poetry

POSTHUMOUS POWER

Chris Wallace-Crabbe

Philip Hodgins
New Selected Poems
Duffy & Snellgrove, $21.95pb, 258pp
1 875989 75 7

THE INTERSECTION OF SELF and art escapes easy definition. The self gets in our way when we try to read its textual traces. Personality builds or destroys reputation: it is easy to think of Australian writers who were perceived to be difficult customers and so were left grazing on the lower slopes of Olympus, consigned to scrannel paddocks and a small press.
      But in the opposite case, too, the self can loom very large in front of the books. And the case of the late Philip Hodgins sets this out more vividly than any other I can think of in this country. A fine man, doomed, surviving, heroically creative: what more can a critic say about the Authorial Subject in this case? And what a disaster it would be if the verse was bad, or even mediocre, when our sorrow over his early death had died down.
      The news is good. Hodgin's New Selected Poems reads very well indeed: attractive, consistent, strong. Here is pastoral poetry which captures real pastures, feeling plain and true. Neither a dazzling prestidigitator like Les Murray nor a squattocratic gent like several older poets, Hodgins found ways to register ordinary farming, common equipment and daily work. In such Frostish poems as 'After the Shearing'. 'The Meaning', 'The Past', and that wonderfully mimetic exercise about exercise,'Getting Through a Strained Fence', he absorbs the ordinary day and its direct, wordless commands. Then again, 'Superphosphate' is just wonderful about farm machinery.
      New Selected Poems is a handsomely chunky paperback, mysteriously selected from Hodgins' five volumes of poetry. (It seemingly echoes a 1997 title from Angus & Robertson.) No editor is named here, though I'd like to think it was the poet's widow, Janet Shaw. But there I am again, personalising my reading of this clean, free-standing book.
      But who could avoid such pollution of objectivity, given that this collection is framed, at opening and near-closure, by powerful lyrics that deal with Hodgins' leukaemia? What Robert Gray, in an appended poem of tribute, called 'Your three-year fight' throws its shadow across these dusty, sunlit pastorals. Of course, death is the mother of beauty, or perhaps the stern parent of all significance in our lives. Hodgins was not only cornered by his own sickness but, as a working farmer, knew the deaths of less reflective animals close at hand: cows, dogs, pigs, ducks and even a tortoise.
      Formally, the poetry here falls into a couple of modes. Some, frequently sonnets, are heavily iambic, with the most regular tread of any modern poet. Perhaps this is a weakness, but in 'The Shoot' and 'The Birds' he just about gets away with it, while it lends punch to the political vilanelle which begins:

It doesn't matter what the critics say.
As long as market forces still exist
The country boys are guaranteed to pay.

Your comments are invited: email them in a letter toAustralian Book Review
Return to Australian Book Review /November 2000