Gwen Foster met Lieutenant Thomas Riddell in Brisbane in 1942, when she was twenty­-two. ‘Tony’ Riddell, stationed in Brisbane, was sent to Darwin early in 1943; and between January and September of that year, Gwen Foster wrote him the eighty-nine letters that make up this book. It’s the chronicle of a year, of a city, of a family, of a friendship, of a war no one could see an end to, and of that stage in the life of a gifted young woman at which she says, ‘At present I am unsettled and do not know which way my life will turn.’

The ‘blessed city’ of the title is partly Brisbane, partly Harwood’s family home, partly ironic and partly not, and mostly a way of talking about a particular state of being. At twenty-two, Harwood had already entered, and subsequently left, a convent; her spiritual awareness and philosophical sophistication shine briefly and occasionally through the pages of what otherwise looks like an excellent script for a comedy routine. Occasionally these two manifestations of her personality – the comic and the mystic – meet, as on the subject of convent food:

Our Miss Foster spent six (6) mths in a convent from August–January 1941–1942. We have every reason to believe that she related to you the incident of the Mouldy Pears … She also consumed obediently a Yellow Pudding (unnamed) which contained lumps of unknown substance THE SIZE OF A FULL-GROWN CANARY’S BODY, floating in stuff which she will not attempt to describe.

Harwood excelled then, as always, at mimicry. These letters are regularly ‘interrupted’ by anonymous voices in various modes, as well as by a number of named alter egos who are forerunners of the ‘pseudonyms under which she hoaxed a generation of editors in the sixties and seventies’, as editor Alison Hoddinott points out in her excellent introduction. One of these pseudonyms, ‘Timothy Klein’ (aka T.F. Kline, apparently), had its beginnings in the Tiny Tim of these letters, who pops up occasionally and parenthetically to remark, ‘Oh hell’.

The letters are also scattered with brilliant parodies, which further enhance the multitude-of-voices effect. Bureaucratese, publisher’s blurbs, ‘women’s magazines’, etiquette books, and the epistolary styles of bygone eras are all plundered and pilloried for Tony’s entertainment. When her mother accidentally leaves the table knives on the stove and their handles ‘catch on fire’, Gwen gleefully relates the incident and proposes an extra paragraph to be ‘inserted in the book of etiquette’:

It is not permissible to comment on the fact that the handles on the knives given to you are partly burnt away. Should any of the burnt portions come off in your hand, drop them quietly on the floor and they will be removed by the servants.

Harwood’s mother looms large in these letters. Her name is Agnes; early in the correspondence she becomes Agens by typographical accident, and subsequently remains so by daughterly design. Mother Agens is a model of the loving but uncomprehending parent, a pragmatically savage cutter-down of trees (‘I just sat down and cried’) whose reaction to her daughter’s wish to enter a convent is ‘Why aren’t you happy at home?’ She fears and mistrusts her daughter’s artistic vocation almost as much as her religious one:

Agens’ fear that ‘Gwen will write it down’ is as real to her as my fear that she will cut down trees I love is real to me. Agens has never been able to help me in the ways I most need help.

‘Father Foster’ and brother Joe, also known as Hippo, are represented in an altogether less troubled and more gently comic style.

During this period Harwood was working at the office of the War Damage Commission, though she seems to have spent most of her time teasing her infuriatingly stodgy workmates, scrambling the switchboard, and writing these letters. The Catch-22 atmosphere in which she ‘worked’ is apparent from the very first letter:

As I always add a few hundred onto any orders that come through my hands, enormous piles of stationery and Forms A, B, C and D are arriving day by day. They come in huge packages from the stores, labelled “NOT FRAGILE”.

Asked by her boss (for whom one begins to feel a certain sympathy) why she doesn’t ‘behave in a normal manner’, she replies: ‘Little Gwendoline was never quite like other girls.’

Volumes of writers’ letters usually have a pretty specialised audience, but this lovely book would give pleasure to almost anybody. Wartime letters are always moving and always highly charged, even if only with what is not said. Wartime letters to a serviceman from a witty, affectionate young musician and nascent poet with a sharp eye and a sharp tongue are, to Harwood’s generation and to later ones, an amazing gift.

The ranking of books at the head of reviews often irritates me. So here let’s have it easy: age before beauty! Geoffrey Lehmanns’s collection is written in a style meditative at times and ranging in subject matter only very slightly; it is most frequently an intelligent description of a family after marriage breakdown. He delineates the daily routines, the moments of clarity and the emotional isolation family separation can bring.

The first poem is rhythmic and a delight. We get his warmth and humour straight off and the deep sense of the duty of parents, more intensified when there is only one:

I have held what I hoped would become the best minds of a generation
over the gutter outside an Italian coffee shop watching the small
warm urine splatter on the asphalt …

As interviewer to the literary gentry in the Yacker series, Candida Baker could hardly be deemed a stranger to the agonies and ecstasies of the fiction writer’s craft. Her skill as interviewer and journalist has attracted attention and praise, and now everyone who’s been holding their breath to see how Candy Baker would manage her own first excursion into fiction can relax with a sigh of relief.

Women and Horses takes the classic theme of the eternal triangle, tells it two or three different ways as she bounces between Camelot and Paddington, chucks in the 1990s career woman’s dilemma (to be or not to be a mother), and pulls off a happy-ish ending with élan.

The subject matter can’t be called original: more stories have probably been told about adultery and its attendant foolishness than anything else over the millennia, and some readers will say that they’ve heard it all, or something very similar, a hundred times before. But as Helen Garner said when being interviewed by Candida Baker, ‘A writer should at the very least be granted her material, and her subject matter’.

And, of course, her protagonist. Deborah is English born and raised, eldest of the four daughters of a moody, faithless father and a mother so disappointed in life and love that serious alcoholism is her only solace.

Escaping to the other side of the world, to Sydney, Deborah finds herself at thirty-five a competent feature writer for a trendy magazine, married to a jealous playwright, stepmother to his normally rowdy kids, and embroiled in a year-old affair. Disconcerting circumstances force her to recognise that ‘she has never made a conscious decision in her life’. She would rather hide under her desk, or in a psychiatric hospital, but that won’t really do. Something has to give.

Interwoven is the tale of Gueneviere and Arthur and Lancelot, modernised via twists of character (‘Gwen’ has PMT and is happiest designing improved medieval weapons; Morgan le Fay signs letters to her royal brother ‘yours etcetera’). This is lots of fun and casts a clever glow on the twentieth-century characters, but I felt in the end that reducing these mythic giants to human size is a bit of a cheat. We lose the sombre thrilling lesson that even the best of us, those who mightily aspire, are frail, and fail, and suffer. Suffer eternally, I’m afraid; a thought that doesn’t sit easily in the minds of we who are white and thirty-five in Australia in 1990, beset with luxury and an excess of choices.

But I call a novel good which entertains as it calls serious questions to debate. From its effervescent cover to its thoughtful afterword, Women and Horses entertains and questions. Candida Baker has won her novelist’s spurs.

Set mostly in north-western Nepal during the early 1970s, Blood on the Lotus is a fictionalised account of the events leading up and consequent to the CIA’s withdrawal of support for the Kamphas, the Tibetan guerrilla army fighting the occupying Chinese.

The story revolves around three characters: Harry Roberts, a climber whose best friend has been killed on their latest (and illegal) climb, Kay Randall, an idealistic CIA agent who identifies more strongly with the Tibetan cause than with US interests, and Lama Gyaltzen, a Tibetan monk who has been acting for many years as a mediator between the Dalai Lama, the Khampas and the CIA.

Comedy and violence co-exist happily in this delightful first novel about a group of weekend bird watchers who themselves become the objects of scrutiny.

Written in the form of bird Watchers’ journals, the characters are introduced individually, their distinctive features listed as if they too are birds. Their colourful plumage, raucous behaviour, underlying tendencies towards violence, their abnormalities, eccentricities and even their mating habits are all recorded.

One afternoon at the recent Melbourne Writers’ Festival I noticed that, while adulatory throngs surrounded Elizabeth Jolley and Thea Astley, another notable member of our literary matriarchy, Gwen Harwood, sat quietly outside in the sun, deep in philosophical discussion with a younger poet. This is a comment on the differential status accorded to fiction writers and poets, but also on the relatively self-effacing Gwen and her presence or place in the literary world.

As the somewhat infelicitous comments on the cover of her book Bone Scan put it, ‘Perhaps all too unobtrusively, a high reputation has grown around the name of Gwen Harwood.’ She has in fact been publishing poetry for at least thirty years. Her first book, modestly titled Poems, appeared in 1963, and was followed, at fairly lengthy intervals, by Poems Vol. Two (1968), Selected Poems (1975), The Lion’s Bride (1981), and Bone Scan (1988). She has been acclaimed, anthologised, awarded honours, but still remains overshadowed by her male contemporaries.

Both the poetry and prose are different from what has gone before. Les Murray tells us what he thinks the difference is in his cover note:

Rhyme is used far more often than in the past … The poet also sets out to recover, or learn, the arts of brevity. In his fight against prolixity, in fact, he has even dropped his middle initial.

The reasons for rhyme, and the rhyme of his reasons, can be found in the prose work in the pieces ‘Poems and Poesies’ and ‘Poemes and the Mystery of the Embodiment’, the general underpinnings of which are outlined in ‘Embodiment and Incarnation’. He argues that art is a product of a trinity: the forebrain (the seat of waking reason), the limbic reptilian brain (the dream) and the body (the dance of ecstasy). God can reach us through all three, and poetry is a uniquely placed art which exploits all of these areas. Any deep integration of the three is a poem. Hence a theology (Christianity), an ideology (Marxism), or a breath-taking design (Porsche cars) can be a poem. Using the analogy from phoneme, Murray calls this large unit a ‘poeme’. ‘Poem’ he reserves for its traditional meaning, arguing that a poem is the most perfect and integrated art-form there is.

Rhyme is poetry’s dance, hence its importance. In an article on the two editions of Anthony Conran’s Penguin Book of Welsh Verse (1967, 1986), Murray clearly indicates his very early and continuing debt to Hopkins (who was himself influenced by Welsh poetic forms). He indicates also his more recent interest in using the musical resources of that language’s poetry. I suspect that the more recent the poem, the more aural decoration it has. Sometimes it is there for comic effect, as in ‘On Removing Spiderweb’ which is, perhaps, a children’s poem (the dustcover promises some):

Like summer silk its denier,
but stickily, o ickilier,
miffed bunny-blinder, silver tar, gesticuli-gesticular,
crepe when cobbed, crap when
rubbed,
stretchily adhere-and-there
and everyway, nap-snarled or sleek, glibly hubbed with grots to tweak; ehh weakly bobbined tae yer neb, spit it Phuoc Tuy! filthy web!

But most often the effect, though playful, is a decoration which lives inside the poem, not outside:

The fiddle stitching through this
quilt lifts up in singing flights, the other’s mourning, meaning tune
goes arching up and down
as life undulates like a heavy snake
through the rocked accordion.

That poem, ‘Accordion Music’, is fit to read after ‘Bagpipe Music’ at a real poetry reading. Even when the subject is the serious one of floods, the aural patterning doesn’t overwhelm or trivialise the subject:

Over the terra cotta
speeds a mirrored sun
on bare and bush-mossed water
as a helicopter’s stutter
signals a stock-feed run,
and cubic fodder-bombs splash open on sodden islands.
In their yolk of orange squash, tugging out each mud galosh, sheep climb those twenty-inch highlands

Here there is an equal balance between the verbal decoration and Murray’s great gift, his acute visual awareness which presents us with metaphors which rearrange the world. Without that balance, these new poems would tip precariously toward the raptures of sound (or dance) for its own sake. On occasions that happens. The collection ends with a celebration of the dance of humanity and a river in an epithalamium. There is a marriage, certainly, and a comprehensive vision of the cosmic dance, but the language strains to embody it. ‘Love never gave up the rhyme’, we are told, but the rococo couplets which follow aren’t as rooted in the visual and don’t have that clarity which is the mark of Murray’s poetry. Perhaps I’m not yet used to their strangeness:

I am listening now to women who
from brew and bouillon of old
caste
hoist up on soda-gnawed dowels the
huge coiled cloths of the past
crying Who didn’t know the cobbles
might glimmer out at nothingness?
Of you, the best knew that gravity
from underneath isn’t levity
but when you were called from broad
pleasing and required to impress
you sacrificed rhyme, the lovelier
proof that impoverished less,
that added, and skip-turned, and
added, on over the abyss.

Other poems are rooted in the visual. The bravura description of ‘Araucaria Bidwilli’ ends with the poet’s recognition that:

These are the trees that teach me again
every tradition is a choke on metaphor
yet the limits to likeness don’t imprison its ends.

Tradition, the forebrain and reason, might choke the dreaming metaphor, but the vegetative life of the body and dance can release that blockage. The tree has its ends ‘climbing above gullies, through mote-drift on the mountain’, and so has the poet in making the poem.

In both these books you can see Murray drawing in the threads of the past few years, consolidating and expounding an idiosyncratic apologia for poetry and this poet’s life and lifestyle. The inventiveness and the certainty, despite an acknowledged recent nervous breakdown in the Preface to the prose, moved this reader. The last time I reviewed one of his collections I compared him to a tourist-bus driver; now he seems more like one of the guides at the Jenolan Caves, conducting us around the chthonic mysteries and renaming all the well-known formations and making them new again. Despite the wish for brevity, sprawl is still with us, not in the individual poems so much as in the collection as a whole, which has a go at the domestic, the national, the religious, the well-told story, the historical and, as he is keen to point out on the cover, a poem in blues form.

The collection of prose overall seems to me more considered and less cranky than some of the offerings in the past. There is also in the final piece, ‘In a Working Forest’, marvellous evidence of the poet’s ability to write simple, hair-raising prose. Even those who pick up Blocks and Tackles thinking it is about Rugby league rather than polemic will not be disappointed. There are ideas here for everyone. And besides, it was the sports master, among others, who turned the young Les on to poetry at Taree High School (‘From Bulby Brush to Figure City’).

This is a distinctive and unsettling voice, one that doesn’t have time for overly polite concessions to our finer feelings. You either keep pace (and it’s compelling) or stand aside as the spadework gets done. Reading this poetry, we are involved in an unearthing of past events and made witness to the laying bare of personal response. But there’s nothing self-indulgent or hollow about Gig Ryan’s disinterment. The poetry has a sometimes shocking immediacy, a curious mixture of fierceness and vulnerability that conveys feeling with integrity.

One of the challenges confronting the writer of poetry is the balancing of public and private modes in an engaging and satisfactory whole. In these three collections the precarious possibilities of balance, of confiding and confronting, are attempted in very different ways.

In The Earthquake Lands Hal Colebatch presents tightly structured poems reflecting a carefully elaborated world view. Here is a writer both sure of his powers and unwilling to take risks with the intensities that go beyond control. Shifting between archetypal English landscapes and the more familiar territory of Western Australia, Colebatch’s passionately nostalgia plays on the confrontation between the human and Nature, as expressed in the opening poem, ‘Selsey Pub’:

And this place I have never seen before
is strangely right, strangely home dear.
The door-nails gleam polished by centuries.
These are the things we need: deep comfort
and The Wild, so close together here.

Judith Rodriguez deserves a guernsey for this book. It’s one of the best collections to appear in a long while. I think it’s more interesting than its companions in the UQP Selected/Collected series which is now three-all with Shapcott, Taylor and Rodriguez standing as our Living Treasures, and Dransfield, Buckmaster and Rankin among those freed from earthly care. Two chaps and one lady in each category, one observes. There must be logic in it? Poets don’t actually have to die before they get notices. But in the case of Buckmaster and Rankin it will push the reputation up a few notches. I know that’s callous, but you want the truth, don’t you?