What do you think?
Rate this book
Poems by Kenneth Slessor
This new edition presents the main body of Kenneth Slessor's work: the contents of One Hundred Poems (1944) with several later pieces of the greatest distinction.
116 pages, Hardcover
Published January 1, 1957
3 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
July 2, 2017
I feel quite confident, after reviewing over 400 books, that I have got the hang of reviewing fiction. I can’t say the same thing for reviewing poetry. For the most part I can only point out lines that I love, comment for the most part on what I think works and doesn’t and perhaps explain why I chose the collection.
For Poems by Kenneth Slessor, one of Australia’s most famous poets I am employing an assistant - Adrian Caesar the author of a biography of Kenneth Slessor, which I will be reviewing shortly.
Poems was originally published as 100 poems in 1944. In 1957 the collection was printed again with the addition of Beach Burial, An Inscription for Dog River and Polarities and became Poems.
Of course I knew and loved Five Bells but what I noticed in the collection was the flatness in some of the poems to do with women. I thought at first that I was reading them incorrectly. Was I missing something? A finer point that was eluding me?
In Surrender:
“When to those Venusbergs, thy breasts,
By wars of love and moonlight batteries,
My lips have stormed-O pout thy mouth above,”
I thought What the? Caesar explains:
“Women, like towns or countries, are there to be explored, conquered, possessed by the brave and adventurous male. The female body is thus made into the aggressively fortified, mysterious and unknown ‘other’.”
Speaking of brave and adventurous males there are quite a lot of them - particularly roving through strange lands - the lost lands or the Orient or on long sea voyages in Slessor’s poetry. There is frequent mention of (or similar):
‘...strange riders once, came gusting down
cloaked in dark furs, with faces grave and sweet,’
‘those friends of Lao-Tzu, those wise old men
dozing all day in lemon-silken robes,’.
We’ve also got tall gilded Tartars, roaring pistol-boys and brave lads of gold. There’s Captain Cook, Captain Dobbin, the writer Heine in Paris (parts of this poem I really liked but as a whole the poem didn’t speak to me), but then as a reader you come across lines like these:
“Come in your painted coaches, friends of mine,
We’ll keep the stars night-company with wine,
Morning shall find us bending to the flute,
And daybreak mock us at our candleshine.”
However, ultimately as Caesar writes so eloquently:
“We are removed from the natural world into one of high artifice signalled by the ‘pastel air’ and ‘gilded stair’ the cherubim and undines.”
Thankfully these poems only form a part of this collection. In evidence is Slessor’s mastery of the evocation of time, not just in the incomparable Five Bells but in poems such as Out of Time:
“Out of all reckoning, out of dark and light,
Over the edges of dead Nows and Heres,
Blindly and softly, as a mistress might,
He keeps appointments with a million years.”
In Slessor’s contemporary poems it seems that when he is not fortified with the romance of the past, bleakness creeps in and the poet reveals that he actually believes art cannot conquer death. Sometimes such lines are startling when you come across them in a poem. One of the very memorable examples of this is from Stars:
“But I could not escape those tunnels of nothingness...”
And the final surprising line from Serenade about the moon and the world’s lovers.
And from Winter Dawn:
“The city, dissolves to a shell of bricks and paper,
Empty, without purpose, a thing not comprehended,
A broken tomb, where ghosts unknown sleep.”
The astute reader will find many more lines such as these including the mention of “handcuffed angels” from Trade Circular which fascinates and haunts me. But it is “Five Bells” that I applaud and rank as my favourite long poem. Slessor’s evocation of Sydney harbour, his obvious grief over his lost friend and more than anything the beautiful rhythm of the poem are all mesmerising.
“Deep and dissolving verticals of light
Ferry the falls of moonshine down. Five bells
Coldly rung out in a machine’s voice. Night and water
Pour to one rip of darkness, the Harbour floats
In air, the Cross hangs upside-down in water.”
This is the second stanza of Five Bells. Impossible not to read further. As a strange sort of trope to Slessor’s emotional life, 100 poems published in 1944 is dedicated to his first wife Noela. This edition published in 1957 is dedicated to his second wife Pauline and their son Paul.
For Poems by Kenneth Slessor, one of Australia’s most famous poets I am employing an assistant - Adrian Caesar the author of a biography of Kenneth Slessor, which I will be reviewing shortly.
Poems was originally published as 100 poems in 1944. In 1957 the collection was printed again with the addition of Beach Burial, An Inscription for Dog River and Polarities and became Poems.
Of course I knew and loved Five Bells but what I noticed in the collection was the flatness in some of the poems to do with women. I thought at first that I was reading them incorrectly. Was I missing something? A finer point that was eluding me?
In Surrender:
“When to those Venusbergs, thy breasts,
By wars of love and moonlight batteries,
My lips have stormed-O pout thy mouth above,”
I thought What the? Caesar explains:
“Women, like towns or countries, are there to be explored, conquered, possessed by the brave and adventurous male. The female body is thus made into the aggressively fortified, mysterious and unknown ‘other’.”
Speaking of brave and adventurous males there are quite a lot of them - particularly roving through strange lands - the lost lands or the Orient or on long sea voyages in Slessor’s poetry. There is frequent mention of (or similar):
‘...strange riders once, came gusting down
cloaked in dark furs, with faces grave and sweet,’
‘those friends of Lao-Tzu, those wise old men
dozing all day in lemon-silken robes,’.
We’ve also got tall gilded Tartars, roaring pistol-boys and brave lads of gold. There’s Captain Cook, Captain Dobbin, the writer Heine in Paris (parts of this poem I really liked but as a whole the poem didn’t speak to me), but then as a reader you come across lines like these:
“Come in your painted coaches, friends of mine,
We’ll keep the stars night-company with wine,
Morning shall find us bending to the flute,
And daybreak mock us at our candleshine.”
However, ultimately as Caesar writes so eloquently:
“We are removed from the natural world into one of high artifice signalled by the ‘pastel air’ and ‘gilded stair’ the cherubim and undines.”
Thankfully these poems only form a part of this collection. In evidence is Slessor’s mastery of the evocation of time, not just in the incomparable Five Bells but in poems such as Out of Time:
“Out of all reckoning, out of dark and light,
Over the edges of dead Nows and Heres,
Blindly and softly, as a mistress might,
He keeps appointments with a million years.”
In Slessor’s contemporary poems it seems that when he is not fortified with the romance of the past, bleakness creeps in and the poet reveals that he actually believes art cannot conquer death. Sometimes such lines are startling when you come across them in a poem. One of the very memorable examples of this is from Stars:
“But I could not escape those tunnels of nothingness...”
And the final surprising line from Serenade about the moon and the world’s lovers.
And from Winter Dawn:
“The city, dissolves to a shell of bricks and paper,
Empty, without purpose, a thing not comprehended,
A broken tomb, where ghosts unknown sleep.”
The astute reader will find many more lines such as these including the mention of “handcuffed angels” from Trade Circular which fascinates and haunts me. But it is “Five Bells” that I applaud and rank as my favourite long poem. Slessor’s evocation of Sydney harbour, his obvious grief over his lost friend and more than anything the beautiful rhythm of the poem are all mesmerising.
“Deep and dissolving verticals of light
Ferry the falls of moonshine down. Five bells
Coldly rung out in a machine’s voice. Night and water
Pour to one rip of darkness, the Harbour floats
In air, the Cross hangs upside-down in water.”
This is the second stanza of Five Bells. Impossible not to read further. As a strange sort of trope to Slessor’s emotional life, 100 poems published in 1944 is dedicated to his first wife Noela. This edition published in 1957 is dedicated to his second wife Pauline and their son Paul.
Displaying 1 of 1 review