Verbal Castles

Etiquette with Angels is a new book by Andrew Bullen SJ. Many of the poems have been set to music. The author had cancer at the age of thirteen, and a leg amputation. His MA on Australian religious poetry and his life as a Jesuit generate an expectation that the poems will be ordered and measured; they are also at times passionate, insightful and provocative and at home across the centuries (diachronicity) and in the core of human experience. Cover art references a Durer work from 1498 and alerts us to the possibility of divine intervention. I tested the book’s claim that “An angel always enters from the left” and found it to be true for St Teresa of Avila, though her encounter with an angel did seem to break some of Fr Bullen’s table manners. Her angel was an etiquette-buster.

Bullen writes a lot, wryly, about the Bible and brings humanity and realism to the poems based on it. He also writes about the Buddha, as one must if one is serious about the void that might be ultimate or the mid-point of a dark night. Hindu metaphysicians also know that ultimacy lies beyond the silence of the deepest sleep and is in some sense concept-less. When Bullen writes about a statue of the Buddha, he notes that it also is missing a leg.

I liked his poem “An Epistle to the Welsh”, which ends with something St Paul might have said had he journeyed to Wales in his day: “The rain here, if you look closely, is green. Like Christ.” The poems are not as intense as R.S. Thomas’s. It is true that St Paul in his day could have journeyed north and reached England and Wales as part of the Roman imperial momentum. I felt this when near the site of the Roman bridge at Rochester, south of London, first built when St Paul was writing his Letter to the Romans. Bullen jumps readily from Wales to Costa Rica and his domain is global—at home in Prague, Melbourne, Costa Rica, Isfahan and China. His close observations highlight a world that can be full of bright colour. He shares a vision for the oikumene best expressed in his poem about Matteo Ricci who becomes Li Ma-tou in his quest for a “new calligraphy” on behalf of a “barbarian God”. We need many such calligraphers in Australia today.

Catching the Light is Suzanne Edgar’s fourth collection of poems. It comprises six sections: “This healing light”, “Where two walls meet”, “True minds”, “Watchers”, “For want of a spoon”, and “Water sleekly falls”.

“For want of a spoon” is powerful and gravitates around the death of an ageing parent, an experience most will in time enter. Its central poem, “A silver teaspoon”, resonates with the proverbial form “For want of a nail” about a sequence of increasingly great disasters that arise from one small, even trivial incident—in this case, over-reaching to find a tiny spoon, falling and breaking a wrist. This leads to death “down a chain of causation” arising from the seemingly trivial. The poem made me think about Les Murray’s “The Chimes of Neverwhere”, and the Russian parable where a chain of disasters preludes eucatastrophe.

Many named people are referenced in these poems. At least nine poems are dedicated to individuals, and others name intellectual or artistic greats like Dante, Shakespeare, Chekhov, Coleridge and Eliot. This adds gravitas. Internally, some of the poems reference great visual artists such as Michelangelo, Van Gogh, Klimt, Picasso and Millais. Learned references also occur in many of the poems, and these can provide a matrix in which to set her own detail and her own painterly observations—by which I mean “colour expresses form” or colour observations and tones dominate. Colour is an experience of light, and this helps make the title even more apt. But intellectual greats rarely travel without baggage or shadow.

Some of the poems evoke the experience of looking at watercolours, inscribing detail over washes of colour. Her eye is sensitive to colour. Paint-colour types appear in the first poem, and we have gold, yellow, reddish, crimson, blue and brown in the first three poems before poem four takes us to “tonal effects” and grey, gunmetal and shadows.

Edgar’s poems are clear, accessible (in spite of the luminaries) and balanced either by lovely rhymes that structure the early poems or by syllabic rhythms where rhyme is not needed to make the poetry work.

I liked “The Fragrance of Lemons”. What lies in my reader response that makes it so? It’s not only a love of the lemon tree as such, and its place in the older Australian garden, but Edgar’s story of the neighbour who by hacking and uprooting, undoes and destroys the patient work of others:

and my breath stopped: I knew it before

I saw the mangled heap of limbs.

The wreck of a woman’s dream, they lay

across the broken cobbled path.

I stood in falling rain and stared:

The fruit was blotched with a fetid mould

sodden, pale, and cold to touch.

This reminded me of John Kinsella’s poem about the West Australian wheat-belt farmer who cuts down the very last trees along his creek line, only to lie in his creek-water bath, cursing the brown water that now stains it. I like it because a similar thing happened to me when a neighbour cut down a thirty-year-old mulberry tree that stood just inside her fence but branched five metres into my domain. One day it was gone and all I could do was lament.

I would have cropped the lovely cover photo and reduced it the flame alone, thus intensifying the light.

An Inherited Epic of Gilgamesh: A Poetic Memoir Dedicated to James McAuley is Graeme Hetherington’s seventh book of poetry. It will contribute strongly to ongoing research projects into James McAuley. It asks a lot of the reader, which can be a good thing if the reader will make the effort or pursue the research project. It is focused in specific and specialist knowledge of the Babylonian epic, and a deeply personal friendship with McAuley. It asks for wider knowledge of and interest in the multi-faceted James McAuley, founding editor of Quadrant, devotee of Papua New Guinea, fervent DLP and B.A. Santamaria supporter, anti-communist theorist, poet and hymn-writer, convert to Catholicism, and dweller in Tasmania where he held an academic post at the university. The poem identifies Hetherington as friend and one mentored by McAuley (enthralled by McAuley). The book adds to the body of literature about the great and controversial man and may itself become the subject of research projects.

Using Gilgamesh as the matrix asks a lot of the reader. I once had a poem rejected with the comment that the footnotes were longer than the poem and so I continue to ask about how much wider reading one must do to appreciate a poem. Footnotes can help but must one read encyclopaedia articles first, or take a crash course in a specialist degree? Perhaps. But this epic is much less accessible as a poem than for instance Auden’s diachronic masterpiece “The Shield of Achilles”. My concern about wider reading is not unrelated to Tolstoy’s retelling of “How Much Land Does a Man Need?”

I encountered a little of Gilgamesh in 1976 when John Scullion SJ in Melbourne was introducing us to global best practice scholarship on the book of Genesis, and I used to do obeisance before the blue spruce planted outside the arts faculty in Hobart, planted in honour of McAuley.

But as the Australian Book Review notes of Hetherington’s time as a Classics Department lecturer in the University of Tasmania, “Not finding any Hittites, Greeks or Romans in Australia, he went to Europe for a more substantial contact with them.” Thus, bringing Gilgamesh back to Hobart may not be easy.

This sixty-four-page epic also stands alongside McAuley’s own epic Captain Quiros, a poem I more respected than read—perhaps as Slessor too is more respected than read deeply. Hetherington at eighty-two writes from within the domain of his friendship with McAuley and a second-nature familiarity with Gilgamesh and Enkidu. The poem is at times a narrative of personal purgation, a summation with threads of negative self-disclosure, of dark struggles. This uncovering of dark places (apo-kalupto in the Dionysiac myth and in the Pauline Epistles) runs clearly through the section titled “Encounters with Hell’s Gates, Monsters and Others”. Did not McAuley say somewhere that “the past is a deep pond in which one can drown”?

Hetherington lists the personae applicable to McAuley, roles that gave him a face and the measure of greatness that he had. Some personae probably ran right to the depths of his inner man. I think his conversion and Catholic faith did that, even if by the end that was a struggle. It seems that the Catholic faith is rarely bendable by or to one individual will, even if that voice holds St Peter’s Keys. The machine is too big, too diverse, or is a mansion with too many rooms.

Hetherington’s work made me think of a cinema film about personae: the movie about Bob Dylan in which Dylan was played by five or so different actors. One of the actors was a woman. Each covered a different aspect of his career in the music business. This inclusion of difference via a multiplicity of actors exemplified the film’s title, I’m Not There. Brand and persona take over and the individual is hidden or somewhere else. Anyone who has filled a strong role in professional life will understand this point intuitively.  Perhaps this leads us to the view that the core of McAuley may also have been “not there” despite a projection of great intensity in his several public personae. I finish on Hetherington’s strong lines about McAuley in “Prologue”: “All said and done, Christ-crosser of / The great Australian emptiness.”

The Gang of One is the selected poems of Robert Harris, edited by Judith Beveridge and Philip Mead, who bring their high levels of professional skill and standing to this carefully-put-together work. It is a major book that encompasses Robert Harris’s life achievement. It includes a photographic portrait by the noted photographer Juno Gemes. The book conveys a sense that great affection and care have been taken in bringing it to publication.

It is an important collection of poems by a man who lived only half as long as a man may reasonably hope to live. Harris died in 1993 of a heart attack in his early forties. Gang of One is an unusual and powerful title and can suggest a powerful diversity that achieves a unity; or of the poet as a sole operator in life who by backing his own vision and calling achieves more in that one life than many a collective or school.

I first encountered Robert Harris’s poetry when I got a copy of JANE, Interlinear and Other Poems (1992) soon after publication. My interest in the Henrician “reforms” probably led me to his highly researched and deeply empathetic poems about this notable young woman beheaded in a dynastic conflict that makes Game of Thrones seem understated in brutality. Jane was the “what might have been” interloper between the slightly younger Edward VI and Edward’s sibling Mary Tudor. Edward and Jane were in modern terms minors when they died and it is a challenge not to impose modern adult sensibilities on them. Harris is properly arrested by the highly confronting realities of the beheading of a potential monarch perhaps just seventeen at her death. Great violence swirled around Henry’s “Iron throne” and the modern reader can revisit those times via Foxe’s contemporaneous Book of Martyrs.

In JANE, Harris made use of a page-presentation pattern from the Interlinear Hebrew-Greek-English Bible. This picks up ideas of an authoritative text, of a master theme to be followed, and also allows for the interruption to standard sequential consciousness as confronting thoughts of death by beheading take over, and thoughts and disconnected images float in and out of the lines.

The scope of Harris’s last book and the range of his interests and masteries is seen also in the inclusion of “Seven Songs for Sydney”, a sequence of poems written and performed to commemorate HMAS Sydney and its sinking in 1941. In reading “Seven Songs” I thought I heard the ghost of Kenneth Slessor, and the reader can test this by reading “Five Bells” and “Five Visions of Captain Cook”, when turning to read Harris. Slessor tells us that Cook must “Choose now!”, while Harris tells us, “Burnett must decide.” In “Five Bells” it is said of the drowned man, “You have gone from earth, / Gone from the meaning of a name”; in “Seven Songs”, “I am forgotten as a dead man out of mind: I am like a broken vessel.”

The Gang of One has its place among the best modern Australian poetry and will give the pleasure of returning to read it. I like these lines in one of his very last poems, “Don’t Feel Sorry About It”: “only say for me I walked an older road / where poetry was rare and hard, and, frankly, good.”

Robert Adamson’s essay “The Ultimate Commitment: The Poetry of Michael Dransfield, Vicki Viidikas and Robert Harris” is accessible and valuable reading that helps get us closer to these poems. Adamson credits Judith Beveridge with saying that Harris’s volume A Cloud Passes Over (1986) contains “some of the best religious poems written in the last 50 years”; Kevin Hart included five of the poems in his 1994 Oxford Book of Australian Religious Verse.

Harris lived knowing that his mother had died young of heart failure when he was only six years old. Adamson notes that some of this may be seen in Harris’s poem “Going to See the Elephant”, where the world of childhood is partly re-created and reference is made to an ominous “withheld cardiograph”. The world of childhood lives by being at least partially quarantined, for a time, from the non-eucatastrophes of adult life.

The poems can have their own raw realities. In “Don’t Feel Sorry About It” there is a fine internal rhyme commemorating the experience of being read by unsympathetic critics where piss-ants (a Shakespearean term by the way) and pick-thanks (stingy critics) pair up in a line. He says here, “remember / how many times I got you to laugh / from the verbal castles I built you.”

Edwin Wilson’s memoir Long-Distance Poet: A Portrait of the Poet as an Old Fart is heavy enough at 790 pages to hold open the door of life in a strong gale. It is the third volume of an autobiographical trilogy.

Wilson’s very long book contains some engaging reproductions of his artwork and the elegant covers from his long list of publications, but is mostly an account of his life in full detail. It’s a big gesture to publish a book this size and a big decision to put micro detail before the reader. There are deeply personal dimensions to the book including accounts of deaths, bust-ups and declarations of forgiveness. The whole book is confessional.

When reading it, the American science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick came to mind, perhaps because he also wrote one monumentally long tract at a critical juncture in his life when his matrix of normality was unsettled. In it he wrote:

There exists for everyone, a sentence—a series of words—that has the power to destroy you. Another sentence exists, another series of words, that could heal you. If you are lucky you will get the second but you can be certain of getting the first.

Wilson concedes that one of the book’s major purposes is therapeutic, and best wishes to him in the venture.

Etiquette with Angels: Selected and New Poems
by Andrew Bullen
David Lovell Publishing, 2018, 138 pages, $21.95 

Catching the Light
by Suzanne Edgar
Ginninderra Press, 2019, 104 pages, $22.50 

An Inherited Epic of Gilgamesh: A Poetic Memoir Dedicated to James McAuley
by Graeme Hetherington
Ginninderra Press, 2019, 64 pages, $20 

The Gang of One: Selected Poems
by Robert Harris
Grand Parade Poets, 2019, 224 pages, $26.95 

Long-Distance Poet: A Portrait of the Poet as an Old Fart
by Edwin Wilson
Woodbine Press, 2019, 790 pages

Dr Ivan Head was warden of two Anglican university colleges in Australia for more than a quarter of a century. He holds degrees from the University of Western Australia, the Melbourne College of Divinity, and Glasgow University.