101 Poems. John Foulcher. Pitt Street Poetry.
Reviewed by Michael Byrne
Australian poet John Foulcher was born in 1952. He holds a Bachelor of Arts (honours) and a Diploma of Education from Macquarie University. He has taught in schools in New South Wales, Victoria and the ACT. Foulcher retired from teaching in 2016. Foulcher’s poetry has been widely published. His 101 Poems – featuring poetry selected from nine previous collections – was published by Pitt Street Poetry in 2015. His poetry has been praised by The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature for being ‘simple, direct and convincing’. But Foulcher’s poetry should not be oversimplified (‘Marriage’):
In that January, we were married. The wedding
snapped us from the past
like twigs. Broke,
we went north for a week, and made love every day.
At Avoca, we stood at the cliff’s edge,
the sea oiled with dusk;
stood there, above waves that slumped on the dull brown rocks
as a congregation kneels to pray –
mosquitoes were scattered about like confetti.
There is an underlying cleverness in this poem which extends to the wider collection. Marriage as a topic is skirted around in some of his experimental poetry. But his experimental poetry is more concerned with different scenarios, such as the aftermath of war for a soldier. Where pieces of sky fall to the ground (‘Atmospheres’):
I’d lift it, trying to find its place
in the shattered blue, though no one
could reach that far.
How comical I must have seemed,
swaying under the weight
of something I couldn’t put back. Soon,
the weaker among us peeled away,
gone beyond hearing. I stayed, though,
shooting from memory. Until
the missives failed. Then I buried my gun.
And I took off my clothes, saw
how scarred I was, cut by the splintered wind.
Now, I will show you the scars.
This poem has a lovely surrealism about it and it ends well. Foulcher displays imagination, here. In a later poem Foulcher shows more nous in a sequence with a narrative bent. It is about French lawyer and judge, Maximilien Robespierre, who condemns some people to death in his lifetime (‘The Revolutionary Calendar’):
. . . the man condemned
is still and quiet, the floor collapses under him:
he defecates, ejaculates; his tongue turns blue
and bloats, his eyes grow white as mushrooms,
his face as black as earth.
Foulcher’s narrative does not get in the way of concentrated language in the poem. He is good with description. He also displays a subtle technique throughout 101 Poems (‘Summer rain’):
As the wreck is cleared, rain trembles
across the cars
and the charred, unbroken road.
The consonance in the penultimate and last lines of this final stanza is deft. It acts as a microcosm in terms of subtlety of technique for the larger collection. In 101 Poems, a bible acts as a symbol for a commitment to Christ (‘After the flood’):
In the shed, books huddle on the rafters, dry
by two inches. Only my childhood Bible,
coloured in the borders, was caught
in the water – Joshua, Moses, Christ and the Pharisees
swirl in crayon rainbows. The sun blooms them
now, though the pages are brittle with dirt.
Getting his childhood bible caught in the water matters to Foulcher. Here and elsewhere in 101 Poems, Foulcher displays a devout but not overbearing faith in Christ. He displays these things in a selected poems format which serves Foulcher well. A collected poems would have too much information. A selected poems is worth doing after nine collections because there is plenty of poems to choose from. It is also worth doing for Foulcher fans who love his work.
Michael Byrne 