AustLit

'Kevin Brophy’s This Is What Gives Us Time together with David Musgrave’s Anatomy of Voice are the first two productions of a new press, GloriaSMH – a name which derives from the wartime Parisian resistance group and thus, like Puncher & Wattmann, conceals a Beckett allusion (and the morse code for GSMH makes a very satisfying logo). This Is What Gives Us Time is, to me, the most satisfying of Brophy’s books since Mr Wittgenstein’s Lion. His contribution to Radar, a book shared with Nathan Curnow, was a set of prose poems which had a decidedly abstract ring (as prose poems often do) and Walking, from 2013, has always seemed to me to have a slightly unfocussed quality. The overall shape of Brophy’s poetry, despite its unchanging interests and values, seems to be a move away from documenting life in a Melbourne suburb towards elegant abstraction. A few poems are no sort of evidence, of course, but a comparison of the first lines of Brophy’s first book, Replies to the Questionnaire on Love, with the first lines of this new book will give some idea of what I mean:

'In my street

there are fig trees and grape vines in back yards

and stone lions guarding front gates . . .

and

Fountains work hard to be joyous for us. Look how they

keep their mouths open.' (Introduction)

'It’s probably significant that this review is appearing the day after a Victorian mother’s photograph of her two-year-old daughter which accidentally captured a very large and nasty looking brown snake sliding past the girl’s feet appeared in substantial numbers of digitised news media at home and abroad. There are snakes everywhere in Amanda Joy’s excellent Snake Like Charms – a first book full of poems celebrating or recording such accidental meetings – and I won’t be the first critic to warn those readers who are sent into fits of the heebie-jeebies by the very idea of snakes that this may be a book they need to leave on the shelf. The poems work through all the possible significances they might have: they are there as nasty surprises, venomous threats to children, fellow-parents, Medusa’s famous locks and benevolent incarnations of the great Rainbow Serpent. Almost all the poems are intriguing and they range in complexity from fairly simple accounts of meetings (“Brown Snake, North Lake”) to challenging poems like the book’s first, “Almost Pause / Pareidolia”. (Introduction)

'For readers daunted by the sheer size of John Kinsella’s poetic output (not to mention the at-least-superficially unappetising “experimental” books, beginning with Syzygy and finishing up with the recent publication of a three volume collected Graphology series) this new volume probably provides a welcoming introduction. If you want to get exposed to the hyperactive Kinsella poetic world, On the Outskirts (together with the earlier Jam Tree Gully) can be recommended as a good place to start. Most of the distinctive Kinsella obsessions are there but the poems themselves work in ways that will be familiar to most readers of contemporary poetry.' (Introduction)

'Here are two books which, put together, show Wearne in three of his most important poetic roles: as maker of the best verse narratives Australia has produced, and as satirist and as teacher. Perhaps this final role should be modified slightly since With the Youngsters is not a book about how to go about teaching the writing of poetry at university level but rather an anthology of what students and their teacher have, over the years, produced when faced with the task of writing something collectively in two of the most demanding fixed forms. If anything, then, it might be more accurate to speak of Wearne in his little-commented-on role of explorer of fixed poetic forms. The big verse-narratives – The Nightmarkets and The Lovemakers – never seem happy to operate entirely in Wearne’s distinctive blank verse and are always ready to rise to the challenge of one of the available forms.' (Introduction)

'Kate Middleton’s first book, Fire Season, contained, spread throughout the book, a group of poems built out of the biographies of Hollywood actresses interwoven with other, often personal, material. As a group these poems tend to progress towards more self-conscious “essays” so that Doris Day becomes part of an essay on purity, Judy Garland an essay on absence, and Clara Bow an essay on erasure. I begin with these not to tease out their meanings but to show that the model of poems in a particular mode spread throughout a book – which is how this new book, Passage, is constructed – is something that is present from the beginning. A writer should always avoid contemporary critical cant but this does seem a case where the word, “braiding”, is unavoidable. You can apply it to the methods of the construction of individual poems like the actress ones, or even, in the case of Middleton’s second book, Ephemeral Waters, to a single, hundred page poem which follows the course of the Colorado River and thus mimics the interlaced flow of the water.' (Introduction)

'There is a minor but delicate problem with this book that arises right at the beginning and is reflected in the heading of this review: how should it be titled. Released, according to its publisher’s website, days before Zwicky’s death, The Collected Poems of Fay Zwicky, edited by Lucy Dougan and Tim Dolin, has a distinctly posthumous sound to it, rather like a scholarly edition of a classic author – The Collected Poems of Kenneth Slessor, for example. Marvellous as Zwicky’s poetry can be – and I have always felt that her intense ethical engagement with the world coupled with a very tough, intelligent and humorous scepticism about virtually everything including herself, has made her one of the Australian poets who speaks most sympathetically to me – it isn’t yet that of an established classic and the title might be criticised as an attempt to smuggle her in immediately after her death. It is, in the long run, a minor issue but one feels for the publisher and editors who must have pondered long and hard over the title.' (Introduction)

'Shastra Deo’s poems seem to inhabit the same symbolic space. This makes The Agonist recall something like Galway Kinnell’s Book of Nightmares (though there may be much more recent and current examples outside the scope of my reading) despite the fact that the tone of the poems is much different. But you feel that there is a continuous symbolic landscape that the poems inhabit even though different poems occupy different parts of that landscape. Generally, the poems, as the title suggests, are about conflicts but these conflicts are never the clash of immovable objects or positions. An even more important principle in the mini-mythology Deo has created is that conflicts involve interpenetrations: these are poems where the border lines between one individual and another, or between an individual and the world are, if clearly defined, important sites of definition, mapping and change. Though many of the poems explore relationships between individuals, these are often people who have some sort of stake with each other, as lovers, brothers, parents and children.' (Introduction)