Rondo

Chris Wallace-Crabbe

• Publisher: Carcanet Poetry
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781784106430
• eBook ISBN: 9781784106447
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Shortlisted for the 2019 Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry in the NSW Premier's Literature Awards

Chris Wallace-Crabbe's Rondo harvests a decade's worth of new writing by one of Australia's foremost poets. It paints a vivid portrait of eucalypt Australia's current position in an rapidly changing world. The poet asks for fresh meanings from Gallipoli and Scotland, from physics and from 'Art's porous auditorium', where poetry can still be heard. 'The words are only the words, ' he writes, 'which is more or less everything.'

Critic Eric Ormsby dubbed Wallace-Crabbe a 'genial smuggler of surprises': 'his uncommon affability, even when treating the gravest subjects, leaves the reader unprepared for his sudden luxuriance of phrase.' ( TLS )

III

Geology

The self could easily be viewed

as a grey, rubbled glacier

with silvery highlights

now discernibly shrunk

by some global warming:

Nothing has yet been written

that hasn’t been said before…

Surely its one hope

is to have left behind

a terminal stony moraine

to please exploring kids

or puzzle them at least.

Not a word has been written

that wasn’t said before.

What is more, some sort if god

spent millions of years

up there, or down below

in the excitingly

striped or speckled strata

trying to be Mozart.

Where’s the sentence we’ve written

that hadn’t been uttered before?

I reckon the nimble blackbird caught

a glimpse of it in our hedge

and sang a snatch of the tune.

Apollo and Daphne

They worry their brows into little nets of wrinkles

while dismally tapping at smoky keys;

they ask,

am I happy enough or serious

enough, am I pulling my weight with the rest,

can I pay the bills of July late in August

and all the while this young chap with bare legs

goes haring after the plump pretty girl through a scene

that is silvereyed with rivers and lakes,

part-stroked by a late fall of classic sunlight

which is really his element

you can tell that for sure.

There, now he has caught her and hoicks her up by the hips,

still on the move, and she smiles in her blondfall of hair

as he is breathing hard, as her body stiffens

much as though her limbs were changing now

to the dense branches of a bay tree

flickered with light, boldly assertive,

shadowing her face with green triumph.

Robert Browning at Bundanon

There’s a kookaburra chortling, so I think it’s time for tea.

That’s a cup in bed for you, then, and another one for me.

We’ll have a day devoted to creative enterprise,

you exploring with a paintbrush and, after several tries

I could come up with something: not quite burned out, after all;

might hatch a crafty lyric handling chaos and Man’s fall,

bu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• I
• II
• III
• About the Author
• Also by Chris Wallace-Crabbe from Carcanet
• Copyright