The Führer wore layered
cotton waste
around
his dapper genitals
when
exhorting hordes of
supplicants
at
those Walpurgisnacht
spectacles.
Bookended
by Eve and Adam
but haunted by the depravity of the Third Reich, Madrigals for a Misanthrope
questions our place on the planet. Author of one of
Australia’s most
famous plays, Dimboola,
Jack
Hibberd is Swiftean, savage and funny. His satire flays human
pretensions. The poet’s affinity with Baudelaire is given in
a suite of
adaptations. His laments on the deaths of lost friends form a group of
mellower character portraits.
Jack
Hibberd has been Melbourne’s irritant-conscience for
more than three decades. He writes sardonic, democratic, unpredictable
verse.
Alan
Wearne, Sydney Morning
Herald
Hibberd’s
talent, really, is for Jacobean revenge and
spleen about the body... Poem after poem indulges a morbid disgust with
human motives, an an ennui about the inevitable end of things. His
linguistic zest, which is skillful and considerable, is at its best
with political caricatures and his his clever takes on various poetic
forms.
Barry
Hill, The Australian
His
poetry is characterised by verve and abundance in
vocabulary and verse form.
Gig
Ryan, The Age
Hibberd
has a professional’s skill, an amateur’s
openness... I should say that he is writing trenodies. That seems
appropriate to the formality which he finds congenial, the grief at
loss which pervades many of the poems, and the spanning of both public
and private experience.
Peter
Steele Australian
Book Review
ISBN
1
876044 46 2
104 pgs
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Eve
Salt and Pepper Sonnets
Jock
Eva
Birth
Breasts
Divorce
McDonalds
Sunsets
The
Wind of Madness
Joy
Friendship
Bergson
Fear,
Time, and Matter
Earnestness
Autumn
Leaves
I.M.
Brian Sweeney
I.M.
Yvonne Rotstein (Marini)
I.M.
Dinny O’Hearn
Snail
Bait
Vacuum
Hope
Grief
Poem No.
2 for Bill
Cats and Dogs
Time
Disaffection
Beach Holiday
Air
Nocturne
The Big Apple
Hum
A Tutorial
Revenant
Solitude
Sir Thomas More
One Day
Christmas 2001
Adelaide Botanical Gardens
Life Forces
Progress
Nags
Siamese Love
Ages
Off Your Face and In the Wall
Sleep Tight
Drought
Religion
Terra Cognita
Early Winter
Leaf Drop
Soundings
Madame Bovary
The
Brothers Karamazov
Moby
Dick
On
Reading Stendhal’s Love
W.G.
Sebald
Madrigals
Pain
Pleasure
Eva
Braun
Reinhard
Heydrich
Chamberlain
Waste
Not Want Not
Belsen
Aharon
Appelfeld
Primo
Levi
The
Plains of Poland
Holiday
in the South
Rape
of Nanking
The
Most Dangerous Species on Our Planet
Face
Egotist
Politicians
Hate
Evil
Good
Hotel
Paradiso
Fourteen Poems following Baudelaire
À une Dame
Créole
Le
Chat
L’Avertisseur
Le
Gouffre
Alchimie
de la douleur
La
Fin de la journée
Horreur
sympathique
La
Lune Offensée
Recueillement
La
Mort des Amants
Le
Couvercle
L’Idéal
Bien
loin d’ici
La
Mort des pauvres
Adam
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Reviews
Poetry Survey
Jack Hibberd - Madrigals For A Misanthrope
Oliver Dennis
Island, No.
101, Winter 2005
For someone who has long
held a
reputation as an irreverent dramatist, Jack Hibberd can write
surprisingly formal poetry. A number of these poems are sonnets,
ranging from elegies and ancestral portraits to a set of translations
from Baudelaire. Acerbic and despairing, Hibberd’s work often
responds
to life’s cruelties (as one poem has it: ‘I
comprehend / that life
itself is punishment’); it also expresses disgust at our
endless
capacity for selfishness and violence, and specifically targets famous
Nazi figures: ‘A model for tasteful totalitarians, / beyond
causes,
ideology, race, caste, / the über-Hitler to some historians, /
a
stylist, he made Stalin seem gross, daft’
(‘Reinhard Heydrich’). In
contrast, Hibberd elsewhere writes a good deal about sex and the
consoling influence of love: ‘Often our branches / caress,
rub, touch;
/ not quite as often / they thrash’ (‘Siamese
Love’). Excluding a fine
version of ‘Le Chat’, which speaks magnificently of
Jeanne Duval’s
‘coffee limbs and curls’, his metrical writing
tends to appear somewhat
strained. In fact, one of the most likeable poems in this collection is
pure doggerel. ‘Poem No. 2 for Bill’, about
‘a piebald hound’ that dies
of heat exhaustion, shows him in complete control of his medium,
employing language he is perhaps used to reserving for the stage.
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Madrigals
for a
Misanthrope