Personal Comment by Andrew Taylor

I guess most poets find it hard to answer the questions, "What do you write about?" and "What kind of poetry do you write?" Besides, people only ask these questions when they've read nothing you've written, and maybe I should just tell them do do their homework first.

But the impossibility of answering these questions - at least in my case - set me thinking. Why couldn't I say that I'm writing "about something"? Why couldn't I define the "kind of poetry" I write? I can find answers for these questions when, as any literary critic and theorist, I look at the work of other writers. So maybe it was time I found them for myself? Recently I've tried to do this.

What interests me as a poet, I've discovered, is not what we write, but what we can't write. Novelists and poets can't write about certain topics, due to their upbringing, their moral sensibilities, their squeamishness, censorship or the acceptabilities of their age. But that isnot what I mean. I mean that language is always frustrated, no matter how hard we try. And that's putting it badly too. I don't mean that there are things, entities, concepts out there in some Platonic world which our language can't quite come to grips with - though that is one very traditional way of approaching it. What I mean is perhaps caught by this truism: language is the vehicle of the sayable, and everything that cam be said will find its way intolanguage. What excites me about poetry, the poetry I like and which i try to write, is that it keeps probing its border with the unsayable, with where language has to fail.

It's like the edge of the Universe. There is nothing beyond the Universe which the Universe will one day encompass and turn into matter. there is nothing "out there" to encompass because there is no "out there" But because it is considered to be expanding, the shape of the Universe is defined by its edge. Similarly, the shape of our knowledge, and of our identity, is defined by the limits of language.

All good poetry probes that border, whether it is avant-garde or traditional. Shakespeare's metaphors in Macbeth ("Pity, like a naked newborm babe/ striding the blast" for example) do it as effectively as Ashberry's tantalizing incoherencies. What is being presented to us here is the end of language. And that is the end of knowledge, because we can only know in language. But it is not the end of desire.

I grew up on the south coast of Australia, in victoria, and live now beside the coast in Western Australia. Like many Australian, I have lived most of my life at an edge. I am also aware of the vast interior of the continent, and have travelled in it and will do so more. Bu t the cost is where my knowledge stops. Poetry lives on, traces, and retraces, a border like that. It is baffled by, challenged by, and inspired by what it can't - and never could, and never will - say. So the coast figures in my poetry in much the way that darkness or dreams - or even death - are important in the work of others. But the coast is a much more lovely, exciting, sexy and physical site and image; and it is much more positive. I know from first hand how dangerous the coast can be. I grew up where drowning were not unusual. But it is also very hard for Australians to find the coast gloomy.

As I get older I find I write more about death. That's natural - parents die, even the children of friends, and friends themselves die prematurely. And the world is full of atrocities and avoidable calamities - civil wars in africa, Asia and even Europe - not to mention the ecological disastersthat are calculated and planned. No thinking person can ignore such things, nor escape personal grief. But in Australia the coast is always a reminder of our limits - even our political limits, since it also marks out the nation's border. to be reminded of my physical and metaphysical finiteness in such a beautiful and exhilarating way is something for which I am constantly grateful. It is something which I hope is refelcted in my poetry.