book excerptise:   a book unexamined is wasting trees

60 Classic Australian Poems

Geoff Page

Page, Geoff;

60 Classic Australian Poems

UNSW Press, 2010, 288 pages  [gbook]

ISBN 1921410795, 9781921410796

topics: |  poetry | austraila


An excellent collection.  Great poetry on every page.  The commentaries are
superb, and draw you into the poems. 

I wonder why we don't have collections of this quality on Indian poets. 

Excerpts

David Malouf (1934-) : The Year Of The Foxes

		for Don Anderson
				p.153

When I was ten my mother, having sold
her old fox-fur (a ginger red bone-jawed
Magda Lupescu
of a fox that on her arm played
dead, cunningly dangled
a lean and tufted paw)

decided there was money to be made
from foxes, and bought via
the columns of the Courier Mail a whole
pack of them; they hung from penny hooks
in our panelled sitting-room, trailed from the backs
of chairs; and Brisbane ladies, rather
the worse for war, drove up in taxis wearing
a G.I. on their arm
and rang at our front door.

I slept across the hall, at night hearing
their thin cold cry. I dreamed the dangerous spark
of their eyes, brushes aflame
in our fur-hung, nomadic
tent in the suburbs, the dark fox-stink of them
cornered in their holes
and turning.

		Among my mother's show pieces —
Noritake teacups, tall hock glasses
with stems like barley-sugar,
goldleaf demitasses—
the foxes, row upon row, thin-nosed, prick-eared,
dead.

	The cry of hounds
was lost behind mirror glass,
where ladies with silken snoods and fingernails
of chinese laquer red
fastened a limp paw;
went down in their high heels
to the warm soft bitumen, wearing at throat
and elbow the rare spoils
of '44; old foxes, rusty red like dried-up wounds,
and a G.I. escort.


Judith Rodriguez : In-flight note

			p.170

Kitten, writes the mousy boy in his neat
fawn casuals sitting beside me on the flight,
neatly, I can't give up everything just like that.
Everything, how much was it? and just like what?
Did she cool it or walk out? loosen her hand from his tight
white-knuckled hand, or not meet him, just as he thought
You mean far too much to me. I can't forget
the four months we've known each other. No, he won't eat,
finally he pays — pale, careful, distraught —
for a beer, turns over the pad on the page he wrote
and sleeps a bit. Or dreams of his Sydney cat.
The pad cost one dollar twenty. He wakes to write
It's naive to think we could be just good friends.
Pages and pages. And so the whole world ends.


Judith Beveridge : Bahadour

				p.271

The sun stamps his shadow on the wall
and he's left one wheel of his bicycle
spinning. It is dusk, there are a few minutes

before he must pedal his wares through 
the streets again. But now, nothing
is more important than his kite working

its way into the wobbly winter sky.
For the time he can live at the summit
of his head without a ticket, he is following

the kite through pastures of snow where
his father calls into the mountains for him,
where his mother weeps his farewell into

the carriages of a five-day train. You can
see so many boys out on the rooftops this
time of day, surrendering diamonds to the

thin blue air, putting their arms up, neither
in answer nor apprehension, but because
the day tenders them a coupon of release.

He does not think about the failing light,
nor of how his legs must mint so many steel
suns from a bicycle's wheel each day,

nor of how his life must drop like a token
into its appropriate slot; not even
of constructing whatever angles would break

the deal that transacted away his childhood -
nor of taking some fairness back 
to Nepal, but only of how he can find

purchase on whatever minutes of dusk are left
to raise a diamond, to claim some share 
of hope, some acre of sky within a hard-fisted

budget; and of how happy he is, yielding,
his arms up, equivalent now only to himself,
a last spoke in the denominations of light.

[ bahadour is a child worker, sent (or sold?) off by his parents... 
  now he works in this town, a five-day train ride away from his home in
  Nepal...

  breaking it up into artificial tercets - style from William Carlos William.
  the shadow of iambic pentameter that seems to lie beneath this poem.]


Philip Hodgins : Shooting the Dogs

				p.281

There wasn't much else we could do
that final day on the farm.
We couldn't take them with us into town,
no-one round the district needed them
and the new people had their own.
It was one of those things.

You sometimes hear of dogs
who know they're about to be put down
and who look up along the barrel of the rifle
into responsible eyes that never forget
that look and so on,
but our dogs didn't seem to have a clue.

They only stopped for a short while
to look at the Bedford stacked with furniture
not hay
and then cleared off towards the swamp,
plunging through the thick paspalum
noses up, like speedboats.

They weren't without their faults.
The young one liked to terrorize the chooks
and eat the eggs.
Whenever he started doing this
we'd let him have an egg full of chilli paste
and then the chooks would get some peace.

The old one's weakness was rolling in dead sheep.
Sometimes after this he'd sit outside
the kitchen window at dinner time.
The stink would hit us all at once
and we'd grimace like the young dog
discovering what was in the egg.

But basically they were pretty good.
They worked well and added life to the place.
I called them back enthusiastically
and got the old one as he bounded up
and then the young one as he shot off
for his life.

I buried them behind the tool shed.
It was one of the last things I did before we left.
Each time the gravel slid off the shovel
it sounded like something
trying to hang on by its nails.


John Kinsella : Drowning in Wheat

			p.286

They’d been warned
on every farm
that playing
in the silos
would lead to death.
You sink in wheat.
Slowly. And the more
you struggle the worse it gets.
‘You’ll see a rat sail past
your face, nimble on its turf,
and then you’ll disappear.’
In there, hard work
has no reward.
So it became a kind of test
to see how far they could sink
without needing a rope
to help them out.
But in the midst of play
rituals miss a beat — like both
leaping in to resolve
an argument
as to who’d go first
and forgetting
to attach the rope.
Up to the waist
and afraid to move.
That even a call for help
would see the wheat
trickle down.
The painful consolidation
of time. The grains
in the hourglass
grotesquely swollen.
And that acrid
chemical smell
of treated wheat
coaxing them into
a near-dead sleep.




Contents

Introduction 
 1  Adam Lindsay Gordon (1833–70)  The Sick Stockrider                            19
 2  A.B. 'Banjo' Paterson (1864–1941) The Travelling Post Office                  25
 3  Dame Mary Gilmore (1865–1962)  Nationality                                    31
 4  Henry Lawson (1867–1922)  Middleton's Rouseabout                              35
 5  Christopher Brennan (1870–1932)  We sat entwined an hour or two together      39
 6  John Shaw Neilson (1872–1942)  The Orange Tree                                43
 7  C.J. Dennis (1876–1938)  The Play                                             47
 8  Lesbia Harford (1891–1927)  I'm like all lovers, wanting love to be           54
 9  Kenneth Slessor (1901–71)  Beach Burial                                       58
10  Robert D. Fitzgerald (1902–87)  The Wind at Your Door                         62
11  A.D. Hope (1907–2000)  The Mayan Books                                        71
12  Ronald McCuaig (1908–93)  The Commercial Traveller's Wife                     75
13  Elizabeth Riddell (1910–98)  The Children March                               80
14  William Hart-Smith (1911–90)  Baiamai's Never-failing Stream                  84
15  Roland Robinson (1912–92)  Mapooram                                           87 
16  John Blight (1913–95)  Death of a Whale                                       91 
17  Douglas Stewart (1913–85)  Leopard Skin                                       95 
18  John Manifold (1915–85)  On the Boundary                                      99 
19  Judith Wright (1915–2000)  Remittance Man                                    103
20  David Campbell (1915–79)  Windy Gap                                          107
21  James McAuley (1917–76)  Because                                             111
22  Gwen Harwood (1920–95)  Suburban Sonnet                                      116
23  Rosemary Dobson (1920– )   The Three Fates                                   119
24  Oodgeroo Noonuccal (1920–93)  Gifts                                          123
25  Dorothy Hewett (1923–2002)  The Witnesses                                    127
26  Francis Webb (1925–73)  Harry                                                131
27  Bruce Beaver (1928–2004)  Experiment                                         136
28  Peter Porter (1929– )  Mort aux chats                                        140
29  Vincent Buckley (1929–88)  Secret Policeman                                  145
30  Bruce Dawe (1930– )  Drifters                                                149
31  David Malouf (1934– )  The Year of the Foxes                                 153
32  Chris Wallace-Crabbe (1934– )  Other People                                  158
33  Thomas Shapcott (1935– )  Flying Fox                                         162
34  Randolph Stow (1935– )  There Was a Time: The Youth                          165
35  Judith Rodriguez (1936– )  In-flight Note                                    170
36  Les Murray (1938– )  The Mitchells                                           173
37  J.S. Harry (1939– )  Mousepoem                                               176
38  Clive James (1939– )  In Town for the March                                  181
39  Geoffrey Lehmann (1940– ) Parenthood                                         186
40  Kate Llewellyn (1940– )  To a Married Man                                    193
41  Jan Owen (1940– )  Young Woman Gathering Lemons                              197
42  Geoff Page (1940– )  The Publisher's Apprentice                              201
43  John Tranter (1943– )  North Light                                           206
44  Robert Adamson (1943– )  Canticle for the Bicentennial Dead                  210
45  Robert Gray (1945– )  In Departing Light                                     215
46  Michael Dransfield (1948–73)  Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man           225
47  Alex Skovron (1948– )  Eclipse                                               229
48  Alan Wearne (1948– )   A World of Our Own                                    233
49  Alan Gould (1949– )  A U-Boat Morning, 1914                                  237
50  Jennifer Maiden (1949– )  Costume Jewellery                                  242
51  John Forbes (1950–98)  Europe: A Guide for Ken Searle                        247
52  Stephen Edgar (1951– )  Another Country                                      253
53  Kevin Hart (1954– )  The Last Day                                            257
54  Dorothy Porter (1954– )  Exuberance With Bloody Hands                        262
55  Jennifer Harrison (1955– )  Glass Harmonica                                  267
56  Judith Beveridge (1956– )  Bahadour                                          271
57  Anthony Lawrence (1957– )  The Drive                                         276
58  Philip Hodgins (1959–95)  Shooting the Dogs                                  281
59  John Kinsella (1963– )  Drowning in Wheat                                    286
60  Bronwyn Lea (1969– ) Girls' Night on Long Island                             290

---blurb

Featuring notable verses dating from the 19th century to contemporary times,
this unique compilation offers a superb introduction to Australia’s poetry
scene. With contributions by a prolific poet, this examination includes a
short essay following each poem that justifies its “classic” status. Offering
such distinct and renowned voices as Adam Lindsay Gordon, Banjo Paterson, and
John Kinsella, this collection is sure to be a treasured collection among
both poetry fans and English students.  


amitabha mukerjee (mukerjee [at-symbol] gmail) 2012 Aug 06