6 am in the Universe comes with a DVD of Frater reading at Mad Pride, Campbelltown, in 2006: a spot-lit stage, a mighty performance, an audience going wild for – not the rock star – but The Poet! Frater declaims ‘The Argument’ with mystic fervour, an incitement against the tyrannies of privilege, pretention, and injustice:

My forearm is our unclear nuclear
future,
My forearm bleeds its own delight
My forearm refuses to bomb its enemies
and dives into the rubble
My forearm is a solar backlash
My forearm invites refugees, provides
none but exists in asylum

We are fortunate to have this footage. Frater died a year later, aged twenty-eight, as the result of an accident with medication used to treat his schizophrenia. It would be unfair to categorise Frater in terms of his illness, for he is not a confessional poet, nor a mawkish exhibitionist; he combines exterior reality and interior truths with an expansive intelligence and a sharp wit. To the descriptors ‘hallucinatory’ and ‘visionary’, commonly applied to his poetry, I would add the Spanish duende, indicating the kind of authenticity that comes from baring the soul in honest expressions of joy and sorrow, tempered by an acute awareness of mortality.

In ‘MAW RAW MIND: Bughouse Notations’ Frater provides his own analysis: ‘I am the pilgrim of parasites / at the mercy / of / questionable / pharmacy, / pedalling passion / and / parabolic / parables, / proverbs / and / poetics.’ In ‘The Repossession of Sacrarium’, the author shouts, ‘WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO!!!’ and has already answered, ‘I will save the world with poetry.’

Frater’s later works, and certainly the labyrinthine epic ‘Ourizen’, are texturally complex, with alliterations and repetitions, and dense with arcane and erudite allusions. He has distilled a rare apocalyptic, yet redemptive, lyricism from his literary heroes – Blake, Baudelaire, Ginsberg – and mentors – Wearne, John A. Scott, John Hawke – and fulfils García Lorca’s claims for duende: ‘a radical change to all the old kinds of form, rings totally unknown and fresh sensations, with the qualities of a newly created rose, miraculous, generating an almost religious enthusiasm.’

Spence’s Perrier Fever is replete with characters and clues that attest to his influences and interests: Frank O’Hara, the Surrealists, the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E School, music, art, poets and poetry, friends and family. His verse is an ongoing conversation with, and observation of, life and the world of the mind, as Kris Hemensley, to whom Spence’s afterword is dedicated, might say. I can imagine Spence’s plethora of references, allusions, puns, substitutions, and odd conjunctions causing apoplexy, were his poems not so self-deprecating, pithy, perceptive, and frequently hilarious. ‘Shop’ makes me laugh out loud – ‘i thought the shop / was called SLIDE / until i walked into the door!’

There is no indication of chronology in Perrier Fever, so I may be wrong in deducing that in his later work the obfuscations of surrealism are leavened by a poignant nostalgia, such as we encounter in ‘Ocean Grove Suite’, a paean of sorts to summer holidays: ‘BLAH! / i get / a job / and / the sun / comes out!’

Of these latter extended works the ‘Orange Sonnets’, which come with an informative annotation by the poet, are a favourite, spelling out the evolution of Spence’s thought, O-R-A-N-G-E, from Steven Fry’s challenge that ‘nothing rhymes with orange’ to ‘why don’t you stop look around revenge / is nothing if nothing rhymes with orange’.

I close with the final lines from ‘Sonnet 10’, a typically Spence-ian note, which applies to both his and Frater’s poetry, and which stands as my promise to the reader:

the sonnet is not tod nor is les mystères
de New York! today’s a mystery! is one
less one to oneself? a mullet stunned
by it’s own flight! je me suis bien amuse!
je me suis bien amuse!
(i have really enjoyed myself)

CONTENTS: NOVEMBER 2011