Michael Dransfield

54

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

MARCH 2003

Posthumous Poet

Philip Harvey

John Kinsella (ed.)

MICHAEL DRANSFIELD: A RETROSPECTIVE

UQP, $19.95pb, 92pp, 0 7022 3298 X

F

OR THOSE WHO grew up reading his dreamy,

solipsistic sequences, Michael Dransfield met

immediate needs. He expressed overtly the counter-

cultural attitudes of the times, and portrayed the frustrations

and elations of transition into one’s twenties. He was the

most convincing of the slash/dash lower-case poets, one

whose experiments were not a plaything but the means to

new meaning. Rereading him now, we meet a gifted but also

indulged individual — a young man with his own country

estate, a stash of opiates and a library of Romantic literature.

His own portrait of himself to the world is of a doomed youth,

a Dedalus of Darlinghurst, set ‘to deify doubt’.

Dransfield was always up against ‘the problems of the

day’. His philosophy is concerned with what he calls

‘complexity’. Dransfield incisively demonstrates the shift

in thought from the adolescent who knows everything to

the adult who knows otherwise, due to consciousness of

complexity. In social terms ‘there / are no people in cities, only

strangers, populations, / or the sometime consolation of famil-

iar / others’ (‘Geography’). In literary terms, the complexity is

wrought between ‘my first love / the silence’ and ‘the craft of

singing’ that ‘recruits apprentices from the abyss’. Relation-

ships are a delicate complexity: involvement is tentative, and

solitariness soon resumed. This last complexity is the result

of an unresolved, transcendent narcissism. Identifiable in

many of the fantasy poems, but also in his works of self-

defeat and imminent death, it informs the epigraph: ‘I’m the

ghost haunting an old house, / my poems are posthumous.’

Dransfield may haunt these pages; the editor, John Kinsella,

overshadows them. The introduction is as useful for Kinsella

studies as Dransfield studies. Dransfield was his teenage

hero, and Kinsella is quick to laud the poet, sadly a eulogy

that turns into overbearing appropriation. Unlike most selec-

tions, meant to show the artist’s best work, this one is made to

prove a thesis: ‘it was Dransfield who lifted Australian poetry

into a heightened state of modernism, bordering the post-

modern.’ Poets who border postmodernism are numerous as

grains of sand; the ‘little pebble’ Dransfield is singled out for

dual-coding, hybridisation and meta-textualisation, though

there is plenty here of a more conventional nature.

More dubious is Kinsella’s extravagant claim that ‘critical

analysis of twentieth-century English-language poetry will be

realigned once a thorough textual investigation of Dransfield’s

poems [is] made’, an unqualified apostrophe that sounds

hollow after Kinsella initiates little such investigation himself.

Placing Dransfield in some phoney hierarchy of world poets

in English is to up the odds dangerously, especially when the

argument wavers around words like ‘perhaps’. All of which is

a pity, as Kinsella has some fine perceptions about his idol,

once he gets past his Parnassus complex. He is helpful in

showing how Dransfield was a blocked individual, someone

who didn’t break through early restrictions of place and iden-

tity. ‘Let yourself vanish,’ the poet says in ‘Bum’s Rush’,

though this captivity to a psychology is found in his restless

tidal poems as much as in those of wilful self-oblivion. Addic-

tion, dissembling, misanthropy, doom and useless longing

preoccupy this loner.

Kinsella is right to dismiss the idea of Dransfield as a

confessional poet. But it is impossible to separate Dransfield

from the presentations of himself that animate his poetry.

Poems such as ‘Island’ and ‘The Hermit of Green Light’ are

elaborate scenarios reminiscent of the Pre-Raphaelites he so

admired. The trick in these works is how he turns the dis-

course around by reference to an ‘I’ or ‘he’ that we know to be

the poet. Self-reflexiveness is Dransfield’s haven, the fall-

back of someone engrossed in self-reflection. Mirrors are a

common object in his poems; the world of self-made illusion

seduces and troubles the poet. The pathos of the lone voice

is turned into performance.

Because this multifaceted portrait of the ‘I’ is so central to

any reading, we have to interpret some incontrovertible evi-

dence, even if it is not called confession. Here is a suburban

boy who lives in an escapist dreamworld of ancient manor

houses and medieval retro; a drug addict who lives where

there is ‘nothing beyond the candle and the spike’ (‘Mazurka’).

Here is familiar post-adolescent behaviour, frustrated but also

skilful, feeding off neuroses. Perhaps not so familiar are the

corresponding elucidations of strangeness and disintegra-

tion that Dransfield tables with the same equipoise.

This seamless drift in the

Retrospective

toward ‘the long

voyage into solitude’ (‘Going Away’) is the most disturbing

sensation left by the poetry. The personal mood of disquiet

engendered by this drift is indistinguishable from the

emotional life of Michael Dransfield and implausible as

merely the result of a series of clever constructs.

Dransfield’s achievement has to be assessed beside its

untidy profusion and editorial indiscretion. He shows the

makings of a great social satirist. The politics of ‘Endsight’

and ‘Letter to People about Pelicans’ is pointed and far

removed from the caginess of his poetic personae. His lyric

gift can be calmly dilatory or rigorous.

Dransfield, permissive with subject, elastic with grammar,

a perfecter of instant cadence, is unquestionably a source

figure for contemporary Australian poetry. It is on these

grounds, rather than tendentious agendas for making him a

harbinger of postmodernism, or a token god of international

English language poetry, that this collection is justified.

Kinsella, conscious of Dransfield’s tendency to expatiate with-

out resolution, has selected non-rambles that are amongst the

best of Dransfield’s tight experiments, including great works

(‘Geography’, ‘Chopin Ballade’) that are layered with the

philosophy of ‘complexity’.

POETRY

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