knife
forest.I t is that deeply religious poetry of transcendence – transcendence of the physical
to an ephemeral world of perceptions and memories, which, though no less real
than the physical, leads to an awareness of the presence of God: naming all that is
beautiful in this world after His nature.
The theme of the animating power of the word is continued and in poem V
of the collection, Malouf writes:
There are so many things that need us to be looking
before they can appear
in our lives, in our poems. How else should they
come into existence? Angels,
centaurs, chocolate éclairs (Malouf, 1992:157).
I n poem VI I of the collection, he emphasises the theme of the breath of life
by creating images of the physicality of the existence out of which the metaphysical
change is effected by lines such as:
Hearing you read the poems, hearing you breathe
through them feeling your breath
rub the world of objects...
We are the conductors of an absolute music
... I bend
an ear toward the pauses where air
is drawn back to your lungs
and charged, recharged. I ’m carried
forward as it swells into the place of
your other reading
... We are conductors
of heaven’s fire its current
music striking through us to the earth (Malouf, 1992:160).
Here then is Malouf’s sense of life as being conditioned by the interaction of
opposing forces: conscious and unconscious, civilized and primitive, of one
individual against another, the power of the breath of life of an individual, literally,
flowing out and around to invigorate his milieu, to animate what was previously
inanimate. The prose and poetry of Malouf is also filled with sensualness. I t feeds
directly into his work, as if the sexual passion and energy was a necessary
concomitant to a spiritual vision, a sort of reconciliation of the sacred and the
profane. I n Malouf’s An I maginary Life, for example, there is what might be
identified as a homoerotic element in Ovid’s need, in his emotional and physical
dependency on the Child: