The Best Australian Poems 2011

by John Tranter

beautiful eyes,

  beautiful thighs. And yet, he still

  couldn’t rate with a tardis. Between anthropomorphic stars

  and unfamiliar history, a garden gnome quartet

  practises dub karaoke and pert variety singers

  live high in the grass. What price Russian formalism?

  How unusual can an everyday poem be? These things,

  wrestled with a knife and fork, remember Jameson.

  We take what crumbs that sparrows throw us

  and discuss the code of the West:

  common sense, Coalcliff, occasionally Coltrane.

  That night you had the illness poem real bad,

  coughed your guts up and took inclement gigabytes,

  washed down with lachrymose love-notes from Spicer.

  Hyperventilate now!, you said,

  I can’t find my postoffice. Was it a postoffice,

  or just a plain old pawnshop? Sometimes we just

  don’t get history, or history doesn’t get us. Say, haven’t I

  heard that before? Circularity breeds

  stove-top despair, the coffee always spills twice.

  Say hello to muffin-tops, good morning high-quality buns,

  these baked goods so leavenly cool.

  Oscar remonstrates with Shklovsky and finds a

  substitute in Ken Brown: what a gambler!

  And as we drive back south, we become

  part of the Great Tradition. Thanks Mum, thanks Dad,

  thanks Pam, Ken, Laurie, and the whole damn gang –

  Rae, Denis, Tom, Barbara, Micky, Kelen, Alan, Erica,

  Kate, Leigh, Sal, and Kurt. (Ella, make a note!)

  In the distance, someone waves, a touch sad.

  Athol don’t be blue, be a marine aid,

  and watch over the incessant bridal parties,

  still caught in baby’s breath and the last sure spray

  of the twentieth century.

  View

  Corey Wakeling

  It is worth knowing a fever at 38, so far.

  Catching the calls of the boss beckoning from streets

  all the way down. Sniff him out. Down some street, again.

  Yellow chairs and new fruit. Winter knows nothing.

  No crater

  for 39 degrees, and shifting, for want of sweat.

  Hvolsvelli, Britain. Marriage. Weddings and

  the listless absent. Too hot even to touch bride,

  even to touch groom. Better to be 39 and a half

  losing sleep if winter is to be left to the previous

  three months and we are to learn the trails of

  longer walks. Smoke like mist for months.

  No ash for days. Made it up from the blanket lounge.

  Ate found cheese at the left fire. Late Pound trees

  of the cleft liar. Date-mound knees draped with bereft

  attire. Good company to be having, fishermen far off

  enough that we eat their catch and hardly seen as they

  board towering blue waves. Success. Coast, off the coast.

  Off the coast, to the coast, to return by skeins. 40.

  To be 40. Lining the river with college canoes. Better

  yet, honest pumice soil. Sinking by the feet. 41. One

  more down. Eventually, it will be hot enough to start something.

  The Piano Inkpot

  Chris Wallace-Crabbe

  We’re scribbles at the margin of

  nothing: that is to say

  the edges of a sound-bite’s edge,

  altogether unreal as time

  itself. The self that isn’t there,

  but when we hear a playing of

  Chopin’s miraculous ballades

  we’re not so little, nor so mean,

  teetering on the fringe of space.

  Our clock has been turned over, and

  this music entertains the spheres,

  as Shakespeare or Donne would have said

  from quite another dispensation,

  yet both had a hunch that we could be

  only the tennis-balls of the stars.

  Missing Miss Moore

  John Watson

  Particularly adoring of wisteria

  Tiffany invented the system

  of steel cables over lawns

  from which their pendulous purples devolved

  like inverted tightrope walkers.

  Matching lead to glass, he would say

  Art is man’s nature; nature is God’s art

  which could have suited Miss Moore

  who might space it thus:

  Art is man’s nature; nature

  is God’s art

  from which beginning

  she would leap

  over skyscrapers of obstacles

  and fly down tangents

  into luminous observations

  and curious obdurate facts

  such as whether macaws shed tears

  or cranes stand on one leg

  longer than a child ever could.

  How we miss her and these facts

  carried out like a tray of glasses

  from the Scientific American

  to us at the poolside sunlit page.

  How we miss her frank primness,

  Since no one has replaced

  this princess of praxis

  this patron of exemplars

  this sterling silver

  scissors and paste adept who would, on discovering, say

  the prodigious word

  psilanthropism, show no fear

  and blithely proceed to orchestrate the idea

  of Christ as mere male. Orchestration

  for light chamber orchestra

  was her fortepiano

  and we relished her scale passages

  with their unexpected trills and tremolos and shakes.

  Who amongst us now

  can still remember

  those days of favourable Faber weather

  when Managing Director Captain Editor Eliot

  was flying the Union Jack

  and steering the ship amongst chthonic seas?

  Who amongst us remembering

  that paper and that font

  and that generous severity

  will not regret those dappled waters,

  the outrunning tide

  in which she proposed shallow sunlit sandwaves,

  little platforms, atolls and lily pads

  round which cephalopods

  (molluscs with tentacled heads)

  and ctenoids (fish with comb-like scales)

  happily lap or paddle

  amongst Japanese paper flowers?

  And just as scents cannot be recalled

  the way visual memory floods,

  and the overwhelming perfume of wisteria at dusk

  cannot be remembered,

  so no one has replaced or revived

  the acute licorice tinctures

  and memorable vanilla windows of Miss Moore.

  Happiness

  Meredith Wattison

  Yes, I walked from Room 3

  and down across the small bridge,

  saw fingerlings there,

  and along the harbour’s curve

  to its chrome edge,

  a woman is laughing and telling

  a story about her funny friends;

  everything that happens to them

  is so f
unny, and then the way

  they tell the story; it is so funny;

  I find her rather sad.

  She is manning her stall

  like a seagull, no one wants

  to buy what she has; she wants

  them to. She fusses over stall space.

  A Jungian bus trip descends,

  one of them my mother’s stand-in.

  I sit to write a letter, to organise

  my thoughts, to withdraw

  from contention, to close the practice.

  I mention the absinthe sea

  and liken the posting, the gift of it,

  the perversity of a message in a bottle

  being addressed to someone.

  A Tasmanian waterfall in the top

  right corner, twice. Surplus, five cent

  platypuses in my coin purse,

  bound for an international post,

  float like displacement.

  Freely and with the appropriate sense of space

  Alan Wearne

  Dreams: lived, dreamt and composed for Ken Bolton

  1.

  A loft on the US West Coast. Out of a window the sun sinks into the Pacific whilst Charles Bukowski is reading in Catullian mode. ‘Hey Catullus, you cocksucker!’ he emotes. I tell him he is a fraud but an amiable fraud. He replies that no one has ever spoken to him like that and thus he respects me.

  2.

  Peter Skrzynecki is digging in his backyard. It is an overcast day. His neighbour Judith Beveridge is looking over the fence. Peter glances up. ‘Hey Judith,’ he asks, ‘you dig?’ Thinking this some kind of innuendo Judith announces she is going to call the police. They never arrive. Peter keeps digging.

  3.

  I am in a Chinese restaurant with Geoff Page, Alan Gould, Les Murray and an Anglican bishop (in mufti) who has written a life of Harold Holt. Murray and I sit next to each other, both ordering a ‘Num Duck’. A lot of the conversation is about Harold Holt. I consider telling them about the weird sequence on the former PM written by my one time student Jason Gunst (which was nothing like the Holt I recall!) but instead tell them of Monash student Mick Cahill telling me in 1968 ‘Ahh they were on acid. I know some of that crowd and they were all on acid.’ Then Murray stands up, tells some kind of gag and does a strange little dance.

  4.

  Geoff Eggleston and Shelton Lea are elected Labor members of the Federal Parliament, and although both are deceased no one seems to mind. Geoff is content to be a humble backbencher but Shelley’s ambitions are stymied by the PM, who tells him that because of his rather colourful past he won’t obtain a ministry. Still, they are willing to offer him the post of Speaker. ‘That’ll do me, brother,’ says Shelley. The Liberal members are a bit bewildered by Speaker Lea though the Nationals are seduced by his rough hewn charm.

  5.

  A nightmare. I am on a plane, daylight outside. All is quiet, very quiet. As if in preparation for an exam every passenger is reading the same Bryce Courtenay novel.

  6.

  John Forbes, Gig Ryan and I are in what must be a thirties screwball comedy. John is pursuing Gig, Gig is replying with many witty lines (none of which I can remember) whilst I am in an Edward Everett Horton-style support. This dream is all mood.

  7. (for Jodie Magee)

  At the age I am now I have become a barrister. It is my first case and I am defending a man in Horsham who has allegedly murdered his wife. Robert Richter QC is prosecuting and this fills me with certain apprehension. I am also anxious about the questions I will ask and how I shall address the jury. At some stage I get into an innocuous conversation about Horsham with a rather dowdy female jury member, later thinking ‘I shouldn’t have done that, I hope no one finds out.’ But my biggest worry centres on combining the careers of poetry and the law. Then an answer to this problem arrives in the person of Robert Richter. ‘Welcome to the bar my learned friend,’ he says. ‘I’m glad you’re here because I’ve just started writing poetry and I’d love your opinion on what I’ve written.’

  8.

  I am in Lisbon. It is night and I am walking around with Alvaro de Campos who is raving in Scots accented English. Eventually I get to ask him ‘What’s it like being a heteronym?’ He replies that he isn’t a heteronym, the heteronyms are Albert Caeiro, Riccardo Reis and Fernando Pessoa, and that he, de Campos, invented them. Since he has spent time in Glasgow I ask him his opinion of Robbie Burns. I am told that Burns too is one of his heteronyms.

  9.

  The houses are a brilliant white, the sky an even more brilliant blue and Pi O is an exuberant village barber, forever singing. The villagers get him to compose songs for their weddings and he does though he won’t attend the services which are run by his arch-enemy the village priest. Neither of them will walk on the same side of the street. End of dream.

  10.

  The early seventies. Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti are invited to tour Down Under but forgo the experience. Then some very enterprising literary entrepreneur achieves what one newspaper describes as ‘What once was thought impossible’: bringing Dante Gabriel Rosetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne to Australia. Rosetti, a quiet, gloomy man suffers from jet lag the entire time leaving the running to his colleague. And Swinburne in his green velvet suit and big red afro is an enormous hit: Bob Adamson and Vicki Viidikas meet him at Sydney Airport, sceptics like Nigel Roberts and Laurie Duggan are won over and of course the Tranters have him round for dinner. Then in Melbourne things get even more frantic. A sell out at La Mama has a massive crowd clamouring well into Faraday Street. With a near carnival ensuing the police block off Faraday at Lygon and Drummond. Emboldened Swinburne climbs onto the back of a truck and gives forth with some of his greatest hits. ‘Come down and redeem us from virtue,/Our Lady of Pain,’ he declaims. And in spite of, or because of him sounding very much like bad imitation Dylan his audience is in positive uproar. The Pre-Raphaelite revival is on and Australian poetry will never be the same.

  11.

  The 1950s. The lamps are down low in a large London living room for a meeting of ‘The Room’ a collection of poets somewhat like ‘The Movement’ and ‘The Group’. In the garb and accoutrements of the day (pipes, ties, elbow patches etc) they are all very earnest young men except for one very earnest young woman. One of their number reads a poem which I gather is in praise of Mantovani, this being greeted with slow smiles. Then another tells the young woman that he is going to make a risqué comment. She nods and although I don’t quite hear the comment I see her smiling. How young and earnest they are!

  12

  The mid seventies. Sir John Suckling and the Earl of Rochester are both hip high school teachers: Suckling laid back in Phys. Ed and Rochester perpetually stoned in Art. Rochester gets upbraided by the principal for making a joke about Suckling’s surname which has resulted in the Phys. Ed teacher being called Mr Blowjob throughout the school. Suckling though takes a ‘Yeah man well whatever …’ attitude. Rochester also gets into a certain trouble by taking nude photos of Year 12 girls and boys. A decade or so later dying of AIDS he is received into the evangelical outreaches of Christendom by the Rev. Fred Nile. Two decades on from that his photos mysteriously appear on the Web.

  13.

  George Herbert is a well meaning sixties suburban vicar who runs a Youth Fellowship following Sunday Evensong. Contemporary folk music is played and although this sometimes bewilders Rev. Herbert he still tries enjoying it. The kids love him and call him Herbie. When a smart alec interloper tries interrupting the vicar with stand up comedy lines à la Bob Newhart or Shelley Berman the kids become quite vehement: ‘You leave Herbie alone!’

  14.

  Ivor Indyk and I are taking Alexander Pope on a tour of the Sydney Writers’ Festival, which in this case is a kind of sideshow alley. Pop
e is smallish, though not the misshapen midget I’ve read about and this slightly bewilders me. Nevertheless I have a feeling of trust about the man, if not the situation as the Sydney Writers’ Festival have not invited Pope and thus he is our special, secret guest. My apprehension remains and increases as I try recalling, but can’t, Pope quotations that I could recite to the great man. When Pope is distracted by what appears to be a poetry slam in a large tent (and this too is an embarrassment) I confide my anxieties to Ivor who reassures me that Pope hasn’t come all this way in time and space just to hear his own words, and as for poetry slams well the author of ‘The Dunciad’ can accommodate anything! And it seems he can. Coming back from the slam tent Pope has a large grin, ear-to-ear.

  Poolside Reflections

  Ron Wilkins

  The fact ... [the philosophers] constantly disagree with each other is sufficient proof that they do not know the truth about anything.

  —DESIDERIUS ERASMUS, The Praise of Folly (1509)

  Imagine my astonishment

  to find a grey nurse shark

  at least twenty kilometres from the sea

  in my backyard swimming pool.

  Too big to do laps, strictly speaking.

  it circled while I looked on in fascination,

  its dorsal fin parting the air

  like the keel of a capsized boat

  trapped in some endless eddy, which,

  it struck me, could be a symbol of predestination –

  of God’s immutable and infallible power

  guiding all things by necessity,

  so that our will is in bondage to him

  as Martin Luther expounded

  in De Servo Arbitrio.

  Except there was no eddy,

  only a circular flow of water

  drawn by the shark’s own movement,

  which, I reflected, could well be a symbol

  of freedom of the will,