The necessity of great poetry.(The Long Game and Other Poems)(Book Review)

The Long Game and Other Poems, by Bruce Beaver; UQP, 2005, $22.95.

I READ BRUCE BEAVER'S The Long Game with elegiac greed. It s his last book, published posthumously almost a year to the day after his death. But there is nothing morbid or even autumnal in this collection. Beaver's is one of the most avidly alive voices in Australian poetry. His poems insinuate themselves like friendly parasites. They are always hard to shake.

The title poem, "The Long Game", in its enchanted sing-song of rhyming couplets, is a very uncanny poem indeed. It has certain benign echoes of Christina Rossetti's subversive masterpiece, "Goblin Market", with its eerie naive narrative, but its idiosyncratic rapture is uniquely Beaver:

 
   Their laughter in the game rose high as any flame 
   consuming every woe, beyond all praise and blame. 
   With or without the sun it rose in joy upon 
   the long ecstatic dance, the circling marathon. 

"The Long Game" is a poem more about secrets and spells than innocent games. There is always in Beaver's poetry an undercurrent of real and ritual sacred knowledge; a sense of its allure and cost. The protagonists of "The Long Game" are children, but children imbued with an adult sense of longing, and the poem's heart is a huge sacred tree:

 
   Now he'd found a king and a kind of arboreal ring 
   that he'd read of. About the base there grew a magic 
      thing. 

This "king" tree immediately reminded me of the Norfolk Island pines that branch through so much of Beaver's work, especially his expansive and intimate poems set in his lifelong home of Manly. The opening poem of the collection, "Something for the Birds", is familiar domestic Beaver territory as he welcomes the birds in the pines from the balcony of his beach flat: