from 'Deep River'

Review of Rivers by Peter Porter, Sean O'Brien and John Kinsella and The State of the Rivers and Streams by Warrick Wynne

Reviewed by Geoff Page

[Australian Book Review - October 2002]

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Warrick Wynne's third collection would, from its title, seem to have much in common with the Kinsella project; in the book's first third, this is the case. Here, the poems are all landscape, geology and weather features, sometimes employed symbolically, as in 'The River of History', but more often used simply for their non-human selves. Wynne states at least part of his credo in the opening poem 'Landscape': 'Mine is the marginal no-place / between suburb and bush, / stony places under electric pylons / or creeks under railway bridges.'

The temperament in The State of the Rivers and Streams is essentially melancholic. Even in the last two-thirds of the book, when human beings appear, the predominant theme is their ephemerality and the triumph of entropy. In poems such as 'The Street of the Dead', 'Reunion', 'The Shortening Leash', 'The Egg Factory' and 'My Father's Advice', Wynne is preoccupied with things that slip away into memory, finite and fading. Fortunately, this is at least partly offset by a number of more epiphanic moments, as in 'Love Poem' and 'Tin Cup', which, even while they are retrospective, recognise that something worthwhile and memorable has happened. 'So love lasts, lies unsoftening, seed-hard. / Until one day a path is re-crossed, / instinct finds you in a forgotten suburb / at a green door / you knew once as well as your own; / it opens, rains pour down, / things begin again.' ('Love Poern')

To judge from his third book, Wynne is a poet who writes directly from his own experience and sensibility. His language is more than sufficiently attentive, thoughtful and vivid to do justice to his particular slant on the world.