Kenneth Slessor: Selected Poems

"Beach Burial" makes the anonymity of the war dead audible before it states it. The long, dissolving lines rock like water working at the graves, sibilance murmuring like surf and shifting sand, until "The sob and clubbing of the gunfire" enters with heavy, adjacent stresses that stop the falling cadence dead. The gravemarker reading "'Unknown seaman'" is the poem's saddest stroke, standing for a man the war has stripped of identity, while the damp of the wet season washes out the pencilled inscriptions on the crosses - the elements rub out the one mark of who they were, and shared, nameless death levels friend and enemy into a common humanity.

"Out of Time" arrives at the same uncomforted mortality by a different road. Slessor personifies time as a vast, ceaseless force with the presence of an adversary, and sets against it the fleeting moment of release that seems, for an instant, to stand outside the flow. The poem's cyclical, onward structure imitates time's own continuous passage, returning the mind again and again to the same longing, so the form encloses the self inside the current it is thinking about and the defeat becomes structural rather than stated.

Memory and grief get their most physical treatment in "Wild Grapes", where the surviving vine's fruit is "small, pointed, black, like boughs of musket-shot", sweetness and violence yoked in a single simile. The remembered girl is "half-fierce, half-melting", her fate withheld in the unresolved alternative "Kissed here, or killed here", so the reader sits inside the same unclosed grief the speaker carries.

Other poems bind the self from inside and corrupt it from above. "Gulliver" relocates restraint into the body itself - "this tyranny of sinews", "a hundred ropes of nerve and bone" - and its anticlimactic catalogue of "love, hunger, drunkenness, neuralgia, debt" insists that lives are held motionless by drudgery, not dragons. "Vesper-Song of the Reverend Samuel Marsden" opens on the contemptuous "my cure of souls, my cage of brutes" and recasts flogging as "a scarlet grace for holy meat", torture rendered as a grotesque parody of communion.

Against all this, "William Street" mounts a defence of the ordinary world: the refrain "You find this ugly, I find it lovely" stages two irreconcilable readings of the same street, its glamour grounded in "Smells rich and rasping, smoke and fat and fish". What unifies the selection is the refusal of consolation - a secular poet closing on the open fact of limitation, representing loss and mortality as we actually meet them.

Slessor's poetry is studied in the HSC English Standard and Advanced Common Module: Texts and Human Experiences, which asks how texts represent individual and collective human experiences and the emotions and qualities that arise from them. BTA's expert English tutors work with students one-on-one on exactly that skill - find out more about English tutoring at BTA or explore our HSC English resources.