A Cretive Life.(Review)

A Cretive Life, by Philip Salom; Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2001, $18.95.

LONG-TIME READERS of Quadrant should find particular interest in one of the poems in Bruce Beaver's fourteenth collection of verse. It is called "Requiem for Richard (Lewis) Packer", and is one of a series of tributes to other poets, some still living but most long-deceased. Packer was the author of a memorable essay, published in these pages in 1975, entitled "Against the Epigones"; elegantly written and closely reasoned, it was the first expression of dissent against the takeover of Australian poetry by a group known variously (and misleadingly) as "The Balmain Poets", "The New Writing", and the "Generation of '68". The only reward Packer received for his candour and courage was to be so abused and harassed by the poets he had criticised as to feel he had to change his first name from Richard to Lewis; now, it would seem from Beaver's poem, he has been hounded into an early grave:

 
   ... your art was strictly something else and when they get around to 
   granting it the new lease of life it deserves you'll scare the pants off 
   the trendy readers and bring home more than the bacon of sizzling words and 
   the good wine of big thoughts to those hungry and thirsty for something 
   like, sometimes really the real thing and we'll remember you almost forever 
   which is all the best and worst of us can hopefully wish for. 

The conclusion of Beaver's elegy for Packer thus confirms what he has to say about himself in the course of the second of his five "Poems for Adrienne Rich": "I tend to think in cliches/now I am only half alive".

Despite the cliches the poem seems deeply felt, if only because it is clearly an expression of mixed feelings for a man who could be both "dear" and "quite awful", an "alter ego" and a "friendly enemy". Beaver's writing only appears to come fully alive when his subject is poets and poetry (his most acclaimed book was Letters to Live Poets, published in 1969) and the richest rewards for readers come in this book's third section of eleven poems about poets such as W.H. Auden, Robert Lowell, Paul Celan, Jorge Luis Borges (the news of whose death appears not to have reached Beaver) and Robert Duncan, as well as Rich, Packer and Grace Perry. Yet the only readers with much to gain, one suspects, from poems which make poetry their subject would have to be poets themselves.

JENNIFER COMPTON writes poems about poetry, too, as well as poems about the theatre--she is better known as a playwright than as a poet, no doubt because playwrights are always better known than poets--but these form only a minor aspect of a more varied and wide-ranging collection. Horseriding, motherhood, marriages, gardens, childhood memories, the quirky details of life in a rural community, and two poems that hint at the horrors which took place in the Belanglo State Forest near Compton's home--all of this reveals a character as capable of finding stimulation in the life around her as in the process of creating her art. A typical Compton poem is the first one in this book, and one of several that give Blue its title, "Blue Flash":

 
   The cloud must drift so the sun strikes the nail hole in the corrugated 
   iron so the horse dances sideways on the thin shaft of light in the indoor 
   arena--so I am lifted across the bunkhouse kitchen by the flash of blue 
   loosed out of your eyes like laughter see me dance sideways to switch on 
   the kettle in a blue flash the rider doesn't shift low in the saddle she 
   has her weight low holds the heartbeat between her legs so I seek for the 
   blue thrill of your glancing blow.