poetry
Martin Harrison
John Kinsella (ed)
Landbridge: Contemporary Australian Poetry
FACP $19.95pb, 342pp
1 86368 269 4
A new anthology which promises to represent the diversity of contemporary Australian poetry -- and which updates the poetics of Australian poetry beyond the heated factionalisms of twenty or so
years ago -- could only be welcomed. This is, as John Kinsella
explains in his introduction, an anthology which aims 'to look to
the future.' His focus is fairly exclusively the generation of
'68 and younger. Forty-two poets -- including writers as diverse
as John Tranter, Judith Beveridge, Kevin Hart and Peter Rose --
are spliced through by brief selections from three senior poets,
Dorothy Hewett, Peter Porter and Les Murray. They're represented
here more as a gesture towards lineages rather than as indicating
any serious attempt to build a connectedness between younger and
older poets.
Landbridge, then, is probably best described as a rather wobbly, at times negligent, cross-section taken through a wealth of
recent and fairly recent poetry. Kinsella introduces very few
little known poets: Peter Boyle's work is there, as are Gig Ryan,
Rhyll McMaster, S.K.Kelen, Alison Croggon, Ken Bolton, Robert
Gray and so on. Each poet is given the same regulation of five or
so pages; some have included unpublished poems; nearly all have
provided page length notes on themselves, to varying degrees of
success. Many are woodenly pretentious. Few have the
eyeball-to-eyeball clarity of Les Murray's one liner, 'Art is
indefensible' or the acuity of Robert Gray's 'The freshness of a
poem is all that is unspoken in it.' In fact, measured up against
Kinsella's opening claim that Australian poetry is 'rapidly finding a place in the context of an international poetics',
these notes disappointingly suggest how few of the poets can
frame powerful, new ideas about themselves or their work.
It's a troubling (and disappointing) anthology in another way
too. Despite Kinsella's aim that this should be not 'a collection
of identities, but of poems', not enough of Landbridge is
riveting, inflected with a local eye or tone, or accomplished.
Interestingly, the senior poets stand out like colossi: Dorothy
Hewett's six pages in particular -- it's a marvellous, all too
brief selection. Peter Porter reprints 'On First Looking into
Chapman's Hesiod' (a key poem for any anthology which says that
it seeks to bridge the divide between City and Bush). There are,
of course, better and worse selections amongst the main body of
the anthology; but the overall impression is of a series of
snapshots of poetic journey work.
If there are discoveries, they are (I'm sorry to say it) exceptions: for me, some of them are Jennifer Maiden's remarkable
'The Case of the Dalmatian Diamond' and 'Look, I'm standing on
no-floor', Anthony Lawrence's 'Whistling Fox', the passage from
Alan Wearne's 'Stubbsy', Zwicky's 'Kaddish' or the reprinting of
Laurie Duggan's 'Adventures in Paradise'. It is such a skilful,
tonally adept poem. The text (sic) wins hands down for me, writes
Kinsella of his selection process, opposing this notion 'text' to
any sense of careful, generous critical choice. But what results
as the produced, shared 'text' of recent Australian poetry rarely
advantages the particular projects -- the individuated
preoccupations and voices -- of his poets. Poems have to be very
striking indeed to stand out among Kinsella's smoothing down of
poetry into 'text'. The work of poets with lifelong
pre-occupations, like Gray and Adamson, collapses down into five page 'magazine style' appearances. Innovative sharpness (as
in Pam Brown's atomised, glimpse poetry, or Gig Ryan's polished self-referencing poetry) is blurred by the contextual wadding of
too much 'looking out of the window' poetry. Yet, for all that,
the representation of poetry of 'place' and narrative poetry is
done half-heartedly. Equally, in an anthology whose preface talks
up the merits of experiment and Language poetry, you happen in on
the few examples -- for instance, Tranter's double layer
poem/proses, some of the best work he's ever written, in my view
-- much like Charles Sturt on a flowing creek.
The problem is Kinsella's tendentious, expertly written preface promises something more (and different) from what the poets are
doing. His critical desire to represent uniquely the terminus ad
quem of a literary political matter -- that 'factionalism' -- gets
hitched to a thesis about the reconciliative work of recent
Australian poets as `urban pastoralists'. Yet Kinsella (who
describes his own poems here as 'hybrids' which aim to 'ironise
the pastoral construct') is not the first anthologist to
overcome the factionalism of Sydney poetry: Chris Wallace-Crabbe,
Rodney Hall, Tom Shapcott, Judith Rodriguez, Jennifer Strauss,
Rudi Krausmann, Kevin Hart have all done it before. Likewise, the
claim that the positive or negative influence of the City/Bush
divide influences poets of very diverse pre-occupations both
seriously misunderstands the classical (and respectful) terms on
which Les Murray and Peter Porter debated their poetry
twenty-five years ago, no less than it cannot help but sound a
tad too much like Kinsella talking to (and about) only himself.
The fact is that, measured against its subtitle Contemporary Australian Poetry , Landbridge is one of the most exclusionary anthologies I have read in a while.