I make these allusions for a reason, for, apart from reading the National Farmer for news of the Coonabarrabran staggers, barber’s pole warm, and the prospects of rape seed, Michael Sharkey kept his Ovid, his Horace, his Chinese poets, and other poets more numerous than woolmark ties on show week, close at hand during his time in the country. And that is what I find as his major achievement – a wonderful sense of living in the moment and living within the continuum of the great traditions of poetry, all gathered together at the one time.

He has a well-developed capacity for visual description. The interiors of his rooms and houses are lovingly created, as are the gardens and the walks which are an organic part of where he lives. I sense all the time a striving for an ideal city – a state of mind and being where the organic and natural patterns of life fit in with books, music, pubs, friends, and where the economic problem (unlike the sex problem which is treated as good fun in this collection) has been solved for ever. The enemy of the ideal city is property and its corollary, rent.

I spend my time in rented rooms,
in rented beds and tubs;
in rented kitchens, parlours,
rented chair.
I wait for you in rented halls,
by rented porches, rented walls,
by rented backyard garden stairs;
and in this rented world we spend
our rented time and rented love:
I celebrate in rented lines,
as if the rented words were mine.

In those poems where the real city figures, you can sense the ideal even there. Greenwood’s book store in Sydney, though it has been knocked down, can still conjure up the feeling of autumnal forests in the midst of the ringbarked development of Elizabeth street. You notice, however, that the ideal city is preserved in books and poetry, not in masonry and asphalt.

The sign is gone, the shop is shut,
the city once again has cut
itself adrift from what it was;
the leaves still fall inside the pond,
the traffic pauses, moves along,
and wind lifts scraps and dust beyond
the pavements where the scaffolds hide
the shop where leaves once glowed inside.

The style of the poem is typical of the poet. A jokey but elegiac regularity, which evokes the proper sadness and despair. Sharkey can write fluent and easy lyrics, but the style we hear here is his individual voice. It is like the trotting dromedary that Coleridge heard in Donne; it’s an essential party of the poetry, and a very effective part. It’s a kind of comic sadness in which the usual cues for light verse (heavy accent, chiming rhymes) are undermined and given a sombre tone by the use of enjambment and unusual caesurae.

I wouldn’t want to give the impression that the collection is a double album of the Bucolics and Georgics for the first section is called ‘The Sex Problem’ which ranges from ‘The Hots’:

Leaving all his wisdom standing
at the bedroom door,
he leaped upon the moment
like a plague upon the poor

to the lunar cold of a 1875 Ars Amoris, ‘Trenchant after Rhodope’:

Life is brief: Corinna, open up,
before the wrinkles
creep across us both and leave us
like the tombstones
by the roadside: mouth to mouth
and breast to breast
let’s hold each other tight
with nothing else to come
between us. For the rest, the moon
can look on, scandalised.

Section Two, ‘Stranger in the Fire’, has some evocative poems about New Zealand and Fiji, and nine epigrams in which Martial and Byron are invoked to give the right level to move the times:

Martial wrote about his lord,
Domitian, whom the world abhorred;
Martial lives, in what he said,
while the emperor is dead:
time took him, the great eraser,
but it left me Malcolm Fraser.

And the collection ends with ‘The Boys Who Stole the Possum’, which is about poetry, poets, readings, evil, and the western Sydney suburb of Merrylands. Like the rest of the volume they show his energy, the restless experimentation with form (and this is real experiment for he takes the great traditions and makes them live again), and the engaging combination of seriousness and comic anarchy.

tears are what bodies dispense with
when life is a joke

It’s one of the few books of poetry I’ve read recently that you could give to any of your friends and know that they would enjoy it. There aren’t many poets writing in Australia today with such a deep sense of literary tradition, but still capable of writing for a wide audience, and that is borne out of his Acknowledgements – he must be one of the very few who have published in the Australian Women’s Weekly.