BRUCE Dawe is one of Australia's most popular poets. In a culture in which poetry is mostly the preoccupation of small coteries and where many major publishing companies have ceased to publish it at all, Dawe's appeal reaches right across the spectrum to include many people who don't usually read poetry.
There are several reasons for this. One is that Dawe employs a wide and varied range of subject matter that includes many of the most commonplace and unglamorous activities. He writes about major issues, true. But he is not afraid of the day to day, of what critics like to call the quotidian, and every experience, even the apparently minor, is grist to his mill.
He writes about deadbeats and drifters and the homeless, about popular culture, from Gary Cooper to Butch Cassidy to Australian football, about "the rowdy carnival of sparrows" as well as the Dogs in the Morning Light. In Homo Suburbiensis he writes affectionately about the mundane nature of suburban life, also celebrated by friend Craig McGregor, to whom the poem is dedicated, and how it can encompass much of the human condition - "time, pain, love, hate, age, war, death, laughter, fever".
It is true that elsewhere he can be genially satirical at the expense of ordinary people leading ordinary lives, or even show the darker side of their loneliness and solitude, as in the housewife in Up the Wall who is slowly going mad under the isolation of her life. It is significant that he finds some topics of his poetry in newspaper items.
He has an interest in individuals that we associate more with novelists than poets. Many of the poems, for example, are mini-portraits of people he has glimpsed briefly and who he manages to bring alive in a few lines - the museum attendant, the family man, the boy and so on. The same curiosity about life is present in his many poems about travelling and foreign countries.
But apart from the range and variety of his interests, Dawe also gains much of his appeal and accessibility from the voice in which he speaks to us. He is, to use that rather clumsy Greek word, a demotic poet. He loves the Australian vernacular and employs it without inhibition or self-consciousness and frequently with humour.
There are not many poets who would use a word like "bludger" or, even more audaciously, the self-devised "Stick-at-it-iveness" for "perseverance".
The range of allusion is enormous, with icons of popular culture rubbing shoulders with references to philosophers and composers and scraps of foreign languages. Underneath all the wit and good humour, the delight in the commonplace and profoundly democratic identification with the luckless of the world, runs a deep vein of religious belief.
Dawe mentions in his introduction his liking for a metaphor and frequently his metaphor will take the form of the sacred, as in "The infant raising a soft creased palm to bless" (Waiting Is Seeing Is Believing) or "knowing that ever dies, neither Tom nor Jerry, / why do we sense Gethsemane?" (Betrayers). The title poem is as much a prayer as a piece of verse.
At other times, Dawe can turn to parody of religious language, as in First Corinthians at the Crossroads, to indicate shallowness of feeling:
When I was a blonde I
walked as a blonde I
talked as a blonde;
Or again, there is the cleverly titled And a Good Friday Was Had by All in which the poet employs the casually colloquial speech of the Roman soldiers to paint the horror of Christ's crucifixion.
On a less serious note, a poem like Life-cycle takes the local passion for Australian Rules football and exaggerates it to comic and parodic effect: "a voice / like the voice of God booms from the stands / Ooohh you bludger and the covenant is sealed". The poem is full of religious imagery, which it systematically undermines. Similarly, Beatitudes takes the cadences of the Bible and transfers them satirically to bureaucratic life: "Blessed are the files marked ACTION in the INWARD tray, / for they shall be actioned."
Unusually, Dawe's religious beliefs also go hand in hand with strong political stances. In Burial Ceremony he ponders the fate of Hungary after it was invaded by Russian in 1956. He was also an early and fierce opponent of the Vietnam war and one of his finest poems, Homecoming, is a deeply moving lament for the Australian soldiers killed in that war. Many of his poems are satiric attacks on the ruin of the environment, long before the issue became fashionable.
In the New Landscape evokes a future in which cars have taken over completely from human beings, trees and even weeds.
Politics and religion unite when Dawe can even turn his anger on the Catholic Church itself where he believes it has failed in its mission - as in At Mass.
There is considerable tonal variety in Dawe's voice. Think, for instance, of the disturbing mixture of humour and savage anger in The Not So Good Earth. Condolences of the Season is a poem addressed to the poet's new-born son but again mingles elements of playfulness - with the baby's physical appearance and finally identity appropriated by his relatives - and tender feeling.
In the mordant A Victorian Hangman Tells His Love Dawe uses the form of the dramatic monologue, as he did in And A Good Friday Was Had By All, to dramatise the hideous nature of capital punishment. In the hangman's macabre imagination the execution becomes a marriage with the moment of death the orgasmic consummation.
Images of marriage, with the condemned man as a bridegroom, pervade the poem. This conveys Dawe's revulsion at the idea of the state killing a man in cold blood.
Half a century of labour has gone into the making of these poems and what characterises them most of all is a sense of the richness and variety of the world they create.
Laurie Clancy is a Melbourne fiction writer and critic.
Further reading
■K. L. Goodwin, Adjacent Worlds: A Literary Life of Bruce Dawe." Longman Cheshire, Melbourne, 1988.
■K.L. Goodwin (ed.), Bruce Dawe: Essays and Opinions. Longman Cheshire, Melbourne, 1990.
■Peter Kuch, Bruce Dawe. O.U.P., 1995.
■Cwisfa Lim, Bruce Dawe and his world. CW0X Publishers, Australia.
■Margaret Saltau, "The poetry of Bruce Dawe", The Age, 13 March, 2002.
Web links
■Australian Biography: Bruce Dawe. www.filmaust.com.au/programs/teachers-notes/6030-ausbio-dawenotes.pdf
■John Kinsella in conversation with Bruce Dawe. www.johnkinsella.org/interviews/dawe.html
■Bruce Dawe. From Wikipedia. En.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce-Dawe.