The dish to make your mark in.(The Indigo Book of Modern Australian Sonnets)(Book Review)

The Indigo Book of Modern Australian Sonnets, edited by Geoff Page; Indigo/Ginninderra, 2003, $20.

REVIEWING AN ANTHOLOGY of poetry is fraught with danger. Particular difficulties present themselves when it comes to discussing examples of the sampled work, since one is especially aware that the authors of any weak poems will feel put out for being attacked for work they themselves are probably not even proud of. At the same time, when one praises the inclusion of a good poem, this tends to appear as praise of the author of the poem rather than the editor of the anthology. No matter whom he praises or criticises, therefore, the reviewer is left with the uneasy feeling that his arrows (both the barbed and those of Cupid) will not hit their intended targets. With all the above in mind, I trembled as I took up the task of reviewing Geoff Page's new anthology.

These days, any poem with fourteen lines is described as a sonnet, though even this broad definition excludes the Meredithean sonnet (sixteen lines), the best modern exponent of which is the English poet Tony Harrison. The sonnet is probably the most durable of poetic forms, flexible yet sufficiently ordered to provide both infinite variety and a high level of unity in its manifold expressions. It is therefore a good subject for an anthology, either a general one or one defined by specific boundaries of time and geography.

Geoff Page's stated aim in this anthology is to "redress the balance" after the failure in recent years of key anthologists of the sonnet, notably Phillis Levin (editor of The Penguin Book of Sonnets) and Don Paterson (editor of Faber's 101 Sonnets from Shakespeare to Heaney) to include sufficient examples of Australian works in their respective anthologies. A worthwhile aim, perhaps, though one would have hoped we had outgrown the need (and the desire) to justify our artistic achievements to the world, why not produce an anthology of Aussie sonnets for the sheer pleasure of yarning amongst ourselves, without bothering to care who else may or may not be listening?

Just as Page rightly criticises the sins of omission of both Levin and Paterson, so must he be critieised for the absence of some important sonnets, all of which are more interesting, more successfully rendered and more original than a good majority of those included. It is difficult to fathom how an anthology of Australian sonnets could include, on the one hand, five by John Tranter (making him with Philip Hodgins the most represented poet) and, on the other, exclude Randolph Stow's "Endymion", in any terms a classic of Australian literature, where is Vicky Raymond's "On Seeing the First Flasher" (the absence of that poem reflects the general lack of amusing sonnets in the collection) and Dorothy Porter's "Drought Sonnet"? These poems would deserve inclusion even if their respective authors had written nothing else, but the fact that Stow is not represented at all makes the absence of his classic even more startling.

At the same time, the editor includes nothing from the poet who is easily the most fascinating, eccentric, brilliant and controversial of our younger poets, Harry Cummins. His lovely sonnet, "Farm in the London Suburbs", is included in the New Oxford Book of Australian Verse, so lovers of the sonnet and Australian poetry can find it there, but Cummins has another that contains ...