THREE OF THE BEST FROM UQP
By John Davies
1. Andrew Taylor, Folds in the Map. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1991.
Andrew Taylor is not unknown. This is his eighth collection of poems. His Selected Poems is also available. Somehow, though, he is not as well known as he ought to be for his contribution to Australian poetry over twenty years. There may be many reasons for this.He has lived abroad in several countries and when here has travelled frequently. His work does not fit into any category we think of, yet, as traditional in the way that David Campbell or Judith Wright can be seen in a pastoral or landscape tradition. Perhaps he simply does not encourage publicity.
Whatever the reasons, which may include bad luck, Taylor has been noticed since his first collection (The Cool Change, 1971) and his reputation has grown steadily if quietly since. In that first book, Number 4 in the original UQP Paperback Poets series, he established himself as a meticulous observer. There was an intriguing steadiness in his observation, as if he had set himself up on a tripod and stayed there for days whenever something caught his attention. A typical example of this was his description of spiders in the Sistine Chapel emerging "from their homes in cracks / at God's right hand". Another was the poem "developing a wife", which gives his thoughts as he develops a photograph of his wife and finally carries "her smile out in the heat to her, as a gift."
Back then he named the sun itself a "dominant zero, pointless, tyrannous". He is still fascinated by what he sees under its light.
The canteen at sunrise
gleams as the first flat light
under the tables' frail legs
sweeps the lino clean as a lake
In this poem doors slam elsewhere as the world wakes and prepares itself. His eye is on the empty and waiting canteen. His capacity to outstare objects reaches a teasing level of bravado in "Thirteen ways of looking at a mirror". This is one of them:
The mirror is lonely
it stares each day and every night
at an absence of mirror
only the mirror
reflects on this
Confronted with unpromising titles such as "Spoons", "Radio", "Letterboxes", "Stapler", "Windows", and "Sheets", we might conclude that he has dared himself to extract poetry from them and risked self-parody while daring us to believe that he can extract it.
He can. Even his "Dish Drainers" yield significance to him.
Small as they are, and mostly
bearing a burden of upright
cleanliness, they also
align us with our primary weakness -
our inability to hold a wet plate
until it dries. If all decisions
in history could have been deferred
for those minutes, when
remnants of charred lizard
broiled swan or Chateaubriand en Brioche
are rinsed and the plate, that empty
future, pinched between thumb
and two other fingers dumbly
drips dry - how many tears
could the world have been spared?
2. David Malouf, Poems 1959-89. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1992.
Once upon a time David Malouf was a poet. Then he was a poet who wrote a novel. Now he is a novelist who also writes poetry. We do not need to search very far to account for his constant interest in metamorphosis.
This book is a distillation of six previous books of poetry and includes 37 pages of new work.
As a poet he often returns to childhood, the private mud from which we all crawl into consciousness to discover ourselves, amazed, on a strange planet. His beloved Tuscany is another frequent inspiration. Bicycles often appear and in increasingly symbolic form, until he sees one as a messenger of Time, "spoked with stars".
Malouf is particularly sensitive to the natural world. He almost seems to feel the grass growing beneath his feet, to respond to air currents like a wary animal. Human beings are often entirely absent from these poems or present in a small role. In "Between Towns" a human appears as "a shadow by flashlight" changing a tyre, a shadow between the past and the potential. The point of origin and destination are equally uncertain - they might be Sydney or New York, Florence or Babylon.
It is difficult to select brief passages for quotation. Punchy he isn't, or rarely. His authorial eye shifts within shifting frames. His style as a poet is discursive and patient. That is really its appeal. He says himself:
Not all
blow trumpets, not all
perform in the grand manner. There are occasions
when smaller mouths will do.
At times his shifting focus and natural tact verge on the incomprehensible. This happens in poems written primarily for friends. When not talking sideways or roaming in his shadowy form he does sometimes leap out from the camouflage to declare himself, as in "Inspirations":
I'm grateful now for all
those moments of being
inadvertently absent
when "something of importance"
was being made clear.
Having
slipped from the room a space to follow bees
into tunnels of hot leaves I did not catch
that tune but another Not listening
was a way of overhearing
the further smaller voices falling
asleep over a book
the surest way of missing
direction posts to other orderly lives Instead I stumbled
on adventures too loud
in a small boy's head to disclose to me whose fate
that day was being settled
3. Dorothy Porter, Akhenaten. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1992.
Dorothy Porter went to Berlin in 1976 to see a famous bust of the famous Nefertiti. On the spot she found herself more intrigued by Akhenaten, the husband. "A strange confession from a feminist poet", she comments in her introduction almost as an apology.
Leaving aside the question of feminist heresy, Akhenaten is a unique imaginative experiment. Transcending gender, culture, geography, and 3370 years in an epic of 123 poems, it sets a daunting standard for other poets wondering what they might write about next. It makes us wonder what she will do next.
Porter, child of the Menzies era, rising poet of the 70s, confident performer and sophisticated feminist of the 80s, seems quite comfortable in another time, another place, another body, worshipping another god. One explanation may be that, living in strange times, the Egypt of 1378 BC was a welcome change.
Akhenaten himself was an A-grade loon, and loons are always fun to read about. He married his cousin, slept with his harem, his daughters, and his own brother Smenkhare. No wonder Nefertiti regularly packed her bags and moved to the northern palace.
He was physically unusual to look at and at the same time a vigorous self-publicist revelling in his own peculiarities. Porter speaks for him:
Look at me
I'm a marvel
and so embarrassing!
He reigned for 17 years, ahead of his time in his one big idea that there was one true god named Aten. (Porter embraces his cranky religious obsession with as much relish as his other excesses.) When he died his name and capital city were obliterated, Amun and the old gods restored. His son Tutankhaten, a sensible boy, assumed the throne as Tutankhamun but unfortunately died young, succeeded by his mother's father.
Within this grand story of intrigue and incest and an idea that came too soon Porter sketches the small details, the scents and sounds of court life - roast geese, music, sacred ibis among the reeds, Assyrian ambassadors fainting in the heat. Her titles resonantly suggest the era: "I'll Enjoy Shrivelling Up", "Death and a Randy Vulture", "Mother's Noseless Thief", "Doctor Skull-Opener".
It is another world yet like ours. The people of the ancient world knew a thing or two and Porter skilfully insinuates her modern perspective into alignment with theirs.
This book demonstrates the modern (the real?) Porter's increasing strength in testing the limits of her craft and scope. She says as much in "Borders":
Mother, tell this
to the bigots and the priests
in sex and art
I'm like a Hittite army
I don't recognise borders
I heap male and female
into one silky dune
and dig in my toes
Published in Mattoid Issue No.46/47 1994