In Simpson’s case, the truism about autobiography is very obviously just that. Many of the poems have ‘I’, that lonely letter, standing up in the first line and most of them stand by it all the way through. It is arguable, indeed has often been argued in effect, that this is what all poetry ‘is about, and must be about: if that is so, the Romantic movement made express what had always previously been at least implicit. Simpson nowhere baulks at this. The poems accept the paradox of publishing the private, and accept the fact that the endeavour is in various ways all but beyond accomplishment, confessional poetry’ is an ungainly term, as well as a by now unfashionable one, yet it does have this use – that it implies the pressing but stressed utterance of what one knows to be one’s own, but is somewhat dismayed to find. ‘Here I stand. I cannot do otherwise’ is its bold but chastened slogan.

The poems are eminently about loss: lost years, lost hopes, lost illusions, but also lost fears. They are formal in cast, which makes by definition for discipline, but also, in this case makes for as objective as possible a presentation of the announced experiences. Many of them deal in the pictorial, which has the double advantage of making something vivid, and showing it as that which we can only imperfectly lake to ourselves. Simpson’s way is to proffer the scenic as holding clues or adumbrations of what is latent in him all the time. but as never taking over that latency. Something – someone? – is left out, because it has to be. The sculpture can insinuate, but not show, its own inwardness: the painting can figure, but not replicate, the experience which energises it.

Another way of putting this is to say that the argument of his poems is often an argument about the experience of the poems – Yeats’s ‘quarrel with ourselves’ made most evident at just that point where we might expect to find relief from it. The poems revise the experience they display. I do not mean this in the way it is the norm in, say, John Ashbery. but more in the way it is the norm in Herbert. Simpson is rich in misgiving about the fugitive quality of life, but the formality I mentioned serves in his case to frame that quality in its going. This is strikingly evident in such poems as ‘Father Christmas and the Girl’, ‘Carboni in the Chimney’, ‘Landscape’, ‘Visit to the Museum’. ‘My Funeral’, and ‘The Achievement’. The stillness always being sought in these and similar poems is to be a solace for the discontents which make the poet seize upon it. This emerges very clearly in, for instance, ‘The Lake’:

I can’t hold it, keep it.
It’s full of mountains fluttering down.
And trees – or rather their other selves.

I can break it with a stone.
My foot: and I can almost see
Just what it’s thinking. I’m certain it’s thinking.

A fisherman unpacks himself gently
On a ledge, and soon his line
Is holding the lake exactly.

‘Lake’, while it instances the thing I have been talking about, is also a good example of the way in which Simpson’s wit seasons his poetry. Without that, the gravity would be in constant larger of degenerating into glumness, a state which, however much it may call for sympathy in life, is a menace in poetry in that it tends to cloud representation and rob expression of all nuance. Simpson is very good, at his best, at using wit’s precision to keep an edge on contemplation. He is able to give a persuasive and instructive finish to sensations and observations which are always tugging clear of finish. At such points, one is made aware of new ways in which the often-proclaimed war between the riot of sense and the dragoons of intellect can after all give way to the compact of art. As importantly, one comes to realise anew that the traffic between private man and public men has its street where it has always been in the poetry which instantiates both conditions.

Vincent Buckley’s Poetry is probably more widely known than Simpson’s and is the art of a man well-known in a number of other contexts. But the Selected Poems need make no appeal beyond their own covers for great interest and, for me at least, engrossment. Buckley is as preoccupied as Simpson with the reciprocated pressure of world upon self. Here too is the avowal, sometimes the proclamation, of Frost’s ‘lover’s quarrel with the world’. Places as the milieu, the ambience, of persons are salient throughout. Buckley’s first book of poetry was called The World’s Flesh and that feeling-provoking title might continue to stand as a kind of epigraph for his poetry as indeed for his prose. The two modes sometimes fuse in this book, as in ‘Gaeltacht’; at such points, one finds a marriage between exposition and exclamation, a divulgence of the mind’s long, difficult music. That music wells with authority from the places of which Buckley tries again and again to take possession, conscious that they have in some sense mastered him long ago, but conscious too that such mastery as lies in him must consist in his saying how this is so.

The public in poetry is, as Buckley has pointed out more than once, a somewhat alien terrain for him. Yet passion, and the control of passion can appear quite as evidently in poems where the grossness or the exposedness of public life is the central motif as anywhere else. I think naturally of ‘Eleven Political Poems’ in this context: one does not readily forget ‘Election Speech’ or ‘No New Thing’. But the point is better evidenced, perhaps, in the bulk of ‘Golden Builders’, where the incivilities of man’s city are shown repeatedly as the lacerations of his own heart: and where, more surprisingly, the milieu of pain is investigated as a zone of promise.

‘Golden Builders’ and ‘The Pattern’ are surely the writings of Buckley’s which most seek out the way in which the public and the private variously collide and collude. But no reading of them, let alone of the bulk of the other poems in this volume, could long ignore another debate – or perhaps the same in another form – that between love and death. My abstractions do the duel little justice: certainly, this is no poetry of abstraction. Buckley always goes back to the flesh and to its crucial shakings. The songs, pleas, murmurs, and cries of love are not confined to those poems overtly concerned with that greatest of human matters. They are given tongue on every page, and given tongue in the awareness that death, our great cross-grainer, keeps trying to take the words away from us. Not surprisingly. therefore, a great deal of Buckley’s poetry is poetry of complaint, in the strong and traditional sense. He knows, and does not like, the fact that to tap any vein of life is also to discover that the vein is vulnerable. His ‘Lament for the Makers’, a poem not included here, is like its model a controlled outburst at the death which shames us, we who have been glorified by our loves. Once a poet is held by a radical dismay at the insult which our own mortality deals us, he is not likely to move on to other things, for what could other things mean?

It may be for that reason that the poems to be found here give a very strong sense of consistency – consistency of manner, of registered personality. Declaring the interest of a friend, I must declare the other interest of one who reads and writes very differently from Buckley. As such, I look with fascination at his ways of giving himself to experience, and of withholding himself, and announcing that he is doing so, from its ruinous potentialities. A couple of decades ago, he took the essentials of what he found helpful in American poetry and inflected his own poetry accordingly. But he has been making his own for as long as he has been publishing poetry the données of romanticism: locale seized as eloquent, community reached towards as precious and evanescent: the mind hoping to become patient in its the hungers: mortality as the dark aureole of the flesh: and perhaps hardest of all, the wish to be a man speaking to men. Such things come through with remarkable consistency in this volume. The effort to instance them, were it not fleshed out in words honoured by their use, would be worthy but no more. As it is, it is not hard to see why Buckley might be described as the most passionately exact of Australian poets.