Still Is
by Vincent O’Sullivan

The poems in Still Is, the latest and only-just-posthumous collection by Vincent O’Sullivan, are steeped in fondness for the world. Marking the end of a brilliant career in letters, they attend not just to the world’s loveliness but its untidiness, its unwieldy rhythms, its random chance.

Throughout this collection, though O’Sullivan’s voice is many things, it’s never polite. He sacrifices refinement for movement, favours what sounds good over what is true (‘no one expects it’s gospel’), and knows that the shapes he’s making out of what he’s seen and heard aren’t necessarily the most complete or proportionate. In ‘Last time’, he spends two thirds of a poem recounting the time he saw thrushes in a garden before he reveals the main event of that memory:

                                 ‘God, the things
you think worth remembering! How many
spots did the thrushes speckle their throats
with?’ you demanded. The same week, that was it,
as your best friend died. But small things
happen, whatever, there’s delight removed
from ourselves, that’s all I’m saying.

Part of O’Sullivan’s charm is that he’s eager to remind us, wherever possible, not to expect too much from poetry. And though he often pops up as a meta-narrator, referring to himself as the poet, he doesn’t take this role too seriously. One poem begins, ‘I have written a story I don’t much/care for’. In another, O’Sullivan brushes ‘poetry’s notions aside’ to focus on the act of hanging out washing without trying to match it with a bulletproof metaphor.

Just as O’Sullivan urges us not to grant too much awe to poetry, he also wants us to know that poems don’t offer us the answers we might want. ‘I don’t go for asking questions once a poem has settled,’ goes the first line of one of this collection’s final poems. Such curiosities about why a poem says what it says or how it got built can’t really be satisfied:

All one does is confess, the colour was hanging about,
blue was loitering with intent before the line was thought of,
the way it demanded, in a manner of speaking,
as a gun at my head, politely insisting, ‘There are times
even in verse, when choice isn’t the question.’

O’Sullivan’s position is that poems are not – or at least not always – within the poet’s control. Often, they happen to the poet, not the other way around. They arise from the dust of the world, ‘loitering with intent’ until he writes them down.

In lieu of seeking to preserve a moment perfectly in time, then, or to relay a concept with perfect clarity, O’Sullivan’s poems aim to notate the cadence of speech and the movement of thought. This poet captures characters through the way they sound, and as with any good dialogue, their meaning is in their cadence more than in what they say. You really hear the people in these poems: you hear – though this sounds silly – their brains working, O’Sullivan’s most of all. When he writes, of a girl he thought beautiful as a teenager, ‘I knew, whatever, I wasn’t in/with an earthly, then or ever’, you see him wringing his hands, telling himself off for his own fantasies. When he records a girl, perhaps his granddaughter, describing how shadows move over the cast of a Greek head on his bookshelf (‘it’s different and it’s so sad/then the way she looks’), you can slip into the quick-moving sentence and hear a voice tumbling over itself in excitement.

Many of the poems in Still Is make explicit mention of the fact that their poet is near the end of his life, but death is something they treat matter-of-factly rather than with acute dread or grief. At the halfway point of the collection, ‘Confessional as it gets’ attempts to resist this pattern of retrospect and memoriam, but even in O’Sullivan’s insistence that he doesn’t spend all his time mourning, wistfulness seeps in:

I’m still one for parties in summer
paddocks, the fat moon poised
on its own effulgence, sharing
a tilted bottle with those who matter,
were they here. But they’re not.
So I don’t.

Those final two fragments, petulantly end-stopped at ‘not’ and ‘don’t’, reveal that attempts to eschew mourning do not always succeed. The absence of friends persists, embitters joyous plans, ruins lovely evenings. It’s just one example of the push-me-pull-you of gravitas and buoyancy that defines so many poems in this collection, and a masterclass in letting a poem commit to two contradictory but equally true attitudes.

If there’s angst in this collection, it’s the existential angst that arises from only getting to have one small life. We cannot see the whole world from the little houses of ourselves. Windows bookend this collection. Early on, O’Sullivan suggests a window might be ‘our first ever friend, the bright edge of our mind’. But near the end of the book, there’s a poem titled ‘The trouble with windows’, and it starts like this:

They are only there because of rooms,
as rooms, when we dream them,
are ourselves, in the dreamed houses
of ourselves.

We can’t truly get outside of ourselves, no matter how much we notice, or record, or how many times we anthropomorphise a tree, a bird, a statue. We can peer out the windows, but we can’t ever get out of these rooms, these houses, O’Sullivan laments. We have only ourselves, only these single lives, once through.

It’s difficult to write about this collection when it seems better to quote from it instead. There’s so much delight in these pages that it’s tempting just to point at them, saying, ‘Do you see how he does this?’ Still Is is never stagnant, always flitting from mood to mood, image to image, like the birds on its cover. It’s a book rich with wonder. It deserves to be treasured by many. And if I’m allowed, I’ll end with just one more excerpt, from ‘Get this’ — one of the most songlike poems of the collection:

Is it so much to ask, all this as intended?
asks the common man, or simply

 

as a child wishing to find a nasturtium,
the stroked cheek, a mountain to look at: bear
witness, says each in its time, its expected

 

orbit: the heart, we insist, meaning true to us
most, the beat we walk to, our hope, get this.
Love, our last possible word, get this.