Memorable and Beguiling

Walking the Boundary
by Damen O’Brien
Pitt Street Poetry, 2024, 113 pages, $28.00

Having just published his second collection, Walking the Boundary, Brisbane poet Damen O’Brien is probably best known at this stage for the extraordinary number of prizes he has already won or been the runner-up in. Most poets of substance score a number of prizes over a career, but to have won so many so early is unusual. Prize juries (and their shared aesthetics) vary considerably over place and time. To have pleased so many of them raises interesting questions and to some extent may even impede a proper appreciation of a poet’s overall work.

There are some sixty poems in this collection and over thirty competitions are thanked in the acknowledgments. Not a bad strike rate—and several of those prizes have been won more than once.

The most memorable and attractive poems here vary considerably in both style and content, but they all have a strong underlying idea (what the Metaphysicals called an “argument”) and it is essentially that which we as readers remember. On the other hand, we certainly wouldn’t remember the idea had it not been so well-expressed.

It’s interesting then to think about what holds these poems together as a book beyond their unquestionable quality. Clearly O’Brien has an underlying interest in, and knowledge of, science, religion, landscapes, human relations (particularly marital and familial) and Australia’s complex and troubled history. But it is none of these which unifies the book.

On his website, O’Brien expresses his gratitude to a number of Australian poets, among them Les Murray, Anthony Lawrence, Mark Tredinnick, Sarah Holland-Batt and Judith Beveridge. While one can sense, for instance, Beveridge’s influence in the density of O’Brien’s use of detail and Murray’s in his range of thought, none of these poets is the “key” to his work.

After reading all six of this book’s thematic sections, each named from what the author seems to consider the best (or most indicative) poem in the section, one sees that the underlying unifying factor here is, in fact, O’Brien’s poetic technique. It’s as if he avoids anything which a less-gifted poet might have been tempted by, and works only on ideas which are inherently memorable or beguiling, ideas which (in the right hands) are likely to win a competition, perhaps. There is little sense of an underlying “field” (as there was with Murray) which the poet is deliberately, or inadvertently, filling in the course of a career.

Each reader of Walking the Boundary will have his or her preferred poems, but the choice will probably be subjective rather than a judgment on the poems’ absolute merits. For this reviewer, the outstanding poems in the first section are “The View from Heaven” and “The Ninth Circle” but this may well proceed from an agnostic’s incurable interest in religion.

Ostensibly, “The View from Heaven” is about native bees swarming. “There is nothing to be done”, O’Brien says halfway through. “My wife knows / a man that works with hives, but he isn’t answering the phone”. Such lines may seem plain at first, but two lines on O’Brien begins a long sentence with: “We watch them for a while with the impersonal pity of seraphs” and ends with a resonant phrase expressing how, watching the bees, the poet senses “the powerlessness of gods”.

No less striking is “The Ninth Circle” with its acknowledged debt to Dante’s “Inferno”. “I was met in hell by a herd of sheep, / wild with desperation, cows, white-eyed / and stamping, thousands of chickens …” Later the poem’s narrator takes up

the hammer I’d been given … and [gives] them the bolt that they were seeking
and later the firebrand, sputtering and oily,
shone in their open, watching eyes
and for each animal I let burn once, I set them alight again.

It’s not an easy poem to recover from.

Hardly less apocalyptic is the poem “The Next Sunrise”, in the second section, where O’Brien works from the “what-if” premise of: “We were in the air when the world ended on the ground.” After a series of convincing and sardonic “in-flight” details, the narrator concludes:

But this is
the most beautiful day of the rest of our lives and I can tell
as we circle over where Changi used to be, that
there is hope for us, that things will work out after all.

Though such irony is not the book’s dominant tone it serves to remind us that O’Brien is not a poet who takes himself too seriously. Humour is a welcome and recurrent element, reminiscent perhaps of the “comic relief” in Macbeth’s “porter” scene.

The book’s last three parts have a similar ration of intensely memorable (and presumably prize-winning) poems. The last of these sections, “A First Approximation”, is perhaps a little more “political”: “Lazarette”, for instance, dedicated to the Manus refugees, a long prose poem, “What is Wrong with the Date?” and “The Last Birds” which may, or may not, refer to A.D. Hope’s “The Death of the Bird”.

The penultimate section is more concerned with relationships and it plays effectively with whether or not the poems are “autobiographical”. “The Plot” is one example. A real-life wife may or may not want to hear from her husband a line such as: “You and I? What story did we write? Which / of the seven stories did our misfortunes take?” Dramatic monologue or memoir? Either way, it’s a liminal area which can be profitably (and riskily?) worked.

There is much more that could be said by going through all the book’s “best” poems systematically but it is surely just as useful to insist that Walking the Boundary is a collection not to be missed. Better then to conclude with a quotation from the poet’s website: “I have two boys and a very patient wife, and they can be found in my poetry too. I work as a Contracts Manager, and poetry keeps me sane.” So far, so good.

Geoff Page’s latest books of poetry are 101 Poems: 2011–2021 and a collection of new poems, Penultima, both published by Pitt Street Poetry.