Geoff Page

Somewhere along the line I've absorbed, without really noticing it, the notion that poetry should be difficult -- if it's not difficult it's doggerel, almost: if it rhymes and has a sense of humour, it's doggerel. Not that I hold these assertions to be true, but they have insinuated themselves into my sense of the world. But hell, if Lawrie and Shirley is doggerel, then let's have lots more like it. It's a rhyming narrative, "A Movie in Verse", about a relationship between a man in his early show more eighties and a woman who's not a lot younger. Each of it's 47 'scenes' opens with screenplay-style directions like 'INTERIOR. DAY', and the story progresses mainly through visuals and dialogue. It's light, funny, has an unsurprising range of characters (middle-aged children who see their inheritances threatened, disapproving former friends, etc), and manages to feel like a romantic comedy, albeit a geriatric one. The great fear that hangs over the characters isn't death -- everyone knows that death isn't far off -- but disability, and more specifically dementia. I wouldn't say it's a major focus, but it crops up from time to time. Like this, our final glimpse of Shirley's favourite aunt Ida, demented in her nursing home:

Ida's vacant, lunar face,

a kind of undiscovered planet
staring coldly into space. show less

I really enjoyed this book - it presents the poems, and then discusses each one, first the meaning, and then the technical details of the poem's construction. It is focussed towards Australian poetry, particularly in the recent poetry section, but the older poetry is international, including the usual English classics.

There are a few great pieces here, but the majority are middling or worse.