THE WILL OF THE POEM: Religio-Imaginative Variations in the Poetry of James McAuley, Francis Webb, and Vincent Buckley

While considering the work of James McAuley, Francis Webb and Vincent Buckley, this thesis concentrates on the religious character of their poetry. Since it assumes that religious language is primarily metaphorical (as distinct from dogmatic), the thesis describes the poetry by way of its religio-imaginative relationships and structures. James McAuley's poetry is religious, not so much because it is Catholic, as because it voyages between despair and hope, believing always in the reasoned will. Francis Webb's poetry, continually discovering glory in dereliction, dramatises the revelatory and redeeming power of the rejected ones - and so works within the 'Suffering Servant' model of 'Isaiah'. While Vincent Buckley's poetry gradually abandons Catholic language in favour of its own 'idiom of sensation', the religious quality of that sensation is discovered more in liminal than in paradisal possibilities - in the way 'holy spaces' are always in some sense expatriate ones. Since each of these poets belongs in the period of Vatican II Catholicism, the thesis next relates their work to that context. Here, however, it searches for imaginative connections and disconnections by setting up its comparison on the basis, not of dogmas, but of models. Finally, the thesis interprets Webb's 'Eyre All Alone' as a search for renewed religious language, returning to its opening assumption that religious language is primarily metaphorical

The Choice of Nothing

I cannot say when I was chosen by the word, 'nothing', but I felt it first in Phuket, southern Thailand. It was in the New Year of 1990 and I was visiting the abbot of a Buddhist monastery called Wat Mongkolnimit. I had been taken there by my friend, Stephen Fahey, a disciple of the abbot's. According to Stephen, the abbot was an extraordinary person: wise, compassionate, detached, unpretentious and humorous. I can remember going up the stairs to the monk's room clutching my spiritual insights, hoping that I would not say anything too banal and that I might receive at least one little nod of approval. And the abbot gave us tea and never spoke tome

Sounds in print, worlds below: Seamus Heaney’s deepening words

Seamus Heaney’s poetry seems, at first sight, safely suited to an interest in the relationships between the global and the local. Even a reader who knows it is no longer permissible to speak of “universal human truths” can take comfort in the “global” appeal of a poetry celebrated for its precisely sensuous descriptions of place, its quest for origins and continuities, its ritualising, reconciling response to violence. What happens, though, when such a reader starts to learn what other readers think? Some critics claim that Heaney’s is a poetry in which sound substitutes for sense. Others assert his quest for origins and continuities is an escape from immediate actualities. Still others argue among themselves about whether Heaney’s is a poetry too much or too little engaged in the politics of Northern Ireland. Is it possible to make sense(s) of Heaney’s “global” appeal in the context of a complex of different readings (keeping in mind that “global” may signal a complex rather than a simple effect, a compact of difference rather than a single, uniform agreement)? This essay seeks to address that question by exploring some different readings of Heaney’s work and by standing (not choosing) between the differences. It takes a clue, a cue, from Heaney’s originary symbol of place: Mossbawn the family farm, is “the realm of division”, combining a Norse word for bog (“moss”) with an English or Scottish word for foot (“bawn”) and geographically situated between Toome Bridge and Castledawson. In Heaney’s words, this place is “a symbolic placing for a Northern Catholic, to be in-between the marks of nationalist local sentiment on the one hand, and the marks of colonial and British presence on the other.

Much More You Could Say: Bruce Dawe’s poetry

Bruce Dawe’s reputation as a vernacular poet can be a disadvantage. I once heard an eminent Australian critic remark that once you’d read his poems there wasn’t much more you could say. The implication was that his work had an immediate appeal but no depth and that to exercise one’s critical faculties on work so colloquial in pitch and perspective would be a waste of a well-trained mind. At the same time I encountered the poetry of Philip Martin. Martin is a writer Dawe acknowledges as his friend and mentor, yet Martin’s poetry seems at first very different: the accent is more cultivated and the focus more personal. There is, however, at least one important similarity: both practise ‘the art that conceals art’, exercising great control of rhythm and speech stress to create an apparently uncomplicated voice. It is only when you do read their poems — that is, read within rather than over their poems — that you find there is much more you could say

Landing the Sacred

Somewhere near the beginning of my memory I find myself on windy ground. I must be little more than a toddler, playing on what appears to be a large, open paddock. The wind is running up behind me, catching my shoulders, then rushing out ahead of me. The grass (it seems so tall) is always bending away from me. And in this memory I have picked a dandelion flower (we used to call them 'Santa Claus') and am blowing on it until its globe breaks up and out into a myriad of tiny seeds. I am trying to retrieve as many as I can from the drifting air. It isn't easy. But it feels good: the movement of the wind, the movement of my hand, the staying power of earth, and the dandelion seeds, so there and so out of reach, like tiny parachutes of hope