Sea and Land

It is not always a good thing for a poet who feels he is on to a good thing to pursue it and hunt it to death. John Blight’s earlier sonnet sequence A Beachcomber’s Diary, dredged the edge of the sea most proficiently. This one page 647 does the same, but two defects that were apparent in the earlier book are written larger here. John Blight does not really have a great deal to say about himself or the life of the rock pools and beaches he so devotedly haunts –

There is not such beauty in the octopuses
That one would land their beauty to the muses;
And yet the picture of the sea refuses
To seem the sea, if we exclude these molluscs . . .

This is a fairly typical sonnet beginning. It says that octopuses are not beautiful; it says that the sea would not be the sea without them; and this could be enough to build a poem, if John Blight could see the octopuses as a hidden part of his own and human nature. But he is not a symbolist, and this is his downfall. It makes his poems light nature-study pieces. It takes more than this to justify a hundred sonnets.

If Gwen Harwood were to write of octopuses (she doesn’t) they would be creatures of the mind as well as actual molluscs. There would be socialites in glass tanks, or lovers with inordinate wishes. Her poems have the dimension of interiority that John Blight’s work unfortunately lacks –

Stones rolled in lively anarchy
Through centuries of water grind
These hemispheres in softer stone.
I walk along a narrow ledge
Of sandstone at the water’s edge,
And thought like water takes its own
Shape in the hollows of the mind . . .

We may grow tired of Professor Kröte, the drunken music teacher who is her type of exiled European sensitivity and sophistication in a series of social fables; still, she knows the society of which she is writing, the arid, melancholy Tasmanian orchard-land where the white settlers long ago formed a cordon across the country and systematically exterminated the aborigines along with any hope of their own for cultural change. And her love poems ring true. I recommend this book to any reader who might wonder what new thing could come out of Tasmania.

1968 (544)