The Rock in the Poet’s Bag

Kevin Densley, Adrienne Eberhard and Stephen Edgar are Australian poets. The other two books are by Jeffrey Burghauser, who is North American. Each poet has an internet profile which Quadrant readers can pursue.

Kevin Densley’s Sacredly Profane is a fine collection and I enjoyed reading it straight through. Each poem has an astringency, often most intense in the literal denouement, the end-phase of the poem. His short poems have a powerful effect created by a dark or perhaps unexpected ending. Often there is a punchline. This adds a touch of retrospectivity to their appreciation, not unlike finding in hindsight that the chilli in the salad was in fact high on the Scoville scale and not a harmless capsicum.

The poems have a metaphysical edge, and the denouement or punchline allows the reader to see a darker and costlier side to the world, and to gaze more directly at dimensions that otherwise lurk beneath or behind manner and custom. The sociologist Peter Berger would have called this penetrating the smokescreens that mask reality.

Death is often the visitor that brings the naked-light-bulb moment and throws the switch of illumination. Death as a character is both droll and incisive, banal and intrusive, ordinary and extraordinary. The intrusion is most clear in the poems from pages 61 to 68—the Great War AIF Suite. Each poem takes a named soldier of the Great War and after an introduction, the figure is knocked down like a skittle. No euphemisms of glory or Anzac tributes erase or soften death as loss, the loss of the named individual. An officer is about to lead a heroic charge on April 25, 1915, but only gets as far as beginning to say, “Now then, 12th battalion …”, before a Turkish sniper’s bullet inserts its own full stop.

Of another decorated officer, we think he is being discussed in person until the tearful man returns the photograph of the deceased to his pocket. Death as the loss of the person is the intrusive theme:

He was dead, unmarked,

as if asleep.

We who were left

had to hurry on.

I liked “Cracker Night”, a piece about the banning of the sale of fireworks in Victoria in 1982. It is typical because it uses this powerful strike in the final lines; moving from colloquial description to astringency or core reflection, from sunlight to waiting shadow. The poem begins:

What a shame

we can no longer

celebrate Guy Fawkes Night …

Set off penny bangers …

As the poem ends it is about a mate blinded in the eye or with a finger blown off. Densley’s capacity to notice introduces one element of the everyday sacred into his poems. He is sensitive to that which stands out in—or from—its setting, that which sets things apart. Scholars have used “that which stands out” as one of the internal markers of the holy in a phenomenology of religion. It is not only the darkly ironic, or death ever-waiting, but about moments of illumination and light. It might be the casual reference to “morning mass at Saint Mary’s, then fish and chips” or passing a dark brick church, “its yellow stained glass windows blooming with holy light”.

Presence is hinted in what is not overtly religious, in a set of intense memories that some describe as anamnetic. These can be first memories of childhood with which the individuated soul arises, and in which one’s experiences and memories are indelible and unique. In some sense, these memories carry the soul and are indelible to it. In “House by the Sea”, the reader finds a set of these intense, almost tactile memories to which “my mind keeps returning”. After a list of vivid particulars, the poet asks: “why am I suddenly, palpably, there, here wondering why I’m present?”

The collection is aptly named Sacredly Profane. I would be happy to see this book on a Year 11 or 12 reading list. Its intensity of observation and its capacity to invert and subvert normal, prosaic expectations could develop values of critical insight and awareness of what is given in the moment, what more can be given in every moment to those with eyes to see or ears to hear. Familiarity with the astringent cameos of Great War individuals would add value to the wider study of that formative war of 100 years ago and take one beyond the limits of poetry as a discipline.

Adrienne Eberhard’s collection is graced with the striking title, Chasing Marie Antoinette All Over Paris. The notes tell us that Eberhard is deeply formed by Tasmania, and has four prior poetry-book publications. She is a consistently awarded and anthologised poet. I read the poems with great interest, partly because I also lived in Tasmania for a while and have read my way into great Tasmanian poets such as Gwen Harwood, James McAuley and Vivian Smith. To use a wine metaphor, Tasmania has its own terroir—this is also sufficiently true of all those poems where I identify the “place” of each of the poets in this review, working as they do in a variant of the common English-language tradition.

Eberhard is deeply immersed in and sensitive to Tasmania as place. The volume begins with a poem called “Distance”, which is to some extent about Mount Field. The poem begins with the question: “What is the space between this hut and that mountain but impenetrable black, and frosty cold?” It ends with a return to this question, asking: “what is distance but a prayer?” But it is not any distance. It is in part the distance between this hut and that mountain. The poems are deeply immersed in the Tasmanian landscape and in the local reality of family and forebears.

Family and forebears explain the capacity of the book to move easily between Indonesia, the United Kingdom and local friends. All the time the matrix for her work lies in the closely experienced detail of Tasmanian landscape. Perhaps the book moves readily to illuminate the historical figure of Marie Antoinette because she can be placed in the same time-frame as forebears and so she raises the question of the lived past and the experiences of those from whom we ourselves came—whether these are now simply remembered or pondered deeply through historical records, photographs, imagination and even DNA research.

I particularly liked “Cheddar Man”, the final poem in the collection. It tells the story of finding a human body in a cave in the Cheddar Gorge in England, the body being dated to 9000 years ago. DNA testing shows strong connection between this ancient body and families still living in the area. One member at least of the DNA-connected family came to Tasmania in the early nineteenth century and was a forebear of the poet. This is a powerful set of experiences which generate a deep response in the author. I visited a little settlement in southern Tasmania named Montacute, because my wife’s forebears had settled there in the early nineteenth century. They named the place after an original in Somerset. There is a sense of arriving in a landscape with resonances elsewhere.

Eberhard’s poetry elicits a depth of feeling for one’s family, forebears, terroir and the strengths and frailties of the human story transmitted through the generations.

The Strangest Place: New and Selected Poems, is a formidable book of 284 pages. It embraces Stephen Edgar’s lifetime of published poetry and reaches across forty-five years of publications and ten volumes of poems. Edgar, in his seventieth year, is a significant Australian poet at the apogee of a life of writing and publishing success. The introduction tells us that after some time in London in the 1970s he moved to Hobart where he lived for some thirty years. He acknowledges the help and influence of Clive James and Gwen Harwood amongst others, including Judith Beveridge. He has lived for the last fifteen years in Sydney and is married to Judith Beveridge. Judith’s review notes from Westerly grace the rear cover of the Adrienne Eberhard volume.

The introduction should be read. It reminds us of the hard-won success a poet might earn with a measure of inspiration and dedication to excellence. Of the ten previous volumes mentioned, three achieved the status of shortlist for major awards or won a major award. Edgar won what is now the Peter Porter Prize in 2006, the inaugural Australian Catholic University Literature Prize in 2013, and the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal for excellence in literature. Having read Philip Hodgins’s poetry, one knows how significant that memorial medal is. Edgar tells us that his first book was published in 1985, midpoint of his life to date, but the earliest poem in it (“Nasturtium”) dates to 1976. That poem is included in this new book.

The latest poems are included in The Strangest Place as “Background Noise” and occupy the first seventy-five pages. I read and greatly liked the new poems. “Hoverfly” is masterly. Its fifteen two-line stanzas locate this brilliant, tiny, flying creature “stationed precisely in midair, / The hoverfly seems painted there”. The end-rhyme of each couplet adds to the pleasure of reading and flows as easily as the creature seems to hover. The reader can read up and down the rhyming pillar on which the creature is set. The rhyme suggests vertical stability. The same rhyming couplet pattern illuminates “Dragonfly”, also a new poem. Again, I like the way that the steady repetition of the rhyming couplets forms a column on the pages, as if a soft ladder, an easy support for the mind as the reader ascends the aural pattern. Perhaps this makes the poem a kind of verbal icon of the flesh-and-blood world. Edgar’s poems seem to move very close to the tangible realities in the physical world they describe and are a delight to read. They seem to code the tangible.

It is not only the selection of poems as prior, successful and awarded books that make this collection worth having. The book is a hendecagon of delight as the new poems add to the long-established success of the prior ten volumes from which selections are made.

This review concludes with two books by the North American poet Jeffrey Burghauser. The terroir of English-language use changes and the occasional Hebrew term enters. Patient exploration yields treasure to the reader. His poems are energetic, deeply focused and intense. He is a master of highly structured, traditional forms of poetry and he seems to inhabit the verse in a way that makes rhyme seem effortless. It is the result of hard work and mastery of languages. He is at home in religious tradition and is illuminating on Hebrew and Christian matters. His work made me take a few excurses into the dictionary to feel that I had grasped his sense: this being not a problem with the poems, but with my unfamiliarity with occasional Hebrew terms or with nuance.

Real Poems begins with twenty-four sonnets. Triolets, quatrains and couplets add to formal masteries. The couplets depict Burghauser as a wisdom teacher, one who delivers the incisive and provocative remark—with a dash of enigma. The longer poems are no less dense and no less infused and often have a precisely explored musicality of metre.

Christ is mentioned three times in the eleven couplets offered and there is an echo of the wisdom teacher if not the mystic in them. The reduction of poetic insight to two brief lines is good for this reader. What do we make of this (once we have explored the meaning of yidn)? “Only yidn cannot go / To a YES whose place they know.” Or perhaps this? “To a Jewish intellective strain / Christ supplied the bottom line.” Burghauser is intensely self-observant as well as being deeply observant of his settings. I rather like “The Devil”, the penultimate, five-line poem in Real Poems:

The devil I know is

The phenomenon squinting at me

From the shaving mirror; the

Devil I don’t, me observed

From any other vantage point.

I have not conveyed a taste of the poet unless I mention the longer, freer-form verse. The forms may not be as free as they seem. Long-cycle structures are everywhere. I greatly liked the apparent dialogue-verbatim of a three-page poem whose translated title is “Master of Repentance or Return”. It is a poem about leaving Jerusalem to return home to North America: “Once I knew that my experiment in applied Zionism was screwed.” The poet has souvenired a rock from the plaza by the Western Wall, the foundations of the Temple that the Romans destroyed in the first century. A security guard at the station finds the rock in the poet’s bag, and a form of crazy-wisdom dialogue begins. It includes these lines:

There would be to me a specialness

If I brought a piece with me

Of the pure, Holy City.

The guard asks: “Do you plan to throw the rock? … Will you throw it at the driver’s head?” A subsequent spiral (still rhymed) in the interrogation reads, “Why don’t before you leave / Take a rock from Tel Aviv?” I leave the reader to the concluding lines in what becomes a form of acerbic, ironic, insightful, satirical humour.

Still Telling What is Told was published a year after Real Poems and is evidence of the production of a powerful body of work. The title is taken from the last five words of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 76. The author tells the reader this on his title page and it is helpful for us to detour and find and read that sonnet. Shakespeare’s sonnet is in praise of tradition and traditional form and style. He seems to be saying that the real subjects never change. He asserts that his poem is “barren of new pride”, “far from variation”, takes no notice of “new-found methods and … compounds strange”. He would rather “spend again what is already spent”, “dressing old words new”.

Burghauser uses the line from Shakespeare to indicate that he is staying with the same themes and indeed the same forms. Perhaps he mines them more deeply and perhaps he finds “the sun daily new and old”. Shakespeare’s sonnet may be a love poem: “So is my love still telling what is told.” But I hear this with the sense, “I still love telling what is told”, and am immersed in the traditional themes. Still Telling What is Told includes seventeen highly crafted sonnets.

The longer poem “Dactylic Song” is humorous, clever, intricately rhymed and an exercise in dactylic metre. Quadrant readers can web-search dactylic and mark up the stresses for this poem’s metre. It will increase your admiration for it. It begins, “Railway lines under my window invite / Many occasions of clamor at night.” This first stanza is repeated as a chorus throughout the poem. Cleverly, Burghauser changes the central line in the chorus stanza each time he repeats it, and these central lines considered by themselves form a Masefield-like inventory of cargo, but this time in freight wagons. The central lines read:

Hoppers of hillbilly coal to enable my day …

Apple computers asleep in synthetical hay …

Boxes of dishes concocted from catchpenny clay …

Pineapples, pastries and sofas immune to decay.

It is a lovely poem to read, at any age.

Burghauser’s skill and mastery make each poem vivid and arresting. Ability to convey sensed detail keeps the poems fresh each time one re-reads them. This true of the two poems, “29th Annual Appalachian String Band Festival”, and “In Appalachia”. Is he talking about the landscape or the music in this?

Here’s the lane

That extends until

Fiddle’s Bane.

Up a mossy hill. Down a lesser knoll. Repeat.

Thus the upward spill.

“The Prodigy” is another example of his longer “dialogical skills” where what seems to be a verbatim conversation takes poetic form. On a train journey, while writing something about Dylan Thomas, he meets a man who interjects: “I got drunk with him, you know.” Three and a half pages unfold.

Burghauser is among the most competent poets I have read in recent years, and among the most satisfying. He is aged about forty and so we can hope for the good that will come. I close with the last stanza in this book:

Hebrew is my holy mother tongue,

And my wife (a shiksa raised among

Prairie solos) couldn’t hail a bus

In such Hebrew as she has. And thus,

My own children cannot understand

When their dad is talking to himself.

I do not think that this poet is simply talking to himself and I hope that more in Australia will read and enjoy his works.

Sacredly Profane
by Kevin Densley
Ginninderra Press, 2020, 68 pages, $20

Chasing Marie Antoinette All Over Paris
by Adrienne Eberhard
Black Pepper, 2020, 98 pages, $24

The Strangest Place: New and Collected Poem
by Stephen Edgar
Black Pepper, 2020, 284 pages, $29

Real Poems and Still Telling What is Told
by Jeffrey Burghauser
Argus Huber Press, 2019 and 2020, 82 and 91 pages, about $15 each

Ivan Head is a frequent contributor of prose and poetry. His most recent omnibus poetry review appeared in the November 2020 issue