The sea sounds through her skin
song of whale and dolphin
swish of fin and fishtail …

my arms wave
like filaments of seaweed
I am shell pink
and my hair has the pattern of shells.

Susan Schwartz’s ability to stand aside and see herself – with utmost clarity, let it be said – removes her poetry from the hectic, self­congratulatory tone of too much that is written about the experiences of pregnancy and birth. She universalises her experience; her work is far above the usual.

She has a quick wit, a nice turn for satire, as in ‘Voting for Ronnie’: ‘“It isn’t guns that kill” / his finger on the trigger’. She ranges wide, and always there is the exact picture, the flashing metaphor, economy of language and entire control.

Susan Schwartz can take heart. This is a striking first collection, written in years that silence so many women; she is a poet developing strongly, a poet to watch. And Abalone Press must be congratulated on the elegant design of this book.

Madge Staunton, who died just before the appearance of this, her second book, was a painter, who did not begin writing until the 1970’s. She won several major literary awards, including the Henry Lawson Festival award twice.

Beginning to write in maturity holds certain advantages, a consciousness of possibilities, an awareness of what has been done, but it can also create a certain diffidence; and this leads Madge Staunton into using, sometimes, other admired poets as a jumping-off place for her own verse. Beginning a poem with ‘If I were a Marianne Moore’, she proceeds to write an elegant and assured poem; other poems acknowledge W. H. Auden. These echoes are unnecessary, though surely she took pleasure in doing them well; her own natural style is less formal, stronger. She calls up sharp focussed images of flower, tree, bird, of people and places; ‘The guttural feasting ?f the crow’; ‘ships travel the horizon like tin cut outs in a shooting gallery’. She philosophizes on death, as is likely for her age, in ‘Nothing to Write About’ – death ‘Tearing the prints from our fingers’.

Madge Staunton found plenty to write about; an encounter at a taxi rank led her to the subject of integrity, a flash flood to the pleasures of staying home. ‘My concern,’ she said, ‘is to name and name and name / the obscure places, people or events / the habitual, the banal, with care / and grace. To hold in love / to renew and renew and renew. / By naming to affirm the Word.’

It is sad this late-found voice is silenced, after a bare ten years.

Elly McDonald is another poet who writes with simplicity, yet with striking force. Apt metaphors, sparingly used, illuminate and enrich her verse. She also has something to say worth listening to. Other People, she calls her book, but the ‘I’ who surfaces occasionally must be she.

The people of whom she writes are lively and various, some successful, some unsuccessful; her own life as rock music, film and theatre writer offers her many slices of life. A continuing theme is the separateness, the self-possession, of women; a woman owns herself no matter what. ‘Alone in this place / where everything is his / through lips still thick with his body’s roughness / I whisper to shadows / He’s not a part of me.’ Again, ‘Two thighs / knees together / insolent autonomy’. These women are gentle, are brave, are cynical: ‘Swimming or flying; it’s exhausting / a lurching struggle to keep on top.’

Her portraits, both of men and women, are witty and she can take the mickey out of herself as well. Hers is poetry that’s bright, tough, incisive, intelligent, and I’m glad she had the courage to self-publish.

In strong contrast to Schwartz, Staunton and McDonald is Patricia Avery. The motifs mentioned above which inhabit her poetry presuppose an unease, a separation from existence, which her choice of epigraph from the work of Robert Desnos underlines.

Avery’ s poetry inclines to the cryptic, its expression straightforward, its intention sometimes difficult of apprehension. There is a piling up of images, adjectives and metaphor, the last sometime inapt, as for example in Mad Descant, where the girl ‘washed in acids’ stood on bridges ‘wavering like empty laundry’, later ‘waving her death like empty laundry or accusations’. One wonders, in view of the epigraph, and her valedictory poem for Desnos, if she intends surrealism; but surrealism is not intended as obfuscation, rather as illumination. There is also an impertinent appeal to Rimbaud, whose ghost must by now be weary of those who thrust responsibilities on him.

I find much of this writing pretentious, particularly in poems such as ‘Arctic Circle’, in which Avery spends a lot of words telling the reader that a woman and the Arctic circle are quite other and ‘Demeter’, where the myth is inverted to make a female political statement. Given Avery’s string of degrees this can’t be anything but wilful distortion.

I like best those poems which she gets outside herself: the fine poem on Desnos, ‘At the Incinerator’ and ‘Visitors’. Undoubted ability here, wanting pruning or a clearer direction. We’ll hear from her again.

After Avery’s Arctic jungle the poetry of Caroline Caddy is like a strong flowing river.

First one small precise note of praise, Caroline Caddy knows how to write a haiku: the stance of each line, the traditional turn at the end being what makes the haiku effective and gives it its impact, is strictly adhered to. Take note, those who think of it as merely syllable-decided.

The range of her poetry deserves a longer review. What else is good? She has a great ear, exemplified in a tiny poem, ‘Stones’ – ‘wave ground quartz and granite / walking over them / the sound of the stones is / Rhomboid Oblate Torus’ – and in a longer poem, ‘The Scythe’, which conveys the rhythm of scything and the sound of the falling grass – ‘sat-is-fac-tion’ – in a manner instantly recognisable by anyone who has ever used the implement. One can pick out poem after poem, voices, machines, eating a peach at dawn, poems of experience, contemplation and incident which delight.

The sequence ‘From the North’ gives a disturbing view of American imperialism. ‘Who owns our country?’ is the question posed; on the land itself, I’ll quote:

There’s no map I can send to show you exactly where we are.
The earth is the same red
the sky the same blue …
Three hundred yards each side of the
track is untouched
but you’d swear it had been mined
already.
The hills are bulldozed ore dumps.
The plants look like they’ve barely
grown back
I’m stunned over and over
that it’s all quite natural.

Stark? Yes, but it’s exactly like that. That is only one of Caddy’s voices. She can be much more literary, as in ‘Discourse of the Stone Guest’, or in her owl poem ‘Cages’. Not all praise; the last section, ‘Member of the Tribe’, doesn’t always come off so well when it’s colloquial. Overall, a fine collection.

Among these poets, simplicity pays off, assumed simplicity; where they have sought for complexity, they have failed to convince.