A Fold in the Light. (Books: On The Sea, On The Land).

 
A Fold in the Light, by Alan Gould; 
Indigo/Ginninderra, 2001, $30. 

BEING A POET is a difficult vocation at the best of times but especially during this "discouraging era", as Alan Gould describes it, when there is no indication that perseverance will bring any short-term reward, and every possibility that it will bring heartbreak. Even the most talented and successful of our number experience moments of acute self-doubt. A cursory glance of books by some of the most renowned poets at work in the language is likely to yield a harvest of poems about mental institutions and substance abuse. Inevitably we must ask ourselves, is it worth it?

A friend of mine, a well-known writer whose ten-year-old daughter is proving a rather precocious poet, hopes that if Little Miss is intelligent enough to be writing so well at this age, she'll be wise enough to find herself a career other than poetry when she grows up. He is right, I think. But in some cases poetry is not a career but a vocation, and vocations are not easy things to shake off. In the light of these considerations, Alan Gould and Russell Erwin strike me not only as fine poets but also as courageous human beings. Their new collections have just been released from Indigo.

Gould is one of our best poets but he is largely neglected both at home and abroad. In happier times the decision to persevere in his craft was probably an easy one; that he has continued to do so is testament to his character and his faith in the redeeming qualities of his art. Gould is justified in this faith. A Fold in the Light, his tenth collection, contains much of his best work. I can think of few writers whose latest offering I more look forward to. It is a joy.

Gould is a poet of the numinous, a "collector of the human thisness", like one of the characters he describes in his poem "History of the Log Dwellers". His work is really a search for the "now" in everything, for (divine?) presence that is here one moment, gone the next. In some ways he seeks to incarnate this "presence" in the quantitative dimensions of his poems, so that these come to represent the fleeting "now" even as they search for it. Like a sacrament, his poems strive to effect what they signify:

 
   And if some mind 
   restores men now, writes each story down 
   so you can pour the then and now from hand to hand, 
   that is because the mind is thorough, just and fond 
   and will contain what will not be contained. 
 
   ("The Catch") 

The poems in this collection are largely about mariners and the age of sail, subjects that Gould has made his own. He reminds me of Slessor's Captain Dobbin, collecting the life of the sea in jars, maps and chests full of bric-a-brac and treasure. And what treasure!