David Malouf’s most recent, and ninth, book of poetry is an intensely romantic collection that speaks of love, of landscapes and of memory: memories of dear friends, of Tuscany, of Queensland, of poignant emotional moments. Bound in navy blue, with its sparse poems peppering thick cream paper, this small hardback is of quintessential ‘good taste’. Here is poetry in its most refined, and erudite form – a literary digestive for life’s pain.
Now an internationally celebrated literary figure, Malouf spoke about his relationship to his writing in interview in 2008: ‘I now have a body of work behind me and I am more interested in that body of work than what I have to say… Now I am interested in exploring the space of what I feel and how to say the things that belong together. I wouldn’t want to add anything now to the body of work that I didn’t feel belonged there and that didn’t expand or push me into saying how I see things now’.
In Earth Hour, the 79 year-old author’s words brim with pathos and there is a sweetness behind the intention of these poems. They move from a celebration of intimacy, ‘our need for comfort in the dark’, to a joyful appreciation of the natural world. One poem is a homage to the sun. There is also melancholy and reflections on the darker realms. In ‘Brothers: Morphine and Death’, the poem closes with, ‘To sleep/ is good. Death’s better. Best of all/ to never have been born’.
Malouf was awarded the Muriel Spark International Fellowship in 2008 which provided him with a residency in Edinburgh and the Isle of Orkney. His poems speak of a gentle life of recollection and artistic retreat and his life in Tuscany and Australia. In ‘At Laterina’, Queensland and Tuscany are placed side by side. From a perspective of stillness and reflection, the feeling world is surrendered to in this book of poetry. Occasionally, older themes of Malouf’s writing also re-emerge, such as the conflicted Australian identity and a uneasy sense of belonging.
The form of Malouf’s poems – coupled with the melancholy that can suddenly transform into joy – recalls the English poet Philip Larkin. In Malouf’s poem, ‘Dog Park’, a minimalist evocation of contemporary Australia parallels Larkin’s ability to capture the monotony of English suburban life in the Sixties. Malouf writes critically, perhaps, but also with a quiet objectivity, about the muted state of community in Australia: ‘Communication/ is minimal, the greeting/ codes more intimate-curious among/ the creatures, who know no shame and are free to follow their noses’.
In Earth Hour, however, Malouf’s writing appears more than ever about engagement with himself and his pen as opposed to the world at large or to bigger political issues. Malouf’s confidence to write as he feels imbues his work with a feeling of relaxed expression and self-exposure. The trade-off is that self-criticism or discipline as regards to form is sometimes lacking. The repeated cutting-up of sentences to allow the words to come slowly can become a disguise for poems that do not always much substance. When his writing moves beyond the personal and to questions of being, the poems can seem to descend into hackneyed, zen stock-phrases which border on new age cliché.
My temptation to criticise Malouf is inhibited by the sincerity of this writer, who has developed a confident sense of beauty in poetic form. The vulnerability in Malouf’s desire to share something with his reader always saves him, in my reading, from grandiosity.
In ‘Radiance’, Malouf writes: ‘Not all come to it/ but some do, and serenely.’ Malouf’s optimism and his urge for lightness, combined with his deep valuing of human connection, is captured with considerable effortlessness in Earth Hour.
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
Earth Hour
By David Malouf
Release date: 26 February
Pages: 96
ISBN: 978 0 7022 5013 2
UQP
