Shane Malone - Eureka Street

moral-issues aphorisms, those kinds
of lecturettes George Eliot so loved
to scatter through her work. You
migh t learn something from them
but it sure won't be poetry!
Regular reissues of, say, the
Collected Les Murray are to be
expected; the Collected Dorothy
Hewett, however has crept up on
this reviewer and, I'm certain, much
of literary Australia. Over 50 years
in its on-off construction, the end
result exceeds 400 pages. Yes there's
so much and yes it's too much,
absolutely; but there's always been
too much poetry; too much Chaucer,
too much Tennyson, too much
Pound. She's in great company.
Hers is a mid-to-late 20th
Century Woman's 'Song of Myself':
ranting and keening, hectoring and
bemoaning, wallowing and reflecting,
but above all loving and singing
her body and mind and soul and
heart electric. There is a wonderful
Victorian era sprawl to her work, not
just because she has Tennyson, Lewis
Carroll (and their creations) as reference
points, much in the way that
Gray has the cultures of China and
Japan for his. Is Hewett a beuer poet
than Gray I doubt it. A
greater one Absolutely.
H
AS ANYONE IN Australian verse
delivered quite such a document A
Collected Beaver might be a
contender, in a decade or two a
Collected Adamson ditto; while the
Collected Webb and the Collected
McAuley would certainly be worthwhile
comparisons. But the one
reasonably contemporary poet from
this part of the globe whose complete
work does, for me, the closest
to what Hewett does, is (or rather
was) from over the Tasman. James
K. Baxter, who died 23 years ago,
aged 46, has recently had both his
Collected and Selected re-issued
(alas in hardback). An over-reacher
like Hewett, his total verse swept in
the under-done, the done, the welldone
and the over-done. Like Hewett
he could write great poems, but also
like her, consistency for him was of
secondary importance. No-one
writes bad poems quite as badly as a
great poet and Baxter (particularly
towards the end of his life) wrote
some whopper-baddies.
I have never exactly been a fan of
the I, me, mine, m yself mode, the
poet forever parading him/herself
dead centre of the work, without any
of the self-mocking irony of, for instance,
a Frank O'Hara. Well, Baxter
did it, and Hewett does it often
enough. The good thing is that they
as often as not get away with it: the
verse actually transcends its maker.
Of the two how is the greater poet
Baxter, but I wouldn't worry: no
Australian ever has been as great as
the New Zealander.
At her best Hewett seems to
know that the personal needn't be
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the confessional; and, even better,
that you certainly must keep your
audience firmly in mind when you
set about constructing your verse.
All poets, students and the rest of us,
could l earn greatly from this
approach. Of more importance
though, it should earn her wider public
respect. By this time next year I
trust that at least one of our seemingly
countless awards will have
come her way for this collection. •
Allan Wearne is a poet and author of
the verse novel The Nightmarkets.
" Follow me" to "Seize The Day"
"Transformation of Heart" and "Dare To Journey"
The Open Book
The Bible Society ~
51 . Paul Book &
Media &
Central Catholic
BookSho p (VIc)
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t±l n.& A : PUBLISHER
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