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What a delight it is to read a collection of contemporary poetry which is not only good but entertaining and capable of arousing emotions – and the delight is intensified because the experience is so rare. Most Australian poets that I have read recently seem to think that the exercise of writing, for example ‘happy days / lost in lust’ justifies them in putting ‘poet’ instead of ‘esq.’ after their names. Geoffrey Lehmann is not one of these. On the strength of his recent book, Nero’s Poems: Translations of the Public and Private Poems of the Emperor Nero, published by Angus and Robertson, it can be seen that Mr Lehmann justly deserves the title ‘poet’, even though, for the duration of the book, we are asked to suspend our belief and attribute the poems to the Emperor Nero himself.
- Book 1 Title: Nero’s Poems
- Book 1 Biblio: Angus & Robertson, $5.95 pb, 77 pp.
But I’ll find a new poetry of the refuse dumps and concrete channels mossed with sewage.
PROPAGATE THE SALVATION OF MY FRENZIES. BRANDISH STAFFS TIPPED WITH PINECONES, O MY MAENADS,
TEETH BLACKENED BY THE WINE-STAIN, PREACH MY MESSAGE
TO EGYPT, LIBYA AND REJOICING ASIA
EVEN TO THE RAGGED CHILDREN
PLAYING AMONG CINDERS, THE MESSAGE OF KING DIONYSIUS THE SECOND.
It’s all beginning to happen right here in this wine-bar.
The poems to wine and love figure among my favourites in this volume. The love and lust is mainly directed towards an ex-slave, Acte, and his Queen Poppaea, in poems which are exuberant, loving, lascivious and frequently ironic.
After I deflowered you, Octavilla
When I was away at night
in other beds, or on the streets, you slept with a pillow between your legs.
Octavilla, our good times are finished.
Please get yourself a pillow with balls.
This Nero is a contemporary man, in many ways, and so are the people of his poems. One gets the feeling that Lehmann is portraying or satirising many of his acquaintances by means of an old device of dressing them in historical guise. He expresses the decadence and beauty of both an ancient and a modern civilisation by this device, which is never heavy-handed and never pushes analogies too far.
While children fret and bang the table with a spoon,
and wives strain to hear footsteps and lonely migrants pace beneath our Roman moon
your concrete channel brings
coolness to sultry courtyards, flowers and bean leaves lift beneath a tilting bucket.
Our people comatose
on pallets take your gift
of water under pressure.
It matters little whether Lehmann’s portrait of Nero is correct or not. It disagrees with those presented by Tacitus and Suetonius but these were written a generation after Nero’s death, and who knows how much the later political climate may have affected these writings. We saw the same thing happening when the character of Richard III was blackened by Shakespeare for the sake of Tudor dynastical peace. The fascination of the book lies in the fact that it examines a man who could present such contradictory traits – a murderer, violent and lecherous but a lover of the arts and a man in whom lechery turned to love – one who, Lehmann tells us, repudiated the bloodshed of the arena and wished to replace it with Greek wrestling. Perhaps the message for our present day is that crimes of passion kill fewer people than wars, and that there are worse things than indulgence in love and fornication.
At night I wear your dresses in our bed
and howl. Each day
your perfume in the room is weaker. I’ll go to Greece, never come back.
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