The Wind Outside. Stephen McInerney. Hardie Grant Publishing.
Reviewed by Michael Byrne
Stephen McInerney (the poet) was born and grew up in Kiama on the NSW south coast. He attended boarding school in Sydney. He studied at the Australian National University, where he won the University Medal, the University of Sydney, where he was awarded his doctorate, and the University of Cambridge, where he won the Theological Studies Prize. His first book of poetry, In Your Absence, was recommended in The Times Literary Supplement ‘Books of the Year’ in 2002. His next book of poetry, The Wind Outside, was published in 2016. In 2026, McInerney will begin teaching at Radford College, Canberra. McInerney has a teacher’s interest in children (‘The Back Window, Kiama’):
These are the mornings that I love the most:
to watch all this, a fresh brew in the palm,
a pile of books, the plump unopened post,
at peace with has been and what’s to come;
old neighbours with their grandkids idling past,
as if they’ll never come to any harm.
McInerney has a sense of humour in this extract. He takes the reader to a happy place. He is sceptical and speaks the truth. McInerney speaks the truth about other matters in his poetry (‘A Family Joke’):
My mother threw spaghetti on my dad
one summer night, when I was nine years old.
The spaghetti, like her anger, soon grew cold.
It became a family joke. It mightn’t have.
McInerney has a sense of humour in this poem. He is aptly embarrassed about the matter. Also, there is the consonance of ‘dad’ and ‘have’ and the assonance of ‘cold’ and ‘old’. Another poem which has full and half rhymes is ‘Homecoming’:
It was a time for noticing small things:
my mother neatly pressing out the seams
of my cricket creams and woollen blazers;
my father licking through the yearbook pages.
Waking, I was surprised by my own room,
and thought of my first night away from home;
and then thought of my first weekend at home
after four weeks in a sniffling dorm,
how everything seemed vast and so immense
I learned the minutiae of transience:
sand sifting through my hand, a gull’s icy song
lilting and flurrying through the long
silences, as I walked, humming, along the beach,
searching for the high notes I could no longer reach.
‘Homecoming’ is one of nineteen poems which feature In Your Absence and The Wind Outside’. ‘Homecoming’, in The Wind Outside version, features the fifth last line of this poem – ‘I learned the minutiae of transience:’ An earlier version of the fifth last line (the In Your Absence version) reads:
I learned the miniature of transience:
The Wind Outside version is better, more precise. McInerney also displays a commitment to editing. According to McInerney, in ‘A Summer Morning, Clovelly 2003’, McInerney was doing the watching:
Opening the bathroom window,
he can see
across the alleyway,
secretly,
this young woman
on the edge of her bed.
Like a stretch of sand
damply bared
by flourishing foam,
when the towel withdraws
beauty breathes
through her million pores.
Shoulders and neck, buttocks and back
are defined:
Le Violon d’Ingres
in outline,
lightly finished
by the brush of the sun,
and dusted with freckles
like cinnamon.
With one change, a ‘he’ to an ‘I’, McInerney is openly heterosexual in this extract. Here we have poetry as pornography. In ‘Sometimes’ there is (mostly) poetry without punctuation:
Sometimes there is nothing there
sometimes air
taken in small doses and given back
sometimes thoughts and words cohere
sometimes prayer
draws the day together, random thoughts, the idea
of another life,
lays bare
the body,
a shoulder
in moonlight, a dress
over the chair
sometimes there is nothing there
There are no full stops in ‘Sometimes’. That, and the fact that there are only five commas, gives the poem a chance to breathe. There is predominantly one rhyme. This is refreshingly different. What else is different is the nineteen poems from his previous collection, In Your Absence, are included in The Wind Outside. The poems display a commitment to editing. Poems are not always finished. How finished a poem is can spark dialogue. If a poet is religious that can spark dialogue, too. McInerney is a Catholic. His target audience would be other Catholics. And poets that appreciate the craft of poetry. McInerney is old-fashioned with his rhyming verse. And old-fashioned with his pious voice. There is humour in his poetry when it is warranted.
Michael Byrne 