Cirrus@Austlit

'Regular visitors to this site will know that these “Rereadings” are my excuse to look again at books which have meant a lot to me in the past but which, for one reason or another, I haven’t written about. I have long been wanting to revisit Martin Johnston’s last collection of poems, not because I feel that after thirty years it would be interesting to see whether his reputation has grown, plateaued or declined but because there are a number of very difficult poems in the book – especially those of the large, final sequence, “To the Innate Island” – that I might understand better if I could devote some serious time to them. Entirely coincidentally, 2020 saw the release of Johnston’s selected poems in a volume, Beautiful Objects, edited (with an excellent biographical introduction) by Nadia Wheatley, designed to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of Johnston’s death. This volume, together with John Tranter’s Martin Johnston: Selected Poems and Prose, published in 1993, is a sign that readers of Australian poetry might be less prepared, in Johnston’s case, to let his memory slide into oblivion than they are in the case of other poets born after the war.' (Introduction)

'Philip Hammial’s latest collection – his thirty-fourth – is an opportunity for readers to re-enter the strange and compelling world of his poetry – something we have been doing since the mid-seventies. The length of this career makes the energy of the poems all the more extraordinary and, as readers of the various reviews I have written of his work will know, I think energy is one of its defining characteristics. And it’s an energy that shows no signs of faltering as the poet enters old age – the “Age of Frail” as one of the poems calls it. Inveigling Snafus forms something of a pair with Detroit and Selected Poems which was published in 2018 in the US. Ideally this latter book (an update of his previous selected, Asylum Nerves, with the poems from the first ten years of his books dropped and replaced by a full-length version of his 2011 volume, Detroit) would provide a career overview against which Inveigling Snafus could be examined for developments, or at least, changes.' (Introduction)

'Stephen Edgar always seems to me to be one of the most unusual of major Australian poets. Half a century ago there was an important shift from poems that made their way in the world as objects structured by conventions of rhyme and metre to what is usually called free verse but is really a recognition of a poem’s right to be a piece of discourse as long as it fulfils the obligation of being an interesting piece of discourse in terms of its conception and its execution. Fifty years produces an awful lot of examples but an obvious one might be Les Murray’s “Bulahdelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle” which is, in a sense, a pastiche of an Aboriginal song cycle and whose challenge – successfully achieved, most readers would think – is to avoid any sense in its tone that it is mocking either Aboriginal singers or modern holiday-makers. When contemporary poets do use the old metrical/rhyming structures there is usually a touch of post-modernist flamboyance about it: “I don’t really believe in these archaic modes but I can do them perfectly well”. A sense of the attractions of formality always accompanies poetry no matter what phase it is in and contemporary poets are more likely to be attracted to the sort of arbitrary formal structures that the Oulipo group exercise themselves in generating.'

(Introduction)

'The author’s note which accompanies Jane Gibian’s Beneath the Tree Line begins by saying, “More and more I have become preoccupied with the natural world and our place in its increasingly precarious situation”. This together with the emphasis on those who will be stuck with our mess in Amanda Anastasi’s The Inheritors inevitably suggested their connection and a chance to round out, as it were, the emphases behind the books reviewed in my previous two posts. In fact, both books have more in them than an obsession with the cumulative toxic effects of the Anthropocene, Jane Gibian’s book, especially. Its five parts comprise five different perspectives on living which could be summarised, very crudely, as: living in the world, in language, in the digital age, the act of living in itself and living in the natural world.' (Introduction)

'Somehow it’s hard not to warm to a book whose acknowledgements page tells us that many of the poems about “the apparition” – the character or state that the whole lengthy work is devoted to – “have been rejected by prominent magazines and anthologies. I would like to thank them for authenticating the nature of his character. The few that did take poems I do not embarrass by naming them”. And you can see why it would be difficult to get these poems into journals. Most of them are attempts to define something indefinable and their strategy is to continuously look at the subject from different angles, different perspectives and different genres: not something that produces stand-alone works. On top of this the poems are often very rough, sometimes even doggerel though – I’ll look at this later on – this seems to be a deliberate ploy on the author’s part, perhaps to avoid the unwanted elegances of symbolism.' (Introduction)