Launch: Andrew Sant's
'Tremors: New and Selected Poems'
Hobart Bookshop. October
16th 2004
Barry Jones
once observed of the political process that the important is always displaced by the
urgent. A somewhat analogous situation could be said to apply to literature, at least in
the matter of book publication, where the important is often overshadowed by the recent.
We tend to be so frantic to keep up with new books that we may forget to go back to old
ones which warrant as much attention, sometimes perhaps more.
For this reason it is always a happy milestone in a poet’s career when a selected
appears because, by this miraculous sleight of hand, the old suddenly becomes new
again—or as much of the old as the poet chooses to include—and all of us
neophiliac readers not only have the opportunity to revisit the earlier books, we are
obliged to. Andrew is actually in the curious, possibly unique, position of having two
separate and distinct selections of his poetry published in the one calendar year, a piece
of good fortune which might almost be said to nudge the boundaries of good taste. However,
one of them was in another country and the extreme restriction imposed on space by the
publisher means that it gives a less generous and representative overview of Andrew’s
work than the present volume, which is the one to get.
One of the immediate impressions, or rather realizations, borne in upon me when I began to
read this selected was how, right from the start, the characteristic Sant sensibility and
persona were present. The first poem in this book, from his first full collection The
Caught Sky, is "Glenlyon". It is short, so I’ll read it:
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This page is cool light and my shadow’s
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hovering vague shape from the window behind
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defining hazed distances I’ve come from—
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childhood, a city. You could guess my position,
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undefined and remote as the nearby pre-settlement hills.
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The mind behind the particular mind may be thus:
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uncleared, unsettled, mysterious
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enough to look into constantly, while passing a window
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or else, as now, to turn my back on
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and let these passing words settle on the unmapped page.
So much that is characteristic of the Sant oeuvre seems to me stored or embryonically
present in this brief poem: the light of the world around us; the inner world of human
habitation, buildings, rooms; the formative and haunting influences of childhood, and
history, and geography; and the mind, endlessly curious, questing, engaged, seeking in
these external phenomena and in itself points of connexion, points of departure and the
words to embody them: communicability, human society. The Unmapped Page,
incidentally, is the title of the English selected. I have some theories about the title
of this book which I shall share with you later. We see some of these
preoccupations even in the titles of poems: "Geologist in a Cave", "A Mount
Wellington Sequence" attest to the place of place; "Homage to the Canal
People", "Old Woman in Apple Country" to the interconnexion between people
and place; "Literacy Lessons" to language and communication.
What a fine debut The Caught Sky was—and remains. I knew it at the time but I
don’t think I knew it sufficiently. Just as we can’t see an oil painting
properly when we stand too close, but have to move some paces back into the room before it
reveals its true form, so temporal distance is required, I think, for any work of art in
any genre to reveal its true lineaments and quality.
The Flower Industry, Andrew’s second book, is in a similar mould to The Caught
Sky, though Andrew is evidently a little dissatisfied with it because he has
represented it by far fewer poems. But these include the excellent "Fires"
which, in describing the scenes of a bushfire with the panoramic sweep of a camera mounted
in a helicopter—"the ripple of fire…like a black sea rising over a blond
beach…A row of fenceposts…blossoming with flames…the hurrying sheep
confused as poked maggots"—also describes in part the poet’s procedure:
"…he could ponder it all/with the detachment/of someone accumulating detail/for
posterity"; watching "trapped by curiosity".
Different poets have careers following different trajectories of development. The
traditional Romantic notion, still residually present in the public consciousness, is of
poetry as essentially a product of youth. Keats had written such great poems by the time
he died at twenty-five that he might well never have been able to better them, so that
what his illness forced on him may have been the best career move left open to him in any
case—and one that some other poets could do worse than emulate. But not Andrew,
because he belongs to that lucky band of poets who, while starting strongly, continue to
get better.
Now, I could proceed doggedly through each of Andrew’s books, but I don’t think
we want a full-scale lecture tonight. However, I’ll observe two things. First, the
developing assurance and scope from book to book, and the leavening of serious subjects
with wit and playfulness, culminating perhaps in The Islanders, which in a way is a
single long poem in many parts. And secondly, as I observed at the start, the continuity
of a recognizable persona with a recognizable angle on reality. In "Lear, Tolstoy and
the Fool", Orwell said of Shakespeare—and relax, Andrew, I’m not actually
going to compare you to Shakespeare, except in this—Orwell said, "Shakespeare
was not a philosopher or a scientist, but he did have curiosity, he loved the surface of
the earth and the process of life." And that sounds Santian as much as Shakespearian.
Another thing I notice, and like, is that the authorial "I" is not always
present in the poems and that even when it is present it is, as it were, more interested
in the surrounding scenery than in jumping up and down before the camera like a small boy
at a football match.
I shouldn’t fail to point out that this is not just a selected, it is a new
and selected, and there is a group of terrific new poems to conclude the book, the last of
them, "Nike at the Megaliths", one of Andrew’s best poems, I think,
certainly one of my favourites: a portrait of a tourist at an archaeological site which
conjures, wonderfully, the heat and clarity of the Mediterranean and the simultaneous
presence of the ancient past and today. It concludes:
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To return, like the caver, to the present
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Is a trek via the Enlightenment
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Through the many ages of humankind.
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Her Nike runners are fit for it.
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The sea shimmers and glints there,
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A tabula rasa. She’s recomposing,
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With effort, her febrile life on the fringe
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Of the tour group, modernity
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—the megaliths a gang of shadows, lost
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cosmology protected from the olives—
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when, as if conjured, a silent jet
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splits the sky overhead, like a zip.
I think it was T S Eliot who said that meaning in poetry is like the piece of meat that
the burglar throws to distract the watchdog while he makes his way into the house. The
watchdog in a poem being the conscious intelligence, which demands to understand
everything, and the house being those larger regions of the imagination from which poetry
emerges in the poet’s mind and which must be penetrated in the reader if the poem is
to achieve its effect. Or, as Housman put it in his wonderful essay "The Name and
Nature of Poetry", "I think that to transfuse emotion—not to transmit
thought but to set up in the reader’s sense a vibration corresponding to what was
felt by the writer—is the peculiar function of poetry." This is not to say that
poetry does not, or should not, make sense, but that a prose sense transcribed from a poem
will scarcely tell you anything useful about why or whether a poem works, why or how it
moves us or stays in our memories. All of this is a roundabout way of saying that
Andrew’s poems are about a broad range of fascinating subjects and these are indeed
interesting, and often informative, to read about, but we could, after all, if mere
information was our requirement, read about them in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. What
Andrew’s poetry, like all good poetry, gives us is the nimbus surrounding the
facts—"uncleared, unsettled, mysterious", as he said in
"Glenlyon"—the aura of intimation, imagery and music which makes those
facts begin to speak of things whereof we cannot speak. And, you know, interconnectedness
being, after all, one of Andrew’s abiding themes, whatever a Sant poem is ostensibly
about, or begins by being about, a hell of a lot of other matters are likely to be
encountered between beginning and end.
After he finished A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Douglas Adams wrote Dirk
Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. In Chapter Sixteen Dirk is engaged in a
contretemps over the phone with a Mrs Sauskind, who is disputing her latest bill, one of
the items on which reads: "Detecting and triangulating the vectors of
interconnectedness of all things, one hundred and fifty pounds." Detecting and
triangulating the vectors of interconnectedness of all things. Now, it is not entirely
tongue in cheek that I propose to you this evening that this is the very enterprise in
which Andrew has been engaged for upwards of two decades and the fruits of his researches
are gathered for us in this compendious volume—and it costs a good deal less than a
hundred and fifty quid.
To end on a more personal note, contemplating the poetry collected in this book, which
dates back to the early eighties and earlier, inevitably makes me think of the length of
my friendship with Andrew. Last month marked the thirtieth anniversary of my arrival on
this interesting island and, although I haven’t known Andrew all that
time—indeed I arrived before he did—I have known him for the bulk of it. And one
of the things that occurs to my reflexion is the astonishing, the truly astonishing number
of… hangovers he has caused me. And I suddenly realize why this book is called Tremors—it’s
a subtle gesture in my honour. You all think that I am trembling with suppressed emotion
because of the occasion but, no, I’m just hungover from the last time I saw him. I
wouldn’t want you to think, though, that that is the only noteworthy feature of our
friendship; there are many other things, and just as soon as my brain has cleared I
promise to write some of them down.
"The intellect of man is forced to choose", said Yeats, "Perfection of the
life or of the work". To which Auden tartly replied, "Perfection is possible in
neither." No. But Andrew can be cited as evidence that it is after all possible to be
pretty good at both.
So if he would like to triangulate his way to the microphone, I shall declare Tremors
shaken and poured.
- Andrew Sant's Tremors: New
and Selected Poems
- [Black Pepper, 2004] was
launched at Hobart
- Bookshop by Stephen Edgar on
16th Oct, 2004
Stephen Edgar
is the author of several collections of poetry: Queuing for the Mudd Club, Ancient
Music, Corrupted Treasures and Where the Trees Were. His most recent
collection is Lost in The Foreground (Duffy and Snellgrove, 2003).