One of my great delights is good writing--essays especially. I aspire to be a clear and succinct writer myself. A fine example is Delight as small collection of by pieces J.B. Priestly, in which he tells of things that delight him, as if to contradict what he supposes to be his reputation for grumpiness. One of his delights is clear well crafted writing, of which he writes in chapter Twenty Six of the book. I also like the presentation and typography of British books from the 40s and 50s. They're more compact and economical that what we often have today, with interesting fonts.

At the end of a long talk with a youngish critic, a sincere fellow whose personality (though not his values) I respect, he stared at me and then said slowly: 'I don't understand you. Your talk is so much more complicated--subtle--than your writing. Your writing always seems to me too simple.' And I replied: 'But I've spent years and years trying to make my writing simple. What you see as a fault, I regard as a virtue.'

There was now revealed to us the gulf between his generation and mine. He and his lot, who matured in the early 'thirties, wanted literature to be difficult. They grew up in revolt against the Mass Communication antics of their age. They did not want to share anything with the crowd. Writing that was hard to understand was like a password to their secret society. A good writer to them was one who made his readers toil and sweat. They admired extreme cleverness and solemnity, poets like political cardinals, critics who came to literature like specialists summoned to a consultation at a king's bedside. A genuine author, an artist, as distinct from hacks who tried to please the mob, began with some simple thoughts and impressions and then proceeded to complicate his account of them, if only to keep away the fools. Difficulty was demanded: hence the vogue of Donne and Hopkins. Literature had to respond to something twisted, tormented, esoteric, in their own secret natures.

In all this there was no pose; and here their elders went wrong about them. They could be accused not unjustly of narrowness and arrogance, but not of insincerity. They were desperately sincere in believing that the true artist must hide from the crowd behind a thicket of briers. They grew up terrified of the crowd, who in this new Mass Age seemed to them to be threatening all decent values.

But I was born in the nineteenth century and my most impressionable years were those just before 1914. Rightly or wrongly, I am not afraid of the crowd. And art to me is not synonymous with introversion. (I regard this as the great critical fallacy of our time.) Because I am what is called now 'an intellectual'--and I am just as much 'an intellectual' as these younger chaps--I do not feel that there is a glass wall between me and the people in the nearest factories, shops and pubs. I do not believe that my thoughts and feelings are quite different from theirs. I prefer therefore a wide channel of communication. Deliberately I aim at simplicity and not complexity in my writing.

No matter what the subject in hand might be, I want to write something that at a pinch I could read aloud in a bar-parlour. (And the time came when I was heard and understood in a thousand bar-parlours.) I do not pretend to be subtle and profound, but when I am at work I try to appear simpler than I really am. Perhaps I make it too easy for the reader, do too much of the toiling and sweating myself.

No doubt I am altogether too obvious for the cleverest fellows, who want to beat their brains against something hard and knotty. But then I am not impressed by this view of literature as a cerebral activity. Some contemporary critics would be better occupied solving chess problems and breaking down cyphers. They are no customers of mine, and I do not display my goods to catch their eye. But any man who thinks the kind of simplicity I attempt is easy should try it for himself, if only in his next letter to The Times. I find it much easier now than I used to do, but that is because I have kept this aim in view throughout years of hard work.

I do not claim to have achieved even now a prose that is like an easy persuasive voice, preferably my own at its best; but this is what I have been trying to do for years, quite deliberately, and it is this that puzzled my friend, the youngish critic, who cannot help wanting something quite different. And this habit of simplification has its own little triumphs. Thus, I was asked to pay a birthday tribute, on the air, to C. C. Jung, for whose work and personality I have a massive admiration. To explain Jung in thirteen-and-a-half minutes so that the ordinary listener could understand what the fuss was about! My friends said it could not be done. The psychologists said it could not be done. But I can reasonably claim, backed by first-class evidence, that I did it. It was a tough little task but when I had come to the end of it, I found, like honey in the rock, a taste of delight.

I've just finished Ian Rankin's latest and last Rebus novel, Exit music (2007). A great read and a fine story.

J.B. Priestly has the right idea about reading crime thrillers, in his Delight. (London, 1951, pp.11-13.)

Reading detective stories in bed. I find this delightful at home, and even more delightful when I am away from home, a lost man. The fuss of the day is done with; you are snugly installed in bed, in a little lighted place of your own; and now to make the mind as cosy as the body I But why detective stories? Why not some good literature? Because, with a few happy exceptions and there are far too few of them good literature, which challenges and excites the mind, will not do. In my view, it should be read away from the bedroom. But why not some dull solemn stuff, portentous memoirs, faded works of travel, soporifics bound in calf? Here I can speak only for myself. But if my bed book is too dull then I begin to think about my own work and then sleep is banished for hours. No, the detective story is the thing, and its own peculiar virtues have not been sufficiently appreciated. The worst attempt I ever heard the Brains Trust. make was at a question concerning the popularity of detective stories. The wise men woffled on about violence and crime, missing the point by miles. (But then a man who enjoyed his detective stories at night would not bother being on the Brains Trust.) We enthusiasts are not fascinated by violence or the crime element in these narratives. Often, like myself, we deplore the blood and bones atmosphere and wish the detective novelist were not so conventional about offering us murder all the time. (A superb detective story could be written and I have half a mind to write it about people who were not involved in any form of crime. About disappearance or a double life, for example.) Please remember that most serious fiction now has ceased to appeal to our taste for narrative. The novelist may be a social critic, a philosopher, a poet, or a madman, but he is no longer primarily a story teller. And there are times when we do not want anybody's social criticism or deep psychological insight or prose poetry or vision of the world: we want a narrative, an artfully contrived tale. But not any kind of tale, no fragrant romances and the like. What we want or at least what I want, late at night; you can please yourself is a tale that is in its own way a picture of life but yet has an entertaining puzzle element in it. And this the detective story offers me. It is of course highly conventional and stylised think of all those final meetings in the library, or those little dinners in Soho (with about six pounds worth of wine) paid for out of a Scotland Yard salary but its limitations are part of its charm. It opposes to the vast mournful muddle of the real world its own tidy problem and neat solution. As thoughtful citizens we are hemmed in now by gigantic problems that appear as insoluble as they are menacing, so how pleasant it is to take an hour or two off to consider only the problem of the body that locked itself in its study and then used the telephone. (We know now that Sir Rufus must have died not later than ten o'clock, and yet we know too that he apparently telephoned to Lady Bridget at ten forty five, eh Travers?) This is easy and sensible compared with the problem of remaining a sane citizen in the middle of the twentieth century. After the newspaper headlines, it is refreshing to enter this well ordered microcosm, like finding one's way into a garden after wandering for days in a jungle. I like to approach sleep by way of these neat simplifications, most of them as soundly ethical as Socrates himself. It is true that I may burn my bedlight too long, just because I must know how the dead Sir Rufus managed to telephone; yet, one problem having been settled for me, I feel I sleep all the sounder for this hour or two's indulgence. And what a delight it is to switch off the day's long chaos, stretch legs that have begun to ache a little, turn on the right side, and then once more find the eccentric private detective moodily playing his violin or tending his orchids, or discover again the grumpy inspector doodling in his office, and know that a still more astonishing puzzle is on its way to him and to me!

A friend showed me this for Christmas Eve. I like it.

The Oxen

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.
'Now they are all on their knees,'
An elder said as we sat in a flock
By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where
They dwelt in their strawy pen,
Nor did it occur to one of us there
To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave
In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
'Come; see the oxen kneel

'In the barton by yonder coomb
Our childhood used to know,'
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so.

Thomas Hardy – 1915

I have greatly enjoyed First Names, a book of poems by Simon West, published by Puncher and Wattmann. Dr West is a specialist in Italian poetry, comparative literature and translation studies at Monash University's School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics. His doctoral thesis È tant' e dritta e simigliante cosa: Translating Guido Cavalcanti was awarded the University of Melbourne Chancellor's Prize 2004.

The poems were reviewed by Barry Hill in the Weekend Australian Review, 26-27 May 2007, p.9. My apologies for being too lazy to write my own review -- I'm not a literary critic, but I do want to recommend these verses.

Lyrical poet tuned to earth and sky

One way to think about this astonishingly finished and coherent little book is as an installation meant to demonstrate various moments with language. Here in one part of the room, is the moment when a glance between a man and a woman defeats words. Here is the moment between strangers where what you thought was a mutual introduction turns out to be a play of words. And here is where there seems to be "nothing in a name", or where the mind disperses "the way a herd of goats spreads over the side of a hill--slowly and through the clatter of bells".

These are fugitive moments; the mind can darken. But in the middle of the room is an item called Mushrooms, which is the title of Simon West's opening poem. As the mushrooms "outgrow the dark grounds of their birth to join at last the light of day", the poet reflects:

The soft-fleshed name, mushroom,
of humus and moss, tugged at me
as if it had something to say,
as if it too could be prodded and wielded by the tongue, turned over to expose an underbelly's hidden treasure of gills.

And the bloom of meaning when thought breaks from such pods, then spreads outward
like the scattering of spawn?
Shhh … This tissuey fruit is all syllable, is already
bowing to the moisture of earth.
Mushrooms fulfil their word, and then some.

What you have here is an exactly observed image made with the sound of things, and which has metaphoric power. The mushrooms themselves offer pleasure enough, as do palms, rosellas, starlings, persimmons and clouds, to name some of the things that objectify the titles of other poems in the book. West's graphic power is wonderful, so that you feel, in all of his language moments, of this world.

In fact, you can also step into the book as a set of moods and landscapes beginning and lingering in northern Italy before transporting you to the Mornington Peninsula, the Australian Alps, and as far as the Australian desert (via a reflection on a painting by Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri). The unifying tone is nostalgic, yearning, and quickly latch on to a fertile moment:

A bee deflowers a flower, collecting
pollen like a count of first names,
while man, screened by the fuzz of his own bee-talk,
looks on in envy at a labourer willed by love,
and whose thoughts perhaps lie with her tiny portion of the queen ...
(A Bee)

All the book tells us about West is that in 2004 he held an Australian Young Poets Fellowship, and "was born in 1974 in Melbourne, where he currently teaches Italian".

Yet the reference to teaching Italian is pregnant. His poems invoke the mouthing of words, love affairs with vowels, a sense of the foreign word well digested. The mood of his Italian landscapes reminds me of the modem Italian poet Eugenio Montale, just as his two poems after Guido Cavalcanti, along with the imagist lyrics that follow, call up the figure of Ezra Pound, that passionate disciple of Italy.

A critic cited on the back cover describes West as "a laureate of darkness and a lyrical quester of light". True enough. But better to say that West is a poet beset by the roots and the reach of language. His poems seek the source of speech--the humus of the tongue, we might say, as their mushroomy bed--as much as they celebrate the way our words echo in starlight.

That, I think, is the joy of this book. You read it and feel that here is a poet absolutely attuned to both earth and sky, and who has--all of a sudden in a first book--worked out poems that make the great connections.

West is short-listed for the NSW Premier's Award for poetry.

In a long bleat in The Australian "Pulping our poetry" (07 Jul 07) Rosemary Neil laments big publisher's lack of interest in Australian poetry. She cites a study by University of Queensland Press poetry editor, Bronwyn Lea, who notes a fall of more than 40 per cent in the number of poetry books being published. Lea's study finds that "in the years between 1993 and 1996, more than 250 books of poems were published in Australia each year. By 2006, this figure had been reduced by about 100 titles." Today, Lea says, the vast majority of local poetry titles come from small, independent presses. Some "punch above their weight", winning prestigious literary prizes or attracting big names. According to Lea, however, many independent poetry presses "do not have sufficient access to resources, distribution and marketing to have their books noticed by readers. Under these conditions, the thus far unchallenged maxim that 'poetry doesn't sell' becomes self-fulfilling."

Lea, a poet and academic, believes UQP is the only large, mainstream publisher that still maintains a formal poetry list. UQP publishes five or six poetry titles a year and has on its list eminent poets such as John Tranter and David Malouf. Malouf's first poetry collection in 26 years, Typewriter Music, was released in hardback at the Sydney Writers' Festival last month. Within three days, its print run of 3000 had all but sold out. Lea says this shows that -- contrary to popular belief -- if poetry is properly marketed, it will connect with readers. Her study, published in the new UQP title, Making Books, retraces how "the 1990s heralded a new ethos in Australian book publishing: poetry was no longer presumed to be a prestigious staple on the list of a serious publishing house.

Neil asks, "While we like to profess reverence for dead poets from Shakespeare to Paterson, could it be that readers have little time for living poets?"

For many months now, I have been reading a lot of Australian contemporary poetry, trying to acquaint myself with it and trying to get up to date. Some times, rarely, I find a poem that speaks brilliantly. I am well educated and well read, yet more often than not, I find myself irritated by contemporary poetry as it is literally meaningless -- that is, the words fail to convey any meaning or image to to me as reader; they are simply . . . words.

If poets cannot write poetry that has meaning to the reader (or listener) they will remain unpublished or their publications will be pulped, and deservedly so. If it's good enough, it will sell.

Even apparently good poetry can be obscure. Newcastle Region Art Gallery has had an exhibition/webpages of poems by Australian poets responding to paintings in its collection. Some of these make sense to me, some don't. In this example, distinguished poet Les Murray responds with his poem Definitions to Dale Hickey's Painting 1968. It's a fine poem. Yet it is only because I happen to know a small amount about the Household Division that I could catch a relationship between the painting and the poem. It's all very well for poetry to mean something to the writer, but it must have meaning to the the reader. Here Murray, at least, succeeds. Too many poems tragically have no meaning for anyone.

Definitions Effete: a pose of Palace cavalry officers in plum Crimean fig, spurs and pointed boots, not at all the stamp of tight-buttoned Guards executing arm-geometry in the shouting yards, but sitting his vehicle listening to tanks change gears amid oncoming fusiliers one murmurs the style that has carried his cohort to this day, and now will test them: You have to kill them, Giles, you can't arrest them. --Les Murray The distinctive red tunic is worn by all regiments of the footguards. They are distinguished by the buttons on the tunic, and the plumes in the bearskins -- Grenadier Guards: single buttons, white plume; Coldstream Guards: buttons in pairs, red plume; Scots Guards: buttons in threes, no plume; Welsh Guards: buttons in fours, white and green plume; Irish Guards: buttons in fives, blue plume.