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- Article Title: Stand and Chatter
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We have to thank Julian Croft for this selection of Slessor’s light verse first published in Smith's Weekly between February 1928 and November 1933. Here is a worthy successor to Slessor’s Darlinghurst Nights, until now the only selection of frivolous Slessor available to the general reader. The verses here are no less charming than those of the earlier selection and their omission from Darlinghurst Nights, first published in 1933, seems merely to be based on the fact that they do not fit easily into the theme of that volume. They are certainly no less delightfully capricious in their rhyme schemes and no less artfully artless.
- Book 1 Title: Backless Betty from Bondi
- Book 1 Biblio: A & R, $9.95, 35pp
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The verses range widely in their subject matter from the returned digger who dreams of girls he has left behind in far-away places but now has ‘a life of brick bungs and De Sotos and pansies’ to a celebration of girls who learn to fly the new-fangled aeroplanes. Some of the poems are both jokey and elegaic like ‘Moving Day', a song for fly-by-nights who stealthily move at midnight because they cannot meet the rent.
‘Poor Little Rich Girl’ is a sardonic monologue addressed to a girl from Woolloomooloo who married for money:
Your fingers are hard with diamonds.
They gleam on a crystal cup:
Their wealth you'd scatter to stand and chatter
Back there – washing up.
Here, as in the other verses, Slessor deftly creates a character or situation and views it with a mixture of sentiment and sympathy which, while it had obvious appeal for a popular audience and, perhaps, dealt with the more obvious truths about circumstance, yet invites the admiration of a more sophisticated reader on several grounds. The most obvious is the pleasure of observing a poet literally playing with his tools of trade, his assured lightness of touch, his crafty avoidance of excessive whimsy or sarcasm, his balanced management of mood and metre.
The verses most often deal with loneliness, the romantic imaginings of shops girls and country girls, and girls, girls, girls. They all have charm, even the pretentious ‘Little Theatre girl’ –
The works of D.H. Lawrence
She talks about all night –
In private with abhorrence.
In public with delight.
What if she thinks that Strindberg
Is just a kind of cheese,
Or mixes him with Lindbergh –
Who cares for things like these?
Like Darlinghurst Nights all the verses here have been charmingly illustrated, this time by Joan Morrison and Frank Demme as well as Virgil Reilly. The illustrations belong to the 1930s, the era in which the verses were written, but the verses themselves, though not without a strong nostalgic element for the modern reader, are surprisingly pertinent to the present day.
I wonder if Julian Croft is going to unearth any more of Slessor’s minor treasures for us?
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