Collected Poems. Michael Dransfield. University of Queensland Press.
Reviewed by Michael Byrne
Australian poet Michael Dransfield was born in 1948 and died in 1973 (aged twenty-four). His Collected Poems was published by University of Queensland Press in 1987. It was the first time his seven collections – Streets of the Long Voyage (1970), Mazurka (1971), The Inspector of Tides (1972), Drug Poems (1972), Memoirs of a Velvet Urinal (1975), Voyage into Solitude (1978) and The Second Month of Spring (1980) – were together in one volume.
In one of his early poems Dransfield is together, intimately, with a woman. The poem hinges on one word (‘Pas de deux for lovers’):
Morning ought not
to be complex.
The sun is a seed
cast at dawn into the long
furrow of history.
To wake
and go
would be so simple.
Yet
how the
first light
makes gold her hair
upon my arm.
How then
shall I leave,
and where away to go. Day
is so deep already with involvement.
The usage of the word ‘Yet’ evinces a certain deliberateness and control of language. Also, in Streets of the Long Voyage, Dransfield reasons (‘Clouds hill’):
a letter today
written on petals
happiness love
ingredients of serenity
this, though; serenity is
acceptance, acceptance is
compromise, compromise is
defeat
Dransfield reasons well in poetry. This is a sign of an intelligent poet. Humour is also a sign of intelligence. Dransfield can be witty (‘Flying’):
i was flying over sydney
in a giant dog
things looked bad
Here, his sense of humour wins the reader over. Dransfield also wins the reader over with imagination (‘The hermit of green light’):
only the wind and a river know the way to his
hut in the woods, and sometimes only the wind.
the moon, who is his lady, calls him
from the orchard, her light
releasing dim scents of heavy fruit
fallen, concealing the earth. the wind,
a white visitor, knows him through shutters,
through a torn shirt he wears.
he has no love now, has scraps of song
to hum in odd corners of night. besides the moon
he tends broken birds, the forest victims.
cats tumble about him; there are books, the sound
of the river. it is almost enough, this imperfect
silence: often it is enough.
In this poem, Dransfield uses his imagination to conceptualise something convincing. If Dransfield has a vivid imagination, he also stands for something (‘That which we call a rose’):
I dremt of satori a sudden crystal wherein civilisation was seen
more truly than with cameras but it was your world not ours
yours is a glut of martyrs money and carbon monoxide
I dremt of next week perhaps then we would eat again sleep in a house again
perhaps we would wake to find humanity where at present
freedom is obsolete and honour a heresy. Innocently
I dremt that madness passes like a dream
Here, Dransfield conveys his desperation in an eloquent way. ‘That which we call a rose’ would have to be one of the best poems from Streets of the Long Voyage. Streets of the Long Voyage would have to be Dransfield’s best book. However, there is good poetry throughout Collected Poems. Collected Poems contains about forty or fifty outstanding poems. Many of these poems will most likely be anthologised for quite some time.
Michael Byrne 