By John Tranter
Salt/Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 114pp, $21.95
In a review of the recently published Collected Poems of Robert Lowell (1917-77), perhaps the most notorious English-writing poet last century, translator and poet Michael Hofmann lamented: "In Lowell's 'mid-century', poetry still belonged in every well-stocked library and mind. There's little reason to read it any more. Poetry in America has declined to a civil war, a banal derby between two awful teams, and in Britain to a variety show."
This can be of little comfort to Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, John Ashbery, Les Murray or John Ernest Tranter. Let us, however, celebrate the importance of being Ernest, and of poetry, and remember that the disgraced novelist Jerzy Kosinski said 30 years ago that serious literature would always remain where it has always been, "at the margins of consciousness".
Studio Moon is Tranter's 17th volume of poetry in a distinguished career spanning four decades and, in this book, he is in top form. A stanza from Dark Harvest may see the poet's place through a glass darkly: Garrulous history tells us that greed and ambition Stir the struggle to make great art, but then The riders gallop up with their strange truth, troublesome, painful.
In a world all too full of garrulous and hectoring prose, it may be welcome that poetry not only "makes nothing happen", as W.H. Auden said, but tells us nothing. Formal virtuosity is sufficient, and Tranter is nothing if not virtuosic. An author's note informs us that some of the poems use a device he calls "terminals" - "taking a poem by another writer, copying the words that end each line, discarding the original poem and its concerns, and inventing a new and different poem using the borrowed end-words". Poems by Matthew Arnold, Barbara Guest, Frank O'Hara and Auden provide ends for Tranter's beginnings.
The collection also includes a three-page poem in Sapphic stanzas, a computer-based pastiche, two sestinas, four haibun, and eight pantoums (a Malay verse form). A remark by the English poet Mark Ford may be germane. "Content is a problem, as well. I can't bear poems about grandfathers or fishing expeditions. And then there's form! What should a poem look like, should it rhyme? The course is pretty well all hazards. The only way to do it is by not caring."
Tranter's poetry is always formally inventive, rhetorically convincing and intellectually complex, recalling his own characteristically iridescent simile in Invitation to America: "Like the paint job on a new convertible/ the talk is brilliant and skin-deep." Couple that with lines from American poet John Berryman, 50 years ago - "We are using our skins for wallpaper/ and cannot win" - and you have the Scylla and Charybdis of modern poetry.Don Anderson taught American literature at the University of Sydney for 30 years.
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