Blurb
George Huitker’s second collection of poems published in 2000 intensifies and widens the concerns of his first book, An Unfamiliar Sea. The poems here are vivid and striking, yet admirably modest: in his exploration of the ordinary things in life, Huitker refuses to sacrifice the particularity of experience for grand gestures of meaning.
Instead, experiences drawn from teaching in a high school (“Teacher Turns Thirty” and “Jack”), family entanglements (“Fitness Freak” and “Furious”) and voices half-heard in the rush of living (“The Kid on the Train” and “Alan Street Revisited”) – these are allowed to be intensely themselves, to live. They wear their significance lightly, like a freshly ironed shirt on a crisp Canberra morning in autumn.
- John Foulcher
Contents
They Blew Up The Hospital Where I Was Born, I Consider Selling the Car Again, Mount Ainslie Morning, The World Game, Dislocation, On Top of Mount Tennent, Baby Dougal, Teacher Turns Thirty, The Kid on a Train, Bullshitting, A Rhyming Poem, The New Car Purrs Like a Kitten, Pushkin, Interior Monologue, Sir, Learning Lines, Directors, Rejection Slip, Jack, Literacy, Roadside, Christmas in the Park - San Jose, Kangaroos Near Jessup - Georgia, Centralia Burning, Pete Townshend, Red Rock South, Postcards from the Edge, Late 31/12/99, Fitness Freak, Weekly Hire, Indulgence Self, Your First Love is Your Last, Furious, British Bus Driver, Blackpool Has Its Charm, Anfield 2000, Hair Rufflers, Rainbow Lorikeets, Near Murrurundi, Places, Merry Beach Sabbatical, Allan Street Revisited
Extract
The Kid on the Train
The kid on the train next to me
is falling asleep, his head
has touched down
on my shoulders.
Resisting an urge to let him slide
to my chest where he’d nestle
at comfortable angles, I
choose instead to lean gently
towards the window where
these trees, farmhouses and
dry, open plains
hurl past
at the speed of childhood.
Anfield 2000
Collective in chant, united
in contempt. The overpaid
below in new strips and sponsors
perform their silky acrobatics
for the Kop. It’s not just abuse
that is hurled, but an almost-personal
expectation that there, in the centre,
twenty million pounds away,
things must go according to song.
A scoreless draw may ensue.
But then that other game
played in surrounding streets,
where dignity sparkles
at the end of broken bottles
or festers at the far end
of a dole or ticket queue,
it gambols on with its own rules;
sweaty, angry, the close
of an eight-day week. Then
in an empty stadium, days later,
the air is electricity, full of ghosts.
We sit among them and soak in
an unswerving tradition of longing,
an insatiable desire to feel –
just for a millisecond –
a fleeting sense of victory.
Somewhere here the knowledge
you could not, you will not,
ever walk alone
and never, truly, hopelessly lose.
Reviews
.- John Foulcher
Structurally, George Huitker is the most restless of poets. He clearly enjoys playing with the visual arrangements of words on the page, enjoys plunging into bits of prose with a nice dig at critics who, like your reviewer, prefer verse that is verse to what A.D.Hope called "the formless babble and vomit", and like shocking the reader with varieties of arse, shit, crap and the imagined lingo of a British Bus Driver. There is a comic tone in much of Huitker's verse which is refreshing, as well as poignancy, and here, too, as in the other poems discussed, I have found memorable images drawn from everyday experience. Who has not heard the "short, flatulent bursts like a mower cutting out", or experienced "the beautiful catastrophe of dusk", or listened to the "ocean's slow choreography"? John Foulcher has summed up Huitker's poems with a poet's sensibility: "They wear their significance lightly, like a freshly ironed shirt on a crisp Canberra morning in autumn."
- Ralph Elliott, The Canberra Times
George Huitker's The Actor Is Happy, thankfully, has the advantage of clarity of language. But it too should not be associated with actual poetry. It is a collection of notions and impressions presented, generally, as something akin to quips. The work is not to confused... being, within its limited range, effective. But Huitker's concerns are trivial and his consideration of the issues of contemporary language, culture and poetics so slight as to be non-existent.
- John Mateer, Australian Book Review
On a first browse through George Huitker's book of poetry, I decided that its immediate strength was the variety of poetic forms. This could be truly a reflection of the actor's ability to perform different roles. Huitker has written prose poems, rhyming poems, dialogue poems, short, long, sequence poems. An amazing varied reading menu.But my one negative comment is that to better savour this variety I would have liked to see some form of editing the poems into sections. This would allow the poems to have greater impact for the reader, through natural progression of subject matter.One natural progression which does occur, happens towards the middle of the book with the two poems "Baby Dougal" an "Teacher Turns Thirty".I saw faces in there, your mum, dad, their parents, mine, the clean heads of Year 7 classes unspoiled by textbooks...And this theme is echoed in the accompanying poem "Teacher Turns Thirty".Pre-teen heads turning from left to right, wide smiling and open-mouthed, waiting for those ping-pong balls of affirmation...The cover of the book is indeed striking, but to me the title is not riveting. A more creative title could indeed come from one of the poems itself such as "Learning Lines" and this would blend with the graphics of actors' masks.I enjoyed reading Huitker's poetry and will certainly look for his work in the small literary magazines that continue to encourage poets to the broader platform of book publication.
- Lorraine Marwood, Studio
