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.
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.
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.
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.]
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.
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.
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.