poetry


LIGHT AND SHADE

Jennifer Strauss

Margaret Scott
Collected Poems
Montpelier Press $25.00pb, 174pp
1 876597 03 8

IT'S GOOD TO SEE Margaret Scott's fine poetry so elegantly presented. And it's poetry that works extremely well as a collection, since the poems -- however admirable they have seemed in isolation in journals or anthologies -- take on a deeper resonance and force as a group, partly through their thematic connections, but even more through the play of light and shade that constantly informs their sensibility.
     So it is in 'Fig'

that Adam
sees loss is the shadow cast by an act of love.
On the tree of the knowledge of good and evil grow
fruit that ripen as summer comes to an end,
instants of sweetness defined by a net of darkness.
     'Fig' is dedicated to Gwen Harwood, and, indeed, in reading these poems, I was irresistibly reminded of one particular poem by Scott's fellow immigrant to Tasmania. There are, of course, several tempting analogies to be drawn between Harwood and Scott. For each, Tasmania was initially experienced as a 'texture of strangeness': but where Brisbane-reared Harwood flinched from the cold, English-born Scott 'hated this strange island' for its heat ('Migrants'). There is more poignancy and complexity, however, in her 'In Tasmania', where the human desire to construct familiarity and continuity is briefly nourished, then thwarted.
Here at the earth's end
a sudden sweep of woodland to the sea
flings on the heart some surging memory
of Dorset or of Devonshire. But here,
above the trees' familiar mass, one spare
exotic scarecrow gum clutches the sky,
strange as the cold face of a passer-by
turned at being mistaken for a friend.
     For Scott, as for Harwood, Tasmania did become a friend, even if it took time to come to the exuberant celebrations of 'Feast' or 'Spring Song: Hobart 1980'. Yet for each, their place of origin remained a potent imaginative force -- one better perhaps not revisited in the body. The ending of Scott's 'Return to Tockington' cuts deeper than Harwood's elegiac recognition that 'You cannot come as a child to your father's house' ('Return of the Native'), because Scott's acknowledgment that 'Everything I love's/Down Under now' is modulated by the realisation that this return has stripped away one of the sustaining fantasies of her détente with Tasmania, so that she must go back to a Hobart that is also changed, 'shorn of its rustling vision of going home.'
     The childhood memories that are so significant in the work of both poets are again very different. In the golden world of Harwood's childhood, intimations of evil and violence come subtly through childish misdemeanours, while parents are a source of wisdom and comfort, not caught 'between sniggering and horror' as they take away an unacceptably randy dog to be put down ('Prince'). Above all, war is merely a rumour in Harwood's childhood world, not the brute fact of Scott's English childhood. A poem like 'Bristol 1942' perhaps shows us the roots of Scott's preoccupation with moments when the 'ordinary' collides with the miraculous or the monstrous. 'The days were tame', full of mundane actions: the nights of air raids were spent 'huddled at the foot of a beanstalk of black air/growing up between our little hoarding lives/and the huge wild profligacy of strangers.'
     The most heart-rending instance of human bafflement in the face of such moments occurs at the beginning of 'Elegies':
At ten to twelve by the grandfather clock
in the hall you stopped breathing in your sleep.
I put down the telephone and came back
to the study door -- as I'd come for years
with questions, news and jokes --
meaning, I think, to tell you you were dead,
     It is a moment of total lucidity, yet fraught with the mystery of loss, as other, tonally very different, poems are fraught with the mystery of 'the golden light/of the present moment' shed on the most ordinary of household tasks, as in 'Mending a Dress'.
     It is in fact that special (and blessed) quality of lucidity, along with the impressively unobtrusive authority with which Scott can shape a poem, that made me think of Harwood's 'Giorgio Morandi'. There the artist's capacity to 'stare the ambiguous scale of light apart/to tone-by-tone' is what enables him to work '[i]n quietness/transfiguring with gentle art/his earthen jugs.' It is not that either Scott's subject matter or her perception of the world is particularly 'gentle': passion, joy, absurdity, disappointment, earth's storms, the body's blood -- all are there. Her art, however, is, I think, 'gentle' in that it looks on its material with a clarity that is never clouded by glib, easy judgments, and that its shaping of that material depends so little on posturing or pyrotechnics. Yet how the poems command attention -- it was hard to put this beautiful book down.

Complete:

Jennifer Strauss is a poet, a critic and currently an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at Monash University. Her most recent publications are.Tierra del Fuego: New and Selected Poems, the edited anthology Family Ties and the co-edited The Oxford Literary History of Australia

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