Landscapes with Figures

Invaders of the Heart by Lee Knowles; Interactive Press, 2008, $25.

From the late 1960s Australian poetry became dominated by a group that Mark O’Connor has described as “The Bubble”, and Richard Packer as “The Epigones”. One of their leading lights stated they specifically rejected poetry dealing with: “ethics, morality, religion and mythology”. This, while possibly in some cases simply sour grapes, was good news for ethics, morality, religion and mythology.

Had they gone off to play with their own trivial conceits, little harm might have been done. However, tightly organised mutual promotion was accompanied by an equally intense if generally unspoken campaign to exclude and silence all those not in the group. The reading and book-buying public had its own opinion, and tended to simply turn away from poetry altogether. The good suffered along with the bad.

Anyway, the bubble eventually went away somewhere, leaving hardly a single memorable line behind (save, of course, for “Mallarmé’s curse hangs over Launceston”—it takes some kind of gift to produce such lambent inanity), and leaving Australian poetry, which had once had a modest but respected place in the national culture, very badly damaged as far as both public appreciation and publishing opportunities went. Looking back, their work does not seem allusive or sophisticated, and certainly not “modern”, but simply pointless.

As the tsunami of bilge retreated, a few scattered survivors stood here and there in the muddy devastation. In some combination or other ethics, morality, religion and mythology—and lyricism—are part of what they work with, as they have always been part of what real poets worked with.

Lee Knowles, one of the real poets to have survived, has ignored ephemeral poetic fashions and has shown a quiet and steady dedication to the art. She may also be one of those with whom hope for a regrowth of Australian poetry lies. She has pursued a steady career in publication with the books Cool Summer (1977), Dial Marina (1986), Sirocco Days (1993), all from the Fremantle Arts Centre Press, Lucretia (2007) from Picaro Press, and this latest volume. This is a considerable body of work, including much of high quality. She has also won a number of major poetry prizes. Geoff Page has correctly said that her writing deserves to be much better known. (It will be interesting to see how widely this book is reviewed.) She combines a real lyrical gift with a feeling for what is important, and her voice is unmistakably her own. Further, unlike many poets who reach a plateau of accomplishment and remain on it, so it is perhaps impossible to tell an early work from a late one, Lee Knowles’s poetry has shown a steady growth of technique, each book an advance on the one before it.

Lee Knowles has maintained a distinctive and genuinely individual voice, and a predominant theme of her work is the exploration and celebration of individuality. She and her husband lived for some time aboard an ocean-going yacht, and for her the sea has always been not merely a symbol but a manifestation of freedom. A recurrent theme of this poetry is an exploration of the drive behind those people who follow new and unusual courses, whether in the mind or in the physical world.

This is not meant to suggest that the work is the stale and stereotyped caressing of a bohemian non-conformism. Chesterton once said a sage felt too small for the world, and a fool to large for it, and these poems have also a kind of wise wonder at the richness of the world—manifested in, for example, the ceremony of the blessing of the fishing fleet at Fremantle.

Her work reminds me also of the statement by H.G. Wells that we are so often prisoners of “the paper walls of everyday circumstances”, and if your world doesn’t suit you, you can change it. This is not “message” poetry, but one of the messages it does convey is that the world can be full of richness.

Lee Knowles’s style is unlike that of any other poet writing in Australia today. A poet should achieve—along perhaps with other things—a blend of lyricism, insight, thought and knowledge, but for each real poet the precise mixture, and the result, is individual and unique. Carrying on from her excellent collection Sirocco Days, her poetry is often redolent of mythology, but in a subtle, oblique way. Yet—and how refreshing this is—it is also the poetry of someone who does things:

Under white lights

the ground sleeps where all day

the lifter groaned, plucking boats

from the water and along to lower

them into steel cradles. It straddles

the path and we drive between its

four feet. Heads wrapped, dressed

in white paper moon-suits, these figures

have stood, blasting away at their

impossible desires. This is home

at the top of a ladder …

Although her descriptions of some landscapes—by which is included seascapes and townscapes—with an affinity for wild and strange corners, are as sharp and unforgettable as any I have seen (The poem “Seal rocks” is a good example), she is far more than a landscape poet.

There is also near-epic. Like other West Australian-born writers—as well as Douglas Stewart and Mark O’Connor—she has written major pieces on the massacre on Batavia’s Graveyard on the Abrolhos Islands in 1629, that prequel to the totalitarian nightmares of the twentieth century which called forth the worst and best in human beings (the “good ones” led by the soldier Webbye Hayes, resisted the mass-murdering, psychopathic mutineers led by Jerome Cornelius with the greatest courage and resource, and ultimately won through against all odds). It is a story from which much may continue to be mined, with the murderous messianic set against the stolid, resourceful and steadfast good man. She made a latter-day exploration of those barren rocks:

This island fends us off as we wade through shallows

sliding as though on jelly. Its beach

edges a white cliff wall—ghosts of friendly faces.

The soldiers, shoved off to this island to die,

up there with their axe-edged rock, the mutineers

where we are. And Pelsaert already returned

from Java, a quick row to his ship beside a sister island.

Any longer and these islands would have swallowed all.

Ruins with packed stones, we say, are forts. One

in a hollow, guards a well. Signal fireplaces gaze

across to Beacon. We carry none of the stoicism

of those old soldiers in our backpacks.

The snake that lies at the heart of the well

they chipped away is a sand python.

We scoop it out and wear it on our arms.

There is also close observation of human experience, with a lyricism that is all too seldom to be found in contemporary poetry, as in “Port City Tales”:

            … The father

seldom leaves the counter as though

his feet are stone. A glow

of lamps styled from the Eternal City

falls on the waistcoat

and the gold on the hand

he raises as though in blessing,

the high smile for his son …

Quite different are poems of journeying to Luxor and visiting the Clan Donald Centre on the Isle of Skye, the latter a beautiful verbal capturing of thin, high mouth or pipe-music.

This is a rich and intriguing collection. Lee Knowles’s poetry combines an individual vision and highly-wrought technique with sometimes profound cultural resonances. She is also one of those who, by showing that poetry can still engage important subjects, prove again what the true function of the poet is.

Hal G.P. Colebatch’s The Light River (Connor Court) won the West Australian Premier’s Prize for Poetry in 2008.