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...........
........... ........ |
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Of
Muse, Meandering and Midnight, Samuel Wagan Watson.
University
of Queensland Press, 2000
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Many of the
sentiments conveyed in Samuel Wagan Watson's prize-winning
three-part collection of poetry startle with their apparent
contemporariness and ability to put into a beautiful
Brisbane vernacular thoughts that are both new and also
capable of spanning cultural divides with their directness
and sincerity. It is not a new observation that mainstream
views of indigenous issues often become skewed through
a media dealing in sound-bytes and a sometimes inappropriately
formal language that rarely reflects the actual desires
of the people it professes to represent; the word on
the ground.
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Watson is
a message-poet writing for a wide audience. It is evident
from his tone, one that at once says "listen"
and "please learn something", that the local
is about to be aired on a larger scale; that although
indigenous Australians have been censored and abused,
every individual, living in different days and different
weather, can sing these same songs.
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Perhaps
what most distinguishes this collection is a detectable
desire to be true - to use language that buys you a beer
in order to get you gold. The three parts, as the title
indicates, called Of Muse, Of Meandering and Of Midnight
track, not so much a wandering minstrel's efforts to get
down a tune drawn from real life, but of stages of thought
on a particular strand. It evokes a concept of how time
changes attitudes, and, just like the Greeks said, if
you think about something for long enough, a revelation
will come. Pythagorean images aside, this collection's
parts could be seen as dealing with, at first, youth and
discovery, consciousness and recognition of one's lot,
and then finally retrospection, resolution, or concern
for seemingly lost hopes. Although some of Watson's verse
indicates that poetically he is not yet wholly master
of his domain, he is most probably the poetical King of
West End and the frequency of lines that stop the reader
in their tracks touts of an artist well on a path to being
a discerning voice. |
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