The best poets have often been inspired by travel and foreign shores, using their experiences to construct a personal mythology of truth while exploring themes of discovery, culture, and the human experience. One has only to think of Basho, Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Neruda and Whitman. Amongst Australians, there are AD Hope, Judith Wright, Peter Porter, Les Murray, Robert Gray, Alison Croggon and of course John Kinsella.
Anyone who has read any of his c.90 (!) collections of poetry and enjoyed his paintings and drawings will insist that West Australian “poet, painter and professor” Glen Phillips must join this august company. And if they have yet to be convinced, they need look no further than Glen’s latest book of poems, Hamlets and Towers, which pays homage not just to the numerous overseas cities and towns he’s visited over the course of a long life, but to those within his own country.
As Claudia Piccinno writes in her excellent preface to the collection, ‘His poetry… is profoundly linked to the ritual of remembrance for the places he mentions from time to time are inscribed in a map of memory… In fact, it is the details that strike him and not the geography as an end in itself.’
A single example from each of the book’s six sections will serve to illustrate the veracity of this observation.
In Breaking Dreams, there is A Late Spring Snowing in Beijing and the image of ‘early spring sparrows’ perching ‘uneasily on handlebars/of snow-burdened bicycles.’ In Summer Memories, Kerala: At Trivandrum, where ‘later you took my hand/and led me to a lesser temple/where you had already planned/to make me mark my face.’ In Ci Siamo, Northam: ‘The Shamrock Bar’ and ‘Each week the pub set up the room for us/same as the Cricket Club had used/on other nights.’
Then, in Waking at Night’s Old Gold and Toledo Steel: ‘Steel of Toledo comes to mind now/as I mount in memory the steep steps/from Puerta de Bisagra to the city, poised/on its pinnacle above the River Targus’ bends.’ And in How Time Flies, Town by the Bay: Albany, where ‘it’s a grey and yellow day/with torn skies and a wind/streaming across low-set/houses and the straggling/dark trees.’ Then finally, in Memoria, Perth Poppies: WA, ‘But some other day the wind will find/the petals weakened, colour scattered/across grey concrete to empty gutters.’
Red poppies are of course symbols of remembrance; they are, because of opium, also emblematic of sleep. To wake is to remember; to sleep is, perchance, to dream. With these marvellous poems, which as they take us through parts of Asia, Europe, America and Australia vary as much in form and content as the places they depict, Glen has gifted us a vicarious package tour for the ages.