POETRY
AURELIA
By John Hawke. Cordite Books. $20.
Aurelia is one of four new volumes from Cordite Books, an imprint of well-established on-line journal Cordite Poetry Review. Its author, John Hawke, is one of the few Australian poets who can trace his aesthetic lineage directly back to the French symbolists of the 19th century. They were an illustrious – and influential – lot, vide T.S. Eliot's early work, for instance.
As Gig Ryan points out in her introduction, the book's title poem goes all the way back to a work by Gerard de Nerval called Aurelia, of which the first sentence is "Le reve est une seconde vie." Many, if not most, of Hawke's poems here also have this dream-like quality, even when they are describing something as mundane as an evening street with pedestrians (Emily Street). His sentences tend to be long and complex, not unlike those of another symbolist heir, New Yorker John Ashbery.
Also, as with the symbolists, many of the poems are set in transitional light conditions, e.g. dusk, and make metaphorical links which are far from obvious. Hawke's vocabulary, too, has a romantic, even surrealist, dimension to it, as can be felt in the opening lines of The Poet Speaks: "Here is the one with skin as pale / as powdered parchment, and mouth ripe / as a witch's kiss. This is the poet // whose lips were caressed / by the transparent wings of insects, / laying delicate sacs of honey // on his tongue."
Quite a deal of Hawke's poetry in Aurelia has this extended musicality, as seen here in the alliterative 'p's' of "pale /as powdered parchment" and the assonantal 'i's' of "witch's kiss". Some readers may wonder at the statistical frequency of witches' kisses in the 21st century but such kisses do at least serve to illustrate the importance of mythology in Hawke's poetry. The story of Orpheus and Eurydice surfaces in a number of the poems and nearly always to good effect.
Hawke's use of myth reminds us of how Greek mythology was once over-used in the poetry of the Anglosphere and how it was more recently under-used, owing to its no longer being taught in schools. Hawke has the confidence to expect his readers to check his references on Google rather than merely lament their own ignorance.
Unlike the symbolists, however, Hawke is not a strict believer in "Art for art's sake". Several of his poems, e.g. The First Man into Hiroshima and the long poem The Conscience of Avimael Guzman, promise and deliver complex moralities.
In the former, Hawke reminds us of how "The first man into Hiroshima / dies of cancer. It is forty years on. / What has not been left behind has been confessed." And then, a little later, he insists that "We cannot rid ourselves of wars, or of their traces, / or of 'the ones they leave behind' ". There's a nice (and characteristic) ambiguity here. Is the poet talking about wars left behind or the veterans of those wars? Almost certainly both – and that is just one of the several charms of this at-times difficult but ultimately rewarding collection.
Geoff Page is a Canberra poet and reviewer.
