simple and elegant, the lines generally long-breathed. The poet is present, but not oppressively so. Too interested in the lessons of light, he never gushes. If he despairs at what he sees, he does so philosophically.
The title poem, which opens the book, establishes the cool, slightly detached tone. Harrison relies on the minutiae of ordinary life. In this he is unlike many contemporary poets who lunge at gesture and effect, addicted to facile epiphanies. Like Elizabeth Bishop, Harrison knows that eventually the extraordinary is likely to become manifest, and describable. This is patient poetry. It listens. It waits. Reverently it engages with the natural world "what it can still mean" in a mechanical age. In one of the three poems aptly titled Letter from America, he describes nature as "the only theme/we have which speaks beyond ourselves". Harrison appreciates that one of poetry's functions is to reveal "another tense" the deeper tense.
In Sydney Lawyer with Horses, the ambivalent narrator regrets his acquisitive past and all that he has forsaken ("My own darkness is lost time, a time from the past"). Harrison, radically unsuited to these meretricious times, seeks a world where "There is no need for TV" and where "time's the best thing to contemplate". The clearest statement of this comes in the third Letter from America, whose politics are more explicit. Mildness gives way to opinionated tones. The poet longs for a more contemplative world: "with no traffic/noise, either faint or close-up, droning/non-stop phasal music (Phillip [sic] Glass/turned down several octaves)." The solution, he states with unwonted insistence, is "to be accurate to an in-built/knowledge of how you feel for things, of/how attentiveness turns its regard towards/pale sky, spires of trees."
Throughout this sonorous and likable book, the poet remains meditative, prone to expatiate on timeless, perhaps unfashionable themes "still half-thinking of that inescapable blue sky".
Geraldine McKenzie's poetry could not be more different. Nor could the contrast with her fellow poet be sharper a good sign for any publishing list. Duty is McKenzie's first collection, though she has published widely in the magazines. It is a confident debut.
Anne Ferran's atmospheric photogram on the cover an unworn, half-unbuttoned blouse poised against black hints at absences and eroticism that might have been imbued in the poet by her unmistakable French sources. The voice is loquacious, many-tongued, some of them relentless and difficult to understand. If Harrison's voice is measured and conversational, McKenzie's is throaty, impulsive, mercurial. Although it will appeal to those who take their poetry neat, not everyone will stay with this long and demanding collection: 100 pages of heightened language.
Much is asked of the reader. The kaleidoscopic nature of the writing seems to leave it up to him or her to create meanings and associations. McKenzie is full of guises, like the photographer's wardrobe. The selves in this book are subtle and swerving: they resist us like cloudage. When she writes unambiguously ("biographical:/I don't think poetry/can save us"), the message seems debatable. As with Harrison, this is ardent poetry, but always oblique, evasive, fringed with second thoughts ("The search is the meaning. Qualify this." And, from the same poem, "I have edges, I go so far, then stop.")
Phrasing appears to be all, the poet's raison d'ètre. But if the discontinuities pall at times, the imagination is rarely less than flamboyant or expressive ("Swallows twisting in the stairwells"; "Gracious levity enthralling the fractious ghosts"; "The snake whistle of poured wheat. Billow the drift.")
Duty, veering from absurdist plunges to impressionistic music, will have its own admirers.
Peter Rose is the editor of Australian Book Review and the author of Rose Boys (Allen & Unwin).
See also
Other reviews of Duty