So far, Carol Jenkins’s River Road Press has brought out nineteen CDs of contemporary Australian poets reading their work. Mostly, the list is made up of mid- and late-career poets, including Judith Beveridge, joanne burns, Vivian Smith and Geoff Page. It is a long overdue project, useful for teaching poetry, and useful for posterity. Hearing Kenneth Slessor read ‘Beach Burial’, as you can on www.lyrikline.org, saves the poem from the fake authority of the canon and returns it to poetry’s one true authority of a single voice.

Hearing a poem without seeing it before you, printed on a page, entirely changes your experience of it. Seeing a poem, you know where it will end. All the lines work in relation to this sense of its ending. Listening, you are always at once in the middle and at the edge of the poem – an experience vulnerable and improvisatory. For that reason, though these River Road Press recordings suit some styles of poetry better than others, they renew them all. More intimate than a poetry reading, where the ritual of theatre holds poet and audience in their separate roles, with these recordings you can have the poet speaking in your kitchen. If you use an iPod, you can have the poet speaking in your ear. You can take a walk with them.

Chris Wallace-Crabbe’s poetry makes an ideal companion. Alert, speculative, wide-ranging, his poems not only include several images and accounts of people walking; they also take as a principle the human necessity of heading out. Wallace-Crabbe doesn’t make self-enclosed artefacts of his poems. He keeps them moving from elegant phrases into an easy vernacular, from metaphysics into practicalities and back again. His poem ‘Stardust’ asks, ‘But how could the universe have meaning?’ Its answer ranges from, ‘would the stars be patterned differently’ to, ‘maybe we would no longer have to shit’.

This recording, titled The Domestic Sublime, presents an intelligent selection of Wallace-Crabbe’s poetry. The poems work well together and cover a range, from the recent love poem ‘Loving in Truth’ to his early, darkly funny poem, ‘The Amorous Cannibal’; from his beautifully paced elegy ‘Erstwhile’ to his description of ‘The Bush’: ‘it is all scraggy, wide awake, ironical … subtle for mile on mile.’ The recording takes its title from his playful and memorable sequence ‘The Domestic Sublime’, which includes the defining description of coathangers: ‘Clubbable and promiscuous …’

Kris Hemensley has published some twenty collections of poetry, now all out of print. Life in Theatre is his first new collection for many years. For these reasons, it is a coup for River Road Press. More, it is a wayward, assailable and intriguing collection. My Life in Theatre is the work of a solitary romantic; the spirit of John Shaw Neilson lives in these poems. With their use of repetition and variation, they work best when you hear them. In fact, they often turn on conversations, or something overheard, and use sound patterns as their organising principle. For instance, the poem, ‘As tho’ a grey bell’s blue ringing’, rings that title phrase repeatedly through the poem, at once describing an echo and making one.

Repetition very often breaks the forward sequence of these poems, which deal with time not as the medium of history, but as an inward patterning of sound and memory. The poems that stand out – ‘Tangley Lodge’, ‘Giving Directions to McDonalds’, ‘After Boy Dies’, ‘The Badger – along a line of Seamus Heaney’s’, ‘I Saw My Name’ – are at once impressionistic and complex, with a complexity held not in any single line or image, but in how the poem balances its account of a single event against the sense of repeating time that its sound patterns make.

Luke Davies’ Totem Poem is another work well suited to reading aloud, a long paean to sex, love, drugs and the new physics. The River Road Press recording includes a part of the whole poem. Ivor Indyk has described the shyness that characterises Australian writing, but Davies is an original: probably the only Australian poet to manage the rhapsodic, expansive style of Walt Whitman. Listening to Totem Poem, you hear how his repeating lines work a larger rhythm through the poem and complicate its meaning by testing its claims over and over again.

Fay Zwicky’s The Witnesses is the Press’s most recent issue. With twenty-nine poems covering five decades of work, The Witnesses works as a sort of Selected Poems. In an essay for Radio National’s Lingua Franca (9 September 2006), Zwicky said that she preferred poetry that was ‘honest, personal, direct and passionate’. If, in these River Road Recordings, Davies’ Totem Poem works like a song, Zwicky’s The Witnesses works like a conversation.

In fact, Zwicky’s great strength is her conversational ease. She uses dramatic monologues in some of her strongest poems: ‘Ark Voices: Mrs. Noah Speaks’, ‘The Gatekeeper’s Wife’ and her long sequence, ‘The Terracotta Army at Xi’an’. Many of her other poems advance like conversations that she is holding with herself, her tone characteristically stubborn, sceptical, self-deprecating and wry. ‘Picnic’, for instance, the title poem in her most recent collection, moves from her description of a picnic with refugees into recollections of her experience as a young mother in a foreign country. The whole poem depends on what she calls ‘the grace of candour’.

Longer poems and sequences suit Zwicky’s style best, giving her room to develop opposing points of view. It would have been good to include more than one poem from her sequence ‘The Terracotta Army at Xi’an’: a poem different in kind from her early, brilliant poem ‘Kaddish’; but equal to it. Still, at an hour and seventeen minutes, this is a generous selection of Zwicky’s work. 

Discs mentioned in this review:

Totem Poem (NO. 15)
by Luke Davies
$18 CD, 33 minutes, 9780980538656

The Domestic Sublime (no. 17)
by Chris Wallace-Crabbe
$18 CD, 33 minutes, 9780980538663

My Life in Theatre (no. 18)
by Kris Hemensley
$18 CD, 24 minutes, 9780980538670

The Witnesses (no. 19)
by Fay Zwicky
$18 CD, 77 minutes, 9780980538687