FuelAndrew Sant Sant is a poet of precision and imagination Geoffrey Lehmann, The Weekend Australian makes a distinguished contribution to what is now often called ecocentric poetry a bravura performance John Lucas, Critical Survey (UK) |
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In
poems that are sometimes celebratory, at other times darkly comic,
Andrew Sant’s fascination is with energy as a creative and
destructive force. There are combustibles fuelling speed and there is
the fuel of desire; food as fuel on a plate and food for thought.
Highly visual, rhythmically charged and suffused with feeling, the
poems are often set against a background of deep geologic time
influencing a present in which puzzled humans—and better
adapted
insects and plants—are seen to be engaged in their various
acts
of survival. Fuel
represents a journey that begins and ends with water.
ISBN 978 1876044 63 3
2009
138 pgs
Fuel book sample
Back to top
Revisiting Cliffs
Two Fishermen
Marvellous Harbours
The Letter S
Significance
Mr Habitat’s Own Bones
The Strong Word Acrostic
Dedication to a Potter Wasp
Little Forest Bats in the Foothills
The Household Moth
The Marriage Vow
The General Electric Drama
Oak
Eradicating Ivy
Craquelure
Heart on a Summer Afternoon
Lift
Seeing Reason
Mr Habitat on Terror Etc
The Heathrow to Melbourne Flight
English Meals
Birthplace
Speaking of Hampstead Heath
In the Wake of Taxonomies
To the Kiosk
Poet as Locksmith
The Family Fun Fair
Freddy and the Christening Gift
Mr Habitat on Edge
The Good Things
You Are Here
Dandelions
August
Rock Music
Interrogative Pressure
Mr Habitat’s Take on the Future
High Cost
The Misses
Change of Address Book
In the Land Called Desire
Words with an Ant
Probability Etcetera
Good Question
The Story of a Story
Dreammobile
The Promethean Gift
Phoney Reversal
Knight
Visitants
The Fires
Mr Habitat at Sea
Birthday
Capital Chance to See the Family
Interior Flora and Fauna
Mr Habitat on Trees
Appetites
The Spider in the Kitchen
Cycle
Bringing in the Fossil
Autumn Brief on a Creek
Freeze
Given
Dishes in the Family Narratives
The Round
Mr Habitat Reacts to a Fly
The Mosquito Satisfaction Wrap
Along the Rehabilitated Creek
Ode to Water
Back to top
Andrew Sant, Fuel
John Lucas
Critical Survey (UK) (forthcoming)
Fuel is high octane, though a few stray impurities have got through the filter. Chief of these is an over-use of ‘ever’ to mean ‘always’, as in ‘ever ready’, ‘ever on the move’, ‘ever renewed’, ‘ever restless.’ I can see why a poet whose language is characterised by such quick-paced energy doesn’t want to waste time on the dragging sounds of ‘always’, but the alternative, when repeated as often as it here is, can be ever-so slightly irritating. As can the habit of pushing two assonantal words against each other in a kind of stylistic tic (You see how habit-forming it is!); ‘guests expect’, ‘nifty shift’, ‘core, swore’, ‘script ripped’, ‘sensibly fenced’, ‘test/pest’, ‘note/known’, ‘creek/leans’ and plenty more. The fact that the last three examples involve enjambments doesn’t prevent me from thinking this habit needs to be reined in. Enough already. And yet it is, I guess, the price you pay for Sant’s linguistic exuberance, a delight in handling words that makes Fuel a bravura performance. John Wain once said that to write a poem ‘you have to be a bit above yourself’, and Sant’s collection feels on a perpetual high. It is certainly the work of someone in love with what poetry can be made to do. Individual poems, different from each other as their ostensible-subject matter may be, are, as a theorist might say, ‘performative’.
Here, for example, in apparently skittish mode, are the closing lines of ‘Words with an Ant’, in which the insect has
A snuff poem! The adroit playfulness of this is in the handling of line breaks and of syntax (the deftly positioned ‘thanks to a killer pencil’), the linked sounds that track through the lines - limb, risked, briskly, killer, reflective, respect, expression, likes, bite. Not that this is any comfort to the ant. And snails can take equally little comfort from ‘High Cost’, which begins ‘In their garages, obedient cars are like pets/dreaming of petrol, oil, speed,/highways as beelines to free/the use of carboniferous energy’ and ends with a warning to snails that they ‘should quickly take/into consideration the fact/that I can easily nab them and,/if they still don’t see things my way,/the considerable impact my boots/will have on their preposterous habits.’
And at this point you idealise that Fuel is by no means merely playful. If, as the blurb rightly says, ‘the poems are often set against a background of deep geological time’ - though ‘background’ hardly does justice to the way such poems are grounded in geological history - it is also true that Sant takes as read that we live in a world of aggressively competing egotisms. The voice that emerges in ‘High Cost’ is after all fascistic, and while to ‘nab’ a snail seems to soften the will to power, the boots’ impact on ‘preposterous habits’ is intended to crush the opposition. Cars, on the other hand, whose fuel consumption represents a terrible threat to the green world, are ‘pets.’
I had to read Fuel twice before grasping how subtly Sant handles this serious matter, how the collection in fact makes a distinguished contribution to what is now often called ecocentric poetry. For Sant, this doesn’t so much mean genuflections to the green world as a wry, slanted awareness of the battles that go on between the human and the natural, as in ‘Eradicating Ivy’, in which a ‘Gloves off, then gloves on’ struggle for supremacy concludes with the admission of ‘towards ivy - now in heaps -/a hard-won attachment’, or ‘Dandelions’, where, as the children ‘blow off seeds’, the gardener thinks it ‘high time’ that their advance should be arrested, though he is ‘annually defeated’, and his insult is ‘to call them a weed’. (As Clare knew, ‘weed’ has no botanical meaning: it s simply an unwanted plant.) Or there is ‘The Mosquito Satisfaction Wrap’, a tour-de-force one-sentence poem that unspools over 42 lines, registering satisfactions that include ‘a superlative crap, better than/at last, sneezing though not better/than a Belgian wheat beer straight from the tap’, until we arrive at the final one: that ‘driven proboscis [which] draws sweet blood,/a slow stoned-eyed gutful, till she wings/clear of itch, and trickily of vengeance,/her parting gift to the diminished victim.’
Winging clear, lifting off, is how Sant characteristically operates. In one brilliant poem he contrasts his role as apparently casual but in truth fully engaged observer of the ceaseless endeavours of the potter wasp - ‘nine cells I’ve greeted - two already set hard/when I arrived as a guest’ - determination and persistence which cause him, ‘sluggish in the tropics’, to ‘praise/this maker’, as he himself packs ‘to fly in pursuit of the south’. Always in pursuit, but never at rest for long. Hence, the equally brilliant ‘The Round’, with its epigraph from Weldon Kees, ‘restless forever, and quite indomitable’, which begins ‘Mid-week, he left’ (nothing predictable about this man), and whose last stanza runs
This isn’t however the poet as Banddanan flâneur. Sant’s essentially modernist stance reminds me more of Isaac Rosenberg, the first Anglophone poet to direct his gaze, unwavering, sardonic, full of fascinated - and appalled - wonder, at the breakable world, though what Rosenberg had to register was far more terrible than anything that comes within Sant’s jauntily viewed perspective. Sardonic he may be, but this doesn’t cancel affirmation, as in the collection’s final, Redgrovian and ample ‘Ode to Water’. Put it another way. Fuel shows that modernism isn’t merely, or mostly, a matter of rebarbative forms and modes of address.
Back to top
Inverse perspectives on the maturing voice
[reviewing Fuel and Wimmera by Homer Rieth]
Geoffrey Lehmann
(Geoffrey Lehmann is preparing a new anthology of Australian poetry)
The Weekend Australian, 7 November 2009
Back to top
Sant’s
accomplished, cosmopolitan style gains from repeated exposure.
‘Pleasure’ has been a word much trivialised of late
when
talking about poetry, but Sant’s poems genuinely provide that
all-too-rare commodity.
Nicholas
Birns, Verse
(USA)
In
this remarkable new book... the poems work quickly on the senses, but
the music doesn’t diminish because of this immediacy.
It’s
a work off its leash, and that’s to be celebrated.
Anthony
Lawrence, Australian
Book Review
In
what is now a significant body of work we should see Andrew Sant, in
this new book, in its approachable eloquence and its formal and musical
intelligence as, in his phrase, a new ‘passport into
immersion.’
Adam
Phillips, The Observer
(UK)
ISBN 978 1876044 63 3
2009
138 pgs
Fuel book sample
Back to top
I
Revisiting Cliffs
Two Fishermen
Marvellous Harbours
The Letter S
Significance
Mr Habitat’s Own Bones
The Strong Word Acrostic
Dedication to a Potter Wasp
Little Forest Bats in the Foothills
The Household Moth
The Marriage Vow
The General Electric Drama
Oak
Eradicating Ivy
Craquelure
Heart on a Summer Afternoon
II
Lift
Seeing Reason
Mr Habitat on Terror Etc
The Heathrow to Melbourne Flight
English Meals
Birthplace
Speaking of Hampstead Heath
In the Wake of Taxonomies
To the Kiosk
Poet as Locksmith
The Family Fun Fair
Freddy and the Christening Gift
Mr Habitat on Edge
The Good Things
You Are Here
III
Dandelions
August
Rock Music
Interrogative Pressure
Mr Habitat’s Take on the Future
High Cost
The Misses
Change of Address Book
In the Land Called Desire
Words with an Ant
Probability Etcetera
Good Question
The Story of a Story
Dreammobile
IV
The Promethean Gift
Phoney Reversal
Knight
Visitants
The Fires
Mr Habitat at Sea
Birthday
Capital Chance to See the Family
Interior Flora and Fauna
Mr Habitat on Trees
Appetites
The Spider in the Kitchen
Cycle
Bringing in the Fossil
Autumn Brief on a Creek
Freeze
Given
Dishes in the Family Narratives
The Round
Mr Habitat Reacts to a Fly
The Mosquito Satisfaction Wrap
Along the Rehabilitated Creek
Ode to Water
Back to top
Reviews
Andrew Sant, Fuel
John Lucas
Critical Survey (UK) (forthcoming)
Fuel is high octane, though a few stray impurities have got through the filter. Chief of these is an over-use of ‘ever’ to mean ‘always’, as in ‘ever ready’, ‘ever on the move’, ‘ever renewed’, ‘ever restless.’ I can see why a poet whose language is characterised by such quick-paced energy doesn’t want to waste time on the dragging sounds of ‘always’, but the alternative, when repeated as often as it here is, can be ever-so slightly irritating. As can the habit of pushing two assonantal words against each other in a kind of stylistic tic (You see how habit-forming it is!); ‘guests expect’, ‘nifty shift’, ‘core, swore’, ‘script ripped’, ‘sensibly fenced’, ‘test/pest’, ‘note/known’, ‘creek/leans’ and plenty more. The fact that the last three examples involve enjambments doesn’t prevent me from thinking this habit needs to be reined in. Enough already. And yet it is, I guess, the price you pay for Sant’s linguistic exuberance, a delight in handling words that makes Fuel a bravura performance. John Wain once said that to write a poem ‘you have to be a bit above yourself’, and Sant’s collection feels on a perpetual high. It is certainly the work of someone in love with what poetry can be made to do. Individual poems, different from each other as their ostensible-subject matter may be, are, as a theorist might say, ‘performative’.
Here, for example, in apparently skittish mode, are the closing lines of ‘Words with an Ant’, in which the insect has
gone out on a limb,
risked it, advanced briskly,
thanks to a killer pencil,
into the zone of a poem
that’s neither reflective
nor earnest
out of respect
for expression that likes
- and swiftly follows - your bite.
risked it, advanced briskly,
thanks to a killer pencil,
into the zone of a poem
that’s neither reflective
nor earnest
out of respect
for expression that likes
- and swiftly follows - your bite.
A snuff poem! The adroit playfulness of this is in the handling of line breaks and of syntax (the deftly positioned ‘thanks to a killer pencil’), the linked sounds that track through the lines - limb, risked, briskly, killer, reflective, respect, expression, likes, bite. Not that this is any comfort to the ant. And snails can take equally little comfort from ‘High Cost’, which begins ‘In their garages, obedient cars are like pets/dreaming of petrol, oil, speed,/highways as beelines to free/the use of carboniferous energy’ and ends with a warning to snails that they ‘should quickly take/into consideration the fact/that I can easily nab them and,/if they still don’t see things my way,/the considerable impact my boots/will have on their preposterous habits.’
And at this point you idealise that Fuel is by no means merely playful. If, as the blurb rightly says, ‘the poems are often set against a background of deep geological time’ - though ‘background’ hardly does justice to the way such poems are grounded in geological history - it is also true that Sant takes as read that we live in a world of aggressively competing egotisms. The voice that emerges in ‘High Cost’ is after all fascistic, and while to ‘nab’ a snail seems to soften the will to power, the boots’ impact on ‘preposterous habits’ is intended to crush the opposition. Cars, on the other hand, whose fuel consumption represents a terrible threat to the green world, are ‘pets.’
I had to read Fuel twice before grasping how subtly Sant handles this serious matter, how the collection in fact makes a distinguished contribution to what is now often called ecocentric poetry. For Sant, this doesn’t so much mean genuflections to the green world as a wry, slanted awareness of the battles that go on between the human and the natural, as in ‘Eradicating Ivy’, in which a ‘Gloves off, then gloves on’ struggle for supremacy concludes with the admission of ‘towards ivy - now in heaps -/a hard-won attachment’, or ‘Dandelions’, where, as the children ‘blow off seeds’, the gardener thinks it ‘high time’ that their advance should be arrested, though he is ‘annually defeated’, and his insult is ‘to call them a weed’. (As Clare knew, ‘weed’ has no botanical meaning: it s simply an unwanted plant.) Or there is ‘The Mosquito Satisfaction Wrap’, a tour-de-force one-sentence poem that unspools over 42 lines, registering satisfactions that include ‘a superlative crap, better than/at last, sneezing though not better/than a Belgian wheat beer straight from the tap’, until we arrive at the final one: that ‘driven proboscis [which] draws sweet blood,/a slow stoned-eyed gutful, till she wings/clear of itch, and trickily of vengeance,/her parting gift to the diminished victim.’
Winging clear, lifting off, is how Sant characteristically operates. In one brilliant poem he contrasts his role as apparently casual but in truth fully engaged observer of the ceaseless endeavours of the potter wasp - ‘nine cells I’ve greeted - two already set hard/when I arrived as a guest’ - determination and persistence which cause him, ‘sluggish in the tropics’, to ‘praise/this maker’, as he himself packs ‘to fly in pursuit of the south’. Always in pursuit, but never at rest for long. Hence, the equally brilliant ‘The Round’, with its epigraph from Weldon Kees, ‘restless forever, and quite indomitable’, which begins ‘Mid-week, he left’ (nothing predictable about this man), and whose last stanza runs
There must be, he thought, an end
To this other than in a strange city
where his life again would be recast.
He packed - and soon was back to try
on for size what some found vast,
The one he’d quit. It didn’t fit.
To this other than in a strange city
where his life again would be recast.
He packed - and soon was back to try
on for size what some found vast,
The one he’d quit. It didn’t fit.
This isn’t however the poet as Banddanan flâneur. Sant’s essentially modernist stance reminds me more of Isaac Rosenberg, the first Anglophone poet to direct his gaze, unwavering, sardonic, full of fascinated - and appalled - wonder, at the breakable world, though what Rosenberg had to register was far more terrible than anything that comes within Sant’s jauntily viewed perspective. Sardonic he may be, but this doesn’t cancel affirmation, as in the collection’s final, Redgrovian and ample ‘Ode to Water’. Put it another way. Fuel shows that modernism isn’t merely, or mostly, a matter of rebarbative forms and modes of address.
Back to top
Inverse perspectives on the maturing voice
[reviewing Fuel and Wimmera by Homer Rieth]
Geoffrey Lehmann
(Geoffrey Lehmann is preparing a new anthology of Australian poetry)
The Weekend Australian, 7 November 2009
Why do some poets, like some people, do their best work early, and
others continue improving and peak in their late 40s or 50s? While
editing an anthology of Australian poetry, this has been on my mind.
Kenneth Slessor, Henry Lawson, Christopher Brennan and Banjo Paterson
had virtually exhausted themselves as poets by the time they reached
40. But Slessor’s friend, R.D. FitzGerald, matured as a poet
only after
reaching that age.
Goethe and Yeats continued developing until late. For male poets, at least, it may be necessary to have an argument with oneself if one is to continue developing. Goethe rejected the romantic storm and stress of his youth, and embraced classicism and balance. Yeats rejected the lushness of his early poetry for a language that was stripped back and closer to everyday speech, the famous ‘cold eye’ of his epitaph.
With female poets, a decision to have an argument with oneself may not be needed. Biology may force the issue. When reading the poetry of Elizabeth Riddell, one of our good middle-ranking poets, I was struck by how free her poetry became once she reached her late 40s, as though a burden had been lifted from her. Jennifer Maiden, one of our best contemporary poets, has even written a poem about it, ‘Menopause as a Bee Freed from a Fairy Floss Machine’. The title of this stunningly good poem says it all.
Both books, Fuel and Wimmera, are the work of mature poets. Andrew Sant was born in London in 1950 and came to Australia with his parents in 1962. Homer Rieth was born in Germany of German and Georgian parents in 1947 and came to Australia in 1952. Both poets are published by Black Pepper, founded by the feisty Kevin Pearson, himself a noted poet. Black Pepper is one of the livelier new houses that has sprung up after the large publishers decided to exit poetry publishing.
That’s about where the similarities between Sant and Rieth stop. Sant has a long publishing history, going back to 1980; Fuel is his 11th published volume of poetry. He writes short, mainly domestic poems, and is able to tease significance and a sense of profundity out of everyday things with wit and ingenuity.
Although a few years older than Sant, Rieth has a short publishing history, starting in 2001, and Wimmera is just his second published volume of poetry. In contrast to Sant’s short poems, Wimmera is a single epic of more than 300 pages, a leviathan of a poem, cosmic in its ambition and symphonic in its approach.
In 1983, as editors of an anthology, Robert Gray and I wrote: ‘Sant’s poetry seems very English in its reticence and use of the middle tone of voice. He always deals directly with experience... His strength is his interest in and close observation of other people, combined with a classical openness of style and freedom from affectation.’
These comments about Sant in 1983 are still true, except that his syntax, which was always a bit complex, has become more complex and circuitous, and his poetry is drier in tone; perhaps too dry and sinewy at times.
He has continued to grow and develop as a poet because his poetry thrives on wit and intelligence rather than on hormones.
Take ‘Rock Music’, for example, a poem not about a type of popular music. It’s about ‘the frequencies of stones’, the music of geology. Sant is a poet of precision and imagination. In ‘Given’, after the inaction of listening to the news and hours at a computer, he starts digging in the garden:
Goethe and Yeats continued developing until late. For male poets, at least, it may be necessary to have an argument with oneself if one is to continue developing. Goethe rejected the romantic storm and stress of his youth, and embraced classicism and balance. Yeats rejected the lushness of his early poetry for a language that was stripped back and closer to everyday speech, the famous ‘cold eye’ of his epitaph.
With female poets, a decision to have an argument with oneself may not be needed. Biology may force the issue. When reading the poetry of Elizabeth Riddell, one of our good middle-ranking poets, I was struck by how free her poetry became once she reached her late 40s, as though a burden had been lifted from her. Jennifer Maiden, one of our best contemporary poets, has even written a poem about it, ‘Menopause as a Bee Freed from a Fairy Floss Machine’. The title of this stunningly good poem says it all.
Both books, Fuel and Wimmera, are the work of mature poets. Andrew Sant was born in London in 1950 and came to Australia with his parents in 1962. Homer Rieth was born in Germany of German and Georgian parents in 1947 and came to Australia in 1952. Both poets are published by Black Pepper, founded by the feisty Kevin Pearson, himself a noted poet. Black Pepper is one of the livelier new houses that has sprung up after the large publishers decided to exit poetry publishing.
That’s about where the similarities between Sant and Rieth stop. Sant has a long publishing history, going back to 1980; Fuel is his 11th published volume of poetry. He writes short, mainly domestic poems, and is able to tease significance and a sense of profundity out of everyday things with wit and ingenuity.
Although a few years older than Sant, Rieth has a short publishing history, starting in 2001, and Wimmera is just his second published volume of poetry. In contrast to Sant’s short poems, Wimmera is a single epic of more than 300 pages, a leviathan of a poem, cosmic in its ambition and symphonic in its approach.
In 1983, as editors of an anthology, Robert Gray and I wrote: ‘Sant’s poetry seems very English in its reticence and use of the middle tone of voice. He always deals directly with experience... His strength is his interest in and close observation of other people, combined with a classical openness of style and freedom from affectation.’
These comments about Sant in 1983 are still true, except that his syntax, which was always a bit complex, has become more complex and circuitous, and his poetry is drier in tone; perhaps too dry and sinewy at times.
He has continued to grow and develop as a poet because his poetry thrives on wit and intelligence rather than on hormones.
Take ‘Rock Music’, for example, a poem not about a type of popular music. It’s about ‘the frequencies of stones’, the music of geology. Sant is a poet of precision and imagination. In ‘Given’, after the inaction of listening to the news and hours at a computer, he starts digging in the garden:
Gigantic, the fresh spadefuls
of planet; wrecked worms
like swimmers fighting
incredible turbulence.
of planet; wrecked worms
like swimmers fighting
incredible turbulence.
His adoption of the
worm’s viewpoint and his choice of the word planet are quite
remarkable.
Perhaps the pick of the poems in this book is his elegy for a fellow poet, Margaret Scott. ‘The Fires’ also may be a poem of farewell to Tasmania, the island where he has spent much of his life. Flying out of Tasmania over a bushfire, he thinks of Margaret Scott, two of whose houses were incinerated in fires, and who always said to him, in a motherly way between cigarettes, ‘Now tell me what you’ve been doing/and where you’ve been.’ He also remembers how Margaret used to keep herself awake while driving at night by repeatedly shouting, ‘Elephants! Elephants!’
Rieth’s first volume of poetry, The Dining Car Scene, published when he was in his 50s, was an elusive book. The title poem was a virtuoso piece describing with great precision a scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. But it was hard to make out what he stood for. Rieth has been a teacher of Greek and Roman literature and the one thing that was clear was his love of language.
Wimmera is an extraordinary poem, comprising 12 books, each of two parts. Rieth moved to Minyip in the Wimmera district of Victoria in 1999. At a basic level the poem reflects Rieth’s feelings for a landscape and people he has come to love.
Each book, we are told in an introductory note by Justin Clemens, ‘moves through the experience of a particular place: discoveries, establishments, characters, events, the contingencies and violence of settlement and the unexpected profusions of the natural environment.’
The poem reaches its climax in part one of Book 12, where Rieth moves from the profusions of drought and flood of the Wimmera and addresses the ‘countless curvatures of space/an atoll of time in an ocean of infinitude/the starry night is no more than time/only space only/the inaudible overheard’.
The long, sinuous sentences of the poem have passages of bravura language. This is how Rieth summarises the life and death of poet Adam Lindsay Gordon: ‘trooper Gordon... between poignant poems/... had seen how over the jumps a horse instinctively picks up a/certain tempo/by the time it covers the distance the tempo has become a heartbeat/tbe grace of its motion almost supernatural/and yet he shot himself as if the shot ringing out might make for/the sound of a caesura’.
This technically brilliant passage reveals one of the weaknesses of Wimmera. Gordon’s tragic suicide is treated almost flippantly. The consistently heroic tone of the poem, although it knits it together musically, sometimes places too great a distance between the reader and details that might have engaged our sympathy.
My second grouch is the deliberate use of cliche, such as ‘drunk as skunks’, ‘back of beyond’.
I realise that the father of European poetry, Homer, also used cliches such as ‘wine-dark sea’ but that does not justify their use here.
Notwithstanding these faults, Wimmera is quite extraordinary: it reads like a young man’s poem, with its ebullience, panache, occasional passages of juddering bathos, and its hormonal music.
Perhaps the pick of the poems in this book is his elegy for a fellow poet, Margaret Scott. ‘The Fires’ also may be a poem of farewell to Tasmania, the island where he has spent much of his life. Flying out of Tasmania over a bushfire, he thinks of Margaret Scott, two of whose houses were incinerated in fires, and who always said to him, in a motherly way between cigarettes, ‘Now tell me what you’ve been doing/and where you’ve been.’ He also remembers how Margaret used to keep herself awake while driving at night by repeatedly shouting, ‘Elephants! Elephants!’
Rieth’s first volume of poetry, The Dining Car Scene, published when he was in his 50s, was an elusive book. The title poem was a virtuoso piece describing with great precision a scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. But it was hard to make out what he stood for. Rieth has been a teacher of Greek and Roman literature and the one thing that was clear was his love of language.
Wimmera is an extraordinary poem, comprising 12 books, each of two parts. Rieth moved to Minyip in the Wimmera district of Victoria in 1999. At a basic level the poem reflects Rieth’s feelings for a landscape and people he has come to love.
Each book, we are told in an introductory note by Justin Clemens, ‘moves through the experience of a particular place: discoveries, establishments, characters, events, the contingencies and violence of settlement and the unexpected profusions of the natural environment.’
The poem reaches its climax in part one of Book 12, where Rieth moves from the profusions of drought and flood of the Wimmera and addresses the ‘countless curvatures of space/an atoll of time in an ocean of infinitude/the starry night is no more than time/only space only/the inaudible overheard’.
The long, sinuous sentences of the poem have passages of bravura language. This is how Rieth summarises the life and death of poet Adam Lindsay Gordon: ‘trooper Gordon... between poignant poems/... had seen how over the jumps a horse instinctively picks up a/certain tempo/by the time it covers the distance the tempo has become a heartbeat/tbe grace of its motion almost supernatural/and yet he shot himself as if the shot ringing out might make for/the sound of a caesura’.
This technically brilliant passage reveals one of the weaknesses of Wimmera. Gordon’s tragic suicide is treated almost flippantly. The consistently heroic tone of the poem, although it knits it together musically, sometimes places too great a distance between the reader and details that might have engaged our sympathy.
My second grouch is the deliberate use of cliche, such as ‘drunk as skunks’, ‘back of beyond’.
I realise that the father of European poetry, Homer, also used cliches such as ‘wine-dark sea’ but that does not justify their use here.
Notwithstanding these faults, Wimmera is quite extraordinary: it reads like a young man’s poem, with its ebullience, panache, occasional passages of juddering bathos, and its hormonal music.
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