Introduction

‘I SEE THE POET AS A SEISMOGRAPH OF THE AGE’S DARKER regions,’ Fay Zwicky wrote in a recently published extract of her journals.^* ‘Living out fifty years of this dreadful century has certainly made the needle twitch without stopping.’ I have turned Zwicky’s enigmatic, quaking metaphor of the seismograph over in my mind since I read it; in it, I recognise two ideas. The first is that while the poet does not leap at every cataclysmic event or operate as some kind of geopolitical tuning fork, she often responds powerfully to the dark events and anxieties of the age. Poetry is not written in a vacuum: it is of its time, and it responds to the conditions of its time – whether earnestly or satirically, directly or aslant. And, like a seismograph, the poet often registers the uneasy vibrations of a culture before the repercussions are felt by the body politic – a dangerous prescience that goes some way toward explaining why poets are persecuted by authoritarian regimes the world over.

But Zwicky’s metaphor also speaks more broadly to poetry’s curious relationship to time. As a form, poetry is paradoxically both fleeting and ephemeral, yet remarkably durable. It is able to respond nimbly to its subject matter, at lightning speed – yet last, at its best, for millennia afterwards. It inhabits the language of the hour, and often of the minute; we see this in its swift and often parodic adoption of neologisms, its linguistic dexterity and adaptability, its unceasing and energetic reinvention – yet its readers enjoy decoding it centuries later. The poet, like the seismograph, skitters over the peaks and troughs of a lifetime, but the poem itself is a series of aftershocks realised through generations of readers who follow.

This durability is precisely because the poem detonates in the instant of its reading. Its utterances come into being just as we vault each enjambment; its silences and spaces are conjured up in the moment we encounter them; its meaning is arrived upon through the jouissance and play of reading. Above all, poetry – for both its readers and its writers – is a form that demands attentiveness and active intelligence. It treats language as a volatile and charged commodity, and one whose subtleties and nuances are worth puzzling over. As Valéry defined it, poetry is ‘a separate language, or more specifically, a language within a language’. In the context of our increasingly corrosive political discourse and the fuzzy ‘truthiness’ that pervades it, poetry seems to me a radical form, and reading it a radical act.

Reading the past year’s poetry with a view to editing this anthology was a different species of reading than I am used to – full of the usual exhilarating jolts of delight and surprise, but accompanied by an unusual anxiety. I found myself charmed and elated by some poems one day, but then a little cool on them the next; they looked different in one light than they did in another. I wanted to be sure of the poems, but found myself returning to a favourite Michael Dransfield poem more than once, with renewed understanding:

i’m not dead

sure of the poems

life seems

to suffer a bit

in the translation

Like Dransfield, I was ‘not dead / sure of the poems’. I circled back, re-reading and re-reading, feeling like a forensic scientist must: on the hunt for proof, for certainty. I reminded myself that reading poetry – and the joy of a particular poem – is a sort of alchemy; at the risk of sounding mystical, there are aspects to the reading experience that seem mercurial, quixotic, dependent on some unpredictable internal weather. Some days, the poem’s electric power, its frisson, can ‘suffer a bit / in the translation’.

So I re-read, patiently – obsessively is probably the more accurate adverb – and slowly a magnetic group of poems emerged that I found myself returning to, over and over again. Their shocks, to paraphrase a line from a superb Lucy Dougan poem included in this selection, went right through me. I turned them to the light many times, probing their facets; they emerged from this process adamantine. Lines from each of them are now lodged permanently in my mind, and I am as sure of these poems as I am of anything.

I aimed to capture a diverse cross section of the poetry being written in Australia at present and to include the work of new poets wherever I could, but above all I paid attention to the individual poems themselves, privileging those that seemed most urgent, startling, stylish, ingenious, defiant, alive. My selection gestures towards the formal and thematic variety and brilliant inventiveness of our poets, but is a beginning rather than an end point in that respect. Overall, I was struck by the sheer volume of extraordinary poems being published in Australia, the dynamism and range of our poets. I was also struck by the dedication of our poetry editors and anthologists. If, as Dransfield once wrote, ‘to be a poet in Australia / is the ultimate commitment’, then the work of poetry editors and publishers verges on zealotry of the best sort.

There are several projects and anthologies that stood out over my past year of reading that are worth remarking on; I hope readers of this anthology will seek them out. Australian Book Review introduced a new initiative with States of Poetry – a significant new annual anthology drawing attention to the geographic distribution and localities of our poets. Dan Disney and Kit Kelen co-edited Writing to the Wire, a remarkable and urgent anthology centred on refugee and asylum seeker issues. Bonny Cassidy and Jessica Wilkinson co-edited the recently published Hunter Anthology of Contemporary Australian Feminist Poetry – a fantastically rich and diverse collection that introduced me to several emerging poets I have included here. And Kate Fagan and Ann Vickery co-edited the excellent Active Aesthetics: Contemporary Australian Poetry, a significant anthology collecting poets committed to decolonisation, ecopoetics, cultural unsettlement, and other forms of transformational poetics.

One of the great pleasures of Australian poetry is its quality of sprawl, to borrow Les Murray’s phrase. The poems collected here sprawl geographically – from the ‘pimple amongst the wildflowers’ of the colonial township at Mullewa in Charmaine Papertalk-Green’s eclogue with John Kinsella, to the catfish hole at Jayipa in Phillip Hall’s ‘Royalty’ and the crustacean effigy at Ballina in Fiona Hile’s ‘Relocation of the Big Prawn’. In a country where even the names of so many of our literary journals signal towards geographical orientation or locality – Meanjin, Overland, Southerly, Island, Westerly – it is perhaps unsurprising that many of these poems contend with place. But their sprawl extends beyond national borders, and is wholly cosmopolitan, veering to the glacial tip of South America in Maria Takolander’s ‘Argument’, a Norwegian graveyard in Kit Kelen’s ‘takk for alt,’ a Guangzhou wet market in Lachlan Brown’s ‘Suspended Belief’, Biscayan and Tahitian surf breaks in Jaya Savige’s ‘Hossegor’, and Rome’s ancient sewerage system in Elizabeth Campbell’s ‘Cloaca Maxima’. The worldliness and urbanity of these peripatetic poems will surely strike readers as a refreshing palate cleanser from the parochialism, tribalism and nativism dominating much of our political discourse at present.

Beyond their terrestrial ambulations, the poems in this year’s anthology also sprawl across a dazzlingly diverse range of subjects and aesthetics. There are poems that tremor with the anxieties of the war on terror, with the seismic shifts of Brexit and the promise of Grexit, poems that reverberate with social and cultural discontent and unsettlement. There are poems that probe news events frequently shrouded by cultural amnesia – from Ali Cobby Eckermann’s indelible ‘Black Deaths in Custody’ to Michelle Cahill’s ‘Car Lover’, a haunting address to those who assault and murder women. There are poems centred on the body – its precariousness, its sensuality, its limitations and mortality – and poems about the often disturbing advances in biotechnology. There are poems sketching the relationship between the human and natural worlds that fizz with a particularly muscular Australian vernacular – Les Murray’s native bees as evicted smallholders ‘with their new life to rebuild, / new eggs, new sugarbag, // gold skinfulls of water’, or Judith Beveridge’s corpulent toads ‘bull[ing] their way across earth’. There are poems interrogating the nexus between language, place, and belonging, stretching from those charting migrant experiences in our capital cities, such as Omar Sakr’s ‘ghosting the ghetto’ and π.o.’s ‘Shakespeare & the State Library’, to the memorable ‘Learning Buandjalung on Tharawal’ by Evelyn Araluen – a powerful account of the continuous cultural knowledge embedded in language and Country.

One of the most likeable aspects of contemporary Australian poetry is that it is profane as often as it is sacred; there is a rich vein of irony and satire that runs through our poetics, a colloquialism, contrarianism and playfulness that separates it from its counterparts in the northern hemisphere. This enduring quality is evident in many of the poems collected here, including brilliant contributions by Pam Brown, John Tranter, Ken Bolton, Ouyang Yu, Jill Jones and Tim Thorne. There are poems that respond ekphrastically to other art forms, from Jessica L. Wilkinson’s ‘FAUNE et JEUX’ to Bronwyn Lea’s playful encounter with the kitsch porn aesthetics of pop art superstar Jeff Koons, and those that speak to the act of writing itself, such as Robert Adamson’s intertextual ‘Black Winged Stilts’, with its Stevensian ‘mangrove tree at the end of the mind’, or Andy Kissane’s sardonic take on recent plagiarism scandals in ‘Getting away with it’. Overall, I suspect my selection skews slightly darker in tone than some previous years; this perhaps speaks to the fact that the past year has felt a particularly vertiginous one. These poems speak in and of unsettling times; in the maelstrom, they shudder and catch.

The anthology this year opens with an emblematic poem by the late poet Martin Harrison, ‘Patio’, from his stunning last book, Happiness: just as the patio itself serves as entryway to the house, so Harrison’s poem is the entry point to the past year’s poems. As well as being one of our finest poets, scholars and environmentalists, Harrison was an indefatigable mentor and teacher to many of the poets in this anthology, and I encourage those readers and admirers of his work to seek out the edition of Plumwood Mountain, guest edited by Stuart Cooke and Peter Minter, dedicated to his memory. ‘Patio’ is, among other things, an entreaty to remember our capacity for wonder in the face of so much darkness – a fitting inclusion from a poet who brought wonder and delight to so many of his readers and fellow writers.

Bookending the collection this year is an arresting last poem by Billy Marshall Stoneking, another generous mentor and vital member of the Australian poetry community, who passed away during the parentheses of this anthology’s timeframe. Stoneking was a poet, playwright, scriptwriter and producer who had a keen interest in Indigenous issues since he first arrived in Australia in the 1970s, and spent an extended period of time living in the Papunya Aboriginal Settlement, where he helped found a literacy program to empower local Luritja and Pintupi peoples to read and write their own languages. His haunting ‘One Last Poem’ speaks to his enduring interest in language preservation in the Northern Territory; it is a poem that gave me chills when I discovered it, and I know it will do the same for readers of this anthology.

This past year, the Australian poetry community also lost Dimitris Tsaloumas, a brilliant and humane poet whose work I have loved for as long as I have been a reader of Australian poetry. There have been many wonderful tributes to him by those who knew him best, including Vrasidas Karalis in the Sydney Review of Books, Helen Nickas in Australian Poetry Journal and Antigone Kefala in Rochford Street Review; these essays speak not only to his superb poetry but also to his seminal work in translation and the way in which his writing, while always highly regarded by peers and critics, has been somewhat neglected due to his position as a poet of the Greek diaspora; as Nickas writes, ‘Tsaloumas remained largely an outsider in Australia.’ This neglect does a great disservice to his exceptional body of poems; I am sure that future generations of readers, poets and critics will return to his oeuvre and see his extraordinary contribution to Australian literature.

Due to his ailing health, Tsaloumas was unable to write in his last years, which is why I could not represent him within the pages of this anthology with a recent poem. Instead, he will have the last say of this introduction, via lines from one of his best-loved poems, ‘Note With Interlude From the Banks of The Brisbane in September’, first published in his classic volume Falcon Drinking. The poem begins with the poet sitting beside a ‘fawn-thick’ Brisbane River that ‘gifts a city with loveliness’, prompting him to enter into a fantasia about ‘days of happiness’ with the hetaerae of Ancient Greece: a reverie brought about by a sudden visitation of poetry, of ‘words come forth again, / unfathomable, out of yellow-paged time’. Here, Tsaloumas writes about the ways in which the poet’s work – punctuated by delight and exuberance – is ultimately fleeting for the poet, beginning and ending in doubt. He reminds us, too, of the great gift poets leave behind for their readers, of the treasury of their enduring works. Tsaloumas, Stoneking and Harrison were all fine, original, necessary poets whose works reverberate with the concerns of their time; while their vital works and voices will endure, we will miss them in the years to come.

I write because

this ache gets sharper with the years

and my truth is but a husk of substance

wasted, my strength no longer adequate

to breast the song of the rock-bound sisters.

My message is this: in the old cupboard

in the wall, beside the mirror

opposite the bed, you’ll find some papers

held in a roll with string:

please burn them. Youthful,

possibly happy stuff, I can’t recall –

things one could redeem perhaps

in leaner times, but burn them nonetheless.

This has been preying on my mind of late,

but if I am to end this journey at all

it’ll have to be as I began, expecting nothing.

Sarah Holland-Batt

^* Dougan, Lucy and Zwicky, Fay. “Plain Speech: Extracts from Fay Zwicky’s Journals.” Axon: Creative Explorations 5.2 (Nov 2015)