Above all a resourceful shape-shifter, the South Australian poet K.F. Pearson keeps trying, and succeeding with, different modes and pitches of poetry. From imitations of Polynesian chant and Arabic ghazal to a delicious satire on applying for funding, from auto-biographical sketches to highly worked portraits, and equally in richly rewarding examples of that intense meditation on particulars which tests a good poet by being so well-worked a field, Pearson displays a versatility and a freshness well worthy of the abundant life in his chosen topics.

Published 1991 (Angus & Robertson)
ISBN 0207169276
78 pgs
$15.95

Reviews

KF. Pearson’s blurb describes him as ‘a resourceful shapeshifter’, a phrase which dares the reviewer to try and pin him down. ‘From imitations of Polynesian chant and Arabic Ghazal to a delicious satire on applying for funding...’ Yes, funding applications again...

The poem... can be read as reflections on love-making, poetry, or even the mandolin...

Pearson’s lines are spare, polished and sophisticated, as befits a sharp-shooting shape-shifter. His concern for the aesthetic, for colour, shadows and spaces between things may be seen in many of the poems. Red, the accent colour of the cover, is absent from the tropical landscape of ‘Travel to an Island’ until the High Stepping Wader builds a nest topped with a red kerchief.

And so they came to a religious love
of a colour they did not have.

This is a world in which a god’s
a bearer of forgotten red.

One poem that particularly appeals to me is ‘The Economy of Fashion,’ a serenade to lace, ‘a membranous slim physicality that replaces other thoughts, / fabric that tells of itself by an absence of itself.’ This beautifully crafted poem loses some of its lyricism in the last line when Pearson restates his point about absences with the highfalutin word ‘interstices’:

And how shall we turn when we leave by a door
knowing we worship interstices and not their shrill surrounds?

I also like the more colloquial ‘A Letter from Mitcalfe’s Hut,’ and the delicately observant ‘Entrance Ceremony,’ on the custom of taking off one’s shoes at the door. Another hymn to fabric, ‘The Double World,’ about corduroy, takes the dual texture of piping and indents and applies it to a number of other two-edged experiences:

...Thus is a telephone
cream and cool on a desk but you know too
that other nervy telephone you’ve sat by
minute by minute, quickened, awaiting its call.
I have thought of corduroy and thought of it again.

‘The Peach, In Fact,’ a sensuous evocation of the texture, shape and taste of a peach, moves from aesthetic appreciation to a juicy bite and then backs away to a long shot of how it might appear in Japanese art. Like many other poems in this collection, this one is able to turn a subject around, presenting both experience and its observation.

Occasionally, in this collection, something jars. (For instance, isn’t the past participle of stride stridden, not strode as in ‘For the Vanquished’: ‘Let it be said when all has fallen away/ you have strode naked in the full blast of air’?) Most of the poems, though, have a finished, musical quality and offer intriguing ways of looking at the world. I will look forward to other work by this poet.

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If Kinsella’s poetry at its best is inten­se, K.F. Pearson’s is elegant. Many of the poems in The History of Colour are highly sensitive (in a way that is often called painterly) to objects and the way we perceive them, close to the poetry of someone like Gary Catalano.

One important poem, ‘The Double World’, distinguishes between objects in themselves and objects as we animate them with our own concerns. Another good poem, ‘The Economy of Fashion’, concentrates on lace as a symbol for an art in which the centre of attention is an absence, surrounded by elaborate coruscations of decoration.

Some of the poems lean towards a Wallace Stevens-like appreciation of context by focusing on the act of locating simple objects in their frame. This is true of both the marvellous first poem, ‘Leaf and Context’, and the last, ‘Ghazal of the Mandolin.’

At his best, Pearson has a great sensi­tivity to the visual; it is no accident that one of the best poems in the book is de­voted to the poetry of that highly visual poet Robert Gray.

It is all extremely assured, but there is an un uncomfortable juxtapositioning of an immense meditative assuredness, so­phisticated and knowing, with decided awkwardnesses of syntax and punctua­tion. There is also a tendency to lapse into predictable and fashionable modes.

The book concludes with a set of poems of Middle Eastern inspiration, remind­ing us that the ghazal is to the 1980s what the villanelle was to the 1950s, and there is a set of rather Browningesque monologues.

I don’t know what the Renaissance painters did to deserve it, but it seems de rigueur that they should appear in En­glish language poetry since Browning, pumping out dramatic monologues for all they are worth. Here Brunelleschi, Donatello and Uccello are put through the mill.

Perhaps it is a divine punishment for their earlier lives that they should suffer these endless literary reincarnations.

Ultimately, I am not sure how good a poet Pearson is, but I worry about the corruption of elegant smoothness by mo­ments of awkwardness. After all, as we have learnt from poets like Catalano and Gray, this kind of painterly meditation must never have rough joins or surfaces.

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Recent volumes of poetry by Gary Catalano [The Empire of Grass], Julian Croft [Confessions of a Corinthian] and K.F. Pearson clearly demonstrate that a poet doesn’t have to be prolific to be successful. All three publish sparsely, and these volumes reflect the quality that such a frugal attitude nurtures...

K.F. Pearson’s The History of Colour, his first with a national publisher, is an intriguing volume. Its title is, paradoxically, both accurate and misleading: although it suggests visual effusion, the book’s focus lies much more in concepts than the actual detail of things.

Unlike Croft, Pearson seems largely uninterested in painting landscapes or experience; to this end, his poem about Fiji, for instance, uses the landscape merely to explore his initial rumination that ‘The furious art of patience makes the coral’.

The book’s first poem, ‘Leaf and Context’, outlines his method. In its opening lines he tells:

I’ll not number the streaks of the tulip
but tell of the fall from an ornamental vine
of a tattered red leaf...
...on a crisp ironical morning.

So the context, not the leaf, is where his interest lies.

Though his language is more expansive than Catalano’s, both poets share the same emphasis.

At times, Pearson’s poetry appears a little precious, particularly when he borrows from cultures such as the Middle East or Polynesia.

More often, though, the poetry has the ability to ambush the reader with remarkable twists of imaginative logic, such as in ‘Horizon Walker’, where disparate images and ideas are connected with an easy sense of their inevitability.

In all three volumes, the shorter poems are far more impressive than the longer ones.

Perhaps this is further evidence for the late Vincent Buckley’s assertion in his introduction to The Faber Book of Modern Australian Verse that the real strength of Australian poetry has always been in the lyric poem.

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This collection, by a South Australian anthologist and poet, has a rich front cover and an asinine blurb on the back cover. Which are readers to believe?

The front uses a fine water-colour of a king parrot, by John Hunter (somewhere back in the Re­gency period, probably), which chimes with the title and promises alert, workmanlike, visual poetry. On the back, however, the blurb an­nounces that the poet is ‘a success­ful shape-shifter’ (whatever that means in poetry!) then seems con­descendingly to say ‘K.F. Pearson keeps trying...’. Later, it is an­nounced that Pearson writes ‘imi­tations of... Arctic [this should read ‘Arabic’] ghazal’. The ghazal is an elegant Persian, Urdu, Arab and Turkish form, rarely at­tempted by Eskimos, and Pearson obviously knows a good deal more about the matter than whoever his publishers trusted to describe him.

The king parrot emphasis is apt. Pearson is a genuinely visual poet, at times very like Wallace Stevens, although by no means as subtle and rhetorically much stiffer. Never confined to the descriptive, any more than Stevens is, Pearson of­fers unusual and classy human re­actions to sight.

Pearson is even sight-obsessed. The second part of the book is a group of dramatic monologues he calls ‘Autobiographical Moments’, all about Renaissance Florence. One comes from a poet, Poliziano, but he focuses on visual images; the rest are from a rich cluster of visual art­ists: Cellini, Brunelleschi, Ghiberti. Uccello, and Donatello. The poems in the more assorted first section are mostly visual too, including three batches of very satisfying small poems, under the headings ‘Stamps on Metal’, ‘A Set of In­teriors’, and ‘Cameos’. Even his superficially tactile ‘Stamp’, perhaps intended for a gravestone, can be seen:


In the third section, Polynesian in inspiration (this poet is a devoted traveller, obviously), two similar groups of tiny poems are less successful. However, two larger poems show a different range of ability. There is a warm and harmonious feeling for narrative in his retelling of two ancient tales of watery heroines: Ginifale, who was swallowed by a whale, and Hinemoa, that in­trepid Juliet of Lake Rotorua. This section also offers a chilling contem­porary epitaph for all of us, based on R.L. Stevenson’s superb epitaph for himself on Mount Vaea.

The fourth section is back with the visual, even to having some tan­gential and offbeat Stevensian titles such as ‘The Eye Does Make it So,’ ‘The Peach, in Fact’ and ‘A Thing is Event in a Ready World’. All celebrate what ‘the sensitised see’, and alertly too, whether as fact or ‘abstract canvas’. Like his thread of spider-web, Pearson’s awareness


But, as this quotation exempli­fies, sometimes a swoon of syntax creates obscurity where only observation was promised or needed. And they are not, like ‘Artic’ on the back cover, misprints.

The least successful part of The History of Colour is the Arabic sec­tion that ends the volume. First, the verse-forms are not. in these versions, satisfying, especially those where a word is rhymed to itself ('rime riche’). I wonder why Pear­son rarely attempts orthodox rhyme? Second, there is no good reason why ‘Inscriptions on Arabic Coins’ should include koori-style ad­vice about dreaming the mulloway. Third, the key poem of the section seems to me to be spiritual preten­sion. Is a glimpse of an orange in a stranger’s room an equivalent to Paul’s experience on the road to Damascus, no matter how it hangs on in the mind’s eye? If so, what a testimony to the sacredness of the purely aesthetic! But the seanng absolute of Paul’s experience is beyond glimpses and oranges.

But wait. A review of a poet de­voted to real particulars should end positively. Poetry has plenty of room for grateful poets, celebrants of description such as K.F. Pearson, who makes readers enjoy - and ask more of - their own awareness of what is around them.

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‘The one who would know everything’,
I wrote, ‘is everywhere at home;
nor is a stranger to the past.’
A letter to Donatello

One of the strengths of this, K.F. Pearson’s second collection, is the range of the poetry it contains: both geographical - from Adelaide (and suburban Adelaide at that) through Polynesia to the Arabian Gulf; and historical - moving between the present and Quattrocento Italy.

The most impressive poems in the book are undoubtedly those in the section ‘Autobiographical Moments’ in which he explores Renaissance artists and writers. These are poems of considerable interest and ingenuity, for not only does Pearson create a fine sense of the era, but he also finds, in the lives and concerns of these artists, many issues of contemporary relevance. In ‘Fragment of an Autobiography’, for instance, Cellini discusses the reworking of ancient artefacts in modern form and using modern materials; in ‘A Circle in Florence’, the need for lateral thinking (I had thought the story of the egg made to stand on its end was attributed to Columbus, but never mind); in ‘The Origin of Excellence’ it’s the need for training, for ‘true apprenticeship’.

‘An Application for Assistance’ picks up on the most longstanding of issues - that of patronage. ‘Since my poems and inspiration I’ve acknowledged to you, Medici’, Politian writes, ‘and my every talent is at your service / ...send your clothes as a gift to me at once’. Fairly blunt. I was reminded of the controlled invective of Samuel Johnson writing to Lord Chesterfield.

Although there are good poems elsewhere in The History of Colour, no other section achieves the sustained high standard of ‘Autobiographical Moments’. Nevertheless, there is considerable poetic ability on display.

Poems such as ‘Port Elliot Magpie’ or ‘Entrance Ceremony’ are made notable by Pearson’s sharp eye for detail. There are many shrewd observations: for fishermen, ‘the horizon (is)... the pinnacle of desire stretched flat’. A number of poems are enlivened by subtle touches of humour. The voice that runs through these poems is a colloquial one, though he often successfully contains this voice within poems of heightened rhythm and controlled structure. A poem such as ‘Ginifale’ demonstrates Pearson’s range, with its evocation of the Polynesian myth, the control of tone and the neat parallel of the whale to the pregnant woman.

But balancing these considerable strengths are a number of weaknesses that tend to mar one’s appreciation of the collection as a whole. Some of the poems here feel to me as if they need more work. The perceptions and the inventiveness are there, the ability to see the everyday world from new perspectives, but some suggest that the poet has been too easily satisfied. A number of poems have benefited from being workshopped, or at least looked at with the eyes of a critic. In ‘Of the Critic’ Pearson denies the value of such people, suggesting at best, a ‘shadow glory’. I would suggest, however, that a critic’s eye before some of these poems went to press would have strengthened them considerably.

For example, ‘The Death of the Bird’ recalls A.D. Hope’s poem of the same name, and that comparison underlines the extent to which some of Pearson’s poems are under-developed. In The Cave and the Spring, Hope discusses his poem, and mentions the fact that it took him four years to complete (some of his poems took much longer). He began the poem, Hope tells us, but could not see how to finish it, so he put it aside. When he came back to it four years later, the missing conclusion suggested itself fairly promptly. Pearson’s poem, like a number of others in his collection, might well benefit from such time to mature.

The weaknesses in such poems include an over-reliance on modifiers (‘A Drum This Time’, ‘Sea Urchin Shell’, ‘Tiji’; a reliance on abstractions and /or rhetoric (The Economy of Fashion’, ‘Tour Glasses’ or ‘A Thing is Event’); line endings that seem arbitrary (‘A Touch of Green’, ‘The Eye Does Make It So’ or ‘The Peach in Fact’). There are also occasional lines which remind one of a New Statesman competition in the way they state the obvious: ‘the river still moves at a watery pace’, The scarlet anemone will not be like the settled / world of blue plates on a dresser’ or ‘When the fish begin to swim, the fish begin to swim’.

Some of the poems are very slight: ‘Stamps on Metal’, ‘Island Suite’, ‘ A Feather’ among them. Sometimes you leave these slight poems with a sense that there is nothing more to say, that the poem is as complete as a Japanese Haiku. More often though there’s the unsatisfied sense that the poet has barely scratched the surface.

This poem demonstrates many of the strengths and weaknesses of the collection as a whole. Here is the eye for detail, the sense of relevance of the past to the present, the colloquial voice that works quite effectively with the heightened rhythms of the verse. But here also are the abstractions, the over-dependence on modifiers, the resort to rhetoric which tend to attenuate many of the poems.

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Although utterly distinct, all four poets [K.F. Pearson, The History of Colour, John Foulcher, Paper Weight, Gary Catalano, The Empire of Grass, Tim Thorn, Red Dirt] are centrally concerned with the artist as observer.

K.F. Pearson is the most strikingly visual. Much of The History of Colour depends on an acutely developed talent for noting and organising particulars in a revelatory fashion:

When you are come to love the world
    it’s numinous with single things:
you have the flight of one white bird
    in all an Island blue of sky.

Often, Pearson’s strategy is to contemplate (if his fierce, often philosophical, concentration can be so described) some one thing.

Yet every single thing ‘carries always the freight of what / it connotes’, hence Pearson’s ‘double world’. For the space of the poem the observer obsessively possesses, and is possessed by, the inspiring particular thing: its details, shape, texture, colour and context. The poem’s focal point may be a red leaf or a pine table in a red-bricked backyard, an orchid in a terracotta pot, a purple guava in the sunlight, a blue feather in a jar, or a kitchen chair.

In the section ‘Autobiographical Moments’, a gallery of Renaissance artists speaks in dramatic monologues, petitions and letters. Here the apparent focus is the Quattrocento Masters, but clearly its double is the contemporary Australian artist. For example, a petition to the patron Lorenzo de Medici serves as the poet’s wry acknowledgement of a grant from the South Australian Department of the Arts.

Pearson’s work is intensely focused, controlled and commanding; his language is enlivening and his vision lush.

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Prepared and presented by K.F. Pearson for ABC Radio, 1991


That cameo’s what poetry is about. It’s about being receptive to the world and its occasions, and giving expression to that reception in the careful fall of the chosen words that celebrate it.

All of us live necessarily in the world, but we go about our daily lives primarily closed to our surroundings; alert enough to not crash the car or miss the bus but the pores of our senses are not fully open. Our emotional survival demands that this is so; otherwise the daily experience of our personal environment would be too constantly intense, and we would all go mad. The murderer, before he commits his act, experiences the world like that.

Mast of us, however, have a more even tenor to our days. Our moments of intensity are moments only, considered in the long perspective of our lives. Such occasional intensity usually will have been at times of love or loss. A child will grieve for the death of a puppy, an adult for the loss of a parent; a woman will desire a man.

A central poem in The History of Colour, ‘The Double World’ specifically contrasts the routine of our lives with these times of emotional heightening. It does so by looking at two objects in the world, one the material, corduroy, and the other a telephone.


It’s not the neutral thing, the everyday thing seen in an everyday sort of way, which will give inspirational rise to a poem, but that same thing seen in a passionate, or perhaps fixated, moment. The next poem, ‘The Kitchen Chair’, undergoes this transformation, from being merely there to being a thing of beauty, and desired. It does so when lit by morning sunlight, which reveals it.


What’s changed about the chair is its context, and a major part of the context is the eye of the perceiver. Perhaps you had a lover once, who gave you a colourful umbrella; but, now that that relationship has ceased, every time you notice it in the hallstand you feel a twinge of bitterness. Physically, the umbrella remains the same, but to you a cherished object has become a hated thing.

Later, perhaps, the umbrella may resume neutrality, or even regain, as memories soften, some of its former splendour. ‘An Urn in a Private Collection’, the poem from which the title of my book is taken, gives just such a contextual history of a thing. It’s about a partial retrieval of farmer splendour. The imagined urn of the poem has ceased to be a thing of use and has been confined to the half-life of display; it’s not lost, but neither is it fully available, as it once was.


What’s at play in that history of the urn is not merely what happened to the urn itself but also the speaker’s memory of its former glory, which gives the poem its tinge of regret. We’re very much in the command of the eye of the perceiver.

It’s not always so to such an extent. Some things, some events, some processes are seen with less immediately personal involvement. In ‘Leaf and Context’, the first poem in The History of Colour, the speaker is more observer than participant. He’s a bit player, a Rosencrantz or a Guildenstern, commenting on the main action. There is, as you will hear, a description of him undertaking a casual act at the end of the poem. He is, of course, me.

‘Leaf and Context’ is a poem of death and resurrection. Unlike ‘An Urn in a Private Collection’ its conclusion is almost wholly triumphant. It tells the story of the fall of the first leaf in autumn from an ornamental vine. The context which is important here is that of the leaf itself, its place in the life-cycle of the vine. You could say the poem is a parable of the individual in society, or of how the passing of a year prepares the way for a new year.

There are two references in the poem, both of which you will have heard on ABC radio. The first is to Eric Bogle’s folk song of the Great War ‘And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda’; the second to Beethoven’s song-cycle, ‘An die ferne Geliebte - To the Distant Beloved.’


We’ve returned, of course, to the red leaf we began with, to the income of the poet. You’ll remember he was one who, in his profession, was required to keep himself unusually alert to those moments of intensity. This can make him seern somewhat odd to those around him. Here is


My most recent poems put aside the problems of perception in relation to the emotions and concentrate directly on the emotions themselves. But they are prefigured in the dramatic monologues in this book, and in this poem adapted from an Arabic poet.