Actor, priest, academic: there is something interestingly theatrical about Noel’s affiliations. In each case, to varying degrees, one is required to take on a persona. And in each case, to varying degrees, one has an audience that needs to believe in that persona, if not in the persona’s message. Noel was an accomplished teacher and reader of his own poetry, though he was never overtly didactic in either role. Perhaps this disinclination to seek compliance in his audience can be seen in the lightly facetious element of Noel’s personality. He could gently mock a person or an idea in such a way as to make that mocking seem a kind of tribute. There was a trace of the ‘theatrical’ in Noel’s self-presentation, a style one might at a pinch designate as a muted form of camp. But in contradiction to all of this, Noel seemed the antithesis of factitious. His persona was believable to the extent that it seemed not to be a persona at all. One felt that Noel was entirely ‘himself’, so that his personal ‘style’ was an appealing riddle.

This characterisation may seem excessive or irrelevant depending on one’s point of view, but what strikes me with force reading Rowe’s Collected Poems,and the selected essays in Ethical Investigations, is thatthis contradictory nature of Rowe’s personality – theatrical and authentic – can also be seen in his writing, especially his poetry, which ranges widely in mood and tone.

In collecting Rowe’s poetry, Vagabond Press (which has published Rowe’s work since 1999) has emphasised its pastoral element. The title – A Cool and Shaded Heart – typifies the pastoral mode in the classical sense of repose in an idealised bucolic landscape. The cover photograph of a treed paddock with a fence running towards the horizon evokes the pastoral in another sense. Unpeopled and large (though not epic) in scale, the image suggests one strand of an Australian pastoral mythology.

One can understand these decisions. In part, they are attuned to a market that is still receptive to an Australian poetry concerned with the lyrical evocation of pastoral settings, landscape, and identity. They relate, too, of course, to the actual contents of the book. Some of Rowe’s strongest poems evoke the pastoral life of his childhood, and of his family in that pastoral context. In the sequence ‘My Grandmother’s House’, Rowe presents the complexity of an ‘ordinary’ life in spare, unsparing details. These details range from the poet’s grandmother waking to find a snake crawling across her mouth, to memories of the poet washing his grandmother’s hair: ‘Afterwards, I drank / tea with her on the back verandah / (and once she said, “This tea’s / as weak as cricket’s piss”).’ As poems such as ‘Next to Nothing’
and ‘Hope Everything’ demonstrate, linking the pastoral with the family in this way, especially in terms of their problematics and ambiguities, is a characteristic of Rowe’s.

But Rowe’s interests are extremely various, and range beyond the family and the childhood farm to the everyday life of inner-suburban Sydney, experiences in Thailand, political poems, poems that could be designated as ‘religious’, and satirical explorations of contemporary culture through the lightly camp (and autobiographical) character of ‘Bluthorpe’ (‘whose idea of a celebrity is Bette Davis, / all cigarette and diction, not the local weatherman’). These poems (a number of which appear in print for the first time) are trenchant, funny, and superbly ironic. They are reason enough to buy the volume. But they are not the only reason, as Rowe’s powerful poems on mortality illustrate. These comprise a notable number of elegies (and Rowe is now himself the subject of a number of elegies), and the moving sequence ‘Touching the Hem’, which is concerned with the day-to-day aspects of dealing with cancer. The sequence is notable for its mix of plain-speaking and lyricism: ‘My visitors have gone. The jacaranda / has surrendered its colour to the evening coming on.’

As this suggests, Rowe’s principal concerns are the post-Romantic ones of combining the quotidian and the sacred, the ordinary and extraordinary. It is no surprise that Rowe also manages to bring together other apparently divergent things, such as the languages of Christianity and Buddhism. ‘Touching the Hem’ also shows the importance to Rowe’s poetics of that most basic of oppositions: self and other. In particular, Rowe was interested in that special form of sociability, friendship. Friends in conversation are always both themselves and acting at being themselves, for the sake of friendship. The balance that this offers – a recognition of both mutuality and difference – is a peculiarly apposite concern for Rowe.

Such a balance – between a presentation of the self and a recognition of the other – is at the heart of Rowe’s literary criticism. As the title indicates, Ethical Investigations shows Rowe’s long-running concern with finding a way to talk about literature in terms of ethics. (Rowe once said to me that he thought too many academics mistook ethics for politics.) Related to this, as the editor of the collection, Bernadette Brennan, points out, is Rowe’s sensitivity to the links between ‘religious and poetic processes’.

The early essays are indeed concerned with theology, and the ‘religious poets’ Rowe wrote about in his PhD thesis: James McAuley, Francis Webb, and Vincent Buckley. But while these essays are undoubtedly compelling, for me the most exciting moments in the collection come toward the end. In these late essays, Rowe makes clear his attention to the dialogic power of literature, to the ways in which the reading and writing of literature involves a relationship – or dialogue – between individuals that is not ‘purely’ aesthetic. At times this attention can lead to striking statements such as this (from ‘Just Poetry’): ‘So we live in a world where the value of freedom is compromised by metaphors of force and war, where justice is something we “get” rather than give, and where words of reconciliation are spoken from a single, empowered position.’

One should be grateful to Michael Brennan of Vagabond Press for publishing the writings of Noel Rowe. A Cool and Shaded Heart (which Brennan also edited) and Ethical Investigations are important collections in which Rowe witnesses both the marvellous and the awful, attuned at all times to the ethical implications of recognising others.