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Leavis at The London

These poems are available in print in John Tranter's Selected Poems, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1982, ISBN 0 86806 029 1, paperback.






Listen to the Poet Read

 You need the money - your way of thinking's

going out of fashion, and you're growing old.

You need the make-up, and you need

the wake-up pills before the bombing run.

The flak is active tonight, you need

a glass of something sparkling and a deep

breath before you're ready for the fray.

On your way to the affair in the back seat

of a taxi you catch a face in the mirror -

bandages and a black eye, is that really

you? It's not Humphrey Bogart - you

should have gone to Acapulco like

mother said, but no, you had to take

the youth cure, then the bandage

loops across the screen spelling out

'Mad Dog' and you guess it's true.

The shark pool looks inviting

when they turn out the lights,

but that's for after breakfast -

breakfast on the terrace with the Krazy Kats,

after the test of strength. Say goodbye

to the Kodachrome mirage and the heavy

petting, from now on your career

shrinks to a point and your many enemies

gather like a gerontology convention and

whisper. After the Monkey Business, after

a famous middle age there's nothing left

but the engines turning over, the crew waiting

in the moonlight - and when you take off

the shadow on the speeding tarmac drops away.





Notes:
F.R.Leavis, 1895-1978, English literary critic who introduced a new seriousness into a field still influenced by the informal narrative approach taken by George Saintsbury and other English critics. Always expressing his opinions with severity, Leavis believed that literature should be closely related to criticism of life and that it is therefore a literary critic's duty to assess works according to the author's moral position. (Encyclopaedia Britannica). The Humphrey Bogart movie referred to is Dark Passage.
The cover photo for Dazed in the Ladies Lounge is of John Tranter and Lyn Grady (later Lyn Tranter) at the 1964 Royal Alexandra Hospital for Children Nurses' Graduation Ball at Sydney's Menzies Hotel, Wynyard Square.
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