LAUNCH ...
Launch speech by Pete Hay, January 2004.
I don't know how to do justice to this collection. How to tell you how good this book is and not sound extravagant and hyperbolic. I can only say that the superlatives I intend to use will have been chosen with extreme care -- and if anything they will still fail to do right by The Sleep of a Learning Man. I can take heart, though, in the knowledge that anyone I have spoken to who has already this book as fulsomely agrees with my assessment.
We are privileged, all of us, to be living here on the island at the end of the earth at a time of extraordinary poetic energy -- and achievement. Perhaps it is the turbulence of the times, I don't know, but that Tasmania is experiencing such a flowering in the flagship literary art seems to me indisputably true. We are blessed -- and we are also cursed, because to aspire to poetry in these times, right here, can be singularly daunting. The bar has been raised very high indeed.
And now, just when I have no les than two manuscripts urgently calling for closure, along comes The Sleep of a Learning Man. The gods are truly unkind.
This is a world-class collection. I am not deploying this descriptor in its usual meaningless way -- I mean, literally, that this collection should go out to the world to stand with the very small number of poetry books that, in any given year, rise above context and speak of a timeless, universally recognisable human, social and even cosmological condition. I do not wish to denigrate a poetry of context here. All poetry must first of all be true to a context and succeed within that context, and to do that is sufficiently remarkable an achievement. It is all I aspire to. But to take one's art, its context along with it, to the world (forget the nation: that's a mere administrative figment and quite meaningless); well such an achievement is about as rare as a hen with teeth.
What has Anthony Lawrence done here? What are the superlative qualities of this collection of poetry? Well, for one there's the imagery -- utterly extraordinary, and not just now and then as it is with a merely good collection, but unremittingly so. Every image is carved in crystal.
And for two there's the poet's treatment of the natural world. I think most of us who are familiar with Anthony Lawrence's work know that he is especially deft when he engages with the quick and living world, and there is evidence of that facility a-plenty here. There is an achingly beautiful hymn to the going of the ocean's megafauna, a wonderful poem called 'The Searoads', and it ends with lines that convey simultaneously a shattering power and a heart-stopping poignancy:
They are going beyond the range of echo-sounders
and spotter planes to surface somewhere
inside our heads, vaguely luminous, like memory loss;
like those gold circles that appear for a moment when,
absentmindedly, we press the corners of our eyes
and remember.
I have, indeed, seen Andrew Lawrence described as a 'nature poet'. Such a designation is akin to describing Fred Astaire as a man who looked good in a tux. He is that, but he can't be captured as that. Nor can Anthony Lawrence be satisfactorily boxed as a 'nature poet'. The human condition is revealed here with a clarity that could be achieved only someone who has faced the dark -- and come away with a nuanced sensitivity; an advanced sympathy for those who struggle with the great complexities of life and death. These are observed in both the charged and dramatic everydayness of domestic interiors:
The loud ratchet of our anger is still
drawing a frayed cable
of animated language through the house.
And unfolding tragedy within the perilous world 'out there':
Taken from the rocks, she floundered
out of reach inside a water-taking stream
of her own language, and he went
after her, answering panic
with a struggle between foam and words.
This last stanza is from a poem of utter brilliance called 'The Country They Have Left'. It's about a migrant couple who are swept to their deaths when they go rock-fishing: having no English, they can't read the obvious warning sign. It's the last poem in the second of three sections that make up the collection, a suite of poems about the sea and the coast that reduced me to sycophantic admiration.
But I'm going to stop. I'm not up to this. I'm sorry Anthony, but I can't do your collection justice. I can't find the words to describe it as it should be described. It is just wonderful.
©
Anthony Lawrence | 
