In search of a poet.(Book Review)

Victor J. Daley." A Life, by Frank Molloy; Crossing Press (Sydney), 2004, $24.

THE POET Victor Daley was famous in Bulletin circles in late nineteenth century. Since then his reputation has faded gradually, but he is still featured in most anthologies of Australian poetry, and two of his books, At Dawn & Dusk and Wine and Roses, are still commonly seen in second-hand bookshops.

Frank Molloy, Senior Lecturer in English at the Wagga Wagga campus of Charles Sturt University, has been ferreting out various details of Daley's life for some years in order to resurrect interest in the poet. Some chapters in this book were given as talks at literature conferences. Now this comprehensive biography, the first on Daley, has appeared.

Molloy demonstrates that the true story of Daley's life has been up till now obscured. His friends provided a distorted version of his output. Most of them knew him only in the 1890s, and did not know his earlier work so well. One example is the view of him as essentially a Celtic Twilight poet. Molloy shows this was a brief episode near the end of his life, when he was running out of other sources of inspiration.

Another reason for the neglect of his poetry is that, like many other fin de siecle writers, he was famous for his bar-room wit, legendary escapades and personal charm. It was these qualities, as much as his poetry, which made him renowned among his peers. The book includes a photograph of Daley with a handsome spade-shaped beard like that of his friend E.J. Brady, whose poetic output and literary career were somewhat similar. But whereas Brady lived into his eighties, Daley died relatively young in his forties in 1905. His fame declined in the absence of his engaging personality. Many 1890s writers, and those in the later Norman Lindsay circle, suffered the same fate.

Daley was highly intelligent and possessed a natural lyric gift. In addition this biography includes some striking poems that are not well known, for example, this description of a burnt-out landscape:

 
   It was a day of sombre heat: 
   The still, dense air was void of sound 
   And life; no wing of bird did beat 
   A little breeze through it--the ground 
   Was like live ashes to the feet. 
   From the black hills that loomed around 
   The valley many a sudden spire 
   Of flame shot up, and writhed, and curled, 
   And sank again for heaviness ... 
   For evermore the sky did press 
   Closer upon the earth that lay 
   Fainting beneath, as one in dire 
   Dreams of the night, upon whose breast 
   Sits a black phantom of unrest 
   That holds him down.