Shane Malone - Eureka Street

sponsor of modern balladry. The
OBC gives house-room to creatures
great and small in various poems,
from the warhorse and the whale of
fob to Andrew Marvell's glow-worms
and Elizabeth Bishop's sandpiper.
Poetry itself can be, like those
creatures, both obvious and runic; if
it is, often, humanity's first word (in
chants and lullabies), it may as well
be their last word here. First, there is
half of Anthony Hecht's 'Giant Tortoise':
I am related to stones
The slow accretion of moss
where dirt is wedged
Lon g waxy hair that can split
boulders.
Events are not important ....
PoETRY
ALAN WEARNE
There is nothing worth
remem.bering
But the silver glint in the muck
The thickening of great trees
The hard crust getting harder.
And finally, the whole of Alasdair
MacLean's 'The Buzzard':
The buzzard turns a circle
in the sky,
making its ends meet.
When it completes the figure
a round blue segment drops out of
the air,
leaving a black hole
through which the souls of many
little birds
fly up to heaven.
•
Peter Steele has a Personal Chair at
the University of Melbourne.
Getting it together
New and Selected Poems, Robert Gray, William Heienemann
Australia, Melbourne, 1995. I ~BN 0 85561 6660 RRP $16.95
Collected Poems, Dorothy Hewett, Fremantle Arts Centre Press,
fremantle, 1995. ISBN 1 86368 114 0 RRI' $19.95
OUTSIDER it may seem
obligatory at times for Australian
poets with a certain track record to
assemble a Selected, a New and
Selected, or a Collected. Sometimes
there is a certain amount of cheating
done and an old Selected is reassembled
as a brand-new volume.
If this ritual has a touch of the
predominantly middle-aged about it,
it is also a ritual that knows no
ideological bounds: Ken Bolton one
day, Kevin Hart the next. And
certainly if a poet's work has been
confined, in the main, to slim voltunes
with small print runs from
non-mainstream presses, a Selected
will be quite valuable in assessing or
re-assessing their career. (Let's have
a Selected Gig Ryan, a Selected Eric
Beach I) Of course with the Australia
Council now finding itself unable to
fund selections or collections, all
this ritual may wind-down dramatically.
Though I'm not a great believer
in them I give you some instant
statistics: of the 24 poets who appear
in Tranter's The New Australian
Poetry (1979), 10 have made it into
the Collected/Selected listings, with
Laurie Duggan due next August. (Had
he not bedded down with the epic
muse this reviewer may, too, have
made the grade.) Such figures arc, I'd
guess, quite likely in what I'd very
loosely term The Tribe of Les:
Murray, Lehmann, Gray, Page,
McMaster, O'Connor and Gould
springing to mind. Then there is J. S.
Harry who refuses any instant
categorisation.
Gray's New and Selected Poems
is his second attempt at a selection
and, as I prowled about the book I
admired and felt niggled, by turns:
one word slotted-in so aptly after the
previous one, their author rarely
putting a foot wrong. And it was
there where both the admiration and
annoyance commenced: for a] though
it seems to be a very lush verse (and
let's have more lush verse please) it
could also be a very chilled verse,
containing much that is possible in
our craft except, rarely, that additive
to drive it: all-out humanity. And
yet I could go for page after page and
find individual poems to enjoy
greatly (and individual phrases of
which I'd be most envious).
Those attending poetry-writing
classes could do worse than be given
this book and told: learn from him.
From experience I know the task
facing teachers confronted with adolescent
and post-adolescent wordbingeing.
Having seen someone start
the subject with reams of angst-rhapsody,
and end the year with a dozen
snappy haiku, though, now that can
give one heart 1 Not being able to
write anything remotely haiku (yet
knowing how infectious concocting
such short pieces can be) I would
propel plenty of would-be's in the
Gray direction: not to write like him
of course, but to sec what he can do
and how well at times h e can do to.
After mastering the shorter form,
then might be the time to go longerlined,
more rhapsodic. Here again
Gray would be ideal-at his best he's
lean, tight, without a hint of 'splurge';
and yet as I have noted, lush.
There is a precision that must be
admired, one which (as an example)
compares the folding of a pelican's
wings to a Swiss army knife; not my
idea of wit exactly, but an image of
such confidence you feel certain that
no-one else has presented
that comparison before.
0
F COURSE WHE the same ensibility
applies itself to humanity- ob
boy! This is where the chill commences:
what we get are the poet's
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EUREKA STREET • APRIL 1996