Reviews
George Huitker has a playwright’s ear for the poignant situation. Like Woody Allen, he also understands the healing sadness of the comic.
- Geoff Page
There are good things in Huitker's slim volume. I'm old-fashioned enough to look for more than what looks like prose cut up into uneven lines, such as rhythmic sound, language that iluminates thought, or as Gerald Manley Hopkins said, "Speech framed... to be heard for its own sake and interest over and above its interest of meaning".
George Huitker is happy writing very free verse, and it can work superbly well, as in his poem 14/8/1993, which opens: "The Courts And The Law page / invites you in", or Easter Raid with its resounding alliteration: "hailing of heroes, / homage of hands".
A fine meditation, where the broken verses reflect the desolate scene, is Honeysuckle Creek, where "All that is left / is eyesore, / and its associated quiet". And there is a nicely observed moment in Beaches: "My ice cream / melts like a memory, crab-like across / cupped fingers".
- Ralph Elliott, The Canberra Times
'The cover (by Jan Ward) of An Unfamiliar Sea, George Huitker's first collection of poetry is captivating. A black and white image of a ship on a Turner-like troubled sea. It's a strong image full of movement and depths. Huitker's poetry is at its strongest where there is movement and the emotion is physicalised. Little Elegies evokes a spiritual/personal experience through the body and earthiness of a story of a man running on a horse track after Good Friday mass:
...to sweat blood and water.
I try to run off
the heaviness
of this day that is Good.
In The Brothers the tenuousness of faith and love are strongly physicalised in the metaphor of an abseiling rope.
And I
can only hope
and cling
with a weakening grip
to the slender threads
of this frayed thing
we name
love
The rhythms of Huitker's poetry have grace and strength.
Unfortunately, in my view, Huitker's poetry loses its strength in telling too much rather than trusting images to evoke the moment/ sense. In Harry's Gap the richness of colour and place in landscape are so evocative they need no explanation. Lines such as "everything here is penultimate" and "Is this a metaphor for looking out / instead of in"... weaken the imagery and break the rhythm in Honeysuckle Creek.
Huitker's poetic voices are stronger when he uses character and dialogue. we hear/see Huitker's ear for street speak and his playwright's skill in writing the rhythms and idiosyncrasies of spoken language in Cabbies. The New York cabbie's voice in uncensored. Here Huitker's poetry is unrestrained and brave. He's unafraid of ugliness, particularly in the very graphic and powerful images of Kangaroo slaughter in Kangaroos Near Broken Hill. There's also power and poignancy in poems of passing, grieving and remembering such as Snapshots and Little Elegies.'
- Kathleen Bleakly, Muse
'In demotic diction George Huitker writes quiet, reverent, elegiac poems. The reverence is engaging and egalitarian, it seduced me readily enough.
The poems typically begin with an expertly conjured experience, and the evocation of a powerful affection for the particular. The anecdote continues until, when it is complete, the pain that has been sublimated flows into view like a bike coming around a corner.
The ordinary events are often relational. On a New York train a druggie begs. The moment or revelation, of shock, accuses the narrator of cowardice before the moral demands of the world. Questions are posed: there is self-reflection. We are left on the verge of decision that will meet or fail the World's moral and spiritual demands. One of the dangerous propositions of the moral challenge is that you must make your self by taking a position, "Games can be won off the final delivery".
Metaphors for human life and feeling emerge from the everyday. A football team's victory at Easter provokes thoughts of other triumphs and salvations. A one-day cricket match suggests the possibility of last minute moral elevation. A surfer caught in a rip does as image for the grief of a loved one's death. A creaky gifted car personifies the giver in his enfeeblement and affection. The mental and the metaphysical are facets of the one reality.
The rhythm of these poems is hushed and reverent. It suggests mysteries and spells. At times the rhythm has a sustained and exquisite onomatopoeic quality such as the memoir of Brother Raphael. My favourite piece, I think.
"You taught me
prayer
was a
lifestyle,
and love,
a discipline,
formulated
like a back line move,
like an opinion.
You had many of those."
The reverence is for the particularity of human life. The measure of all things and the benchmark of all things is the local, the idiosyncratic. Lurking within this particularity are the redeeming mysteries that illuminate the events, deaths and meetings. Many poems remind me of some of James McAuley's final poems; while My Father's Last Stand and others remind one of Vincent Buckley's cycle of long farewell poems to his father.
These works convey the sense that the appropriate response to the World is awe, humility and responsibility. This sense is carried by seductive, honest, loving poems. After reading these poems you feel as if you've had a meal of good muesli; or, the gentle excitement of having found a close friend by accident in a busy market and you both move aside from the crowd, arm in arm, to chat with warmth and intimacy.
This man George is having an adventure. I want to know of the next stages. The outcome is important to me, and there are many of me. - Terry Monagle, Studio
