I received an email last week from a poet who lives in Tasmania. He wrote,
The highlight of my past week has been a seven and a half hour cruise up the Derwent River from Franklin Wharf to New Norfolk and back again. It was very interesting to see so many familiar sights from a slightly different angel.
And I want to say that Lyndon’s The Book of Angels is itself a slightly different angel, one strongly connected to Tasmania, in particular to
its light and its often gently playful way with clouds as well as rain, which is, as Lyndon writes, the sound of angels dancing.
An angel, being a being without a body, and as far as we know far more intelligent and powerful than any of us, carrying a name that means
something like messenger—it’s reasonable to wonder what these visitors are up to in Lyndon’s poems, where they are sometimes disguised as goats,
and sometimes as bad house guests who don’t make the bed in the morning. And their message? I discovered on page 47 that they do have a message
for us, and I think it is that there is no need to travel to America. It’s an old message but somehow gets more powerful every year.
The angels are of course messengers from our own psyches, like unicorns and dragons, like saints and monsters, no moere than metaphors, but don’t
we more than half-believe in them once they’re named?
In any case, we’re drawn to angels, and they’re drawn to us because we are their mystery. I imagine they long to know what it means to be
a creature able to suffer, able to be late for a book launch, able to love, and even die. They have no idea what it is like to be us,
and maybe this is exactly why we need them to be close to us.
Lyndon, drawn to angels, has always nevertheless been an irretrievably human creature, and the proof has been, for me, his blast from a blues
harp at the beginning of a poetry reading—a harp that reminds angels of the perhaps overly celestial choice they’ve made with their harps.
Lyndon’s blues blast has woken up many a poetry audience and left them in the following pause listening in ways they hadn’t expect to.
I don't have a blues harp to blow, but I do have a real, physical book here to launch, and despite having been to countless book launches, I’m
still not really sure what it means to launch a book. A book is not a rocket, it can’t float, and if I throw it at you it won’t go far enough to
justify the word ‘launch’, maybe only far enough to poke someone very close here in the eye. Of course, though, we’re talking metaphors,
which are the invasive and allergenic pollen given off by the great tree of language.
To return to angels, if the great and gone Michael Leunig (1945-2024) was making a cartoon of the launch of a poetry book he might show the chosen
forelorn launcher leaning forward, book in hand, tossing it into an abyss while the poet sits on a stool to the side weeping into his or her hands,
and perhaps a guardian angel standing behind the poet reaching one hand out to the poet’s shaking shoulders. But even if most poetry books
do seem to be swallowed by an abyssal silence that goes by the name of remainders, or ‘returned’, that doesn’t matter too much because
Lyndon’s harp has a message about poetry, and that is that poetry lives in the body. It lives in the strange and unangelic human breath
we alchemise into words.
As a grandparent to two preverbal humans I’m coming to understand all over again that words are only half of any message, maybe less
than half. Those little preverbal creatures get by with da-da, wa-wa, ayawayada, ha, and a few other squeals and conversational sounding
trills. It amounts to a natural form of poetry, and if poetry is anything, it’s the best kind of living conversation, which includes
not only what’s said but how words are made by bodies carrying and creating the physical traces of their own imaginatioins and histories.
So, abyss-of-the-printed-word, do your worst. Us poets will survive you. But in the meantime, perhaps those of us present today could
remember that to buy a book of poetry (that is, to save at least one copy from the abyss) is to buy a loaf or maybe a slice of bread
for a poet. And poets are after all not angels. They need bread as much as they need the seasons, midnight streets, rain and sunlight.
Lyndon’s poems are dappled and spotted and striped and struck with light, which means there are also many shadows, because that is an
element of light too. We can’t have angels without having the fallen angels. Lyndon’s poems, lit or darkened, invite us in, the buoyant
and the deflated, because they are open, and open to questions, to rawness and doubt, to dismay and joy. I guess what a poet does is
point at the world like a toddler who has recognised something or wants to know something, but has not yet learned exactly what word to
use, or even quite what a word is. Maybe poetry at its best is always bent towards a necessary suspicion of language.
When Gwen Harwood, perhaps the greatest Tasmanian poet, wrote,
the world’s more than the sum of things
Like moon, sky, centre, body, bed,
As all the singing masters know
she was doing this kind of pointing, with hope that words won’t close us down, and Lyndon does it too when he writes, within a sequence titled ‘Coastal Music’:
I knew they were her socks when I picked them up
And put them with other things
Into my bag. Two small socks without dislike or suspicion.
She had thrown them off, quickly
To race out across the road
To tell the man
Whose hat had blown off
Where he could find it.
She’s like that
And when she came back
Laughing and breathless
The huge blue sky her whole canvas
The wind blowing hair across her face
Leaping at me
Like a silver fish from a stream of pure joy
I lifted the camera I had been playing with
And gave thanks.
Lyndon’s poetry has the courage to point at the world and trust we can see it with him. The man has an eye, and a tone of discovery.
I don’t quite know how to describe what he has done in those few lines, but I know it’s something I enjoy, and get lifted by every time
I read it. The thing has wings.
There are love poems in this book too that are unafraid of themselves, and even of cliches. Lots of poets avoid writing love poems
for the very reason that Lyndon has a go at it, and makes of his poems small angels. Lyndon is the keeper of a house of light when he
writes in his Apollo Bay poem, ‘Images on Holiday’:
The carpet of purple flowers
First trumpet their little martyrdoms
Across the wet concrete of summer
Before small steam makes a magic of the footpath.
Those four lines: simple, surprising, modest, ironic, and finally, briefly, celebratory, and all of it grounded by that concrete footpath.
Not simple at all really. But it is perhaps the best kind of lyric spirit that poetry can manage in a world being mashed by wars of
genocide, rampant pollution, a debased politics, and the Frankensteinian nightmare of data centres. The carpet of purple flowers
might be benign until we come to their martyrdom, throwing back the possibility of carpet trailing the shadow of carpet-bombing.
The steam hints too of a world not at peace, but somehow still at peace by ‘magic’, which, as we know, is always trickery.
Perhaps only a Tasmanian poet can hold so surely to the lyric in poetry while suffusing this with unsettled irony.
And Lyndon lives at a place called Beauty Point, a name that must make you look and think and look again.
One of my most favourite poems ever is here (it is a selected), and you might say this poem has no angels in it, but I suspect it does. It is a
one-pager, and its title is‘Holding the Egg’. I think I like it so much because it moves so confidently as a free verse poem, and because it is a
small story (and I love stories) of almost unbearable and unspeakable, undeniable emotions involving hurt, responsibility, defiance, resilience,
compassion, guilt, atonement, desire, yearning, epiphany, and the natural poetry of gesture all at once. Lyndon has spent decades wandering through
people’s psyches in his work as a counsellor and therapist, and I am sure he has looked hard for answers that might resolve or cure or release
people from suffering. But that worthy and important desire for answers is often the enemy of poetry, partly because any answer must first
simplify the questions we face, and simplifying questions is anathema to poetry. It seems to me that this poem I am about to read faces
squarely its questions, and it faces too the power metaphor might have in coming to understand the complexity of a question. No impulse
to simplify things here. Lyndon manages to dance with the human psyche in this poem:
When she was eight
she used to go riding
but the parents
wouldn’t let her go riding
you can go to the farm they said
but you can’t go riding.
Well you know don’t you
that she went to the farm
and she rode that horse
and of course she fell off
and of course she broke her arm
and of course she went home
and didn’t tell she broke her arm.
She sat down to watch television
until she could feel her mother looking at her
and of course her mother knew she’d been to the farm
and of course she said you rode that horse didn’t you
and as the pain ran down her face
she remembered when she was five
she wanted so much to help her mother
while her mother was cooking
and she would beg to help and her mother would say
later I will need this egg
and when she looked down
she noticed
she was hlding her arm
in the same way
she held that egg.
Perhaps I can point to one more poem before you rush away back into the world outside this world in here, with a book under your arm.
Close Up It Might Be Rain, p 83-4
This is the poetry of sincerity. In the early 2000s some poets and commentators noticed what they called then the new sincerity in
some poetry, a sincerity that shouldered modernism’s despair and postmodernism’s cynicism while managing to celebrate and hold to
human emotions naïvely. Lyndon’s is not a naïve poem but a noticing one where the opening ordinary stillness of river and mountains
by the end of the poem has become the point of existence. Of course, you might say. You might even say this all goes without saying,
but then we’d have missed out on the yellow motor bike striking its way along a dusty brown road, the one-year-old dazzled by a
black and white tv bargained hard for, and the immense difficulty of resting in a green heaven above a blue river, we would have
missed out on the apprentices’ blue rubber hammers. I am imagining they are apprentice angels (as we all are), and I’m grateful
for the image of the source of that pounding on the roof.
And in the movement from close up to the distant theatrical curtain of rain across a landscape, I’m reminded of a
passage early in Niall Williams’ beautiful novel History of the Rain:
… the rain that is coming is not hard or driving but a kind you can’t quite see falling but is there all the same. It started raining here in the sixteenth century and hasn’t stopped. But we don’t notice, and people still say Not a Bad Day though the drizzle is beaded on the top of their hair or in the furrows of their brow. (p 41)
About rain in Melbourne we know much, but what we know doesn’t come near to what’s known in County Clare, nor what’s there for the
knowing in Tasmania. Almost every night on the ABC news I watch those ribbons of rain sweep across the island of Tasmania. Recently,
after a month in Hobart, I have a renewed respect for Tasmanians’ acceptance of the non-conformity of clouds, and the powerful,
instructive stillness of their Mount Wellington/Kunanyi.
There is a lot, lot more to say about this marvellous book, which turns to other poets, Sylvia Plath, Anne Carson, Alex Skovron,
and William Carlos Williams, to the recurring figure of Jean and other women, his daughter, mother, lovers in exchanges that pull
us into a moment or reach us back in time, to the experience of bushfire, rain, New Orleans, memorably to a snowfall (p21), and
to the hum of the world, but my job here is to get this book launched — at you — and your job, you must know, is to catch it.
Good luck. I hope, once you’ve rescued a copy, that you open the book and allow enough time for each poem to sift through you
so that you do find in them many familiar sights from a slightly different angel. They are worth your time. Here goes.
Kevin Brophy, October 2026