Editorial: 1 September 2010

August 24, 2010 This issue of PIW brings together Dutch and Australian poetry which looks at notions of travel, home and exile. The Australian landscape is one of vastness and variation, with areas of farmland as well as enormous uncultivated stretches of desert, beach and bush. In the Netherlands, on the other hand, space is at a premium. In many parts of the country, the low, flat land, reclaimed from the sea by draining, is as carefully planned out and tended as its cityscapes.

Dutch poet J. Slauerhoff (1898–1936), whose work straddled the late Romantic and Modernist traditions, did not, to my knowledge, visit Australia, but I imagine its expansive landscape would have appealed to him. His brief life was an itinerant one, largely spent working as a ship’s doctor on Dutch vessels sailing to East Asia, Latin America and Africa. Drifters and loners populate the selection of poems published here, in which Slauerhoff’s gaze ranges from retired fado singers in colonial Mozambique to Lisbon’s post-earthquake ruins, from an isolated woman gazing out of a window to lonely sailors reading and re-reading letters while at sea. Although Slauerhoff sees the world with clear vision and in no way romanticises the exotic places he visits, there are things about a travelling life that Slauerhoff does delight in: freedom from the constraints of community norms, the possibility to express one’s true emotions and escape provincialism and tedious routine. For Slauerhoff, home, as described in ‘Letters at Sea’, is a place of “kids, isle, village homes they own – / Which only weddings, births and deaths rephrase”, while in the scathing poem ‘In Holland . . .’, he holds back no contempt for his birthplace: “Holland’s no place for me to bide, / I’d ossify, seize up inside. / There life’s too stolid, too sedate, / Men weigh their words, dispassionate.” For Slauerhoff, homelessness is preferable to being tethered to a place and a set of behaviours and traditions: “Nowhere but in my poems can I dwell, / Nowhere else could I a shelter find” he writes in one of his most famous poems, ‘Homeless’.

Slauerhoff’s work sits alongside that of Peter Skrzynecki, a poet of Ukrainian/Polish background who emigrated to Australia with his family as a young boy. Whereas Slauerhoff’s work embraces the limbo of a home-spurner and outside observer of new places, Skrzynecki’s poetry is one of deep engagement with the Australian landscape, as a place of both exile and home. Scanning the titles of poems by Skrzynecki presented here already gives a sense of the focus of his vision, from Australian pastoral – ‘Bushfires at Kunghur’, ‘Red trees’, ‘Billycart days’ – to migrant experience – ‘Sailing to Australia’, ‘Migrant Hostel’, ‘The Polish immigrant’. Yet, argues PIW Australia editor Michael Brennan, “the pigeonholing of Skrzynecki as first and foremost mildly exotic as a migrant misrepresents him, as much as that misplaced exoticism misrepresents contemporary multicultural Australia”. Skrzynecki’s poems are complex interrogations of themes such as identity, memory, displacement and settlement, issues which integral to Australian consciousness, politics and society today. Michael Brennan emphasises the accessibility of Skrzynecki’s work, and indeed it is the combination of clarity of thought and lyricism that makes his poems so appealing. Of the selection presented here, ‘Hunting rabbits’ resonates in particular, for the way gradual familiarisation of a new landscape is intertwined with coming-of-age, assimilation and masculine identity. ‘In Basho’s house’, meanwhile, seems almost a partner poem to Slauerhoff’s ‘Homeless’: a celebration of the imaginative landscape and dwelling places of the nowhere-everywhere of poetic space.