The Bluegum Smokes a Long Cigar by John Anderson

Rigmarole of the Hours, $2.50 pb

At the other end of the scale John Anderson’s The Blue Gum Smokes a Long Cigar  speaks to those who want to read between the lines in another fashion, those who share the writer’s sense of a world in which one is sociable with trees and clouds, sees all things living, in fact, in the ‘light generated by dreams’. At the same time, a refreshing note of self-irony sometimes manifests itself, rescuing the poems from the sentimentality - working off in words, that is, of feelings that plants and animals can hardly be expected to have. Yet maybe this self-irony tends to destroy the whole project

To be housed in a nice new book

Printed by the Lansdowne Press

With glossy white margins and heavy black type

Is the salvation of nature lovers all over Australia.

If life is short while art is long, John Anderson seems to be directing our attention to life.

V Hunter Valley Poets edited by Norman Talbot

University of Newcastle, $2.50 pb, 57 pp

The Hunter River poets also point beyond themselves, but for my money, less agreeably. No major poet and with no pretensions to be one, Anderson is prepared to let be and let his poems float along on an undercurrent of dream. But the Hunter Fiver poets seem earnestly intent not only on writing poetry but also on making theirs a poetic region. Now this is an admirable thing and the more poets and interest in poetry we have the better not only for poets but, in my opinion for society as a whole. But one does not become a poet merely by the determination to be one, nor as Auden remarked, does poetry make anything happen. Newcastle will not necessarily become Montmartre by having poems written about it. What mailers is the poetic passion, the power with words, the concern with form and with melody, the lover’s quarrel with the world, and it is this passion which I find lacking here, though there is plenty of thoughtful chronicling of the world of matter of fact – going away and coming home, dreaming of men from Mars, canvassing votes at election time and so on. Nor does it help when the editor makes inflated claims. Are Tim McGee’s poems really ‘far superior to the much-admired drug poem of Michael Dransfield’? Do we still want to play this ranking game or does it represent the negative side of the regionalism these poets cultivate, an uneasiness, a determination to get things organised, with oneself and one’s friends prominent in the foreground? Regionalism, like patriotism, is not enough.

Sometimes Gladness: Collected Poems 1954–1978 by Bruce Dawe

Longman Cheshire, $4.95 pb, 249 pp

However, Bruce Dawe saves the day. Indisputably, his poetry matters for, anyone interested in the future of poetry in Australia if that future depends, as I believe it does, on people caring for poetry not because it is a luxury taste, like a taste for driving a Ferrari, but because it is necessary. Bruce Dawe’s poetry, I believe, is necessary in this sense that it kindles one’s sense of self as an Australian:

… part of this bull-necked civilisation shoving its

way across country past the pizzaterias and Colonel Sanders’

gaily incongruous establishments.

He is not prepared, that is, to yield the common ground and retire to his own precious poetic fields. Instead of standing apart’ and manipulating the contents of a culture with which he does not deign to associate himself, he attempts to make a mythic country of it, committing himself to its jokes, its TV watching, its dreams of lovely blondes, its motor-mowers, Sunday afternoon drives and visits to the zoo. In this collection, the arrangement of poems into sections. ranging from City, Suburb, Family Affections and War and Topicalities makes this determination even clearer, highlighting it by the choice of epigrams which prefix the sections. This means, firstly, that Dawe writes poetry that is widely read and not merely read by obligation – his poetry is widely ‘set’ for study – but also for pleasure, and secondly that he can make an impact that is political as well as poetic and anyone concerned for the health of what we may please to call ‘our democratic way of life’ or, more colloquially, the ‘rights of all and a fair go’, can only be grateful for the courageous series of occasional poems ranging from poems against capital punishment written during the Ryan controversy in Victoria through poems about the human cost of the Vietnam adventure to his recent hard-hitting attacks on the laws passed recently in Queensland aimed at the rights of Aborigines and dissenters.

True, in this determination to be a citizen as well as a poet, there are tosses, and not merely for the cause of pure poetry. The lack of shape of many of the poems, his uneasiness with the single line and his general inability to extend his language any further than he found it suggests he is suffering, even if mildly, from the disease he diagnoses, that he, too, has:

… the look on my face of those people standing around

awkwardly the jacked-up car when you rush past them …

... the Australian look we had before we were born,

we grope over the face of this land with blind hands,

guessing the features…

… we try to look content, not let down, not disappointed.

There is, all too often, disappointment, a sense of settling for less instead of more. This is true, I think, of his vision: implicitly, Dawe’s sense of cosmic perspective, the sense that resembles Blake’s or Yeats’, tends not to enlarge but to diminish the individual and his destiny – ‘he walks out in the morning’ for instance reduces Dilmun, Mohenjo-Daro, and Ur to the suburban level rather than raising the suburbs to the heroic. Moreover, for all his tenderness and compassion, his people are and perhaps always have been defeated. What history teaches is that decent people seldom win – not even God. Moving as it is, Dawe’s vision’ is of Pascal’s Christ in agony until the end of the world – his ‘and a good friday was had by all’, for example, or in, the poem ‘after Mass’ in which a priest discovers the meaning of priesthood in taking up the burden of his common humanity. But Dawe lacks Pascal’s sense of the majesty and terror of the infinite spaces. For him, ‘happiness is the art of being broken / with least sound’, this world remains transitory, not entirely trustworthy, and that, for a poet, represents a profound limitation because the poet then does not entirely trust his gift or his world, being aware of another mode of arbitration and control beyond his own. In this sense, perhaps Dawe is too pious - the type of the artist, and not just in the Romantic tradition either, is Prometheus, the hero who claims himself to shape or reshape the world.

This same piety means also that he fails to push his gift for language. No other Australian poet, I think, has realised the possibilities of the Australian vernacular as he has and it is this ability to capture what lies between the words of inarticulate people confused by the emotions they can neither fully understand nor acknowledge, which makes his poems so movingly truthful. These are people for whom language is less the sensuous experience which is the stuff of poetry than a fresh occasion of defeat. For this reason, Dawe tends also to succumb to the limitations he so consciously embraces. The otherwise moving ‘soliloquy for one dead’ for instance, falters when the speaker comes to confess his longing:

my heart sickens, Joe, calling

for the water of your voice and the gone

agony of your nearness

Here the poet cannot find the words to match the speaker’s feelings because, I suspect, there are none – they are feelings not expressed in words but in the silences the opening lines indicate so sensitive:

Ah no, Joe, you never knew the half of it.

Similarly, the language and sentiments of ‘elegy for drowned children’ seem to belie their speaker. Still, to be fair, at times Dawe succeeds brilliantly, suspending his poem between a language of understatement always ready to collapse under its own weight of embarrassment and a subject almost too large for words - in ‘a good friday was had by all’, for instance, in more secular vein, in ‘drifters’. Disappointing to those who look for intoxication in their poetry, the sheer honesty of his language at its best expresses that sense of stoic acceptance, which lends his best poems their simple dignity. There is no battering after an unsatisfactory brilliance here but a respect for humanity which is touched with divinity when it suffers knowingly and even at times wittily ‘enter without so much as knocking’, for instance, is a jeremiad cast in comic mode - particularly refreshing in a culture where stylists are usually not moralists and moralists tend to regard style as devilish.

All this said, it must be conceded that in the long run Dawe’s collected poems shows him as in some respects a limited poet. His range is narrow, his language often awkward and his musical ear dubious despite his feeling for the intonations of the vernacular. Yet in the long run he is also one of our most important poets, rescuing poetry from death by inanition in the ivory towers of academy or grubby rooms of Balmain, Fitzroy or North Adelaide. Poetry is always perhaps a movement towards its own reality, and that reality is not achieved in the void but in an exchange with life. If one of the problems facing Australian poets is the lack of poetic events to write about, Bruce Dawe has opened a way ahead, into the world of common experience. At the same time, his poetry also matters to those concerned with the larger project described by Patrick White as the ‘attempt to make the people of a half-savage country a race possessed of understanding.’