The Sydney Morning Herald from Sydney, New South Wales, Australia • Page 40

40 The Sydney Morning Herald Saturday, March 25, 1989 BOOK The poet as his worst enemy THE popular imagination, i A catastrophically apostrophic wake BOOKS AND WRITERS it 4 NEW PAPERBACKS ROBIN LUCAS John Forbes, whose third book of poetry, The Stunned Mullet, has recently been published by Hale Iremonger, tells JENNIFER REDFORD about the perils and pitfalls of writing poetry. AS THE action of Sassenachs on the one hand and Scots Protestants on the other, I have never really noticed St Patrick's Day (March 17). It took the late James Joyce to bring it my attention this year, though I think that Flann O'Brien somewhere asserts that Mr Joyce viewed the celebration with an unleavened detestation. I had been invited to the St Patrick's Day launch of Australia's "first-ever James Joyce and here confess that I failed to turn up. My remissness may have been due to not wanting to hear six actors and five speakers, not to mention two singers, perform in one (long?) lunch hour.

Or it may have been due to the organisers being an unpardonable month out in their dating of Blooms-day (June 16), the day on which the events of Joyce's Ulysses transpire. horrible looking covers," he mutters shaking his head at the garish orange and green cover of his first book. Tropical Skiing. He also hates the cover of The Stunned Mullet and is disappointed that the Bicentennial Authority, which commissioned it, did not publicise it (Publishers given grants by the Literature Board to publish poetry often have less incentive to promote the books as their costs are covered before the books go on sale.) 1 poets are weedy, emaciated dreamers given to excesses of drink and drugs to call forth the elusive muse. John Forbes does not conform to the stereotype.

He is so sturdily built he could pass for a Rugby player. A slightly awkward, thick-necked man, who seems not altogether comfortable with his large body, he admits to living life largely in his head. A gentleness and hesitancy in his speech suggest country origins. He wears glasses that give him a boyish rather than scholarly air, though his poetry is neither naive nor romantic, but impressionistic and intellectual. At 15 he decided to become a poet and made writing poems his primary interest.

He recalls much excitement in the poetry scene while he studied Arts at Sydney University in the 70s, with many outlets for new poets in underground poetry magazines. The established organs of Australian poetry were fairly impenetrable then for poets like himself whose work was outside the social realist mode and who were experimenting in creating a different aesthetic and inventing new forms. It took three years before New Poetry and Poetry Australia (both no longer in existence) started publishing his work. He writes poems for pleasure and because "they seem difficult to do but worth doing well. I don't know what my poems are about.

I'm happy if other people enjoy them. All poetry should make you happier after you've read it, without making you laugh necessarily." Most of his poems take at least 10 or IS drafts to get right. Some take SO drafts. He sometimes rewrites a poem after publication. One of the poems which he feels is successful, a pastoral titled was inspired by a speed dealer who said write me a poem and I'll give you a gram.

"I thought it was a joke," John says, but he went home and wrote it "It turned out really well." Although John feels he has gained recognition as a poet, he is unhappy with the presentation and marketing of his books. "I have a tradition of 4 To say that you write poetry is marginally associated in some people's minds with proudly proclaiming that you are a wanker. part of themselves. People don't see poetry as being primarily for pleasure, in the way they see novels. Poetry has a semi-religious role in people's estimation.

People are taught that the poet is a special person and they naturally resent reading the effusions of someone who claims to be special. "Another thing that colours people's attitudes to poets is that the vast majority of middle-class people wrote poetry in adolescence and gave it up in adulthood. To say that you write poetry is marginally associated in some people's minds with proudly proclaiming that you are a wanker. Wanking and writing poetry are mixed up in their minds; they occurred at about the same time in their development." John believes that successful poets tell people things they want to hear and that once people have been exposed to poet enough they'll buy him. He cites Bruce Dawe and Les Murray.

"Les Murray is a rather good poet who has something to say that most people want to hear that they're okay. He's the originator of that type of Australian nationalism that reaches its climax in beer ads. His poetry basically tells people they're good blokes, that it's good to be Australian." John acknowledges that in his own poetry he says things people may not want to hear about themselves. For example, "we're massively deluded about ourselves most of the time and I don't just mean about things like nationalism, I mean about how we see ourselves. My poetry points out that there are no free spaces there is no unoccupied territory.

Les Murray talks about Australians living in one quarter of Australia and keeping the rest empty for poetry, which is an example of how people like to see things. Actually, what the three quarters is kept empty for is mineral exploration. My poetry doesn't pretend. It is demythologising rather than mythologising." For the past six years Forbes has earned a living moving furniture. He says his body is made for physical activity and furniture removal holds more attraction than jogging.

"You could also say that I'm so incredibly neurotic that the only way I can relax is twelve hours of demeaning, physical hard work. You don't get to meet too many people in furniture removal who can help further your career." Should you see a lone cyclist between Nowra and Melbourne in the next few weeks, it may be John cycling to Deakin University for a stint as creative writing teacher. Grant him safe passage: he had to borrow the money from his publisher to buy the bicycle, and, after all, he is a national treasure. Jennifer Radford is a Sydney freelance writer. BEHIND THE LINES DON ANDERSON In John's opinion, the public and publishers are happy to see poetry funded by the Government, because they resent poets' being successful in the same way that novelists are successful.

"Poetry is seen as personal and private. It's rather crass to make money out of your feelings. People read poetry when they're deeply depressed or exalted. There's some part of themselves they'd like to keep unsullied by this commercial rat race and poetry is one of those things that decorates that Joyce, that this most egalitarian of authors is through to be so difficult, that he needs to be explained by a caste of secular priest-professors. At one extreme, one reads of the French chamber-maid surprised with her ear to the keyhole of Joyce's Paris apartment some time in the 1930s.

Asked what she was doing, she replied: "Listening to the beautiful language Monsieur made." Inside the room, Joyce was pacing up and down, reading aloud from Finnegans Wake, which is not written in French, or in any other language. (I have met people who insist that Joyce is not meant to be read aloud, but heard with the inner-ear, wherever that organ is located. I remember Meaghan Morris, whose collection of essays The Pirate's Fiancee has just been published by Verso, objecting that I had spoiled Molly Bloom's monologue for her by playing Sio-1 bhan McKenna's famous recording of a large part thereof. She said the necessity of breathing forced Mc-Kenna to pause where Molly did not.) There are nine references to St Patrick's Day in Ulysses, the most extended and most Irish being in the "Cyclops" chapter, in Barney Kier-nan's Fenian pub, where everyone save BloomUlysses is somewhat the worse for drink: An animated altercation (in which all took part) ensued as to whether the eighth or the ninth of March was the correct date of the birth of Ireland's patron saint In the course of the argument cannonballs, scimitars, boomerangs (sic), blunderbusses, stinkpots, meatchoppers, umbrellas, catapults, knuckledusters, sandbags, lumps of pig iron were resorted to and blows freely exchanged. The baby policeman.

Constable Mac Fadden, summoned by special courier from Booierstown, quickly restored order and with lightning promptitude proposed the seventeenth of the month as a solution equally honourable for both contending parties. Ulysses was banned for many years in Australia, and it was the famous Scot, Professor John Anderson (no relation), who was responsible for its promulgation here. James Joyce would doubtless have felt sympathy with Salman Rushdie, convinced unjustifiably as he was that the IRA was out to kill him. Though, in his monstrous egotism, Joyce would doubtless have persuaded himself that his plight was worse than Rushdie's. As he wrote to his Italian translator, Carlo Linati, of Ulysses in 1920: No English printer wanted to print a word of it.

In America the review in which it was being serialised was suppressed four times. Now, as I hear, a great movement is being prepared against the publication, initiated by Puritans, English Imperialists, Irish Republicans, Catholics what an alliance! I ought to be given the Nobel prize for peace! He wasn't Nor was he given the Nobel prize for literature, though many obscure diplomats have been. So all power to the James Joyce Society of Australia! Slainte! Tempting morsels for fastidious tastes Or it may have been due to their inserting an apostrophe into Finn-egans Wake. Flann O'Brien claimed that he knew from personal communication that "the increasing frequency of that peccant apostrophe hastened Mr Joyce's untimely Whatever the reason, I spent the afternoon in a Viennese-Jewish Pad-dington pub, which seems only appropriate given that Joyce's modern-day Ulysses was a Hungarian Jew who embraced Irish citizenship, Catholicism, Protestantism, and Freethought at a blow. The James Joyce Society "hopes to foster a better understanding of the works of this great Irish writer, not by rational, academic analysis, but by focusing instead on the innate musically of Joyce's writing.

As the nucleus of the society, a group of actors and writers including a founding member of Ireland's renowned Druid Theatre Company will explore Joyce's masterpieces in the manner he himself suggested: 'If anyone doesn't understand a passage all he need do is read it Anyone interested in hearing Joyce and that other famous Irishman, William Shakespeare, read aloud may care to attend the Crossroads Theatre, Darlinghurst, March 29 to April 29. (Inquiries 332 3649.) This will not be the first society formed in Australia to promulgate the works of a famous, if difficult, author. There was once a thriving Blake Society. In Melbourne, in 1888, a Browning Society was formed to explain that "difficult" poet, and to make him available to a general and not merely an institutional audience. It is a curious contradiction about VIETNAMESE EXILES Wherever we go, the sweet memories of our country dwell in our hearts.

On a restaurant wall. In such words, all the barnacles Of grief, lurid photographs Fill their eyes, and all death's kingdom Seems set down with our rice: Such seeming gentleness in this Unforgetting, wordlessness seething In their laughter. The clash Of our different galaxies subsides Into this soup. Memories ride The teetering syllables of their Language, wincing as all around Them our world takes on the camouflage Of everything unexpected; we sit Lamenting the loss of summer, They are naked with loss of every season. We pay the bill, now free to leave.

They take our money, only free to stay. Shane McCauley The Old Jest, by Jennifer Johnston (Penguin, 167pp, The cover says "Filmed as The Dawning" in bigger letters than the real title and author (just thought I'd warn you in case you go looking for it in a bookshop). Eighteen-year-old Nancy is between school and university in 1920. Living just outside Dublin with her aunt and her dotty grandfather, she sets up a sanctuary in a beach hut where she writes a tentative diary and gives herself useless lectures on improvement. When a mysterious fugitive arrives on the beach, Nancy is unconsciously ready for what he will teach her about the world.

The young girl is an unconventional delight, saving The Old Jest from being merely another delicate exploration of growing up in very troubled times. To Be The Best, by Barbara Taylor Bradford (Grafton, 460pp, $11.95) is puffed as "The superb sequel to A Woman of Substance and Hold The Dream. Emma Harte's grandaughter, Paula O'Neill, strides through these 460 pages determined to save her grandmother's empire from takeovers and treachery. Do people really pay money to read this stuff? Beware of the health hazard of nausea brought on by a surfeit of adjectives. Raparapa Stories from the Fitzroy River Drovers, edited by Paul Marshall (Magabala Books, 288pp, The nine Aboriginal men who tell thtSr stories here are drovers from different parts of the West Kimberley.

They speak for generations of their people with humour, insight and knowledge. Jock Shandley, born in 1925, remembers four white station managers murdering a young stockman because he was "a bad and his own stepfather being chained and flogged, (van and John Watson are working to make the recently-granted Mt Anderson lease a viable Aboriginal operation, and have some suggestions to make to the policymakers in Canberra. Important Australian history, to be placed on your bookshelf next to other versions of this region's past, such as Mary Durack's Kings in Grass Castles. The Battling Prophet, by Arthur Upfield (Eden, 226pp, S8.95). Aboriginal Detective-Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte 'is near Mount Gambier in South Australia, investigating the death of a famous long-range weather forecaster.

He works it out, as his fans have come to expect, with patience and a formidable intellect. A pity the publishers didn't amend the note on page 15 which tells readers that "The aborigines are also debarred from hotels and to serve them with liquor under any circumstances is an Accurate information in 1956, when this book was first published, no doubt, but sloppy publishing to include it in a 1989 edition. The Maiden Voyage A Complete and Documented Account of the Titanic Disaster, by Geoffrey Marcus (Unwin. 319pp, S16.95) is a detailed investigation, full of period flavour, of the events that led to the loss of the Titanic in 1912, and the cover-ups and investigations later. Chapter 1 describes Waterloo Station as the White Star Line boat train leaves for Southampton: the millionaires, the bookstall posters, women in hobble skins and the station smells.

Marcus's style is richly descriptive: you could almost be watching a film rather than reading a book. As for the disaster and subsequent investigations, Marcus concludes: "It was the human element that failed the keenness and vigilance which characterised the Carpathia another ship in the vicinity were in striking contrast to the laxity and overconfidence which obtained in the Titanic and the lack of proper liaison between her wireless station and the ship's officers." Mrs Oscar Wilde, by Anne Clark Amor (Sidgwick and Jackson, 249pp, What happened to Constance when' Oscar was ostracised? What was their courtship like? Their married life? You won't learn much from this book Anne Clark Amor is a heavy-handed apologist for Constance. Contemr porary observers who call Mrs Wilde dull and humourless are dismissed by Amor as unjust, and perhaps they are; it would be hard to look bright and witty next to Oscar. Amor's version is that Constance was intelligent.loyal. had a mind of her own, and was overtaken by a life which was suddenly out of control.

This may be so, but Amor's writing style is heavy and over-apologetic, so that Constance corner across as you guessed it: humourless and dull. The Garden House, by Martin Long (Bantam, 231pp, S9.95). Whacko a whodunnit set in 1880s Sydney, with a feminist activist enlisting the aid of a retired police officer, Tom Cotter. It's the blurb that calls Julia Pyke a feminist activist, but she would probably have been described in the 1880s as a suffragette and prison reformer. Julia seeks justice for the illiterate Irish servant girl accused of murdering her employer and seducer, playboy Charles Blackwell.

With Cotter's help, Julia gets her person. Slyly humorous. Moving Out. by Margaret McMahon (Millennium, 240pp, S14.95) is written for kids who want to move out, but some of the legal advice would do for escaping wives who've never had to deal with a bond or their rights as tenants. McMahon is a lawyer who put together this long list of practical advice at the breezy request of her daughter: "Mum, will you write down for me everything I need to know?" You can't beat 'em, can you? It's a good beginning book for the little darlings, although I can't see any of them consulting it without howls of merriment from the rest of their household.

INE cookbooks are food for thought, in addition to their more 1 practical value as a source of recipes, rrom Mrs Beeton to more Hand-me-down tales OPEN FOR THUMBING, SUNDAYS AS WELL Pop in and thumb through recent, exciting additions to our bulging "old books" collection 5 7 days a week, 1 1 am-6pm. FRANCIS HAYMES I 43 Queen Street, Woollahra (02) 32 289S OMETIMES, confronted with the flood of children's picture books (even though practically overcome, in very rare cases, with admiration for their makers' achieve are the real strength of When Hippo was Hairy and Other Tales from Africa, an attractive publication from Collins 1 8.95). As if to counter the dearth of scientific facts in the traditional tales conservatively retold by Nick Greaves, business-like tables about each animal are provided: gestation period, lifespan, diet and so on. The poetry is in the pictures accurate, skilful and far more expressive than colour photographs. Two first-rate picture books have come to hand.

The subtleties of Come by Chance (story and pictures by Madeleine Winch, Angus Robertson, SI 4.95) will let it survive innumerable successive readings. It's a distinctly Australian story, but not in the popular, obnoxious corks-on-hat-brims style. BOOK SALE 1096 off ALL STOCK Including specials already reduced Genuine opportunity to buy that expensive book you covet Abbeys Bookshops 131 York Street, Sydney 2000 (Behind Queen Victoria Building) Open Easter Saturday, Sunday and Monday till 4 p.m. Sale ends Sunday, 2nd April. Phone (02) 264 31 1 1 ANTOINE'S RESTAURANT COOKBOOK By Roy Guste Jun Norton, 1 86pp, S37.95.

ISBN 0393 026663 CIZEZ MARTHA ROSE Pleasures of Parisian Eating By Martha Rose Shulman Macmillan, 3 1 2pp, S39.95 ISBN 0333 48102X FREUD'S OWN COOKBOOK Edited by James Hillman and Charles Boer BrunnerMazel, 188pp. ISBN 0 87630 497 8 A TASTE OF PROVENCE By Carey and Julian More Michael Joseph, 159pp. ISBN 1 85145 1226 Reviewed by MAISY STAPLETON Papillote, Peach and Apricot Tart and the accompanying instructions specify all the details of preparation and cooking. Freud's Own Cookbook, on the other hand, is an elaborate joke. Ostensibly a collection of the master's recipes, it seems he had a food fetish.

Recipes such as Fettucine Libido, Oedipal Pie and Birth Trauma Cake, do more to stimulate the intellectual palate and the sceptical buds than start the gastric juices flowing, though they may form the basis for an interesting dinner party. You may even pick up a smattering of Freudian theory as you sift the text for the recipes! All these books lack illustrations of individual dishes, so you have to take the food on trust. A Taste of Provence, by comparison, is almost a still-frame version of popular television travel cum cookery programs. The book is evocatively illustrated with photographs of the Provencal countryside mist-clad olive groves, white-tiled kitchens strung with feathered game and batterie de cuisine, shuttered pink-washed villas, potted lemon trees in a paved courtyard, with accompanying text in the finest travelogue tradition it takes you right to France. The book also includes photographs of delectable traditional Provencal dishes baked fennel with tomato, goat cheese in oil, ragout of pheasant looking as if they had been whipped out of a fuel-burning oven or taken from the larder of a country kitchen.

The food has none of the stereotyped precision of a professional kitchen. The recipes are simple, such as Olive Tart, Garlic Chicken and Pear Tart with Almonds. No doubt you can find them in many other books on French provincial cooking, but as an attractive acquisition for the kitchen or the bookshelf, this book is recommended. Maisy Stapleton loves fine food. CH1LDRENS BOQ8CS SALCf MclNERNEY recent writers such as Elizabeth David, Jane Grigson and Gretta Anna Teplitzky, a cookbook not only provides blueprints for food preparation, but can be a travel book, a social instructor, a paean to the art of eating and a fount of inspiration for good living, not forgetting that its underlying motive is to encourage you to cook.

The ultimate cookbook is that which so gratifies the senses that you are replete, or even satiated, without handling a saucepan or having to wash up the chopping board. Four recently-published cookbooks provide an assortment of recipes and browsing material. In the best tradition, they were reviewed from an armchair, rather than the kitchen, though I was tempted to concoct a recipe or two. Antoine's Cookbook establishes its credentials as a cookbook in the first few pages. A rather uninspired history of the family of Artoine Alciatore, who established the restaurant that bears his name in New Orleans in 1840, prefaces recipes of classical Louiiiana cuisine.

It's rather like sampling Antoine's menu as you choose between Looster Thermidor, Creole Gumbo and at least half a dozen recipes for the huge Louisiana oysters. Rather boo.nshly, the author and fifth-generation proprietor refuses to divulge the secret ingredients for Oysters Rockefeller, invented by his great-grandfather, though there are recipes for other house specialties such as the equally lavish sounding Canape Rothschild (pate, egg, capers and truffle on toast) and the book is spiced with historical gossip on the origins of many of the dishes. Though the selection of food is traditional, as you may expect from "New Orleans's oldest and most famous the recipes are straightforward and the cuisine is diverse enough to please anyone with a taste for cooking from the Deep South. Chez Martha Rose presents a more sumptuous array of food devised for Martha's Parisian supper club. Here she holds elegant soirees where the company is congenial, conversation flows till midnight, the ambience is a cross between a private dining room and a salon, with tall vases of exotic blooms and flickering fires and the food is designed to enhance the sophistication of the gathering.

These recipes fill the book. They are all meatless and based on seasonally available fish, fruit and vegetables which should appeal to the health-conscious Australian palate. They are eclectically drawn from Mexican, French and vegetarian sources and the author has provided a selection of menus with the requisite variety of taste, and mix of ingredients which spares you the bother of compiling your own. A sample menu For a Hot Summer Evening includes Crazy Salad with Tuna Tartare, Country Bread, Cold Steamed Fish Fillets with Tomato Caper Sauce, New Potatoes en THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES KENSINGTON National Drug and ments), I start to think that the rise of the picture book means the end of the real story the kind that people used to weave into conversations and pass on to their children like heirlooms. These were not traditional fairy tales so much as elaborate pieces of gossip the time old Uncle Bernie swam the flooded river with his hat on, for instance, and things that happened to children when they were too young to remember.

In this way, living family trees were formed in children's minds, creating a sense of place and personal history. I feel people should revive old inherited stories for their children, not resort automatically to the fixed and often stilted images in picture.books, so it was good to find a couple of new books written as if intended to be told aloud and handed around. Both are about the beginnings of things, and both have fine black and white pictures which hint at the atmosphere of scenes rather than spelling them out. James Berry's Anancy-Spiderman (pictures by Joseph Olubo; Walker Books, $19.95) is a collection of 20 tales about a hero of West Indian folklore, who originated in Ghana as the Ashanti Spider God and was transplanted to the Caribbean with his name and nature slightly changed. Here all the characters are animals Ratbats, Cow-Mother, and Swing-Swing-Janey, the clever first daughter of Dog.

Berry, an English writer born in Jamaica, has elaborated and retold the tales in marvellous language. The favourite pursuit of Anancy's son, for instance, is thinking. Tacooma will think on things like the way an ocean lives there in the seabed it has; the way darkness is the only world of deep-sea fishes; the way fire is able to make itself burn; the way a seed changes more and more into a tree; the way webbed feet of flying frogs open out in flight like four little umbrellas Berry is never more poetic than this; generally his sentences are short and punchy. The English poet Ted Hughes has invented 10 tales about the origins of animals, including people, in Tales of the Early World (pictures by Andrew Davidson; Faber, God is the main character here, eccentric and always fiddling about with various types of clay (so the book will probably be banned in Queensland). He has a tiny, authoritative mother who lives in the cellar "a great knot of doubled-up arms and legs, like a big, dusty Spider" and a passion for making birds with wonderfully diverse voice-boxes.

The Anancy tales have more bounce and sting in them, but Hughes's grasp of zoology leads him to some inspired fabrications. Rod Clement's pictures, rather than the stories. Alcohol Research Centre A ragged female figure plods through yellow grass on a cleared hill and comes to the haven of a derelict hut, all weatherboard and rusting corrugated iron. After much hard work she turns it into a friendly home with hearth and apple-trees and seems content to live alone, but winter brings a tribe of animals to the door (and into the living room), and there is a tranquil scene of pigs, cows, sheep and smaller beasts asleep by the fire around the portly, beautiful young woman. Spring comes; the animals depart, but winter storms will bring them back, and meanwhile the countryside through the windows is lonely and peaceful.

In Hello, Barney! (Viking Kestrel, $16.99) Mary K. Pershall tells the story of a young sulphur-crested cockatoo trapped in the wild by a boy and kept in a cage for many years until the boy, by now an old man, one day leaves the cage door open on purpose, because histrength is running out. From his cage, the cockatoo has seen the boy become a man and marry, and more little children growing up. He has learnt to say "Hello, and when he is found and rescued by a strange new child, he addresses her in the cheerful, young voice of the old man who is now (presumably) dead. So the adaptable bird begins a new life, carrying with him a remnant of the old.

Mark Wilson's pictures extend to the edges of every page, so that reading the book is like leafing through the sketchy album of a life, white bursts of feathers being interspersed with nostalgic golden light falling on children, gardens and quaint motorcars. The Directorate of the Drug Offensive has provided funds for a PhD scholar to undertake research into the treatment and rehabilitation of alcohol and drug dependence (including nicotine). The duration of the scholarship is for 3 years and the stipend is $15,440 for the first year and indexed to NH and MRC Medical and Dental Postgraduate Awards. The scholar will be located at the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre whose staff will supervise the research. Applications are invited from students with training in any health profession or relevant social service.

A good honours degree (or its equivalent is required. Further information can be obtained from Associate IYofessor Wayne Hall on' (02)398 9333. Application forms available from Barbara Townsden, Postgraduate Section, Chancellery, UNSW, (02)697 3101. CLOSING DATE: 14th April, 1989..