Australian Poetry

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30158, 15 June 1963, Page 3

Australian Poetry

(reviewed by R.G.F.]

Four Poets. F. W. Cheshire. 55 pp. No Fixed Address. By Bruce

Dawe. F. IV. Cheshire

54 pp. Poems. By Kenneth Slessor. Angus and Robertson. 116 PP.

The publishers of “Four Poets” acknowledge the “disturbing difficulty of presenting the work of young poets in individual volumes,” which becomes more expensive and less rewarding every year. They acknowledge also that this anthology is a “deliberate rather than cautious" attempt to meet the difficulty. In all four authors the signs of experiment and imitation are manifest, as is a tendency to talk about a problem rather than to record experience of it; but in general the venture is worth while. The writers are all in their late twenties, and seem to share a connexion with the University of Queensland. David Malouf has a nice command of metaphor which offsets the potential tedium of some of his subjects, and a delicate irony which plays well on the contrast between the genteel and harmless and the perverse and monstrous in animal, man and society alike. There is rather less strain in him than in Rodney Hall, whose talent appears to be similar in kind. Some of Don Maynard's pieces are in a kind of poetic prose, the form of which, while of doubtful value, does not actually intrude; and he can display strong lyrical feeling and a healthy unity. But in not a few the idiom is imitative, bears no relation to the substance, and gets in the way. There is more intensity in Judith Green’s work; the freshness of immediate experience is profitably married to seriousness and a proper control, so that a high proportion of her poems are altogether successful. Bruce Dawe, born in 1930. is a member of the R.A.A.F., a part-time student at the University of Melbourne, a convert to Catholicism, and a writer whose vocation is beyond question. Not overstuffed with book-learning, he is rich in experience and in the power of recording it excitingly and and with concentration. Considered in bulk, “No Fixed Address" approximates an anatomy of the spiritually dead of the big city, of life under any sort of tyrant, of the lonely and the oppressed everywhere. There is an extraordinary blend of sympathy and detachment—the first making feeling possible, and the second giving it a “local habitation": and when directed on himself, the combination commonly yields an insight which is at once convincing personal statement and, so to speak, a fact of experience as such. Nor is the author lacking in humour. He gives the impression of knowing nearly always what he is up to, and of being no mean craftsman—whether in lyrically patterned verses of his own devising, in more regular stanzaic forms, or in the freer style of the dramatic monologue, he lays hold on the appropriate resources of language and uses them with courage and confidence. All in all, this is a first volume which one will want to remember.

To be reprinted in the young Sirius Books series is sufficient tribute to the poetry of Kenneth Slessor; the aim of the series is “to bring back to print and keep in print works which have proved their merits over the years and for which there is a constant demand,” and so to build a library of memorable Australian books in all departments of literature. By profession a journalist, the author is at home with a wide variety of subjects, moods and forms. A few poems may seem to echo the Georgian rhetoric or to be something less than modern in their idiom; but the imagery is as precise as the music is subtle, and there is byturns a lively address to issues, a vitality in the impressionistic pieces, and a reflective profundity which persistently command our interest. As it developed from 1919 to 1947, Kenneth Slessor’s poetry is said to have “epitomised and foreshadowed the general development of Australian poetry in the twentieth century.” This edition reprints the main body of his work as it was collected in “One Hundred Poems” <19441, with several additional pieces.