I speak for the Dear Four when I say what a privilege it is for us, Robert, that you have agreed to launch our
collection.
At home, I pick up one of Robert's books, open it at random, read a paragraph aloud – and it is beautiful. It’s the way he writes. He’s a consummate wordsmith and at the top of his game at 81.
I promised Robert I wouldn’t read from his extensive biography or say how well his books have done in various European countries (it would put him to sleep, he said). So, here’s a one-sentence summary: Robert Dessaix has written two works of fiction and twelve of non-fiction, and has edited several anthologies of essays.
We could have asked a poet to launch our book but what could a poet do that Robert can’t. He may tell you he knows nothing about poetry. Don’t believe him. He writes from a wealth of knowledge, it’s true, but he’s also intensely lyrical, without trying to be. He’s erudite and philosophical but his books are accessible to any reader. And he writes from the heart – with eloquence and humour couched in that conversational style. His voice is so strong it’s as if he’s in the room talking as you read. Any poet would envy such a quality.
Please welcome Robert Dessaix. And I have no idea what he’s going to say!
Liz McQuilkin
Thank you, Mary, Christiane, Karen and Liz, for choosing me to launch this collection of your poetry. I’m delighted to usher it out into the world this afternoon.
I beg your forgiveness for reading these remarks … I’m at a point in life (evoked with singular vividness in The Dear Four) when, if I don’t read from notes, I’m apt halfway through whatever I’m doing to forget what I’m doing and why. These pages will keep me on target.
I’m an eccentric choice on your part, dear poets, because … to speak honestly, I have lived almost my entire life beyond the bounds of poetry. (Beyond the bounds of almost everything else as well, it turns out: sport, children, post-modernism … but in particular poetry.) I know who Keats and Rilke were, of course, and Emily Dickenson and Pushkin, and have read some Larkin and Eliot and Pasternak, but I really only came face to face with poetry in my late thirties when I used to meet up with two Canberra poets (many of you will know, Rosemary Dobson and David Campbell) every fortnight to translate Russian poets – Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva and others – into English. It was like discovering America. Poetry, from a Russian perspective, at that time, was a fantastically intricate game with words, a game with many rules and more than one net to hit the ball over. I loved it. It was gothic. It soared. It was a cathedral. In poetry you could look for ways to say things in Russian that you weren’t allowed (in those days) to say straightforwardly in prose.
May I be bleak for a moment? A tiny bit Russian? Literature – as distinct from just ‘writing’ – (to me) is a kind of refined conscience at the back of the mind (society’s mind) as it watches us all being eaten alive (by the kind of ogres and their henchmen we see on the evening news day after day).
This small voice, this conscience, asks you questions about how aware you are of what truly matters now to you (and it may be the moment itself that matters), about what roots you’ve put down in the cultural soil you grow in – thrive in, I hope, how deep or shallow you are in your understanding of what’s going on … but (above all) about what matters. What has weight. Not much (as I see it) does. Literature isn’t simply voicing a moral stance (in somebody’s eyes: the Guardian’s, for instance, or the English Department’s at your local university). It isn’t a mirror. It’s a conscience. And it’s multifarious because, as Mary Blackwood writes in the first poem in the book, The world is holding all of us at once. Yes, it is – all of us. Hundreds of millions of people we have nothing in common with at all.
Nowadays YouTube, film-makers and David Walsh do all these things for the population at large – ask questions about what matters, what roots we’ve put down, where we’re going and why – by-passing literature entirely. Tribal echo-chambers still like novels, it’s true, so long as the ideas bouncing back and forth are ideologically acceptable to them, but nobody needs literature … people live their whole lives reading nothing but the Gardening Australia monthly magazine, and even fewer feel drawn to poetry.
It’s not the way it was when I was young. If only things were as they used to be then everyone would turn out well, like me. (I’m quoting Mary Blackwood again.) Well, exactly. In every regard, exactly. I’ve just come back from Indonesia where the main bookstore chain (Gramedia) doesn’t bother with it all … there are a couple of Agatha Christies and a Jane Austen in Indonesian on the shelves, along with handful of largely unread local writers, and that’s about it … Gramedia sells self-help books, holy books (lots of Korans and Bibles) and biros.
And so I feel, as the century goes pop all around me like a cloud of carnival balloons, that fine writing, and poetry in particular, along with drama for live audiences perhaps, is of diminishing interest to anybody.
I feel (in this year of Donald Trump, Ukraine, Sudan and Gaza) as if something has withered inside me. Something that’s always been there, isn’t there any more. There’s an emptiness. (And not the Buddhist sort.) I feel a sort of grief. Who doesn’t. Something vital I once had a grasp of has disappeared. Am I mildly demented? Have I misplaced something? What is it? (At my age, after all, you misplace things all the time: books, letters, your spectacles, people ...) Please don’t let me lose my mind, pleads a night-time voice in Liz McQuilkin’s first poem in the collection … but she, with her squirrel psyche, has a store of poems to nourish her spirit.
This collection, The Dear Four (an eccentric title, too, arresting – Who’d have guessed what ‘dear’ means without being told?) The Dear Four gives me confidence, nevertheless, even without a store of poems, if I pay attention, I can find what’s been missing. I am enlivened by it – inspirited, we once said. (If only things were as they used to be …) Not every poem in the book will mend the wound – my particular wounds … how could it? But a surprising number make me feel whole. To my surprise. To my delight. (I don’t normally listen to what poets say, remember. The distillation I find in poetry is usually too radical for me.) Yet overwhelmingly these poems made me sing. One by one they made me take flight.
How? How, exactly, did these poems do this? In half a dozen ways – ways close to my heart.
It’s not, by the way, through the evocation of nature: The Dear Four is alive with animals as poetry across the planet is: kangaroos, ducks, quail, hens, platypuses … pigs, calves, blowflies, possums, swans, cormorants, one thylacine, they’re all here, the pages seethe with them, animals and birds and trees and plants being the source, I suppose, in poetry, of immediate, enriching, sensual moments … a more and more precious source as each day goes by and fewer and fewer of us ever see any sign of it. But that’s not what made me sing.
A surprising number of poems in this collection (to quote Christiane Conésa Bostock at the end of a demanding poem ‘White Library at MONA’) ‘transform the ordinary into the extraordinary’. Art does. (Writing doesn’t.) But art does. It’s magic – the only kind that really works, I suspect. Christiane can even do it with objects found behind a wardrobe. She does it devastatingly (in my opinion) in her poem about a face at an airport. My whole life, I often can’t help feeling, is ‘made up of objects found behind a wardrobe’, you see, amongst the dead flies and kleenexes. It doesn’t need a fortune to make it beautiful, it doesn’t need a designer or a guru, it needs a poem, a poetic voice, it needs the utter dailiness of it all to be transformed by a poet into something extraordinary – not meaningful, or valuable, but extraordinary. Paper over with your words the emptiness I stare into. Turn it into a haiku (for example). The mining of everydayness is in fact what makes us modern (it has been argued) – not just smallness but everydayness … everyday love after forty years, for instance, or the arrival of the Veolia truck. Keats didn’t do this sort of thing. Nor did T.S. Eliot. Once upon a time, dailiness was a wife’s business Readers once upon a time demanded politics, history, kings, wars, great loves, infatuations. The dear four, without quite meaning to be (I get the impression), are actually at the cutting edge. It’s a cup of cold water. Dailiness is not enough, of course – I know that. Old Kleenexes aren’t enough. We also need the poetry – we need the reframing, the transformation. At the airport, in that poem about the face at the airport, it was a moment that struck – a moment so thin it was hardly there.
It takes great skill
to avoid the other’s gaze
when –
to eat a chocolate croissant
and sip a cappuccino –
you take a seat
opposite her
in silence
as if she did not exist
as if she were transparent.
In these pages, page after page, that’s what you notice, that’s what invigorates you: the moment captured and transformed, the moment (at its best) which is also miraculously timeless. (That’s the key, I think.) I think, but may be wrong, that as the outside world becomes darker, seemingly devoid of hope, as the grand narratives we once took heart from lose their believability, (perhaps that’s a better way to put it) we will turn more and more often to the remembered moment for … sustenance, to the briefest of narratives, the least pompous, for a bolt of timelessness, cocking a snook at death. There is after all no grand revelation at the end, as we’d once expected. There are just reflections. But they may need to be magicked into being beautiful. In some sense.
I seem to have touched on old age without meaning to … talking about the narratives we might turn to at the end … but in this collection, admirably, the poets return over and over again to the final years, how to live out the remaining years. (How indeed.) To what another Hobart poet, Sarah Day, I think would call ‘coming undone’. And so there are coffins, there is fragility – a dog’s last day in Karen Knight’s touching but also bracing poem about her dying Hyundai, (the march of time and its detritus, while present in her verse, avoids being tragic somehow: there are grandchildren, the arrival of her garbage truck is a life-enhancing affair) – but there is still fragility on every second page in this book.
But I like (on the subject of endings) – indeed I love – (if I might say so) Liz McQuilkin’s staunch objection in the book’s final poem to the frankly silly advice – jejune, unthought-through – that Dylan Thomas offered us ‘to rage against the dying of the light’. And why exactly would you do that? What comfort or beauty would that afford you … or anyone? Like Liz, I hope – devoutly, fiercely – the opposite: to go gentle into it. (So far so good.)
‘Rate your experience of this poem,’ one of the poems in this book is called. ‘Please say how you think we have done.’ In real life, something inside me shrivels and dies when I see these words pop up on my phone. But I want to rate the experience of your book, dear Four. I’m delighted to say how I think you’ve done.
It’s a joy. Truly. It’s me now, it’s how modern life feels, it’s beautiful. I give it five stars. The biggest elephant stamp I can find. Congratulations to all four of you. For just a time (your words, Mary) the barking world was indeed silenced by your poetry. ‘Rate your experience’: A remarkable book. (Thank you.)