The Best Australian Poems 2008. Edited by Peter Rose.
Black Inc. 2008. 192pp. ISBN: 9781863953030. RRP: $24.95.

Reviewed by Simon Patton

The main advantage of a collection such as this is to provide us with a profile of current Australian poetry: through it, we can get a rough idea of what people currently consider poetry to be, and what its specific qualities are. In The Best Australian Poems 2008, we are presented with a range of styles, including the formal, the lyric, the experimental, as well as various kinds of longer poem. Since, on the whole, I found the poetry less than satisfying, I would like to discuss in some detail the weaknesses of contemporary Australian poetry, before moving on to some of its successes. In doing so, I have suppressed all reference to poets; my focus is on poems. I think names have come to assume too much power in their own right; ideally, a collection of “best poems” would be made without reference to names so as to ensure the primacy of poetic quality over all other considerations.

Rhythmical inertia

The first glaring defect of much recent Australian poetry is its rhythmical inertness. As a people, we seem to have lost contact with language at that level, overtaken by the Great Australian Drawl, perhaps, or conquered completely by the mechanized rhythms of the contemporary ultra machine-identified age. Whatever the reasons, our national deafness to language rhythms results in poems that are conspicuously disembodied. The following lines from “Nothing Grows under Lantana” exemplify this:

Will that shy albatross be available only on inter-library loan?
The latter part of our methodologies are (sic) the result of haphazard
life events, it just turns out that way if you happen to grow up in the Shire
although I think we missed a session designated for non-Nauruans was it?
Or venturesome second-generation denizens of an economic exclusion zone
self/and or territory? Some individuals with unreconciled histories
are actually addicted to the BBC World Service, it’s a political thing.

What works against the poem here is an absence of intelligent emphasis. After the first line, in which ‘albatross’ and ‘loan’ are endowed with a degree of stress, there is virtually no emphasis on individual words at all, which stream past in a largely undifferentiated ¯ and therefore undistinguished ¯ flow. As a result, the poem seems to go out of focus: there is no distinct imagery, and the quality of the poetic thought becomes hard to follow, which is a pity, because the poem is trying to make a contribution to the constructive criticism of the current mess we have made for ourselves. Elsewhere, rhythmic monotony may be employed to achieve a particular effect. In the poem “Broken House”, for instance, the persistent dreariness of “Light a fire on the back porch. / It burns obediently all night. Until well into the afternoon. / It’s not a fuse. The lights are broken. Under the roof / the wiring has been a meal for mice. Or something else” suggests a severe psychological dysfunction of some kind. However, even here, such deliberate use of rhythmic monotony has to be handled with sensitivity.

In other poems, there is attention paid to rhythm, but this time the vitiating factor is predictability. A rhythm mannered by over-reliance on a certain pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables also damages the qualities of a poem. Here are two examples, the first is from “Danger: Lantana” in which the speaker recounts an emotionally fraught visit to the site of a boy’s home he had once spent time in:

. . . One end was defended
by a turret of lantana, swaying its cachous of red
and yellow and white, the end near the room
I’d shared with three others, to a total of thirteen.
I noticed that not a window was broken, though

all now had newspapers pasted over them, inside.
I had merely chanced here, but how quickly now
I felt compelled to find my old room, breathe it.

The opening phrase “one end was defended” employs a pattern that is used in many parts of this long poem: an unstressed syllable – a stressed syllable – 1-2 unstressed syllables - a stressed syllable. From the lines quoted above, we can see that other phrases such as “a turret of lantana”, “its cachous of red”, “and yellow and white”, “end near the room”, “I’d shared with three others” and “a window was broken” all echo this rhythmic pattern. This undoubtedly contributes the heightened dramatic atmosphere of the poem, and certainly engages the reader more effectively than lines which exhibit an indifference to the rhythmic properties of language, but they fatally undermine the intensity and even the sincerity of feeling expressed, a sincerity that is further harmed by the showiness of the lantana-image “its cachous of red . . .” and the archaic, literary fragment “I had merely chanced here”.

A similar flaw is present in the poem “Those Adamant Shapes”:

You teach each other what language unlocks
blockading the doorways, the hall, wherever
you can hang a star or a scarecrow. Those adamant shapes
that will only budge at the sound of the secret word,
the way please peels an apple, releases a spring
inside your parents. Some magic remains, it seems
the classics still work . . .

“Those Adamant Shapes” utilizes the same stress pattern as “Danger: Lantana”. It resounds in the following phrases: “what language unlocks”, “blockading the doorways”, “a star or a scarecrow”, “only budge at the sound”, “releases a spring”, “some magic remains” and “the classics still work”. On the one hand, such repetition gives the poem a sense of coherence; on the other, it veils with sameness too much of the freshness of the imagery.

Another issue connected with the abuse of rhythm in free verse is over-emphasis; in this situation, certain words are given a great deal of stress, while the rest receive virtually none at all. This creates a false solemnity, an impression that the lines are saying something of far greater import than they actually manage to realize. The following lines, from “After Reading the Sasruta Samhita”, gave me this impression:

Listen
to your leashed breathing
and that grinding sound

that is produced
by rubbing the broken ends
of hope together.

Like an anxious pet
I sniff your perfume
that has changed characteristics

from flowers and sun
to some touch of earth,
that breathless must
in a wooden box.

Most of the lines contain two main stresses, and this contributes to their steady, slightly funereal march. This is appropriate to the theme of sickness and the approach of death, but it renders the sense of tragedy somewhat hollow. This hollowness, moreover, is exacerbated by the oddity of the imagery: it is difficult to get any distinct impression from “that grinding sound / that is produced / by rubbing the broken ends / of hope together”, and “Like an anxious pet / I sniff your perfume” would confuse many readers, I think. (I imagine it is meant to refer to aform of medical diagnosis which includes smelling the patient’s body odour, but the word ‘perfume’ obscures this sense.) Finally, the rhythmic parallel between “from flowers and sun” and “that breathless must” could be read as enhancing the inevitability of the transition from life to death (although ‘flowers’ have a intimate connection to the earth despite their solar affinities), but at the expense of divesting each state of their real singular qualities.

Worse, however, than either monotony or repetitiousness or solemnity, is the sing-song mechanical rhythm prevalent in poems that work within ‘strict’ (that is, rigid) schemes of versification. There are many examples of this in The Best Australian Poems 2008, and it is difficult to know why such writing persists given the strain inherent in such writing. These are the two opening verses of “We Being Ghosts”:

Too many of my friends are dead, and others wrecked
By various diseases of the intellect
Or failing body. How am I still upright?
And even I sleep half the day, cough half the night.

How did it come to this? How else but through
The course of years, and what its workings do
To wood, stone, glass and almost all the metals
Smouldering already in the fresh rose petals.

It is almost impossible to read these lines without emphasizing the end-rhyme couples, and this in turns tends to distort the rhythm of the poem in fatal ways. The sombre subject of the first line is ruined by the jerkiness of ‘intellect’, which, under the influence of ‘wrecked’, tends to be pronounced against usage with a rising intonation on the final syllable. The next rhyme word ‘upright’ (a synonym for ‘alive’ used so memorably by Edward Thomas in his lines “With a poor man of any sort, down to a king, / Standing upright out in the air / Wondering where he shall journey, O where?”) is also distorted under the expectation of ‘night’, and the unimportant word ‘through’ receives exaggerated stress in the first line of the second stanza. In the final line, the rhyme-word ‘petals’ steals a disproportionate share of emphasis away from the word ‘smouldering’ which is wonderful here, enclosing as it does the sense of ‘moulder’ in its blazing vitality.

Banal and imprecise imagery

Imagery is pointless if it adds nothing to the poem or is rendered imprecisely. When a didgeridoo is described in “Circular Breathing” as “Just one dark warm lush hum”, we get some sense of the droning sonority of the sound, but when, later in the same poem, the same thing is reformulated as “some vast, unhurried Om”, an image that is slightly humourous and throwaway, the vividness is lost. In “Kandukur”, a scene from a hospital ward is presented in the lines “experts come, but nothing seems to change. / The monitor winks like an understanding uncle, the drip / a laconic sentinel over the bed”. The image here of the monitor as a winking uncle is imprecise because winking is a brief, occasional action, whereas the blinking of a monitor is something that is constantly repeated. In another poem, “Bank Rolls”, the image “and they’re rolling, their progress / rapid and uneven as palm-rolled plasticine” is used to describe two girls rolling down a grass slope. It fails, I think, because one generally rolls plasticine backwards and forwards between the palms, whereas the rolling of the girls can happen in one direction only (they can’t roll back up the slope as they are rolling down it). In cases such as the above, the use of imagery constitutes an obstacle to the appreciation of the poetry rather than as an enhancement.

In addition to imagery that is unadventurous or imprecise, there is also a more ambitious imagery that tends to get lost in the imaginative abundance of the poem. Paradoxically, the clarity of the object diminishes with the accumulation of novel ways to present it. Here’s an example which deals with the moon from “Rain Event in the Whispering Country”. The first image refers to metaphorically as “grapefruit splendour”:

The black cattle congregate to blink at grapefruit splendour,
that gold satellite hanging over them.
Incomprehensible.
The Moon ¯ woman-steeped, bringer of blood, the mother cycle ¯
which rose from the landline late and fast
bringing a low tide of warmth.
Vast rose-coloured, milky petal-textured, pot of
clotted cream. Tangerine fullness, like a swollen areola
in the full breast of that night.

Here, it is the gorgeousness of the imagery that wreaks havoc. In the course of 9 lines, the moon is compared to two kinds of fruit, and evoked as a satellite, a pot of cream, and a breast’s “areola”. The diversity of this range of terms creates further ripples of discord. A fruit can “hang”, but not a satellite. A pot of cream cannot at the same time be “milky”. An areola may be “rose-coloured” but it is unlikely to be “tangerine”. Although such imagery is impressive for its attentiveness to the changes that the moon undergoes in the course of an evening, the incompatibility of the various elements considerably weakens the total impression.

A second example comes from “Persephone as a Whistling Moth”. Again, the undeniable richness of the poem’s imagery seems to work against its coherence:

But the pull to the light is too strong;
the self’s longing to luminesce.

It rings through me in tines
until I am a prism, holy, my mouth
all bells, wreathing the air with powder
scarves likes eddies of air behind a kite.

A conscious synaesthesia is at work here, blending sense impressions from a diverse range of sources, and this is an interesting fact in itself. First up, “pull to the light” suggests a physical force, but “luminesce” makes it more a matter of light, of the visionary. The first main image of the excerpt, however, is based on sound: the “tines” of the self begin to ring (the self is conceived here as a fork of some kind, possibly a tuning fork). After that, the image returns to light through “prism”, presumably refracting the self in a rainbow diversity of colour. Incongruously, this self as prism has a mouth full of “bells”, a transition prepared by the lone word “holy”, and this shift takes us back to the aural. After that, however, the imagery shifts to the tactile-physical in the suggestive but elusive “wreathing the air with powder”. The total effect is enhanced by the rhythmic control at work in the lines, a control that gives pull emphasis to all the self-consciously “poetic” words such as “luminesce”, “tines”, “prism”, “wreathing”, “scarves” and “kite”. Clearly, a powerful experience is being explored here, and allowance must be made for the difficulty of conveying such intensity in words, but once again, the poem fails to bring enough control and clarity to bear on the experience to communicate it aptly.

Confused poetic thought

Poetry can be so deft in the presentation of thought. In the poem “Broken House”, the lines “The lights have gone out. We can’t find our way about. / We haven’t got our faces on.”, suggest a disorientation that moves from the simple lack of illumination to something that is also psychic: without lighting, people lose their faces in a very direct way, and this threatens the sense of identity and influences the possibilities for satisfying human interaction. The poem “road” begins inauspiciously with the lines “I have nothing exciting to tell” and almost lives up to its promise until the sentence “ . . . false smoke alarms have replaced / church bells”, a formulation that neatly evokes urban wilderness with its soulless noise that serves no constructive purpose (unlike the [once] meaningful ringing of church bells). A striking thought is also at work in the final three lines of “Old Adaminaby: Drought”: “We touch the old bridge pylons / with the silence and disconnect / of museums”. Although “disconnect” spoils the effect by spelling things out, the idea of encountering a familiar object as if it were something devoid of personal history is, I think, effectively conveyed here.

Many poems in The Best Australian Poems 2008 struggle to think quite so clearly. The main problem seems to be one of rigour: poems either fail to present a thought of any substance, or they do so in a confused way. Australians seem to have a weakness for nature poems lashed with anthropomorphism in which ingenious description is all that really happens. The poem “At Long Last”, is content to present rain in various fanciful images, including the unlikely “And it sounds to have settled in / like a large matriculation of ants / rustling their completed exam papers / all at once”. “Anthem to the Green Tree Frog” is well-meaning, but lines such as “daily I wonder at the / painted glee of your / colour, green so green / it would make the Irish / envious” suggests that effusion is more important that precise observation, especially when it leads on to the (almost inevitable?) Aussie larrikin sentimentality of “you play / tricks on tourists hiding / insides the flange of the toilet / bowl”. “Field Guide” is made up of a series of such vignettes, witty in a way that ultimately embellishes rather than enlivens their subjects.

The experimentalists also tend to disavow thought in favour of the stern semiotic chora. In “Facebook”, poetry becomes a hit and miss affair based on a string of trying sentences (“Veronica is painting her nails. / Jordan is buying a new TV. Kate is at work. Tom is having issues”). Similarly, “birthday party ever” stakes everything on elusiveness: “with every second language you ‘reconcile’ / it gets easier, but harder for everyone around you. / your fairy godmother appeared at your fiftieth, / restoring your foreskin and teething mug”. Punctuation is played with in “pleasure again comes (like”, the unclosed bracket adding to the experimentation done in this area of language, but the reader is teased to uncover the thought.

I was struck too by the beguiling ring of the following lines, inspired by the sight of a coal barge travelling down a Polish river by night:

That silent
burden of blackness was not
only coal
it was smuggling history
through southern Poland
it was dragging me back
to the nineteen forties

to when there was less light
to when my friend
hadn’t been born

to when the bridge
was a broken arch

To when carbon
had another meaning
falling like soot (“Dinner by the River”)

These lines suggest only that the speaker recalls the Second World War, impelled rather vaguely by sinister appearance of the vessel. The verb “smuggling” here could apply equally well to the logic of the poem, dependent as it is on the significance of the War for its essential meaning. The weakness of the images meant to evoke that time ¯ “when there was less light”, “when the bridge was a broken arch”, “when carbon had another meaning” ¯ indicate to me little commitment to the actual horrors of that period. The thought, it would seem, has not been developed with any strong feeling.

Exuberance can obscure the thinking presented in a poem. “On the Undoing of Buttons” reveals an enjoyment in making farfetched connections in order to convey a significant, if well-known, ecological message. The lines play with the meaning of “button”, both a kind of flower as well as a humble fastening device:

Yet do not, do not undo these
subtle threads rethreading

stream, muscle, sinew, nerves
of earth. If you drift into sock-
burr grass and bend to see,
you may jolt at abrading air,

query lace-wings, plash of eel,
corroboree frog, gone where?
bacteria, fibre, moth, wing,
hammering sky mute of birdcall.

I got as far as “sock-burr grass” before I began to lose my way. The phrase “you may jolt at abrading air” sounds very grand, but I’m unsure why bending to down to look at something would deliver such a jolt. The syntax becomes quite rarefied after “query lace-wings” and by the time “wing” makes its next appearance, this time attached to moths, it is made to “hammer” for no plausible reason I can see accept to amplify the immense emptiness of the human wasteland. Here again, the intensity of feelings provoked by the awareness of senseless environmental degradation overcomes any gift for control.

What makes a “best poem”?

From my reading of this collection, the poems that emerge as both engaging and challenging are those that steer clear of the lyrical, the ostentatiously experimental, and the formal. Such poems are sceptical in their composure: they make no easy appeals to familiar topics, and they avoid on the whole elaborate, showy language. Significantly, as Peter Rose notes in his introduction, they tend to be longer poems, more meander than march, yet vigilant in their patient accumulation of detail.

“Train train” uses the simple device of a train journey to plot the mind’s responses to the shifting scenes. There’s a fine attention to rhythm, and to the use of typographical devices to suggest tone or mood:

a mild commotion (fuckin this n fuckin that)
     a reformed junkie,     wiry,
hard bright eyes,     (methadone?)
          lined skinny gripped jaw,
     ironed lightblue jeans (creases down the middle)
     fighting the automatic carriage doors
    to wedge a stroller ¯
        sheepskin and bottles and pastel-coloured stuff,
everything he cares about and it is
      it is

  *

through the window
        stained with the gels
     of drowsy workers
hillsides dotted with
green plastic-encased saplings

[ . . . ]

black ice
     on the highway sliding by
and trackside
     mounds of rusty looking pine needles
the colour of pharmaceuticals,
        those brown transparent capsules

The scenery is familiar, and unremittingly bleak. The imagery is precise, perhaps a little flat, but not inflated by strident feelings, and gently evocative of the meaningless of social routines and a degraded natural environment. Although the total effect is one of bleakness, the poem’s attempt to register this squarely provides one small source of strength against unremitting waste and ugliness.

“Tuk-tuk” is frustrating: it blends textures in a deliberately incongruous way, and yet incongruity is a part of what the poem seeks to tackle, the mismatch between mass-produced music, mass-produced images and tawdry reality:

San Francisco, O San Francisco
I can no longer ¯ could I ever ¯ dream you in dreams that smoulder
Like a deserted desert street after the explosion.
So, San Francisco, so I Google you unfiltered,
Scroll down the dimpled thumbnails of amateur porn;
Each coupling couple coupling tediously towards dawn
While I lie, an actor on the queen-sized stage,
And yawn.

[ . . .]

I tuk-tuked to a stop and stared back at a pair of immortal eyes
Staring into the mirror of my servo sunnies
Out of the mask of a model face
That could appear flawless if its humanity was blown up,
Out of all proportion,
Billboard size,
To cover the slab side of some piece of concrete brutalism ¯
Selling the product, the promise, the lie
Of immortal youth.

San Francisco the dream is brought at once into abrupt contact with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Site 300, a place where testing of nuclear material takes place. The degradation continues with the description of “dimpled thumbnails of amateur porn”, the word “dimple” suggesting a vulnerable human quality alongside the harsh, trivial “thumbnails”. The degradation of the sexual act is enacted in the repetitiveness of “Each coupling couple coupling tediously”. The poem plays artfully with the tension between contemporary references and conventional end-rhyme: “porn” chimes discordantly with the poetic word “dawn”, while the two resolve in the final “yawn”.

Later in the poem, the same tension continues: “eyes” rhymes with “sunnies”. The punning on “was blown up” is perhaps a little obvious, but its use helps to underscore the links suggested in the text between consumerism and the threat of destruction. Desire is suggested in the expression “immortal eyes”, but such desire is at once threatened by mechanical reproduction ¯ Staring into the mirror of my servo sunnies / Out of the mask of a model face ¯ at once narcissistic and “masked” (that is, that face both conceals and falsifies in some fundamental sense what it projects).

Although long poems stand out in The Best Australian Poems 2008, the most striking moment in the book for me was provided by the final three lines of “Wattles by Water”:

Riverbank wattles ¯
spattering the brown water
with their yellow spawn.

The jolt produced by this unexpected equation between pollen and spawn is intelligently shocking. It suggests at once how insistently the mind divides the world up into things it finds attractive and repugnant, and how unstable such divisions frequently are. Pollen as an agent of reproduction, and not simply a romanticized gold powder, is forcefully brought home to us here.

What happened to the short lyric?

By way of conclusion, I would like to think briefly about the failure of the free verse short poem suggested by this book’s polaroid composite landscape of the Australian poetry scene. For some reason, the short form tends to attract a slightly ponderous solemnity that nullifies verbal excitement:

this is not a house
of language, in the first sense of the word, the one
in which it made the world, this is not a place of origin,
ground, or single source: this is not a road for drinking
in the middle of the night: you won’t see
the ink of fire moving day and night across
the blotting paper of savannah, or the scorched paperbark
raining through a reddened dusk (“T/here”)

The rhythms are steady, but slightly grand, the wording tends towards the abstract (“house of language”, “the first sense of the word”, “place of origin”), and the frequent repetition of “this is not” is tends rigidify the movement of the poem, locking it into gradual amplifications of the same tone and mode. Possibly what is happening here is that poets writing in the lyric mode are striving for an impression of gravity in response to the dominance of prose and the apparent rise of long, frequently quite discursive kinds of poetry. The original freedom and concision of the short form, as well as its dominant personal quality, are viewed as sources of embarrassment. Ultimately, I fear the influence of a growing depersonalization is a key factor here. We don’t seem to believe in the worth of an individual voice, unless it is tricked up with fancy language, a worthy cause, clever humour, or the ever-diminishing shock of the new. In this scenario, poems serve as substitutes for the loss of the human: they tend to gloss over what we’re all really thinking and feeling. They become tokens of loss.