The Arms Of Men
On June 2nd at Geelong library, Maria Takolander launched my first collection of poetry, “The Arms of Men” published by Melbourne Poets’Union as part of their Union Poets Series.
Around 90 people attended, including many local Geelong poets, indicating Geelong is now punching above its weight in the poetry stakes.
Below are Maria’s words at the launch and an audio version also attached, with public performance of some of my poems.
John Bartlett’s The Arms of Men Launch speech by Maria Takolander
“These days the sky is full of falling bodies,
thudding rain upon the roofs,
a smell of burning feathers
These are lines from a poem called ‘Damaged Angels’.
And from a poem called ‘Drifting’:
onshore
the thwack of leather
on cricket bats
a prime minister
cheerily
tweeting scores,
offshore
the crack of clubs
on flesh
while no-one was watching
the Ship of State
drifting towards the rocks.
These are just two of the poems in John Bartlett’s new collection The Arms of Men, which continue to haunt me with their power and necessity, as all great poetry does.
These poems also show how The Arms of Men is a collection for our times. With its apocalyptic overtones, this is a poetry that speaks of our environmental and humanitarian crisis. It is a poetry of urgency.
It is also often a poetry of anger and pain and grief, for what we have already lost, for what we stand to lose.
Sometimes that grief is personal. There are some extraordinary elegies in this book. ‘Saying the Rosary’ is one of my favourites. It connects us with a family, who are kneeling at night to say the rosary,
speeding up the final ‘glory be’s’,
accelerating, arriving just in time
for News on Seven.
The humour is beautiful and necessary. But what heartbreak and wisdom there is in the lines:
How brief we were a family,
how short the chance to love.
And it is through those precious opportunities for love, for connection, that this book hangs onto the possibility of grace, of salvation. ‘Grace still hovers / over the earth,’ as the lines in one poem gently assert.
That grace, these poems boldly suggest, might be achieved through love, through the intimate connection of bodies surrendering to each other. Love may be ‘a perilous country,’ as we read in the poem called ‘I Lie Down,’ but it is what nature calls for. Thus the lovers in this poem are as beautiful as the earth to which they are bound:
I still remember the orange sunlight
scorched in strips across white sheets
and your limbs arranged,
an impassable mountain range,
the humid air carrying promises
of kisses more articulate than words.
John lives in Breamlea, alongside the sea and the wetland and the bird life—egrets, ducks, swans, magpies, curlews—all of which make their presence felt in these poems.
But these are never romanticised nature poems. Neither are they small-town nor small-time. They are worldly, bold and important declarations of the ways in which the earth and our humanity are precious, endangered, worth writing and fighting for.
In the poem ‘Apocalypse,’ we see the poet at a supermarket, doing his shopping while keeping tabs on the news. The poem shows us the state of our world, where the atrocities of war have become as much a part of our life as picking up the groceries.
In aisle four at Safeway
searching for Indian pickles
my iPhone announced
refugees streaming out of Syria
clutching bloodied babies, clothes on fire
And then there are the ‘luxury car ads . . . on a perennial loop’ and ‘sponsors mouthing cheery messages.’ It is so easy to be distracted. John’s poetry, however, reminds us how vital it is that we pay attention.
What we have in The Arms of Men is a poetry of authenticity and humanity, of humour and wisdom. These are also characteristics, as many of you would know, of the man himself.
John is already an accomplished author. He is the author of three novels, Towards a Distant Sea, Estuary, and Jack Ferryman: Reluctant Private Investigator. He has also published a collection of short stories titled All Mortal Flesh and a non-fiction work A Tiny and Brilliant Light. And his poetry has been published over the years in a number of national and international journals. Now we have this collection of his poems, The Arms of Men.
John congratulations on this superb book. I hope it reaches the audience it deserves, the audience it needs if the world is to be a better place to live in.”
Copies of “The Arms of Men” available by emailing heartsong1@iprimus.com.au – $17 (incl. postage) within Australia
“I have been immersed in your poetry: walking, watching and being there. You are a poet of place, geographic and spiritual. ” (Yvonne Adami)
“As usual, I am struck by your creative combination of words and images which, in themselves, have no relationship at all, but when combined, create an intensity of meaning that my prosaic vertical thinking can never achieve.
John wastes no words in the recently published slim volume of poems covering his major themes: society and politics in present tense; religion and church in past tense; reminiscence of family life with the never-forgotten pain of a brother’s passing; and woven throughout, romantic love and eroticism. Reading slowly, I savoured John’s crisp verses, including the erotic poems with Dorothea Mackeller’s lines as caveat: “I know but cannot share it/My love is otherwise”. (Ian Fraser, publisher)