When I’m not thinking about poetry, I’m teaching, mainly English and Literature.  For a while now I’ve been co-writing an English text book, and the latest edition came out this week. It’s a practical guide to one aspect of the English course, designed for Year 12 VCE students in Victoria.  I like the subdued cover colours this year. The book is published by Cengage.

The latest Five Bells magazine, coming out f the Poets Union, has as its them ‘Poetry and Music’ and features pieces by Peter Goldsworthy, Angela Stretch and Cathy Bray. It’s the third issue in the new more compact format, which I really like, and sits nicely along my old collections of Poetry Australia.

I’ve always enjoyed Mark O’Connor’s poetry about the landscape and the natural world, though he’s gone a bit quiet since the days when he was everywhere, and always seemed to be with Les Murray. So, nice to see a new book, Pilbara, coming out of the distinguished John Leonard Press, being launched at the University of Melbourne,  on November 8.  All welcome.

Anyone who’s read this blog for any length of time will know that I’ve got a bit of a thing for those literary places that connect up with writers I like. So, one of the highlights of a recent trip to the USA was a trip to Walden Pond.  We were staying in Boston for a few days so took the suburban commuter train to Concord and then walked out to Walden Pond, the place Thoreau made famous. It’s about a half an hour walk. It was well worth the trip to walk the lake and see the reconstruction of Thoreau’s cottage as well as the site of the original house, which people make literary pilgrimages to. Which is what I was doing I suppose.

I received my invitation to the launch of a new coffee-table book Reflecting on Melbourne, which will feature a poem and a photograph of mine along with lots of other writers and photographers.  Unfortunately I can’t attend as I’m riding around the Bay that day but I’m sure it will be great.

The book will be launched by Arnold Zable at St Paul’s Cathedral on Sunday October 18th at 2.30. It’s published by Poetica Christi Press and edited by Janette Fernando and Jean Sietzema-Dickson.  You can find more details, or order the book from poetica@iprimus.com.au

I achieved a long held ambition today; to stand in front of the memorial in Boston that Auden wrote about in one of my favourite poems, For the Union Dead. The memorial is along the Boston Common. I walked past it last night, but it was  too dark, so came back this morning. Here’s a photo, and the original poem.

For the Union Dead

by Robert Lowell

“Relinquunt Omnia Servare Rem Publicam.”

The old South Boston Aquarium stands

in a Sahara of snow now.  Its broken windows are boarded.

The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.

The airy tanks are dry.

Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass;

my hand tingled

to burst the bubbles

drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish.

My hand draws back.  I often sigh still

for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom

of the fish and reptile.  One morning last March,

I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized

fence on the Boston Common.  Behind their cage,

yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting

as they cropped up tons of mush and grass

to gouge their underworld garage.

Parking spaces luxuriate like civic

sandpiles in the heart of Boston.

A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders

braces the tingling Statehouse,

shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw

and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry

on St. Gaudens’ shaking Civil War relief,

propped by a plank splint against the garage’s earthquake.

Two months after marching through Boston,

half the regiment was dead;

at the dedication,

William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.

Their monument sticks like a fishbone

in the city’s throat.

Its Colonel is as lean

as a compass-needle.

He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,

a greyhound’s gentle tautness;

he seems to wince at pleasure,

and suffocate for privacy.

He is out of bounds now.  He rejoices in man’s lovely,

peculiar power to choose life and die–

when he leads his black soldiers to death,

he cannot bend his back.

On a thousand small town New England greens,

the old white churches hold their air

of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags

quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic.

The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier

grow slimmer and younger each year–

wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets

and muse through their sideburns . . .

Shaw’s father wanted no monument

except the ditch,

where his son’s body was thrown

and lost with his “niggers.”

The ditch is nearer.

There are no statues for the last war here;

on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph

shows Hiroshima boiling

over a Mosler Safe, the “Rock of Ages”

that survived the blast.  Space is nearer.

When I crouch to my television set,

the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons.

Colonel Shaw

is riding on his bubble,

he waits

for the blessèd break.

The Aquarium is gone.  Everywhere,

giant finned cars nose forward like fish;

a savage servility

slides by on grease.

When I’ve been in England, Ireland or France I’ve always been drawn to the stone circles from prehistory.  The megatliths have always fascinated me; something about the landscape charged with a kind of ancient magic or meaning. I visited Newgrange in Ireland and several stone circles and some poems came out of those visits too.

So, when I saw a short video promoting a new doucmentary on all this, Standing with Stones, it became a must-see! If you’re into this kind of thing, the Stone Pages are a great resource.

This week the NY Times reviewed Wallace Steven’s Selected Poems, including this nice quote from Stevens.

Individual poets, whatever their imperfections may be, are driven all their lives by that inner companion of the conscience which is, after all, the genius of poetry in their hearts and minds. I speak of a companion of the conscience because to every faithful poet, the faithful poem is an act of conscience.

Above: Wallace Stevens, right, with Robert Frost in Key West, circa 1940.

I received the latest issue of Five Bells from the Poet’s Union this week and I like the new format, more magazine-like and substantial, especially with the double issue approach.

This issue contains articles from the Creative Reading Seminar 2008, reviews, poetry and the Poets Union 2008 Poetry Prize Joint Winners: In the Clearing by Anne Buck, and The Ringing World by Tricia Dearborn.

By far the most interesting thing in the always interesting magazine The Monthly this month is the Pico Iyer review of Nicolas Rothwell’s The Red Highway, a book I liked a lot as I blogged about recently.

Iyer’s long review calls Rothwell’s book ‘masterful and unforgettable’ and proceeds to make more links between Rothwell and some of his characters than I’d made in my first reading; which is what good reviewers should do.

Iyer also draws in threads between Rothewell and another old favourite, W. B. Sebald, an author whose work I’ve admired for a long time. ‘These writers are reporting on the world, but in the process they penetrate into some private and haunted space they can’t escape.

It’s a lovely review, of a powerful book and an argument for the longer kind of review not seen now in newspapers. Towards the end of the review Iyer writes:

The innocent browser may, picking up The Red Highway, think it is a ‘travel book’. She couldn’t be more wrong.  It is in fact a book about being shriven and broken down and brought so close to oblivion that you are released to something else. Though full of long drives into the bush, it has nothing to do with locomotion, and everythig to do with being stirred and moved, carried out of the self …  (Rothewell) carries us higher and higher with his antique elegance and a rapt, attentive interest in everything human, vegetable and celestial tht tempts one to use the almost outdated word ’sublime’.

Worth the price of the magazine for this review alone.