THE VIEW FROM WHERE YOU ARE
By John Davies
Ernest G. Moll, The View From a Ninetieth Birthday (La Jolla Poets Press, 1992, $10)
Marguerite Varday, Spiral (Medal Poets, 1992, $7)
Geoff Page, Gravel Corners (Angus & Robertson, 1992, $14.95)
Peter Gebhardt, Secretary to Praise (Webber's Publishers, 1992)
Warrick Wynne, Lost Things & Other Poems (Butterfly Books, 1992, $11.95)
Timoshenko Aslanides, Australian Alphabet (Butterfly Books, 1992, $11.95)
Most of us, let's face it, will not live to be ninety. With this sobering thought I began Ernest G. Moll's forthrightly titled The View From a Ninetieth Birthday - Lyrical Poems of Old Age.
Moll was born in Australia in 1900. He went to the United States of America in 1920 and stayed there. He was Professor of English at the University of Oregon from 1928 to 1966 and has published fifteen books before this one. Judging by the look of him on the jacket photograph he may well be among us to receive birthday greetings in 2000, depending on his citizenship status, from both Queen Elizabeth and NBC's Willard Scott. Perhaps we can hope for another volume from him then.
Moll is no stranger to Southerly. Of his Poems 1940-55, Thomas Gardiner wrote in these pages that his work had "the unmistakable character of first-rate poetry... Moll's achievement as a lyric poet is impressive".
In "For Dreams That Come Too Late" the lyric impulse, undiminished, asserts itself from a new point of view:
Forgive us, you who have small chance of growing,
Sown by us out of our vast need of sowing,
Dreams that may never feel the touch of Spring;
For our old hearts and old brains tired of knowing
How Winter scoffs at such fond bargaining,
This act of hope is not a little thing.
His subjects, the seasons, hawks and swallows, the sea, a butterfly, chaff in the wind, clouds, migration, mirages, reunions, are now knitted closer and held more urgently in his examination of ageing, on which he is an expert. Searching for his slippers on a polished oak floor
They slide till I grow weak
...in testy mood
I crawled upon my knees,
And there, deep in the shining wood
I saw the living trees!
Moll quotes from Arnold, Swinburne, Shelley,Frost, Tennyson, his models. To modern tastes the hand of tradition may seem heavy in his work but at 92 all notions of tradition and modernity must seem incredibly funny. Moll rises above them, deftly and with deadpan poignancy, in his concluding title poem:
Sinking into the long-assured takeover,
The last surrender and folding of the arms
As there is nothing left them to recover -
Even that sinking has its sober charms.
Marguerite Varday has a lively sense of those moments when "attic thoughts turn antic". A woman tied to routine "dreams of travelling misses/every bus, train, plane en route". A nervous mother feels that "the Worry Fairy/ attended her christening". Two little old ladies do not simply meet at the Regent for afternoon tea. Varday sees them "storming" the hotel, pressing ahead through revolving doors and circular corridors to the thirty-fifth floor where the waitresses are "tall as goddesses". They have come through the maze to old ladies' Valhalla, but no victory is final. The heights must be stormed again and again. At least they get their tea.
The author remembers climbing peppercorn trees as a child:
Wafts of pepper lifted us high
on a sneeze and we gazed at the world
spread at our feet
Observation of this kind is her strength. Elsewhere in Spiral there is some sense of a straining at subjects, of topics picked because it seems a poem ought to be written about them, e.g. the spirit of the land, the contribution of migrants to Australian culture, a child born without arms or legs. Certainly the land must be valued, migrants have transformed this country with their spirit, sweat, and tears, and we feel pure pain for a limbless child. Varday attempts these subjects with integrity but the socially worthy, and especially the tragic, is not quite her pitch. She may find her own tone of voice for them. For now she is at her best, and most surprising, when she is herself most surprised, as in "Edvard Munch at the Gallery":
Our guide informs us
his mother died when he was five
his father was a religious maniac
Munch was sent to Dr. Jacobson
after a nervous breakdown
better if he had gone to Vienna
he could have taught Dr. Freud
a thing or two".
Gravel Corners is Geoff Page's first book since Selected Poems (1991). It is dedicated to his father, and four of the poems are about him. The gravel is underfoot at the scattering of his ashes, the "homeward gravel" of the family's Clarence River property remembered by his "son from the city".
This is public grief. At the gathering after the funeral, almost a party, friends and relatives reassure each other and themselves that "you didn't simply fall away/between our small mistakes". The author reflects
A day to celebrate your birth
would generate the same attendance.
I see how you
might stroll among them
group to group
and have no need for introduction.
You might have rung them
all yourself -
then suddenly been very late.
and we can smile with him, remembering someone and such a moment in our own life.
The son from the city is also a poet from the city. For the poet, a visit to the country is a visit to the past and a way of life that has inspired much Australian poetry. His three brothers have remained on the land but
One son's absorbed by pure mechanics,
the geometries of seed and paddocks;
the other two prefer their saddles
New ways encroach. It must be so, though Don Quixote may ride a little longer.
Layered behind this immediate story is the poet's limitless landscape of memory. The Clarence River itself has "flowed/through every second of my life". A horse that once dumped him in a creek bed taught him "a truth that still can be of use/attempting other paddocks".
Thus equipped, the poet went to the city and found that the memories of others are also his province. He becomes a forester, clearing and planting an area that will become Canberra. He goes further back, among the first map-makers and namers:
Meridians and parallels
are rules to start the game,
the edges trimmed by Cook and Flinders
and further back among those who needed no maps and already had names:
This painting shows
the Yam and Bush Tomato Dreamings.
You can see the Yams
and the small round berries of the Bush Tomatoes.
The place associated with this Dreaming
is west of Yuendumu
Page rarely settles into the merely elegaic.He knows dreams can be violent. "The Train" recreates, with horrifying empathy, the thoughts of a mass murderer. The incident it is based on is known to us all. After the killing he jumps
out from the tenth floor, down to the street
and straight on through it;
the limits of his doubt and physics
carried through complete
This is the kind of poem that can make a poet's friends look sideways at him over dinner and wonder if they might leave early.
Secretary to Praise is not Peter Gebhardt's first book but it is a welcome debut offering from Webber's as a publisher of books. The title of this volume is derived from "Providence" by George Herbert:
Of all the creatures both in sea and land
Onely to Man thou hast made known thy wayes,
And put the penne alone into his hand
And made him Secretarie of thy praise.
All writers have a perspective on their role in society. They may see themselves as humanist, proletarian, entertainers or keepers of a high art flame. They may write for love of language, telling a story, for their own catharsis or for other reasons. Gebhardt's position is clear and fused with a specific faith. With most writers we can only guess what they believe. Gebhardt lays his cards down from the start. In "The Collector of Cones" he says:
Love survives if we allow it
This particularity ripens for ever,
A sinew without decay,
Spreading like scales from cones
Across the earth
Answering each summons the winds serve,
Making new crops, day by day.
He is unequivocal. He is not dogmatic. The twinkle of irony is indispensable to sensibility, religious or literary. In "William John Wills writes his ending" he portrays Wills as dying, frightened, proud of what he has accomplished, and worried that his father will think it was a mistake to go with Burke in the first place, "too close to an Irishman". His energy fades. His pulse sinks to forty eight a minute.
I remember how
In chapel I always took the window seat
So I could watch the clouds in motion...
I like the distance more and more
And that is how our little lives, which can be grand, end if we are lucky.
Lost Things & Other Poems is the first collection from Warrick Wynne and another in the attractively presented Butterfly series. Wynne has earned his place. His work has appeared in numerous magazines, been broadcast on radio, won or been highly commended in several prestigious competitions and included in several anthologies.
In a brief introduction which I wish were longer (why are poets so shy of spreading across the page?) Wynne tells us that when he was "younger and more romantic" he dreamt of an ideal book that would be titled "Atlantis":
It would be neither a novel nor a book of archaeology. It would be an adventure and an exploration, a rediscovery of a lost thing... Many things are lost in these poems, not just a diver's watch or even a ruined, submerged city, but ideas and beliefs, ways of doing things, ways of thinking and believing: my own past.
Central to his past and many of the poems is Victoria's Mornington Peninsula. He has lived there since he was sixteen and holidayed there in childhood. He is a poet of place, fortunate in his intimacy with a place where he can write poetry. The ocean is always near. It "lurks down the end of streets". There are storms. "The bay smells of engine rooms,/engine oil washed up"; "Each tide some irreparable damage/refloats". The presence of water so close over his shoulder suggests the pragmatic notion that "Atlantis will be rediscovered by accident/in a search for oil".
Fortunate in his location, Wynne is also fortunate in being just old enough not to have been distracted by the introduction of television. (How many potentially insightful young eyes have been blinded to the world around them by that device?) A childhood explorer of the Peninsula, as an adult he can write of it with confident familiarity:
Along this fifty yards of scrubby shoreline
fossils regularly bubble to the surface
as if the earth was still molten here.
Beneath a thin crust of yellow sand,
a solid rock river flows out of the cliff...
Elsewhere there are bathing-boxes, "pride of the beach in '51", many times repaired and repainted:
On blazing days in summer they open up
like whales,
and swallow families whole.
Landscape predominates in this collection. The indoor explorations are equally interesting. His two daughters intrude charmingly in several poems, though he does not tell us which one drowned the Barbie doll:
Coming home late to a dark house
I am disturbed to find Barbie
pink and thin and delicate
spinning nude
in an orange bowl of water
drifting in slow flat circles
In "Chocolate Factory" he shows a flair for the astute postscript:
The ladies, mainly, seem happy,
the men less so - can't cope -
dedicating their life
to something so frivolous...
They are living a kid's dream,
to work in a chocolate factory,
the score-board on the wall proclaims:
"The Finest Full-Cream Chocolate in the World.
Twenty-one full days
without a disabling injury."
Australian Alphabet is another book in the Butterfly series. In 1978 Timoshenko Aslanides' first collection won the British Commonwealth Poetry Prize. He has published three volumes of poetry since then, the last being Australian Things (1990). This time, over two years and with the aid of 73 reference books, he has taken his biggest bite yet - Australia whole. He comes out roaring on the first page:
It's no accident that I lead the Australian alphabet:
an "Aslan" is a lion and, though not
a native, symbol of my share of the Muses' largesse
Poetry with this tone needs a balance of doubt. The counterweight comes early in "Confidence":
Ask questions.Then ask more questions. Then ask,
"Is there a question I haven't asked?" That's
the advice I gave, though I didn't always follow it myself
-that takes confidence, and the getting of that
is the getting of everything
The lion's questions take him into far corners of Australian life, past and present. He becomes a detective, tracing hospital records of Ben Chifley's death (lost in a combination of fire and water damage). Dealing with the beginnings of Melbourne he is a psychological historian. In this scenario Batman thinks he has made a guilty bargain buying the site of his future village "for these few blankets, knives, scissors, beads and flour". On the other hand the Wurundjeri people think they are well ahead on the deal because they know the land was not theirs to "sell" in the first place.
In "Imagination", Aslanides' wife refuses to believe that Bligh, an officer and a Governor, would hide from any rowdy rebels under a bed. Together they concoct the plausible theory that he was trying to retrieve a document which proved his own right conduct and damned "The Perturbator".
In the present Aslanides deals with, well, just about everything from bushfires to Vegemite, not omitting good wine and the nature of happiness. As a poet who has studied piano, musical composition, art, psychology and economics, he assembles his Alphabet with multiple perspectives. His Greek heritage gives him another perspective.In his questioning he asks nothing of others that he has not asked himself:
tell me, as you would were I an auditor,
chairman of a Select Committee of the Senate,
or a priest administering last rites; tell me
whether you really think that this country is your home?
Whether this continent, which slowly
edges north, painfully towing Tasmania
as a woodchipped haemorrhoid, actually
contains even one hectare which agrees with you?
In "Jenny" he gives his own answer:
I too soar in my way, for when
a poet like me has a woman like you and a country like
Australia, how can I fail a lasting interest?
Southerly, Number 4, 1992