Poets New and Old
The rising cost of books at times seems astronomical. When I was a boy (not an astronomical time ago) this Australian book would have cost me at most five shillings; it now costs fifteen shillings, which means that something has tripled, and I do not think it can be solely the cost of living or the cost of paper. Meanwhile the cost of liquor has only doubled. A thrifty man would drink more and read less.
But the Australian selection is certainly worth buying. I notice, in particular, ‘Person to Person’, by Gwen Harwood, ‘The Convict and the Lady’, by James McAuley, ‘Words with Galatea’, by David Campbell, ‘Jack the Ripper’, by Charles Higham, ‘Country Idyll’, by Dorothy Hewett, and ‘Crossing the Frontier’, by A.D. Hope. And this list suggests that I value the established Australian poets most; which is true, for I find chiefly among them a genuine myth-making power. The newest writers seem all too well adjusted to the Age of the Computer. The Australian poets one returns topage 688 nearly all possess a strong satirical talent, and the best of them (including those I have mentioned here) come out fighting.
It is unfortunate that the publishers of Mr Walsh’s small book of verse thought fit to include a four-page Introduction by a friend. The poems do not need interpretation. They are naïve, sincere, idealist comments on God, culture, sex and American college life by a lecturer in English who is also an Episcopalian clergyman; and behind them one seems to detect an unfathomable tiredness.
A translation of Gide’s early surrealist account of an imaginary voyage (written in 1892) is of interest chiefly for the light it sheds on other works. Its ornate erotic style and highly literary images seem now merely pretentious; but the passages which refer, under the name of Ellis, to Gide’s cousin and wife-to-be, Madeleine, are still real and forceful.
1964 (332)