Cornucopia Book

I’m studying Kenneth Slessor and his world at the moment, particularly the 1920s and what better way to see what was happening in the poetry world at that time than to look at Slessor’s first and second collections. As a result this is actually only a partial review of this marvellous Kenneth Slessor Collected Poems.
I thought I’d be clever on Goodreads and actually put up the two collections separately. That way my stats look better. Don’t laugh. These are desperate times. I’m two books behind on my 2016 reading challenge. Anyway, I did some searching on the net. Thief of the Moon, Slessor’s first collection from 1924 is currently selling for over $4,000 and the image is courtesy of the seller so no go. And the image for his second collection Earth Visitors is faded and indiscernible.
I must say, honestly, that I was disappointed in both these early collections. It seems Slessor and probably a lot of other poets were taken up with very antiquated language, references to gods, Pan, fauns and fairies. Sunshine and flowers and rain. Sort of throwback groupies from Romanticism before Modernism reared its head over here. Or at least a strange mix of the two. Lots of thees and thous evidently appeared in the original collections. They have since been excised by Slessor himself and the changes carefully annotated by the editors Dennis Haskell and Geoffrey Dutton.
What stands out for me in the three collections that I read (the third is Backless Betty from Bondi collected after Slessor’s death) is the odd poem that completely grips the imagination and stands out from the rest. I also strayed and read a few of the uncollected poems. One of these that caught my attention was Passenger by Greycliffe. The Greycliffe was a ferry that was involved in a collision with a larger boat the Tahiti and sank in Sydney Harbour in 1927. I’ve only just realised that the title suggests that maybe it is the sunk ferry talking about a passenger.

“Sometimes he lights a lantern far below;
The cloudy waters melt, the shadows pass,
Foam turns to crystal, down a tunnel of glass,
We gaze at things forgotten long ago.”

In Thief of the Moon my favourite poems are January 18, 1922 and Two Nocturnes:

“..The sizzling steam that blows like cotton-wool
From clockwork ferries at a toy pontoon...
The dear electric signs above the Quay...
And all of Sydney that seems wonderful,
Return to haunt me unendurably,
Whilst night leans blackly over Arakoon.”

Also Clocks and several translations of poems or part poems that to me, seem better than the more famous translations annotated in the notes - Old Chinese Poem, Taoist and An Old Harp.
In Earth Visitors my favourite is the powerful Winter Dawn:

“Oh buried dolls, O men sleeping invisible there,
I stare above your mounds of stone, lean down,
Marooned and lonely in this bitter air,
And in one moment deny your frozen town...”

I also really enjoyed Heine in Paris about a German poet and his last years. I must admit that, due to time constraints, I skipped over the collection Cuckooz Contrey and then next is the matchless Five Bells. I reread the title poem to this collection and it is as wonderfully elegiac as I remembered it.

“Where have you gone? The tide is over you,
The turn of midnight water’s over you,
As time is over you, and mystery,
And memory, the flood that does not flow.
You have no suburb, like those easier dead
In private berths of dissolution laid -...”

Oh My God! How can any poet attempt to better such a work? I’ll put Beach Burial in there as well, still timelessly fitting as a tribute to the dead of campaigns that are currently being waged. Also in this collection are another two favourites, William Street and Out of Time:

“I saw Time flowing like the hundred yachts
That fly behind the daylight, foxed with air;
Or piercing, like the quince-bright, bitter slats
Of sun gone thrusting under Harbour’s hair.”

Only a few hours later I discovered that I have quoted the same lines as Ivor Indyk at Sydney Review of Books in his 2015 article on Kenneth Slessor and Time.

Sadly, I didn’t find anything in Backless Betty from Bondi to recommend. For similar, and in my opinion more successful poetry, see my review of Darlinghurst Nights on Goodreads.
What I must say I’m left with after reading approximately half of Collected Poems is Slessor’s fascination with time, subjective and literal. It is something that fascinates me too. Highly recommended for poetry lovers.