Mappings of the Plane E-Book

Gwen Harwood

• Herausgeber: Fyfield Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2009

Seitenzahl: 117

Beschreibung

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.

Leseprobe

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

Mappings of the Plane

NEW SELECTED POEMS

Edited with an introduction byGREGORY KRATZMANN andCHRIS WALLACE-CRABBE

 

 

To the memory of Thomas Riddell

Contents

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

Introduction

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

from Poems (1963)

Alter Ego

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.

At the Water’s Edge

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.

The Glass Jar

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.

A Postcard

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