The Metronome: Jennifer Maiden’s nod to history in topical verse

Our poets are alive to the impact of world-shattering events, none more so than Jennifer Maiden.

Australian poet Jennifer Maiden.

When I edited Black Inc’s Best Australian Poems in the immediate wake of 9/11 I was struck by how much our poets were alive to the impact of world-shattering events and how capable they were of finding a voice for the bewilderment of a terrible time. And no poet is more darkly informed than Jennifer Maiden. She can dramatise how political insights and intimations can twist and turn in a mind, and she can reconfigure worlds of feeling and reference into a poetic speech that is nimble, ornery, but in every way her own.

The play of the rhetoric of politics and history would scarcely matter if Maiden could not put a poetic shape, at once traditional and new, to her brooding. WH Auden was right to say poetry doesn’t make things happen, WB Yeats was right to say a poet has no licence to set a politician right — but the satisfaction of reading Maiden is that her poems come from a mind that has stared into the pit of politics and a heart that is troubled and full of feeling at what the mind beholds.

And so we have this new volume. The title is musical. “Metronomes,” Maiden says, “tend to lean to the pattern of two beats.” But she uses this to create a set of poems that measure what she calls “the blood at the heart of reason”. And they are full of the shadow of what former British prime minister Harold Macmillan, that thoughtful old Tory, called “events”. Often they are dialogues between ­people from different periods, chatting about ­visions and happenings, failures and poten­tialities.

So in The Gazelle, the blighted UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn (whom Maiden seems to admire) talks to Constance Markievicz, one of the mighty, turbulent women who stalks the poems of Yeats like the destiny of Ireland. “Constance Markievicz woke in grand Highland country / in the snow shadow of Ben Nevis, newly / tramping beside Jeremy Corbyn …’’

In “open country, high hills and waves as wild / or gentle as horses” the chat touches on friendship. “ ‘But complex,’ sighed Corbyn hopefully, ‘Mountbatten / and his wife were friends with Gandhi.’ Constance, / who had wounded a British sniper in the fight / for Saint Stephens’ Green, had come quite late / to the concept of passive resistance … ”

Maiden’s version of poetry including history has something of the rich, unstable, beguilement of a poetry, like Yeats’s, that purloins the grandeur of history to provide poetic narrative and dialectic with a seriousness of drama and allusion comparable to its high and mighty formal magic.

In The Metronome the calamitous wrongs of what has been done to harried seekers of refuge on Nauru (and to the once rich people of Nauru themselves) recall George Orwell’s view of the Spanish Civil War, before leading on to a ravishing pop song from contemporary Catalonia. There are sweeping long-shots in the poems, such as Hillary Clinton talking to the shades of Abraham Lincoln and Eleanor Roosevelt before the last election.

And for a long, bewildering moment there we think The Metronome is going to fall into the trap of The Gabriels, the plays staged throughout the election that barely mentioned Donald Trump. But the collection ends, in Eleanor and Hillary: 14: The Bayonet, with the acceptance speech when it had looked for a fugitive moment like all might be well.

... On TV, Donald suddenly

appeared, husking about ‘beautiful things’ and ‘dealing fairly’,

with that mannerism George remembered: an explanatory

coda at the end of sentences as if some normalising echo,

metronomic. Donald’s face

was no longer a shaggy cartoon, but careful. George

thought: yes, please be careful: careful, and just that

might after all suffice ...

Still, the recurrent hope leads to Maiden’s language rising to meet with portent and power as two people grope for hope: “The greedy autumn ice / of Washington blinded the window. And, knelt against each other, / for comfort on the floor, the two /gripped hands as if they faced a flood together.’’

There are nearly always two in this book, that’s the metronome logic, but Maiden has another lofty analogue. In Diary Poem: Uses of Rodin’s The Kiss she recalls an occasion at school where her schoolmistresses (a grey benighted lot) exhibit a replica of Rodin’s sculpture (“I remember how white it was, the curl / into oblivion of the legs relaxed / so that all the concentration is on mouths / meeting so deeply that the marble / becomes shapeless where their lips touch”). And she wonders if what they had in mind was that “Rodin said it was based on Dante, / that the lovers are Francesca and Paolo”.

Maiden suggests it’s “telling those who braved the doorway / to abandon hope”. But it also points to her own strategy, which is one of heightened encounter between the living and the mighty dead and which derives, with a spectacularism hard to miss, from the example of Dante in The Divine Comedy.

An especially striking Dantean encounter is between William Bligh (who fell foul of the Rum Corps) and Malcolm Bligh Turnbull. It’s a potent homage to Dante framed in terms of ‘‘temper’’, the title of the poem. It vividly encapsulates both the Prime Minister’s career and the sense of justice of the headstrong governor standing up to the crooked top end of town for the small farmers.

Turnbull says with a fierce hauteur to his old accuser, “Sir / I still do not see myself as Rum Corps. I / would have saved my ancestors their land.”

It’s an illumination of contemporary history and the long shadow of the past, full of the ­potent mythology of the city of Sydney, as an old, alienated poet does ample justice to the once — and, who knows, the future — Turnbull.

The Dantean technique, so very modern, blends the resonance of history, buoyantly conceived, with the bite and dazzle of gossip. Robert Hughes, unsurprisingly, gets a guernsey. “My good wife / had an uncle who criticised Art successfully / to the point where he took on an aura / himself of his favourite Goya, and became / devoted to Catalonia, which was at that time /not gentled by the hope of independence … he loved to hunt / and fish on my property and anywhere: a man / of that jovial violence which I’ve always feared / is the best way to endear yourself to men.”

And this in turn is linked to Turnbull’s ambition, to his adopted Catholicism, and to Tony Abbott as his prey. “I am, / said Malcolm ‘a hunter of men, in that I crouched in wait for the last Prime Minster, who was / a violent man only by proxy: wanted wars / to be fought for him to comfort his shy soul”.

A lot of people who might think they would be put off by the rather ostentatious way in which Maiden pisses in the pocket of history and politics are likely to find this book more seductive than they would imagine. And it is the power of the poetic imagination, the ability of a poet’s rhetoric and sense of drama to wind itself around the wonders and fears of our blood and state, that should command the audience this book deserves.

Peter Craven is a cultural critic.

The Metronome

By Jennifer Maiden

Giramondo, 96pp, $24