Collected Poems: 1969-1999

by John Forbes

Genres: Poetry

264 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Australian poet John Forbes was born in Melbourne and lived in New Guinea, Malaya and Townsville until his family settled in Sydney in the early sixties. He gained a BA (Hons) at the University of Sydney in 1973 and moved to Melbourne in 1989. John Forbes continued to work in various jobs, including writer-in-residence, reviewer, freelance poetry tutor, and voluntary mentor to many younger poets. Over the years, he received a number of poetry prizes and Literature Board grants, allowing him to travel. John Forbes was widely published in Australia and esteemed by his many fans, students, peers and colleagues. He died suddenly of a heart attack in 1998.

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Reviews

[C. · Rating 5 out of 5]

I suffer from that common Australian ailment - I feel like my culture is being marginalised. Like there is relatively little in the way of good art, good dance, good theatre, good music, good food, whatever, that happens here, and if it is, it is criminally undervalued. Undervalued by the rest of the world, sure, but more worryingly, by Australians themselves. The cultural cringe is alive and well. (This is of course a huge generalisation.) In any case, for many years I have carefully scrutinised every piece of Australian literature that has passed before my eyes, looking for a writer, any writer, who writes for the Australia I know.

The Australia I know is not represented by the I-love-the-sunburnt-country school, or the I-hate-the-sunburnt-country school, or the directionless-existentialist-angst-and-anomie school, or the sentimental-but-loveable school, or the suburbia-bashing school, or the nationalist school, or the suffering-of-indigenous-peoples school, or the depressive-rural-setting school, or the grumpy-racist-conservative-misogynist-Vietnam-vets school, or the pissed-up-ocker school.

All of these 'schools' are of course valid and often excellent representations of modern Australia; but they are not representative of my Australia, the one I experience every day. They are interesting to read, and it is comforting to see the places and things that I know rendered seriously and well in words. But it is not me.

I have never encountered any author who seems to speak for me and the people I know. These people are young, multicultural, well-educated, trendy, smart, concerned. They are also staid, safe, a little conservative, in general not adventurous, thinkers not doers. They are arrogant, overconfident and spoiled - for choice and for opportunities. Few of them seem to be motivated by anything outside of their own small existences. They live life in our little transparent boxes, sipping lattes while they look out and make sarcastic/ironic/cutting/intelligent comments on the things that go by the windows of their Brunswick Street cafes. They think Sydney Road is 'quaint'. They pretend to know what they're talking about when faced with Salvador Dali. We have potential, but it remains to be seen if anything good will come of us.

John Forbes' poetry is the first, and only, thing I've read that goes some way towards articulating Australia as I know it. He is smart, ironic, unashamed, hilarious. And also, undervalued. I'd never heard of him - I only read this because it was on the English syllabus. (Many of the English academics at Melbourne Uni, incidentally, are British - they know our literature better than we do.) He is at once a Howard Arkley and a John Romeril. He writes with energy and emotion. He writes on politics, life and love. His imagery is spectacular, his form perfection. Non-Australians probably won't 'get' him. This, my friends, is a great Australian poet.

I want to choose a poem to reproduce here, but it's so hard. They are all so good, so full of brilliant little asides, fantastic images, throwaway lines. This one is great, but it doesn't have the exuberance of Rrose Selavy, the quiet beauty of love poem, the acerbic political commentary of Bicentennial Poem, or the fantastic description of Bob Hawke's hair in another poem I can't remember the name of. I wanted to choose The Corrosive Littoral, which is brilliant, but it's a lot longer and I don't know what the deal is with copyright and I feel better if I don't copy such a large amount. So, I choose Melbourne, which is not flattering to us Melburnians, but has a nice quip about the weather.

Melbourne
after Max Jacob

The incessant trams are the colour of the skin
after a course of suntan pills and your opinions
have to change a lot, like the weather but more
deliberately; where fashion is argued for, is
true love like two speech balloons that merge,
even before the attached figures have met?
At least your blinding headaches will modulate to a
slow wastage of the self, as your drugged &
artificial suntan fades. Then a voice you've never
heard before--your own--will say: 'Be a caricature,
John, and not a cartoon, if you want to lose
your nostalgia for the sensual, glaring sun!'

[dom · Rating 2 out of 5]

apparently a cult figure, Forbes’ dashed off poems have all the wit and satirical zest of a leunig cartoon - best mashed up as covering for ur wire mesh volcano

[George · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing collection. The introduction already makes the point that it's quite slim for a collected works, out of proportion to the quality and the widespread publication and influence of Forbes in Australia. It's also surprisingly consistent, at least in my opinion, and I enjoyed tracing the subtly varying density of rhyme throughout. He also writes a lot of excellent free verse sonnets. There's a lot of quite explicit philosophical work, some references to Quine, some post-Kantian wrestling with concepts versus intuitions, as in "Love's Body:" "Certain kinds of knowledge leave the field of / all possible experience, apparently to enlarge / the sphere of our judgements beyond the limits / of experience, by means of concepts to which / experience—even after we've made up our minds / on its blaze of nothing—can never supply / any corresponding objects" (61). (Other love poems sexier than this also mark the collection).

But there's in addition a lot of less explicit philosophical work. I particularly love the poem "Phaenomena," which opens with the following Walter Benjaminian pathetic fallacy: "Pellucid stars chart my direction, you who / never hear our intent or voices, polish these / manoeuvres that, by instants, resemble you. / I sketch a course among attractions only to / invent you as a shining vehicle, yet as you / are, I am" (99). It's a beautiful and somehow not cliched apostrophe. Really it's an incredible poem and unusually serious amongst the satires and the effusions of the rest of the collection; the last line is "I must change," in which I hear a kind of postmodern take up of Rilke's "Archaic Torso of Apollo," whose famous last line reads "You must change your life." But just before that final line the archaic torso is described as "suffused with brilliance" that comes from inside, even without the head of the original sculpture. Right before the end, the qualities of the sculpture "burst like a star" from the fractured torso. That's an interesting link I would pose right there, in which Forbes silently picks up the star qua human constellation and repeats the poetico-ethical injunction that stars always seem to be giving us. The sculpture, and the stars, see you from everywhere.

[Differengenera · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ode To Karl Marx
Old father of the horrible bride whose
wedding cake has finally collapsed, you

spoke the truth that doesn’t set us free—
it’s like a lever made of words no one’s

learnt to operate. So the machine it once
connected to just accelerates & each new

rap dance video’s a perfect image of this,
bodies going faster and faster, still dancing

on the spot. At the moment tho’ this set up
works for me, being paid to sit and write &

smoke, thumbing through Adorno like New Idea
on a cold working day in Ballarat, where

adult unemployment is 22% & all your grand
schemata of intricate cause and effect

work out like this: take a muscle car &
wire its accelerator to the floor, take out

the brakes, the gears the steering wheel
& let it rip. The dumbest tattooed hoon

—mortal diamond hanging round the Mall—
knows what happens next. It’s fun unless

you’re strapped inside the car. I’m not,
but the dummies they use for testing are.

[edmondegreen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved it.

[Joel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I dug this out of a $5 bargain bin with no foreknowledge of Forbes or his work. It has left a deep impression, particularly in regards to form and style. Forbes has a uniquely Australian sense of humour - incredibly wry, though not whimsical in the way Leunig can be. Also noteworthy is the manner in which he ties the abstract to the concrete, for instance, interpreting cultural identity through things such as landscapes and cities. My favourite above all are his personal reflections. Highly recommended.

[David Kaufmann]

Excellent and remarkably influential Australian poet, a good amount of his stuff (as well as appreciations of him) at Jacket (www.jacketmagazine.com).

[Pip Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

A poet with a sense of humour! A comedian with an eye for art! Put him on a goddamn pedestal!