Here's a quote from John Forbes review of John Tranter's earlier
Selected Poems (UQP): (There's more and it's very interesting, at
http://johntranter.com/reviewed/selected-forbes.html
In Crying In Early Infancy (100 Sonnets) Tranter comes close to
abandoning subject for total surface effect. He does this by
undermining the subject while the sonnet form works as a grid, or
rack, on which this occurs. He does not give up his favourite images;
here there are the technical vocabularies, motor cars, 'girls', drugs,
anguish, weaponry and foreign places familiar from his earlier poems.
But now the symbolic value they had is constantly subverted. Also, the
interrogation of History and Culture that fails to hold one's interest
in 'Rimbaud and the Pursuit of the Modernist Heresy' here produces
empty, embellished frenzies that answer their own questions and
self-destruct. One I like a lot is 'Sonnet 89', partly because of the
contrast that can be made between the manic dissolution of the subject
in this poem, and the subject as commentator on the site of the
authentic in Les Murray's 'Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow'. Both are set
against a background of 'Sydney':
I'd like to throw an epileptic fit
at the Sydney Opera House and call it Rodent.
That's what separates me from the herd.
The hand forgives the cutting edge
for what the hand guides it to do.
The knife has no pleasure in it.
I'm eating my way through my life —
they said it couldn't be done
but here I am in the Palace of Gastronomes
crazy about the flavour!
Moonlight along the blade of a kitchen knife
belongs to the ritzy forties, it's nostalgic
like playing the comb and one hundred dollar bill
and calling it the blues.
On 18/09/06, andrew burke <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> And John Tranter's 'Crying in Early Infancy' - a hundred pomo sonnets.
> Naybe he has somem on his site - I'll look.
>
> Andrew
>
> On 18/09/06, Halvard Johnson <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> > You might then think of changing where you're sitting.
> > E.g., you might take a look at what's been done with
> > the sonnet by the likes of Ted Berrigan and Bernadette
> > Mayer, among others.
> >
> > Hal
> >
> > "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously."
> > --Noam Chomsky
> >
> > Halvard Johnson
> > ================
> > [log in to unmask]
> > [log in to unmask]
> > http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard
> > http://entropyandme.blogspot.com
> > http://imageswithoutwords.blogspot.com
> > http://www.hamiltonstone.org
> >
--
Andrew
http://hispirits.blogspot.com/
http://www.bam.com.au/andrew
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