But it was his fourth collection, Letters to Live Poets (1969), that really put Bruce Beaver in the big picture, as it were. Nothing like this had been written in Australia before. Beaver was not a naturally lyrical poet; he had inherited something of the loping awkwardness of Christopher Brennan and R.D. FitzGerald. Letters to Live Poets displayed how he had honed his long-limbed verse cadence to a personal style and a universal application. These Letters are very much that – epistles to writers dead or not dead – and it was in this mode of address that Beaver became a master of invention and a self-confident conversationalist in a heightened, but natural, word-world.

His next volume, Lauds & Plaints (1974), developed the rhetoric, but the gathering intensity was even more powerful. The shadow of Rilke became more apparent, though Beaver in doing this was refining his own voice and his language. From this point on, all his collections fell into place, though often with elements of surprise, as in the autobiographical recollection of a rural childhood, As It Was (1979), or the prose sketches in Headlands (1986).

At the time of his death, Beaver had just sent a new manuscript of poems to his publisher, UQP. His last decade or so had been a continuing battle with kidney failure and illness, but during that decade Beaver published several collections, as well as a New and Selected Poems 1960–1990 in 1991, in the notorious Angus & Robertson series, which fell apart in the reader’s hands, due to poor glue and binding. Although, during his Manly years, he constantly battled with a bipolar condition, Beaver was a generous and charming host, and the Manly flat which he shared with his wife, Brenda, became a meeting place for younger poets and writers.

Beaver was one of the original committee members of Poetry Australia, the important journal begun by Grace Perry in 1964, and which, for more than a decade and a half, led the way in adventurous poetry publishing in this country. It produced French, Dutch, German, Swedish and Irish issues, and regularly featured overseas writers of high calibre. It was through Perry’s international network of connections that Beaver was first able to expand his range of reading so remarkably. As the 1960s developed, this openness to what was new and possible in poetry was one of the factors that made the Beaver household such a stimulating and welcoming place for younger writers.

In his later years, because of medication and failing health, Beaver withdrew from that more public role, but the number of poets initially encouraged and nurtured under his wing, as it were, was wide and varied.

Beaver received most of the major Australian literary awards: the Patrick White Prize, the Grace Leven Prize and others. Because he was on an invalid pension for most of his writing years, he never applied to the Literature Board for a grant. His second novel, You Can’t Come Back, was published in 1966, and was reprinted a couple of decades later. But it is as a poet, a poet’s poet, that Bruce Beaver will be remembered.

October 1999

 Got my gal, got my Lord, got my song

Gershwin, Gershwin, Heyward

It’s come! Spring’s second month with
hot and cold days and the last
October in two thousand years.
This time the fin de siecle’s
crazier than even the frogs
could imagine, even though they
invented nutty ends of centuries.
This time more bombs, earthquakes,
floods, droughts, gun-murders as well as
more pink and white blossoms
in the perfectly sane streets, full
of not-so-sane human beings.
But most of them are in love, including
me because we’re still alive
enough and the weather’s warming up.
It’s like the Old Testament: great poetry,
lousy theology and a God –
damned God – Still there’s the Lord
to come in the New Millennium and this new
Spring. Blossoms and bombs. Every
Spring’s mad with love and wars,
babies and murderers. And if you think I’m
not going to keep on chanting about
it, you’re nuttier than the century’s end.

Bruce Beaver