The Indigo Book of Modern Australian Sonnets. Geoff Page (Editor). Indigo.
Reviewed by Michael Byrne
The Indigo Book of Modern Australian Sonnets, edited by Geoff Page, is a lively and entertaining anthology. Each sonnet has fourteen lines and is loosely defined as a sonnet. The sonnets are arranged thematically. When the sonnets are added together they comprise of almost two hundred sonnets. There are a number of sonnets about love, sex and death. John Tranter has five sonnets, Philip Hodgins has five, Gwen Harwood has five and Les Murray has four. There are a number of poets with three. Sometimes with a poet with one sonnet there is a find. There are few poets that adhere to the classical rhyme schemes of old. These include the Shakespearean sonnet which has the rhyme scheme abab cdcd efef gg and the Petrarchan sonnet which has the rhyme scheme abba abba cde cde. There is a range of rhyming and non-rhyming sonnets as well as a range of voices within the sonnets.
There are even sonnets that summarise the life of the poet. Such is the case with Gig Ryan with her sonnet ‘When I Consider.’ The last six lines, like the previous eight, are very stream of consciousness:
I pause at the silky prolonged sunset
that death or god should taper off and shrink
as all the city’s woe and all the skies
say not to remember but to forget
and chafing through the cars I fall to think
how sorrows lift and pleasures cauterize
The last six lines all rhyme together like all the lines in the sonnet. Ryan has written a sonnet that is technically accomplished. It is neither forced nor cumbersome. It is also holistic, in terms of her life. John Foulcher, on the other hand, takes an historians idea and runs with it (‘Wars of Imperialism’):
From 66 to 70 AD Rome and Palestine tore
Jerusalem – in history it’s small, strong only to the Jews
who lost, living since then in tents.
Yet I think we should see more in this:
things ended when their Temple fell. Like a honeycomb,
cells progressively damp and alone, the great home
of God was peeled; brick by brick,
places more holy exposed to the light, the Romans marched,
spiralling in. And when light came
to the last place, the centre, He must have left . . .
Did they know what they set free then?
Something was there,
changing to light from ages of nothing –
scorching the known world, ripping the new world.
The point in the sonnet is like a point in a good essay. The sonnet is precise and concise. Jan Owen’s sonnet is about a vice – gambling (‘Dividend’):
Saturday, late morning, the fever began:
the short phone calls to the little man
that Aunty Bubbles knew, the form and weight
and starting price. ‘They’re lined up at the gate
for the fourth at Victoria Park.’ The nasal voice
of the wireless galloped us fast as the winning horse.
’It’s Valiant Boy by a short half-head.’
‘Oh pooh,’ our mother said, ‘another dud.’
But when she wore her lucky hat to the races
once, her Uncle Clarry’s grey, Sir Croesus,
came home on the rails at fifty to one.
He gave a pound note each to me and John,
and a taste for risk; we learned to back long shots,
dark horses, elderly relatives, and red hats.
Owen has a sense of humour and a sense of fun. In ‘Dividend’ the rhyme scheme consists of couplets. However, there is variation in the sonnet in terms of full rhymes and half rhymes. John Tranter’s sonnet ‘Lullaby’ is basically free verse without abandoning rhyme altogether:
Now the sea heaps itself on the pillow
with its wacky promises, and you’re floating
through the ceiling again. Tell sex to go
back to the playpen where it came from. Your
future’s waiting: suburbia loud with radios,
telling you to wake up now, and do the shopping!
Tranter is influenced by certain American poets. Thus, his voice is breezy and chatty. Refreshingly so. ‘Refugee Camp’ by Geoffrey Lehmann is also chatty in that the sonnet utilises speech:
The old men sleep, eat fruit, roll cigarettes.
They squint, discussing old, unsettled debts.
The unemployed youths gamble and wear knives.
Because there’s nothing else to fill their lives,
Young couples breed. The children swarm like flies.
Mobbing the stranger with their raucous cries.
‘We own a melon patch.’ ‘Our olive oil
is best.’ ‘Our orange grove has marvellous soil.’
‘Our coffee shop is famous for its cakes.’
‘Everyone wants the bread my mother bakes.’
Their house is big and white, its vines are green.
They boast of places they have never seen,
A garden with a well that’s never dry.
It will be theirs again, before they die.
‘Refugee Camp’ has technical competence and clarity. Geoff Page’s ‘The Recipe’ also has both these traits. It reads:
‘A sonnet tells me nothing but itself,’
as William Carlos Williams liked to say –
somewhat perversely lifting from the shelf
a pattern even free verse must obey.
Your sonnet’s eight and six are sacrosanct;
the greatest chef would hardly dare to alter
the ancient taste for eight lines neatly ranked
then six from what Italians call the volta.
A rhyme scheme down the side is de rigeur.
Elizabethan maybe – or Petrarchan.
And cooks from Spenser on will all concur
the sonnet is the dish to make your mark in.
By God, we’re there and, yes, you’re doing fine.
And now, like pepper, add the fourteenth line.
The simile in the last line is clever. The sonnet is also Shakespearean in terms of rhyme scheme. But if Page only took sonnets with rhyme schemes for the anthology there would not be the same diversity within the sonnets. A fourteen line sonnet is a good place to start for a poet – more substantial than a haiku, smaller than a villanelle. Its specifications are not demanding, just fourteen lines is the requisite. If you are a poet that adheres to a certain rhyme scheme with your sonnet or sonnets, this is good – you are part of a tradition. If you are a poet who has written sonnets or a sonnet, if you are a reader of sonnets, if you have written sonnets or a sonnet and you are a reader of them, sonnets are a lively and entertaining form. They are well utilised by Page.
Michael Byrne 