John Anderson grew up in
the Goulburn
Valley, at Kyabram. He has
previously published a volume of poetry, in 1978.
the forest set out like
the night
is a 116-page song-cycle or treatise in poetry, on gum-trees and their
environment, interwoven with commentry and meditation.
Those who expect a modern collection of free-style lyrics will not find
it here. In a three-part cycle, Anderson sets out his vision of a
forested Australia, its avian and other inhabitants, its response to
human beings and its effect on all who come under its influence. He
draws from Aboriginal lore and legend, and from writers as diverse as
Mary Gilmore and Chris Mudd, but chiefly from his own observation and
reflection formed in forest areas here and overseas. He celebrates the
extraordinary variety and richness of this land and the way its symbols
recur and intertwine.
The book needs to be read and absorbed as a whole, so I shall not
attempt to quote lines or indicate preferred segments, although
individual pieces have been previously published. For me the interest
lies in the attempt to give voice to, and teach us to listen to, the
music coming from the complex living core of our ancient land. If that
sounds a little far-fetched, I can only suggest that you get hold of
the book and read it.
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Prime Rating
the forest set out like
the night
Alan Wearne (poet and
author)
Eureka Street,
Vol. 7, No. 1,
January-February 1997
John Anderson is underrated for the finest reason: few know who he is.
His previous volume arriving 18 years ago, he has since been assembling
these 118 pages. To my knowledge no-one today has kept up such a
constant, patient ploughing, and the least his audience can do is to
apply m themselves with commensurate effort. One of the best things
about Anderson is that his readers are required to
work (though note I
didn’t say
struggle).
What does he give in return? An interconnected weaving of rhapsodies,
evocations and prose poems celebrating aspects of the Australian
landscape, its flora and fauna, not just of now, nor even before white
arrival, but from before humanity. This is a small-sized book of which
the term ‘big picture’ is the inadequate
cliché it always has been.
Has Anderson Laurie Duggan’s ‘The Ash
Range’ for a neighbour? Certainly
for those who don’t know Anderson’s work it could
be explained thus:
vis-à-vis ‘The Ash Range’ they are
neighbours in the way that two
hermits living 60 kilometres apart in the bush, with no-one in between,
are neighbours. Has Anderson (have you) read the remarkable Canadian
writer Christopher Dewdney? He too may be a neighbour, although Dewdney
has been known to go back to his domain’s geological
foundations. But
fishing about for comparisons is, on both sides, somewhat of an insult.
Anderson is as original and ambitious as any writing today.
I’d be
certain he knew of his originality and, surprise surprise, be as sure
he wouldn’t know, or care, how ambitious he was.
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Landscapes are in again
- real or
imaginary. Not the pastoral with its changes of season, but the silvan,
fluvial and littoral, all old and enduring enough, so it seems, to
provide the measure for a poet’s life who, with increasing
age, prefers
timelcssness over instantaneity.
the forest set out like
the night
is a book of prose/poetry exploring initially Victorian themes: the
Gippsland forests, Merri Creek, the Grampians. Later it draws in - and
provides drawings of - the mythic meaning of tortoise and lizard, of
eucalypt and elm.
Anderson has the naturalist explorer in him. He dreams of entering an
untouched landscape but he knows that nature is never innocent, is
marked by the ‘blood of lava flow’, and the lava
flow of blood. More
importantly, he is fully aware that he is a late settler on this
continent and that his language ‘comes from Europe where
moonlit reefs
and / shires and shoals of leaves also glisten.’
The book begins on the fluvial plain. Can the Merri and the Yarra
explain Melbourne? Anderson thinks so. But this is the only appearance
of a town in this 116 page long book, praised on its cover as a
‘uniquely Australian song cycle of epic
proportions’. In tone and style
this book varies enormously, from tourist brochure to nature magazine
to poem, from lyrical mode to aphorism to the prosaic. On one hand,
this makes the book very accessible; on the other, one is left
wondering at times whether poetry really needs so much explanation:
‘I
found myself formulating these words: ‘The ducks fly over in
the night
and create stillness in the body’’.
The title poem occupies the first, sixty pages. Much of its energy and
liveliness is admirable but the rhythmic force needed to give it unity
is lacking. Too much is characterized by a magpie approach, picking up
a prose paragraph here, stealing a few notebook jottings there. Part
II, ‘love, the cartographer’s way’, is
illustrated with drawings by the
author and part III, entitled ‘the logs like silver
reliquaries, like
bones long persisting in the grass’, is a long poem disguised
as a book
review of ‘anthropomorphic and theosophically speculative
literary
portraits’.
The term mulitmedia - loved by some, unloved by others - looks like
finding its application also within the narrower confines of one genre:
poetry. John Anderson’s
the
forest
set out like the night manages to present it within the
covers
of a single book of poems, and it obviously has its attractions: the
book is highly recommended by the Poetry Book Club of Australia.
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At The Margins’ Margins
the
forest set out
like the night
Simon Caterson
Metre
Still on Australian soil, though further afield and much more mobile,
John Anderson, Robert Gray [
Lineations]
and Caroline Caddy [
Antartica]
are cartographers in verse, the first two supplying visual as well as
metaphoric delineations of various parts of the landscape. For her
part, in addition to her shiver-inducing poems, Caddy conveys the white
vastness of Antarctica by means of a heavy reliance on infra- and
inter-line spacing and the interleaving of satellite images of storms
over the Australian Antarctic Territory, the last Australian
terra nullius.
Anderson’s line
drawings help to disguise the prosaic (in both senses) nature of his
search in the bush for found objects, floral and faunal.
Gray’s
drawings of landscapes and bodies are sparer of line than
Anderson’s,
yet achieve greater clarity, as do the poems, all of which have
appeared before without the illustrations.
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