Publishing
Under a Medlar Tree
Syd Harrex
Under a Medlar Tree is the latest collection of poetry from highly respected Australian poet Syd Harrex. The poems, as with all Harrex’s work, are characterised by his ‘imagination, humanity, wit, precision, and an assured, well honed technique’.
Syd Harrex is a close contemporary of Graeme Hetherington, being two years his senior. Hetherington names James McAuley as his mentor. Harrex, having been a colleague in McAuley’s English Department for many years would also have been influenced by the twenty-years-older senior poet, a celebrated authority on prosody.
The poetry of all three is characterised by high technical achievement. They strive for clarity of expression, precise imagery and formal control – to be accessible and meaningful. Thematically they seem almost overwhelmed by the awareness of transience and death. McAuley, at least sometimes, had the consolation of Catholicism, without which, for Harrex and Hetherington, the world is arbitrary and often bleak, the experience of love only momentarily relieving the pain before, as it says in a recently published poem by Karen Knight, ‘the dark,/dressed for the opera,/begins its smothering’.
Harrex’s poetry is in a similar position to that Stephen Edgar. It, too, is literate, sophisticated, confidently unfashionable; it too, until very recently, was largely overlooked. The spirit of Harrex’s poetry is, however, very different from Edgar’s. There is a Shakespearean breadth and intensity to the writing in Under A Medlar Tree. That tradition can encompass both the Epicurean and the Stoic, different responses to an almost tragic world view. It is almost as if the fatal flaw of Harrex, as hero/anti-hero, is his lucidity – to see clearly that Eros is the driving force and that in everything, through everything there is death. However, there is also often a lightness in his poems, a playfulness, an ironic distancing which seems to save him from the crush of knowledge and self-annihilation.
Most of the poems have some form of humour. It is perhaps a hallmark of Harrex as a poet, the elegant banter of the existential or cosmic jokester. Taking the book’s title from Shakespeare is probably meant to be both serious and playful. The dictionary defines ‘medlar’ as ‘a small European tree of the rose family, remarkable for its small, bitterly acid fruit, resembling crab apples’. With roses, particularly if red, associated with love, that suggests bitter fruits of love. In Shakespeare’s words, from Romeo and Juliet, quoted on the title page, there are suggestions of disappointments, shortcomings in love or its availability. The humour allows Harris to be mildly salacious. (He is more direct in ‘A Lover’s Anguish in King William Street’, where a sign on a truck ‘is still capable of exciting/the genitalia of exhausted angels.’) He can suggest frustration, pain, loss, as if they were inevitable in the order of things, and at the same time make the awareness of them bearable.
Cultural references range broadly: Keats, Shelley, Yeats, classicial Greek Mythology, the Bhagavadgita, Chinese and Japanese tradition.
The book sings in a wide register. There is an agreeable diversity in topic and tone, style and form. In most poems … there was something to enjoy and return to. There is also a satisfying balance in the selection and sequencing. There is a movement from an initial reference to the painter David Harrex’s skeleton signature, through poems with dead stars, Todeswunsch and so on to the last poem with its re-statement of the inevitability of death, its presence in life and nothing else beyond? Despite the desire that love might overcome death,
Nothing less complicated
than severing of leaf from twig,
of bedside grief from gradual death
can transubstantiate the roses
aflame on the coffin’s breast, nor
chrysanthemums breathing like fish;
fragrancing the dusk with wisps and motes
of mortal music, words, unworded
in the sandstone of brittle sermons;
nor can ghosts in quiescent mist
distance suspicion of presence (that
intimate insect in the eyelashes)
from this face there at the window
which fades as it brightens recollection
while seagulls interrupt the sleep of air.
‘Some Take Wing Sooner Than Others’
Under A Medlar Tree is a tour de force on the mortality complex – time, eternity mutability, loss. It is one poetry collection to make one’s own, one to keep, and also one to buy to give to a friend or three.
Peter Macrow, Five Bells, Winter 2005
ISBN: 0 9751260 8 3
Format: Paperback, 46 pages
Price: $22.00
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