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INTRODUCTION TO THE AUSTRALIAN POETS
Dennis Haskell
In terms of quality, poetry is sometimes thought of as the strongest
genre in Australian literature, and for the last half-century it
has exhibited enormous range and variety, and a level of imaginative
intelligence that was not so widespread before reviewing Peter Porters
anthology, The Oxford Book of Modern Australian Verse (Melbourne:
Oxford University Press, 1997), for the Times Literary Supplement
on 3 October 1997. Englands leading poetry critic, Robert
Potts, declared, «This is possibly the best anthology of modern
poetry I have read for consistent pleasure and stimulation»,
and described it as «a book which could, and should, be read
by nearly anyone». Thus the work of the five poets included
here is just a sampling of the whole, a few small tasting glasses
from a large vineyard.
That Australia should have a strong poetry tradition and a lively
current scene is perhaps surprising to an Italian audience, given
Australias image of bush landscape, sunshine and sport. Although
sometimes exaggerated, as for example in the Crocodile Dundee
films, the bush, sunshine and a love for physical activity genuinely
are strong features of Australian society. However, Australia is
a large and geographically various continent with a very multicultural
society, so that an interest in poetic lyric can sit comfortably
alongside an interest in the adventures of the Australian cricket
team.
Unlike Europe, Australia has a short recorded history only
about 200 years but it is one of the oldest continents, and
Aboriginal oral culture developed over the previous 50.000 years.
It is thus an old country but a new nation, with sufficient maturity
to feel that it is connected to a largely European heritage but
without the burden that a long artistic history can put on the shoulders
of the contemporary artist. There is no Giotto or Dante against
whom Australian artists feel they have to measure themselves. The
novelist Kate Grenville has noted, «Theres so much about
Australia that still hasnt been written about» whereas
«in Europe and North America theres sometimes a feeling
that everythings been written out» (quoted in Donyale
Harrison, «The Wizards of Oz Lit», Panorama,
December 1999, p. 112). Australia is a developed country and so
part of the global village that new technologies and internationl
trade have created. Thus it is part of world-wide cultural movements
such as postmodernism, but it can also bring a freshness and distinctiveness
to contemporary artistic activity.
Les Murray is Australias best-known poet internationally,
a recent winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize, and often bracketed with
Derek Walcott and Seamus Heaney as a triunvirate of the worlds
leading poets (at least in English). He is a prolific, sophisticated
and complex poet, with a verbal facility that is matched, in the
twentieth century, only by W.H. Auden. He has adopted a stance as
spokesperson for the traditional world of the Australian bush and
the rural poor. However, his poetry is nothing like traditional
Australian verse, except in his long lines and long sentences, that
seem as expansive as the Australian countryside itself. Murrays
language frequently has a baroque complexity but at its best his
work has a breathtaking imaginativeness, and a religious equanimity
at the heart of immense verbal energy. He is a take-no-prisoners
critic of contemporary mores, and an extremely controversial figure.
Often idiosyncratic in his opinions, he has also unlimited intellectual
courage. In many respects he is an Australian Wordsworth - more
at home with landscape than with people, his poetry provides many
instances of the egotistical sublime, and he attempts to wed declarations
of beliefs to a richness of image and metaphor.
Of similar age to Murray, and also a convert to Catholicism, but
different in most other respects is Bruce Dawe. Dawe is renowned
for his use of Australian vernacular and his introduction of suburban
life into contemporary poetry. He is the most difficult to translate
of all Australian poets, and, partly because he is a non-traveller,
he is little known overseas; within Australia, however, he is far
the most frequently studied Australian poet and his books enjoy
the largest sales. Colloquial and unpretentious, his verse is often
witty, even in its social criticism. A deeply moral poet, his work
is shot through with a sense of human decency, and his lyric insistence
on the dignity of lifes downtrodden is tonally balanced by
his satires on those who misuse power.
Like Dawe, Fay Zwicky can be a wickedly funny satirist, but her
work is often more immediately personal, including in recent poems
that exhibit a degree of nostalgia for her early married life in
Indonesia. Her poetry always conveys an impression of an intelligent
person in action and she often treats ideas as they emerge from
meditations on various relationships. She is a former lecturer in
American literature and her poetry sometimes reflects American influences,
particularly in long lines and Whitmanesque rhythms. Some of her
best-known poems draw on her Jewish background but, to my mind,
it is a Jewishness strongly mediated by American culture. Her poems
often include narrative elements and, because they tend to be long
by the standards of contemporary lyric, they are difficult to anthologise.
Judith Wrights poetry evidenced a profound and distinctive
voice from the time it first appeared, in the early 1940s, and she
may now be considered a kind of grande dame of Australian poetry,
even though she stopped writing verse some years ago. Over time
the tone of her verse changed, in accordance with a shift in literary
language generally, from the hieratic and philosophical to the more
relaxed and colloquial. However, her concerns have not altered
principally nature, the Aborigenes and a womans outlook. Although
she has always been, and still is, a strong social activist for
the first Australians and the environment, all her poetry, I would
argue, is strongly metaphysical. Social statements are made, and
she has a deep concern for responsability and justice partly
due to her coming from a rural land-owning family. However, for
Wright ultimate meaning exists in a religious dimension, broadly
defined, and the meanings of her poems lie not on their surfaces
but in the reverberations of their imagery.
About the last Australian poet included here I can say less, for
obvious reasons, but I have been concerned in my work with creating
a poetry that is central rather than marginal to peoples lives.
Thus, I try to wed emotion and intellect, and to portray the discovery
of the poetic, even the transcendental, in the ordinary. That said,
my poems are deeply concerned with human relationships, and little
concerned with landscape. On the whole, this is unusual in Australian
literature, in a landscape of such relentless light and of such
dimensions that it can dwarf the human.
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