Dennis Haskell’s new collection, Who Would Know?, blazing in free verse, prose poems, dialogues, and rhymed forms, is more than poetry. A towering figure in Australian literary culture, Haskell ranges over life writing, journalism, scholarship, and reportage, organically evolving a deep time thematic trajectory. The unities in genres knit his complex humanity, autobiographical, psychological, and spiritual, global in reach yet solidly rooted in Australian history and life. Facing his own mortality and the prospect of catastrophe for humans in Covid lockdowns, his sardonic wit and humor leaven social critique with poems that uplift with tender embrace of human flaws. The sequence of eulogies for writers, the greats, minors, indigenous poets he admired, guided or edited, will long stand as testimony to Haskell’s central position in Australian letters. This is a book to be re-read for its plain-spoken courage, its empathy for all sentient beings, a treasure trove of hard-earned wisdom original to this one voice.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Professor Emerita, University of California, Santa Barbara
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… All this underlies my poems, which I would argue are philosophical, even those which qualify as light verse. You don’t get to choose what to write about, it chooses you—I’m Romantic and romantic enough to still believe in inspiration—and I mostly write about ideas and relationships. Still, I like to think that, as Claire Tomalin says of Thomas Hardy, I deal with ‘the central themes of human experience, time, memory, loss, love, grief, anger, uncertainty, death’.[1] One section of this book provides the context in which the poems included arose; it’s the only way I can explain that. No doubt much of my poetics comes from my vaguely Protestant, working class background. I do value clarity, humility and unpretentiousness: the elaborateness of a Gerard Manley Hopkins leaves me cold. I highly respect the sincerity and emotional risk I perceive in West Australian poetry more than in Australian poetry generally. Being the age I am, I do write a good many elegies, and death seems to me the supreme irony and absurdity of human life, but my generation and at least my children’s generation are stuck with it. However, life is such a wonderful gift, at least for those of us in the developed world, that I hope my books seem mostly celebratory. They do include splashes of humour, of different sorts, from wry to slapstick. Although most of my poems unhesitatingly use ‘I’, I hope they speak to and for that general reader as well as me. Above all, I hope the poems demonstrate a love of language, a humane voice and intelligent generosity of spirit.
Dennis Haskell
March, 2024
[1] Claire Tomalin, Thomas Hardy: The Time-torn Man (London: Viking, 2006), p.379.