READINGS OF THE WORK BY PHILIP HARVEY

Outside, by David McCooey. Salt. ISBN 9781844717590 This review by Philip Harvey first appeared in the Australian Book Review in 2012 Philip Larkin at 31 asked ‘Where can we live but days?’ It shouldn’t take half a lifetime to learn that we have night and day, yet learning how to live with this arrangement, and that this is the arrangement, is something we keep adapting to all our lives. While not itself a dichotomy, night and day helps form the dichotomous nature of our thinking, and informs especially that method of describing and explaining everything, that we call poetry. David McCooey has taken this elementary fact as first principle in laying out writings that are by turns accepting and acerbic, buoyant and bothered, carefree and careful. Or, to get nocturnal for a moment, they are not absolutist, boring, or careless. The book itself is divided into two studied sections, one coloured by day, the second by night. W. H. Auden defined a poet as one who is ‘admired...

The Whispering Gallery : Art into Poetry, by Peter Steele. Macmillan Art Publishing, 2006. ISBN 1 876832 85 1, RRP $88.00. Reviewed by Philip Harvey in Eureka Street at the time of the book's publication. Johnson, deploring an absence of trees in Scotland,      claimed that one would foster gaping, ‘as a horse in Venice.’ Homebound or hapless, the mind      will have its fling, essaying. (from The Bridge) Peter Steele’s poems are miniature essays, assemblies of words and ideas compacted into easeful lines with well-tempered rhythms. Steele is well-tempered always, even when the subject is not. Aphoristic gambits, different sides of a paradox, colours occasionally nailed to the proverbial, the personal in play with the like-minded or other-minded, criss-cross paths of the argument – all good features of an essay – animate the Steele poem. He is insistent on the conjunction; we can sense the word ‘but’ about to turn a vigne...

Max is Missing, by Peter Porter, Picador, 2001. ISBN 0 330 48698 5, RRP no idea Reviewed by Philip Harvey in Eureka Street, at the time of the book's publication ‘Chaos is the ideal of every pattern,’ it is said, though the 41 patterns in this latest collection by Peter Porter aspire dutifully to whatever order the poet desires. Purportedly ‘a late work’, there is here nothing late about the delivery, nor any overstaying the welcome, whether in the precision found in, say, his catalogue of misfit classics: The Troiliad , just as silly and twice as long, with lists of heroes, ships and towns, interfering gods on shortest fuses and magic implements and animals, its love-life platitudinous and epithets attached like luggage labels. Or in the brevity of a lyric like ‘The Puppy of Heaven’: Some sort of judgment comes to everyone - Mind overtaken by its metaphor May watch dismayed as in the evening sun The Baskerville-shaped shadows cross the flo...

Window at St Andrew's Church, Bemerton The Melbourne Anglican, December 2010 Article by Philip Harvey Silence is, I find, often the best way to be with God. Wonder and love are returned through silence and silent prayer. Words can get in the way of such contemplation. Words can hinder and confuse. They can reveal the limits of our understanding, of God and ourselves. However, words are our human way of making meaning. They are necessary, and we are blessed with the abundant vocabulary and versatile verbs of English. Our English has been global for over 300 years, with a multiplicity of expressions for what matters most. Being someone who reads poetry every day, there are poets I return to for refreshment, clarity, or good humour. Perspective helps and George Herbert offers good things. He lived at a time when English more or less coalesced into its modern form. The Authorised Bible was first printed in his lifetime. He lived beside prestigious contemporaries, b...

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...