Duggan also celebrates the artistry of other earlier ‘singers’ by acknowledging the common struggle of Petrarch and Robert Graves in his epigraphs and including translations of the poetry of the Italian Futurists, Ardengo Soffici, Farfa (Vittoria Tommasini), Luciano Folgore, Corrado Govoni, and other poets who resisted both the heritage of eloquence and Fascist politicisation, like Salvatore Quasimodo or Eugenio Montale. These translations will be of interest to readers of Italian, but the problem of finding appropriate equivalents for meaning, experience, image and voice between languages is notorious. Duggan expresses his preference for ‘tone’ rather than ‘literal rendering’ and his approach seems justified if we compare it with just a few lines from the Penguin edition’s earlier version of Montale’s ‘Eastbourne’ (translator George Kay, 1969):

As flashing upon its quarters turns the
                  door of a hotel
       – another answers, sending it a ray –
a roundabout startles me that overturns everything in its track; and I intent on
       hearing
(‘my country’) recognise your breath-
       ing.

Here is Duggan’s more engaging version (from Le Occasioni, 1976):

A swinging hotel door catches the light (another replies in the same dialect) the merry-go-round tilts everything in
       its orbit
and I am thrown as I listen intently catching a faint breath of my own lan-
       guage

Soffici’s poetry is full of surprises. The imagery testifies to the Futurist’s desire to free the word, to sharpen and re-establish poetry as a relevant form of expression and to include the machinery of their daily lives:

We leave too soon, delayed by trains,
       seasons, happiness.
This evening, I offer you a tram.

The selection avoids the excess and belligerence of the manifesto that brought Marinetti into disrepute. The revitalising effect of the Futurists, like that of the Vision artists, continues to be a matter of debate, but the question of whether there was art beyond the desire to shock, provoke or ridicule seems answered. These poems articulate Soffici’s claim that:

‘It’s a great joy to take notes amid history’ but they also express the anxiety of those writing poetry during the crisis of war and belief:

In Florence for a lifetime of hours
I have traced the movements of an out-
       side world:
the ‘Messenger’ arrives from Rome, and the wind that pummels the yellow
       eye of the station clock, enters
       through the open shutters
inflating that camouflaged blimp, the
       poem.

The collection suggests an implicit connection between the blues, with their mixture of low tones and falsetto, sliding transitions, portamento, percussive rhythms and pervasive social comment, and the futurist articulation of movement, dynamic sequence, fragmentation, and portrayal of states of mind at odds with the conventional line. Just as jazz gave music new life by fooling around with the beat, the futurist artists forsook static certainties for a language unfettered by traditional syntax, metre and punctuation as they experimented with onomatopoeia and typography. (Duggan’s poem ‘In Perigord’ pays its dues in this respect.) Soffici’s interest in the ‘psychological perspective’ acknowledges debts to the philosophy of Bergson and his literary improvisation, like that of Pound, might be seen as a bridge to current poetic practice. It was Barthes who suggested in 1975 that it was:

... our own post-modern urge to break down the centred, hierarchical orders of the past that makes the Futurist movement so appealing. For here, at the origins of a Modernism that was to turn increasingly elitist and formalist in its concern for self-sufficient structures and aesthetic distance, is the latent promise of an impure art world that might also be a place where we live.

In this context, a poem like Duggan’s ‘Days of 1988’, which looks at the bicentennial Australian experience, commands attention:

The self floats, rubberlike
in bath among suds; is cajoled
by politicians on the radio,
and dreams of a desert of low shrubs and rocks, of distant volcanic outcrops and the minute tracks of nocturnal ro-
       dents
which the sand obscures in an instant the self lies on its back and contemplates these things, dark stains on the ceiling, the rustling of loose garbage outside,
a meniscus of water around the body, hair pasted to flesh; it sighs
detaching its hams from the enamel, hearing the water gurgle; rubs
these moons of contact, vapour condens-
       ing
on the mirror, exhaust fan
sucking it all away.

The whitewash of our appropriation of aboriginal dreaming gives shape to this response just as surely as African rhythms remind us of another people’s blues. The self is relocated through contemplation of ‘these things’.

In a world reading the signs of its post-edenic situation, a song of personal loss may become, paradoxically, a comforting affirmation of universal experience. But the blues also celebrate defiance and the humour of the form subverts systems that oppress. Duggan offers an epigrammatic lament to this country’s over-taxed resources:

I like the way we’ve
been able to fuck things here
as good as anywhere else
in only half the time.

The sense of lost worlds, the search for meaning, the need to accommodate human suffering or simply celebrate a capacity to still find something to sing about links Sappho to Pro Hart – now there’s a stretch of the imagination. Duggan utilises poetry’s accommodating forms and moves with ease from the personal to the political which, in contemporary society, too often seem poles apart.