Rave Review for Black Pepper's Latest [18.11.2009]

Inverse perspectives on the maturing voice [reviewing Wimmera and Fuel by Andrew Sant] by Geoffrey Lehmann (Geoffrey Lehmann is preparing a new anthology of Australian poetry) The Weekend Australian, 7 November 2009

Why do some poets, like some people, do their best work early, and others continue improving and peak in their late 40s or 50s? While editing an anthology of Australian poetry, this has been on my mind. Kenneth Slessor, Henry Lawson, Christopher Brennan and Banjo Paterson had virtually exhausted themselves as poets by the time they reached 40. But Slessor’s friend, R.D. FitzGerald, matured as a poet only after reaching that age.

Goethe and Yeats continued developing until late. For male poets, at least, it may be necessary to have an argument with oneself if one is to continue developing. Goethe rejected the romantic storm and stress of his youth, and embraced classicism and balance. Yeats rejected the lushness of his early poetry for a language that was stripped back and closer to everyday speech, the famous ‘cold eye’ of his epitaph.

With female poets, a decision to have an argument with oneself may not be needed. Biology may force the issue. When reading the poetry of Elizabeth Riddell, one of our good middle-ranking poets, I was struck by how free her poetry became once she reached her late 40s, as though a burden had been lifted from her. Jennifer Maiden, one of our best contemporary poets, has even written a poem about it, ‘Menopause as a Bee Freed from a Fairy Floss Machine’. The title of this stunningly good poem says it all.

Both books, Fuel and Wimmera, are the work of mature poets. Andrew Sant was born in London in 1950 and came to Australia with his parents in 1962. Homer Rieth was born in Germany of German and Georgian parents in 1947 and came to Australia in 1952. Both poets are published by Black Pepper, founded by the feisty Kevin Pearson, himself a noted poet. Black Pepper is one of the livelier new houses that has sprung up after the large publishers decided to exit poetry publishing.

That’s about where the similarities between Sant and Rieth stop. Sant has a long publishing history, going back to 1980; Fuel is his 11th published volume of poetry. He writes short, mainly domestic poems, and is able to tease significance and a sense of profundity out of everyday things with wit and ingenuity.

Although a few years older than Sant, Rieth has a short publishing history, starting in 2001, and Wimmera is just his second published volume of poetry. In contrast to Sant’s short poems, Wimmera is a single epic of more than 300 pages, a leviathan of a poem, cosmic in its ambition and symphonic in its approach.

In 1983, as editors of an anthology, Robert Gray and I wrote: ‘Sant’s poetry seems very English in its reticence and use of the middle tone of voice. He always deals directly with experience... His strength is his interest in and close observation of other people, combined with a classical openness of style and freedom from affectation.’

These comments about Sant in 1983 are still true, except that his syntax, which was always a bit complex, has become more complex and circuitous, and his poetry is drier in tone; perhaps too dry and sinewy at times.

He has continued to grow and develop as a poet because his poetry thrives on wit and intelligence rather than on hormones.

Take ‘Rock Music’, for example, a poem not about a type of popular music. It’s about ‘the frequencies of stones’, the music of geology. Sant is a poet of precision and imagination. In ‘Given’, after the inaction of listening to the news and hours at a computer, he starts digging in the garden:

Gigantic, the fresh spadefuls of planet; wrecked worms like swimmers fighting incredible turbulence.

His adoption of the worm’s viewpoint and his choice of the word planet are quite remarkable.

Perhaps the pick of the poems in this book is his elegy for a fellow poet, Margaret Scott. ‘The Fires’ also may be a poem of farewell to Tasmania, the island where he has spent much of his life. Flying out of Tasmania over a bushfire, he thinks of Margaret Scott, two of whose houses were incinerated in fires, and who always said to him, in a motherly way between cigarettes, ‘Now tell me what you’ve been doing/and where you’ve been.’ He also remembers how Margaret used to keep herself awake while driving at night by repeatedly shouting, ‘Elephants! Elephants!’

Rieth’s first volume of poetry, The Dining Car Scene, published when he was in his 50s, was an elusive book. The title poem was a virtuoso piece describing with great precision a scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. But it was hard to make out what he stood for. Rieth has been a teacher of Greek and Roman literature and the one thing that was clear was his love of language.

Wimmera is an extraordinary poem, comprising 12 books, each of two parts. Rieth moved to Minyip in the Wimmera district of Victoria in 1999. At a basic level the poem reflects Rieth’s feelings for a landscape and people he has come to love.

Each book, we are told in an introductory note by Justin Clemens, ‘moves through the experience of a particular place: discoveries, establishments, characters, events, the contingencies and violence of settlement and the unexpected profusions of the natural environment.’

The poem reaches its climax in part one of Book 12, where Rieth moves from the profusions of drought and flood of the Wimmera and addresses the ‘countless curvatures of space/an atoll of time in an ocean of infinitude/the starry night is no more than time/only space only/the inaudible overheard’.

The long, sinuous sentences of the poem have passages of bravura language. This is how Rieth summarises the life and death of poet Adam Lindsay Gordon: ‘trooper Gordon... between poignant poems/... had seen how over the jumps a horse instinctively picks up a/certain tempo/by the time it covers the distance the tempo has become a heartbeat/the grace of its motion almost supernatural/and yet he shot himself as if the shot ringing out might make for/the sound of a caesura’.

This technically brilliant passage reveals one of the weaknesses of Wimmera. Gordon’s tragic suicide is treated almost flippantly. The consistently heroic tone of the poem, although it knits it together musically, sometimes places too great a distance between the reader and details that might have engaged our sympathy.

My second grouch is the deliberate use of cliche, such as ‘drunk as skunks’, ‘back of beyond’.

I realise that the father of European poetry, Homer, also used cliches such as ‘wine-dark sea’ but that does not justify their use here.

Notwithstanding these faults, Wimmera is quite extraordinary: it reads like a young man’s poem, with its ebullience, panache, occasional passages of juddering bathos, and its hormonal music.

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