New and Selected Poems

’…in his valuing of both the aesthetic and the ordinary as the realms of humanity, he always reminds us - despite what the end has to offer us all - of a different kind of weather, one where, even as darkness is falling, “the lit clouds yet / sail sweetly over us / inhabiting a daylight of their own”.’David McCooey, Sydney Morning Herald

First, I will bore you with some Chris Wallace-Crabbe statistics. Born in 1934, he has thirty-three ‘new’ poems in his New and Selected Poems, which is an average of about seven poems a year since his last volume, Telling a Hawk from a Handsaw (2008). That is a lot of poems for the second half of a poet’s eighth decade, a time when many run dry. The ‘selected’ part of this volume draws from fourteen volumes (he has 681 poems on the Australian Poetry Library website). With earlier volumes, he has sometimes selected as few as two or three poems from each. With later volumes he has been less strict. For example, from the forty-three poems of For Crying Out Loud (1990) he has included eleven in New and Selected Poems. But in making this selection he has omitted some very good poems, which are worth preserving, such as his ten ‘Sonnets to the Left’ from I’m Deadly Serious (1988).I hope that in his ninth decade Wallace-Crabbe may publish a Collected Poems of perhaps a bit more than 400 hundred pages, but not a Complete Poems, which might run to more than an indigestible 800 pages.A meticulously selected Collected of Wallace-Crabbe would be a landmark publication and allow a clear perspective of his work, as well as giving much pleasure to those of us who admire his art.He is one of our best poets, with a remarkable range.Why is Wallace-Crabbe so consistantly prolific?Michael Sharkey has described his output as ‘protean’.Wallace-Crabbe has several modes.Among his ‘new’ poems in this volume, he has nature lyrics, a poem of single-sentence aphorisms, a sharp and bitter satirical ballad, ‘Mayhem’, in which he laments American foreign policy over the last decade (Osama is Tweedledee and Saddam is Tweedledum), a verse essay on insects, a poem in which he imagines himself as a revenant after his own death, and a nineteen-part sequence, by way of a poetic journal, ‘The Troubled Weather of Humanity’, dedicated to the memory of Peter Porter.Most enjoyable are the brilliantly observed and precise poems of observation such as ‘The Sharpener’:Soft cedar turns against the bladecoming away in aromatic flakes.The red of a Staedtler stains each edgeof these rising, falling petalsand instrumental black emergesready to limn a comic faceor mark a pine plankfor the careful carpenter’s cut,implication drawing tothe very point.A tiny screw ensures howthe steel edge can snuggle downinto its yellow plastic bed.There.Stop now.The pencil’s done.Because of his many modes, the transition from early to late poems is less clearly marked than with some other poets.Nevertheless, there is a progression from formalism to a more playful tone, and a tendency toward a larrikin use of colloquialisms.This larrikinism can become wilful, as in these lines from ‘Chekhov Days’: ‘But, mate, what a pack of wankers! / Not one of them will ever / pull the proverbial finger out / being ready / to do an honest job for once - ‘This accumulation of cliches is worrying.The tone wobbles unconvincingly.Poems using the vernacular may also date quickly.One of the ‘new’ poems, ‘Rendition’, catalogues ways of torturing people.It leaves me uneasy, particularly the vernacular expletive at the climax: ‘Not the electrodes, / Fuck, no, not the electrodes / and not your buttocks beaten, then beaten again.‘Momentary lapses such as this are the obverse side of one of Wallace-Crabbe’s main strengths.This is his optimism and a youthful preparedness to ‘give it a go’.He tackles subjects that are outside his comfort zone and personal experience.Inevitably, there are some failures, such as ‘Rendition’.This optimism is also a source of his extrordinary productiveness.Combined with modesty and scepticism, it gives recent poems a freshness and openness to experience.In the brief biographical note at the front of the book it states: ‘Wallace-Crabbe draws, beach-walks and plays tennis, and has read his poetry all round the world’.His beach-walking may have inspired one of his best short poems, ‘Kelp’, from a fine sequence ‘The Bits and Pieces’, which he has chosen from The Amorous Cannibal (1985):Slowly it blackenson the yellow shore;a hardness thickensmore and morein leaf, bulb, flangeand rubbery stemalong the fringeor scalloped hemof surf-surge.Timeturns all opaque,including thesestraps, grapes, trees,fan, tress and rake:gone their soft prime.‘Kelp’ is a masterpiece of Rilkean concision, one of those ‘ultimate poems’ about everyday things.I am ashamed that I was not aware of its existance four years ago when co-editing an anthology of Australian poetry.Ditto the lovely and unforgettable ‘Emus’, from the same sequence.‘Kelp’ combines the best of the formalism of the early poems with the more observant and open-minded later Wallace-Crabbe.This formalism dates back to the late 1950s when a formidable phalanx of Melbourne poets, including Vincent Buckley, R.A. Simpson, Evan Jones, Alexander Craig, Noel Macainsh, as well as Wallace-Crabbe, imported the academic restraint of the British ‘Movement’ poets and changed the face of Australian poetry for a decade or so, by challenging what had become to be known as the Sydney ‘vitalist’ tradition.In ‘Memories of Vin Buckley, Spelt from Sibyl’s Golden Leaves’, Wallace-Crabbe amusingly recalls Buckley: ‘…we sipped and planned / to change the whole face of Australaian Lit, / outwitting the weasel cunning / of dwellers in the great Coathangers’s shade, / harbour-dazzle apparatchiks / and Marxified weanlings.’I was one of those ‘harbour-dazzle appararatchiks’ ( but not a Marxified weanling ), and the accusation of our ‘weasel cunning’ is thoroughly justified.More than fifty years ago, John Quinlem (1931-2010), a model for Billy Kwan in Christopher Koch’s The Year of Living Dangerously (1978) (though not a dwarf), came to me with a fistful of printed rejection slips.He had taken these from a desk at Weekend Magazine, which was a girlie, titties, and beer weekly edited by Donald Horne.The rejection slips had ‘Weekend Magazine’ in white lettering on a cheerful red banner and a message to the effect: ‘The editor of Weekend Magazine thanks you for your contribution and regrets it does not suit our current needs.’‘Lehmann,’ Quinlem said, ‘you should write a parody of Vincent Buckley.We’ll post it to him, with one of these rejection slips.‘This I did, stringing together phrases from Buckley’s first book The World’s Flesh (1954).Buckley had yet to find his later, magisterial voice and this book was rhetorical and florid.Almost every poem had a reference to either ‘black’, ‘dark’, or ‘wind’, including ‘Winter Gales’, which had a marvellous last line (for my purposes): ‘To hold the escaping dark continuous wind.‘I did not keep a copy of this parody, nor, I guess, did Buckley, when he received it in an anonymous envelope with a Sydney postmark.