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Dennis Haskell. And Yet ... . WA Poets Publishing, 2020. 88 pages POA ISBN 9780648685029 (Paperback)
And Yet. . Dennis Haskell's ninth collection of poems, is a (late?) string quartet, its four movements attenuating poetic moments, moods and wordplay with poise and emotional intelligence. The first movement 'Afterwards' is a jugular-seeking, sonata-form allegro, spinning words around experiences of grieving after the deaths of his wife, his mother and his father-in-law: 'No matter how blanketed, you can't get warm / because the blizzard of death is blowing / from within; blood leaches from your body / all the dim day and all through the night' ('Go Gently').
Despite the busy, public 'front matter' of these poems-they're set around Perth, but also in Brisbane, Sydney, Taiwan, Arles and the Philippines-there's a persistent elegiac note and more than one echo of Kenneth Slessor's 'Five Bells': 'your voice is louder / now it can no longer be heard, / ... your hand is softer / now it can no longer be held' ('Holding'), and 'Why do I talk to you, despite myself, / when you have done with time altogether? / We who are alive are commanded by time / in all its dimensions' ('The Second Time'). The poems are both conversational and intense, juggling confessionally distant moments of memory ('forgettories' Haskell calls them), fondness, anguish, ironic reflection: 'But scratch the skin of happiness / and you bleed grief in an instant' ('Brisbane Holiday'). Haskell's language is compelling, layered, interrogatory in its orchestration of the 'big questions': 'As if life was a test of absolutes / not gradations' ('On the UP Campus'). The poetry is emotionally labile and holds the reader in a fine, lyrical immediacy with a keen, sceptical gaze: 'Sleepless, I staggered up in the early hours / with an intemperate cough / as though I had got you / caught in my throat'...