Searching the Poetic

Ivan Head

Searching the Poetic

Eþandun: Epic Poem

by William G. Carpenter, illustrations by Miko Simmons

Beaver’s Pond Press, 2021, 252 pages, about $30

Abundance: New and Selected Poems

by Andrew Lansdown

Cascade Books, 2020, 225 pages, about $30

The Covid Chronicles

by Roger G McDonald, paintings by Cally Lotz

IM Directions, 2021, $25

Woodhenge

by R L Swihart

Gold Across the Water Books, 2020, 103 pages

A surgeon might specialise in one organ or bodily system and stay confined to a specialisation. A reviewer of poetry can deal with very different works on different topics and ways of writing poetry; different understandings of poetry and what may lie at its core. It all looks like poetry.

A rejection slip from Les Murray had an arrow that pointed to line three of a poem and said, “the poem stopped here”. Further down, an arrow pointed to a word and said “false rhyme”. Clearly there is a kind of canonical shape that marks poetry and distinguishes it from core poems and the lookalike.

These four poetry books differ widely. I cannot really compare them as if they were the same kind of thing. Before commenting on them, I make one critical point. It is the question of footnotes and the need to go outside the poem to understand the poem. I am not saying that the poem can only convey what you already know or know implicitly. One might be compelled to read more widely, to learn what is new. But the e-world is a challenge. Should the first line in a poem challenge the reader to a half-hour’s net search in a quest for accessibility and meaning? Perhaps. I can remember buying a large Oxford volume of English poetry and being helped to read Eliot because of the clever and extensive way in which small notes on the page helped the sense of the poem come alive for a young antipodean student. In those days, the net did not exist and it could only be approximated on the page. But the wider material, in the notes, is not itself the poem.

On the other hand, the issue of legerdemain arises, the use of clever conjuring tricks where the gnostic privacy of the obscure sustains a stream of consciousness that is lost in individualism. No matter the search through notes, the journey will end atop James McAuley’s dromedary in Ern Malley. There is, by the way, a good view from up there.

Eþandun styles itself as an epic, and its tale is set in the ninth century. It weaves in and out of historical sources to create its own story, in poetic rather than narrative form, and when in modern English, most characters speak grandly. In this respect, the work is not a translation from old English or old German or old Scandinavian, but a modern attempt to form a tale fit to give a sense of those times when English as we know it was not yet spoken. The epic is scholarly in style and Carpenter divides each page into two columns, one occupying two thirds of the page (for his text) and the other third filled with historical and textual source notes that help the reader to place the text in a properly informed matrix. This is apt, for the poem is historical tale-telling for lovers of this genre, many of whom will become fully immersed in it. Notes may well be what a deeply learned work requires. There is nothing amiss with reading Eliot or Pound with notes to assist. The reader will need the notes even to pronounce the title which, as the flyleaf says, is pronounced something like Eth-an-dune. None begrudge notes when reading Chaucer.

The flyleaf tells us that this war epic in the tradition of Homer and Virgil paints Western Christendom in its darkest hour as Gormr the Dane mounts an attack on the young King Alfred in 878 AD. The language is grand and measured. A scholar named Gregor McNamee tells me elsewhere that saga and epic can be used interchangeably for a work, fictional or filmic that is “sprawling, colossal, and otherwise staggeringly great”. The poem is indeed filmic and Hollywood or New Zealand might pick it up.

I wondered whether to fully understand the work I would need to bring to it a prior reading and love of Homer, and perhaps a familiarity with the Venerable Bede, Tolkien’s renderings of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl and Sir Orfeo, Beowulf and Seamus Heaney’s notes on modern Irish dialect as a translator’s tool, and perhaps Milton and Wordsworth. This may be asking too much of the casual reader of poetry.

It is more than a work for the specialist scholar. Miko Simmons’s lovely illustrations suggest that an animator or digital cinema, or historical dramatist could present the poem as a movie that breaks out of any narrow bounds and grabs a world audience of the young—as Tolkien’s work has done. As one reviewer said, it “is a medievalist’s delight”.

Not all longer poems work or find an audience. C.S. Lewis’s long 1926 publication Dymer is still looking for one. My favourite poem that compresses the centuries and embraces references from myth and epic is W.H. Auden’s nine-verse poem “The Shield of Achilles”—which compresses the centuries into a diachronic masterpiece of seventy-two lines.

Were the poem presented out loud and performed, author’s notes on metre and rhythm might help. I spent some time closely reading for instance page 115 to see how stresses might be applied. One could apply either iambic or trochaic stresses to different effect, or even read the poem with a heavier, even stress on most syllables. The challenge to sales of this book will be to overcome any sense that its content is confined to a specialist subsection of poetry readers and to affirm that it will come alive to an engaged, wider audience. That is simply the same challenge facing many poets whose works struggle to find an audience.

I may help the reader by noting John Baker and Stuart Brookes in Viking and Medieval Scandinavia Vol. 8 (2012). They tell us that in 878, Alfred led his army through Somerset and Wiltshire (as we now call them) and took on and defeated the Vikings (Guthrum’s forces) at a place called Eþanduse, probably Edington in Wiltshire. Eþandun invites a long winter of leisure time by the fire.

Metre and notes also need not be far away when turning to Andrew Lansdown’s wonderful book Abundance: New and Selected Poems. Not that the pursuit of either need detract from the splendid accessibility of this large and carefully chosen collection. For instance, “On Poetry”, the second poem, and reprinted from Counterpoise (1980), carries a dedication to William Hart-Smith, who had a significant influence on West Australian poets. Immediately, one can use the marvels of the net to track material on Hart-Smith and the interaction between these two and other poets before returning to the poetry itself. At the end of “On Poetry”, Lansdown writes of his infant son, not yet walking but sitting on his knee as he talks with Hart-Smith:

my son …

spasmodically stops

our talking with

a short sigh,

and lifts and drops,

his foot rhythmically

on the flat of my thigh.

Lansdown is a poet of the embodied and deeply-observed world and, in the end, metre and rhythm in poetry will have more than a close relationship to the beating heart, the dancing feet and all human movement. It is a kind of incarnationalism. Auden’s persona in “The Shield of Achilles” was also looking for figures dancing. To read Lansdown’s new book is to become open to a much wider world.

One earlier publication, Abiding Things, is not represented in this volume. I note that critics of that book said significant things about Lansdown. Les Murray wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald: “He espouses … an aesthetic of small observations”. Rod Moran in the Fremantle Arts Review wrote of Lansdown “lifting the veil of familiarity from the world”, and Philip Salom in the West Australian called him “an imagist of the highest order”.

Micro-observation can go hand-in-glove with a larger metaphysic, even an off-stage metaphysic that is made by the poet’s mastery of the art to serve the poetry, and where the poetry is not a convenient footstool for other concerns that in the end dominate. In that sense of micro, there is something dense and condensed in Lansdown’s poems, a vision lurking. I’m happy to call Lansdown a metaphysical poet. Blake could write in an observational-micro that evoked London in detail, though perhaps his larger vision became obscure in the longer poems. They became seriously esoteric, seriously gnostic.

Lansdown’s larger questions emerge in his exploration of Buddhist thematics and in the minimalism of haiku. These are fully consistent with his Western and Christian vision of the world as a created reality in which the traces of the creator are evident. Something immense lurks behind the micro and the nano. The focal point for the poet lies in the Buddhist concern with the moment-by-moment arising of consciousness, even the seamless construction of self from the little portions (a Franciscan term) of sensory and other mental data. Lansdown’s poems often land right on that moment of singular consciousness which is consciousness of items in the visual or wider sensory field. I deeply enjoy his poems that focus on the contents of the natural world in its precise setting. His selections from Birds in Mind: Australian Nature Poems (2009) make some explicitly theological comment where, for instance, the title poem, “Birds in Mind”, contains four stanzas, each of which is psalm-like in its praise of the Creator. One of them reads: “Goodness, that ibis / signals the presence of birds / in the mind of God!”

Now if one did not know a little theology, recourse to notes might be needed here. I simply refer to Eric Mascall’s Gifford Lectures called The Openness of Being where he discusses in the abstract a human capacity to co-intuit a thing and the ground of its being in a single act of perception. Whether then Lansdown sees the contents of the world as given icons within nature I leave the reader to pursue.

This is a wonderful book that makes considered selections from eleven earlier books and adds a twelfth section of twenty-five new poems. The book includes thorough and somewhat overwhelming detail of Lansdown’s substantive publication record and life work. Somewhere, James McAuley, the first editor of Quadrant, wrote that it was harder for Christ to walk in an Australian poem than upon the waters of the Sea of Galilee. Perhaps in time he revised that opinion. Les Murray’s poetry books were prefaced with “To the glory of God”. I close with some lines from the final poem in Lansdown’s book: “Radiance after the Apostle, 2 Corinthians 4:6”. This is overtly Christian poetry and Christ walks through its lines. It is a testimonial confession of identity and belonging and is placed intentionally at the end of the book.

Lansdown is playing with the Greek word doxa and the Hebrew word kabod, and it is the same word Murray uses as glory. Lansdown identifies a cosmion at the centre of which he finds himself as poet. But it is not an inner docetism but something cosmic as well. It is like St Francis’s Brother Sun: “And I see the sun / rise up in its radiance / like its Maker.” That Maker has also “shone in my heart / to give me the light”. And that light had its locus for Lansdown, literally, as “his great glory in the face of Christ”.

The back cover of Roger G McDonald’s book The Covid Chronicles tells me to expect a book that contains one hundred Shakespearean sonnets, which serves to remind me to make time to re-read more of Shakespeare’s work in due course. McDonald’s sonnets evoke the theme of COVID-19, which itself is a shape-shifting theme as the virus morphs into new and virulent variants. Things have changed even since this book’s publication in March this year. Perhaps that makes it harder to appraise the book and its poems since the Covid milieu has not yet gone away. It may be too hard yet for some to buy a volume dedicated to this theme.

Perhaps Sonnet 43, “VC (Victory over Covid Day)” can be quoted:

Will there be jubilation in the streets?

Will silenced church bells ring, and from the mosques

Muezzins sing? …

Easy questions, but still; no answers yet.

Will this war end the same: Lest we forget?

“The Audacious Monk”, a local pub and watering hole, appears in a few places in the poems. It is one of the concentrations of social capital which Covid removes from the normal human experience of life. These are themes often explored in prose by Hugh Mackay, distinguished observer and reflector of Australian life and customs. The volume ends with a snipe at the now former President of the USA as “Neo Nero plays his truculent golf”.

It is a well-made book. The end-notes on the author are engaging, as are the notes about the artist, Cally Lotz. The poems are interspersed with coloured reproductions of twelve of her paintings that work by “emotional intensity and symbolism”. I liked the inclusion of her art. I also like the inside back cover note about Covid-related “works of corporal mercy” in southern Africa. 

Woodhenge is R L Swihart’s third volume of poetry and a work of his maturity. He lives in Long Beach, California. The literary editor of Quadrant is cited on the back cover and says, “Readers will enjoy his sheer delight in language, and the astute, and often whimsical intimacy of these well-wrought poems.”

The title poem consists of four two-line verses. It is a poem about a memory and contains directly observational material. It begins with the enigmatic sentence: “Boys amid timothy.” Research tells me that timothy is a grassy or herbal groundcover not usually found in this reviewer’s part of the world. I have learned something, and further reading of the poems invites further search-engine mania to increase my vocabulary and historical and geographical knowledge. I also note that the first poem, though running for eight lines, contains only two full stops though I identify five full sentences. It works.

I think that the first poem is about indelible memories, that class of memory that never leaves a person and which when arising from childhood becomes formative for identity. Here, the boys seem to be making a kind of sacred space for themselves modelled on the Stonehenge of southern England. But my net search kicks in again and I find out that not all henges are built of stone and that the phenomenon of wooden henges or woodhenge is real. Indeed, the phenomenon is not limited to the proto-English, but is widespread and had a key exemplar in early cultures of the Mississippi valley. It does not really matter which locus lives in this poem. Vocabulary is again pushed by the word greywethers, which I first think might be a kind of sheep—but research suggests is a set of large stones that from a distance may look like sheep. For engineering convenience, the boys’ henge is made of scraps of wood, not immovable boulders.

The poem captures and expresses a single remembered experience. The detritus of childhood is gathered and valued in a kind of natural construction of the sacred. It includes a “dead crow, five fake arrowheads and a jack-knife”. Perhaps anyone whose childhood was exposed to a yard or a field, to “free space”, will respond with particular favour to this poem. I do. It sets the human “outside the city” and open to a mystery. The boys make even a sacred chronology: “The departing sun slants through a makeshift door.” The political theorist Eric Voegelin used the term “anamnesis” to group the class of first, indelible memories which he said arose with consciousness of soul and then carried that vital moment of self-awareness on through human time.

I comment on one further poem in this collection, “The Redactor and Q”. Having pondered it for some hours, I conclude that it takes me for a ride with McAuley’s Ern Malley; and contains a large dose of highly creative whimsy. I chose this poem because I think I can bring some prior knowledge to it and understand it without the journey into net search. I know something about the literal Redactor and the literal Q. Redaction is a recognisable shaping of a prior tradition. A redactor modifies to stress new meanings or to emphasise something that must be drawn out in a tradition. Q is a hypothetical, but discernible document, thought to precede three synoptic gospels and able to be reconstructed from a careful study of them as the later tradition. Perhaps a redactor shapes a lover. I think that’s what this poem is about.

The poem expresses moments of private exchange between the poet and one other and does this in an intense and colourful way. The poem is humorous, with a line: “feral parrots tear at dusky pages and drop white gloves for luck”. Birdlime forever intrudes. We seem to be somewhere in France. The net searcher can locate Menton and Colmar and then place Cocteau’s chapel, and then the poem ends with the experience of pondering Grünewald’s Christ. But the poem enjoys its own obscurities, its own wit. The key character in the poem “plays the Tolstoyan”. Another disturbs the bath water, but is “the angel of Bethesda”. To be Tolstoyan may involve works of supererogation, or rewriting Russian folk tales, but I am lost with the colourful line: “The leather sandwich is ragged and thin”. The collection is intensely individualistic and personal and invites the reader to join in.

Ivan Head was Warden of Christ College in the University of Tasmania, and Warden of St Paul’s College in the University of Sydney, where a major building now carries his name. This is the latest of several omnibus poetry reviews he has written for Quadrant in recent years