Introduction

Science has recently proven something that most poetry readers already know intuitively to be true: we read poems differently than other kinds of texts. Using fMRI technology, cognitive neurologists at Exeter University scanned the brains of volunteers as they read slabs of dreary prose from a heating installation manual, emotional passages from novels, and their favourite poems. Unsurprisingly, the heating manual failed to light up the part of the brain responsible for sending shivers down the spine. Poetry did, as did lyrical prose. Of particular interest, though, is what happened when participants read their favourite poems: the brain’s memory centres were activated more strongly than the areas associated with reading. Rereading our favourite poems, the study suggests, is also an act of remembering.

Two years of editing The Best Australian Poems has driven this fact home to me. Reading thousands of poems in a short time span does not sound, on the face of things, particularly conducive to retaining much. And it is true that in the last frenetic months of finalising this selection, I have forgotten car keys, appointments, names, dates, the year. Poetry has sandblasted just about everything else clean out of my head. Yet, even in the midst of this avalanche of reading, I have been surprised by how quickly my favourite lines have earwormed their way into my mind: Todd Turner’s description of a horse’s shadow ‘dense as almond wood’, Judith Beveridge’s ‘crystal brew / of stars’ or Julie Chevalier’s seagulls that ‘stir fry the air’, to quote a glittering few. These electric images spring to mind, unbidden, at odd and mundane moments. They accompany me everywhere I go. They insinuate themselves. They insist. I could go on quoting such lines from this year’s anthology ad infinitum, but I will leave such gems for readers to discover on their own instead.

In reaching this selection, I have privileged individual poems, not poets. The poems collected here have no preordained shape, subject matter or form. They range from formal verse, where part of the reader’s pleasure is in the musical structures of language, to something akin to a jazz riff, where zigs and zags of thought run wild. They blossom from a strange miscellany of subject matter, too: corpse flowers and craft beer tastings populate these pages, as do pigeons trapped inside the dome of the Hagia Sophia, Anna Karenina, cloud formations in Sydney, a plague of bogong moths invading Parliament House, the Borroloola Rodeo and Mahler. Some poems tap into the pop culture zeitgeist and speak in the lexicon of tweets, memes and emojis. Others turn their attention to urgent political, social and environmental issues: the after-effects of the nuclear tests at Maralinga; the spectre of terrorism in Europe; the shock and awe tactics of a bombastic new US president; domestic violence; the UK’s protracted and messy exit from the European Union; the role of the element cobalt in building dirty bombs; and the painful legacy of sexual abuse perpetrated by elements of the Catholic Church. And others yet are simply a linguistic joyride at great speed, the poet slaloming around one linguistic hairpin turn after another. In one way or another, they are all highly memorable.

An anthology devoted to the poems of a particular year is bound to display some eclecticism. Poems brush up against one another that would rarely appear in the same company elsewhere. It goes without saying that any other editor would have reached a different combination of ‘best’ poems than I did; this idea inheres in this anthology’s rotating editorship. Even so, I believe these poems offer the best of Australian poetry, in their intelligence and wit, their solace and provocation, their formal genius, their charged encounters with language, and their refusal of all that is ordinary and utilitarian. I found these qualities evident in poems by emerging poets as well as eminent ones; readers will find both here. Some poets whose work I admire greatly are absent by simple virtue of the year’s brackets; they have had a fallow year. Others have made a return appearance because they are on a tear at the moment. At the end of the editing process, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that roughly half of the poets here were not present in last year’s anthology; this is evidence of the hundreds of serious poets writing in Australia at present. Whittling my selection down to these final hundred poems was difficult, if not downright heartbreaking. The joy and curse of editing an anthology like this is that you become attached to many more poems than you are able to include. To the poets who feel I have let one through to the keeper by skipping over one of their best: I am keenly aware of my own sins of omission. I read many more excellent poems than I was able to publish. This dazzling crop is a sampling, not a complete edition.

As I did last year, I must applaud all the literary journals, magazines, newspapers and other venues that publish poems in this country, as well as the small and independent presses that are its lifeblood, especially given the current publishing climate. It is quite incredible to contemplate the collective effort, dedication and sheer force of will that brought all of the thousands of poems I read this past year to print. In the midst of all this energetic publishing activity, however, this past year also shepherded in a few sad developments. I know I am not alone in feeling disheartened that stalwarts the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald have shuttered their weekly publication of poetry. Many major Australian poems first appeared in those pages, where they jostled for attention with statecraft, economics and sport: an incongruous but oddly fitting context for poetry which, like reportage, illuminates world and self. Here’s hoping the Weekend Australian and the Canberra Times continue printing poems.

Over the course of my reading, I came across a few special projects that I would like to recommend to readers. Martin Langford, Judith Beveridge, Judy Johnson and David Musgrave co-edited the monumental Contemporary Australian Poetry, a lively survey volume which is well worth the price of admission. Heather Taylor Johnson edited Shaping the Fractured Self: Poetry of Chronic Illness and Pain, an incisive collection of poems and essays offering a view into the body in trauma. And John Kinsella and Tracy Ryan edited The Fremantle Press Anthology of Western Australian Poetry, canvassing poetry from the nineteenth century to the present, including a substantial number of Indigenous poets from the region. Beyond these excellent publications, however, I would encourage readers to buy the individual collections of the poets they have particularly enjoyed here; this is the best way to support poets and the tireless editors and presses who publish them.

This anthology opens with a poem by the late poet Fay Zwicky, who passed away only one day after the publication of her masterful Collected Poems, assiduously edited by Lucy Dougan and Tim Dolan. Zwicky wrote some of the most compelling Australian poems of the past century, including her magisterial elegy for her father, Kaddish, wherein she upended the gender roles of her Jewish heritage by invoking the Kaddish prayer as a woman, an act proscribed by the Jewish faith. There have been a number of affecting tributes examining Zwicky’s manifold contributions to Australian letters published since her death in July, with more, I am sure, to follow; in these pages, Barry Hill remembers her in his eloquent ‘Mister Lincoln or Camp David’. Zwicky is represented here by another elegy, her final published poem, ‘In Memoriam, JB’, a bravura work that closes with characteristically clear-eyed, profound lines: ‘We only ever yield to love / when someone’s dead or gone.’

This past year also saw the passing of Rae Desmond Jones, a much-loved Sydney poet, novelist, short-story writer, and one-time popular mayor of the inner-Sydney municipality of Ashfield. With John Edwards, Jones founded and edited the long-running iconoclastic journal Your Friendly Fascist, known for its irreverence and joyful anarchism. Jones’s own poetry was likewise relentlessly inventive, propulsive and often satirical; his writing life was marked by what John Jenkins aptly described as a long-waged ‘campaign against dullness, comfortable formulas and poetic complacency.’ Jones, like Zwicky, is remembered with great affection by the many poets and fellow publishers to whom he was a generous mentor and friend. He closes this anthology with a moving poem from his final collection of ghazals, the superb A Caterpillar on a Leaf (Puncher & Wattman), where the poet confronts death with a light touch.

Also included in this volume is a poem by the late John Upton, poet, dramatist and screenwriter, who staged numerous plays over his career, as well as writing for more than twenty Australian television series, before devoting his retirement to poetry. Upton published one poetry collection in 2014, Embracing the Razor (Puncher & Wattman), and is represented in this anthology with a nimble travel poem published this past year, ‘Crossing Galata, Istanbul’, in which the poet stands among fishermen on the Galata Bridge over the Golden Horn, watching the ‘rods bowing and bobbing’ until he experiences a complex transmogrification from human and animal, passing ‘between poles / of then and now, / a fish caught / in a rip of time.’ It’s a deft performance that gets more strange and wondrous on each rereading.

Finally, to all the poets collected in this volume: thank you for your company over this year of reading; it’s been a gift to spend so much time with your poems. I am also grateful to Black Inc. for its enduring commitment to this important series, and, by extension, to Australian poetry. I must give special thanks to Chris Feik for the invitation to edit The Best Australian Poems these past two years; I’ve enjoyed every minute of it, even the most difficult of deliberations. Thanks, too, to Erin Sandiford and Siân Scott-Clash for their considerable help in making these two anthologies happen. And to the readers of The Best Australian Poems 2017, I hope you see in these poems what I see: order and rebellion, ardour and irony, beauty and abjection and everything in between.

Sarah Holland-Batt