Sure, he could have - but didn't. He just had to go down those roads. And so did Watson. With a good heart, or so it seems from his poetry.
In "scenes from a getaway car" Watson creates a poignant bar scene, with an Aboriginal narrator who knows the score in Australian society; recognizing the guy who's also an "Other", the one whose skin is darker, and how that man looks at his own "dark-skinned gait". Yeah, just two men in a bar, trying to relax and have fun. The narrator says, "I acknowledge his staunch Mediterranean jaw,/ lines in his face like a topographic map/ the cuneiform of worry, from the old country and centuries of killing".
But fun can't be found, not that night. Perhaps, completely, not ever. A sadness fills the narrator. The only woman within view as a possible object of desire is a "fake blonde along the linoleum counter ... this driver that everyone calls 'love'
"how are ya, love?
what will it be, love?
'nother pot, love?"
The smell of heavy food, the images of greyhound races from the TV, and the faces of lonely men along the bar all contribute to the narrator's depression. It's a wonderful poem, with crisp line breaks, the long lines flowing with the musicality of first-rate Spoken Word, the voice that speaks to us always honest and direct.
Watson's background is Aboriginal, and his sense of history is never far fro any given poem in this book. In "the finder's fee", one of the best poems in Itinerant Blues, images of being haunted by genocide are conveyed in these lines: "milky dead eyes upon your living/ and what you inherited/ in that pool of blood and membrane". The past, of course, is inescapable. It infuses the poems "kangaroo crossing", "pre-flight", "without regret", and with Watson's characteristic sardonic humor, in "the job".
There are so many cross-references in this one, it would take too long to list them all: let's just say that in "the job", Watson manages to skewer the West, the East, romantic notions of Africa, and get across the often sorry realities of a poet's life - anxious, marginal, and grubbing for cash. Acquainted with cheap lodgings. No pink clouds out of Keats and Shelley, or even, hey - Gwen Harwood. This one is for endurance, the simple act of getting by. What all poets understand. When we're supportive of each other, these issues come up, or so I like to think.
Like other tough guys with a heart of gold, the narrators of Watson's poems have a secret tenderness. There's a classic American country western song about a truck driver who hears a mother plead a ride for her dying little boy over his CB radio. Of course that driver gets right over there. The poems "ambulance chaser" and "talking to the airplanes" have that kind of humanity. And in "three-legged dogs", sympathy for the plight of local strays in his neighborhood makes the narrator see "dogs caught in a vicious trilateral world/ of the right, the wrong and the cheated".
Watson is particularly good on love that comes with a sting, love that gives you the blues. You think it isn't going to happen again, and of course - it does. Here's an excerpt from "gasoline":
"'cause it's going to combust,
the spirits of her mouth
entering yours
with that NO NAKED FLAMES tattoo
falling from her lips
into the curves of her chest"
This is writing that rings true, from a life well lived. It's a voice I trust, and one I'd want to hear again and again. May Samuel Wagan Watson get the kind of recognition his work deserves.
(Reviewed by Sharon Olinka, September 2003)
