Eldershaw

Acceptance Speech for the Colin Roderick Award 2014 for Eldershaw

Eldershaw consists of three interlinked narrative poems and, as the blurb says, it draws on personal experience, reimagined and transformed through the lens of fiction. They do not exactly constitute a verse novel. You could, I suppose, think of the book as a novel in which only the crucial episodes are related, while all the connecting and subsidiary matter is omitted: a series of highlights that jumps from place to place and time to time over the years, leaving the reader to join up the dots. An acquaintance of mine, the American poet Joshua Mehigan, characterized this as “the purposeful omission of context”, a description for which I am enormously grateful to him; now if anyone complains that I have left out vital details, I can reply: “Oh, no, no, no. That is purposeful omission of context.”

My reason for writing the poems was simple enough: to make some record of the lives of three people, in particular, whom I loved, my first partner, Ann (called Helen in the poems), and my parents, and in doing so to unburden my mind of a freight of accumulated emotions, explored in other ways elsewhere in my work from time to time; and, in the case of Ann and my father, both of whom are now dead, to give some final shape to my feelings. Just as the apparent hauntings in the poems are really a figure for the psychological and emotional conflicts of the characters, so they are perhaps a counterpart for the way these people have haunted my memory. So the poems may be an act of exorcism as well as an expression of love.

They are also quite a good read, I think. In fact, my original motivation for writing the title poem, “Eldershaw”, was to preserve some of the marvellous anecdotes that Ann had told me over the years of events in her earlier life, before I knew her — anecdotes by turns moving, and funny, and horrifying. The whole book grew out of that. The nonchronological arrangement of the sections in the title poem is perhaps partly to reflect the haphazard operation of retrospect and partly the emotional disorder being represented. Originally each of the poems was conceived as a separate work, but in due course I saw how they could form a loosely connected narrative, even though the connection of the second poem, “The Fifth Element”, to the other two lies in the solitary mention of Helen’s name. The seed of “The Fifth Element” lay in my mother once mentioning to me the episode which opens that poem, when my father, after returning from the war, observed that, in contrast to the green of England, the Australian landscape seemed to him dead. And it struck me that he was projecting onto the external scene his own psychological wound, a wound extending through his subsequent life, and leaving its mark on us*. The third poem, “The Pool”, is a logical extension of the title poem and deals with my own relationship with Ann/Helen, its beginnings at any rate, and her death, though curiously enough, the image of that haunted seaside pool itself was grafted on to the poem from an originally separate idea and was linked with a separate narrative strand which I ultimately dispensed with.

Why did I cast the poems as fiction? Well, in the first place because, despite their basis in fact, I have invented certain details, altered chronology and events, conflated characters; also in part to give myself some emotional distance from the events, a bit of artistic elbow room. Partly too because, especially in the first poem “Eldershaw”, if I had identified real people by their actual names I would have been morally obliged to do a deal of research to make sure I had got the facts right, and I had no wish to write that sort of poem. It was the emotional truth I was after, not factual accuracy. Having used fictitious names for the first poem, I had to make the other two match. For the record, the house Eldershaw is in reality called Ashfield, and is in Sandy Bay in Hobart. And the painter Wil Gaudry is the writer Hal Porter, who himself wrote about Ashfield once, giving it the poetic but unlikely name of Cindermead.

* In his poem “See Naples and Die” Anthony Hecht uses an epigraph from Simone Weil which is apposite here: “It is better to say, ‘I’m suffering,’ than to say, ‘This landscape is ugly.’

Sample poems from Eldershaw can be read here.

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