TRIBUTE

Bruce Beaver — A Poet’s Poet Tom Shapcott

RUCE BEAVER DIED peacefully in his sleep on with elements of surprise, as in the autobiographical recollec- February 17, a few days after his seventy-sixth tion of a rural childhood, As It Was (1979), or the prose sketches Bbirthday. He had been under dialysis for a dozen in Headlands (1986). years, so the news was not unexpected. But it is always At the time of his death, Beaver had just sent a new a shock and a sadness when a commanding poet dies. manuscript of poems to his publisher, UQP. His last decade or Bruce Beaver (born in 1928) published his first collection so had been a continuing battle with kidney failure and of poems, Under the Bridge, in 1961, a time when Australian illness, but during that decade Beaver published several poetry was paddling through some- collections, as well as a New and thing of a lull. The generation of Selected Poems 1960–1990 in 1991, poets who had come to maturity October 1999 in the notorious Angus & Robertson during World War II (Judith Wright, series, which fell apart in the reader’s Rosemary Dobson, Douglas Stewart, Got my gal, got my Lord, got my song hands, due to poor glue and binding. John Blight, David Campbell et al.) — Gershwin, Gershwin, Heyward Although, during his Manly years, had by the end of the 1950s become, he constantly battled with a bipolar in a sense, predictable. The newer It’s come! Spring’s second month with condition, Beaver was a generous and generation was spearheaded by Chris hot and cold days and the last charming host, and the Manly flat Wallace-Crabbe’s remarkable and October in two thousand years. which he shared with his wife, Brenda, zesty first collection, The Music of This time the fin de siecle’s became a meeting place for younger Division (1959): urbane, a bit crazier than even the frogs poets and writers. Audenesque and very Melbourne. could imagine, even though they Beaver was one of the original Beaver immediately announced invented nutty ends of centuries. committee members of Poetry Aus- himself as a regional poet — Manly, This time more bombs, earthquakes, tralia, the important journal begun indeed — and he sustained that floods, droughts, gun-murders as well as by Grace Perry in 1964, and which, capacity to give Manly a soiled, solid, more pink and white blossoms for more than a decade and a half, sordid and singing quality, with the in the perfectly sane streets, full led the way in adventurous poetry whiff of ozone and salt, and an old of not-so-sane human beings. publishing in this country. It resilience that would not be smoth- But most of them are in love, including produced French, Dutch, German, ered by the superficial changes me because we’re still alive Swedish and Irish issues, and regu- of the subsequent decades. enough and the weather’s warming up. larly featured overseas writers of high But it was his fourth collection, It’s like the Old Testament: great poetry, calibre. It was through Perry’s inter- Letters to Live Poets (1969), that lousy theology and a God — national network of connections really put Bruce Beaver in the big damned God — Still there’s the Lord that Beaver was first able to expand picture, as it were. Nothing like this to come in the New Millennium and this new his range of reading so remarkably. had been written in Australia before. Spring. Blossoms and bombs. Every As the 1960s developed, this open- Beaver was not a naturally lyrical Spring’s mad with love and wars, ness to what was new and possible poet; he had inherited something babies and murderers. And if you think I’m in poetry was one of the factors that of the loping awkwardness of not going to keep on chanting about made the Beaver household such Christopher Brennan and R.D. it, you’re nuttier than the century’s end. a stimulating and welcoming place FitzGerald. Letters to Live Poets dis- for younger writers. played how he had honed his long- In his later years, because of limbed verse cadence to a personal style and a universal medication and failing health, Beaver withdrew from that application. These Letters are very much that — epistles to more public role, but the number of poets initially encouraged writers dead or not dead — and it was in this mode of address and nurtured under his wing, as it were, was wide and varied. that Beaver became a master of invention and a self-confident Beaver received most of the major Australian literary awards: conversationalist in a heightened, but natural, word-world. the Patrick White Prize, the Grace Leven Prize and others. His next volume, Lauds & Plaints (1974), developed the Because he was on an invalid pension for most of his writing rhetoric, but the gathering intensity was even more powerful. years, he never applied to the Literature Board for a grant. His The shadow of Rilke became more apparent, though Beaver in second novel, You Can’t Come Back, was published in 1966, doing this was refining his own voice and his language. From and was reprinted a couple of decades later. But it is as a poet, this point on, all his collections fell into place, though often a poet’s poet, that Bruce Beaver will be remembered.

Archived at Flinders University: dspace.flinders.edu.au 60 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW APRIL 2004