poetry THE ARCIMBOLDO EFFECT
Ivor Indyk
Peter Steele
Invisible Riders
Paper Bark Press $18.95hb, 103pp
90 5704 106 5
It's not a matter of hiding or concealing, because this is a poetry of potentially infinite expansion; and it's not an escape, because the exuberance of the language suggests that all of life is in it, that this is where the poet lives. The sheer force and pressure of it suggests sublimation -- upward to the heavens, outwards to the ends of the earth and human knowledge, downwards into the demotic (but not the erotic). And into the demonic, which gives Steele some of his most intense and extraordinary effects, as in the last stanza of the opening poem 'As Make the Angels Weep' --
And here comes mr barebones, strutting his stuff
This tableau has a medieval quality about it: the sense of performance, the devilish intimation of death or hollowness at the core. This is the quality of allegory, and often the darkest elaborations are allegorical: 'the night's debauch of reason', 'the white bear of pride', the dogs which 'kennel' in the heart, or the memorable portrait of icy winter in 'Ash Wednesday', 'Roads glaze./The pallid croupier leans and spins/Our frosted wheels to a locked phase.' The images which dominate the title poem 'Invisible Riders', itself an elaboration on Emerson's phrase about 'the invisible riders who whip us through the world', are particularly intense, a source of terror and wonder at the same time:
As though born in a trunk. Somehow he drapes
The swathes of flesh, the fan of blood about him,
Makes war, makes law, makes out, and makes off to
Confused applause from the pit. Here comes...here goes.Some days, it's a gaucho in command,
As every object is a possible starting point for an elaboration, the allegorical mode in its most general sense is at the heart of Steele's approach -- a dog is never simply a dog, a horse not just a horse. Hands, stairs, trees, corridors, hats, fountains, fires, and the palm tree (in the lovely poem 'Palms') all act as points from which the richness of the poet's experience or knowledge may be summoned to bear witness -- not to the poet's own accomplishments, for these are humbly worn -- but to the richness of creation. In these poems, where the allegory opens to the whole world and its plenitude, we are at the opposite extreme to the realm where death spins the wheel of fortune or men strut like skeletons -- the effect is more like synecdoche than allegory. In some respects the technique is similar to Les Murray's elaborations on shorts and louvres and broad beans, celebrations of an earthly abundance that expresses the glory of God.
Hickory-tough, illiterate, stinking of sweat
And violence, plunging into the sea
Of grass, unbiddable, stoic. On others, it's
Elisabeth of Austria...
Steele's poetry runs the full range between these two extremes: sometimes the elaboration is at the service of ritual and ceremony; at other times satire, whimsy, amusement or astonishment. So many of the poems are dedicated to friends or to the memory of friends: here the ornately wrought language is in the strictest sense an ornament, a gift, a tribute, an expression of value.
It can also, in truth, be clutter too, so dense in its effect that you lose sight of the subject as it disappears under the weight of its equivalences. As an alternative, you wish for a simple gesture of tenderness. 'Stardust' opens with: 'That millions of tons of stardust are falling towards/our curious planet momentarily/sticks to the mind like velcro -- a tug, and its off/with the Gross National Product of/Liberia, the melting point of copper,/the Finno-Ugrarian syllables/for 'pear-shaped', and our best guess about/ Eden's triangulation...'.
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Return to Australian Book Review /August 2000