I took some time today after a long walk in the winter wind and after yesterday’s post, to gather the Hodgins books I have and scan front and back covers and some other key pages including a couple of poems to give readers a sense of these books and the work therein.
I couldn’t locate my copy of Dispossessed. Probably, it got mixed up in my teaching materials when I stopped teaching Literature a couple of years ago. Dispossessed is Hodgins’ verse novel, and was commonly set for senior English and Literature courses over the last few years. It is included in full in his Selected Poems.
Blood and Bone (1986)
Blood and Bone (A&R, 1986)Signed by Philip HodginsPoem from ‘Blood and Bone’Back cover of ‘Blood and Bone’
Animal Warmth (A&R 1990)
Animal Warmth (A&R, 1990)Back cover of ‘Animal Warmth’
A Kick of the Footy
‘A Kick of the Footy’ was a promotional sampler published by A&R in 1990, foreshadowing a selection of football related poems in a future Hodgins book. I’m unsure whether these poems appeared in later books.
A Kick of the Footy (Poetry sampler, A&R, 1990)Foreword by Ron Barassi to ‘A Kick of the Footy’Poem ‘Snap Shot’ from ‘A Kick of the Footy’Back cover of ‘A Kick of the Footy’ – NOT FOR SALE
Things Happen (1995)
Things Happen (A&R, 1995) Brief biography from ‘Things Happen’Poem from ‘Things Happen’Back cover of ‘Things Happen’
Selected Poems (1997)
Selected Poems (A&R, 1997)Brief biography from ‘Selected Poems’Contents page 1 from ‘Selected Poems’Contents pages 2 and 3 from ‘Selected Poems’Back cover of ‘Selected Poems’
Sometimes it only takes an image or a memory or a song to bring back something you haven’t thought of in a long time.
Or a book. This week I came across a second hand copy of Philip Hodgins’ Selected Poems (A&R, 1977), that I hadn’t seen before, and I thought of Hodgins and his work again.
Born in 1959, Philip Hodgins died in 1995, nearly thirty years ago now, of cancer, much too early. I knew him, in the Melbourne poetry scene of the time, met him at various readings and corresponded with him, all too briefly.
I remember he argued for more formalism and structure in my work, which he saw as sometimes too loose. I admired his poetry too much for too many suggestions for him; a young Les Murray I think I thought, in that direct, unflinching, unsentimental perspective of someone who really knew the land and how hard it is to make a living on it.
His cancer diagnosis changed his life and his poetry, and he faced his death with bravery and anger and wonder and sadness. Naturally, the fact of his death dominated much of his writing
I reflected a few years ago in a blog post of just how little of his work remains online. It’s the same now, though I’m pleased to see that his work is still available, mostly in second hand formats.
My favourite bookshop lists First Light: A Selection of Poemshere, and his verse novel Dispossessedhere (both out of stock) and Bookfinder lists an American edition edited by Paul Kane.
The A&R edition lists the following works by Hodgins:
Blood and Bone (1986)
Down the Lake with Half a Chook (1988)
Animal Warmth (1990)
Il Linguaggia della memoria (1990)
The End of the Season (1993)
Up On All Fours (1993)
Dispossessed (1994)
Things Happen (1995)
Over the next week or so I will take a look at some of the Hodgins books I have and do some scanning and put some of the images up here, as I’ve done with Gwen Harwood, Robert Adamson and Hans Magnus Enszenberger in this blog. They deserve to be more widely seen and known.
Meanwhile, if you want to know more, seek out some of the poetry. Some further reading includes:
Walking around a local beach this week I saw reference on one of the historical markers to ‘Tanti Estate’, an early settlement on the Mornington Peninsula nearby, which I didn’t know still existed.
The sign at Mills Beach says:
John Alexander Stratton became the first European to take up land in the Tanti Park area in 1841. His “Tontine Station” was where the Tanti Hotel now stands. Then by 1854 William Robertson is thought to have become the major holder of the Tana Pastoral Run. Robertson Drive bears his name. In 1964 the Housing Commission became the landholder, with the Shire retaining the complex of old buildings. The old homestead was demolished but the 2 remaining buildings were retained for community use, now part of the Currarong Centre. They are one of the oldest group of farm buildings on the Peninsula, dating from the earliest period of white settlement.
I was interested to take a look; it took me a few searches to realise that the ‘Currarong Centre’ is actually the ‘Currawong Centre’ which is a collection of community resources that now sits in the middle of a residential area.
I went there this morning. There’s not much left of the original buildings; just enough, perhaps, for a sense of the age of this settlement (there are few older looking buildings I know of in the area) and to give you a chance to imagine how these buildings and the original estate, would have sat on this landscape, just above the creek that would been the reason for its placement.
There’s not much left, but I’m glad something has been retained. What interested me was the textures of the old stone, the wooden window sills, the windows themselves. I’m glad there’s something there near the pre-school and the community centre and the hall for hire, a sense of the place in the earliest days of white settlement.
Information sign: Mills Beach, MorningtonOriginal buildings from the old homestead, now Currawong CentreRear viewTextures
Over the last week I spent a few days in the Murray River town of Echuca for a family get together.
According to the paddle steamer captain of The Canberra, which we took at tour on, Echuca was once the third largest port in Australia, after Melbourne and Sydney, in the time before railways came to dominate transportation in inland Australia.
While the paddle steamer ride was interesting; I always enjoy being on and around rivers, I was also glad that I took some time to explore the Echuca Historical Museum, run by the Echuca Historical Society.
There are galleries of some of the many paddle steamers and their captains, pictures of the founding fathers and the key moments, so often floods, that characterised Echuca’s history as well as bullock drays, steam engines and intriguing human artefacts from the town’s history.
But what interested me most was the river maps that were on display. Paddle steamer captains all had their own hand-drawn maps of the river, which always needed updating as navigation in the river changed after floods or trees that blocked the river in some cases.
One of the maps on display was constructed in a long scroll, with two handles so that the captain could roll the map through to match where he was on the river and what he should be looking out for. It reminded me of Kerouac’s continuous sheet of paper that he used in writing On the Road. The maps are intricately drawn, with fine annotations of depth, obstacles and images of landmarks like houses, large trees, or hills to help orientate the captain.
They are also quite beautiful in their form and function.
The small poetry collection Us, Falling for It, that I’ve mentioned here before is now online and available in Kindle format from my Amazon author page HERE
In 1993, I took long service leave from teaching and headed overseas for the first time, with my wife and two small daughters. We planned a trip through some of Greece, Italy, France, England and Ireland.
During the trip I kept notes for poems that were later assembled in a small collection for close friends and family. That self-published chapbook, completed at the end of the journey, is published here more widely for the first time.
Why publish now a self-published chapbook thirty years old that was ‘published’ in an edition of twelve copies? After all, as I wrote at the time in the introduction: ‘This booklet is not meant to stand the withering scrutiny or critical judgements of strangers’. As a young teacher and writer trying to establish my voice as a poet, I lacked the confidence to look further than family and friends. However, I’m less concerned now about ‘withering scrutiny’ and see things here that others might enjoy.
What I liked about the collection, looking at it again after all these years, besides the memories of a wonderful journey as a family, was the wide-eyed innocence at it all. I knew at the time that I’d been seduced by these first impressions; it’s implicit in the title ‘us falling for it’, but at the same time those first impressions were real, vivid and lasting. I was more than willing to be taken in. It felt like these impressions could be shared more widely.
The collection is $5AUD on the Kindle store. I hope that readers enjoy it. I’m heading back to Europe in a new few weeks for the first time since 2018. I hope that I still have the ability to fall in love with it all again, and some new poems come of it.
I was saddened to hear late last year of the passing of the German poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger (1929-2022) and I thought I should note that even here.
I’m no expert on post-war German poetry, but Enzensberger, along with W.G. Sebald seemed to me one of the great post-war German writers as that country tried to emerge from World War II and deal with its past.
It was my Monash University tutor Philip Martin, who first alerted me to Enzensberger’s work and I was grateful. In retrospect, the European sensibility and awareness of history and the past, was a good fit with Martin’s own preoccupations in his writing.
I’ve blogged about Enzensberger before here in reference to his long poem The Sinking of the Titanic , a poem that for me rival’s Thomas Hardy’s great poem on the subject The Convergence of the Twain.
His collection A History of Clouds was also my poetry book of the year in 2010, a book summed up as a celebration of the ‘tenacity of normality in everyday life’.
Enzensberger’s death barely rated a mention in the Australian press but seems to me the passing of a fine mind. The poems live on
NOTE: I updated this post with some better quality images from some of the Enzensberger books I have.
The Sinking of the Titanic (a poem)A History of Clouds (2010)Selected Poems Selected Poems (title page)Selected Poems (back cover)
thinking about poetry 