John Kinsella and Christopher Wallace-Crabbe
Friday October 17
Tony Ward of Arc Publications described how influential Australian writers currently are in English poetry and introduced two of the most studied Australian poets: John Kinsella and Christopher Wallace-Crabbe. He spoke of his pleasure that Arc had been able to republish Kinsella's early collection The Lightning Tree.
John Kinsella was somewhat more ambivalent, describing the poems in the collection as more personal work than he was accustomed to reading. He began with two poems written when he was living on the Cocos Islands, and explained a little of the extraordinary history of this tiny group of islands in the middle of the Indian Ocean.
The poems written on the Australian mainland offered an equal dose of exoticism to his British audience. A plague of locusts described the episode in the 1980s when Australia suffered a plague of locusts of biblical proportuions: they ate everything green, he explained, not just the grass, the leaves, but even the green fabric of awnings, until all green was removed from the landscape.
He seemed to attract dramatic incidents - the poem Drowning in Wheat refers to an episode in his boyhood when he and his brother almost drowned in a silo of grain. Explaining the fascination with lightning which underlies, among other things, The Lightning Tree, Kinsella explained "I was struck by lightning when I was a boy. My eyes bulged so much that my aunt told me 'for the rest of your life you are doomed to look at things'."
Christopher Wallace-Crabbe looked at things with an equal clarity but perhaps a steadier and less dramatic gaze. He repeatedly described specific landscapes and seemed equally fascinated by the sky above Australia and the rocks beneath. One poem, From the Island, Bundanon, took as its starting point the stones that he had brought each day from the river bed and placed on his desk. But there were reminders of less austere pleasures, too:
Innocent cylinder with a wound,
you have kept the grape's rich blood
from the disillusioning breath of day
at your own cost. Freckled and branded
you lie here on the table,
one end pale magenta. Far from your tree
you became pleasure's sacrifice.
"It's about a cork", he explained. Food was a recurring theme. One poem compared the custard apple and the mango: "The dangling miracle of cognition".
A third poet was conspicuous by his absence. John Kinsella spoke with passion about Alamgir Hashmi, whose visa had been delayed by "post 9/11 racist paranoia". "Because he writes in English primarily reduces his audience in Pakistan, and because he can't travel easily makes it difficult to be heard elsewhere. The Tony Blairs of this world should read this guy!" He underlined the point by reading two poems whose titles gave some indication of the great range of Hashmi's poetry: Captain Kirk in Karachi and Islamabad.
Alamgir Hashmi's latest book, The Ramazan Libation, is published by Arc.
John Kinsella, Christopher Wallace-Crabbe and Alamgir Hashmi's books were available from the bookstall throughout the Festival:
