- The Foliage and the Underworld, by Michael Sharkey. Puncher & Wattmanan. $25.
It is always a pleasure to read poets writing confidently in an old and honourable tradition which they well understand - especially when they give it a contemporary twist of their own. Michael Sharkey is one such poet and the tradition of merciless satire in well-turned verse goes back at least to eighteenth century poets such as Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift - and to Latin poets such as Catullus and Juvenal before that.
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The Foliage in the Underworld is divided into two sections, "The Common Room" (more personal and nostalgic poems) and " The Good Life and Others" (more wide-ranging and explicitly satirical poems). Many of the poems in both sections are distinctive for their (relatively unfashionable) use of iambic pentameter and for their simple, declarative one- (or two) line syntax - often involving jarring but witty discontinuities of subject matter.
Like other poets in the tradition, Sharkey implies, but does not portray, an earlier utopian period when humans were more decent and society less superficial.
One of many examples of the book's dominant tone can be found in a stanza from "The Consolation of Philosophy": "Life's a diatonic run of notes. / The custom of the country's battering wives / and screwing children got by former wives. / My natal state is covered in black smoke."
Like Juvenal long ago, Sharkey can often be shocking - but no less shocking than the faults he is exposing to censure and/or ridicule.
The collection does, it must be conceded, have other tones as well - but not very often. There's "City Circle", for instance, a nostalgic poem about the girls of his adolescence who, like Villon's "snows of yesteryear", have so inexplicably disappeared.
It's followed immediately by "Impromptu", a short, affecting poem about a granddaughter who, on the cusp of adolescence, seems to have been: "so shaken, on discovering / she had turned into a woman, / that speech left her; / not from shyness / in our presence but / bewildered by the world / that had unmade her."
The form is looser here, the tone less sardonic, as if perhaps to emphasise the harshness of the rest of the book.
Other exemplars of Sharkey's approach might well include Clive James and Philip Larkin.
Unlike them, Sharkey is reluctant to use a regular rhyme scheme across a whole poem even though he often employs the device in passing for comic effect.
Whether or not this decision is a wise one, readers of The Foliage in the Underworld (as they smile) will have to decide.
- Geoff Page is a Canberra poet.
