Poetry

‘Net Needle indicates in its title the poem as net, an often-recurring, even talismanic word throughout Robert Adamson’s work. The net is both catcher and sifter, with the needle able to repair and renew. Net Needle then is also the constantly revitalised net accentuating the craft of making – ‘They stitched their lives into my days’ (‘Net Makers’) – and achieves a precarious equilibrium through its scrutiny of life’s twists and reinventions.’

‘For Auden the writing of literary non-fiction prose, which largely consists of reviews, prefaces, and lectures, was far from hack work. The two volumes in question total well over a thousand pages. It is striking how consistently measured and thoughtful each piece is. He may repeat ideas in different forums, but you never have the sense that he has a deadline to meet, or that he ever was rash in his judgement or expression.’ Simon West on the late prose of W.H. Auden.

Michael Farrell enjoys a reputation as one of the foremost experimental poets in the contemporary Australian scene. In Cocky’s Joy, while experimentalism is strongly evident, he seems to have struck a superb and playful balance, a kind of lyrical abstractionism that generates pleasure and intellectual satisfaction at the same time as it continues to question and resist the urge to meaning. The consequence is a free-wheeling, idea-shifting, constantly suggestive, sometimes touching, politically acerbic and often very funny book of poetry. Farrell shows himself to be a ludic master, and reading Cocky’s Joy is as refreshing as going on a holiday.

‘In the winter of 1940, during the first months of the Nazi occupation of France, the analogies between the world of the Iliad and the situation in Europe were, for Simone Weil, striking and chilling. There were broken truces, a city under siege, and failed attempts to appease one man’s wrath. That Troy was destined to be sacked seemed inevitable. For Weil, waiting for an exit visa with a battered copy of the Iliad in her rucksack in case she was arrested, Homer’s great epic seemed to be completely of the moment.’ Peter Salmon on Simone Weil and a new translation of the Iliad.

Open House is part of the continued resurgence of David Brooks as a poet. Although he has now published four collections of poetry since 2005, the first of these, Walking to Point Clear, was his first in 22 years. He is also the author of novels, short fiction, essays and non-fiction: Open House is part of a much larger field of language-making.

Philip Hodgins’ poetry is alive with strange images, jolts of perception, sudden beautiful cadences. And his poetry is frightening. I mean not supernatural fear but the intimate animal fear we have for our own bodies, the fear of pain and the fear of death.

Devadatta’s Poems is written from the perspective of Devadatta, a lesser known figure in Buddhism, who seeks to displace Siddhattha without success. Beveridge takes him from the margins, placing him at the centre of her volume. Moreover, she gives him possession in the title: the collection is his.

Riddles are at the heart of Les Murray’s poetry: that language-gift of his, which shows words to be sounds that strangely hold for us those meanings that we attribute to the world. As he remarks in his poem ‘The Meaning of Existence’: ‘Everything except language knows / the meaning of existence’.

It must be disconcerting for those who find poetry difficult, to discover that the simplest poems are often the most enigmatic. This is because they depend largely on implication. What they don’t say is as important as what they do. If you’re not alert, nothing happens.

The idea that poetry is more difficult than fiction has a lot to do with the failure to recognise that a different method of reading is required by each. A collection of poems is typically 96 pages in length. A novel could be anywhere between, say, 250 and 500 pages. If you allow the same time for the reading of each – on the basis that the same degree of effort has gone into the writing of each – then, simply on that basis, you would have to accept that a page of poetry requires three to five times the attention given to a page of fiction.