DAVID ROWBOTHAM, WRITER - NEW BOOK OF VERSE
DAVID ROWBOTHAM: INTRODUCTORY PAGES OF NEW BOOK
- Title -
THE BEAR THAT DID NOT GO (or, THE PACIFIC STAR)
- POEMS OF DENOUEMENT -
by
DAVID ROWBOTHAM
28 Percival Terrace
Holland Park
Brisbane, Qld.4121
Australia
Ph/Fx 61 07 3397 5541
E-Mail: dhrlit@qct.com.au
- Dedication -
For
Beverley & Jill,
their mother, Ethel,
& my grandsons
Michael
Stephen
Ross
Daniel
Nicholas
because of the light in my eyes
that was theirs, keeping me alive.
Pacific Star: Campaign star, with
riband, awarded for service in the
Pacific Theatre of War, Second World
War 1939-1945
Distant or dead-now kindly penfriend
of a year which rumbled war, have I
since then, been writing one long
letter?...these are my survivor’s words.
- Letter to Jean Chapalain, 1975
NOTES
The war medal that I mounted on my wall, for my grandsons to inherit, gradually compounded the initial sense of legacy I had. It came to mean one's small watch in the immensity of seas and nights during years that were ultimate.
The medal, too, reminds me of the presence of the stars which the skies of the Pacific made large and lustrous, and at the sight of which men were known to weep; and, in a world of total combat, to pray. As much as the concept of place and time that can be ultimate, the company of stars informs this book.
Within and beyond the compass that I discovered, were stories of societies at war and years of physical travel that became, like thought, as systemic as breathing. Probably because of age, these years, along with travel among nations and books, felt urgent.
All that was ultimate, then, led to the urgent, and, with a sense of denouement, to this book.
I am glad that a book of mine again touches on war in a way anticipated by my Penguin Book of Selected Poems: 1945-1993, and that it contains yet another lot of poems (a feature of later books) that owe their existence to the physical fact of mind that is the United States, with whose servicemen I shared a Pacific perimeter. This time the lot is considerable.
From the Penguin Book several related poems have been republished. The earliest draft of “The Moment”, for example, one of my first poems published by the Sydney Bulletin and anthologised for 50 years, was written after an enemy patrol alarm in Bougainville. Nothing about the alarm got into the poem; but words about the fragile value of a green world did.
The book may reflect how long ago it is that I fought for "survivor's words". If it does, it may also be seen as a final answer to the question of how then, for the rest of my life, I fought to write amongst people who withstood me for the rest of theirs. There can be more to surviving than returning.
It needs to be noted that this, at a national level, was something encountered with dull disbelief by American and Australian survivors of Vietnam who returned home to find their countries, and their countries' youth, withstanding them with placards, music, silence, disregard. One of the most poignant and politically accusing world monuments to those fallen or lost in war is the Vietnam wall-memorial at Arlington. The book refers to this in the poem "The Grave of an Unknown Soldier and the Garden of Arlington", which appeared in The Weekend Australian Review.
Returning veterans, man and woman, and society itself, at crucial periods have to survive a national loss or displacement of memory that shames them and the dead.
These wars, and their aftermaths, won't go away. Not least among the aftermaths is the resistance often shown survivors by those who resent their experience. About such people I once wrote a series of bestiary-poems, which were nationally published. Now I no longer wish to give them publicity. I only wish to note that they were there (or here). They might have been the reason that, in the end, I looked elsewhere, seeking relief from their presence; rather like taking a holiday from the hostile life of one's own society. I looked to America.
And, for all that great nation's faults, I found a sense of freedom and the remarkable. If, as in "America My Breath", I have gone pillaging for truth in a New World I am prepared to say I love, I have done so as a person who came to feel at home there. I trust American friends will accept my examination of their epic history. In the course of examining it, I decided to add to this book the poem "Scuttled Bottled Corked Washed Up". Although previously published in book form, it offers by comparison the peculiarly personal history that can prevail, and affect one, in the kind of country where no one of any commonsense wants to belong.
In parts of this book I have given my society and Australia away; not in defeat or retreat but in the service of imagination. Imagination advances, with virility, and conclusively, once you bring the world in.
Prompted by "Ulysses", a story by David Malouf, a superb writer about the imagination, I present a poem about war in terms of the first one - the Trojan War. To bring the poem home, I make the point that it was written in a room by night on a hilltop house overlooking an amateur town whose worthies hide from history, having none.
The book is about more than war. But with war these no doubt debatable notes had to begin. From my most recent book The Ebony Gates (1996) I have put in "The Lament", a now revised De Profundis on women in love with men not deserving their love.
I am republishing, too, the dramatic narrative “Mullabinda” which was anthologised for 25 years and then, for political reasons, shelved.
New poems were published by The Australian, The Australian’s (monthly) Review of Books, which used the genre-narrative "Humdingers", and Southerly and the Goethe Institute. Poems were included, too, in anthologies in North America – continent of the bear in my title as an animal image of nobility, danger and death. There, as I have already noted, and with variation note again, I felt bodily shifted into the 20th Century during a stay as influential as war and my fight to survive my society have been.
Footnotes have been provided for some poems, especially where they seemed needed, in case I am not around to give anymore readings and comment. There is a transport standing by with my name on it, even though I don't want to leave the world. No one is taken alive. - D.R., Brisbane, 2000
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