“No Image Can Ever Be Deserted”

Although he has lived in Sydney since 1967 (when he was thirty-four) Vivian Smith was born and grew up in Hobart, and Hobart and Tasmania have remained reference points of continuing importance in the formulation of his ideas and imagery. My title comes from the poem “Deserted Bandstand, Kingston Beach”, situated in Tasmania. A poem titled “Back in Hobart” declares “the permanence of place does not recede” as he visits “remembered, holy places”. Although he has also written many poems set in Sydney, his work has much in common with the “Lines” he wrote “for Rosamond McCulloch”, one of a number of Tasmanian painters Smith has commemorated: “you always returned / to the coastlines of the south” and “gave the island back the images it gave— / tide country with a sea fence for a frame”. It’s hard now to think how unusual this was when Smith began publishing. Reviewing Smith’s first collection, An Island South, Ray Mathew said that “it … is Tasmanian, which is new, and … gives it … exoticism”, reflecting “a new country in Australian poetry”! Recalling his time at “the Old University, Hobart”, Smith states:

Mount Wellington has not yet been declared

one of the sacred mountains of the world.

It was my Athos and my Ararat,

my Fuji where a hundred views unfurled.

Nevertheless, Smith’s views of Hobart and of the state are not always complimentary. His early poems are tense works that present storms, drownings and human figures such as “Mad Clare” in her landscape of “cold … worn hills / with madness in their monotone / and emptiness”, as well as a deaf grandmother, a blind banjo player and a sad whore. “View from the Domain, Hobart” begins, “Small town, dull town; nothing further south / jagged cape, smooth hills, the neat flat river valley, / the harbour with an island in its mouth”. Poems such as “Winter Foreshore”, “Equinox” and “Praying Mantis” present nature as “cruel” and threatening. Of course, this is not the whole story: “In Summer Rain” celebrates, in Shaw Neilson fashion, “the orchards’ gentle light” and “the simple joy of rain”; “Bird Sanctuary” presents a peaceful “tideless bay” with “light that flickers the pencil reed” and where Yeatsian swans “sail with slim and supple necks”; while “Despite the Room” concludes with “the slow intactness of the world”.

Inevitably, many of Smith’s presentations of Hobart and Tasmania are memories, and invoke “the pathos of the past”, including his own. Smith recalls Morris Miller telling him that “the past can only live if recreated”, and Smith recreates it in a number of poems. He recalls his upbringing as a member of “the urban poor”, living “on the outskirts” with working-class attitudes: his father told him, “Don’t read too much / it will affect your brain”. With typically understated, wry humour, “Return to Hobart” begins:

We leave behind the farms, the aerodrome,

the tall unfinished bridge. Near the centre

a rent-an-Avis-car sign says we’re home …

 

The Hobart streets look “Stunned in their Sunday lunar vacancy” and the poem ends, “Home again. / Challenged by change, the sense of the incomplete”. More positively, Smith’s most recently published poem (in a March issue of the Weekend Australian) presents a “memory from 1945” in which with a schoolfriend he saw an emperor moth emerging from its chrysalis, “the loveliest thing I’d ever seen”. The poem is an unrhymed sonnet that ends with a reflection in the present: “You became an astro-physicist, / I lagged on behind, lost in wonder”.

The links between early environment and individual psychology are no doubt real but complex. Nevertheless, it seems reasonable to deduce that Tasmania’s small population and largely non-industrial landscape have probably encouraged the centrality of nature in Smith’s imagination. In an essay titled “A Bit Off the Map” he has argued that “there is a particular Tasmanian atmosphere” with “qualities of light not found anywhere else”. In a poem simply titled “Tasmania”, Smith describes the state as “Water colour country” where “the hills / rot like rugs beneath enormous skies” while in “the small alleys and along the coast, / the land” is “untamed between the scattered farms”.

This poem is discussed in some detail in one of the most penetrating essays published on Smith’s work, David McCooey’s “Still Life: Art and Nature in Vivian Smith’s Poetry” (published twenty years ago, and there has been only one essay since—a second essay by Noel Rowe in 1996). McCooey reads Smith’s work as evidencing the “pastoral imagination” which reflects “a sense of loss of a more innocent world” redeemed to some extent “in the poetic present” and employing dialectics “between town and country” and between “Art and Nature”. McCooey discusses the work of the other important critic of Smith’s poetry, Noel Rowe, who raises the idea of pastoral but refuses it and reads Smith as presenting a “constitutive negativity”, an uncertain balance between order and uncontainment or even destructiveness, and between satisfaction and unfulfilment. While I disagree with aspects of both these readings they are excellent essays in their detail and provide useful parameters for any discussion of Smith’s poetry.

McCooey claims that “The primary domain of Smith’s pastoral imagination is Tasmania”. In recent years there has been a good deal of critical reading, by Ivor Indyk, John Kinsella and others, of Australian poetry in terms of pastoral or as anti-pastoral. That “anti” is a sign that it is not pastoral at all. It seems to me that if we do not have a locus amoenus in which an idyll is played out that resolves, perhaps temporarily, the complexities of living then we do not have pastoral, and in Australia not even the Tasmanian landscape is liable to conjure up Arcady. Certainly Smith’s Tasmanian landscape does not do so; in his most recent book, Here, There and Elsewhere, “A Garden in Van Diemen’s Land” conjures up “The cruelty of plant life … the way they use, abuse, and fight each other”. Plants are like people: “They cannot thrive without control and order”.

What we do have is nature, and any poems about nature post-1798 must call up the Romantics. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley and others saw a harmony and even a correspondence between the human and external nature. Smith describes many of his early poems as “expressionist”, “focussing as much on inner states as outer views”. They use nature to find images of internal feelings. Thus the speaker of “Old Men Are Facts”—a kind of Captain Dobbin who has been reading Judith Wright—declares that the sea’s “great storms were a part of me”, while in “Winter Foreshore”:

 

These objects caught in light,

discarded anchor, sodden bird,

the wind-rhyming shell,

reveal the heart is desolate.

 

The objects being “caught in light” makes this one of many painterly stanzas in Smith’s work and the painterliness reduces the sense of desolation; there is a certain amount of youthful angst in Smith’s early poems, even those saved for subsequent editions of Selected Poems. Smith has commented:

My own early poems were … aware of constriction, frustration, inhibition and the threat of madness, and I think it is related to some sense of the narrow and insular, a sense of the difficult boundaries and limits we lived in.

This is, of course, another aspect of Tasmania, at least from the 1930s to the 1950s, but as Smith’s work matures, and he moves to Sydney, the tension remains: constriction is clearly also an existential state.

Smith has written that Tasmanian poets “have brought a peculiar concentration to the fashioning of images which can reconcile their own humanity with the paradoxical qualities of an enduring yet changeful landscape and a remote yet ever-present past”. Moreover, “above all Tasmanian poetry’s concern in many instances is with an outer world that is emblematic of an inner one”. Smith could be writing about himself. Sometimes, however, the outer world contrasts with the inner one, as is implied when Smith goes on to say:

Many [Tasmanian poets] have been concerned to explore and to reclaim the tract that lies between the inner world and the outer one, looking out at their surroundings and into themselves and suggesting the strangeness of the dichotomy they have perceived.

This troubling “dichotomy” marks a philosophical difference between Smith and the great Romantics, apart from Coleridge in his moments of dejection and Keats, for whom the wedding of nature and the human in the end meant becoming, as the Nightingale Ode says, “a sod”. While Rowe argues that, in Smith’s poetry, “Objects exist more to show beauty than to illustrate relation” and that “meaning becomes what beauty might be”, I think that Smith does not share Keats’s conviction that “What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth”, and Smith’s search in nature is for some sense of truth and meaning in both human and natural life. In the poem “Images”, musing on “these passing years”, Smith declares “there is a sense of pattern though design / remains invisible” but that sense remains precarious. The title poem of his first book, “The Other Meaning”, is a confession of failure, looking at nature’s combination of “pain and joy” but feeling only the pain:

 

Even now with winter’s first red bird,

the hard, incisive light and snow beginning

I have failed: finding the world alive

with pain, and without its other meaning.

 

This is Smith’s own Ode on Melancholy, in which the mind cannot be fitted to the world.

Smith’s poems are actually full of birds, and the thousand “Sparrows in bamboo” in “Sparrows: Mosman” demonstrate that “nature’s life / simply doesn’t need us to go on”. However, the mind can also be its own place: in revisiting “the suburbs of my youth” he finds his old house “erased, the garden gone” but “still undemolished in my mind”. The elaborate negative, undemolished, emphasises the gap between outer and inner reality. Memory in Smith’s poems has great power: “The picture in my mind records each change / with minute details showing what has gone”, but “everywhere”, then and now, is “the sky, the mountain range”. The landscape is “enduring yet changeful” while the humanly constructed does not last. By contrast the poem “Summer Rain”, set in Sydney, is another which finds “the world alive / with pain”. Its time is “Dead summer” that “will not yield” and all the imagery is of “problems of decay”, even in “Growth and growth”, whether of “A thick grub like a pizzle” or personally of “the hair, the nails, the teeth”. Even “Young trees” are seen as “clamouring for stake and vine” and “The mind alone cannot know such relief”. Smith is well aware of the way the mind can feed depressively on itself.

A less miserable poem than “Summer Rain” and more complex is “An Effect of Light”, which is worth quoting in full:

 

Swans in their grey and silver park

hiss from the reeds their indignation

where looking back to what was wake

the pool suggests a moment’s agitation …

 

After work in solitary rooms

I’ve sought this hour in the tranquil park

where things assume their proper shapes again,

as trees and steeples for the waiting dark.

 

Work I say. It’s self-work that I mean.

Days and hours full of disarray

when life is a discarded scratched-out note

one cannot read … And how can words convey

 

this sense without an image for the mind?

Life’s promised tapestry grows more undone;

or does one merely see the underside,

where to observers burns a modest sun?

 

I would ask this as clearly if I could

as that white dove that’s tumbling in the sky:

how can a sense of meaning still persist

so intertwined with sense of no reply?

 

I turn towards the paddling swans.

What is confusion but no attitude;

or is tranquillity a touch of light

that merely lingers till the mind’s subdued?

 

I watch the fussing wings across the pool

and wonder what it means, regeneration;

and see within the circles ruffling out,

the water-lily’s simple revelation.

 

A walk in the park provides relief from the mind’s distortions so that “things assume their proper shapes again”. It is not that the park is without “agitation” but nature and the birds also offer something of “the other meaning” in the face of the coming “dark”. It would be too glib to say that it is a poem about writer’s block, but the poem seeks calm after the failures of “self-work” in which “life is a discarded scratched-out note”. Even in the park—of course a version of the garden or retreat—the poet is still seeking words for his experience of “disarray”. This is a poem in the tradition that goes back at least to Sidney’s first sonnet of “Astrophil and Stella”—a poem that is a piece of writing about not being able to write. Sidney’s pretend solution is to stop stuffing around and look in his heart but Smith needs to look outwards, for nature to heal the heart’s ills. Nevertheless, he still has to turn what he finds into the human form of words. But not just words—words that form “an image for the mind” (not just his mind). You can see why Smith is a poet rather than a writer of prose fiction.

 

It is this impulse that leads Noel Rowe to see Smith’s aim as more “to show beauty than to illustrate relation”. In his view Smith sees “disintegration at the heart of life” so that he is an existentialist (not Rowe’s word but mine) who finds “ultimate value” in “choice and will”. The earlier poem “Reflections” ends with a rare rhetorical flourish in response to the “narrow world of helpless self-concern”:

 

I only know one tendency is mine:

to walk with images that change and chill

the contours of reality’s design

along the failing tightrope of the will.

 

This combines images and will in trying to apprehend a sense of design inherent in reality, but will as a “failing tightrope” is hardly a force of Sartrean agency. Moreover, sense is the right word, and frequent in Smith’s poetry it is: that design can only be intuited rather than known intellectually, which is what makes images crucial and brings him close to Keats. The mocked poet of “Deathbed Sketch” writes a book “that was merely ideas set to words”. A poem from Smith’s last book declares, “All I have are images”, and although it is said in memory of a particular person it has greater resonance in the context of Smith’s oeuvre. The counterpart to the (I think imagined) mocked poet is the admired blind poet Smith hears read in St Paul’s in “Poetry Reading”: his poems about birds and animals are so imagistically vivid that the audience sees a tortoise “hobbling across the floor” and “a pair of herons treading through the grass / with purpose”.

In “An Effect of Light” when the poet is struggling to find design and purpose in “Life’s promised tapestry” he “would ask this as clearly if I could / as that white dove that’s tumbling in the sky”. He turns to an image, which provides “a sense of meaning” even as it offers a “sense of no reply”. This stanza and the next end with questions but the poem concludes where it began, with the swans “fussing … across the pool”; but now while wondering what it all means he can “see within the circles ruffling out, / the water-lily’s simple revelation”. Simple? In one sense yes, in another no. The earlier poem “Images” declares that in “the simple image … / we try to lasso life into a phrase” but “Life won’t let a single image carry all its load”. Consequently we must “wait and watch, attentive and alert; / do not impose, but tenderly discover”.

This may sound like the effort “to show beauty” rather than “to illustrate relation” but it is ultimately a philosophy, one of humility. In “Warmth in July: Hobart” Smith advises, “We seek too soon the end, the final things; / we try to grasp the whole” whereas we should have more modest aims:

 

feel the light and how it soaks and stings

and taste the blue …

 

till all your knowledge is mere warmth and glow …

 

a sense of sure precision deep in things.

True knowledge is sensory, even synaesthetic, so it cannot be held intellectually; we are limited creatures, just like the tumbling white dove and swans. We will find that “perfection’s not for man” and often we should “simply concentrate on what’s in sight”. Nature, sensorily perceived, “is a world that cannot lie” and Smith celebrates the memory of George Dibbin who told him, “don’t forget the things you cannot measure: / friendliness, the air we breathe”, and who “showed me how to listen”.

Far from being, as Rowe says, a “poetry of and about the will”, it seems to me a poetry sceptical of human will, exhibiting a Keatsian negative capability. As with Keats, Smith’s imagism reflects a scepticism about “how any thing can be known for truth by consequitive reasoning” and an interest in “a Life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts”. While this means a certain frustration, “the sense of the incomplete”, it is ultimately a questioning but celebratory philosophy. In “For a New Year” Smith expresses his religious agnosticism and notes:

 

Whatever sustains us, nature, powers above,

we live by risk and change and sheer surprise:

the fold of a wing, a sudden precision of blue.

 

The poem provides the most resolved expression of these beliefs:

 

We neither live by dogma nor by theory:

still even without orders there’s relation.

I cannot grasp the whole my heart believes.

 

After expressing this belief in something like Keats’s “the holiness of the Heart’s affections”, the poem ends:

 

What we cannot grasp can still be given;

and intertwined with every rooted why

such tenderness, such joy exists.

This is a common contemporary outlook in the developed world, with its mix of provisionality and commitment. In a relatively late poem titled “The Colonial Poet” Smith reflects that “It took me years to learn to use my eyes” and to find “lines as strict and spare as summer hills / through which essentials speak” and this is the reason for his poetry’s expression in succinct lyrics made up of formal metre, stanza and rhyme. One of his recent poems purports to be by Ern Malley and declares, “I Like my writing finished, not too raw” but this sounds much more like Vivian Smith than the wildly wrought Ern. Far from being an expression of complacency, Smith’s formalism is a way of containing a restless mind, “afraid of chaos, and of order, too”. His “brief stanzas neat as coins and bricks / depend upon the order they define” as they attempt to express “what never can be known” through “the art of quiet observation”.