SHADOW ARTISTS.(Australian poets)(Review)

IS THERE DETECTABLE in the personality of any given poet, a shadow-artist where the nous usual to a different art informs the poetry? I have wondered, for instance, whether it is more a sense of brushstroke rather than verbal felicity that makes for some of the most arresting imagery in the lyric poems of-David Campbell or the meditative poems of Robert Gray. I have glimpsed, I believe, the photographer who attends the poetry of both Ken Slessor and John Tranter, ever watchful for the instantaneity with which location or attitude arrange themselves in the ephemeral atmosphere of urban life. Is there a shadow enamellist behind the prose-poems of Gary Catalano, a cartoonist (as David Lodge once suggested) discernible in the deliberately crude outlining in Ted Hughes's mythopoeic poems, an embroiderer in Marianne Moore? And so one might continue.

Once or twice in Canberra I have listened to Russell Erwin read aloud the work of others, most memorably Francis Webb's "Five Days Old" and Les Murray's "Once in a Lifetime Snow". Each time, what I heard was a care, a finesse in the sympathy as he spoke the poems which led me to imagine that the shadow-art behind his professed art of poetry might be that of the actor.

I must be careful. My purpose is to describe the dynamic of an imagination, not the profile of a personality. Thus, it was not that I was aware of a role being successfully played, a performance being given, and then the mask dropped. Rather, it was that I saw an actor's instincts at work, that intelligent easing of the self into the self of another and making it his own. This was to do, not only with taking on the part of another, but communicating a sense of watching how such a transference of sympathy might feel. And this is the sense one has of the speaker of many of the thirty-four poems in this, Erwin's second book, Taken by the Enemy (Molonglo Press, $11).

There are poems here about fractured human relations, there are observations of parents in old age, a wry glimpse of Plymouth Brethren en route to a funeral, studies of childhood and the origins of personality, questings after religious faith amidst the earth's unpromising evidence, and prevailingly, portraits, sketches, anecdotes, all lovingly drawn, of the pastoral life. For if I am to identify exactly what entity it is into which the poet is transferring his sympathy, I would say it is the Boeotian temper of the Australian pastoralist.

Russell Erwin runs a sheep farm near Crookwell. It is a life he has come to and taken to rather than was born to. But the intimacy with which he shows us his learning of its imagery, its attitudes, the tilt of its humour and the starkness of many of its day-to-day tasks is evident in poem after poem. Here one of those tasks is turned into a fine tribute to the late Philip Hodgins:

 
   In the shed, antiseptic from the frost, 
   I shear a wether, dead a day or so. 
   Swelling beneath the skin 
   the damson-plum colour like storm-clouds, 
   their purplish blue accentuating the massing white. 
   Each time the body slumps 
   there's an escape of gas, 
   overwhelming as when passing a piggery, 
   immediately recognisable 
   as the iron in blood ... 
   ... Finishing, I think of you observing 
   with your unsentimental eye, 
   this, the process of your dying, 
   and not blenching at the evidence ... 
   ("Shearing the Dead Wether") 

Whether in this, in a description of rain or the slaughter of a beast, or another meditation on the knives that perform this office, Erwin scrutinises a subject with an intentness and tentativeness in his curiosity that is characteristic. Like the man-in-rehearsal, he wants the thing to both look right and sound right, so characteristically he will try several "takes" on his subject. Thus the rain in "Because It Rained Today" is "in kinks, tensile like wire jinked in uncoiling". It comes "in curvets and caprioles, with the flashing of glutted fish-runs", and so on for a page of equally shimmery and restive fine-tuning. At the same time it is as if he is watching the current of his feeling, unsure where the objects of his contemplation will touch the realm of his human relations. In "Knives" this touch occurs with a surprise and propriety that is wholly effective: