Jeremy Lockhart Nelson, Sic Transit Gloria Mundi, Amazon, pp201, £12
The Australian poet Jeremy Lockhart Nelson, now in his ninety-first year, has published one-hundred-and-sixteen poems under the title Sic Transit Gloria Mundi. Nelson has followed the poet’s vocation since he was sixteen and has over the years published poems in many magazines and journals, mainly in Australia. Some poems remain unpublished in the safekeeping of a Sydney archive.
The Catholic faith of his childhood has waxed and waned during the course of a life scarred by alcoholism (his father’s and his own), depression and divorce, but was never entirely absent from parenthood, sustained exploration of Hindu culture and spirituality and the persistent discipline of writing poetry. These poems, to be read more as the variegated lights of a stained glass window than a constructed growth of the poet’s mind, are intensely personal, revealing vulnerability and mental anguish but also a childlike joy in descriptions of natural beauty and human love. Many are addressed to a child, a friend or his wife.
The poems are direct and spare, unencumbered by contrivance of diction or technique, yet form and subject are well matched in both blank and rhymed verse. If the test of a poet is the writing of a memorable line, Nelson has a claim to many successes: “the serpent’s egg whose catch kills love”, “across its green,/ bird shadows pass, squirrel-swift,/ and out of sight the crows debate/ in black tongues”, “He, through the Hurler of Stars,/ opens the galaxies,/ hurtles the heavens”, “a schoolgirl mastering Pythagoras/ smiles at ease in her noontide dream/ of squared hypotenuse”. There are many more.
To lucid images cling complex memories and emotions. A peppercorn tree outside a convent school retains recollections of childish Catholic-versus-Protestant chants, a concrete cell “remembered love”, a photograph recording “my father’s face…under dark brows/ his eyes…soon to be swamped by grog and politics”. A prose poem describes a wife bearing her husband’s broken body; she “takes up his weight like a Cross and bears him inside”. A Sanskrit scholar “precise for knowledge…bows/to print and manuscript, and his eyes/ that focus the scattered tongues/ draw to his hearth wisdom’s fire”. Suicide is attempted as “the flesh shrinks back along the butcher’s cleft”. Listening to Bach’s cello suites, the poet hymns Vincent van Gogh:
And when I contemplate
these pale blue flowers
spined with gold
that stand on tall green stems
like joyous acclamations –
I think of you, a friend I cannot meet
until the Last Day dawns
annulling pain and death.
And then I’ll sing
my thanks and praise for you
who in your youthful passion
preached Christ’s word to Flemish miners once,
while they like slaves
in lamp-lit tunnels
swung steel picks
to rip the rich man’s wealth
from ravaged earth’s dark,
infernal, dust-choked pits.
The poems are grouped in sections: Children, Stories, Portraits, Seasons, Landscapes and Cityscapes, Guardians and Messengers, Theoria, Darkness, Prayers and Sacred Songs. While these sections provide a kind of thematic order, they more importantly hold in tension the paradoxes of a difficult and at times deeply unhappy life apprehended by a mind of fine intelligence and capacity for detailed observation. At their best Nelson’s poems have the translucent, bisectingsharpness of natural Australian light. Thus pass the glories of this world, as the title of this collection recalls. And its dedication, Ad Maiorem Dei Gloriam, is more than a mere nod to the faith of his childhood.
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