Collected Poems. John Forbes. Brandl & Schlesinger.
Reviewed by Michael Byrne
Australian poet John Forbes was born in 1950 and died of a heart attack in 1998. He was forty-seven. In his short life, he had worked in various ‘literary’ occupations such as writer-in-residence, reviewer, freelance poetry tutor and voluntary mentor to many younger poets. During his lifetime, Forbes received a number of poetry prizes and Literature Board Grants. Soon after his death came Forbes’s Collected Poems, which offers perspectives of his poetry and gives a comprehensive sense of his output. Forbes was a postmodernist, which means he wrote like certain American poets, among them Frank O’Hara. Australian poet and critic Geoff Page has described Forbes’s voice as ‘breezy’ or ‘chatty’.
This is evident in the early poem ‘Up, Up, Home & Away’. The poem is ‘for’ Ranald Allan, Linn Cameron, Landon Watts and Jenny Redford returning from Bali. The last three sentences of the poem say something about Forbes:
Remember our song
‘Glue me to the reef again’?
How glad we were to let
others do their thinking
for us. And now,
‘in the pink’ & happy blue
as the sunset glows & ends
like the Wasted Daze
Dance Orchestra’s
Special Number Grande Finale
we add water to the Acme
Instant Sydney, arrive home
& have a party.
Forbes was a very social poet. According to Geoff Page, there is a sense of the ‘in crowd’. Many of his poems have a ‘coolness’ about them. They smack of charm and charisma. In a poem written to celebrate the Australian Bicentennial, Forbes displays these qualities (‘On the Beach: A Bicentennial Poem’):
your vocation looks
more like a blurred tattoo
or something you did for a bet
& now regret, like a man
walking the length of the bar on his hands
balancing a drink on his shoe
Forbes also displays humility here. He can laugh at his own expense. He also displays imagination in Collected Poems (‘The Best of All Possible Poems’):
like a dozing shark
or a very quiet limb
waiting for the lecture
to make it a star the
best of all possible
poems relaxes asleep
in the tropical surf
beginning near the
right-hand corner of
the room. meanwhile
just outside my window
inter-island trade
begins: their supply
of coconuts is endless
This thumbnail sketch is neat and exotic. It also has clarity. In ‘The History of Nostalgia’ Forbes describes himself in a denser poem:
another miserable subject, composed of a few jokes
& catchphrases worn smooth with repetition
but at the same time almost statuesque, like a bust
of yourself in marble or bronze & mounted on
that plinth you used to lounge against, back
when you were still smoking Marlboros & worried
you’d come to resemble your father, not yourself.
Forbes’s poems are varied stylistically. Some are short and have clarity. The more direct ones can sometimes come from pain – for example, a hangover in ‘At the Pool’. Or something deeper, a ‘balanced odalisque of feeling’ (‘Lullaby’):
The sun tries to go down &
the moon floats near my elbow.
I wish I lived where night
falls suddenly & the stars
look like bits of paint
scraped off a window. Instead
I sleep in the bed of a Great Man,
myself, too tired to cover up
the balanced odalisque of feeling
crashed out beside me
on the cushions in the back
of a revving panel van. I hope
I don’t wake up this alert, or as black
as you paint my childish heart.
In the forward to Forbes’s Collected Poems, Australian poet and critic Gig Ryan quotes the last sentence of ‘Lullaby’ and labels it ‘unaccustomed corniness’. But the tone of the last sentence suits the poem – its subject matter is too grave to end any other way. Also, Forbes’s humour in other poems gives his serious side strength. Another likeable aspect of Forbes’s poetry is its selflessness. ‘Floating’ is ‘for’ Eve Jennings:
don’t decide how you feel
before the first drink you
may not have to feel bad
tonight after all between
what you hope for & what
will disappoint you intensely
there’s a gap you can float
in not fall over & this is
what everyone having a good
time is doing not happy not
drunk yet – a schooner of
old & a gin & tonic please –
but floating. Or you sink &
this helps you personally
In his Collected, Forbes helps people out with his quasi-guides. ‘Floating’ is one and ‘Europe: a guide for Ken Searle’ and ‘Drugs’ are two others. All three are good poems, there are very few bad ones in the collection. There would be about thirty poems that would have been and will continue to be anthologised. There are a few gems among the previously uncollected poems. All in all, Collected Poems is a comprehensive retrospective of one of the best and funniest Australian poets of all time.
Michael Byrne 