A breathtaking new volume of poetry from an Australian literary icon, David Malouf’s first full volume of poetry since Typewriter Music once again shows us why he is one of Australia’s most enduring and respected writers. Earth Hour comes to rest at the perfect, still moment of “silence, following talk” after its exploration of memory, imagination, and mortality. With elegance and wit, these poems move from profound depths to whimsy and playfulness. As Malouf interweaves light and dark, levity and gravity, he offers a vision of life on “this patch/ of earth and its green things,” charting the resilience of beauty amid stubborn human grace.
A breathtaking new volume of poetry from an Australian literary icon, David Malouf’s first full volume of poetry since Typewriter Music once again shows us why he is one of Australia’s most enduring and respected writers. Earth Hour comes to rest at the perfect, still moment of “silence, following talk” after its exploration of memory, imagination, and mortality. With elegance and wit, these poems move from profound depths to whimsy and playfulness. As Malouf interweaves light and dark, levity and gravity, he offers a vision of life on “this patch/ of earth and its green things,” charting the resilience of beauty amid stubborn human grace.
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Overview
A breathtaking new volume of poetry from an Australian literary icon, David Malouf’s first full volume of poetry since Typewriter Music once again shows us why he is one of Australia’s most enduring and respected writers. Earth Hour comes to rest at the perfect, still moment of “silence, following talk” after its exploration of memory, imagination, and mortality. With elegance and wit, these poems move from profound depths to whimsy and playfulness. As Malouf interweaves light and dark, levity and gravity, he offers a vision of life on “this patch/ of earth and its green things,” charting the resilience of beauty amid stubborn human grace.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780702252587 |
---|---|
Publisher: | University of Queensland Press |
Publication date: | 07/01/2014 |
Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
Format: | eBook |
Pages: | 96 |
File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
David Malouf is a poet and writer who was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2000. He is the author of Dream Stuff, The Great World, winner of the Miles Franklin Prize, Remembering Babylon, which won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and was short-listed for the Booker Prize, and the poetry collections Revolving Days and Typewriter Music.
Read an Excerpt
Earth Hour
By David Malouf
University of Queensland Press
Copyright © 2014 David MaloufAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7022-5258-7
CHAPTER 1
Aquarius
One of those sovereign days that might seem never
intended for the dark: the sea's breath deepens
from oyster-shell to inky, blue upon blue,
heaped water, crowded sky. This is the day,
we tell ourselves, that will not end, and stroll
enchanted through its moods as if we shared
its gift and were immortal, till something in us
snaps, a spring, a nerve. There is more to darkness
than nightfall. Caught reversed in a mirror's lens,
we're struck by the prospect of a counterworld
to so much stir, such colour; loved animal
forms, shy otherlings our bodies turn to
when we turn towards sleep; like us the backward
children of a green original anti
-Eden from which we've never been expelled.
Radiance
Not all come to it
but some do, and serenely.
No saying
what party they are of
or what totem
animal walks with them.
Tobias the street-smart
teen has his screwball dog.
For some it is stillness,
or within the orders
of humdrum
the nudge, not so gentle,
of circumstance. For some
the fall across their path
at noon of a shadow
where none should be,
for some their own
shadow seen as not.
For some a wound, some
a gift; and for some
the wound is the gift.
When they
too become one
of the Grateful Dead, it is
the silence they leave,
in a bowl, in a book,
that speaks and may join us;
its presence,
waist high at our side,
a commotion, a companionable
cloud with the shape and smell of
an unknown familiar, call it
an angel. At his nod,
the weather we move in
shifts, the wind changes.
Catching
the mutinous struck infant
in us on the off-chance
smiling.
Retrospect
A day at the end of winter. Two young men,
hooded against the silvery thin rain
that lights the forest boughs, are making towards
a town that at this distance never gets closer.
One of them, not me, as he turns, impatient
for the other to catch up, wears even now when I meet his face
in dreams, the look of one already gone, already gone
too far into the forest; as when, last night
in sleep, I looked behind me out of the queue for an old movie and you
were there, hood thrown back, your stack
of dirty-blond hair misted with sky-wrack, and when
my heart leapt to greet you, No, your glance
in the old conspiratorial way insisted,
Don't speak, don't recognise me. So I did not
turn again but followed down the track,
to where, all those years back, you turned
and waited; and we went on
together at the bare end of winter, breath from our mouths
still clouding the damp air, our footsteps loud
on the rainlit cobbled street, down into Sèvres.
Toccata
Out of such and such and so much bric-a-brac.
Cut-glass atomisers, An Evening in Paris
stain, circa '53, on taffeta.
Four napkin-rings, initialled. Playing cards, one pack
with views of Venice, the other the Greek key pattern
that unlocked the attic door our house
in strict truth did not run to. A wrist
arched above early Chopin: bridge across water
to a lawn where finch and cricket take what's given
as gospel, and even the domino I lost
in the long grass by the passion-vine
fits white to white, four voices in close canon.
Where in all this are the small, hot, free
-associating selves, a constellation
of shoes, sweat, teacups, charms, magnetic debris?
In the ghost of a fingerprint all
that touched us, all that we touched, still glowing actual.
Dot Poem, the Connections
Before I had words
at hand to call the world up
in happenings on a page, there were the dots, a buckshot scatter
of stars, black in a white sky. Behind them, teasingly hidden,
the company of creatures.
What I'd set
my heart on, spellbound, snowbound
in a wood, was a unicorn, shyly invisible but yearning, even
at the risk of being taken,
to be seen and recognised.
What I got
was the dwarfs, Grumpy and Doc;
Spitfires, tanks, a drunken jalopy. I'm still waiting, as star-dots click
and connect, to look up and find myself, with nothing I need say
or do, in its magic presence,
as from the far
far off of our separate realms, two rare
imaginary beasts approach and meet. On the breath that streams from
our mouths, a wordless out-of-the-body singing. On the same
note. From the same sheet.
Entreaty
After the Age of Innocence, golden brawlers
in the arms of demigods,
we arrive at the Age of Reason, credulous poor
monsters led by a dream-team
in a mad dance down loud streets into quicksand.
After that it's the Age
of the Seven Pills daily. Small mercies
restore us. Bayside air
salt-sweet in our mouths again, we set out for
the corner shop, and by some happy chance
it is still there, the same old woman keeps it.
When the doorbell shakes her
from sleep, through wisps of grey
smoke from her asthma-papers, 'What's it to be, what's your poison
this time, love?' she wheezes.
Is it a riddle? If it is
I'm lost. The ancient
grins, abides the answer. I clench my fist on the hot penny
I've brought; only now, a lifetime
later, find my tongue:
If luck is with me
today, on my long walk home, may no
black cat cross my path, no sweet-talking stranger,
no thief, no mischief-maker,
no trafficker in last words waylay me.
Whistling in the Dark
Seeking a mind in the machine, and in constellations, however
distant, a waft of breath. Re-reading space
shrapnel as chromosome bee-swarms, hauling infinity
in so that its silence, a stately contre-dance to numbers,
hums, and flashy glow-stones bare of wild-flower
or shrub, scent, bird-song, hoof-print, heartbeat,
or bones (ah, bones!) are no longer alien or lonely
out there in the airless cold as we prepare
to lie out beneath them. Even as children we know
what cold is, and aloneness, absence of touch. We seed
the night sky with stories like our own: snub-breasted
blond topless Lolitas laying out samples
of their charms beside dimpled ponds, barefoot un-bearded
striplings ready with bow and badinage, pursued
and lost and grieved over by inconsolable immortals
and set eternally adrift, a slow cascade
of luminary dust above the earth, with the companionable
creatures, bear, lion, swan, who share with us the upland
fells and meadow-flats of a rogue planet tossed
into space and by wild haphazard or amazing
grace sent spinning. Old consolations, only half
believed in, though like children we hold them dear, as if their names
on our tongue could bring them close and make,
like theirs, the bitter sweet-stuff of our story
to someone, somewhere out there,
remembered, and fondly, when we are gone.
Ladybird
Childhood visitors,
the surprise of
their presence a kind of grace.
Kindest of all the ladybird,
neither lady
(unless like so much else
in those days disguised
in a witch's spell) nor
bird but an amber-beadlike
jewel that pinned itself
to our breast; a reward for
some good deed we did not
know we'd done, or earnest
of a good world's good will
towards us. Ladybird, ladybird,
fly away home, we sang,
our full hearts lifted
by all that was best
in us, pity for what
like us was small (but why
was her house on fire?), and sped her
on her way with the same breath
we used to snuff out birthdays
on a cake, the break and flare
of her wings the flame that leapt
from the match, snug
in its box, snug in our fist under the house
that out of hand went sprinting
up stairwells, and stamped and roared
about us. Ladybird,
mother, quick, fly
home! The house, our hair, everything close
and dear, even the air,
is burning! In our hands
(we had no warning
of this) the world is alive and dangerous.
Garden Poems
Touching the Earth
The season when all is scrabble,
and surge and disintegration: worms
in their black café a pinchgut Versailles rabble
remaking the earth, processing tea-bags, vegetable scraps, and hot
from the press news of the underworld, the fast lane,
to slow food for the planet.
Plum-blossom, briar rose,
commingling. Overhead pure flow, a commodious blue fine-brushed
with cirrus.
In our part of the world we call this
Spring. Elsewhere it happens other
-wise and in other words, or with no words
at all under fin-shaped palm-frond and fern in greenhouse weather.
But here we call it Spring, when a young man's fancy turns,
fitfully, lightly, to idling in the sun,
to touching in the dark. And the old man's?
To worms in their garden box; stepping aside
a moment in a poem that will remember,
fitfully, who made it and the discord
and stammer, and change of heart and catch of breath
it sprang from. A bending down
lightly to touch the earth.
The Spell
Needlepoints of light
rain pick out a web and I am caught. The garden,
its double iron-barred gate
and the prunus pushing out
on its own path under paving-stones, floats free
and trembles. It might be gravity suspended,
or an odd angle
of time that a slight glance sideways
catches so that the whole
enterprise unsteadies, no longer instant
underfoot. What centres it,
when all has been riddled through
and questioned, is the spider, dark
death's head paramour and spell
-binder. Ablaze
in solar isolation,
it dwindles at the end of its span, its spittle-thread
of inner fire unravelled
in a riot of marigolds, and the spell so light
on the senses yet so strong,
and still unbroken.
After
I bend to it willingly, this patch
of earth and its green things, in their own world
(though I hold the title to it) hungry for life
and tenure. Here they are weeds to be uprooted:
a limited easy task, the damp and crumble
I've lived with since my first
mouthful of it, the peck
of dirt I'm still working through. All round, a suntrap,
the garden-glitter of webs. Tree
-spiders that like the weeds, our late-spring sunlight
colluding, would choke
the lot to keep their hold. Live and let live? Not yet, not
here. Inside, the phone
intrudes. Another world calls and I scurry
in, struck by the coolness of a place that is all surface
polish and appliance. Too late! The message,
if there is one, hangs
in the silence, in the air
of abeyance that attends
on hasty departure: the breathless hush, lightly expectant,
of After.
Inner City
A picture-book street with pop-up gardens, asphalt
bleached to take us down a degree or two
when summer strips and swelters. All things green,
wood sorrel, dandelion, in this urban village
salad not weeds, and food for everyone, including
rats and the phantom night-thieves who with barrow
and spade tip-toe in under the windchimes to cart off virtual
orchards of kaffir limes. Good citizens all
of Chippendale and a planet sore of body
and soul that needs saving, and by more
than faith-healing or grace — good works and elbow
grease, a back set to it, compost bins,
the soy of human kindness. In the late splendour
of early daylight saving, stars regroup
for breakthrough, mynah and honey-eater tuck
their head under a wing, ants at shiftwork
in their gulag conurbations soldier on; and hunters, clean
of hand and clear of conscience, down
tools, troop home to pork-chop plastic packs, and gatherers
gather for hugs and mugs of steaming chai.
The planet, saved for another day, stokes up
its slow-burning gases and toxic dust, gold rift and scarlet
gash that take our breath away; a world at its interminable
show of holy dying. And we go with it, the old
gatherer and hunter. To its gaudy-day, though the contribution
is small, adding our handsel of warm clay.
An Aside on the Sublime
A Ground Thrush,
the latest of many such
occasional companions,
is scribbling the dusk
with its signature
tune, a high five
sol-fa-sol-fa-doh, at each
da capo plainly astonished
by its own sufficiency.
I stand and listen,
happy to yield
the day, the scene, the privilege of being
the one here who will embellish
the hour with all it needs, beyond
silence, of manifesto. Which
the land, as it breathes out warm night
odours and settles,
takes as an usher's
aside on the sublime.
A footnote, Eine Kleine Background Music,
to its blindfold, trancelike
descent into the dark
to bring back
tomorrow.
Sky News
A listening post
in an open field,
a green message tower,
each filament and pad precision
-designed to pick up
what the four
winds and their attendant
weathers pour in,
on the senses, on the skin.
We catch
at a remove what passes
between packed leaves and Heaven's
breath as the big sky
story blows through
the gaps in conversations,
caught without
shelter like Poor Tom
under the wet lick and whiplash
of the metaphysical dark.
Hunkered down
in the raw, a-shiver between
on the one side a mad
king who weeps and blusters,
on the other his Fool
who wisecracks and mocks,
he grits his teeth,
hugs himself
to keep warm, and privy to all,
illustrious nosebleeds, the heigh-ho
Dobbin and full cry
of the great world's
hiccups and fuck-ups, says
nowt, sits out the storm.
Trees
Trees have their own lives, simple
if seasonally haunted;
in their branches the sky
-adventures of passing gods.
They make up the wood
we cannot see, and one
looks so much like the next that we
wonder what sense they have
of being what we would be
when nomad thoughts possess us, standing
in one place only with nowhere to go
but upwards or deeper.
They wear our rough hearts linked;
mute journals of what we felt,
avowals made
before rock and cloud as witness, X loves Y
forever. A promise kept
here and here only,
in their lives not ours, though the wound
still aches, in all weathers.
Rondeau
As long as
the stock keeps turning
over as long
as spring keeps knocking
on wood and willows bud
as long as
Jane and Jed and Lou are still rocking
on and have got
my number as long as
a wet weekend in bed
with you in chill November
just the two
of us and maybe Sting
as long
as long as a piece of string
Two Odes of Horace
Odes I, xxvii
I'm over it, the floral
tributes, fancy speeches.
Thank you but
the roses in that bouquet, so pretty
pink, will be ash-grey
by nightfall.
From now on
I'll take life straight, no fuss,
no faddle. So fill
the wine-cup, boy, and stand
close by in the vine-leaves' fretwork
sunset while I drink.
Odes II, ii
It's the coin in use, the blade
in action that means business.
Stacked in a vault, locked up
in rifts in the Sierra,
all minerals are dross.
It's the world's big-time big spenders
who hog the news. Big bucks
stop nowhere. Endow a college, cast
a pearl, say La Peregrina,
to a call-girl or an ex.
Fortunes are hard to manage.
Far easier to rule
the Russias, take a bowl
of tea with a fat-cat Chairman,
bring Cuba to heel.
Greed is like dropsy;
the body bloats
then parches, feeds on itself,
hoards its toxic
water in hundredweights.
Is Nixon back? Do millions
flatter him and chatter
of History's favourite son?
Well we dissent, and wish
that wise men would use better
terms. True honours rest,
the laurel, the diadem,
on the head that is not turned
by the flash-bulbs' pop when Jackie
O descends on the room.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Earth Hour by David Malouf. Copyright © 2014 David Malouf. Excerpted by permission of University of Queensland Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Aquarius,Radiance,
Retrospect,
Toccata,
Dot Poem, the Connections,
Footloose, a Senior Moment,
Entreaty,
Whistling in the Dark,
Ladybird,
Garden Poems,
Inner City,
An Aside on the Sublime,
Sky News,
Trees,
Rondeau,
Two Odes of Horace,
Spleen,
A Parting Word,
The Brothers: Morphine & Death,
Long Story Short,
Ghost Town,
Writers' Retreat: Maclaren Vale, 2010,
Persimmons: Campagnatico,
A Recollection of Starlings: Rome '84,
Windows,
Nightsong, Nightlong,
Eternal Moment at Poggio Madonna,
Towards Midnight,
At Laterina,
All Souls,
Earth Hour,
A Green Miscellany,
Night Poem,
Shy Gifts,
Still Life,
The Deluge,
Abstract,
Seven Faces of the Die,
A Touch of the Sun,
Shadow Play,
Australia Day at Pennyroyal,
Aquarius II,
Toccata II,
At Lerici,
Acknowledgments,