An Unfamiliar Actor: Collected Poems 1992-2002. George Huitker. Ginninderra Press.
Reviewed by Michael Byrne
George Huitker, the poet, put out three collections of poetry with Ginninderra Press. Huitker’s third book of poems, An Unfamiliar Actor: Collected Poems 1992-2002 contains all the poems from his first two books of poems – An Unfamiliar Sea (1998) and The Actor Is Happy (2000) – as well as eleven new poems. An Unfamiliar Actor features the poem ‘The Car My Father Gave Me Is Breaking Down’. After listing some ailments of his car, Huitker gets pissed off:
It took months
to find a fender
after some moron
reversed into it.
This appears to be page rage. It is also funny. Another pursuit (apart from driving a car) is playing the guitar. Huitker does this in a poetic way (‘Major and Minor Chords’):
(On Being Twenty-Seven)
The change is subtle –
a single finger slips
and the chord’s genetics
are completely altered:
the player is bent
in unison,
ape-like,
slouching
before the upright. Yet
where blacks and whites melt
into those dense, heavy clusters
and fingers dance up and down
routine scales,
a solitary note
can hardly make
a difference
in the din.
Technically, the poem is quite good. There is the consonance in the title. There is something happening in the majority of the lines in the body of the poem. And there is the assonance of the last line. Another pursuit, in An Unfamiliar Actor, is soccer (‘The World Game’):
ii.
There are complaints of cramps,
decisions, fouls,
sprains –
as a funeral procession
of bruised egos
drag themselves off to the car park
followed closely behind,
like shadows,
by their children.
Here, Huitker takes the reader by surprise. And hence the extract is funny. In ‘Rainbow Lorikeets’, in An Unfamiliar Actor, Huitker is playful:
With a C’mon
let’s go twitching of the head, they ping!
out towards the beach. I see one
poised on an aerial attached
to some surfer’s panel van, where
it’s sussing the waves
before a final shake’n’squeal
and a calculated flight to better action.
The personification of the rainbow lorikeets, in most of the extract, is clever. Also, Huitker has an understanding of surf culture – if the break you are looking at is not going off, then you look elsewhere. Elsewhere, on Huitker’s home turf, a pleasant childhood memory is evoked in verse (‘Allan Street, Revisited’):
Along the street,
a simple peace descends as the kids, pre-Nintendo,
are well and truly saved by daylight – there
in the middle of the street, riding wobbly free-wheelers,
tearing up the road with their skateboards and
heaving cricket balls beyond imaginary boundaries
and a small black retriever: C’mon, Spike. Drop it, boy!
Someone’s little sister screams, just like
a scary movie. Mower-smells blend with casserole.
The last complete sentence of this extract has stuff that is olfactory in nature. This is good – smell is underutilised in poetry. Huitker, in An Unfamiliar Actor, has utilised a very good computer for writing poetry. It can justify prose poems on the right-hand side. It can indent lines. It can centre stuff and it can even produce a horizontal line between the last and penultimate lines in ‘Red Rock, South’. And for the poetry Itself? In imprimaturs on the back cover of An Unfamiliar Actor, both Geoff Page and Ralph Elliott make note of Huitker’s humour. It is the best thing about his poetry. His poetry also has clarity, has a sense of fun, uses colloquial language well and is unpretentious. Also, Huitker proves to be a man in these poems. And after what comes next.
Michael Byrne 