Who Knows What Love Is?

Australian Love Poems 2013
edited by Mark Tredinnick
Inkerman & Blunt, 2013, 330 pages, $26.99

“Contemporary Australian love,” writes Mark Tredinnick in this book’s introduction, “turns out to be a wilder and wider and more ecstatic terrain than we had led ourselves to believe.” Tredinnick’s delight, almost euphoric in places, in the success of this venture is apparent. It did not start promisingly: a new publisher, without a book to its name yet, solicited unpublished love poems from Australia’s poets. I wouldn’t have given it much chance of success. But they received 1501 poems from 632 poets, selected 200 poems from 173 poets for publication, and have produced something remarkably good.

By “remarkably good” I do not mean that I liked all or even most of the poems. I liked about a third and was unmoved by the rest, apart from a few I disliked. But in an anthology of previously unpublished poems, a success rate of 33 per cent per reader is more than acceptable. And of those seventy or so poems I liked, I would rate at least thirty very highly indeed.

Among the best poems are several by regular or occasional Quadrant poets. (I suspected when I heard of the strong representation of Quadrant poets that the anthology would succeed; not so much because our poets would carry it, but because such a representation suggested a refreshing openness on the part of the anthologists.) Russell Erwin’s lovely poem “Of a Marriage” has now appeared in our September issue, so I do not need to say anything more here about its merits. Jennifer Compton and Suzanne Edgar each wrote poignantly on a moment in everyday domestic life in which a wife realises she must somehow try to come to terms with the likelihood that she will soon outlive her husband.

But my greatest pleasure came from discovering poets I had not heard of before. Some are evidently well known by plenty of other people. Kim Cheng Boey, for example, according to his brief biographical note, has published five books of poems. If “What Love Is” is typical, then he is a very fine poet. In this poem a suburban man, taking his bins out to the street in the evening, and with Chet Baker’s recording of “You Don’t Know What Love Is” in his head, tries to make sense of his life and love in this strange country to which he has migrated with his wife and children. It ends:

Spooning, we will come as if to the home

we’ve lost, and sleep in the borderless

country of love, deaf to the garbage trucks

grinding their gears at daybreak.

Miranda Aitken’s gentle poem “Fish Like Flowers” describes a man fishing off rocks by the sea, sitting calmly with his faithful dog, thinking about his beloved, hoping he might take her his catch for them to eat. It avoids sentimentality by an implied awareness that neither the fish nor her love can be taken for granted, but that even in the uncertainty there is something of inestimable value.

There is another fragile love at the beach in Sarah Holland-Batt’s “The Hazards”, where a woman watches her lover swimming out:

I saw you as a stranger might see you then,

your head straining above the surface

like a diligent retriever’s, your eyes fixed ahead

as though the future were an island

you needed to reach without me …

Then there are the erotic poems, of which the best in this collection are written by women. Mags Webster’s “Hybrid” uses images of flowers and insects with sustained intensity, while Cate Kennedy’s rollicking “Ode to Lust” celebrates “the wave that leaves you damp, / the rip that knocks your legs away”. I particularly liked Monica Markovina’s “Woo”, an account of an evening of joyous, uninhibited copulation in which, at the same time, there is implicitly an equally joyous embrace of the natural consequences: the life together, the children, the old age.

Some of the poems in this collection, on the other hand, evince no joy at all. The love they describe is pinched and mean: too much “I”, too little “we”. It isn’t really love at all. A few other poems fail because they are unconvincing: the poet is either insincere or is unable to convey the meaning intended. Love’s complexity baffles many of us.

There are surprises that jolt the reader out of jadedness, such as Paula McKay’s powerful “Release”, which lists the things a woman must do when her man comes out of jail in order to “cleanse him”, and ends:

and when his body twists

like a noose dangling in dark

tender with your palm, you got to

swab away the cursing and the fear.

And his eyes will open as you pat him dry.

McKay’s is one of several poems that successfully imitate the style of another poet. In her case it is the contemporary American poet Tyehimba Jess; but Joe Dolce’s Edgar Allan Poe, Gregory Day’s Dylan Thomas and Rory Hudson’s invigorating Shakespeare—

for I have seen the sadness in your eyes,

the insight of the slipping of the prize,

through fingers that would seek to hold it fast …

—all carry off with flair something that many poets would be reluctant to try.

Sarah Stratton’s poem titled “two poems in the act” is similarly bold. It consists of three poems: the odd-numbered lines, the even-numbered lines, and the lot read as one. I’m not sure it succeeds perfectly, but it is a mesmerising attempt that repays re-reading again and again, and that is success enough, especially given the degree of difficulty.

Two other poets to succeed in a difficult genre are Carolyn Leach-Pohalski and Yann Toussaint: the poem about writing a poem. Leach-Pohalski’s (“I Need Your Voice”) is one of the funniest in this book, about a woman at a writers’ retreat (“My two-week home is a hut where writers come / to scare the book in their heads onto foolscap paper”) who misses her lover so debilitatingly that all she can do is sharpen her pencils, doodle, and stare out the window—where she sees “the writing that the bowerbird has done today” using writers’ discarded blue biro caps. It builds up to a hilarious last stanza. Toussaint (“This Sort of Poem”) begins with the least auspicious of opening lines—“This is not what you would call a love poem”—and proceeds to list the sorts of things the poem is not about while surreptitiously telling us what it is about. At the end we realise that it has indeed been a love poem, and a most charming one.

Back to the Quadrant poets. Rod Usher’s “That Love” is a polite, rueful disagreement with Emily Dickinson’s poem “That Love Is All There Is”, arguing that we know quite a bit more about love than Dickinson allowed, and ending:

We also know, gentle Miss D,

from history and first hand

that it’s frequently outlived by

that which you never wore,

the wedding band.

And finally, here is Les Murray’s welcome contribution to one of the great unsolved mysteries of etymology:

Of Earth’s most spoken word,

okay, just one suggested origin

is neither cheesy nor far-fetched:

Only Kissing. From saucy times.

Only kissing, Pa. OK?