Congratulations Mark Tredinnick for winning
the 2012 Cardiff International Poetry Prize. The ‘Margaret River Sestets’ is
another example of Tredinnick’s poetic ability.
The word ‘sestets’ in the title suggests that
the poem will be sophisticated; few people write sestets (six lined stanzas).
Juxtaposing this is the informal, conversational voice that tells of place,
flora, fauna and broken relationships. I will get back to the juxtapositions
within this poem shortly. The poem begins:
There’s a continent between us
now, taut
with distance…
The continental distance, with one person on
the east coast and one on the west, and their relationship separation is
symbolised by the long line length. The expansive lines allow Tredinnick room
to explore the separation and the place of Margaret River. As well as, play
with clichés like the continental distance, lost love and the Romantic ideal of
the poet as at one with nature:
The
grasses thrum like a squadron of spitfires, a sound so palpable
I wait for
it to come in a cloud across the early summer pastures,
but nothing’s troubling them except a little light weather
and nothing’s bothering the grey blueblood
mare, either
or the purple-hooded parrot at its post-pastoral repose, but me.
In these lines Tredinnick captures the sound
and busyness of nature, positioning the speaker in the poem as disturbing
nature.
Without Tredinnick’s clever mastering of
grammar the long lines would not flow as they do:
…Because of the vines, I guess,
and the
olives, the lavender and the limestone and the languid yellow light, they tell
you it’s like Provence here,
but that
would ignore the jarrah and the marri, the black roos and the butcher birds,
the wattlebirds and white-faced herons, the
nasal mutter
of the
honeyeaters, the Australian tripthongs of the frogs in the pond, nights,
the black ducks in their black thongs, the
throngs of roadside lizards.
Here is a second example of Tredinnick’s use
of juxtaposition as he compares Margaret River in Australia with Provence in
France. Though the geography and weather of these two regions may be similar,
the flora and fauna in Margaret River is overtly Australian and Tredinnick
captures this perfectly. This long sentence describes the colour, texture and
sound of the place, representing place in the word choice, alliteration and
pace. The word ‘limestone’ connotes a roughness which contrasts with the
softness of ‘lavender’ and smoothness of the ‘olives’. Alliteration is used to
capture the sound of the bush where sounds revibrate through the place, for
example in the ‘r’ in ‘yarrah’, ‘marri’, ‘roo’ and ‘bird’. Finally,
onomatopoeic words such as ‘tripthong’ are perfectly placed to, again, suggest
the sound of the place. The alliteration helps to quicken the pace of a
grouping of words, making this place appear vibrant.
Sound is important to Tredinnick as he
responds to place, writing poetry which is rooted in an experience of a
particular place. As Tredinnick stated in an interview on the 2nd of
July 2012:
…if we are not attending to rhythm structures,
if we are just focusing on content than we are going to miss half of the
subject that we are concerned with… we have to write more with our ear and less
entirely with our brain. I think that’s always, if not more important, when
trying to write / listen to ideas about country, because if you miss the jazz
of the place then you are playing some other goddamn tune because we’ve got a
bunch of ideas in our head, we are actually not listening, we are projecting
onto it.
Here Tredinnick articulates just how important
sound and musicality are to him when writing of place.
I have suggested that the sophisticated
architecture of the poem contrasts with the relaxed narrative voice, however
there is also a philosophical element to Tredinnick’s poem. This can be seen in the phrase “…post-pastoral
repose…”. John Kinsella argues that all Australian poetry can be “…defined
through or against pastoral models… models have not imposed themselves well on
Australian cultures and landscapes, and… variations on a form are always
outcomes of it” (2008, p131). For Kinsella all poetry in Australia must be seen
as a variation of pastoralism, and within the Australian context the variation
must be titled antipastoral. This is due to the harsh and dry qualities of the
Australian landscape, combined with the underlying dispossession that is behind
every pastoral pursuit, as Kinsella states, “…the Australian landscape is not
the European… it is really the storm that belongs[,] Australia is a place of
extremes[, f]urthermore, a sense of belonging is marred by guilt, that the
European rural is laid over the Aboriginal land…” (1996, p37). Brendan Ryan
disagrees with Kinsella’s antipastoralism, stating, “…to suggest that traditional pastoral idylls are no longer
possible in Australia, denies the possibility of change and adaptation
within the pastoral form” (2001, p26).
The tranquillity of Tredinnick’s post-pastoralism appears to be closer to
Ryan’s understanding of an Australian pastoralism. However, within this poem
the Arcadian pastoral of Australia is disturbed by human presence. The line “…the
trees we don’t call blackboys anymore hang out…” suggests that the persona is
non-Indigenous. In this sense perhaps Tredinnick’s post-pastoral is similar to
Kinsella’s anti-pastoralism. The non-Indigenous human presence is always going
to exist in this place now, and so therefore the Arcadia will always be
disturbed.
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