Deckchairs and Pirouettes

Rescued from Time
by Barbara Fisher
Ginninderra Press, 2016, 108 pages, $20

Charlie Twirl
by Alan Gould
UWA Publishing, 2017, 100 pages, $22.99
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Beginning her career as a published poet relatively late, Barbara Fisher now has four books behind her, most recent of them Rescued from Time. Besides his fiction (most notably, perhaps, the superb novel of the Normandy landings and their aftermath, The Lakewoman, 2009) and two collections of essays, Alan Gould has published fourteen volumes of verse. First of them was Icelandic Solitaries (1978), while the latest is Charlie Twirl, a collection of “Sixty-One New Poems”.

The epigraph that supplies Fisher’s title comes from the American novelist James Salter: “Art, in a sense, is life brought to a standstill, rescued from time.” Gould’s title is his name for the famously photographed man (later part of the coinage) who danced down George Street in Sydney on VJ Day in 1945. The books are of a size. Each embraces the material of the poets’ lives, their reflections on art and the natural world. Fisher’s publisher is Ginninderra Press, since 1996 an inventive, brave supporter of Australian poetry, while Gould’s book is one of a new and excellent series of fourteen just ventured by UWA Publishing.

Rescued from Time begins disarmingly with a poem called “Deckchairs”: “It seems these canvas contraptions are coming back”, before moving deftly to their heyday in the 1930s when they supported “all those Bloomsbury bottoms / in drowsy summer gardens of the literati”. There is a restless movement from subject to subject in the first of the book’s six parts—a poem on the need for occasional social evasiveness in “Conversations I Do Not Have”, a response to “Ghirlandaio’s Portrait of an Old Man and His Grandson”. In “Remembering Moscow”, Fisher smiles at the chance to pose with lookalikes—Marx, Lenin, the last Tsar—and sympathises with the American couple “in the final stages / of the Byzantine process / of adopting a Russian orphan”. Her descriptive talents are given freer rein in “Coming Home”, where from an aeroplane she views “fold on fold of olive-scumbled bush, / until the probe of many-fingered waterways / signals our descent”.

In the second part of the book, Fisher engages with more things of the world, first “In Praise of Oranges”, where she recollects both “the orange grove / that lapped my aunt’s old house with tides of trees” and how, when someone brought Jaffa oranges to her London flat, “their perfume lifts the fug of the darkening hall”. “Paperbarks” are animated next: “With their generous wrappings of loose bark / they make us think of ancient relatives / in shabby dressing gowns”.

What Fisher ventures next, in “A Colonial City”, is a verse narrative set in a Georgian house in Sydney that is now under National Trust protection. Its writer in residence, Miss Phillimore, is intent on preserving not only the material fabric but the good name of the first owner of the house, Captain FitzGibbon, who arrived in New South Wales in 1827. He had a wife, but was bitter that he had missed another, because she preferred the title to come of his older brother. His descent into madness is one of the twists in a tale that might have benefited from more amplitude. At last “with a steady hand / [he] despatched himself and silenced the bells for ever”.

A sequence of poems about Fisher’s own family follows. “Leaf Shadows” is written in memory of her mother:

We tried hard

to shed reserve,

you dying, I still hoping

you were not.

“Lost Uncles” is a prose account of several who were killed in the Great War. One was prompted to enlist under age when cursed with a white feather, while for another “the girl he loved never married, became a courtesy aunt”. Her own childhood features in Fisher’s memories of sitting up on the way back to boarding school on the night train from Sydney to Melbourne, while in “Tears” she recollects the pain of “bawling my grief to the tiny world / which adults have forgotten / and only children know”. The personal focus is sustained in “To An Adopted Child”:

 We have no blood to lend us

nor fleshly mystery,

only the hope of love

and the fact of our frailty.

In the next part, Fisher’s attention turns to apparently random objects, often playfully regarded. “A Survivor” imagines wandering in a Museum of Australian Food and wonders (as many of a similar age might in a delinquent moment) “What happened to the carpet-bag steak”. There are four poems on colours. White is for feathers—and lies—red is the “symbol of danger, light for stop and sleaze”. Blue brings the “legacy of slavery and the deep dark South”, but “for the bluest of all blues give me / the bluebag of vanished washdays”. The waywardness of these adjectives attracts her, as yellow attaches to fever and peril, but also to the “yellow pleasures” of butter, eggs, honey, wattle.

The final part of Rescued from Time is perhaps truest to the title. These “Fragments of a Life” are “from the unpublished letters of Joseph Bergin”—her father—a Polish Jew and engineer who came to Australia in 1950, worked on the Snowy Mountains Scheme, set up his own business and “ended his days immensely rich”. The papers that Fisher finds may have been addressed to a mistress whom Bergin left behind in France. One of them tells of his daughter: “Something in her curtained look, / shy, yet self-contained, reminded me of you”.

Fisher’s poetry eschews experiment, as if out of fealty to material that is mainly personal, rather than discursive, or satirical. By contrast, Gould’s verse is at once formally conservative, yet cheeky within those bounds, not least in the use of rhyme words to tell many unsettling, very small stories. Early on we encounter “finger-sorcery” rhyming with “rhapsody” and there is much more in this frolicking spirit. Charlie Twirl contains all sorts of poetic business. There are numerous homages to past authors and one to the Finnish army that fought the Russians in the Winter War of 1939. Composers of music engage him most, however, whether Bach, Dvorak, Sibelius or—most frequently—Ralph Vaughan Williams. He writes that “My interest is that elusive idea of what it is we ‘see’ in the mind’s eye further to the auditory sensation when a piece of music moves us.” What he ventures in consequence is at once gleeful and thoughtful.

In “Ten Homages to Vaughan Williams” Gould speaks of himself as having been “Shied by the brute of England / when I was seventeen” (to Australia that is, latest and last of his father’s military postings). Thus he left behind (save as literary material) “shires / of wooden stiles and Queen Anne’s lace, / and bloodshot-eyed esquires”. Also consigned to the past were Morris dancers, “wearing Sunday best with ribbons, / goon hats of plaited straw”. Thinking of Vaughan Williams’s oboe concerto leads Gould to judge that “these strings and oboe quicken emptiness, / finding the shape and pulse of air’s conjecture / to flood it with their momentary excess”. Then he is engaged by the non-human world. “It’s Bird Week” is full of brio and good nature: “Now Thursday and galahs have come, like Hardy’s wives to market, / while cockatoos stand on my lawn like batsmen at a wicket”. This poem is followed by “Stanzas for My Insects”—“O silverfish you’ve found my Freud, / Unconscious Mind is now a void”.

Gould finds ribald but respectful fun in the name of an Indian judo participant at the Glasgow Commonwealth Games—“Ms Sushila Likmabam”—before we reach the title poem. It opens in exuberant rhyme: “This is the street of Hullaballoo / where poor link arms with the well-to-do” and then describes the man who appears “to skip away and doff his trilby, / pirouette his sideways smile”. Cut from George Street to encounters with some of Gould’s most admired poets—Chaucer, who “breathed a Universe”, Skelton, Wyatt—“behind you is the cock-a-hoop / of sexual frenzy’s light and shade”. Robert Graves is summoned with his “deadpan eyes / that watched gas dawn on Flanders rise”. Shakespeare is here too, he who could “limn a self with all its else”, “a watchful man / gamekeeper’s eye for how love ran”. For whatever reason (surely not envy, or less-educated writers?), homages to other poets have become increasingly scarce in this country.

Not for Gould, who is never bothered about being in a minority. Besides the poets whom he names, he salutes and imitates anonymous balladeers. In his version of “Go to Sea No More”, the speaker, a whaleman, considers all the humdrum things that he would rather be—shopkeeper, factory hand—“But I got sent to Davis Strait to use a flensing knife / and grew so cold to Life I did not want to win a life”. There is something of the music of Les Murray here, besides that of the ballad. In “Captain Armchair”, the impetus may be Kenneth Slessor’s retired seaman Captain Dobbin, though Gould’s less genial protagonist, “close-hauled past Cape Flattery, gave sea-room to Cape Cynical”. “Maidenly” is referenced to “Solveig’s Song” in Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite, but this is an affectionate way back into the relationship of his parents, who met in Iceland during the Second World War—“The Akureyri girls are out on Sulur”. Meanwhile, “Preposterous Captain G. has come”, soon enough to court Gould’s mother away from Sulur to “a life of never-fixed-address”.

Gould’s address has been fixed in Canberra for many decades now, together with his marriage to Anne Langridge, who is celebrated as—besides much else—a gardener, in “Two Pomegranates Blush Like Mars” (he is a dab hand with titles as well as rhyme). Yet Gould’s place in Australian poetry or the larger literary scene has never been easily described. A radical student protestor at the time of the Vietnam War (see his fictionalised account in the three linked novellas, The Enduring Disguises, 1988), he was not part of the so-called poetic “Generation of ’68”. Often prize-listed and sometimes a prize-winning author, Gould has neither sought celebrity nor had it foisted upon him. Daring, intelligent, deeply-read, he is one of Australia’s finest craftsmen in verse, prose—and model ship building. Yet he has never been given his critical due.

The latest book ends with long, melancholy, but grateful recollections of English schooldays—“Getting the Latin”, “Getting the French”—and with rueful accounting of later stages in his life. “Titanium Where My Hipsters Rub” (see titles, above) is a report, only half in jest, of what a difference in walking and seeing hip replacements can make. The poem “We Boomer Boys” confronts the age when such prostheses are needed and dolefully begins: “We boomer boys were once The Noise but now we run to trouble, / no longer seize those victories we scored when we were able”. In a review of damaged contemporaries, Gould finds himself to be one “whose self-regard proceeded jauntily / from Swagger Bluff to Hobble Lane on cloud Hyperbole”. Wry, witty, emotionally self-contained, humanely open to worlds elsewhere, Gould is an ornament of our literature, however much he might demur.