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Dimitris Tsaloumas: Stoneland Harvest: New & Selected Poems. Nottingham: Shoestring, £8.

Andy Croft: Letter To Randall Swingler. Nottingham: Shoestring, £2.

     In their joint introduction to this selection from Dimitris Tsaloumas’s seven collections to date, John Lucas and Matt Simpson describe his concerns and subjects as “bred in the bone Greek”, quoting a remark about “the stubborn persistence of Hellenism” in support of the point. Born on Leros, Greece, in 1921, Tsaloumas emigrated to Australia for reasons described by the editors as “both personal and political”, and published in Greek until as recently as 1988.

     Yet this emphasis on Tsaloumas’s Greek origins and antecedents tends to obscure what may be his most interesting quality as a poet, his attempt to fuse Greek and Australian poetic traditions. The excoriations of academia in ‘Apocrypha Homerica’, a poem that consciously rewrites The Odyssey in terms of Tsaloumas’s journey to Australia, is a case in point:

                  Thus,
blasted along the shores 
of Suckdem-Suckdem, past
Arkademea fair in which
the Kolophonics live,
a pungent race; and on
past Derridaea beyond
the rock that sings [...]
hit the parlous rocks
off Bondi Beach. And so,
thinking himself a goner,
he suffered deconstruction
and lost his loving Homer.

The tone here, like A.D. Hope’s rhymed satires or Les Murray’s Subhuman Redneck Poems filtered through Hellenism, contains most of the interest and much of the downside of Tsaloumas’s approach, and the writing is at least as distinctive for its Australian qualities as its Greek allusions, its mix of ‘Athenian’ and ‘Boetian’ sensibilities.

     The poem itself, while intermittently interesting, also shows Tsaloumas’s faults, in this instance an apparent inability to differentiate between the bold Joycean stroke (“Derridaea”) and the crass pun (“his loving Homer”), the attempt to mix a ‘matey’ tone with heavyweight academic references. Tsaloumas’s satirical writing more generally has a tendency to over-literalism, and often reads as though he is not merely chopping up prose, but specific newspaper editorials.

     When ‘Investor’s Breakfast Meditation’ is stuffed with lines of the “I hope/ that Reagan gets all his Bills through” variety, and ‘A Progressive Man’s Indignation’ comes across like Larkin without the poetry (“Why the hell do you grumble and blame tourism/ for everything? What’s wrong with it in any case?/.../ That’s how my fellow countrymen go on”) Tsaloumas is seen at his weakest.

     The strength of Tsaloumas’s lyrics, though, his ability to fuse ear and eye in  memorable ways, is wholly convincing, and it’s interesting to note that the poems first published in English, rather than translated from Greek, tend to be the strongest. Perhaps there’s a loss in the translation of the earlier work, or perhaps Tsaloumas is visibly maturing as the book proceeds chronologically. Either way, there is plenty of convincing work like ‘To The Poet’, which sounds like a kind of Australian-Mediterranean fusion of Robert Graves and Derek Mahon:

Your gestures have precision, yet they conflict
with the manner of your speech. Your words

are wine-purple islands that drift below the bars 
of sunset clouds, when the heron leaves

the autumn shore and night’s only a mile away...

Tsaloumas can also (in his own Homeric parallel) navigate material that risks cliché and sentimentality with a skill that avoids the pull of those currents admirably, as in ‘A Postcard To Matina’:

The boats by the tamarisks on the far left
will sail again before dawn, and with the sun

dripping forge-red a mere three fathoms
above my head in the horizon-filled window

I’ll be thinking again of my fishing days and all
the water-loveliness of child-bright summers...

Maybe there’s a coded subtext here, all those allusions to “far left”, “forge-red” and “horizon-filled windows” drawing the romanticism of the landscape into a revolutionary, utopian vision of possibility, and the political opinions expressed elsewhere certainly encourage this kind of decoding.

     Yet one of the flaws of much ‘politically engaged’ criticism of poetry that it rarely sees how the lyric mode itself, in transforming the familiar and making the imaginitive leap into a qualititively different reality (by “transcending the immediate social circumstances of its own production”, in fact), can embody possibilities that the obtuse literalism of issue-based poetics not only fails to realise, but prevents, since in limiting the reader’s perspective to what already exists, it implicitly denies the possibility of change.

     In this sense, Tsaloumas’s most radical poems are his least overtly politicised, and in making the attempt to fuse two poetic traditions, the Greek and the Australian, his poems redefine both tradition and the present, remaking both the Western canonical tradition of Greek poetry and the idea of Australian nationality in his own image: an affront to parochialism of all stripes.

     That he achieves this, at his best, through the medium of the cadenced lyric, with its supposed mystifications of social realities, and not through his more overtly satirical work, makes Tsaloumas an intriguing test of current critical orthodoxy, proving that metaphor is a more powerful tool for opening minds than any amount of institutionalised, academic theorising. I’d like to think there’s a coded point to this effect in ‘A Summer House’, but perhaps I’m just imagining it:

Between the stone-pine and the cypress
the house stands, pensive as the moon,

shuttered against the fierce glare of the sun.
Sometimes, when the sea is a windy blue

and gold hibiscus tips stain the corrugations
of the cicada’s song a scarlet red,

it seems remote as its beginnings and whiter
than any white you’ve seen before...

     In Letter To Randall Swingler, Andy Croft’s pamphlet-length exercise in sustained invective drawing parallels and distinctions between the 1930s and the 1990s, the small ‘c’ conservatism of satirical literalism is very much the primary mode. The “skilful traditionalism” noted by Guy Russell in his assessment of Croft’s exchange with Sean O’Brien (see Thumbscrew 11) is clear from the outset, and within this limitation Croft can be very funny:

These days Old Grigson’s bite has lost its savour,
   And Eliot’s reputation has been revised,
And Cecil’s down but Louis’s back in favour,
   And Laurie Lee has just been televised,
While Wystan’s now regarded as a raver,
   And bloody Orwell has been canonised...

Compared to the wit and formal dexterity of John Fuller and James Fenton’s verse-letters, or Auden’s address to Lord Byron, whose form Croft’s poem appropriates, Letter To Randall Swingler is often awkward and prosy. But it’s an authentic outburst, a disenchanted, sustained invective against Blair’s Britain, the literary scene, publishing and much else besides. Not afraid to hit low, Croft has a few sharp points to make, does a fair bit of floundering, and all in all the piece is a diverting, if not exactly enlightening, exercise.