"My whole life an addiction to country, falling forever for places"

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 2^nd 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.  

‘Margaret River Sestets’ is another powerful exploration of place by Mark Tredinnick and can be viewed in full at http://www.literaturewales.org/cipc/i/141512

By the Estuary

Jonathan Bate writes that “[a] Romantic poem may be regarded as a model of a certain kind of being and of dwelling… the poem itself is an image of ecological wholeness which may grant to the attentive and receptive reader a sense of being-at-home-in-the-world” (2000, p109). In this sense Mark Miller’s poetry could be described as post-Romantic or a reconfiguration of Romanticism. Within his poetry Miller describes the natural world in such a way that the people who are featured in his poems are embedded in their surroundings. An example of this is his poem ‘By the Estuary’, a poem in four parts, where Miller paints images of the activity of one day, from morning till night: “Making the most of the failing light, / a flurry of gulls / scatters like flecks of silver / late children shriek and dive / from the pier into the herringed tide, / down into the lathing currents / before scurring home / with the salt-tang still on their skin /…” (2010). Within this poem the birds, a dead seadragon, moored fishing boats, swimming children and fruit bats are all described in such a way that they all, the human and nonhuman elements, appear natural and ingrained into that place. The majority of Miller’s poetry displays this ‘ecological wholeness’ that Bate discusses, exploring the majesty of life, both human and nonhuman, along the Shoalhaven River. As Mark Miller stated in an interview, “[a] lot of my poems are about place, and although they… don’t have that overtly environmental, or conservation message to them, it’s there inherently or implied through the impact of the environment on me and on my sensibilities” (2012, pers. comm. 1 June). This comment by Miller demonstrates his mission to create a sense of ‘dwelling’ within his poetry, where the reader may take away lessons of preservation through an experience of the majesty of nature, as Miller views it. 

You can buy Mark Miller's Conversing with Stones at http://books.google.com.au/books/about/Conversing_with_Stones.html?id=twpgAAAACAAJ&redir_esc=y

One Long Summer Afternoon

I have been busy working on my honours thesis the last couple of weeks, so much so that I haven't been able to find any inspiration for writing poetry. So, I have instead been reading. I thought I should share some readings of poetry with you.

David Tacey believes that “…good poetry (contemporary and traditional), is written from a spiritual perspective, and is often a celebration of the spirit of life, society and experience” (2004, p55). For Tacey literary theory has for too long practised secular readings of poetry, neglecting and sometimes refusing to acknowledge the spiritual undertone of much poetry, and it is this spirituality that Tacey believes attracts general readers to poetry (2004). In this sense, Tacey argues that literary critics have been interpreting poetry in a way that opposes a general reader’s interpretation. Tacey views the Australian natural landscape as a key source of spiritual reverence in the twenty-first century stating, “…in Australia, the country of reversals… the celestial realm appears to be ‘below’ us, in the earth itself, in the soil, rocks and plants of this ancient land” (2000, p94). By this premise place-poetry in Australia must be spiritual, displaying a level of intimacy between the poet, speaker, reader and the natural subject of the poetry. One example of such a poem is Australian poet Bruce Beaver’s poem ‘One Long Summer Afternoon’. It is set in Bundanoon, in the Southern Highlands and is aesthetically motivated, describing the visual appeal of lilacs: “…The lilac / lulled me away from dusty heat / to scenes as distant as another / life…” (Beaver 1991, p250). Beaver’s poem is transcendental in that the lilac transports the speaker to another space, where the speaker “…hovered half-in half-out of / myself…” (1991, p250). The representations of nature within Beaver’s poem are used as a metaphor for the speaker’s emotional experience of 'the country'. These emotions are linked to the place, but remain human-centred. The speaker is in awe of the space but is not concerned with the human impact on that space as the speaker drives past cow and sheep farms. Although the speaker does not openly acknowledge, for example, the devastation that hard-hooved cattle may have on the Australian earth does that mean that there cannot be a message of preservation taken from the poem? Jonathan Bate writes that “[i]f mortals dwell in that they save the earth and if poetry is the original admission of dwelling, then poetry is the place where we save the earth” (2000, p283). For Bate place-poetry does benefit the natural place that it engages with, through a connection of the heart with place, and by modelling relationships of praise, spirituality and respect for the natural environment. It is my contention that messages of dwelling are conveyed through recognition of a level of spirituality, or the sacredness of nature, within the poetry. In this sense Beaver's poem, where the speaker is in awe of the lilac flower and surrounding nature of Bundanoon, carries in it an underlying message of preservation. In this time of increasing environmental crisis messages of sustainable living are important for the continuum of species of flora and fauna that may be under threat from climate change and various agricultural, mining and development practices.