Among the Rocks

It strikes me that most of the recent Australian poetry is very workmanlike, moderate, precise, exact. Once it was not so. Twenty years ago the garbled outcry of Angry Penguins, and the slapstick humour of the Ern Malley farce concealed an energy that produced much bad verse and the occasional magnificent rocket display. But it is no use blaming poets for the limits that go with their virtues. When Mr Shapcott writes about his grandmother

When I was a boy at the edge of the scattering sea
Where running laughter was an entire language
She was the mystery in the water under the jetty –

I can certainly believe him and be glad that his idiom is so unstrained and exact. Still, there is a diffuseness in it. The grandmother is in turn the mystery in the water, the shallow rockpools, a relaxed summer holiday, a bare sandbank, and by becoming everything comes near to being anything. There is a lurking sentimentality underneath it all. And when he constructs a sequence from various events in the life of Christ, one feels he is doing the impossible much too easily. Everything falls into place; and one has the impression that nobody, least of all the writer, has been really hurt. Mr Shapcott is a most accomplished writer. If I find fault with his work, it is because I suspect he has been floored by the most obvious yet subtle temptation that comes to a poet – to write poems for the sake of writing poems.

Mr Smith is much less accomplished. Most of his poems are like small unripe fruit. But I have no doubt whatever that the tree is a real one; as in this brief sketch of Sydney –

The city’s like a room far undersea
With locked arcades where shadow-waves subside.
Grey windows bend great cloud-shapes as they pass.
Beyond these tiles, tunnels, iron, glass,
page 504 The flat waters of green inlets ride
Where all the folded yachts are chained away.
But here the huge hotels still sway in space
With the exactness of a foreign place. . . .

It is rather muted: but I think there is (in the words of one well-known New Zealand critic) a reality prior to the poem. Some day Mr Smith will break out of his country’s cocoon and become a satirist; but Mr Shapcott by then will be a senior critic on the staff of a Queensland university.

1968 (491)