poetry
Martin Harrison
Dorothy Hewett and John Kinsella
Wheatlands
FACP $19.95pb, 144pp, 1 86368 279 1
John Kinsella
Visitants
Bloodaxe Books $16.95pb, 96pp
1 85224 505 0
Wheatlands is, indeed, a kind of antiphon between two poetic voices -- Hewett's family-oriented, genealogical, sensuous, wry, Kinsella's technical, more 'hands off', often more violent and ugly. It is hard not to read Wheatlands as a kind of friendly poetic 'contest' -- Irish style -- where poems balance and bounce off each other, often revealing hidden aspects and strengths. Hewett reprints from Alice in Wormland to great effect. 'Inheritance', 'At Home', 'Brothers', 'Ghosts', a wonderful long poem about her relatives called 'Still Lives' -- these poems (amongst many) finely register the intimacy of memory and experience.
Possibly Kinsella's poetry fits less easily into the mode of place, memory and atmosphere. But poems like 'Sculpting a Poem from the Landscape's Painting' -- a poem about how you look at something -- and fine, tough work like 'The Hierarchy of Sheep', 'Death of a Roo Dog', 'The Machine of the Twentieth Century...' register a more mechanised, more technical, more negative view. Both poets have a strong sense of the economic and ecological ravagement of their home country. As Hewett says in what is self-evidently a major poem, her 'Legend of the Green Country', '(t)his land is not mine to give or trade.' If you don't know, or want to revisit, the work of both these poets Wheatlands is a fine way of doing so.
John Kinsella's new collection of poems, Visitants, perhaps marks something of a change of direction. Narrowing 'hard-line' preoccupations with language (the materiality of the poem) and with landscape (Australia) are transformed into a poetry which is much more diverse, formally variegated and confident. Visitants is, to a large degree, a kind of livre composé -- a through-designed, partly thematised book. The originality of the aims of the collection cannot be overlooked. Inscribed for the American critic, Marjorie Perloff, Visitants is up-front, pop-art-ish and (I'd suggest) deliberately somewhat bizarre: it lives in the world of fragmented experience, of informatic culture and, less happily, of subcultural 'cult' phenomena such as UFOs, spacemen and sightings.
In a number of poems, the collection offers a complex, interwoven poetry where cosmogonic and technological references build subtle, highly expressive language. There are sometimes traces of the English poet, J.H.Prynne, but usually they have been subsumed into supple, up-front poetry -- as in the fine sequence, 'Area 51/Pine Gap' dedicated to British poet and critic Nigel Wheale.
Likewise, despite its extremely de-referenced opening and closing sections, another sequence 'Body Snatching', written for the philosopher, Elizabeth Grosz, creates a rich, post-modern mythology for the notion of 'country'. A sestina, 'Beyond W. Eugene Smith's Photographic Essay Life Without Germs', or the more descriptive 'Exotica at Lake Joondalup' -- an interior and aerial view of a project-home suburban development -- are poetry which capture technical, subjective and observational references with subtlety and contemporariness. 'Harvest Time' is, quite simply, magic. And if for my taste the sequence, 'Aspects of the Pagan' is simply too obviously a mix of digital aesthetics and camped-up 'Norman Lindsay', it's still an interesting poem. These poems bring the larger technological and cosmological forces of Visitants into a resolved, sometimes abstract, matrix of expression. They're accomplished, often beautiful. Once you have found them, much of the rest of Visitants, like a space-craft's launching rocket, falls away as superfluous.
This is not just a quick metaphor. The over-riding problem with Visitants (outside the poems just mentioned) is its over programmatic construction around the theme of extra-terrestrials. ETs, body snatchers and UFOs crop up in far too many poems, and often they seem (as, by definition, only extra-terrestrials can be) largely irrelevant to the human texture and aims of the work. 'Dispossession', 'High Noon -- Visitation' (based on a Hopper painting, but somehow there are ETs there too), 'Mallee Meltdown', 'Visitant Eclogue', 'Soon They'll Come', 'Moving Through the Range', 'The Spur' -- the list could go on and on. Venusians, however, are sexless things, concocted out of paranoia and B-grade Hollywood movies; and night skies aren't necessarily made more mysterious just because satellite debris falls through them.
'Moving through the Range', for instance, is a fine night poem -- that is, until you encounter the spooky concluding reference to 'the lights' that were 'no weather balloon/or experimental plane'. Indeed not, you can't help replying: they were Qantas Flight 8 from Singapore. Such false mystery-making merely invites bathos. Located biographically in the book's opening section (frankly, even there these boyhood sightings sound somewhat faux naif), the extra-terrestrial theme is never developed, just reiterated for predictably disturbing effect. Nothing good in Visitants depends on it.
Re-reading this complex book, I can't but feel that UFOs make even the most obvious things hard to understand. It might be worthwhile, for instance, to reflect on Visitants as a post-structuralist text -- namely as a book in which confidence and trust between reader and writer are deliberately severed. The poet-UFO watcher is, after all, an unreliable, slightly 'crackpot' narrator. Similarly, many of the poems read as textual fragments or as textually 'uncertain', textually 'under erasure' in a quasi-Derridean sense. ET-free, the long and fascinating verse letter 'nature morte: Oh Rhetoric' plays with this figure expertly. The attempt to find a metaphor for (broadly speaking) de-humanisation is daring. But UFOs are just too eye-catchingly New Age and 'popular cultural' to do any complex philosophical work.
Too thematised, too narrativised, much of Visitants reads more as a project 'upon' or 'to do with' poetry than a realisation of the poetic medium itself. A theorist might want to argue the validity of that task in a post-modern sense. I don't. The collection seeks to position a critical poetry in relation to global informatics, genetic science, cosmology and (occasionally) economy. This indeed is what is exciting about it. It contains a number of fine poems. But all too evidently, Visitants reaches for the stars.