This week’s spotlight shines on Jack Hibberd’s most recent poetry collection, highlighting the titular poem ‘Sweet River’.
Post written by Polly Grant Butler
Jack Hibberd – medical practitioner, playwright, novelist and poet – has had a long and prolific career in the arts, writing over sixty plays, numerous poetry collections, screenplays and novels, and co-founding the Australian Performing Group, an experimental theatre ensemble once based in Melbourne. Much of his work is satirical, with a tone that is both acutely perceptive and radically flippant. Language, meanwhile, is treated with the utmost respect. Notably, throughout his work, poeticism and colloquialism are shown to be equals.
Sweet River is, perhaps, a departure from some of Jack Hibberd’s earlier work. While the collection is mottled with occasional playfulness, as a whole it is mournful, regarding humankind with contempt, ageing as quick, and death as inevitable.
And yet there is an inverse for the melancholy. Throughout the poems, rivers and water are used as an anthesis to human wreckage, a symbol, maybe, of hope. In his introduction to the collection, Barry Oakley observes that ‘there’s always the sweet river, pristine & beautiful, memorably mirrored by a master wordsmith’.
In ‘Wishful Thinking’, one of the funnier poems in the collection, the speaker desires the rain, so that it wipes out ‘the Vatican, / Wall Street, Beverley Hills, Miami, / the IMF, World Bank, and the City’ as well as ‘celebrities, fashionistas, / the Chicago School and Friedmanites’.
Many of the poems in Sweet River depict mortality in a way that is both devastating and unequivocally universal. However, these are poems that are perhaps better read in quiet solitude. Maybe next to a fire, with a glass of red.
For this week’s poetry spotlight, I have decided to highlight the title poem, a beautifully rhythmic ode to the river and its sweetness.
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