Self-Raising Poets

The reader might notice that each of the latter two of these books is larger than its predecessor by about one hundred pages. That is in part because those two have an anthological or retrospective dimension and are treasure-troving the work of decades; in Wollert’s case, six decades. Amazon Publishing has opened some doors to poetry by enabling print-on-demand, and that is a good thing in an environment in which many publishers will look with trepidation at the financial risk of committing to a print run where it is doubtful that even costs can be recovered. Perhaps this form of publishing is in some ways like the panner for gold who can at last gain access to land in which there is a chance of paydirt, rather than sitting at home and lamenting the lack of prospecting leases.

David Kelly’s poems are presented in a well-crafted book by Ginninderra and come credentialled with a significant list of prior publication. The list includes shortlisted and prize-winning poems, and so the eureka moment has been around for a while. His poems have been discovered and liked. The book is gift-worthy for lovers of poetry.

I liked each of the six sections into which this modestly sized book is divided. The focused consistency of the poet held my attention and drew me into his various themes: the handyman, sport, interstellar, tête-à-tête, Bashō and friends, and faunal.

The handyman sequence of eleven poems is a demotic dialogue between the one who has commissioned a construction in the garden and the handyman expert who, in building it, also raises cosmic questions in the midst of the ordinariness of things. There is, after all, a canonical use of plumblines and levels and capping pieces in well-expressed laconicism. Thus in “The handyman grants permission” a wordplay flows through:

I told him I’d been

mistakenly calling it

a pagoda instead of a pergola

well it’s like a place

of worship

he retreated behind

the bench his pulpit …

I’ve heard other people call them

pagodas before

and gazebos of course

… I took the risk

pergola doesn’t have

the same religious …

I stopped and searched

for a word …

no it doesn’t but there’s a kind of overlap between the three.

Thus Kelly forms a wisdom literature from the commonplace.

The colourful demotic continues in, for example, “Wotchamakallit and tuna salad”. I thought wotchamakallit might be quinoa, but my presumption was quashed by an inference of avocado that emerged through this colourful and delightful poem.

One section of Kelly’s book, headed “sport”, contains seven poems about that domain of human activity, so loved by the Australian denizen of the couch. Without overindulging in the country’s obsession with sport and its increasing commercialisation as a profession and livelihood, I maintain an interest in it, partly informed by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s In Praise of Athletic Beauty. He identifies a powerful aesthetic in top levels of sport, perhaps vicariously enjoyed by a nation inhabited by many couch potatoes. (How much of a sponsor’s takeaway food can one eat?)

Kelly freeze-frames a Shane Warne moment, now iconic, in the Australian psyche. It is the Gatting incident when, within the parameters of the game, something almost miraculous happened, caught forever in repeatable television images:

as he walks away

Gatting turns back

looking for a lump on the pitch

for a crack

an area of soft powder

for something he hadn’t seen

looking for something

that wasn’t there.

There is a prosoidia in this, a musicality in the plain, simple prose and speech rhythms of the unrhymed stanzas. The poetry is carried by the simple presentation of a succession of moments, unelaborated but precise. Prose as prosa oratio (straightforward discourse) acquires its own musicality in the human voice that reads the poem. One does not tend to think of cricket as containing mystical moments. but one can look for something that both was and was not on the cricket pitch and something exhibiting a simple human delight.
I could add Manning Clark’s trope about the lack of a revolution in Australian history and his attribution of that “order” to a primary concern with Bradman’s score, Phar Lap’s winning streak and the surf at Bondi.

I liked the simplicity of the concluding “faunal” poems and in particular the sequence about koalas, as in “Koala Advice”:

get out of this tree you can’t have this tree

this is my tree

and that tree over there

that’s my tree too

and four trees down there

until you come to the wire fence

they’re also my trees.

Jeremy Nelson’s book is a selection of poems written over twenty-five years. It divides into ten sections totalling around 120 poems: Children, Stories, Portraits, Seasons, Landscapes and Cityscapes, Guardians and Messengers, Theoria, Darkness, Prayers and Sacred Songs, and an Appendix. Nelson was head of the English Department at Sydney Grammar School from 1971 to 1981. This collection acknowledges the wide publication of his works, prior to this volume, and also their broadcasting by the ABC and All India Radio.

From this highly crafted and considered poetry, “A Scene from New York” is illustrative. The scene is the skating rink beside the Rockefeller Center. It is a short poem of seventeen lines with irregular verse-lengths (three lines, four lines, two lines, four lines, four lines). Each line is short, containing minimal phrases dotted around various nouns. In this tiny matrix, diachronic layers appear, each carrying impressive weight without the engineering support of rhyme.

In mind’s eye, we imagine the sight of the skaters who “glide like ferries” and do so “over a marble of wet ice”. But immediately, Golden Prometheus is there in the sky’s illumination of high flags; the building itself is carrying the flags of “a hundred nations” and is “defying Babel”. It does so because money speaks with a “clear tongue”. And, finally, a Deuteronomic or Exodus-like Moses figure appears as if with the Law:

Like God on Sinai,

Rockefeller

has carved here

his stone testament.

Les Murray wrote a volume of poems called Poems the Size of Photographs, and Nelson has given us a wise and insightful poem the size of a postcard, containing layers of learning and historically informed culture within its brevities and engaging images. Perhaps those who have visited Manhattan will resonate with this icon of destination.

From the section “Guardians and Messengers”, I mention “The Angel Tree” because it shows the poet using regular rhyming patterns to achieve his purpose. It is a nineteen-line poem where the last verse achieves closure as it slips from four to three lines. The rhyming pattern is a repetitive abab, with the final aba. There is a touch of Robert Frost in the poem’s subject, and in style and effect. The poem begins:

I climbed that tree from bough to bough

and did not pause to seek for fruit,

but as I rose the darkness grew.

Then wonder pierced, and fear fell mute.

The theme of ascent is found in literal climbs and in mountaintop experiences, or transfigurations, or in poems like John Magee’s “High Flight”. “The Angel Tree” ends:

And by this dreaded angel’s grace

we move beyond each twitching care

to find that ancient, ageless face.

It is a pleasure to have a copy of this lucid and well-crafted volume by a master of the English language.

Mocco Wollert has given readers the largest book here, and there is an ambition in it to collect and collate a lifetime of poetic work, spanning sixty years. I guess that with Amazon it is all in the cloud and at any point one can incarnate it on demand, in the realm of paper-publication. Wollert exhibits a particular attentiveness to the English language and this may have arisen from the fact that she “migrated to Australia from Cologne, Germany, in 1958 barely speaking any English”. An end-page gives a succinct biographical note and an outline of her substantive publications and prize-winning poems. One is impressed.

“Where is My Father” is the final poem in the book and dates from 2015. It resonates with pathos as a once-familiar figure changes for the worse and becomes imprinted both in the child and in the older woman remembering dimensions of childhood across the decades. It conveys that intensified sense of memory for which we might use the terms indelible or anamnestic; or to which the theorist Eric Voegelin attributed a formative power in the rise of the specific, conscious soul.

I want my father back,

not that stranger who looks like him,

speaks like him, wears his clothes.

My father always laughed,

the stranger cries when no one looks

and crawls into my mother’s arms.

Where did he come from

that man, big like my father

but bent like the old tree in the yard …

Maybe my father will come back one day

and chase the stranger out of the house. 

This is akin to James McAuley’s “Because”. Perhaps it is fitting to end this tiny immersion into a lifetime’s work with a little passage from “Australia, My Love”. I happen to have a print of Cologne Cathedral in my house.

There stands a cathedral far away

in a place I once called home, but I decided to leave that town

explore the world, roam.

I never settled wherever I went

till I came to this vast South Land;

my heart took root, my senses sang.

I had reached my journey’s end.

I conclude with a reference to George Crabbe and his poem of 1785 about the then-new technology that led to the saturation of London streets with endless news sheets of strident opinion, sold by the farthing in an earnest form of monetisation: seen today in the twenty-four-hour news cycle, voracious to fill with something to sell. Crabbe wrote:

I sing of NEWS and all those vapid sheets

The rattling hawker vends through gaping streets;

… Of all these triflers, all like these I write;

Oh! Like my subject could my song delight,

The crowd at Lloyd’s one poet’s name should raise,

And all the Alley echo to his praise.

Those who give time to the reading of poetry will find three poets raised here.

The Handyman and Other Poems
by David Kelly
Ginninderra Press, 2023, 106 pages, $25

Sic Transit Gloria Mundi: A Collection of Poems
by Jeremy Lockhart Nelson
Amazon, 2023, 201 pages, $15

JuXtapositions: Collected Poems 1960–2020
by Mocco Wollert
Amazon, 2023, 311 pages, $12

Ivan Head regularly reviews poetry for Quadrant and contributes his own poems. He was Warden of Christ College Hobart for four years and of St Paul’s College in the University of Sydney for twenty-three years