Dorothy Hewett identified several other roles or figures for women writers of poetry in Australia, most particularly:

The woman as loser, lover, bleeder, the victim figure, at once perverse and self-exacting, who refuses to be second-best.

But it’s clearly Harwood’s heroic proclamation of ‘the right to love’ that Hewett admires.

Perhaps against my own better judgment, I had been persuaded to ask Dorothy Hewett to speak at Writers’ Week in a session entitled ‘Women Writers’. I had wanted her to speak instead on ‘Myth, Symbol and Fable’, and I suspect that she would have preferred this. Her comments on the figures that women writers create for themselves in their writings, and her own admiration of the heroic, match with my own original preference.

Myth, symbol, and fable – and in particular myth and fable – are mostly strategies of triumph. A myth makes coherence out of chaos, a fable gives continuity and even causality to a series of events which would otherwise threaten us with their brutal disregard for our own wants. Both myth and fable are simplifications of the infinite fragments of daily experience. But they are triumphant simplifications because they affirm pattern and shape, a way in which what is potent can be distinguished from what is not. I suppose that is why structuralists love them: they are already structuralist models, from which even more condensed models can be made.

But poetry is not necessarily the same as myth or fable, and the poetry of women as losers or victims exemplifies this. The predominance in Hewett’s own poetry, therefore of fable and myth-like qualities, points to her own sense of triumph and the heroic, even if – as was so common in the heroic literature of the past – that triumph is born occasionally in defeat. The hero is not necessarily undefeated, but the person who refuses to concede defeat.

Vincent Buckley wrote recently that an exploration of inner life is still rare in Australian poetry. I’ve been saying that for years, while being aware that a number of poets have been attempting in their various ways to remedy this situation. Buckley himself is one, and Dorothy Hewett is another. Greenhouse, her most recent book, follows on in an almost obsessed fashion from the inner explorations of Rapunzel in Suburbia, expanding and projecting, them on to a larger screen in such a way that details of feeling emerge with more subtlety and complexity without any loss of clarity.

The result is not that ‘Greenhouse implodes and crackles with the same ferment and burgeoning we find on the canvases of Van Gogh and the pages of Doris Lessing’, as Robert Adamson wrote in a review for The Australian already printed, curiously, on the cover of my first edition copy of the book. Despite several days spent in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, I have yet to witness one of his canvases implode. And, in my opinion, Greenhouse is considerably more interesting reading than Doris Lessing. For me, its interest lies in the way facts are presented in such a way as to enable fable to emerge. The details cohere around and define an inner life, in the way that iron filings reveal the lines of force of a magnet.

It’s no accident that she is also a dramatist. The quality that shows consistent development from her first book of poems, Windmill Country, to her third and most recent is the ability to produce a natural, passionate yet individual way of speaking. It’s worth remembering that Hewett was in her forties when her first book of poems appeared. Yet looking back on it, I can find only a few poems in it that speak with the voice that has emerged as unmistakably her own in Greenhouse. Her first book contains many poems any Australian poet should be proud of, for example ‘The Hidden Journey’ or ‘March through Perth’. But it also shows a great fluency for of others: notably Slessor and T.S. Eliot, who flit in and out of the poems like ghosts on radio.

But a dramatist’s ability to use other people’s voices is less valuable to a poet than the ability to find her own voice and use it dramatically. This entails creating dramatic situations within which her voice speaks clearly; and for Hewett that means finding a plot, a fable, in which she is protagonist. ‘Unanswerable love letter’ and ‘Husband of the poet’ both provide this plot. Though the speaker in the latter poem is a man, the voice is hers, that of her animus, or perhaps her guilt.

The scenario/plot in each of these poems concerns a woman whose undoubted creative spirit is coupled with an intense physicality. In ‘Husband of the poet’, she is seen as an ageing and finally a dying body:

The heavy flesh humped in a flannel nightgown on the bed

The blood stopped up, thrombosed behind the blind.

In ‘Unanswered love letter’ the bodily woman is younger. But her willingness in love has taught her what it is to die:

I have been hanging ever since between the spokes of an old crutch,

Broken-legged, Jumping over puddles and contradictions ...

So many deaths, do we never come to the end of it?

In the first poem the ‘right to love’ writing poetry is maintained. In the second, the ‘right to love’ in itself is proclaimed in such a way that it sounds much the same as poetry:

And though you keep your hand over my mouth,

I will keep on singing, dry cicada under the spring.

But in each case, ‘the right to love’ is paid for by a Yeatsian awareness of physical as well as of psychological death, decay or frustration. For Hewett, this is the challenge that the inner creative life – sexual or poetic – has to come to grips with. It may well be, in fact, not its antagonist, but its raison d’etre.

One of the most striking poems in Rapunzel in Suburbia was ‘Grave Fairytale’. As I read it, it’s a poem about the denial of sexuality, which appears to the young protagonist as a witch, ‘a posturing blackness, savage as a cuckoo’.

The strength of this poem is in no way related to any sense of the woman as victim; it comes instead from the powerful fable­like quality which turns the poem into a chilling exemplary tale.

The opposite of that eternal virgin is found in ‘Forsaken Mermaid’:

She is the self gone free,

the wild girl in the heart

                                                                        tied to no man

no child, but haunts the sea.

The sea, I suppose, can be the Jungian unconscious, in which case this figure can justifiably be seen to haunt woman and man alike. But she’s an elfin ideal; Hewett knows very clearly that in all human relationships there is a price to pay. The beast has an end in view and, all too often, the end comes when we don’t want it to. ‘It helps to be a woman, not in God’s image’, she says in ‘This Time’, which is a poem that looks forward to the two very powerful Solstice sequences in Greenhouse. Being a woman. she can ‘weep in terminals and public libraries’, and she also weeps very movingly in Rapunzel in Suburbia and Greenhouse. But as Les Murray showed us in ‘An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow’, public weeping may be a positive, affirmative act, a declaration of being true to oneself. Certainly this is true of Hewett. The pain is undoubtedly real. But she never sees herself as the victim, only the enjoyer and the sufferer. Someone who keeps away from psychiatrists now because she knows more than they do can’t complain of being victimised in a relationship. She knows exactly what it’s all about and if she’s victimised by anything it’s by her own ‘wild girl in the heart’, her own refusal to do what the protagonist of ‘Grave Fairytale’ did, to icily refuse to live.

Greenhouse is very much a book about living. By that, I mean that it presents us with the feel and texture and pace of a life lived with an intense awareness of its rewards as well as of its pains. This is shown clearly in Hewett’s transformation of that luckless virgin, Tennyson’s Lady of Shallott. In Rapunzel in Suburbia she and Rapunzel exemplified the fate of women trapped in some way - whether by suburbia or by a protestant girlhood or whatever. But in Greenhouse the Lady breaks the bonds of her passivity. In ‘Winter Solstice: 4’she even dares to argue with Lancelot, proclaiming:

I am the wild girl in your heart

who must upset the apple-cart.

This marks a significant change from the earlier ‘Forsaken Mermaid’, where Hewett said of that ‘wild girl’ that ‘with her we cannot identify’. And in a cheerfully irreverent poem in Greenhouse called ‘For The Glory Of God & of Gwendoline’ (clearly Gwen Harwood) she says:

Maybe it’s not too late to bring the news

that you and I intend to light a fuse

in Camelot ... O Gwen

we’ve always had a nice way with the men.

This is no biological imposition, but an act of choice. The conclusion of the poem makes her attitude clear:

who knows

who’ll see the Grail, who is it that will chose

to fuck & fast & masturbate & pray

with inky fingers till his hair turns grey,

because we’re weaker vessels must we stay

within four walls as if it’s holy day

& have a life of discipline and order?

Merlin has told me its across the border,

I say let’s ride we’ve nothing left to lose.

Greenhouse is divided into three sections which. in their titles. represent a progressive coming out into the open: ‘The Window’ ‘The Balcony’ and ‘The Garden’. ‘Psyches Husband’, the last poem in ‘The Window’, is closest in the style last to poem ‘Grave Fairytale’ and is one of the most striking in the book. It shows Hewett at her Grimm’s fairytale grimmest, the woman (or the psyche) living the life of an inadvertent Circe. But even here, where the mere presence of a woman transforms men into beasts, there is a pity for those beasts, no matter how abhorrent they are:

I look back only once

there is a toad with a horned head

sadly plopping down the stairs behind me

kiss me            it croaks           kiss me

The centre of gravity of the book’s middle section – and, in fact, the book itself – is the set of and five ‘Mandelstam Letters’ and their ‘Sydney Postscript’. With the exception of the postscript, these moving poems are written in the persona of Mandelstam himself, but they clearly proclaim Hewett’s own beliefs:

Woe woe fear the snare and the pit cries Gumiliev

Live while you can and we will see says Mandelstam

And as she says elsewhere in the same poem, ‘what is death but a failure of the heart’. Mandelstam is indeed the victimised artist. He is persecuted, censored, exiled. But he refuses to accept the victim’s role: he declares ‘I will write an ode with a rope around my neck’.

In the poems in the book’s third section, two outstanding sequences are ‘Winter Solstice’ and ‘Summer Solstice’. My Shorter Oxford Dictionary, in a mad betrayal into poetry, defines the solstice as ‘One or other of the two times of the year ... when the sun appears to stand still’, and the titles are apt. These sequences capture how it feels to have time stand still, even though we know it relentlessly it goes on:

            the estuary glistens red leaves litter the garden

            in the stone house above the Sound we live for an hour

                        with our boats and printing presses

            late at night my breasts droop from my satin

nightgown

            but that’s all over.

But it’s impossible to separate the achievement of the two Solstice sequences from the two other sequences that follow them and which conclude the book: ‘The Garden’ and ‘The Labyrinth’. In this third section of Greenhouse the various parts con­tribute to and collaborate with each other brilliantly. The result is in fact a 25-page poem which exemplifies the advantages of a longer. multiple form for a poet who is not content to capture only the mood of the moment. but who is committed to uncovering how moment relates to moment.

In her talk at Writers’ Week, Dorothy Hewett suggested that a return to fixed form might be necessary: ‘If the world is multitudinous, and the material painful and fragmented and terror-stricken. the fixed form is one way seemingly to bring it to heel- spilling it over in tumult from run-on line to line and then catching it in the net of the final rhyme.’ There are numerous poems in Greenhouse in something like fixed form, but I’m not convinced that this is what brings her own painful and fragmented experience to heel. Rather, this is done by her determination to follow it all through, to find and never let go of ‘the thread of the past (which) can never be broken’.

This is a quality she shares with several of her contemporaries, particularly Bruce Beaver and Vincent Buckley. This deter­mination to find the thread of meaning, the fabula, to express the inner life as fable, is the strategy of the hero. It is also what makes Greenhouse such a rich and rewardingly human book.