This Island of Weeping

The Divided Self is Graeme Hetherington’s ninth poetry collection since 1986, with the four volumes immediately preceding this one appearing between 2017 and 2020. This fact, together with the poet’s age (he was born in 1937), suggests that he feels a sense of urgency, of the importance of getting his work written and published while there is still time. Indeed, this very urgency and a concomitant quality of emotional intensity pervade the entire book: there is a concentration of the experiences and reflections of a lifetime.

The life explored is a very particular life influenced by a very particular place, Tasmania. The Tasmanian experience, past and present, has dominated Hetherington’s previous collections. One of his mentors, Gwen Harwood (the other was James McAuley) once described Tasmania as “this island of weeping”, a place redolent of its violent past, still burdened with a darkly oppressive atmosphere. In Hetherington’s poem “Learning to Know One’s Place” (2016), an immortal Harwood counsels: “There’s still life in your Hell’s Gates, West / Coast of Tasmania being that’s / Done well …”  In the present collection, the poet has clearly acted on this imagined advice.

However, Hetherington’s perspective in The Divided Self is that of someone with a mixed heritage: while he was born and spent his early years on Tasmania’s west coast, he received his education in Launceston and Hobart, was a classics, history and literature academic for over thirty years, and spent several years living in Europe. Education and wider experience have influenced his understanding of his Tasmanian origins, of the inevitable shaping of his character by that physical and emotional environment, and have also provided him with an understanding of the competing Western influences he has been subject to, both classical and Christian. This mixed heritage characterises The Divided Self.

The collection of poems is divided by theme into ten parts. The first and second deal with the poet’s Tasmanian childhood and family life; the third with his appreciative but usually grim responses to paintings by David Keeling, a Tasmanian artist influenced by classicism, ecophilosophy and the island’s past; the fourth with the spiritual suffering and moral fallout from childhood experiences, and with a sense of sexual ambiguity, concluding with the poet’s salutary moment of horror at his own “festering heart”; while the fifth focuses on the consequences of a bullied childhood, the continued pain and an unsurprising taste for revenge. The sixth and seventh parts explore Tasmania’s violent convict past, the poet’s own convict forebears, the wanton killing of the indigenous inhabitants, and the resulting spiritual legacy of “inherited guilt” and “haunting music”. The eighth part contains poems which expand the increasingly sombre mood of the preceding parts to encompass a broader sentiment of misanthropy; the ninth part concerns the poet’s marriages, an increasing sense of and a coming to terms with mortality, including his own, and a muted celebration of loss through the medium of poetry. The tenth and final part focuses on spirituality and the redemptive act of creating poetry, nonetheless still accommodating the need for revenge, in one poem, at least.

Clearly, this cannot be described as a feel-good collection of poems (it would not have been intended as such) and the prevailing mood is indeed sombre and oppressive, but nonetheless the verse is vivid and compelling. The poems are written in taut tetrameters, predominantly in three-line stanzas, and the effect is both of a sense of intimacy and at the same time, of urgency. There is above all an engaging quality of frankness in the poems, shown, for example, in the poet’s willingness to confess to unworthy emotions such as vengefulness.

Hetherington’s problematic relationship with his father is the focus of several poems, so much so that this parent seems to have been killed several times over by the end of the collection, sometimes with humour and sometimes without. “The Two Bowlers” is perhaps the most affectionate poem about father and son, noting their contrasting bowling styles in cricket—“My father was a tricky left / Arm round the wicket” and “I was right arm over, fast / Enough to open the attack”—and coming to the wistful conclusion: “No wonder we never got on”. More typical are poems in which the father is bitterly denounced, as in “Renison Bell Tin Mine, No Liability”. A mining manager, he is hospitalised after an accident he himself caused, and his son is unsympathetic, judging and hostile:

 

I tweezered grit from his now bald

And furrowed head and prayed he’d die,

Driven by deeper kinship with

Green slopes than with him and his kind

 

Who cruelly turned them arid brown.

Their company’s name “Renison Bell

Tin Mine, No Liability”

 

Revealing profit-blinded souls,

I took responsibility

As bedside angel of revenge.

The violence and the pain of the weeping island of Tasmania are strongly expressed throughout this collection. In “Tasmanian Symphony”, for instance, a howling wind causes the poet to

               … regress, relive

The horrors of Van Diemen’s Land,

The bark flayed off the trunks like skin

From convicts’ backs, and jigging limbs

 

Are them hanged, scurrying leaves lost,

Aimless, anathematised souls

With no resting place to be found,

 

Blacks keening for their murdered kin, their

Dispossession, this symphony’s

Fortissimo notes, crescendos.

Here, the Tasmanian bush itself reifies past collective suffering. And even when the poet is on the other side of the world, Tasmania and its grim heritage remain with him, as in “Throwback: For Richard Skeggs”. In the third part of this poem, he describes how in a gallery in Rome with an English friend, he is suddenly transfixed by a sculpture of Christ’s baptism:

Half convict-spawned, I’m tuned into

Van Diemen’s Land’s cat-o’-nine tail

Floggings those with clout handed out …

 

And I recall how when in Rome

A Christ in stone disrobing for

Baptism by St John changed to

Him stripping for the knotted scourge.

Perhaps this tragic Tasmanian inheritance, “this baggage you can’t shed”, makes the more generalised misanthropy, expressed in some of the poems, an inevitable progression. “Late Afternoon Walk”, written in response to a David Keeling painting, opens with a rapturous appreciation of the sunlit scene depicted, but the mood is abruptly darkened when the poet’s eye takes in “the two bald heads”, and he observes that

Such blindness [was] caused by need to see

The pure before the human burst

Upon the naive eye and fouled.

In “After a Stanza from James McAuley’s ‘Explicit’”, Hetherington’s misanthropy is expressed more directly, more topically and, if possible, more scathingly, as he appears to give up on humankind:

Our institutions, systems of

Belief, anything you can name,

Grown hopelessly corrupt because

 

The shit-factor in us has won,

It’s time to face our failure, sing

God’s dead, let’s take it on the chin.

In the final lines of the poem, the poet despairingly contends, essentially, that nothing matters any more:

Here’s my concluding sentiment,

                                

My nihilistic black swan song:

All’s equally laughable, of

Exactly the same worthlessness.

But this nihilism is not the poet’s final position on humanity, judging by other poems in the collection, especially in the final two parts. One luminous example is the delightful “Pharmacy”, which describes the poet’s affectionate encounters with a young woman working there, who seems to sense his need for physical contact. On Christmas Eve, she first asks permission, then gives him a hug, a “gift”:

Of youthfulness to senescence,

Bestowed there in the middle of

A crowd of locals, an embrace

 

Lovingly transfusing lifeblood,

A profound inner glow from warmth

Enriching, bearing us this poem.

There is a consciousness in “Pharmacy” of the poet having pinned down a joyous, spontaneous moment through the agency of poetry, which is reminiscent of the exuberance and sweetness of Leigh Hunt’s “Jenny Kiss’d Me”.

And indeed it is the writing of poetry that, in the collection’s last two parts, is shown to offer the poet purpose, solace and a form of redemption, albeit a somewhat fugitive one. Hetherington writes about the craft of poetry, about its meaning for him, and about his resolve to keep on writing in old age. In “Resistance”, he compares this determination to that of the tennis great Roger Federer, who plays the game:

With evermore intensity,

An antidote to sensing that

The end is near, with a willed power

Stating deep hatred of the fact,

That would obliterate it, smash

Through to the peace another poem

Achieved or grand slam won might give,

If only temporarily,

Until it’s time for proof again.

But time is not on the side of the tennis player or the poet and there is the fear “that all too soon we’ll hear / The Invisible Umpire’s call / Of ‘out, game set and match to me!’”

Images from classical Greek culture and mythology figure prominently in the last poems of this collection, with the focus on the making of poetry as a means of transcending human limitations. Even the poet’s balcony in “Music from a Balcony in St Helen’s”, “fenced with taut strings of silver wire”, reminds him of the lyre figuring on ancient Greek vases “with archetypal bard”, and then of his mentor and friend Gwen Harwood. He recalls a compliment she paid him about his poems: “‘you’ve heard the music!’ Brief, / But lastingly sweet to my ears”, and now he feels “a growing kinship with / Blind Homer seated at his lyre”.

The last poem in the book, “Orpheus and Eurydice”, sums up the poet’s life and its relationship to poetry. He is Orpheus, and Eurydice is his inspiration, despite his earlier repression of the urge to create poetry, in the face of mockery and abuse from family and peers. The poem has something of the tone of a prayer and Eurydice, his “no-longer-thwarted Muse”, appears to offer her previously rejected inspiration as a source of salvation for the poet as he creates his epitaph:

O Eurydice, gazing in
To my eyes let your image be
The final one on which they close.

Nonetheless, it appears inevitable that Tasmania, “this island of weeping”, with its dark and traumatising past, both individual and collective, remains the chief focus of The Divided Self. Hetherington’s Tasmanian background has affected his life and his art profoundly and this most recent volume is vivid, strongly-felt and expressed, coming to terms with that unavoidable influence through the medium of poetry.

The Divided Self: A Tasmanian Odyssey
by Graeme Hetherington
Ginninderra Press, 2022, 152 pages, $27.50

Lyn Ashcroft has taught English language and literature at tertiary institutions in Australia, England and France. Her interests include literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and humour studies.