baby's fading bloom

I tell him that I still don't respect Song for the Night. But you read De Quincey, he says. Yes I say, but we like different things in him; De Quincey's eccentricity (which is attention) led him to unusual convolutions or crevices (On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth) but you are the opposite, look, you write glosses, “her baby's fading bloom,” nostalgia for younger days at the nanny's knee … do you know how many poets in this anthology are suffering from nostalgia, I say: it's an epidemic – don't blame me for Bertram Stevens' taste in poems, he says, and don't tell me there's not nostalgia in the poems being published in your lifetime.

No, that's true, I say; I was reading the Island interview with Gwen Harwood earlier today and she said that she was “nostalgic even for five minutes ago.” When did she die? Nineteen ninety-five. And how many poems have I read about a living poet's dead father. But you can be suspicious of nostalgia, the way Geoffrey Hill is, or measureful, you can mediate between the past and the present (books mediate between the past of the writer's writing and the present of the reader's reading, say that writers themselves are measuring nostalgia), you can be Harwood and regard the past as if it's a courtroom where you go to be condemned in the present --

Good angel
give me that morning again
and let me share, and spare me
the shame of my parents' rebuke

she writes in Class of 1927 (I can't replicate her layout; the "good" should be over to the right) -- or

Anguish: remembered hours

when she recalls her mother in Mother Who Gave Me Life -- or you can have a more holistic grief, like the one that Cyril Connolly published in The Unquiet Grave, which is one of the books, Harwood says, that brought her towards poetry --

When I contemplate the accumulation of guilt and remorse which, like a garbage-can, I carry through life, and which is fed not only by the lightest action but by the most harmless pleasure, I feel Man to be of all living things the most biologically incompetent and ill-organized. Why has he acquired a seventy years life-span only to poison it incurably by the mere being of himself?

-- or you can say just, “Oh, nostalgia, alas,” as if it's one-dimensional and not part of you, and you were one of the ones who said, “Oh, nostalgia, alas.” You're slack.

I still have form in my poem, he says: which is a subspecies of ruthlessness, or a slaughterhouse, like memory. (Touché.) You keep ignoring that. I did mention music, I mutter; I said the whole purpose of the poem was music – then why are you criticising it for sticking to its bones? he asks, if you've already said that the bones were the point?

its living and its decaying trees

I am about to give away parts of The Man Who Loved Children, so if you haven't read it and you don't want to know what happens, stop now.







Panellists on the ABC's First Tuesday Book Club read Man earlier this month and complained that the author was "relentlessly cruel," that the characters were filled with "cruelty," and that they talked too much. "Unreadable."

It was "suffocating" said Jennifer Byrne: it was all very well reading this before I was a mother (she said) but now I'm distressed at the thought of those children left behind at the end of the book in "that house full of hate and venom" (which is a misreading of the last chapter, in which Stead describes all "hate and venom" receding from the house. Ernie finds five dollars and begins to have "heartening thoughts," while baby Chappy is "learning to punch playfully the large bosom of Hassie." Evie and Tommy occasionally "look a bit downcast" when they remember their mother, but that's all. Above them, the adults who were disagreeing with one another are reconciling and prospering. Angry Henny, lodestar of hate and venom, is sinking into the otherworld of a household myth. If Byrne is worried about the ending from the perspective of a mother, then her concern should not be, "Children are suffering," but, "Christina Stead believes that if I, a mother, died, my resiliant children would get along without me. My son would cheer up and start planning his business career, while my baby would adapt happily to life with my sister").

But we suffocated, groaned Byrne and Luke Davies and Marieke Hardy. It was too much for us! To which: Thoreau: Walden:

We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder-cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander. We are cheered when we observe the vulture feeding on the carrion which disgusts and disheartens us, and deriving health and strength from the repast. There was a dead horse in the hollow by the path to my house, which compelled me sometimes to go out of my way, especially in the night when the air was heavy, but the assurance it gave me of the strong appetite and inviolable health of Nature was my compensation for this.

Christina Stead writes like a natural force, and the Book Club prinks at dead horses and calls in the council. We found a young rattlesnake decapitated in the road yesterday, a corpse that did not make the air "heavy," dessicated as it was, but you could look through a hole in the skin at its poor smashed and crosshatched ribs (each snake a pipe of ribs), and know that you would never wander in that flattened cavern from which the spirit, past pasturing, had departed, banished by one of our neighbours, possibly with the sharp end of a shovel, and then with the weight of a car. Man should be reduced to "A short story perhaps," winces Marieke Hardy, aspiring killer of mysterious snakes, and a young woman in Turgenev's Rudin shouts back at the whole idea of this Book Club: "I am not crying for the reason you think. That is not what hurts me; what hurts me is that I have been deceived in you." This woman has arrived at an assignation prepared to defy her family and run away with her lover, a man she believes is a passionate idealist. She tells him that her mother was upset when she found out about their liason, and the fraud lover quails and baulks. He won't go through with it. "And your mother was so indignant as all that?" he says. The young woman is appalled. "Whom did I meet here? A man of faint heart," unbrave, timorous, easily unsettled. "And how did you know that I am not up to enduring the parting from my family?" She is willing to endure it and he has misjudged her. And Gwen Harwood in A Quartet for Dorothy Hewitt turns her back on the man who says, "It's lovely dear."

I dreamed of soaring passion
as an egg might dream of flight,
while he read my crude sonata.
If he'd said, "That bar's not right,"

or, "Have you thought of a coda,"
or, "What that first repeat,"
or, "Modulate the dominant,"
he'd have had me at his feet

But he shuffled it all together
and said, "That's lovely dear,"
as he put it down on the washstand
in a way that made it clear

that I was no composer.
And I being young and vain
removed my lovely body
from one who'd scorned my brain

Or "you are no mate to me," as the young woman says to the wailing Book Club panellists who wish that fictional characters would be lovely, dear, and shut up a bit so as not to stir them too much. Send her a challenge, send her a muse of fire, don't send her Marieke Hardy or Jennifer Byrne. "Good-by!"







Turgenev translated by Harry Stevens

a lodge of leaves

Enter a spirit. It is M. You have a lot of books, he says. Avaunt! Exits. I'm boxing books again. All of my Australian authors are coming with me because I'm afraid I won't be able to replace them in the US. The Americans have heard of David Malouf, so I'm not afraid of losing him, but Elizabeth Jolley seems to be an unknown quantity, in spite of the quote from the Washington Post that sometimes appears on her book jackets ("Elizabeth Jolley joins the handful of Australian writers of whom it may be said that their books are able to alter the direction of one's inner life" -- Elizabeth Ward, Washington Post), and so I will hold on to her -- and to the Selected Poems of Gwen Harwood as well, and the Selected Poems of J.S. Harry. Harry writes in bursts or hiccups, with dashes and extra spaces in the middles of lines -- or just short lines --

The butcher's dreams
of sleep 're transposed
onto the carcass of a sheep.
Half-asleep on his feet
he says he often dreams
he is the sheep - but alive -
and somebody else
is doing the cutting

(from Behind the Slice)

-- and often the poem ends in a pair of steps, one line, two lines, "and somebody else / is doing the cutting," with other lines wriggling around above it, fiddling a little ("he is the sheep - but alive -") as they search for the place they want to go, and then in two swift plunges they get there. In losing a lover / finding a place to keep seagoats the two lines are "it is months / since you started walking;" in the wanderer it's "so comes rain / to a lodge of leaves," and sometimes it's one line instead of two, which completes the poem with a stronger thud -- "This poem ends by a pile of cooling scrap" (Report, From The Outlands, Mating Habits There Being In A State Of Flux).

In other poems none of this applies, but there is usually a sense of wandering and then deciding in her work, and also a strangeness, verging on Nonsense --

1) Into the valley of death last night
stomped
six hundred/ butterflies/ our belov'd
field specimens/ they were carrying
high-powered
duskyfoot woodrats
(loaded)

(from The Non-Naturalistic Weapon There should be gaps between "specimens/" and "they" and before "(loaded)" but I'm not sure how to insert them.)

If I try to imagine her sentences taken out of the poems I can see that they're usually clear and decisive, but the spaces, dashes, and other punctuation (more prevalent than they must seem from the examples I've quoted here) turn them into tentative bees, not sure where they should set themselves down. Instead they dart out in stabs. Harwood's poems are tighter, slower, more elegant, unhurried (next to Harry's skidding surface breathlessness), and they tend to take place in definite pieces of scenery. Often there will be a person, and this person will be carrying out an activity in a landscape. The landscape will be established quite firmly.

I dream I stand once more
in Ann Street by the old
fire station. The palms
like feather dusters move

(from Dust to Dust)

or from Home of Mercy

By two and two the convent girls are walking
at the neat margin of the convent grass
into the chapel

or from A Postcard

Snow crusts the boughs' austere entanglement

Once she has settled the reader's feet on the ground she goes on to describe a change, or a revelation, or an embitterment. The solid beginning takes on the role of a stepping stone. There is the very beautiful and dense Sea Anemones, with its two colours, first grey

Grey mountains, sea and sky. Even the misty
Seawind is grey. I walk on lichened rock
In a kind of late assessment, call it peace.

then red.

Then the anemones, scarlet, gouts of blood.

and with that, the poet goes from one plain word for everything around her, "grey," to no language at all, nothing adequate -- she is burst open --

There is a word I need, and earth was speaking.
I cannot hear.

Then she is earthed again, she regains her body, and there is a sort of seeking through resistant elements, cold and hardness.

Kneeling on rock, I touch them through cold water

Or an act of penitence. The peace is undone, there is no more lichen attached flat to rocks, but the anemones remind her of a baby's lips, and, "I woke once, with my palm across your mouth" and within a few lines the poet seems to have come to the conclusion that the peace of line three was not a desirable peace, but a closing-down of memory, and that the full life is a stimulated life: "Anemos, wind. The spirit where it will." The anemones appear to be inanimate but they are not. They are engaged in a struggle. "Not flowers, no, animals that must eat or die." She is condemned to this too, apparently, she either struggles, and sees, and has these memories about babies' lips and palms and spirit, or else she goes into the peace, and suffers a kind of death. Blood throughout the poem. Harwood is a romantic, often rueful, with the kind of alertness that seems always ready to come out in comedy.

Quite often in some trendy quarter
the passion to redecorate
those areas concerned with water
results in an expanse of slate.
Cork tiling's warmer, vinyl's neater.
Slate's forty dollars a square metre.
In kitchen, laundry, loo, I see
The stuff the state school gave us free

(from Class of 1927)

Born and raised in Queensland, she moved to Tasmania after her marriage. The grey sky and beach in Sea Anemones are probably chilly Tasmanian.