Martin Duwell
English Department
University of Queensland
Since the early 1970s Alan Wearne has gone about consolidating
a reputation as the Australian poet most able to speak
to us about the lives of the inhabitants of this country.
In doing so, he has also reminded us of the almost forgotten
capacities of poetry in this area. He has reminded us
that a subject we have virtually made over to one kind
of novel can be equally well (perhaps better) explored
in a certain kind of poetry. There is more of the detail
that actually matters in the three hundred pages of
The Nightmarkets, for example, than in any number of
“social” novels.
Wearne’s interest is never just in the registration
of “character” or “voice”, he is
also obsessed by the contexts in which characters appear
and with which they interact. He has, in other words,
a freakish sensitivity to the effects of suburbs, schools,
states, friendships, relationships, occupations on individuals
and from the poetry he makes of this we as readers are
magically exposed to the gorgeous and irreducible complexity
of Australian life.
How is this done? Poetry is always credited with a
certain suggestive sexiness, a tendency to replace narrative
by a sequence of open-ended lyrics, but this usually
involves gesture and gesture is what Wearne’s poetry
characteristically avoids, favouring instead compression.
Perhaps the nearest analogues are the North of Boston
narratives of Robert Frost; poems like Home Burial and
Death of a Hired Man where there so much happening that
there is no room for gesture and no room at all for
“effect”.
The Lovemakers is, without doubt, the best of the Wearne
poems. It differs from its two large scale predecessors
Out Here and The Nightmarkets in a number of important
ways. It is, to begin with, far more ambitious. Out
Here was a kind of portrait of an outer, new suburb,
revealed in the lives of nine people grouped around
a single narrative event. The Nightmarkets focussed
on a specific period, the late seventies, and generally
dealt with a leftist generation of Melburnians, though
revealingly its ambition to be inclusive can be seen
in the way it included a disaffected Liberal party politician
and his mother, a Liberal party matriarch. The Lovemakers
deals with a longer time span and wider set of social
contexts. Of the three locations which generate the
entire narrative, two are in Melbourne, the other in
Sydney.
Even more significant, perhaps, is a change of technique.
The earlier works are all conceived and written as dramatic
monologues. This is a mode which prizes character and
voice and no-one in Australia has done it better than
Wearne: while any passage from say, The Nightmarkets,
is recognisable as being from a Wearne poem, similarly
each of the characters is carefully distinguished so
that Ian is never in danger of sounding like McTaggart,
or Sue Dobson of sounding like Terri.
The Lovemakers introduces, for the first time, sizeable
stretches of third person narration The result is a
greater complexity of voice. There are dramatic monologues
and they are often, as in the case of Cross QC, The
Phil Price Limericks and Roger, or Of Love and Its Anger,
in strict and challenging verse forms (villanelle, limerick
and sonnet respectively) that prevent them ever descending
into the standard, rather stagy blank verse form of
monologue. Here there is a narrator’s voice but
it a narrator who is never allowed to emerge as a character
in his own right.
And what a strange voice it is. It is usually hurried,
as though oppressed by the amount of detail to be dealt
with, and often seems to be uncomfortable with the necessary
process of omission. The first volume, for example,
opens with Jack’s release from gaol:
.........Kent, the friend,
who said he’ll meet him here,
is late, been stopped or given up.
.........How many hours
has Jack been out?
He’ll check when more get logged.
.......... . . and no use
being just “free”, I need to know
I am.
.........Beers and smokes
on a damp late morning,
with Corner Quiz from the bar’s portable.
.........It’s quiet,
business, and Take five the owner
urges his staff.
..................Five
what? Jack wonders
Well whatever they are, take fifty.
But the narrator’s voice is not only interwoven
with monologues, it is also actually interrupted by
a lot of direct speech. Even more extreme, the thoughts
of the character closest to the centre of interest often
infect the narrator’s voice. So The Kid in St Kilda,
which begins neutrally with “Through their kitchen
and onto the back verandah / Desley and The Kid had
dragged the mattress”, almost immediately slides
towards Desley’s voice “She been known to
bring back worse and, / since the lease didn’t
allow for pets / this way they got around that.”
Within a page we hear the accents of an older version
of The Kid in a passage describing how he met the future
victim of the State, Kent: “and how, / yeah anyway
at this party there he met, / well kinda met, that sucker
Kent”. All this makes for a great deal of polyphonic
pleasure and accepts that an omniscient author should
not have sole control over the complexity of events.
This leads me to the most extreme manifestation of
The Lovemaker’s ambition. It replaces character
by relationship as the core of the narrative. This is
a poem which tends to put characters in relationships,
rarely of two but frequently of three. It is as though
the interactions between three people carry enough complexity
to escape the charge of individualism (one character)
or romance (two characters). Some of these triads are
very brilliant. There is the relationship between Roger,
Barb and her lover, Neil, for example. Each sees things
differently and Roger’s monologue is a shocking
revelation precisely because we had discounted him and
focussed, reductively and romantically, on the life
of Barb and her lover.
Also the section His Majesty Prince Jones… brilliantly
works out the ultimately destructive relationship between
Kim the supplier, the hippy-poet, Toby, and Neil (again)
their mutual friend from the suburbs.
As though to stress that three is a magical number
in The Lovemakers, the narrative itself works outward
from three seeds: those originating in The Kid in St
Kilda, the generation of friends in Sydney’s The
Shire and the Price family and their connections in
Melbourne’s Blackburn. The result throughout the
poem is what might be called a compressed complexity
which can be opened out, on careful reading, into amazing
layers of imaginative detail.
Martin Duwell
English Department
University of Queensland
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