TAYLOR, Andrew (McDonald)

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Nationality: Australian. Born: Warrnambool, Victoria, 19 March 1940. Education: Scotch College, Melbourne, graduated 1957; University of Melbourne, 1958–61, B.A. (honors) 1961, M.A. (honors) 1971; State University of New York, Buffalo, 1970–71. Family: Married 1) Jill Burriss in 1964 (divorced 1978), one son; 2) Beate Josephi in 1980, one daughter. Career: Tutor, 1962–63, and Lockie Fellow, 1966–68, University of Melbourne; teacher, British Institute, Rome, 1964–65; American Council of Learned Societies Fellow, State University of New York, Buffalo, 1970–71. Lecturer, 1971–74, and senior lecturer in English, 1975–92, University of Adelaide. Since 1992 Foundation Professor of English, Edith Cowan University, Western Australia. Member, Literary Board of Australian Council, 1978–81. Awards: Australian Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, 1970; Commonwealth poetry prize, 1986; Premier's award for poetry, 1995, for Sandstone. Member of the Order of Australia. Address: Edith Cowan University, Mount Lawley, Western Australia 6050, Australia.

Publications

Poetry

The Cool Change. St. Lucia, University of Queensland Press, 1971.

Ice Fishing. St. Lucia, University of Queensland Press, 1973.

The Invention of Fire. St. Lucia, University of Queensland Press, 1976.

The Cat's Chin and Ears: A Bestiary. Sydney, Angus and Robertson, 1976.

Parabolas: Prose Poems. Brisbane, Makar Press, 1976.

The Crystal Absences, The Trout. Sydney, Island Press, 1978.

Selected Poems 1960–1980. St. Lucia, University of Queensland Press, 1982; revised edition, 1960–1985, 1988.

Travelling. St. Lucia, University of Queensland Press, 1986.

Folds in the Map. St. Lucia, University of Queensland Press, 1991.

Sandstone. St. Lucia, University of Queensland Press, 1995.

Plays

The Letters of Amalie Dietrich (opera libretto; produced Adelaide, 1988).

Borossa (opera libretto; produced Adelaide, 1988).

Other

Bernie the Midnight Owl (for children). Ringwood, Victoria, Penguin, 1984.

Reading Australian Poetry. St. Lucia, University of Queensland Press, 1987.

Editor, Byron: Selected Poems. Melbourne, Cassell, 1971.

Editor, with Ian Reid, Number Two Friendly Street. Adelaide, Adelaide University Union Press, 1978.

Editor, with Judith Rodriguez, Poems from the Australian's 20th Anniversary Competition. Sydney, Angus and Robertson, 1985.

Editor, Unsettled Areas: Recent Short Fiction: A South Australian Collection. Adelaide, Wakefield Press, 1986.

Editor, with Russell McDougall, (Un)Common Ground: Essays on the New Literatures in English. Adelaide, Flinders University, 1990.

Translator, with Beate Josephi, Miracles of Disbelief: Selected Poems from the German of Christine Lavant, Ingeborg Bachmann, Sarah Kirsch, Ursula Krechel. Canberra, Leros Press, 1985.

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Manuscript Collection: National Library of Australia, Canberra.

Critical Studies: "On UQP's Selection" by Graham Rowlands, in Overland (Melbourne), 88, July 1982; by Heimo Ertl, in Voices from Distant Lands: Poetry in the Commonwealth, edited by Konrad Gross and Wolfgang Klooss, Wurzburg, Konigshausen and Neumann, 1983; "Recent Australian Poetry: The Ordinary and the Extraordinary: Rhyll McMaster, Andrew Taylor, Bruce Beaver, Robert Harris and Jan Owen" by Alan Gould, in Quadrant (Victoria, Australia), 30(10), October 1986.

Andrew Taylor comments:

(1980) Looking back across them, I find that my poems are about the ordinary things of life. They grow out of such things as happiness, a response to the weather, and the more traumatic occurrences that a normal life is prey to: breakup of a marriage, separation from a child, a new being in love, travel, etc. The larger historical dramas and the political scenarios are not for me.

On the other hand, I do not see my poetry as particularly domestic. I try to convey the way the mundane particulars of my life, because they are so pressing to me, conform to larger patterns that express common experience and give it importance. As a result, my poems are an attempt at finding the myth within which we live. (Lévi-Strauss suggests that the number of myths is small but the forms they take almost infinite.) My poems are thus the result of a lot of listening to what is within me.

I have tried to make colloquial speech say what it rarely says in talk. This has meant moving away from the more formal phrasing and cadences of my first book toward a plainer speech that says more interesting things. This has also meant a move toward longer poems, toward multiples, though, rather than narratives.

I suppose you could say I am a city poet rather than a rural or a nature poet, even though the country and the sea are an inexhaustible source of images for me. It is in cities that, for me anyway, most life is lived. I find that in Australia it is still possible to live in a city without totally losing touch with the country.

(1985) Supplement: since writing the above I have traveled extensively and am continuing to do so. This has inevitably had some effect on my poetry, although I have tried to maintain its Australian quality.

(1990) Life in Australia is now far less insular than it was when I began writing. Although much of my time is now spent in other countries, I feel that this is not the threat to nationality I might once; have felt it to be. Instead, it is a challenge to redefine nationality on a less parochial basis, the product of a global revolution in travel and communication.

(1995) Since moving to Western Australia in 1992, I have found myself stimulated by the extraordinary Indian Ocean coastline and the countryside to explore connections between my present life and my childhood spent on eastern Australia's southern coast. My most recent poetry has thus taken, probably temporarily, a semiautobiographical turn.

Australian society has changed greatly since I was young. The emphasis on multiculturalism, the diminution of racism and ignorance, and an eager pursuit of cultural and racial plurality have made the country an exciting place for a writer. Although the circumstances of my life still enable me to travel often and extensively, much of the diversity and stimulus Australians once had to seek abroad is now available at home.

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Andrew Taylor's account of influences on his work, set forth in a paper for a seminar at Macquarie University in 1979, confirmed him as one of the Australian poets growing up in the 1950s and 1960s for whom the surprises in their formative reading came from U.S. poetry. Taylor has shown this influence in an increasing freedom with verse forms and an openness to personally associative progressions within his poems. He surely absorbed these lessons the more readily because, from first publication, his has been an emotionally interpreted world.

Copiously detailed in rendering place and mood, the early poems use solid, richly worked forms—long stanzas, discursive chunks of twenty lines or more, often the three-beat Eliot line. They show openness in their willing use of rhyme, which rarely comes into tyrannical prominence. The academic emerges in a well-bred air of always being informed, but Taylor's real business is listening for the personal suggestiveness that living gives to things. His voice is never raised, and the tone is intimate. The tenderness of his love poems is distinctive, as in "the fur coat." His second book deliberately explores the breaking up of form. In its five parts, the last three referring to a stay in the United States, there are sequences of short numbered segments. Although the poems derive their clearest human appeal from crises in relationships—the death of a father, a love affair—Taylor keeps his world rich with things and weather and is liable at any moment to let a gentle, rather introverted humor play among them.

Perhaps Taylor's most tonally ambitious work is the "Cathedral" section of The Invention of Fire, a celebration of continuing life in love and art. The sequence works very differently from the "Beyond Silence" assemblages of tiny poems that have attracted much notice. The nine "Cathedral" poems have wide literary and historical references, tend to lyrical but intense conclusions, and only (it seems) by a lack of vigilance and sudden pressure allow a nakedly personal cry to emerge:

The whole roof
bursts into earth
at the (careful
of skin cancer you say)
touch of summer
 
villages have burnt like banknotes
for the profit of sunburn lotion
   & you've taken our son away
 
in the vault's wreckage
small pieces of sky
glitter.

The Crystal Absences, The Trout is a sustained love discourse written over two months. It is a fluid, continuous, eager, and intimate communication of memories—current emotional notes—and strains toward a reunion. The labored solidity of Taylor's early manner has given way to a protean short line that registers alertness, while his optimism and unaffectedness keep even intense perceptions from weighing and slowing the poem:

a life in the world
	a barefoot
and sure walk over stones
the feel of a place we know
because it's now thoroughly ours
thus thoroughly other
and can never be known
	ourselves
at home in that mystery
	Parsifal's
divine stupidity
	a shaman's
trust in flight
	a man's
and a woman's trust in each other
a child's confidence in love.

Taylor's staying power and the continuing relevance of his 1980s and 1990s poetry have impressively confirmed his choices. These years also have seen forays into libretto writing, in a collaboration with the composer Ralph Middenway, and the publication of Selected Poems, also reissued with additions, and new books of poetry. Taylor's book on Australia's principal twentieth-century poets, Reading Australian Poetry, is probably the most thoughtful available overview. It follows Judith Wright's Preoccupations in Australian Poetry, published twenty years earlier, in method and usefulness to students and also in illustrating how thoroughly time can dispense with minor figures. Travelling, from the mid-1980s, is a ripe achievement. It includes poems on nature and civilization written from Taylor's memories of more than a decade of travels, mainly to Germany and other central European countries, with his wife, the writer Beate Josephi and his collaborator in a distinguished translation from German of four women poets, and their daughter. In a discussion with David Malouf ("Nature"), wielding the ghazel with a Holub-like gentle mordancy ("Regret about the Wolves"), and traversing Prague, Adelaide, New York, and the cities of what was then Yugoslavia, Taylor shows a versatility that flourishes on the multiplicity of material and comparisons.

Folds in the Map is less closely meditated and suffers from its miscellaneous organization, starting with various reminiscences that include a series on a long-cherished home and an anthology of objects—"Spoons," "Dish Drainers," "Letterboxes," "Pencils," "Stapler," "Spade," and so on. The latter are polished—especially the parody "Thirteen ways of looking at a mirror"—and a good deal happier than the third section, which consists of five lightish, uncomfortable pieces about occupying a chairman's office. The fourth part manages dullness even in what should have been a good bet, "Learning how to win at tennis" as miserere, but four elegiac poems end the section with growing conviction.

The fifth part makes amends. Apart from "London," a less than successful essay in the tetrameter couplet form that Peter Porter adopted from Bishop King, these poems once again take up Taylor's truest vein—observations of landscape, culture, and relationships. Mysteries in the continuity of the European literary enterprise are developed in the opening lines of "In the landscape of the Bros. Grimm":

I've come home to a landscape
not my own. Towers of grass
crane over me and the air
is always twilight, a misty avenue
of birdsong that will never sleep
before I do.

It is the context of history that gives "The Lizards of Tuscany" a finesse and joy unchallenged by the merely urban "Ants" and the comically zoomorphic "Stapler" earlier in the collection.

Among a variety of meditations, the coastal scenery—near Warrnambool, Taylor's childhood home, it seems—is constantly invoked in Sandstone. This sea note at the end of "Testament" is perhaps a debt to Shakespeare:

I'm a child. We're in a rowboat
and we've taken the floorboards up
in the dark, my father holding a flashlight
while we pick the pearls of my mother's
broken necklace from the sludge
of the hull. We will never
find them all, the smallest buds
in the gathering dark, as the wind
rises and our boat rocks, water
and wind, slapping the boards.

Michael Sharkey pinpoints urbanity and tenderness as Taylor's leading qualities. With appreciation of these should go the recognition that he has won from scholarship and experiment a fine balance between ease of talk and emotional tension.

—Judith Rodriguez