Thylazine: The Australian Journal of Arts, Ethics & Literature #8/thyla8i-wwbook
AUSTRALIAN POETRY BOOK REVIEWS
The state of the rivers and streams by Warrick Wynne
reviewed by Sharon Olinka
(Five Islands Press, Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia, 2002, $16.95)
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He's good on landscape. And his language is rich, detailed, and evocative of both time and place; sensual at times, tender, and also tough. It's a language that sings. In a poem called "Fish", the short line breaks create a kind of glistening movement of their own:
"Fish, like inch-long filament
Or fuses, hanging
Luminous in a cluster
Strung with spine and eyes." |
The lyricism in Wynne's work surfaces in the lovely poem "Late Walk", with its echoes of Yeats, and imagery of wild swans.
"And imagined them lovers, transformed in fact,
Blessed or cursed, fleeing together, wings beating like twin hearts
with the rain weighing heavier now as we turned back
And all the time I wanted to take your two white hands."
But lest the reader think it's all loveliness, the floating shapes in Wynne's work a restful haven, he jolts us with truths about destruction in nature. This is from "Dead Shearwaters":
"There are the broken arms of crabs,
carnage or ethnic cleansing.
This walk contains too much devastation,
punctuated by these black feather full stops
and the commas of the fallen."
Occasionally, the book is uneven in its tone, with poems that are too prosy, and meandering. "Summer Evening" falls flat, "The Constant Future" feels strained, and "The Egg Factory" is too didactic. The long lines of "Tin Cup", though, work well in establishing a narrative flow appropriate to the structure of the poem, the details are vivid, and the poem is charming in its good-natured compilation of memories. And the lack of pretension in the closing lines make the sentiments expressed all the more effective.
There's a basic decency in Wynne's work, a belief in the transforming power of language, but no hubris about being a poet. And in the end, that's what I like best about him.
The poem "Great Elk in the Dublin Museum" is a wonderful example, how it points out the all too real dangers inherent in making symbols. I'll quote the closing stanzas.
"Before the 'troubles'
the intricate heraldry of its antennae,
not another ornate emblem of defeat surely,
a scrolled calligraphy of evolving intention
ritual, the over-elaborate and the labyrinthine,
we could go on making metaphor before this skinned thing.
I want to see the elk, its knotted skeleton,
its crown of thorn branches.
Above the broken castle and shells of houses
this relic, larger than life
before it all,
its delicate looking hoofs,
in the end
surely too small
to support such lofty ambitions."
It may seem a strange thing to say about a poet, but I hope Warrick Wynne develops his narrative skills. I sense a storyteller there, very much so. "Free Range Upon Beaver Street" could almost be a condensed novel, with its imaginative use of specific detail, its ability to process memories, and its utterly Australian sense of home being both private and expansive: generous to sunlight, gardens, and guests, yet self-protective and aloof if necessary. That might be "home" in other places in the world, as well. Wynne understands, of course; the poem ends with the lines "all that is gone now/ and who knows it was ever like this?" It's the story he imagines that counts, based on certain events and details. It's him looking through a crystal, gazing into water. And that's why I hope he writes a novel one day, filled with father, mother, the Irish ancestors, suburbs in all their wry and conflicting aspects, and all the rivers and streams his heart can contain.
(Reviewed by Sharon Olinka, September 2003)
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Thylazine No.8 (September, 2003) | |
