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Ken Bolton reviews
Selected Poems by James Gleeson (A&R, 14.95) and The Distribution of Voice by Martin Harrison (University of Queensland Press)
This review was first published in Australian Book Review in 1993. It is
1,000 words
or about 4 printed pages long
An old modernist saw (from the visual arts) has it that kitsch imitates the artistic ‘effect’ and that by contrast, art, real art, seeks to distil and offer — to “imitate” is the phrase — the ‘means’ of art. Some postmodern practice allows the emphasis on effect — but the effect will tend to be quoted, or to be offered, with all its (kitsch) power, at some distance, with a degree of detachment: the ‘actual’ power will be intended perhaps metaphorically, or as spectacle, or as expressionism-caught-in-the-act, ironized perhaps.
These later dispensations of postmodernism don’t seem to me to apply to James Gleeson’s surrealist poems (1938–1942) gathered here as his A & R volume of Selected Poems. The modernist censure, though, does apply.
The poems are reminiscent of Gleeson’s Daliesque paintings — and they were originally a part of them, incoporated onto the canvases. They are not usually as interesting as the paintings — within which they mostly provide a tenuous structure for the linking of striking (powerful) images and high, sarcastically sepulchral diction — in non-logical, non syntactical chains.
The connections within the poems are of a more second-order type — those of opposition, of parallel: a fading in and out to ‘scenes’ of localized (visual/ rhetorical) coherence, say. Or the process can be one of extension, prolongation, intensification: sort of “and then” and “even more” and “and then this!” — towards doleful crescendo. Never lyrical or discursive proposition.
Of course I am fulminating here, as a writer of different persuasion. Many of the poems — perhaps most — do have propositions to make — but these have to be tediously translated back from the imagery — decoded — in a process that is not too hard (the propositions are clichés of existential terror and doom and fall out easily enough) but you have to switch off from the so-called power of the images and language and transpose them into their equivalences. Like doing a too, too easy jigsaw.
He divides his arm and breast
among the friends of his wound,
bringing to each, a measurement of corrosion.
Under his armpit the spiders twitch
in the fires of a naked bulb
(p. 73)
The same poem, though, (‘To the Institute for the Molestation of Variants from the Normal’) starts out in relatively more expository fashion. —
In the stream of the seismic night-time
when the rage of the soul
screams its trajectory across the naked canyons
where I must make a killing from the centre,
sometimes I say, — that murder,
that murder was actual but in my head.
Who heard, you say, the red voice added to the rain?
None; that formal guard of black hats on my eye
at worst is some thick sickness of my skull
(p. 72)
The value of the poems seems to me to be chiefly historical. They give something of the willed ambience — and of the intended effects — of much of the painting of their time: of Gleeson’s work, but also Tucker’s, Hester’s, James Cant’s and of less well known artists’. Like these poems many of those paintings signal their punch, and announce an intended power greater than they achieve.
Martin Harrison’s poems do more or less achieve their effect — which is, every time, one of wonderment drawn from a communion with, or a kind of witnessed coalescence of, a multi-facetted ‘ordinary world’. It’s romantic nature poetry: birds, trees and bushes figure heavily, and sound and light. And the unity, the poet’s insertion as part of the picture, comes as a benediction — that the poet satisfyingly pronounces on himself — of course with immanent nature’s urging — near the end of the poem and thus providing resolution.
The gradual and extended build-up of the poems is one of their chief pleasures — apart from the predictability of trajectory. One sighs, turns the page and reads on. The poems are marred by effects of great preciosity. (Obviously these are part of Harrison’s agenda or conception of the ‘poetic’. The ‘narrow road’, here, to poetry, is very refined.) Main clauses of stanzas have long, purl and plain lines of dependent descriptive phrases and clauses, each sensitively unlikely. If the reader can remember at their end what they were meant to pertain to, the idea (I guess) is to gasp and applaud. Though mine was to groan — see the last four stanzas of ‘Self-Portrait with Video Images of Hunting’. The language itself is sometimes rather hilarious: some birds in one poem are “vertically alarmed”, the sky elsewhere is “bird-vacated”. “True, such sense was widowed rain”, and the like. True for you, maybe, as the Irish say. ‘Two Poems with Totemic Moments’ (which idea is pretty much at the core of Harrison’s endeavour) has some dreadful rhymes: here are some birds —
Having flown so many miles
Through April’s ghost-laden light
Out of the drought’s edge,
Escaping that salty barrier
Between good and bad lands,
Murky water low in farm dams.
Here, shiningly sure-footed,
The effect is turbulence,
Blueness, snowy prescience,
As they land, scavaging visitants,
pin-pointing the mallee red-gum’s
Solitary crimson nebulas
Near the shed.
(p. 32)
It shows, too, Harrison’s regular inability to posit any thing without offering an epithet or two for company and a clause or phrase of ornamentally descriptive accompaniment. Which is to the point — that everything should be like something else, and allocated a process and a function, ensures its being sutured into place as part of a massed choir of order and onement.
There are poems within the collection, free of Harrison’s mannerisms, and more thoughtful than picturesque in their relation to his theme, that one would have to say are impressive. The theme itself is to me, as readers will have gathered, antipathetic.
http://april.edu.au/bolton-k/glee-harr.shtml