First Things  Last

David  Malouf 
Published by Chatto and Windus 

Represented in South  Africa
by Oxford  University  Press

1981

Price: R 11.15

Reviewed by Don  McLennan
The point of emergence of Halouf's  poetry  seems to me to be personal and
philosophical.  The poems are not about  injustice, politics, race conflict
or nuclear fall-out:  they are lyrics exploring  self, memory, music, places,
creatures  and moods or intimations.
In First Things Last  there is no satire, no bitter thrust at institutions,
no guilt, no alienation.  Read in a South African  context  they could, no
doubt, seem escapist  because they are not talking  about or even  presuming
uncomfortable  socio-political  issues:  they do not build on the costive
guilt, self-denegration, anger or despair that South African writers  evoke
as a necessary  (and sometimes  sufficient) condition  for poetry.

A handful of these eighteen  poems are very fine, though the rest may  seem
to a hard-liner to be exercises in conspicuous  sensibility.  So it is better
to speak of the fine  poems than to appologise for those which, to our
tormented  readership, may appear less worthy.

To read the finest of these poems is to enter the known yet unknown  world.
The unknown is the specific  texture of another  person's experience in
Australia  and Tuscany:  the known is the assurance  that others  have trod  these
paths before:

It would depend on how
you  see it whether
this path  leads to the world
or back from  it; earth
does not run to distinctions.

The world is a good  place to be, and Maiouf's  statements  come out  reassuringly
with a touch of Rilke and a hint of Seferis:

The dead are buried in us.  We dream  them
as they dreamed us and woke and found us
flesh.  Their bones rise through  us.  These
are your eyes: you will  see a new world  through
them.  This is your tongue  speaking.

The best  poems are personal, like  "Elegy".  They often  begin with a David
Hockney - like  clarity:

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The world is as if
after rain.  Things wear their
instant original  sheen

before thumb print
or boot.  Roof tiles laid
at a keen diagonal

define a perfect wedge
of air that clouds move into,
a bird flies out of;

and may finish, like "Deception  Bay," with quiet discovery:

Back down there
we go on into
a new light not looking
ourselves, and neither forward now
nor back.

"First  Things  Last"  is  the  central  poem  in  terms  of  what  Malouf  is  discovering,
which  is  how autobiography  cedes  i t s e lf  to  the  demands  of  l e t t i nq  self 
away,  and  that  we come  almost  too  late  to  the  most  obvious  and  most  refresh-
ing.  But  the  finest  poem  is  "The  Crab  Feast".  By  eating  the  crab  he becomes
the  crab  and  explores  a  whole  world  of  self  as  crab  and  crab  as  self:

f a ll

There  is  no  getting  closer
than  this.  My tongue  slips  into
the  furthest,  sweetest  corner
of  you. 

I  know  a ll

now a ll  your  secrets.
When the shell
cracked there was nothing

between us.  I taste moonlight

transformed  into flesh ...

He discovers in the end that:

myself  in  another  species,  brute
blue,  a  bolt  of  lightning,  maybe  God.

i uu  we i e
You were

. ..  a  love  feast.  You  l ie  open
before  me. 
Begin.

I  am ready.

The  prose  poems,  and  the  poems  with  heavier  forms  are  not  so  successful.
Yet  even  here,  in  "Ode:  Stravinsky's  Grave"  there  are  wonderful  surprises,
evidence  of  an  alertness  to  miraculous  f i d e l i t y:

we put  out  crumbs  to  catch
birds  and  such  scraps
of  sky  as  are  f i l l ed  with
a  singing

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