Penelope’s Choice

There are some of my father’s poems that always feel right. For me, his deeply lyrical sense is at its most affecting when held within a poetic framework. One of the most strongly felt poems Coming Into The Clyde is for the most part a description of a magical landscape. The point, coming only in the last two lines, has all the more impact. His observations are acute – a whole picture in a single phrase: “and the sunlight is cut by the blade of dark” (The Tunnel). For him, as he describes it, life was “all a waking wonder and a pain of joy”(Come Death Suddenly). We, his children, would have been embarrassed by this phrase in conversation with him. But it was true. And his dry, at times sardonic humour was a good balancing element.

If I had to choose a representative selection, it would definitely include Coming into the Clyde, Space Window, Ballad of Old Sox, Message to my Grandson, Canberra Autumn, Flying to New Zealand, Forestry, Colours, Pause, Rain after Drought, The Gull, Creation, Metamorphosis.

The feeling of imminent war, the thoughts of those involved, as well as the aftermath are vividly evoked in such poems as The Tunnel, The Tactician, Come Death Suddenly, Alone, Australia 1914, and of course The Jervis Bay.

Poems of loss are many – not least his own acute loss of his beloved wife (Willow Tree Two Years After) and much earlier, of their first child (Surmise). The loss of friends is marked in such poems as Banquet, the loss experienced by friends in Relativity. The loss of animals, whether pets or intruders, also produced poems (Farewell to Skye, Mousetrap). Open to dispute on its details, his poem The Extinction of the Tasmanian Aborigines nevertheless is a genuine expression of the horror he felt on first reading an account of a national loss.

Michael often chose to see the world from a perspective beyond it. Poems reflecting this include To Our Grandchildren, Splitting the Red Box, Canberra Autumn, To J S Bach, The Old Convict Church at Port Arthur, Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto, The Honey Man and Milton Blind.

His humour had a great appeal. Talk to the Willow reflects the generations of schoolmasters in the family. Ballade of Suburbia (written at school) and the post-war Punt Counter-Punt were enjoyed by his contemporaries, while Equal Rights for Emus has a quasi-political tone which could never be accused of being rarified. He loved and was amused by his grandchildren, usually supplying a birthday poem, even if the recipient was only one, as in Anna-versary. And for as long as I can remember, he relished fitting words to tunes – the less likely, the better. A Lambeth Garland supplied the other half of a commission I received for a song cycle for vocal quartet and piano duet, marking and celebrating the renovation of the Lambeth Palace Garden in London in 1989.

Penelope Thwaites Jackson
July 2015

Penelope’s Choice

  • Ballade of Suburbia

    I’ve never killed a Marquis in a fight,
    Nor led a lovely lady’s feet astray

  • Forestry

    My love and I in all agree
       As one, save this thing only:

  • Colours

    Before I loved or knew you were
       I spoke as I had eyes,

  • Alone

    Alone to walk the dripping woods of spring
       While daisies spy you?

  • Milton Blind

    That dreaming day it was, the bell-like air
    Unclosed the naked admirable heaven,

  • The Tunnel

    This is where the water hurries under the archway,
    This is where we enter the long tunnel,

  • Australia 1914

    Gone away, away,
    Suddenly at a word departed,

  • Come Death Suddenly

    Come death suddenly from the sea or cloud,
    With the blast of thunder and the blinding shroud,

  • The Tactician

    Spring held her fire
    So long, the long pursuit, the watchers wondered
    Would there be ever an end

  • To J.S. Bach

    Now, when the smoking ruins smoulder low
    Of what was Europe once

  • Surmise

    My little son, whose face I never saw,
    Who could not wait to bless your father ’s eyes

  • Coming into the Clyde

    Part of me for ever is the January morning
    Coming into the Clyde in the frosty moonlight

  • The Jervis Bay

    ..The fifth day of November, Fifty North and Forty West,
    Was edging to its departure, like an undecided guest,

  • Punt Counter Punt

    Mid all these problems we’re confronting
    I come to sing the praise of punting! –

  • Flying to New Zealand

    Hauled headlong starward by the quadruple conviction
    Of lion-lunged engines in their pride of power

  • The Gull

    Riding the wind, in planetary sweep,
    The gull wheels on the radius of a wing.

  • Creation

    Straggling off the highway in search of firewood
    Past the tins and bottles, through the rusty wire,

  • Space Window

    Waylaid by Handel’s theme, I think of you
    Now half a world away, and hear you say
    ‘His music always seems like coming home.’

  • Rain after Drought

    Waking to a diapason in the downpipe
    I peer through curtained panes to a curtained sky

  • A Message to my Grandson

    You chose a marvellous morning to be born,
    The orange edge of dawn, the stars paling,

  • A Talk to the Willow

    When you were caught red-rooted in the drain
    You wept of course, but did the same again

  • Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto

    …Listening,
    I am bereft, lost in the mystery
    of music leaping quenchless, undefiled

  • The Honey Man

    Like liquid silk in golden eddies
    the honey laps into my tin.

  • Metamorphosis

    The young magpie, as large as either parent,
    Piteously pleads the pathos of his need.

  • Pause

    You are late coming home
    To the house we share
    An audible silence
    Chills the air

  • Splitting the Red Box

    The tree-trunk rounds, a fallen Doric column,
    are tumbled on the grass beside my gate.

  • Ballad of Old Sox

    They’re burning Old Sox’s shack
    Just two weeks since he died.

  • A Lambeth Garland

    A garden gracious, serene and spacious at Lambeth –
    This is the dream, the vision that shall be its crown

  • Banquet

    ..You they found fallen, holding a garden hose,
    Where, year on year, you watered, weeded, nurtured things to grow.

  • A Place of Meeting: Glimpses of a National Capital

    How name a capital city where kangaroos
    stare between leaves, past dome, construction cranes,

  • Anna-versary

    Anna is one
    What fun, what fun

  • Willow Tree: Two Years After    

    Spring, at a bound. Once more the colourful chorus,
    Daffodils first declare their lyric yellow,

  • Equal Rights for Emus

    Come down from that Crest! It’s Australia Day, Emu –
    We just want to say, mate, how much we esteem you.

  • Canberra Autumn

    Land of the singing light
    Light that first I saw
    Eighty years and more

  • Mousetrap

    With joyless spade I dig the tiny grave
    Asking, who made me lord of life or death?