Two of Andrew’s literary reviews are reproduced on this page:
1. “Abiding Things”
2. “Our Culloden Come: The Poetry of Peter Kocan”
Abiding Things
by Andrew Lansdown
Standing with Friends, by Peter Kocan; William Heinemann Australia, 1992.
Hand to Hand: A Garnering, by William Hart-Smith; Butterfly Books, 1991.
William Hart-Smith and Peter Kocan are two Australian poets I greatly admire. Yet how different they are! Hart-Smith is experimental in form, while Kocan is traditional. Hart-Smith is joyful in mood, while Kocan is sombre. Hart-Smith takes mother nature as his principal subject, while Kocan takes human nature. Hart-Smith is imagistic in style, while Kocan is epigrammatic. Such diversity is the glory of poetry!
Hand to Hand: A Garnering is a major work by and about William Hart-Smith, edited by Barbara Petrie. It is an essential volume for anyone interested in the work of this important poet.
Hand to Hand contains a generous 423 pages which are divided into eight sections. The first section, “A GARNERING”, is a collection of over 170 poems selected and arranged by Hart-Smith himself before his death in April 1990. The second section, “UNCOLLECTED POEMS”, comprises almost 100 poems selected by Joan Dale from Hart-Smith’s files after his death. (Hart-Smith spent the last years of his life living in New Zealand with Dale, his life-long friend.) The third section, “UNDATED POEMS”, contains over 20 poems given to Dale by Hart-Smith in their younger years. Apart from a few poems in the first section selected by Hart-Smith, the poems in this volume have not been published in book form before, and some have not been previously published in any form at all. They cover the poet’s entire writing life, from 1934 to 1989.
The remaining sections of Hand to Hand contain interesting and informative observations about Hart-Smith and his work by such noteworthy writers as Hal Colebatch, Roland Robinson, Philip Salom, Douglas Stewart and Vivian Smith, and include “ESSAYS & POEMS IN TRIBUTE”, “INTERVIEWS”, “CRITICAL ARTICLES”, and a “BIBLIOGRAPHY”.
The poems in Hand to Hand, as in most of Hart-Smith’s collections, are uneven in quality. But while the bad poems are not so bad, the good poems are very good indeed.
As one would expect from Hart-Smith, his imagery is exact and exhilarating. Sprinklers become “albino/ peacocks showing off their tails”. Jellyfish become “bells in the sea/ adrift from the towers/ of drowned carillions”. Paperbark trees “standing in isolated groups” in a cleared paddock become “conspirators planning revolution,/ heads together/ arms on each other’s shoulders”. Rain at the end of a drought becomes “Footprints of the Spirit Dog”. The moon slipping in and out of the clouds becomes “a pearl shell/ traded across the land/ silently passed/ from hand to hand.”
Some of Hart-Smith’s poems exist solely for the sake of the image, as with “Fly-Catcher”:
The way the Fly-catcher
darts from the Flame-tree in the carpark
to snatch a fly
close to my earreminds me of my mother
crocheting
In other poems the imagery serves to further the mood and theme, as in the Maori poem, “Love Poem” (a poem which also demonstrates the poet’s considerable skill in the use of dramatic monologue):
I am caught like a fish
in the net of my longing,like a Kahawai
that takes the lure behind a canoe.My love is as beautiful
as the iridescentbelly of a dolphin
newly pulled from the sea.
While visual imagery predominates, Hart-Smith’s poems also contain many remarkable auditory images. “Kookaburras - Kalamunda” is a fine example of both auditory imagery and extended metaphor:
From a machine-gun nest
in a gum-tree
at the edge of the escarpmentsix guns opened fire at once
belts chattering
barrels running red hotfollowing an exploratory burst
a chuckle of tracers
sent downhill by a wakeful sentryat something he saw
moving
up the slope in the twilight
among the boulders of red granite
In the closing stanza of “Autumn, Port Hills” Hart-Smith states:
I think it possible that Mother
Nature dreams in favourite images.
Thus one thing likes to represent another.
This tercet summarises Hart-Smith’s approach to poetry. He himself dreams in favourite images and delights to represent one thing in terms of another.
Max Richards, in his essay in the second half of the book, states: “Hart-Smith is one of those poets whose work awakens the reader to a responsive feeling of creativity. You feel that keeping eyes open, heart open and ear alert for nuance of image and cadence, will lead to poems of your own experience, vision, voice.” Without doubt, Hart-Smith’s poetry charges the familiar with wonder, and encourages the reader to see—and to keep on seeing—the world in a new and joyful light.
If Hart-Smith’s strength lies in images, Kocan’s lies in ideas. On one level, Standing with Friends is a defence of ideas and values that seem to be fading from the world.
In the title poem, Kocan regrets that “We limit friendship to the here and now”, and directs us to “think of the uncounted thousands” in history
“Who brought the world along the single track/ Which led to where we now stand looking back”:
They were the rulers who upheld the good,
The fighters who defended what they could,
The scholars who kept knowledge half-alive,
All those who had the courage and the drive
To do their duty as they understood.And many more whose contribution lay
In simply being human in their day,
Who probably had little cause to think
Their ordinary lives would be the link
To us who live a thousand years away.
Stylistically, “Standing with Friends” is typical of most of the poems in the collection. The diction is simple and precise. The lines are measured—often employing an iambic meter, and iambic pentameter at that. The rhymes are regular, although in some poems near or slant rhyme (e.g., hour-pure, lost-vast, dark-black) is used with great effect. The emotion is controlled and the mood subdued.
Thematically, “Standing with Friends” is also typical of the other poems. The themes Kocan explores include the reality of good and evil, the value of ordinary people and acts, the unity of past and present, the beauty of courage and constancy, the necessity of duty and decency.
It is pleasing to observe how Kocan can take the smallest detail and invest it with the largest significance. In “A Baby Crying”, for example, he describes a newborn infant’s seemingly causeless squall, then notes:
This small philippic from the cradle hurled
Is baby’s estimation of the world.And baby’s wise to howl it at the start,
Considering how soon the years impart
a dire sense of being, in the main,
Too deeply implicated to complain.
In “The Puppy”, Kocan describes how a mistreated pup responds gratefully to his affection, then concludes:
And for a moment it can seem
As if I had indeed been called
To heal the sorrows and redeem
The vast unkindness of the world.
In “To a Woman reading The Wind in the Willows” he defends “escapist” literature, asking sympathetically:
What fitter story could a grown-up find
Than one which makes uncomplicated sense
Of things like being brave and being kind,
Of virtues so important and immense?
Kocan constantly challenges the smug perceptions of our age. In “The Imperialists” he notes that the “Sahibs and Bwanas” built up their empires “often with no more lethal tools/ Than backbone and snobbery and gin.” This is in marked contrast to the imperialists of the twentieth century. Indeed,
The piled bodies of our stewardship
Might well suggest we’re deeper in the slime
(And a good deal handier with the whip).
This suggestion is validated in “Beijing Massacre”, where Kocan commemorates the hundreds of students who were massacred in 1989 by the People’s Army because they staged a sit-in for democracy in communist China. Kocan explores why it is that the massacre caused such distress in the West, given that other immensely greater atrocities by communist governments have been routinely overlooked or excused. The answer, the poet suggests, is that the communists made the mistake of allowing the Western media to record the event, thereby giving the Western public and the media itself “no option but to disapprove”. Kocan states with bitter irony,
If only they had had the sense to kill
More tidily, and in the proper place,
Then we in fairness would be lauding still
Their Communism-with-a-human-face.
Kocan’s poetry is epigrammatic in impact, and as a consequence one is tempted to quote couplet after couplet and quatrain after quatrain. Many poems in Standing with Friends are imbued with moral and poetic beauty.
Unlike Hart-Smith’s, Kocan’s book could hardly be called joyful. It is sombre, often sad, and sometimes despairing. Yet it is also strangely uplifting. For his insights are striking, his sentiments just, and his sympathies genuine.
Despite their different subjects, themes and styles, Hart-Smith and Kocan have this in common: they both cherish simple, lovely, abiding things in poetry that is simple, lovely and abiding.
Copyright © Andrew Lansdown
from Abiding Things: poems, stories essays
Andrew Lansdown
Studio (Albury), 1996
ISBN 0-646-28959-4
“Abiding Things” has also been published in the following magazines:
1. Quadrant, No.299, Vol.XXXVII, No.9, September 1993
2. Studio, No.57, Summer 1994/1995
Our Culloden Come: The Poetry of Peter Kocan
Freedom to Breathe by Peter Kocan; Angus & Robertson, 1985
by Andrew Lansdown
Peter Kocan was detained for fifteen years in institutions for the criminally insane. His first collection of poetry, The other side of the fence (University of Queensland Press, 1975), chronicled his experiences as an inmate of Morisset.
Freedom To Breathe also contains several poems detailing his institutional experiences.
He speaks of ‘The Mongoloid Boy’s Mother’ who came ‘To sit with him as though/ He really was in that bent frame’. In ‘The Beauty’, he speaks of a ‘little group/ Of retard women’ among whom one young beauty seems out of place:
The first time I didn’t understand:
I just saw her wandering behind
The hags, and then pausing absently,
Her mind elsewhere; and when she turned to me
A vague smile, a blue-eyed open glance,
I took it for serene intelligence
Until the nurse came scowling back
To hurry the moron with a kick.
He speaks of ‘Retards Out Walking’, ‘Each one the Druid/ Of his own mystery’. In ‘Post Mortem’ he begins: ‘This is the tree he did it from,/ The bough still weighted with it …’ In ‘Cecil’ he describes how, while an inmate died coughing blood from ‘the collapsing bin/ Of his ribs’,
We stood about,
Full of easy air,
And no way to give him
The breath we had to spare.
In ‘Fang and Claw’, Kocan indulges in a moment of black humour. He notes how it used to anger him the way people driving by Morisset would gawk at the inmates as if they were exotic zoo creatures:
Now I’m keen to see one
Leave his car and stroll,
All stupid grin, up to the fence
And poke a finger in
Near Billy Prendergast.
There isn’t any sign
Warning that he bites!
In ‘On an Invitation to Revisit Morisset’, he asks, ‘Why go back?’, and concludes:
So much would be the same, and yet
The place I lived in isn’t there.
I took it with me when I left:
It fitted in a tiny bag
Of the mind, but took years to pack.
Kocan does not whinge or seek pity in his prison poetry. He records facts and remembers fates with insight, integrity and compassion. Nor does he dwell overly on the past. By page eleven, he writes in ‘Goodbye to Morisset’:
I am leaving the old shaft,
The old workings of a theme,
To blink in daylight and find
Fresh material to sift.
The rest of the book is devoted to the new themes and concerns he has sifted from his post-institutional life.
Apple trees, moths, dogs, tussock grass, obsolete trains, cricket, cemeteries, suicides, mass murders, street protests, politics, mutineers, Irish harpers, Jacobites, Scottish, Roman, Grecian and American history: these are some of the subjects of Kocan’s poetry—subjects through which he explores themes relating to love, loneliness, freedom, goodness, and courage.
A recurring theme in Kocan’s work is courage in the face of despair—courage to fight for what is right even though it is too late to win the battle. In ‘Elite’, he celebrates ‘a purity of will/ That finds apotheosis in defeat.’ In ‘Murdoch MacLeod’, he admires the courage of a fifteen-year-old Inverness schoolboy who runs to join his doomed kinsmen at the battle of Culloden. In ‘Exemplars’, he holds up the Jacobites as an example of bravery
’For us in our time
Who can already see
Our Culloden come.
In ‘Jacobites’, he claims that most poets are ‘the Jacobite kind’: ‘We understand defeat makes better songs,/ And our trade is mostly brooding on ancient wrongs’. In ‘Lost Causes’, he states:
I think of nothing now
But lost causes, and how
Many preferred to fall
Fighting, for good or ill.
By far the most moving poem extolling and exhorting courage is ‘To My Godchild, Chloe’, the last two stanzas of which read:
Now the darkness gathers fresh
In empires of the lie and lash
Our candle’s guttering away
To outcomes we cannot see.
You are already summoned
To the battles of the mind
And hard experience will show
Past any word I offer now.
I have my own sins to face
Of folly and of cowardice,
But yet I say to choose your sides
Without measuring the odds;
As did Plataea, little town,
That sent its handful to join
Those reckless Athenians
Hurrying to Marathon.
In Freedom To Breathe, Kocan displays the same reckless courage he praises in men and women of old. Without measuring the odds, he challenges many of the articles of faith so cherished by the powerful, liberal-left intelligentsia.
He is implacably opposed to the abandonment of traditional values and verities. He enunciates his concern in the concluding stanzas of ‘AIDS, among other things’:
We acquiesce to birth-in-bottles now,
Dissimulate on every law we knew
Was solemn in the covenants we had
With whatever we call Nature or God,
Yet we never think to reap what we sow.
The ills multiply as we unlearn
That ancient wise humility of men
Who saw, beyond the wreckage of taboos,
Despair and madness, hatred and disease—
The promised payment in the promised coin.
In ‘The Treason of the Women’, he laments the hatred and treachery embodied in much feminist thought and behaviour:
With all the enemies we had
We knew to guard both front and back.
Who’d have dreamt we had to take
Precautions at our side?
In ‘Protest’, he observes a group of homosexuals wearing pink tringles in the pretence that they are persecuted like those homosexuals imprisoned in Nazi Germany. He notes wryly, ‘I recognise/ What perversion truly is’, and concludes:
… In safe Macquarie Street
The spoiled children rage and pout,
Thieve indignation from a tomb
To make-believe at martyrdom.
In ‘An Anniversary’, he examines the fall of Saigon, noting the courage of several South Vietnamese army divisions in the face of the communist invading army. Although western ‘treachery had sold the pass’, although ‘there was nothing left to save’, the soldiers—from ‘corrupt officer’ to ‘conscripted ploughboy’—fought on, ‘Grown sudden to heroic size’. Kocan is probably right when he says:
It strikes me I may be the only poet
In the entire western world who’ll write
Even one grudging stanza of lament
He’d have appear publicly in print.
Freedom To Breathe, is a moving and courageous book. One hopes it will not be Kocan’s undoing. In this enlightened age, the editor’s rejection and the reviewer’s silence can suffocate a poet as surely as the torturer’s wet towel or the tyrant’s gas chamber.
Copyright © Andrew Lansdown
“Our Culloden Come” was first published (under the title, “Peter Kocan’s Poetry”) in Quadrant, March 1987