Andrew Fuhrmann



Andrew Fuhrmann Reviews Bruce Dawe’s Plays in Verse: Kevin Almighty and Blind Spots

Some poets are sublime and ridiculous at the same time. James Kenneth Stephen was only being felicitously expressive of what oft was thought of Wordsworth when he wrote:

Two voices are there: one is of the deep;
It learns the storm-cloud’s thunderous melody,
Now roars, now murmurs with the changing sea,
Now bird-like pipes, now closes soft in sleep:
And one is of an old half-witted sheep
Which bleats articulate monotony,
And indicates that two and one are three,
That grass is green, lakes damp, and mountains steep
And, Wordsworth, both are thine ...
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Hal Porter’s Pastoral Vision

Few landscape poets have drawn an Arcadia of the austral zones with as much consolidated detail and convincing substance as Hal Porter does in his garden vision The Hexagon (1956). In matters of green comfort he provides from memory's storehouse – the granite-bowled, lush South Gippsland of his youth – Botticelli weeds, flesh-deep mosses, Ruben's cornucopiae, soft privet, canna lilies, extensive pasture, wormwood, boxthorn and blackberry. His poems mount a botanical catalogue recalling equally Spencer's Faerie Queen and the excellent Bush Invaders of South-East Australia, a biological control handbook from the Department of Primary Industries.

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