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Ken Bolton reviews

A Return To Poetry, three volumes, 1998, 1999, 2000; published by Duffy & Snellgrove

An Australian Heritage of Verse, edited by Jim Haynes; published by the ABC, 2000; $24.95

This review was first published in the Bribane Courier Mail in 2000. It is 1,000 words
or about 3 printed pages long

Return to the Past
for the Cardigan Set

The Return To Poetry anthologies are a good idea — an annual collection of one hundred poems, made up of ten different people’s selection of ten favourite poems each. Some of the selectors are poets, some merely readers. There are three volumes so far. The special virtue of the collections — an intended one, I’m sure — is that we are introduced to poems we have never seen and to poems we may have overlooked, poems we have read while trying to get a handle on someone’s oeuvre, say, but which, at the time, failed to stand out from their siblings (all in the same voice & a similar tone, say, & perhaps with the same period feel). Here, because their neighbouring poems are by different poets & often from different centuries, such poems can seem distinct and real contenders.

So, odd poems you might never otherwise see will turn out to be quite inspired choices. Poems by authors one has not thought much of turn out to be strong and memorable. Poems you know and like suddenly seem even better met in this serendipitous way. The contrast with other poems will force reflections upon and insights into different eras and nationalities. And there is some interest in seeing just what a particular celebrity chooses. Predictably, Barry Humphries’ selection is entertaining — for example. Some selectors might be entirely unknown to one but their choices have a particular coherence and savour. These are other people’s favourites and we approach them with anticipation. Liking them you recollect other poems you have liked similarly — pleasure reminding of pleasure.

On the other hand there is more going on here — and it makes the Return To Poetry anthologies increasingly curious as the series rolls on. Perhaps not curious to the punter who has not read poetry in years & years and who is making that sort of return. (And as a lot of people read books, & not many read poetry, a ‘Return to Poetry’ could net an enormous market. Almost everybody!) Or does the title mean a return to real poetry, the real thing — for readers who’ve always loved poetry but been betrayed by the vicious and confusing developments in literary culture since, um, when? 1914? The Beats? The Whitlam era? Maybe we are to envisage people turning, with a gathering optimism, to these books & away from piles of Pound, Emma Lew, Tranter?

The covers give some clue: rural waterways, falling leaves, soft focus. This would indicate the cardigan set: the style is reassuring in the manner of mortgage or insurance ads, advertisements for retirement homes, funerals even. Poetry, then, as sedative — no nasty surprises, no new fangled ideas. Is this the editor’s fault? He, Michael Duffy, chooses the ten selectors. True. None of whom is young, many of whom are distinctly old. And Michael Duffy, isn’t he that journalist with ‘robust views’, not quite in anyone’s pocket but punching generally for the Right? Are these all people he knows, yarns to occasionally, about poetry and art?

Do the selections indicate the agenda? The generous answer is Not really, beyond being ‘conservative’ within the terms of literary history. There’s very little of high modernism, Pound, Eliot, Wallace Stevens. There’s Yeats. Auden hardly features beyond the poem made popular by Three Weddings & A Funeral. Carlos Williams does make it — but, yikes, it’s that cutey about the plums in the fridge. (In fact a number of people opt for poems far too familiar, ‘The Second Coming’, Marvell’s ‘Coy Mistress’, Slessor’s ‘Five Bells’ & ‘Beach Burial’.) Most significantly there’s almost nothing that stems from the breakthrough anthology of postwar US moderns that set off the sixties poetry boom: one O’Hara poem, no Ashbery, certainly no Ginsberg or any of that ilk. Perhaps the anthologies simply reflect a certain caste’s taste. Not much of contemporary English poetry. e.e. cummings is popular — modernist but not dangerous I guess. And so on. Interestingly, Larkin, Hughes and Plath appear only once. Keats & Shelley are the popular Romantics. Coleridge doesn’t make it, Wordsworth once. There’s Owen, Graves, Sassoon. Plenty of Elizabeth Bishop and Emily Dickinson, the Quietists. Donne and Marvell. Elizabethans a bit underrepresented. Little of the Victorians. Translations are only allowed sneak in, and Cavafy is popular. Among the older Australians Wright is popular, Hope a little less so.

One wonders how much poetry some of these people read. But the real giveaway is the conspicuous recurrence of three contemporary Australian poets. They turn up making their own choices as well. And they’re in many of the others’ selections. Not bad poems, of course. But why them? All three are associated. They’re published by Duffy & Snellgrove and in presses edited by each other. You can picture some old duffer ringing Duffy up, Well I’ve picked six gooduns but I don’t know about four more. What, you’ll send over a parcel of books? Very kind. And the Duffy & Snellgrove volumes arrive by courier. Hm, yes, says the duffer, Les Murray, well I’ve heard of him, but who are these other guys?

These anthologies have plenty of good poems in them. Otherwise they generally avoid the poets & ideologies that Duffy and Co usually fulminate against: intellectuals, lefties, feminists, modernists, postmodernists, the ‘Generation of 68’. The Australian poems (half the selections must be Australian) are thus weighted, artificially, a little towards the rural and distinctly against modern currents. Familiar story? It may be why you quit reading poetry. If the series continues this way the basic good idea will be strangled by the narrowness of what is probably its merely secondary agenda.

                  ¶

Finally there’s An Australian Heritage of Verse. The ideological parallels between this and Return To Poetry are amusing in terms of ideas of ‘Australia’ and ‘heritage’. This is not so much a book of dark purpose as a benighted book. So be warned. There may be some good poems in it — by Banjo Patterson, Lawson and others. But these are ‘Bush Ballads’. Too many are the contemporary kind, deliberately & overpoweringly redolent of corked hats and illustrated T-shirts about pubs with no beer and all the rest and so many are written by the collection’s editor! His introduction anticipates this last objection, more or less telling the reader to Go bag your head. What institution published this? The ABC. Gee, thanks, Aunty.

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