New Selected Poems.

New Selected Poems, by Philip Hodgins; Duffy & Snellgrove, 2000, $22.

New Selected Poems, by Peter Goldsworthy; Duffy & Snellgrove, 2001, $22.

WHILE THE New Selected Poems of Philip Hodgins is without a failure, it is nonetheless possible to detect a steady growth through the collection as the poet's voice, seemingly keeping pace with his cancer, matured to become one of the finest in Australian letters. The most notable development occurs in the third collection, Animal Warmth, where in the relief conferred by the cancer's remission--after the "deadline", as Hodgins called it, had passed--the poet diversified his range of poetic forms and applied his trade, with increasing dexterity, to a variety of subjects other than his cancer.

Death, of course, "the overwhelming fact of our existence", is never far beneath the surface in Hodgins' work. Just as cancer feeds on the poet's "decaying form", so do crows feed on the eyes of cows, a pig feeds on an unlucky farmer and we feed on our livestock. As such, the inane cruelty of the creature that "expands in my guts, in my being" is reflected in poems about our and the poet's own cruelty to animals and one another. Hodgins seemed always aware of his own part, both as victim and predator, in the scheme of things:

 
   By the end 
   of the day there were dozens of crows. 
   I slithered inside and beat them to death 
   with a stick. Imagine the noise. 
   ("The Noise") 

It is the seeming inanity and chaos of existence that Hodgins at once resigned himself to and straggled against through the rhythms of language (he once described the iambic pentameter as a "homage to the metered heart") and the stability of traditional poetic forms like the sonnet, sestina and villanelle--those vital organs in the new body he wrote for himself in verse. Meanwhile, and in a way that revealed the generosity of spirit of the poet, the decay of his own body was not simply equated with animal decay, but also inspired the poet's exploration of decay in other bodies, including that one-flesh body of marriage in the beautiful "Little Elegies":

 
   For those two people living with this death 
   the silent meals, the nights of lying still 
 
   are like it always is when they're apart. 
   At any time it seems that one of them 
 
   has stopped half-way through packing little clothes 
   into a box and stands there loose with tears 
 
   while in a distant paddock in the heat 
   the other one is shovelling out a drain, 
 
   becoming more and more obsessed with work: 
   as though they might as well have never met.