enter the slaughterhouse scream,
bearing the lethal waters of spilt images and madness.
(from 'Dit-da-dit' Collage 2002)
"Collage" was dedicated to the poet's wife Rosa, who sadly passed away just as this latest collection must have been going to press. I only mention that at all because the poet seems to have come to publishing late in life, and there is a sense of urgency in his work, a sudden E major that keeps chiming down from the often manic scherzo of this master craftsman.
Peter Lloyd is first and foremost an acute and passionate observer of our species in all its glory, desolation, and folly. It is by no means an unforgiving eye, but thanks to the poet's technical prowess, it is unblinking. I would shudder were it ever turned on me! I can't remember the last time I encountered such seamless technical ability in an Australian poet. Like the great composers to whom Lloyd pays homage (and I can hear Debussy's sonorous play of light and dark on every page), each flash, each leap, each lunge and rest is brilliantly timed and placed:
Witnesses and Mormons: missionaries
bent against the wind, crawling
over the great bell curve of the Estate…
In town, crying of winter storms
as coffins passed
derelict factories
tall houses
half-dark
and waves almost swamping
the Charity Shop
with dead men's clothes for sails.
(from Dead Men's Clothes)
This poet has a great ear for dissonance, for the arresting chord, and it is what renders his writing so vivid and crowded at the expense of so little ink. Had I not run the obligatory check, I would have put Peter Lloyd down as one of the burgeoning Brisbane crew, rubbing shoulders with Hardacre, Fraser, Dionysius et al, but he is in fact a septuagenarian from the Adelaide Hills. Not that it matters, really, except as further proof (if proof were really needed) that this poet is very much alive when he writes (not such a common thing, sadly). He walks a lot of back streets in his work, appraising a world either half-realised or half-destroyed, where a truth of sorts exists, but in tatters, prey to the fickle breezes of avarice, fear, expediency, all the crimes of those who have superannuated themselves at the expense of their children and their world. In fact, at times he strikes me as a post-apocalyptic Leopold Bloom, struggling to digest what he encounters before the next encounter:
One step here through the void
and you can hear them all screaming in the dark;
and it's every night - howl of Tech house and Electrolash,
lights swerving off tree-trunks, shadowy people
who fade back into deeper shadows, echoing stairs
and bubble-wrapped filth ... a roar of bones,
traffic, clattering streets.
("Corbusier's Patch")
Reading Peter Lloyd I can't help the feeling that he could not have held onto these things a moment longer, which brings me back to that sense of urgency in many of the poems, as though putting them down on paper were truly a matter of life or death:
brilliant/brilliant/brilliant
lightning strokes
("The Air was Slab")
The beauty in his writing is harsh, the language at times scree, at times undulating:
Groping through rubble, the dead stumble: a drunk heaves
vowel-howls on the road, a red wine gush-fall
as he lurches off a rainbow dangling
from the corner of his mouth ... a song without words
(from "Harvest")
Had I dared impinge on my editor's patience I would have shared the entire 50-odd lines of this poem with you. It is a gem, the sort of poem I conjure when someone whispers the word "poet" - a bristling, sonorous lamentation crowded with ache and pity and that Sunday sense of unbridgeable loss. Poets young and old need to read this man's work. I promise you will learn to love your craft all over again.
(Reviewed by Justin Lowe, June 2007)
