Reading the gift of sound and vision
The Age
Saturday March 20, 2010
Storm and Honey By Judith Beveridge Giramondo Publishing, $22 Folk Tunes By Alan Gould Salt Publishing, $24.95 Beautiful Waste By David McComb Fremantle Press, $24.95 POETRY Gig Ryan examines three very different styles of writing. JUDITH Beveridge's fourth book, Storm and Honey, takes its title from Kenneth Slessor's poem Captain Dobbin and shares some of that poem's ambition of nostalgic reverie for seafaring life.Where her earlier poems show an affinity with the paintings of Georgia O'Keeffe in their sumptuous, sexualised descriptions of the natural world, here that tendency continues, along with the violent language of fishing in the book's long sequence, Driftgrounds: Three Fishermen, with its gory nightmarish descriptions.The last poem in this sequence follows the imaginings of a young boy, which makes us read backwards as if the whole sequence enacts the boy's wish.Beveridge, like Robert Gray, often makes description the entire burden of the poem, depicting the physical world in attentive detail, each thing etched with simile or metaphor to vivify, smashing language into painting or even documentary: "I'll watch the mist/ clabber up into the leaves, or I'll walk where blebs of gas/ aerate the mud with the sucking sound of ghost crabs." (Sinner's Marsh)This Heaney-esque use of language sometimes feels clotted and some of the images in her sturdy and studious poems strain for effect. The last poem in the book, The Aquarium, paradoxically shows the natural world in an unnatural environment, as if to say that this is the only way life can be preserved, not filleted.But apart from the unusually moving The Binoculars, delight in description is Beveridge's chief concern €” "I prefer the cicada's stroboscopic glitzy aural brandishings/ and the bee's legato burr, even the blowfly's whirr when heat/ keeps the pedal down . . . Mosquito, you/ sing into my ear as if it were your mosque." (The Mosquito, Riffs and Plaints)Alan Gould, a prizewinning novelist as well as poet, has often used his poetry to convey ideas and wit, usually in tightly crafted, playful verse. Some of his work could be categorised as light verse, and much is meant to amuse €” "We love the topic's vertigo,/ how piously we each can rise/ to bubble-wrap in journalese/ the old presentable disguise/ of who we are and why we need to know." (Panel Session On Oz ID)In this, his 12th book of poems, that tendency to see poetry as vehicle for ideas is still apparent, but here he also explores a more personal vein of memory and love, as the title, Folk Tunes, indicates.Gould often writes in four-beat lines, and has an affinity for couplets €” "Truckies and burnout schoolies roar/ through hours my sleep was programmed for." (Questions in Early Summer). His humour is usually sunny or enjoyably argumentative, finally embracing an acceptance of the world as it is.Much of his work displays an Auden-ish tone €” "Lit deep within the microscope/ the worms of living writhe with hope,/ form alphabets of fine desire/ to more than reproduce, expire./ No creature lives just to survive./ All seeking tells us we're alive." (Eleven Tilts Around the Soul) The first and last poems, She Sings Him, He Sings Her, envision a lifelong debate and celebration of art, and the purpose of poetry Gould intends.David McComb, lead singer of The Triffids, who died at the age of 36 in 1999, also wrote poetry and this collection, Beautiful Waste, has been assembled by his friends. McComb's poems vary greatly between straightforward lyrics to more sophisticated reflection. There is often a wearied humour, with the destructive voice revelling in its perversity, while at the same time conscious that its extremism is viewed as ridiculous: "Expect the worst; predict unthinkable losses,/ and then double them./ Only then might you escape disappointment." (An Ugly Rip)As John Kinsella's comprehensive introduction notes, McComb often works within the conventions of love poetry €” "Don't we make a pretty picture,/ you and I embracing? . . . We've discovered the knack, the shaman's trick:/ how to get right inside/ of life, just when life's not looking" (Beautiful Era) €” yet the best poems are usually those where intellect overtakes passion, in particular Bad Back Bad Heart and Death of a Grandmother.Not surprisingly, some poems sound like songs ("All the sleepless drivers/ Still speaking to themselves/ Strangers to their mothers/ Driving into the world"), while others gather into sonnet form with almost-rhymes and classical endings ("the swarming mind glimpses morning death").
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