Pieces Of A Passionate Life Arranged
Sydney Morning Herald
Friday October 9, 1987
DOROTHY Hewett has crowned the confessional mythologising of her life and poetry in Alice in Wormland (Paper Bark Press, $12.95, limited edition hardcover $35).
Hewett's poetry and some of her plays endlessly review and rearrange pieces of a passionate life. There will be argument about seeing the process in the context of sexual politics, made no easier by the episodes of Hewett's politics lived as personal commitments.
Hewett's Alice, Alice's Nim and her Bluey Blood and her Jack Catt, Alice and Nim's white owl and falcon small neat & deadly/beautiful as a stone inhabit a land of legends including Camelot, the lives of the poets, Burnie, Balmain and Darlinghurst.
Hewett skips the bits and the thoughts Lloyd Davies sued her for, but succeeds in this longest and most integrated of her poetic structures(intended as a verse novella, in 10 parts) in arriving at a pageant-like apotheosis: the fine, last poems in "The Shape-Changers" call up old phrases, Death conquers Love, Fame conquers Death.
Her analysis of passion is not a new one. The onward quest for a love that excuses and sanctifies everything is rooted in memories that dog the child and the adult.
Why do we, why will we, go on lapping up the new romantic, Tennyson-Dylan Thomas-Black Mountain mish-mash Hewett serves us? Because of extraordinary simultaneous perceptions like
Alice bolts on broken heels
from the young meatworker
& lying out flat in the school yard
hears him ponder
as the GI spittle dries on Ezra's cheek
you don't expect it from a girl
you could take anywhere.
Because of her tragic intensity. Because of her rhetoric, straight to its target, yet calling freely across centuries of tradition. Because every generation needs to re-clothe the recurring dream of endless passion.
the white owl hoots
from the watery shore
the bloodwoods roar
first light touches the tips
of the spotted gums
the hawk's wing
brushes against the pane
she hears the car start up
the fishing rods
pointing into the dawn
in the white walled room
his chameleon eyes
never leave her face
a funnel of light
bathes the blue typewriters.
Whereas Hewett has been prolific both as poet and playwright since the early '70s, and her 1959 novel has recently been republished, it is 26 years -too long - since Elizabeth Riddell's previous book.
Occasions of Birds (Officina Brindabella, $45) shows that Elizabeth Riddell has developed as a poet through years of earning a living as a journalist. The vivid concern of "News of a Baby" and the ballading facility of "Country Tune", which I met in 1957 in Judith Wright's A Book Of Australian Verse (Oxford), still lie behind her poems here - in grief, in observations on the extinction of a tribe and a species, and in words for friends; in swift, firm outlines and often sardonic reflections.
The third poem in the richly flavoured title sequence describes Governor Hunter's expedition collecting Australian birds for English aviaries, before switching to the present:
One hundred and eighty years later
a man is out there in the dunes
searching for the paradise parrot.
Listen as he walks, crab-scuttle on the sand.
He has not much to offer this bird
which saw the gold and heard the sound of fife and drum.
Riddell's moods are complex. The gravity of many final lines lies between stoicism and pity:
That will do for a life.
So there is security. Look for no more.
Sometimes I put tears on their cheeks
because they died mystified and inconsol-
able
at the delay of predicted happiness.
"Telephone Call" refuses to be an elegy, but is a most moving poem of dailiness and final things.
Some poems I shall treasure from this fine collection use news items -predictions of hard weather that will kill lambs, the vignette of a Chilean soldier sticking carnations in the muzzle of his gun - and go on "with pain and misgiving" to explore the world's contrarieties. Then there are completely honest poems of living through love, living to be old; "The Time of Life" and"The End of the Affair" - extraordinary, this but impossible to quote piecemeal. I like, too, the quirky, epigrammatic quality of Riddell's short"November".
The book is one of Brindabella's most beautiful productions, embellished with drawings by Anne Weinholt; a book-lover's prize.
© 1987 Sydney Morning Herald
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