David Brooks (ed)
A.D. Hope: Selected Poetry and Prose
Halstead Classics $29.95pb, 240pp
1 875684 40 9
A.D. Hope (photo by Loui Seselja)
Hope, who is one of the two or three Australian poets best known internationally, has produced a body of poetry which is remarkable but which is less admired in this era of noncommittal muttering and self-dismantling than it was thirty years ago. His heterosexual passion sounds uncool; his fierce assaults on the Bible have far less impact now that readers can't recognize the scriptural stories which he tears apart; and his poems have that stolid iambic look, on the page.
In this last respect, one remembers that when he came back from an Auden-dominated Oxford in 1931 he lamented the fact that he couldn't do verse-forms like Wystan. Yet the two had much in common in their dramatised forays into many fields of modern knowledge.
Hope's first collection, The Wandering Islands, was a knockout. It was, and probably remains, the most sexually confronting volume of poetry turned out on this side of the Indian Ocean. It had more single 'hits' than any Australian book, other than Slessor's One Hundred Poems: one thinks, in retrospect that there, side by side, were 'Imperial Adam', 'Ascent into Hell', 'The Death of the Bird', 'Conquistador', 'X-Ray Photograph', 'Three Romances', and that faultless satire or metaphysical lament, 'Easter Hymn'.
It is a comment on the sheer pressure felt by David Brooks in making his selection from Hope's plenitude that none of the last three named poems has made the cut for Selected Poetry and Prose. So readers in our sallow age of economic humiliation will have to look elsewhere for these lines;
The city of God is built like other cities:Brooks represents the chronological shifts of Hope's poetry with conviction and, generally, with shrewd judgment. There is room here for the post-Mallarméan gorgeousness of 'The Double Looking Glass', the unusually jagged freedoms of 'Sonnets to Baudelaire', that bawdy ballad, 'Teaser Rams' (though not 'The Ballad of Dan Homer'), and, most tersely, 'Inscription for a War':
Judas negotiates the loans you float;
You will meet Caiaphas upon committees;
You will be glad of Pilate's casting vote.
Linger not, stranger; shed no tear;Springing angrily from the Hot Gates, this was the poet's only written reaction to the Vietnam years.
Go back to those who sent us here.We are the young they drafted out
To wars their folly brought about.Go tell those old men, safe in bed,
We took their orders and are dead.
Still alive, but long silent, Hope has never been a political poet. Indeed, his 'Elegy for Pius the Twelfth', 'this great Pope', looks very naïve indeed in view of recent accounts of the Pope's ambiguous relations with Nazi Germany. What's more, it is a slack poem, linguistically dull and earnestly fluent.
A creative writer whose first book gets published when he has reached his late forties may be expected to lose electrical energy in subsequent decades. It seems to me that Alec Hope declined into benignity somewhere around 1970, both enjoying the 'discursive mode' which he had espoused earlier and learning to situate himself in named landscapes from eastern Australia. Over the same period his critical voice softened so far that one could scarcely recall the feral tone which had coloured his 1944 dismissal of Max Harris ('Confessions of a Zombie'). Ranging from genial to general, he came to have little in common with the younger man of whom Cecil Hadgraft had written, 'he says No to life, however enthusiastically he may utter that negative.'