POETRY Two Collections From Australia

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32637, 19 June 1971, Page 10

POETRY Two Collections From Australia

Collected Poems 1942-1970. By Judith Wright. Angus and Robertson. 302 pp. Index of Titles. Collected Poems 1936-1970. By James McAuley. Angus and Robertson. 232 pp. Notes, Index of Titles. (Reviewed by H. D. McN.) It has become almost a commonplace for critics of Australian literature to measure the achievement of women poets by how far they are behind Judith Wright: Grace Perry, Gwen Harwood, and Rosemary Dobson all seem to be contesting second place, but there seems to be no question of their challenging Judith Wright’s supremacy. Comparative approaches such as this are usually unproductive and inappropriate, but such a question is pertinent in a field like Australian poetry where a single writer (Judith Wright) has more or less pioneered a new style and exerted a magnetic influence over most of her successors; the latest work of both Judith Wright and Gwen Harwood seems of comparable quality (and they are both about the same age), but the decisive factbr is that Judith Wright has been producing mature work since the 19405, whereas Gwen Harwood’s first book only appeared in 1963." The “Collected Poems” include 40 pages of poems which have never been published before, and when one reads these in the perspective of the whole collection one cannot help but notice their very close affinity to Judith Wright’s most characteristic earlier style. Reading this volume straight through as a single book one has a strong impression that she is saying the same thing over and over again in a diversity of ways but without any real progress in her thought. Perhaps it would be more respectful to interpret this as evidence of the fact that she found her poetic vision early and has constantly occupied herself in applying this vision to new material without really managing to broaden it. At its worst, this tendency manifests itself in poems in which she seems to be looking for examples of a general truth, to be converting her accounts of her real experience into parables which support her ideas. For example, one of the recent poems is called "Halfway,” and describes a tadpole which was caught at the point of metamorphosis and frozen into a sheet of ice; this is presented as an illustration of the paradoxical gap between the Utopian dream and the sordid reality, but the whole thing seems so frigidly contrived that the poem also is frozen at birth. This is an extreme example: it is to Judith Wright’s credit that she does not offer a moral resolution to this recurrent perplexity, and in most other cases states it with enough urgency to make it fully convincing.

But to scrutinise Judith Wright’s work in this way is to disengage oneself from the attraction that her technique and her sensitivity as a poet continuously exert on the reader. She has always been a headstrong and individualistic Writer; this is most apparent, of cdurse, in her early work, but it is also becoming evident again now that the drift of poetic style is beginning to move away from her again. Almost everything of the texture of her most recent work recalls a style that was most popular twenty years ago, and yet one feels that this is not because she is simply conservative or nostalgic—she clearly uses these devices with full awareness of what she is doing, and, one senses, with a touch of defiance. If this is so, it is justified, because this kind of work suffers more from compromise than from the vicissitudes of fashion. And this, of course, is a characteristic of the masterpiece. There are, as every reader of Australian poetry knows, two facts that have dominated most of Professor McAuley’s work: his conversion to Roman Catholicism and his opposition to what he calls “modernity.” His conversion occurred after the publication of his first book “Under Aldebaran” (1946), tad > his opposition to post-war trends in literature received its most complete statement in the collection of essays “The End of Modernity” (1959). In the title piece he distinguishes between “secular” and “liturgical" literature, and states a preference for the latter, an attitude which his poetry has generally substantiated. People tend to prefer secular writing, he claimed, because of its apparent variety of sub-ject-matter; in reality, though, the liturgical has wider possibilities, and McAuley has attempted to demonstrate this in his work; Whatever the truth of this assertion, however, it must be objected that English vocabulary, with its huge range of terms describing sensory experience, favours the secular poet, and McAuley has obviously found that poetic treatment of the metaphysical demands sparse use of imagery and a much more extensive reliance on abstract terminology than modem taste will tolerate—although this is unlikely to worry McAuley much. The inevitable consequence of this, though, is that the reader (not to mention the reviewer) who is in sympathy with modernist trends cannot help but feel a degree of dissatisfaction with work that appears to have been generated by a largely negative impulse to defy modernism. McAuley’s most ambitious work (and probably his best) has been the long narrative “Captain Quires,” a historical epic about the navigator searching for the Great South Continent which he intended to claim for Catholic Christendom. As a poem, it is mag-

nificentiy conceived and executed—though perhaps this is only to be expected, since the historical narrative is a genre at which Australian writers excel. Even more significant, however, is the fact that it manages to dramatise liturgical impulses in a form that is easily palatable to the secular modernist reader: this poem is a better vindication of McAuleys theoretical preferences than, any of his essays. And yet, ironically, one’s enjoyment of "Captain Quires" is needlessly limited by the poet’s admitted negative impulse: he apparently began the poem as a challenge to Patrick White’s “Voss,” which he felt had invaded the proper territory of poetry. In this volume, there are 23 new poems which have not been previously collected. As has been the case with McAuley’s other books, these poems are most uneven in quality, varying between skilfully-written devotional work with splendid and unquestionable dignity and insubstantial rhetorical pieces which all too often catch him straining for a rhyme (in one, he rhymes “Thirroul” with “wonderful” and has to go into German to find a rhyme for “letter”). > These things are unfortunate, and the more regrettable since one feels that an inflexible theoretical stance has limited McAuley’s resources of expression, and that it is when he has allowed a degree of compromise that he has realised his full potential as a devotional writer.