Selected Poems. John Tranter. Hale & Iremonger.
Reviewed by Michael Byrne
John Tranter, the deceased Australian poet, was born in 1943 and died in 2023. Tranter was born in Cooma, New South Wales and attended country schools, then took his BA in 1970 after attending university sporadically. He worked mainly in publishing, teaching and radio production, and travelled widely, making more than twenty reading tours to ventures in the United States, in Britain and Europe since the mid-1980’s. He lived in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane in Australia and overseas in London, Cambridge, Singapore, Florida and San Francisco. He spent most of his life in Sydney, where he was a company director (with his wife Lyn) of Australian Literary Management, a leading literary agency. He was married to Lyn, with adult children Kirsten and Leon, and in 2009 completed a Doctorate of Creative Arts from the University of Wollongong.
Tranter was defined as a poet who was a postmodernist. According to internet site Poetry Portal, postmodernism is an attempt to rethink the cultural landscape with theories taken from linguistics, psychiatry, continental philosophy and left-wing politics. Postmodernist poetry tends to be a coterie art – fragmentary, solipsist and provisional, opposed to the ‘great theories of art’ and indeed to saying anything definite. Like Tranter, another deceased Australian postmodernist poet was John Forbes. Like Forbes, Tranter had a good sense of humour. Take sonnet thirteen from his selection of sonnet length poems in his Selected Poems:
FAMOUS POET JETS HOME TO USA!
How lucky to live in America, where
supermarkets stock up heavily on writers!
Thinking of the famous poets floating home
to that luxurious and splendid place
inhabited by living legends like an old movie
you blush with a sudden flush of Romanticism
and your false teeth chatter and shake loose!
How it spoils the magic! In America no writers
have false teeth, they are too beautiful!
Imagine meeting Duncan in your laundromat –
in America it happens all the time – you say
Hi, Robert! – and your teeth fall out!
And you can’t write a poem about that!
The poem was hilarious. There was also the American aspect of the poem. Tranter was influenced by a number of American poets. There was also some Americana in ‘Ode to Col Joye’:
a paperboy shouts something like
New York!
New York!
(you’re not sure . . . perhaps ‘No Work?’)
The extract had a clever play on words. When the poem was read in its entirety, Tranter’s ‘Ode to Col Joye’ had a social aspect to it. Almost all of the time, he was a social poet (‘What Camus Said’):
Peta, flayed red on the harrowed sand.
Dune buggy aerials across the tattered sky.
‘I dropped surfing,’ she said, ‘you know,
too slow, all that bullshit mysticism.
Give me a good stretch of tar,
something to break the monotony.
What was it Camus said? He bought his
in an auto wreck. He should know.
Want a steak?’ Nothing more personal
than the firm muscle, sheen of sweat;
she tricked you with a sly honesty.
‘I suppose you’d say it’s sexual,
I mean, that gearstick stuff.’
Tranter displayed an ear for speech in the extract. ‘The Popular Mysteries’ did not include speech. However, it was evocative and a pleasure to read. The extract from ‘The Popular Mysteries’ left the reader feeling relaxed:
. . . after a quick lunch on the harbour,
a drink picks you up and you
drift off the surface of the planet
daft, adolescent and deeply wise:
a fine glow lights up
your lazy limbs and the nerves
drop away. Behind the blue horizon
a boat disappears, popular mysteries
begin. Your lips fade. You’re
asleep, and thoroughly happy.
In full, ‘The Popular Mysteries’ was one of the best poems in the book. ‘The Popular Mysteries’ was the last poem in Tranter’s Selected Poems. Tranter knew how to end a book. And, with ‘The Moment of Waking’, he knew how to begin one:
. . . Someone hands me a ticket,
in Berlin a hunchback
is printing something hideous;
my passport is bruised with dark blue
and lilac inks. Morning again,
another room batters me awake
you will be haunting the mirror like silver . . .
now the nights punish me with dreams
of a harbour in Italy – you are there
hung in the sky on broken wings
as you always have been, dancing,
preparing to wound me with your
distant and terrible eyes.
The extract from the poem had a lovely last line. In full, it was one of the best poems in the book. Tranter’s evocation of being a traveller was deft.
Tranter was a traveller in Selected Poems. And he was funny. And he was a social poet. But most of all he was different. He was a postmodernist. Writing as a postmodernist seemed natural to him. He used it to his advantage. He was a successful poet. He was widely anthologised and reviewed. Tranter also did some reviewing and anthologising of his own. Tranter had a sense of fun. Tranter’s poetry was often about the pleasures of life. Tranter was an extremely bright poet who was inventive, entertaining and interesting.
Michael Byrne 