The Hooded Lamp (1976, Picaro Press, $15 pb, 56 pp, 9781921691027) was the final volume of poetry published by Roland Robinson (1912–92), whose career started with the Jindyworobaks in the 1940s. His poetry was highly lyrical, as one would expect from a man very conscious of his Irish origins, and full of drama and mysticism, but also firmly rooted in the physical world. His bardic view of the poet didn’t sit easily with the younger poets of the late 1960s, and their styles didn’t suit him either. The Hooded Lamp starts with a direct response to this collision of styles. In ‘The Young Men’, Robinson acknowledges the energy of the young and their attempt to advance the workers’ struggle to which he too had dedicated his youth:

Their verse in
the Mayakovsky
stepped line’s
a lash across
the face with
knotted cords.
Their image is
Che Guevara:
Work is poetry
that serves mankind:
‘to cut cane with
love and grace.’
Encrusted usurers,
your wars to
discipline the masses,
to divide and rule,
the young men
will bury you.

That was Robinson’s polemic in the new style, but when he wanted to write with ‘love and grace’ in his own voice, the whole force of traditional English lyric prosody was available. To hear him read aloud (his word was ‘say’ his own poems) was to witness the bard at work bringing out the metaphysical and physical patterns of the natural world, especially the landscape of the Northern Territory, which he had loved from his youth. ‘The Daly River’ does just that.

Bamboo, pandanus, paper-bark jade,
the river flowed from a red gold
mountain.
Finches in leaf tresses made
songs in jet, spring, and fountain.
Over the river, the jabiru wheeled
when the brumby led down his fillies
who plunged, savaged, and squealed
in shallows among the purple lilies.
Huge, through the leaf fringed hush,
the full moon rose – a sounding brass –
as the pied geese honked, with rush-
shush-shushing flight, to pass
over my camp, the pale sand bars,
the river filled with trembling stars.

At Valentines, (Picaro Press, $15 pb, 84 pp, 9781921691003) Ken Taylor’s collection of poems written in the late 1960s but not published until 1975, was contemporaneous with some of Robinson’s poems, but the stylistic differences were epochal. Taylor (1930–) spent 1966 at Cornell and then became an important force along with Kris Hemensley in the La Mama scene in 1968–69. As such, he must have been a major influence in introducing the new directions in American poetics of the 1960s. Line divisions are not based on breath, syntax or the rhythm of performance. In fact, to translate them from the page into the air means one has to ignore the line breaks. But that is not strictly true, as their vestigial influence is still apparent in the shaping of the thought. Perhaps that is what the poetry is all about: the performance of thought. The tug and push of the lines mimics the jumps of consciousness as it processes the idea in hand. Take the poem ‘A Single Sheet of White Paper’:

In
a papery fall a
single sheet of
white paper can
card skeins of
air with arms.

In the
hand paper
draws blank
algebra with
rhetoric and
equations of lost
windy days.

When it is read aloud, note the way the natural syntactic organisation ignores the line breaks and in fact forces breaks in the lines as they exist. The poem performs the ideas of the poem: that writing, marks on paper, can catch the air, can make solid something insubstantial. If the term ‘conceptual poetry’ wasn’t being used these daysto characterise yet another tired attempt at the avant-garde (see the work of Kenneth Goldsmith), it would be the most fitting description of Taylor’s poems of the late 1960s. There are some wonderful moments in this collection. Thankfully, Picaro Press has let them live again outside a library.

What a great title is Fresh Linen (1988, Picaro Press, $15 pb, 76 pp, 9781921691010), the third poetry collection from Gary Catalano (1947–2002). It is not the title of one of the poems in the volume, but of the whole volume. So you open the book, luxuriate in the clean lines of thought and the well-made beds of short prose poems. If poetry is condensed thought, then there is no problem characterising these pieces as poetry; and if prose is writing justified to two margins, ditto. All of the works in this collection from 1980 to 1986 are in this form: minute essays written not in the discursive logic of prose, but with the metaphorical leaps of poetry, bare statement that suddenly radiates out into expanding circles of meaning as in ‘A Wooden Afternoon’:

You sit at your desk with your pencil. The white page is unmarked, Your
hand hovers over it, waiting to pin all life to one completed shape.

Outside a car races its shadow down
the street. And then a lawn mower begins to saw the afternoon into long, evenly-dressed slabs.

As you would expect from someone who wrote at length about art, there is a strong visual sense and an organising voice that brings those visual elements into an expressionistic, even surreal, relationship.

‘Illumination’

It was late at night. I stood at the top of our back steps and gazed at the stars in the valley below, each one of which represented a greeting I have not returned and a hand I have not shaken. And there, in the left-hand sector of the horizon, a familiar poplar tree was lifting its darkened finger to the sky, and by that gesture calling my attention to the full moon, a moon which floated about in the sky like a slice of lemon in a cup of fresh tea.

The easy freedom of these poems(why not dispense with the prose descriptor?) with their cognitive energy, calm presence, and strong sense of an individual mind, are a hallmark of Catalano’s poetry and of the strengths of poetry of that period.

Picaro Press has embarked on a program of reprinting significant volumes of poetry from the past using the efficiencies of print-on-demand technology. They are aiming to have two hundred titles available through their online store (visit www.picaropress.com). It is an admirable project. Unfortunately, there are too many typographical errors in the books under review, especially the Robinson (obviously a product of having to re-set each book for print-on-demand). I would suggest that future titles be more rigorously proofed.