Haskell - Ahead of Us

Haskells poetry, so often set in familiar environments and concerned with the day today realities of life, is in fact a consideration of what the poetic voice means in the real world. John Kinsella, Southerly Issues of gender and the domestic, and movement through (or against) perceived masculine and feminine spaces are beautifully and sensitively observed and managed an uncommon thing in male Australian verse. John Kinsella, Southerly Haskells poems appear in many forms. Rather than nurturing a single way of speaking, Haskell adopts various shapes and tones and allows each poem its own evolution Incidental rhymes and semi-formal sound patterns are offered with considerable subtlety and persuasion. Kristen Lang Haskells shaping of language is highly skilful the language is heightened just that notch at the appropriate moment for the poetry to singe the readers senses, jolt the mind or open a new window of perception on to the world. Geoff Page Mundane and ethereal, ordinary and extraordinary merge into images that stir us to a new consciousness of life lived today registering a continuity and a modernity, evoking in us a paradoxical sensation and perception of the evanescence and the solidity. Subas Chandra SahaDennis Haskell is the author of seven collections of poetry published in Australia, the Philippines and the UK, and author or editor of fourteen volumes of literary scholarship and criticism. Subas Chandra SahaDennis Haskell is the author of seven collections of poetry published in Australia, the Philippines and the UK, and author or editor of fourteen volumes of literary scholarship and criticism.

He was co-editor of Westerly magazine from 19852009 and is currently a member of the Management Committee of the Westerly Centre, and a Senior Honorary Research Fellow at The University of Western Australia. Haskell was chair of the Literature Board of the Australia Council for the Arts from 20092011 and is currently Chair of the Board of writingWA. He is the recipient of the Western Australia Premiers Prize for Poetry, the A. A. Phillips Prize for a distinguished contribution to Australian Literature, and an honorary doctorate of letters from UWA. In 2015 he was made a Member of the Order of Australia.

Dennis Haskell has served as visiting poet and professor at universities in England, France, Germany, Italy, Singapore, Thailand, the Philippines and the USA. The things we shrink from are the things we make poetry out of. Peter Porter all that we love will escape us sooner or later, and
we cling to it as if it should endure eternally. Jean-Jacques Rousseaui.m. Rhonda Haskell (19472012)

Chance, I know that my chances of having a conversation with you are slight, at the very best, I know its no use taking exception to your presence, but what on earth are you doing in this life? Your place seems so arbitrary; and if we could sit down together I know the talk would be hopelessly haphazard, since love could lead swiftly to gardens to garbage, a line of poetry might read kohl adrift more she role ti dah. There are those sure your heart belongs to Dada but you know its heart belongs to you.

So around the world wed go on a marvellous, maddening, richly frustrating excursion in which go is only occasionally distinguishable from woe. Some think you are not the ultimate in godliness, which you find a glorious test; you who know no meaning know meaning best. Only when we get to death, in which you see you have a role, we part company. You say, In the end thats the subject which is for you, but is not for me.

The surreal numbers flicker like eyelids, 100 kph, 150, 200, the nitrogen-filled tyres now more skittering than turning, whistling to the ground like a fingertip touch at parting, 250, then suddenly we are clear out of this world, its scattered lights that had stood above us at intersections, tending fragile corners, lonely doors, now patterned crazings on a glazed painting. Czanne was correct there are only two dimensions: them and us.

And here, above life, there is nothing we would wish never end but the never of ending.

Small clouds flock outside the window like phlegm in the skys throat that we fly into, hoarser and hoarser, the engines coughing above cut outs of paddy fields, deep olive green plantations intersected by water, and dry strips of land, where men and women work: nature is being put in its place. Lower and lower until we are being whispered about by destiny, or chance. We hang dangling at speed, in fragile air; but today luck chooses us, the headlines will escape our names, we will enter the miraculous serenity of procedures, of routines, all our fear buckled up in a gift of banality, of schedules that even we will quickly forget; then the rumble and crack of wheels on the ground, hooked by gravity and weighty again. The most valuable elements of our lives are hardly noticed. What would Our Lady, or anyones, think as uncaring crowds swarm past her buttresses, and flashbulb lights far outnumber the flights of prayers? An amplified male alto soars like a linnet through the Gothic aisles, unquestionably glorious. What would Our Lady, or anyones, think as uncaring crowds swarm past her buttresses, and flashbulb lights far outnumber the flights of prayers? An amplified male alto soars like a linnet through the Gothic aisles, unquestionably glorious.

Stone everywhere as if to keep the earth out. A brilliant father offers confession in French, English, Italian, Japanese. Jean Verdier, Jean Juvnal des Urse sleep secure in their improbable faith, in this belief museum, amidst circular candelabras of devotion, their deepest truth barely flickering. Yet uncertainty is a kind of grief. The cameras assert a dearth of ideas. People exit, troop off to the awful Tower.

Bones seem stronger than belief, yet they also rot in earth.

Remembering the scarf-necked, firm and almost smiling face of Jean Moulin, I looked at the statuesque, almost imperial Arc de Triomphe, turned and walked with a few thousand other hurrying, dawdling, window-gazing, free and fanciful faces along the vision-wide boulevarde, the expansive paths of the Champs lyses: feet and cars and motorscooters, and dead, wet leaves; Peugeot, Swatch, Louis Vuitton tout en or, Lacoste beside Fouquets grand brasserie, Galeries des Champs and the Galerie des Arcades, Sephoras infinite rows of cosmtiques, Les Comptoirs de Paris, while Yves Rocher offered nature for a price, a literary collection mentioned Les crivains et la Mlancolie. Whatevers wrong with them Club Mditerrane will take you away from the Mediterranean, the paradisal fields, the peck-peck-pecking green-necked pigeons where your purse or wallet speaks its triumphant Esperanto, and lights are strung out in the trees. [Jean Moulin was leader of the French Resistance during World War II] Having endured what no-one could call a good nights sleep, not half a night but at least some, I lumbered towards Lige on a slow country train. More sleep than you, My Love, would have had after quitting Roissy Airport, Paris glittering far below, and I calculated the minutes when you must have stumbled off the plane, and gone straggling through Changi, your head tired, your eyes struggling open, ankles swollen, your legs enjoying being legs again, the muscles stretching, the blood starting to flow freely. Outside, a chimney belching great gouts of smoke, as from an old train, white cows head down in lush grass, a potholed track down which two women push infants, ragged clothes strung out on a ragged line.Next page