READINGS OF THE WORK BY PHILIP HARVEY

A Steady Storm of Correspondence : Selected Letters of Gwen Harwood 1943-1995, Edited by Gregory Kratzmann, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, Queensland, ISBN 0 7022 3257 2 RRP $40 Review by Philip Harvey first published in Eureka Street in 2005 In Gwen Harwood’s first letter to her future editor Greg Kratzmann, she pleads ‘As for my life, there’s little to tell.’ This faux-naif, some would even say housewifely, denial is followed with, ‘I’ve never climbed higher than 1270 metres or been out of Australia or divorced or psychoanalysed or pursued by a bear.’   (28.2.91) Suggestive and flirtatious, Harwood’s contrasting qualification is a game her readers recognise instantly. It is the talent of a poet with the skill to excite her reader into wanting to know more. In this brick of a book we get to know much more than we bargained for. If ‘there’s little to tell’, she Harwood finds a hundred and one ways of spinning it magically into full-scale display. Harw...

Seven Types of Ingenuity Reflections on the Poetry of Peter Steele Eulogy for Peter Steele by Philip Harvey, fisrt published in Eureka Street online in 2012     Even in his own lifetime John Donne was criticised for writing TMI poetry: too much information, Reverend Dean. That his contemporary in London William Shakespeare was doing exactly the same thing in helter-skelter speeches did not elicit similar complaints. Shakespeare had to get his people inside the heads of the audience, so hours of normal connective thought and feeling were compressed into sixty seconds of words. Miraculously, it works. Donne made poems in which every line can be a new simile, an outrageous inversion, a nerve-racking pun. His poems are an anthology of knowledge where, somewhere, an argument or an emotion waits to be revealed. The reader has to have determination. This ingenuity of the anthology is also a characteristic of the poetry of Peter Steele. The American poet Marian...

The Tossmania : an Anthology of Irish Poetic Imaginings of Australia Philip Harvey Paper delivered at the 13 th Irish-Australia Conference Thursday 30 th of September, 2004 Redmond Barry Building, University of Melbourne 1. Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) The charts in ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ map the coastlines of countries unvisited by the European explorers of the time. Largely blank rectangles of space are inscribed with Jonathan Swift’s imaginings. 1 Lilliput is south-west of Sumatra and north-west of Van Diemen’s Land, for Swift, like all residents of Ireland in 1726, was unaware of continental Australia or that Tasmania is an island. All the nations Gulliver visits contain premonitions of the vast land that the Irish, amongst others, would start settling some sixty years later. Everything is slightly different there. Small is large and large is small. Modes of government behave at times like satires of British rule. The Enlightenment god of material measurem...

Some notes on Peter Porter’s poem ‘Frogs outside Barbischio’ Barbischio is part of Chianti in the heart of Tuscany, as is evident from the descriptions in the poem too, so we are in the Porter ‘paradise’ of Italy. As well as being about frogs, the poem has certain humans who are frogs, frogs who are engaged in the activity of art, and in particular writing. In my view, the grandfather frog is PP wistfully looking at his younger self, the frog who writes his anatomy of melancholy. Once more, 17 th century England meets 20 th century Italy: ‘The Anatomy of Melancholy’ (1621) is a famous work by Robert Burton. I am in absolutely no doubt that Basho’s famous haiku is behind this poem, even down to the inference at the end that the grandfather frog has also gone kerplop into the water, only his stick still floating on the surface. I would say it is a reading of the Basho, and to appreciate the Porter it helps to know what Basho’s haiku is doing. Haiku is a form that evolved fr...

Some notes on Peter Porter’s poem ‘An Exequy’ As he acknowledges in verse 2, Porter is using the form and theme of Henry King’s poem ‘Exequy on his Wife’, written by the bishop in the 17 th century: http://www.bartleby.com/101/280.html As in that poem, Porter is talking to his lost wife. It was possibly easier for him to draw on this poem as a model, given his state. As is known, he had a lifelong argument with religion, in particular the Anglicanism of England that he both admired and could not accept. The poem is remarking implicitly on the bishop’s own poem; one can imagine Porter enjoying having a spar with a bishop. As happens in grief, most everything else seems fairly pointless, most especially in his case poetry – the very thing he employs to say how hopeless everything seems, the world and the loss. Now for some notes on references. “The country you wouldn’t visit” cannot be England or Italy, and my guess is he means Australia, though I will suggest he also means ...

John Donne Published in The Melbourne Anglican, 2004 One Equall Light : an anthology of the writings of John Donne, compiled and edited and with introductory essays by John Moses. Foreword by Rowan Williams. Canterbury Press, 2003. 1-85311- 540-1 RRP $74.95 Review by Philip Harvey The rediscovery of John Donne in the 20th century reminds us that his reputation for nearly three hundred years was almost non-existent; Dr Johnson dismissed his poetry in a sentence. Donne's powerful imaginative compression and meaningful wordplay have ensured his name as one of the greatest English poets, ‘The Sunne Rising' and ‘The Good-Morrow' amongst his indispensible gifts to modern consciousness. Donne's name has become synonymous with the sacred and the profane, a line he would have questioned himself. Yet it remains true that the general reader knows the love poetry best and has not ventured much beyond the Holy Sonnets. This collection helps restore Donne...

Disclosure, by Ann Lewin   Philip Harvey   Written by request for the students at St Peter’s Eastern Hill Melbourne studying for their Trinity College Certificate in Theology & Ministry, February-April 2011, under the direction of Bishop Graeme Rutherford.   Disclosure Ann Lewin Prayer is like watching for the Kingfisher. All you can do is Be where he is likely to appear, and Wait. Often, nothing much happens; There is space, silence and Expectancy. No visible sign, only the Knowledge that he’s been there And may come again. Seeing or not seeing cease to matter, You have been prepared. But sometimes when you’ve almost stopped Expecting it, a flash of brightness Gives encouragement. Ann Lewin is drawing on an established tradition in modern poetry of using the kingfisher as a sign of anticipation, breakthrough, recognition, wonder, and revelation. Her understanding of prayer comes from the contemplative and mystical tra...