Necessity: Poems 1996-2006, Barry Hill

" Barry Hill's Necessity is a book of lyrical and philosophical poetry that convinces us, with intellectual clarity, that contemporary poetry matters. Its historical sweep, imagery and emotional punch all help create a new geography for the reader to inhabit. A world torn apart by war and revolution, a site where Eros presides over ruins and new foundations. Here the poet's awareness is informed by Ezra Pound's line, 'Nothing matters but the quality of affection.' Hill is a great technician, calling on political and literary figures from Shelley to Gramsci and Milosz. He maps a spiritual journey as he reflects on various 'necessities' - from collective actions grounded in working-class Australia to acute insights in the temples of India. Necessity is a luminous book, one to savour. "

- Robert Adamson

Brief description

The fifth published volume of poetry by acclaimed poet, editor, novelist, essayist, and librettist Barry Hill, Necessity is a transcendent celebration of freedoms - social, spiritual, personal - in the tradition of the finest lyrical and philosophical poetry. Familial and collective events and calamities; glorious defiance, and resistances verging on the devotional, rub shoulder to shoulder with the poet's own deepening spiritual compulsions, insights and optimism. Political, intellectual and literary, Necessity offers a decade of necessary poetry from one of Australia's modern masters.

About the book

"Necessity is a collection of poems that register ways in which we recognise our freedoms - social, spiritual, personal," says Hill, of his fifth published volume of poetry. "It starts with an elegy to my trade-unionist father and ends in a Buddhist temple in the Himalayas, where I was a couple of years ago. In between, the poems set up a dialogue with loved ones, with friends, and with the ghosts of literary forebears in response to romanticism and its revolutionary tradition. Two cantos, one on the Russian Revolution, the other on Shelley's radical idealism, are also dialogues with my son, Joe. The first was sparked by our discussions about Lenin, when he was doing sixth form history: our argument was all too reminiscent of the rows I used to have with my father when I was a boy. The Shelley poem was a way of talking about 'ideas', while responding to the walks and climbs my son and I used to do on the Bogong High Plains."

Throughout the collection, Hill shadows collective events and calamities in various settings - Leningrad, Warsaw, Rome, and Calcutta, as well as Melbourne, most notably the MUA dispute on the waterfront in 1998. The central section of Necessity, 'The Prince', invokes, according to Hill, "notions of civic nobility to engage with history in the spirit of Gramsci's 'pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.'"

"The poems register, in different ways, Marx's aphorism that 'freedom is the recognition of necessity.' But it is not a Marxist book, far from it: towards the end of the collection, the necessities also include my own deepening compulsion towards Buddhism. There is no 'contradiction' here, as, I hope, the poems suggest. When I got to India, and had to write poems arising from matters of the spirit, I was the same person who takes strength from the traditions of resistance that live in Europe and Australia."

Compared to his earlier, intensely lyrical and more 'private' collections, most notably 2001's The Inland Sea, Necessity is a work that belongs to a public space. "That is one reason why getting another poetry book out is as exciting as it always was. I've always written poetry, but the task of finishing long prose projects has often prevented sending me them out. In Necessity I've pulled together the poems that have helped me stay sane - politically - over the last ten years or so. It expresses a good whack of my social/political self, which is, I also have to say, not all of me."

As cold be expected of a collection sampling from ten years of writing life, Necessity abounds with the poet's many historical and poetic influences. "Walt Whitman loafs in the long narrative poem about a young Australian working man's act of defiance, in 'From the Railway Canteen'. The spark to the poem was an actual event before a Royal Commission into the building industry. Victor Serge was, literally, in my back pocket when I was down at the docks during the MUA dispute. Ezra Pound, for historical as well as poetic reasons, is close to my long poem about Gramsci in prison. D.H. Lawrence is here because I went to see where he lived in Sicily, and because his open, deep, candid speech is salutatory. And - one other presence - the intellectualising, historically awake, lyricism of Milosz helps keeps one's courage up. It's not that any 'favourite poet' has had anything to do with Necessity - it's more a matter of other poets keeping company with particular poems."

Excerpt from the book

A LONG SWIM

Swimming out there
Musculature in ultramarine,
In weed-green sea
You can think 'mackerel'
Till you're blue in the face
But you go like tow rope -
Heavy, frayed, stretched
From pier to pier
From year to year

Entering at the southern one
Mind finned with intent
Crossing crags and sea-grass
Gutters gouged by ebb tides
Rays much wider than beds
Their glide-aways heavenly
Over sands that cloud the hourglass
In light that breaks the light,
Squid invisible, abalone opalescent,
The flood tide your freedom
Its reverse your test of worth

Emerging at the northern one
Your body out of water
Your flesh, on arrival
The underside of flounder,
Each tooth in your head
A little colder, your sense
Of time like coral

from SIX SONNETS CHOKING ON THE WAR IN IRAQ

Rumi's Dancing Shoes

I read my anti-war poems in Persian heat
the kind of heat that puts a lid on argument
and leads to sleep or treachery or war.
I can feel my categories melting.
How stale the modern activist rhetoric.
Too easy it is to hate back.
My mouth tastes like dog meat.

My father used to say, 'like this,' and
cupping a hand over his teeth, exhaled
to check on his own breath. Then,
a blacksmith pounding on History's anvil, he'd say
those heavy principled things all over again. Whereas

I want my words, like Rumi's dancing shoes
to be alight with hope.

Bio

Barry Hill is an acclaimed writer in several genres. His fiction - two novels and two collections of short stories - has been widely anthologised. His first collection of poems, Raft: Poems 1983 - 1990, was runner-up for the Anne Elder Award. His Labor history, Sitting In, won the NSW Premier's Award for Non-Fiction in 1992, and his long narrative poem, Ghosting William Buckley, won the same Award for Poetry in 1994. His 2001 sequence of poems, The Inland Sea, arose out much travelling and researching in Central Australia, as did Broken Song, his biography of TGH Strehlow, winner of two Premier's Awards and the National Biography Award. His Overland lecture, The Mood We're In, circa Australia Day, 2004, won the Victorian Premier's Award for Best Essay. Recent work has appeared in The Best Australian Essays of 2003 and The Best Australian Poems volumes from 2003 to 2006. His most recent poetry collection is The War Sonnets. He lives by the sea in Queenscliff, Victoria, with his wife, the singer/songwriter Rose Bygrave.