Poetry

Rather than read representations of land in terms of the politics they support or contest, what happens when we read poems of politics through the entity of the land? I am suggesting that this is (continues to be) the primary way to read Australian poetry as Australian poetry, politically. (Readings of poetry through lenses of class or other struggle are not primary in terms of their national character, only as they, too, relate to land.) My test case is Marty Hiatt’s long poem ‘the manifold’.

Borderless is not ‘Australian’ or even ‘Australian Feminist Poetry’ – it’s transnational. Not international. Transnational – borderless. Most of these poets live on this continent, but not all. I should probably relax and let myself be confused about definitions for now. Because a poetry anthology is full of poems, poems with their own confusions, pains and delights. Time to talk about the poems, and then return to what brings the poems together, hopefully I’ll be less confused.

Change Machine is an ambitious collection which has two standout accomplishments. One is its formal eclecticism and dexterity; the other is its contribution to Australian poetics in drawing on local vernacular and literary influence, and subjecting these to international currents.

I learn that I have not made the interview stage for the role I had been performing for years prior. I walk to Campsie to meet with J, a former housemate, for a sauna, to sweat and swear. Like G, J has taken a ‘voluntary separation package’ from a different institution, and seems transformed since absconding from the academy. We strip off and I vent my spleen in the steam.

‘A testament to love and joy in the face of ongoing dispossession, continued violence and lack of recognition of the rights of First Nations peoples in Canada and abroad.’

Bonny Cassidy’s Chatelaine is a gift to a reviewer that doesn’t want to paraphrase poems, for a reader that doesn’t need such summarising.

In Araluen’s work spirits and ghosts speak from beyond, above and below the layers of colonial time to remind us of past in present and present in past intertwined and unresolved.

Poems speak to us through panic and fences, closed doors, forests, rivers and distanced days. Their atoms lodge somewhere within us and we carry them close, hoping that, in the inferno of loss and uncertainty, the intensity and ambiguity of poetry can salvage something.

With each collection of poems, Farrell has absorbed new tones and registers in ways subtle enough that it is easy to miss a decisive shift in the make-up of whimsy and seriousness in his work. And so we may suddenly find, reading Family Trees, that irony, kitsch, and burlesque have started to feel like elegy, philosophy, and flashes of utopian vision.

So much has been written on the Heide group of artists, Nolan, Tucker, Hester, and their patrons John and Sunday Reed that it is hard to imagine anything more could be added. π.ο.’s Heide however, though holding this group of communalism, camaraderie, and free love as its centre, radiates backwards to the history that precedes the Reeds’ utopian endeavour, and continues into its aftermath.