Of Muse, Meandering and Midnight. Samuel Wagan Watson. University of Queensland Press.
Reviewed by Michael Byrne
Samuel Wagan Watson, the poet, was born in 1972. He is of Bundjalung, Birri Gubba, German, Scottish, and Irish descent. His childhood was spent in Brisbane and his teen years on the fringes of the Sunshine Coast. He has worked as a door-to-door salesman, a public relations officer, fraud investigator, graphic artist, labourer, law clerk, film technician and actor. He has performed his poetry in spoken-word venues, pubs and at literary festivals; and has worked as a writer-in-residence and written commissioned works. Of Muse, Meandering and Midnight is his first book of poems. It features the poem ‘back seat driver’. An extract from it reads:
make a name for me
nothing else matters . . .
Here, Wagan Watson displays a healthy amount of ambition. An extract from the next poem in the collection is tender (‘on the river’):
it was a drive through the sleeping industrial giants
and thirty minutes before a flight
along Brisbane’s vein of union disputes
to a secluded spot on the river’s edge
with it’s cold sea breezes and dead things,
we kissed
and said goodbye
Wagan Watson displays clarity in this extract. Wagan Watson’s poems about his early life are clever. Especially the first two lines of this one (‘white stucco dreaming’):
sprinkled in the happy dark of my mind
is early childhood and black humour
The double entendre of ‘black humour’ is deft. Wagan Watson utilises humour in a section of ‘labelled’:
“Mr Watson . . . you’re not a race horse . . . you’re a human being!
Oh yeah?
all my life I’ve been under some kind of label –
full blood?
half blood . . .
half breed!
half caste –
and even questioned about being
a quadroon
well
with magnificent bloodlines like that
I decided
I must be a goddamned pedigree of some sort!
The ending of this section is funny, but the outstanding line is the ‘quadroon’ one – it is hilarious. While the penultimate poem in the collection, featured in the following extract, just has soul (‘valley man’):
He danced up a wind
and mocked the dark places
until He laid silent,
waiting . . .
for when the brolga met his breath
inviting his dance to join hers
when,
once again
He felt the dance of the young
There is an Aboriginality here. It is one of the likeable features of Wagan Watson’s poetry. As is his charm and character and integrity. And he never misses a trick with titles. While in having little punctuation in his poems he allows them to breathe. And in eschewing rhyme and metre, Wagan Watson hones a certain aesthetic. Wagan Watson’s poetry has an aesthetic that wins the reader over. All of his poetry is worth reading, again and again.
Michael Byrne 