OWEN, Jan

---

Nationality: Australian. Born: Adelaide, South Australia, 18 August 1940. Education: University of Adelaide, 1958–62, 1974, B.A.1963. Family: Married 1) Balazs Bajka in 1964 (divorced 1972), one son and one daughter; 2) Anthony Brown in 1972 (separated 1995), one son. Career: Laboratory assistant, Waite Institute, Adelaide, 1957–60; library assistant, 1961, librarian, 1962–64, 1966, Barr Smith Library, Adelaide; librarian, South Australian Institute of Technology Library, 1969–71, Salisbury College of Advanced Education Library, 1971–75, and Technical and Further Education College, Gillies Plains, 1981–84. Since 1985 creative writing teacher in schools, colleges, and universities throughout Australia. Awards: Ian Mudie award, 1982; Jessie Litchfield prize, 1984, for Boy with a Telescope; Grenfell Henry Lawson prize, 1985; Harri Jones Memorial prize, 1986, for Boy with a Telescope; Anne Elder award, 1986, for Boy with a Telescope; Mary Gilmore prize, 1987, for Boy with a Telescope; Wesley Michel Wright Poetry prize, 1992. Agent: Margaret Connolly, 17 Ormond Street, Paddington, New South Wales, Australia. Address: 14 Fern Road, Crafers, South Australia 5152, Australia.

Publications

Poetry

Boy with a Telescope. Sydney, Angus and Robertson, 1986.

Fingerprints on Light. Sydney, Angus and Robertson, 1990.

Blackberry Season. Canberra, Molongolo Press, 1993.

Night Rainbows. Melbourne, Heinemann, 1994.

*

Manuscript Collection: Australian Defence Force Academy (University of New South Wales), Canberra.

Critical Studies: "Being Observant, Keeping Faith" by Alan Gould, in Quadrant (Sydney), April 1995; interview with Jenny Digby, in Island Magazine, 65, 1995–96.

Jan Owen comments:

My poetry is lyrical for the most part but often with an ironical or humorous edge. Common themes are transience and loss, contradiction, the hidden or other; I am drawn to difference, to otherness, and to the implicit rather than the explicit, what is hidden within (not beneath) appearances. I would like to be able to say, "Nothing alien is alien to me." So I write about the tiny and the faraway, stars and insects, other times and places. My subject matter is fairly wide and includes modern physics, math, and grammar, as well as exploration, war, art, trees, gemstones, domesticity, relationships, childhood. Imagination and perception come before introspection for me, and other people are perhaps the most common subject of all; the human psyche seems to infiltrate even poems on carnations, tektites, zippers, etc.

My early work has been called exuberant, philosophical, funny, but more recent work is darker in tone and subject matter, though humor is still evident; I am working on a manuscript of parodies at the moment.

I write in traditional rhymed forms—a lot of sonnets—as well as free verse. Sound is very important to me, and I think Plath, Roethke, Judith Wright were influences here, as well as the rhymes taught me as a child, the early Australian ballads, and poems such as Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner" read and learned at an early age. I admire the Australian poets Gwen Harwood and Les Murray, the Americans Galway Kinnell, Randall Jarrell, Frost, Ammons, and Sharon Olds, and the Eastern European poets Zbigniew Herbert, Miroslav Holub, and Wislawa Szymborska. Yehuda Amichai is also certainly a poet I hope to learn from.

It has been said that I write poems that deliberate, that I attempt to reconcile a thing's meaning with its being. According to Alan Gould I share with Plath and Hughes "the notion that a peculiarly rich ground for poetry is that which falls between the eye's capacity for precision and focus, and the intellect's knowledge that all significances, no matter how glittering, are unstable."

*  *  *

Jan Owen made an immediate impact on many of her fellow poets and contemporaries with her first collection, Boy with a Telescope, published in 1986. It received two of the important honors reserved for new poets in Australia—the Anne Elder prize and the Mary Gilmore award. Even before her first book, however, she had been noticed, and during the early 1980s she won several prizes for individual poems and was published regularly in journals and, later, anthologies. Many critics felt that her work, after the larrikin decade of the 1970s, represented a return to standards of craft and poise and a concern for subtlety and nuance. In the sometimes abrasive Australian poetry scene of the 1980s her work was hailed by Chris Wallace-Crabbe and others as evidence of a new generation of poets reaching maturity and writing without ostentation or gimmickry, something always regarded as dangerous in the local cultural environment, where laconism is more highly regarded than bravado.

Owen's second collection, Fingerprints on Light (1990), maintains the sensitivity to detail and concreteness of image that can resonate beyond itself. These qualities can be seen, for example, in "Digging Potatoes":

My grandfather turned the earth
all morning long in the skittery autumn sun
on the weedy patch by the stable wall,
stacking unsteady pyramids
of dirty dimpled knees in the bonfire air
while the tame-tease willy wagtail
skimmed the flung-up clods
and thought me a rival for witchetty grubs.

The ten-page sequence "Write to Me at Rochefort" displays Owen's ambition and willingness to work on a larger canvas. It is within a tradition well established in Australia, what is known as the voyager poem. Early navigators and Pacific explorers have inspired many poets since Kenneth Slessor's landmark "Five Visions of Captain Cook" (1931). Owen's poem is based on early French voyagers, and although it uses the devices of diary entries, letters, and impressionistic notes, it maintains her characteristic lyric tautness and concludes with a reference to the Aborigines and their encounter with change. The use of Aboriginal words in the last section carries allusions to the earlier Jindyworobak movement of determined Australianism, as well as to the later, environmentally inspired attempt to reclaim a wider Australian heritage. The following lines are from "Eora Tribe":

Shaking their wings like this
like this like the clan of Gareway shaking their wings
over the place of Sting-rays shaking their feathers
those people pale as the moon Yenadah
folding their wings to the place of Sitting-Down
those people pale as bone
making the horns of Yettadah on their boughs
following running water looking for food
calling the earth boodjeri
calling the fire boodjeri
resting by Jujabala
resting in the place of Making Canoes.

The influence of Les Murray's "The Buledelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle" (1976) is also evident here. (Murray's bucolic concerns may be thought to be evident in other of Owen's poems as well, though her own impeccable lyricism and sharpness identify her work more tellingly.)

Blackberry Season (1993), which offers a greater refinement in these qualities, was quickly followed by Night Rainbows (1994). The latter is a rich and varied collection that can move from the eight-poem sequence "Describing Words" (more frolicsome and virtuoso than Judith Wright's earlier sequence "Some Words") to a Christian nativity sequence ("This Marriage") and a skillfully wicked set of parodies on fellow Australian poets ("Impersonations"). The impression in this book is of energy, flow, release, and an increasingly flexible and vigorous craftsmanship. In her impressive corpus of work Owen has shown every sign of increasing mastery and outreach.

—Thomas W. Shapcott