Peter Goldsworthy’s poems tackle timeless human themes

Peter Goldsworthy may be best known for his novels but his poems, full of joy and humour, are equally rewarding.

Peter Goldsworthy has an acute intolerance of cultural pretensions.

In the regional town where I live almost no one reads wonderful contemporary Australian poets such as Jennifer Maiden, Ali Cobby Eckermann, or even Les Murray for that matter. Mention poetry and, at a pinch, the local punters might recall the bloke named after the bluegrass instrument. Or perhaps TS Eliot, who probably still looms as a ghoul-like figure laying waste to their school years with his grave tone and dark suit.

That’s a shame, of course, for apart from the purely sensory pleasures poetry affords us — the feel of words on the tongue, the pattern of sound and rhythm in our ears — it places us in an unusually transparent relationship to the very language with which our culture is made.

This is partly to do with a simple fact of ­poetry’s modus operandi, that of lines which terminate through the poet’s intervention rather than because they have come to the right hand side of the page. Thus the very act of composition can often seem more deliberate and revealing than in prose.

The work of the much lauded South Australian writer Peter Goldsworthy is a case in point. For although his novels and short stories have been widely read, studied and much loved over many decades, it is perhaps in the personal interrogations of his lean poems that we see him grappling with the problems of self-expression in the most potent manner.

On the one hand there is his unabashed joy in living and the buoyant humour that comes from it. On the other, there is the tension between what he feels he is and isn’t allowed to say. This second problem, a complex motif of our era and recently a serious debating point in our political sphere under the former Abbott government, looms as both a strength and a sticking point in The Rise of the Machines, Goldsworthy’s first collection of new verse this century.

In this context the first poem in the collection, Australia, is worth looking at closely. Essentially a lighthearted spoof, the title nevertheless promises national commentary of one sort or another, as well as having the traction of lineage. Thus it begins with the aerial perspective of AD Hope’s poem of the same name. This time, however, we are looking not just at Australia but at the whole planet, as if from space.

The poem begins: ‘‘Our Earthern Dish is seven parts water, / one part China, and a tiny bit japanned’’, before listing the joys of the earth as an object of consumption: ‘‘Give me a lever large enough — / a cosmic fork or skewer — and I would move it / to a table: its sherbert fizz of surf, / the creamy ice-cones of its toothy alps, / the spice of islands dotted here and there / like cloves jammed in an onion.’’

This reads like a playfully written Arcimboldo portrait of our biosphere, but it is also a forked metaphor, given our obsession with foodie TV and the unnerving extremes of weather we are experiencing as a result of our modes of consumption. So, a white middle-class male records his pleasure in ogling, then devouring, the earth. Mmm, that’s kind of grotesque, right? Or, at the very least, thought provoking. It is often the case with Goldsworthy that we receive a mental picture crafted with sensory exactness while simultaneously wondering whether we like what we see.

This first poem is perhaps worth continuing with as a way of discussing such tensions within the book. It goes on: ‘‘Turning / this common dish as slowly as a day, / I’d sample the sweet-and-sour river deltas, / the swamps about its world wide waist, / all of which smell fishy. As do many maps / of Tasmania, most of them in other places: / forest fuzz itchy with green pubic life.’’ This is where Goldsworthy the provocateur really begins to, in his language, mess with my head. Because of the delicate satirical insight of which his poetry is capable, one is prone to give him the benefit of the doubt, but surely in this instance that old-school sexual joke about the ‘‘map of Tassie’’ cannot be read as anything other than a little puerile. The fact that it comes without direct reflection or contextualisation, and right after the food metaphor has been mixed with a terribly hackneyed bodily one, doesn’t help either.

Quite apart from what Goldsworthy may be trying to tell us here about himself or the rules he might be breaking, the tonal shift the poem makes also scrambles its effect. From the initial hyper-visual allegory we find our mental survey confused by the awkward joke. When the poem then follows the trajectory of Hope’s poem to end by shifting tone again to an eco-nostalgia for Australia, this reader for one finds it hard to make the journey: ‘‘It’s thousand mile creek tastes a tad too salty, / its muddy waters barely moving, just / moving enough to stir a homesick heart’’.

Thus it goes in this collection. For every crisp image and sharp jibe — the take-down in Cuckoo in the Straw of the way babies are depicted in Renaissance paintings is both funny and anatomically true — there comes a disquieting interrogation of the poet’s ‘‘darkest attitudes’’, which he seems to be confessing and enjoying at the same time. The collection has many poem sequences, three lengthy ones, that all, in their way, explore the topicality of irreverence in a politically correct era. Sex, poetry, medical terminology (Goldsworthy is a doctor) are all documented as symptomatic sites.

For me, however, some of the best poems here are those written in a vulnerable voice of hapless comedy rather than rebellious insouciant fun. One of the most enjoyable is Dog Day, a light portrait of the poet’s dog Walter Mitty and his rather flappable master: ‘‘I sit and work, you sit and watch’’. This poem is Betjeman-esque, coming as it does from fond and intelligent affection, which any dog lover might enjoy. ‘‘Here you are, dog tired / at day’s end, lying self- / toppled on your side, / overspilling your basket / like a dog-pie in a dish, / yet still alert, both eyes / migrated onto the up-side / of your face, flounder fashion / still frisking mine for clues. / Sleep, Walter Mitty. Dream / sweet dreams of cat-bone marrow / and pit-bull steaks, of fresh granny-kill, / and the dark meat of car tyres.’’

Another successful poem in that comic mode, though this time without the mask of dotty geniality, is Self Portrait with Statue. Here Goldsworthy’s taste for sexual humour strikes a more welcome balance with his acute intolerance of cultural pretensions, in this case art tourism and the mindless worship of antiquities. This poem reads at times, in a good way, like the best of Clive James’s TV autocues.

Imagining himself sucking on the breast of a marble statue of Aphrodite in a Berlin museum full of hard-touring Japanese, Goldsworthy enacts the treason of his desire through a self-­effacing mock-up of the real: ‘‘The Philosophers crack / a smile, at last, given / something less Solid / to think about, the tourists / click their Nikkons, already/ planning Lecture Tours / at home — Varieties of Religious Experience in the New Berlin — ’’.

If one of the main engines of this volume is the poet’s reflections on how the reality of his desires coexist with political correctness — which he calls, once again provocatively, the ‘‘chador of words’’ — the poem Long Weekend seems to best express the erotic undersong that so preoccupies him and which makes these poems a collection. Long Weekend expresses the delicious anticipation of desire while simultaneously emitting a subtle hue of grief at the absence of its object. In a scene oddly reminiscent of Jonathan Franzen, we join the heartsore poet inside his car, unsure whether he is experiencing the kind of everyday surrealism hands-free technology allows, or a more timeless and imaginary dialogue of the mind:

‘‘Distracted, I speak to you out loud / in the empty car, old news I forgot to mention / before. When our conversation ends / I am alone again, but in another suburb, lost / and unremembering. Somehow retracing / my trail of miles to our supermarket, / I pay for bread and milk but walk out, / talking to you more quietly, but leaving / the staples of life on the counter.’’

The ambiguity of the mode of communication here is peculiar to our time and Goldsworthy’s quiet, understated staccato conveys it well. Thus the traditional trope of the poem, the inner monologue of lover to lover, seems re-burst, made anew.

This refreshing of timeless human themes is the job contemporary poetry must do, even if it keeps it off the front pages.

In a time when data retention laws and the commodifications of privacy through social media are placing even our most intimate dialogue under threat, it stands to reason that not everyone will have an ear out for its metaphysical notation. Thankfully, as Goldsworthy proves here, this is a much harder thing to capture, restrain or commodify.

Gregory Day’s latest novel is Archipelago Of Souls.

The Rise of the Machines and Other Love Poems

By Peter Goldsworthy

Pitt Street Poetry, 64pp, $28