In fact I had to keep catching myself and asking what was really going on here. It has been a long time since a poem by an Australian poet had that effect on me. "There it is, that dark shadow flitting under the ice." I have read the poem through many times and have already learnt to treasure it, to treat it as a friend trying to tell me something in the careful measured tones of one who perhaps cares a little too much.
I'm perpetually suited to the idea of this land -
only my mind has other plans.
In every sense, I see this as my failing.
("Fresh News from the Arctic, VII")
The voice is both seduced and repelled by this place, this Arctos of somnolent mantra, not so much in an attempt to remind oneself of the reality as to conjure a backdrop worthy of the wastes within.
I hear the years of vacant possession,
the poetics of empty space,
of the dust settling.
I'm not sure
if I'm the haunted
or if I'm doing the haunting.
("Fresh News from the Arctic, V")
In the end the poem is strangely triumphant. The voice has escaped from its arctic wastes:
A tiger moth swoops low,
a fiery phoenix, it burns a patch of sky.
I follow earnestly
Edging my way toward the timberline,
remembering that it's better to travel
hopefully than to arrive safely.
("Fresh News from the Arctic, IX")
And suddenly, "moth-like, I reach out to oncoming traffic". The reader finds themselves jarred awake, staring into an empty glass, a darkened room, their fog on a mirror. Because the arctic world the poet creates is at once so vivid and so surreal it is not an easy thing to let go of. We are taken to a place, the story, the very origin of story. It is really that good. Haven't we all felt the cold breath of Arctos, listened to its howling in our troubled sleep?
This is just the opening, mind you. The rest of the collection does not disappoint by any means, but it is tragically short at only fifty pages, so those first seven pages really do set the rhythm and key for better or worse. I read the whole book through twice in a morning and spent the entire day mulling over Hart's peculiar melding of sound and idea. I'm sure there are those lining up to write this off as the usual writing school fare, and perhaps I may have been one of them once. But it seems the older I get the softer I get, and the keener I am to give a good storyteller their due:
His hand moves roundly
looping distance.
A quick and assured gap of life
on a vivid sheet of paper.
("Circumnavigation")
The poet here is fused with some lost cartographer, some hidebound navigator - the James Cook of Slessor's vision? - until we are not so sure who is looking longingly toward "a bed that is unmade, yet inviting." The world, the mind, a mattress in the corner?
In the end, perhaps what sets this collection apart from all those well-intentioned, carefully-crafted, ultimately timid and hollow collections being ferried out of the writing schools is that the poet here seems genuinely caught between one breath and the next, transfixed like a moth in a darkened room.
It starts with an untidy map
held within skin,
deep and heavy on the head
And becomes an avenue of this, a river of that
a crossroad, meeting between eyebrow
curved and bent beyond recognition;
A roundabout
at cheek and chin,
drawing the mouth into recess.
Eyes are unexplored terrain
while hair, always neater than the face,
reaches for sky.
("Samuel Beckett's Wrinkles")
This is not dodging, or masking, or any other type of obfuscation, but a song from the heart squeezed between the bars. It is a rare and special gift.
(Reviewed by Justin Lowe, June 2007)
