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Gwen Harwood (1920-1995) is one of the best loved Australian poets of the twentieth century - and a fierce prankster, who published poems under half-a-dozen names and identities. By turns poignant, sensuous and mischievous, passionately musical, her poetry is marked by sure intelligence and a quicksilver, anti-authoritarian wit. This new selection of her poetry from 1943 to her death makes the full range of the work accessible for the first time to poetry-lovers in the northern hemisphere. With an introduction by the leading Harwood critic Gregory Kratzmann and the Australian poet Chris Wallace-Crabbe, who corresponded with Harwood, the selection includes hitherto little-known work along with poems which have become part of the central canon of Australian poetry.
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FyfieldBooks aim to make available some of the classics of world literature in clear, affordable formats, and to restore often neglected writers to their place in literary tradition.
FyfieldBooks take their name from the Fyfield elm in Matthew Arnold’s ‘Scholar Gypsy’ and ‘Thyrsis’. The tree stood not far from the village where the series was originally devised in 1971.
Roam on! The light we sought is shining still.
Dost thou ask proof? Our tree yet crowns the hill,
Our Scholar travels yet the loved hill-side
from ‘Thyrsis’
GWEN HARWOOD
NEW SELECTED POEMS
Edited with an introduction byGREGORY KRATZMANN andCHRIS WALLACE-CRABBE
To the memory of Thomas Riddell
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction
from Poems (1963)
Alter Ego
At the Water’s Edge
The Glass Jar
A Postcard
‘I am the Captain of My Soul’
The Waldstein
Prize-Giving
Boundary Conditions
Triste, Triste
In the Park
O Could One Write As One Makes Love
from Poems/Volume Two (1968)
At the Arts Club
Ebb-tide
Burning Sappho
In Brisbane
Estuary
Alla Siciliana
New Music
To A.D. Hope
from Poems 1969–1974
Dust to Dust
An Impromptu for Ann Jennings
The Violets
At Mornington
David’s Harp
Carnal Knowledge I
Carnal Knowledge II
Night Thoughts: Baby & Demon
Meditation on Wyatt II
‘Thought Is Surrounded by a Halo’
Father and Child
from The Lion’s Bride (1981)
The Lion’s Bride
Mappings of the Plane
Evening, Oyster Cove
Wittgenstein and Engelmann
A Quartet for Dorothy Hewett
‘Let Sappho Have the Singing Head’
A Valediction
A Little Night Music
The Sea Anemones
Death Has No Features of His Own
A Scattering of Ashes
Dialogue
Mother Who Gave Me Life
from Bone Scan (1988)
Class of 1927
Bone Scan
I.M. Philip Larkin
The Sun Descending
Schrödinger’s Cat Preaches to the Mice
Night and Dreams
Cups
1945
Forty Years On
Sunset, Oyster Cove
Mid-Channel
Pastorals
from The Present Tense (1995)
Songs of Eve I
To Music
Midwinter Rainbow
The Owl and the Pussycat Baudelaire Rock
from Collected Poems 1943–1995 (Formerly uncollected poems)
The Dead Gums
Water-Music
Last Meeting
‘Can These Bones Live?’
The Speed of Light
Eloisa to Abelard
Abelard to Eloisa
Poet and Peasant
Frog Prince
Emporium
Hyacinth
‘ “Wolfgang,” said father Leopold’
In Memoriam Sela Trau
Late Works
Two poems by Alan Carvosso (Uncollected)
O Sleep, why dost thou leave me?
On Wings of Song
About the Author
Copyright
Gwen Harwood has been described by Peter Porter, in a review of her Collected Poems, 1943-1995 as ‘the outstanding Australian poet of the twentieth century’, a view that has long been shared by other readers. Her poetry is remarkable at many levels: for its range, its wit, and its humane intelligence. Whether the poems are written in formal metres and structures, or whether constructed in freer forms, they offer delight at the primal levels of their musicality and their ability to shift the boundaries between the verbal and the oral. There is no other voice in English-language poetry that resembles hers, and her dominant tone was established very early in her publishing career, along with her formal versatility. A self-proclaimed ‘capital-R Romantic’, Harwood’s affiliations are with European traditions – not only literary, but also musical and philosophical, although her work displays a keen eye for the Australian landscape and a keen ear for vernacular idiom. (As Fleur Adcock pointed out in another review, the rhyme of ‘wattle’ with ‘Aristotle’ is unique in English-language poetry.)
Gwen Harwood was born Gwendoline Foster in 1920 in subtropical Brisbane, where she studied piano and composition, and played the organ at All Saints’, Brisbane’s foremost Anglo-Catholic church. From time to time attempts have been made to claim her as a religious poet, but this is true only in the sense defined in her late poem ‘A Scattering of Ashes’ – ‘Music, my joy, my full-scale God’.
She married the academic F.W. (Bill) Harwood at the end of the war, and they moved to Hobart in Tasmania; the effect of the change from sunny sprawling Brisbane to the chilly English beauty of Australia’s southernmost city is recalled in ‘1945’, included in this selection. The Harwoods had four children in the years to 1952, and she lived the life of a busy housewife and mother. Gwen Harwood did not publish a volume of poetry until she was forty-three, but she did write many poems for journals and little magazines. ‘The Dead Gums’ and ‘Water-Music’, two poems from 1949 which already illustrate her lyrical mastery and her eye for the arresting image, are included here.
When she died in 1995, Gwen Harwood had published six major collections of poetry at intervals of approximately six years: Poems (1963) was followed by Poems/Volume Two (1968), Selected Poems (1975), The Lion’s Bride (1981), Bone Scan (1988), and The Present Tense (1995). She was a rigorous self-editor, and the result of this was that many fine poems published in sometimes obscure and short-lived Australian magazines disappeared from view. A Harwood ‘canon’, shaped by the successive editions of her Selected Poems, came into being, and after her death her editors Alison Hoddinott and Gregory Kratzmann decided that it was time to reinstate the many poems which had fallen into the netherworld of ‘Uncollected’. Collected Poems, 1943-1995, published by University of Queensland Press in 2003, gives access to almost all of her poetic œuvre. The Collected is the basis of the present edition, and the utmost care has been taken to preserve the poet’s care for the shape of her lines on the page, manifest in indenting, spaces within lines, and the running of sentences across divisions of stanza and line.
One curious product of Gwen Harwood’s editing of her own work for the various Australian texts of her Selected Poems which appeared during her lifetime was the removal of the original pseudonymous signatures attached to some of her most memorable work from the 1960s and early 70s. Works published originally by Walter Lehmann, Francis Geyer, and Miriam Stone appeared in time under her own name, thereby obscuring one of the most fascinating phenomena in the history of twentieth-century poetry publishing. Gwen Harwood made newspaper headlines in 1961 when it became known that she was the ‘Walter Lehmann’ who had written two sonnets published in The Bulletin, then one of Australia’s most important forums for new writing. ‘Eloisa to Abelard’ and ‘Abelard to Eloisa’ created a brief furore when it became known that they contained acrostic messages, one containing the word which had been largely responsible for the banning in Australia of Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
Walter Lehmann was also the author of ‘In the Park’, that keen-edged vignette of motherhood for which Gwen Harwood continues to be remembered in anthologies. Francis Geyer, exiled Hungarian music-lover and poet, is represented here by ‘At the Arts Club’ and ‘Ebb-Tide’, and Miriam Stone (Harwood’s only female pseudonym) by ‘Burning Sappho’, with the last two lines of the third stanza restored to their original lacerating version. A fourth poet-self, Timothy Kline, who speaks for the ‘generation of 1968’, was suppressed completely by his creator, but here he speaks again in ‘Poet and Peasant’, ‘Frog Prince’ and ‘Emporium’. A fifth Harwood pseudonym came to light some years after her death and the publication of Collected Poems. Alan Carvosso is the author of two poems inspired by music, ‘O Sleep, why dost thou leave me?’ and ‘On Wings of Song’, published here as parts of a Harwood Selected Poems for the first time.
Her fondness for ‘masques, masquerades, wigs and beards’, evident in the creation of poet-selves, also finds expression in her creation of poetic ‘characters’, the nuclear physicist Professor Eisenbart and the exiled European pianist Professor Kröte: Eisenbart is represented here by ‘Prize-Giving’ and ‘Boundary Conditions’, Kröte by ‘A Scattering of Ashes’.
Piercing, witty, passionate, reflective, as much an elegist as a trickster, Gwen Harwood wrote across a wide variety of forms and genres, including occasional poetry. Often she wrote ‘Sappho cards’ to friends. These are her distinctive contribution to the art of the verse letter, usually hand-made, featuring an etching from a Victorian ladies’ magazine with speech balloons purloined from her children’s comic books; one of them, ‘ “Wolfgang,” said father Leopold’ is included here.
Ironically, it was as a librettist rather than as a poet that she wished to be remembered, and only a small number of music specialists are familiar with her extraordinary talent for writing words for music. Over some thirty years she wrote libretti for the composer Larry Sitsky; although she claimed that the words belonged to the music, many of these texts retain extraordinary dramatic power for readers as well as listeners in the concert hall. The extent to which her practice in song-writing, where gaps have to be left for the music to fill out, influenced the freer forms of her later poetic texts has still to be fully appreciated.
Some of Gwen Harwood’s most moving poems are addressed to friends, including several leading Australian poets, musicians, and artists. Her poems, like her letters (see Blessed City, edited by Alison Hoddinott, and A Steady Storm of Correspondence: Selected Letters of Gwen Harwood 1943–1995, edited by Gregory Kratzmann), celebrate the sustaining and redemptive power of friendship. Chief among her friends was the broadcaster, actor and singer Thomas (‘Tony’) Riddell, who first encouraged her to write, and who remained her confidant for more than fifty years. It is fitting that this edition, like all but one of her published volumes, should be dedicated to his memory.
Gregory Kratzmann Chris Wallace-CrabbeMelbourne, 2008
Who stands beside me still,
nameless, indifferent
to any lost or ill
motion of mind or will,
whose pulse is mine, who goes
sleepless and is not spent?
Mozart said he could hear
a symphony complete,
its changing harmonies clear
plain in his inward ear
in time without extent.
And this one, whom I greet
yet cannot name, or see
save as light’s sidelong shift,
who will not answer me,
knows what I was, will be,
and all I am: beyond
time’s desolating drift.
In half-light I rehearse
Mozart’s cascading thirds.
Light’s lingering tones disperse.
Music and thought reverse
their flow. Beside dark roots
dry crickets call like birds
that morning when I came
from childhood’s steady air
to love, like a blown flame,
and learned: time will reclaim
all music manifest.
Wait, then, beside my chair
as time and music flow
nightward again. I trace
their questioning voices, know
little, but learn, and go
on paths of love and pain
to meet you, face to face.
To Vivian Smith
Smooth, reptilian, soaring,
a gull wheels away from this rock
leaving the scraps I was throwing,
and settles again in a flurry
of foam and plumed air. The wild seaweed
crawls crimson and green in my shadow.
The gull’s flight aches in my shoulders.
It will suffer no change, cannot offer
itself to be changed, cannot suffer:
the forms born of earth are supported
by earth, body-sheltering, guileless.
‘What is truth?’ asks the heart, and is told:
You will suffer, and gaze at the fact
of the world until pain’s after-image
is as real as pain; all your strength
will be fretted to grains of distress;
you will speak to the world; what you offer
will toss upon evil and good
to be snatched or disdained. You will find
all nature exhausted as beauty
though radiant as mystery still.
You will learn what was breathed into dust
the sixth day, when the fowls of the air
wheeled over your flightless dominion.
‘What is truth?’ cries the heart, as the gull
rocks in changeless estate, and I turn
to my kingdom of sorrowing change.
To Vivian Smith
A child one summer’s evening soaked
a glass jar in the reeling sun
hoping to keep, when day was done
and all the sun’s disciples cloaked
in dream and darkness from his passion fled,
this host, this pulse of light beside his bed.
Wrapped in a scarf his monstrance stood
ready to bless, to exorcise
monsters that whispering would rise
nightly from the intricate wood
that ringed his bed, to light with total power
the holy commonplace of field and flower.
He slept. His sidelong violence summoned
fiends whose mosaic vision saw
his heart entire. Pincer and claw,
trident and vampire fang, envenomed
with his most secret hate, reached and came near
to pierce him in the thicket of his fear.
He woke, recalled his jar of light,
and trembling reached one hand to grope
the mantling scarf away. Then hope
fell headlong from its eagle height.
Through the dark house he ran, sobbing his loss,
to the last clearing that he dared not cross:
the bedroom where his comforter
lay in his rival’s fast embrace
and faithless would not turn her face
from the gross violence done to her.
Love’s proud executants played from a score
no child could read or realise. Once more
to bed, and to worse dreams he went.
A ring of skeletons compelled
his steps with theirs. His father held
fiddle and bow, and scraped assent
to the malignant ballet. The child dreamed
this dance perpetual, and waking screamed
fresh morning to his window-sill.
As ravening birds began their song
the resurrected sun, whose long
triumph through flower-brushed fields would fill
night’s gulfs and hungers, came to wink and laugh
in a glass jar beside a crumpled scarf.
Snow crusts the boughs’ austere entanglement.
Bare spines once fleshed in summer’s green delights
pattern an ice-green sky. Three huntsmen go
vested for the ritual of the hunt
with lean, anonymous dogs for acolytes.
Shadowless, luminous, their world of snow
superlative in paint: so we assume
on snowlit air mortality’s faint plume.
Often in the museum I would stand
before this picture, while my father bent