Anthology: Collected Poems By Edwin Wilson, Armidale: Kardoorair Press, 2002, 552 pages, paperback, illus., . Reviewed by Steve Evans in the Aug/Sep 2003 issue. Help more readers find out about this article
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In some respects it is difficult to know what to say about Edwin Wilson's Collected Poems. It presents the life of a genial man dedicated to nature, and it seems to be as much an autobiography as a collection of poetry. Wilson himself says, 'My work has been strongly influenced by the natural world (especially plants) but I would not wish to be stereotyped as 'Botanic poet'. Nonetheless, many of the poems are horticulturally inclined and in the main these seem to be the most accomplished in the collection.
Collected Poems is a handsome book, and a bit of a brick with its 479 poems--no I didn't count them; they are already numbered. Elizabeth McAlpine's realist drawings suit the botanically orientated parts of the text admirably.
In the foreword, John Ryan (University of New England) notes that Wilson says he 'had been outside middle-class culture and the pressures of a more rigorous establishment education and so had never been intimidated by the sheer 'weight of literature''. I infer (at my own risk, of course) an air of independent pride about this claim, curious as it is. In any case, Wilson does not fear to raid the canon and does so with humour, but the result is a mixed bag.
Collected Poems is divided into two sections; the first and larger is Mainstream Poetry, and the second goes by the unwieldy title of Juvenilia/Humorous/Parody/Satirical/Doggerel. I question the wisdom of including the latter group of 61 poems, as they are clearly the weakest ones in the book. It's easy to pontificate and say that they should have been omitted altogether when, of course, it is Wilson's prerogative to represent the breadth of his work by including them. I note that they include a poem written when he was 11, which suggests the sheer urge of autobiography rather than of literary merit. The Juvenilia poems frequently demonstrate the worst excesses of the anthology and the reader should not then be blamed for a lower opinion of the collection. The following two examples speak for themselves: Sing a Song of Nadir
Sing a song of nadir
two towers full of traders,
kabulsha, kabulsha --
they both fall down.
Fi-fi-fo-fum
Fi-fi-fo-fum
I sense the heat of the Talibun,
be they alive or be they dead
I'll launch a smart bomb at their head. Apart from any charges of insensitivity or political naïveté, the poems in this section are simply uninspired. Mark Strand has said that: ...the degree to which a poem is explained or paraphrased is precisely the degree to which it ceases being a poem. If nothing is left of the poem, it has become the paraphrase of itself, and readers will experience the paraphrase in place of the poem. It is for this reason that poems must exist not only in language but beyond it. In that case, Wilson's poems are often all surface. They tend to wear their hearts on their sleeves and would seldom pass Strand's test.
Robert Pinsky says that many of his favourite poems '...involve a bridge or space between the worldly and the spiritual. Poetry itself suggests such a dualism, related in ways that I cannot unravel...poetry seems to have a special, enigmatic relation to the worldly world.' There is little that is enigmatic about Wilson's poetry. Earnest and well-intentioned, yes.
Despite Wilson's statement that, 'poems are mysterious, archaic, and anarchic entities that just creep up on you, or jolt you in the head or guts', there is little evidence of either in his collection. They are accomplished works in their own reserved way, but none of them achieves that particular creeping or jolt. So, what does work? The botanical poems, as I have mentioned, were among the better pieces. They reduced Wilson's tendency to sermonise and offered a learned, compassionate angle to one human's engagement with his environment.
I know that some poems in this collection, including a few that I find unprepossessing, can interest an audience. I've seen Wilson read them and gain a positive reaction. His personal delivery enlivened poems that otherwise seemed limp, adding what the page lacks.
Some of that liveliness of mind is evident in a pleasing playfulness, especially Wilson's more inventive pieces, although there was an occasional puzzle. 'Beautiful Numbers' is a case in point. It is a string of numerically based pieces and clearly not a performance piece. I would defy anyone to say they had read the whole of it, so what is it for? Here Wilson presents a logarithmic table, a partial listing of Pi, random numbers, a Fibonacci Series, and more--all of which are baffling enough on their own in a dull way. In the right circumstances, a jokey approach can work well, and Wilson says he has an 'emotional affinity towards the limerick'. Perhaps that is why we are then presented with this segment of 'Beautiful Numbers': Binary Poem
10101010101010101010/
10101010101010101010101/101010101/
10101010101010/10101010101/
101010101010/10101 (repeat)
101010101010/101010101/
10101010101010101010/
10101010101010101010/101010101010/
10101 -- 101010101010101010/
10101010101010101010/1/
101010101010101010 -- 10101/
10101010101010101010/101 I liked the sense that Wilson was pushing beyond language, even if the product was awkward, but its humour is beyond me. One might argue that not every poem has to be readable, of course, but I am at a loss to say what about the above segment is an original thought. It is amusing as an idea, but a poor poem - why bother to actually do it? There are others like this; they teasingly suggest that Wilson could accomplish more if he were more demanding of himself.
The end of the book comprises 12 pages of autobiographical notes and then 72 pages of notes about the preceding poems. The effect is wearying unless one has decided that the appeal of the collection is its representation of Edwin Wilson the man. The book has to succeed primarily as a work of literature, however.
Had Wilson been more selective rather than inclusive about his material, I would still have wished for a copy editor to go through the text. The frequency of spelling errors was a disappointment altogether too common these days, even with commercial publications. Paul Keating might be amused at the consistent wrong spelling of his name, but I doubt it.
I'm all for quirk and seeing things aslant. Sadly, there is precious little of that in Wilson's collection. His poems are often humanistic and endearing but seldom surprising or challenging. I'd hoped that 479 poems would provide some proof that more space needs to be made in our lives for poetry. Wilson's work seldom does. It is not bad; it is simply ordinary. A carefully edited book of his selected works would be a much better proposition. Citation - Steve Evans. 'Review: Anthology: Collected Poems by Edwin Wilson' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), Aug/Sep 2003. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 26 May 2013].
Back Cover Blurb - Anthology is Edwin Wilson's 17th book, and 9th book of poetry.
Edwin Wilson was born at Lismore, in 1942, of Danish/Irish/English stock, whose great grandfather had anglicised his name (from Wilhelm Jensen Sondelev). Edwin Wilson is married with three adult children and lives at Crows Nest, a suburb of Sydney. He spent his first five years in the then isolated farming community of East Wardell, New South Wales, and was known as Peter as a child.
Since 1980 he has worked in Community Relations at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney.
Visitors' Responses Comment On Review
To Steve Evans, Pooh to you, and what have you done to date so I can rip into it too? I am proud of what I have done, especially not having come from a middle-class arty-farty type background. My work is more in the folkloric tadition and the less literary-inclined may have already deduced the little ditty behind the nmbers of the binary poem. That is the point - of the words actually hidden inside/within the numbers - and this is an original idea for a poem in my book, and I am sorry it has had to be explained to you. Edwin Wilson
Edwin Wilson (20/03/1121)
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