This poem, the first I ever read of Hardacre's, has left a deep impression on me with its originality, control and exotic imagery:
In the fire in the sky at night, I remember your
instruction: marry Irina flee to Lithuania make
a home in the forest contemplate the mantra of
the owl draw pictures of God on the inside of your
skull intimidate local troublemakers with an axe
if need be but above all else be patient find salvation
in the fact that the storm, like most things, will find you.
The poem is written in four stanzas. The first three revolve around the motif of discovery: 'I found the key to write on cardboard', 'I found the ability to strike fear into the hearts of friends', and 'I rediscovered an old amphetamine habit'. So the use of 'I remember' in the fourth stanza reveals a metamorphosis, a transition, which insists upon a past that lives in the present - this is poetry that does not forget where it comes from - and, in any case, Hardacre adds to this with the storm metaphor, that the past will make itself known whether you try to forget it, or not. This analogy for the politics of forgetting that erupted during the late 1990's promises to leave its imprint upon the whole collection. And it does.
In Hardacre's biographical note the reader will discover that the poet is a resource developer for the Queensland Needle and Syringe Program (news: he's now working for the Thai government in the Golden Triangle). The allusion to amphetamines in the first poem is a refusal to forget a period of drug use. The poems, sharing addiction in a way that Michael Dransfield could not, provide glimpses of a reality that has painfully and tragically overcome many. 'Hotel Room, Scara Brae' follows the instructions of Minsk to the letter, bearing witness to the death of someone who has fought against his oppressor:
a newspaper clipping detailing the end of a Red rioter
saboteur of Gross Domestic Propaganda shot dead
in Tung Tau village, Kowloon, last night sprawled
in a pool of blood near hastily added characters
reading Down with imperialism.
This death on the surface of things reveals the deeper political and social undercurrents which often suppress the living. There is a search for peace in this sensuous poetry which, in almost Deleuzian fashion, allows everything, if only to allow movement towards something else The poems are, as stated in 'May's Bridge', 'chipped enamel children/ breathing life like fire/ laughing a fractured music// stories of sun on bone'. This enigmatic tolerance can be understood beside the refusal to enter the language of the Romantics, and its shallow pursuit of a love system. The poems do not hate but they accept the existence of both love and hate. The poetry is not blinded with rhetorical nor moral bias. This freedom from the tyranny of tradition and authority permits alternative points of view, angles rarely adopted in the plethora of mediocre poetry seen in Australia today. For instance, in 'Kiss, Oblik', Hardacre begins:
Love, like cancer
leaves nothing untouched
if you embrace its ebony splendour
and drift amongst subdued and fearful shades.
In Part Two, "The Paradise Engine", the epithet is Dransfield's: 'The true art of our time is something which desolates'. Hardacre recognises the birth of a new life at the same time as he sees the desolation of innocence, the wasteland of a world which can destroy a childhood, as in 'Adorer':
eyebrows arch
a victory parade
celebrating stories
of Filipino children
hollow
and
living
in crypts
lapping at gravestones
for sustenance
selling their parents
for trinkets
Part Three, "Pinion", quotes from Jane's Addiction: 'Ain't no wrong now, ain't no right. Only pleasure and pain'. This quote re-captures the state of mind which can free itself from prejudice in order to write passionately about things that matter at the turn of the century. The poems 'Chhinnamasta', 'The White Swan', and 'The Young Corn God' are some of the darkest poems of loss I've ever read. These poems fuse Hardacre's childhood beside stories of kidnap, rape and murder of children. Hardacre, in a sense, offers his own childhood in a gesture of sacrifice, to replace an irreplaceable loss. Another scary poem, 'Of Sheets', offers the threat of rape. 'The Black Point of the Weapon' is a ferocious example of the power of invasion, and the tyranny of self, to destroy everything in its immediate grasp. 'Little Frozen Trees' takes the reader into darker places, an exotic underground of violence, drugs and male prostitution: 'leads you/ into a backroom motions you/ to lie down'.
In Part Four, The Year Nothing, the reader is greeted by the poem 'The Hill of Life', conjuring a 'black library', the poetry of Mal Morgan, and again, 'children combing smouldering heaps/ of refuse & living beneath cars/ in starving cinereous light'. For such an exotic language, 'cinereous' was the only word in Hardacre's collection which compelled me to reach for a dictionary. If I had to criticise anything, it would be the occasional reference to a person from an exotic mythological history whom I am unaware of, but this could be a criticism of my own ignorance, not a deficit in Hardacre's poetry.
Elsewhere, terms ('bidi', for example) are used which are not noted in the author's notes - a glossary might have been helpful for some readers. This section contains poetry which visits Queensland as if for the first time. Poems such as 'Rise (notes on blue paper)' ('in the courtyard meeka dreams/ eucalypt mummification &// phantom anubis sky children/ & a family that does not exist'), 'Sky Drumming' (at high/ tide we hunted fish with goggles and bare hands, and invented names for the island// a few miles offshore where pandanus fires burn and aboriginal children fill days/ dugong-dreaming'), and 'Territorial' ('examples of coastal Australian/ burial ground paraphernalia') reveal the poet beside an indigenous geo-spatial history.
The final section, Part Five, The Sky Behind Your Head, has several substantial prose poems, an exotic passport into India where Hardacre and his companion have travelled extensively (also a major feature of many of the earlier poems). These later poems remind me of New Zealand poet Stephen Oliver at his prosaic best, and perhaps provide one of the reasons why Mark Pirie from HeadworX (a NZ publisher) decided to produce Hardacre's book. Hardacre ends the collection with three brief poems; he 'makes for the funeral pyre' and, then, 'the clean smile of grief,/ the sky behind your head'. Hardacre quotes Pankaj Mishra: 'it created new hopes in order to offset the destruction of old ones', to bring the collection full circle.
Hardacre's mature language is elaborate and detailed, though his use of description, its exoticality so to speak, doesn't detract from what the poems are trying to say about his life in the context of a world clarified by its humanity (or lack of it). Instead The Year Nothing reinforces something else, a condition, a state, a need for something to take on or fly off in the aftermath of an unforgettable broader social and personal desolation. Hardacre is a young poet and, excitingly for us, this means he has the potential to be one of the finest poets Australia has ever produced. Read the collection; you won't be wasting your time.
(Reviewed by Richard Hillman, September 2004)
