Appearing so early in the collection, ‘Goodbye Memory’ inevitably raises the question: at what point did the poet-asfool become a leading figure in Forbes’s poetry? The premonition of failure is there from the beginning, judging by ‘Requiem’ (1971), one of his earliest published poems. So, too, is the exalted idea of what poetry might achieve, and it is perhaps this that makes failure inevitable – the hair of the Icarus-like rope-dancers in ‘Requiem’ is full of light, and their music like ‘angel flutes’, but the poem ends with the falling and tottering that is the characteristic gait of Forbes’s poet, and bits of old rope and wax floating in the sea. Forbes referred to his ‘vocation’ as a poet often enough, and ironically enough, to leave no doubt that it could have religious overtones for him. (An earlier version of ‘On the Beach’ included in this volume has ‘vacation’ for ‘vocation’ in its first line – a nice touch, because what Forbes often yearned for, as the end of ‘Goodbye Memory’ testifies, was a vacation from vocation.)

It is reading back into the poetry from the life, but the more essayistic poems, such as ‘Love’s Body’, ‘Topothesia’, ‘Blonde & Aussie’ or ‘Event Horizon’, also give the impression that Forbes was trying to make poetry do what philosophy, theology or psychology might be made to do if you had a Ph.D and a tenured lectureship in the subject. Only better. Typically, these poems advance an unexpected proposition and then set out to ‘prove’ it in the most circuitous way, through disjunctive imagery, attenuated syntax and rhetorical questions designed to set the hares running. It is probably these poems which critics complain about when they call Forbes obscure, and it is true that his best insights – on addiction in ‘Speed, a Pastoral’, or Americans in ‘Antipodean Heads’, or the nineteenth century in ‘Death, an Ode’ – all seem to appear spontaneously, rather than as the consequence of argument. Yet, in wrestling with the difficult tasks they set themselves, these discursive poems display both a remarkable virtuosity and a high intellectual conception of the poetic art – perhaps impossibly high. When they succeed, as in ‘Phaenomena’ and ‘Ode to Doubt’ (clearly a subject Forbes understood intimately), the effect is extraordinary.

It is only a short step to see the poet as a fool or a clown, when he places such a high value on poetry, as a vocation, or as a calling superior to the profession he didn’t pursue. For Forbes, I think, this was simply realism – the kind of realism which recognised that, however high the ideal, the poet wasn’t going to make much headway in a world of commercial interest and ‘milled day-glo ephemera’. In ‘Floating’, Forbes noted, ‘between / what you hope for & what / will disappoint you intensely / there’s a gap you can float / in not fall over’. He liked the idea of floating, and compared both poem and poet to fish, though in ‘The Stunned Mullet’ it is a fish with ‘lips bruised blue / from the impact of the shore’. Indeed, it is the bruising, the possibility of impact, that you feel most in Forbes’s poetry since, despite the desirability of floating, it is the perilous act of not falling over which he practises best.

In ‘Monkey’s Pride’, the poet presents himself as a talking grape, then as a balloon ‘that floats around / bumping into the suburbs’ – and, finally, as a rowing boat mounted in a park, ‘because society has elected me / to decorate / its falling apart / with a useless panache’. In ‘On the Beach’, the poetic vocation is presented, in a well-known image, as ‘something you did for a bet / & now regret, like a man / walking the length of the bar on his hands / balancing a drink on his shoe’. Forbes’s depiction of the poet and his precarious routines becomes increasingly bizarre. In ‘Middle Age’, he is Sisyphus with a frisbee instead of a stone; in ‘Night Shift’, the rhythm he creates by beating his head against a television set provides the pulse the whole city lives by. And in ‘Indus Valley Script’, there is this ghastly image, of the poem as a fun-house mirror:

each phrase suggesting some 
distorted aspect of your face
with rubber lips repeating 
high speed shaggy dog jokes 
until the eyes gleam & the voice stutters ‘Ththaat’s 
all, fffolkks!’.

It is tempting to read these images of uselessness and imminent collapse in the light of Forbes’s early death. Clearly, the precariousness of his own social and physical existence is in them. Yet, within the ordered sequence offered by the Collected Poems, Forbes’s tendency to foreground the poet in the poem appears more like a deliberate aesthetic strategy than a means of drawing attention to his own personal distress.

In ‘Ubi nihil vales’, Forbes uses the phrase ‘the casually sublime’, to describe the art of floating in the face of disappointment. The reference to the sublime, and to the Gothic mode which this term implies, is entirely appropriate when you consider the role that the prospect of disaster plays in Forbes’s poetry. In his version of Gothic, the ruins are provided by the poet’s career, or by the poet himself, considered as a ruin. The comic element, never far off in Gothic because of the way it plays with anxiety, is necessarily uppermost when the sublime is conceived as fundamentally casual – not the ‘unguarded transport’ described by Edmund Burke, but a more modest kind of elevation, ‘as if you were dancing on air or dreaming up // a puncture repair kit so perfect the world / will beat a path to your door’.

Forbes’s sublime is also casual in that it has to strike its effects from the cheap and the ordinary – no silver lockets or oversized helmets here. In ‘Serenade’, he describes his poetics, accurately I think, as ‘low rent coloratura / or a style suggesting its own collapse’. Both formulations are Gothic, and there’s no reason why, though the elements may be cheap, the effects shouldn’t have all the grandeur of Gothic too.

There’s a good example of casual grandeur in ‘The History of Nostalgia’, where the poet is portrayed as ‘almost statuesque’, like a bust in marble or bronze, ‘mounted on / that plinth you used to lounge against, back / when you were still smoking Marlboros & worried / you’d come to resemble your father, not yourself’. When the lovelorn poet imagines that the Gulf War has been waged for him, in ‘Love Poem’, that’s grandeur, too, of a particularly savage kind. Forbes is at his best in such poems, where the ruin the poet contemplates is not merely his own, but that of a culture, an epoch, or an imperium. In these dramatic tableaux, Forbes’s villains, unlike his poet-fool, have ‘got the lot’ – the indifferent beauty, the merchant banker, the wealthy businessman, the politician. The point about Keating, in ‘Watching the Treasurer’, is that his beautiful lies constitute a false poem, a false utopia, ‘where / what seems, is & what your words describe // you know exists’. Forbes’s poet would never allow the gap between hope and disappointment to be denied in this way – as he notes in ‘The Hammer Song’, ‘what I think of or take for granted / as grammar, Spakfillas the cracks’.