READINGS OF THE WORK BY PHILIP HARVEY

A Local Habitation: Poems and Homilies, by Peter Steele. Edited by Sean Burke. Newman College. $39.95 hb, 168 pp, 9780734041708 Once in a seminar long ago I heard Peter Steele quote one of the more disagreeable opinions of Winston Churchill, noting that Churchill was allowed to say such things ‘because he was Churchill.’ This Churchillian self-definition, or certitude, or authority, or prowess, animates much of Peter Steele’s writings: Steele says this because he is Steele. Nor does he need to be disagreeable to do so. Importantly in the context, we need to balance this with another quote he used once in lectures, this time from the mouth of Benito Mussolini: ‘I have extinguished in myself all egoisms!’ Steele assumed, correctly, that his students would grasp the ludicrous pomposity of Il Duce, someone somewhat lacking in self-awareness. A second message though was that the ego is loose in the world, not least amongst writers, and what shall be done with it?   One answe...

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...

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...