In reading the poems in Ultra, I began to reflect on the notion of international modernism suggested by Tranter throughout his career, and in particular on the myth of Ern Malley. Along with the Malley poems, and with the poetry of some of the poets represented in the recent Paper Bark Press anthology Calyx, the poems in Ultra have a disjunctive quality, a dynamic which, while depending on the illusion of coherence, disrupts syntactic and semantic conventions but doesn’t do so too radically. For instance: ‘I gambled with my body, and lost, Julia said. / She seemed an angel of the stairs / poking about up there. Did I believe her? / I fell into a deep grabby sham. / The shape of a cross, a faint trowelled reality, // full of sound, and drugs to cure a migraine.’ (‘Country Matters’)

In its phrasing, particularly in the last sentence, ‘The shape of a cross, a faintly trowelled reality’, I detect something of the mixed idiom of the Malley poems, the same desire to allude to experience or archetypes while indicating an awareness of the superficial ‘trick’ of poetic artifice.

At times in the poems ‘Package Tour’ or ‘Coffee’, Tranter’s characteristically droll but skittish phrasing captures well the visual and temporal experience of those generations whose knowledge of the world has been mediated by television and film. In many poems, the effect is less that of the literary cut-and-paste than of the filmic edit. This is noticeable in the first stanza of ‘Coffee’: ‘The edge of the fields were green, you could see them / through the narrow streets like a distant movie, / a few tiny people moving about slowly, sowing / or reaping. And in the other direction, a glimpse / between two high walls, the glass-green sea.’

Yet that stanza, despite its effectiveness, which reminded me of the cinematic fluidity of poems by Ken Bolton and John Jenkins, is marred by what I assume is a grammatical error –shouldn’t it be ‘The edge of the field was green’? – and by the casualness of the description of the activity of the people out on the fields: are they sowing or reaping? The difference between sowing and reaping, the two ends of the growing season, is profound. The author’s conflating them suggests serious alienation.

These ‘errors’ are apparently part of Tranter’s strategy of literary disruption, his concern to eschew what is generally called ‘the transparency of representation’, the ‘flaws’ in the language being flaws in the glass of the window through which we are said to view the world. They are an indication of the philosophy that seems to underlie this body of work, a poetics in which the ‘fun’ of linguistic play replaces the ambition of the conveyance of meaning.

Consequently, the pervasive tone of this book is that of nearly comic – but certainly not tragic – irony, a tone constantly suggestive of seriousness yet lacking it: ‘Back in la belle époque the hired hand would spend / all his savings on a wireless, and turn a cold shoulder / to the investment bloopers of the rural poor.’ (‘My Story’) It is a tone produced by the intentionally jarring clash of connotations and advanced by the author’s refusal to become engaged, either as a creator of so called rounded characters or as the creator of his ‘own voice’. Nor does Tranter allow the language to be divorced from the imitation of the drama of the speech act as it is in the work of the American Language poets, among others. Occasionally, Tranter’s poems put me in mind of John Ashbery, the way certain of his lines or phrases are banal yet almost numinous, brilliant, while his poems themselves are sometimes so doleful in their entirety as to deter readers like me from reading any further. (This, it must be said, is a personal, not an historical or critical, response.)

Beyond this, and certainly a result of what might be Tranter’s conception of Literature – what is described in the poem ‘Per Ardua ad Astra’ as ‘literature, the alphabet pretending to some / great passion, one more bourgeois jerk /raking in the dollars while he tapped at the keys, / constructing some dizzying confectionary of emotion …’ – is the problem of what I will characterise as superficiality. It is present on three levels: firstly, even though he depends on dramatisation – namely, character, setting and dialogue – to enable the poems to function as entities, he doesn’t attend to the complexities and contradictions of the psychology, the ‘embodiedness’, of the speakers. This means that the people simply become cyphers, types. Secondly, he doesn’t appear to consider the correspondence between concepts and the acts they facilitate, the causality of language, hence his reliance on a mode of language in which representation is less about meaning than about ornamentation. Thirdly, the English of these poems is mainly the ‘placeless’, American standard English of international mass communication. At their least engaging, these poems can sound like someone at a party who is not having a conversation with you but simply talking at you. At their best, they are like the small talk of a witty guest.

In reading Ultra in light of other recent Australian poetry, I feel concerned that basic issues pertaining to the effective functioning of language in Australia – but not only here —aren’t being well considered in this book. This collection by one of ‘our’ leading poets is, to me at least, a frustration. The source of my frustration is its various alienations, alienations that may be occurring because the linguistic lessons represented by the Ern Malley ‘hoax’ have not yet been learned.