Gary Catalano.(Obituary)(Biography)

GARY CATALANO, who died last December, was a remarkable figure in recent Australian writing. Poet, art historian and critic, he was the author of a number of important studies like The Years of Hope: Australian Art and Criticism 1959-1968 (1980), The Bandaged Image: A Study of Australian Artists' Books (1983), An Intimate Australia: The Landscape and Recent Australian Art (1985) and The Solitary Watcher: Rick Amor and His Art (2002) as well as of a large number of essays and reviews, not collected in book form.

Although he was one of the best art historians and critics of his time, I had the impression that he had become disenchanted, even disillusioned with the world of Australian art reviewing for the newspapers, and in the last decade of his life, he devoted more time to literary essays, focusing on some of the forgotten, marginalised or misunderstood Australian poets whose work he was rediscovering--figures like Shaw Neilson, James Devaney and Mary Gilmore--as well as on some of his contemporaries whose work he particularly admired: Les Murray, Geoff Page, Jamie Grant, Alan Gould, and a number of others. Most of these essays first appeared in Quadrant.

At the time of his death he was working on a biography of David Campbell, a figure who spanned the period from the old rural Australia of the early twentieth century to the more experimental world of modern poetry and art, a poet with whom he felt a special affinity. His own first published book of verse had been called Remembering the Rural Life, his last Jigsaw, and the trajectory of his own poetry carries a number of similarities with Campbell's.

His essays on poets had the value of being jargon-free, fresh and individual. They move in a different direction and use a different idiom from much present-day academic writing, and they are packed with individual insights and perceptions, unexpected notations and observations. He always had something completely new and unpredictable to say about the writer or the work in hand.

Catalano, who could be robust and forthright in the expression of his views, was a poet of great delicacy and precision, a master of the fragilities. His work often reminded me of oriental landscapes and drawings; some of his poems seemed almost wordless-sketched on air or tissue paper, and recalled Mallarme's Chinese porcelain painter "au coeur limpide et fin". This can be seen in two of his most remarkable books, The Empire of Grass (1991) and Jigsaw (1998), but especially in his prose poems. He was not very impressed when I once compared some of his poems to the line drawings of Ben Nicholson--and in fact rejected the comparison almost vehemently--but he was delighted when my wife noted a similarity between some of his poems and the work of Paul Klee.

The prose poem, a particularly French development, has been around for nearly two hundred years, and it reached a peak of astonishing achievement in the hands of Baudelaire, Mallarme and Rimbaud. It has only slowly entered Australian poetry. There were a few attempts before the 1970s, not forgetting those that appeared in Voss in 1957, but it was the appearance of the Penguin Modern European Poets series throughout that decade that gave it sudden acceleration and impetus here. Very few Australian poets since then have not attempted a prose poem or two, but none seems to have explored the form as consistently and as meticulously as Catalano.

Although he had started out as an imitator of Robert Lowell--the Robert Lowell of "Mother Marie Therese" and "Falling Asleep over the Aeneid"--Catalano quickly moved away from the cult of fixed forms. He developed a marked resistance to A.D. Hope, both the poetry and criticism, as his search for freedom and flexibility led him towards the prose poem and its American and Eastern European practitioners. Now the Finlay Press of Braidwood has brought out a special edition to commemorate that aspect of his work--a volume of great finesse and distinction, printed in ...