Alan Gould

(1949- ), born London, his father a British Army officer and his mother, Valdergur, of Icelandic origin, came to Australia in 1966 after a childhood dominated by the frequent changes characteristic of a serviceman's family. As a student Gould was involved in the anti-Vietnam War protests and demonstrations; he graduated from the ANU with an arts degree and after a few brief casual occupations has settled to a life as a poet and novelist interspersed with occasional periods of teaching. He has lived mostly in Canberra and nearby Queanbeyan, was the founding editor of Canberra Poetry and the Open Door Press in Canberra, has been poetry reviewer for Nation Review, Poetry Australia, and other journals and newspapers, and is editor of the anthology, Arteries in Stone (1976). He has published numerous books of poetry, Icelandic Solitaries (1978); Astral Sea (1981, winner of NSW Premier's Poetry Award); The Pausing of the Hours (1984); The Twofold Place (1986); Years Found in Likeness (1988); Formerlight (1992, a Selected volume of the previous five books); and Momentum (1992).

Much of Gould's early poetry derives from his interest in Norse mythology and early ocean exploration. Astral Sea includes the sections, 'The Vinlanders', which owes much to Farley Mowat's reconstruction of Norse voyages in his book Westocking (1965), and 'The Songs of Ymir' which tells of the birth of the first man and woman and the first Frost giants. Ymir is killed and from his parts Heaven and Earth are made. Astral Sea also contains a series 'Marine Photographs', episodes of shipwrecks and near disasters at sea, mostly from the days of sail. The mesmerising focus of the sea is present also in The Twofold Place with its series 'A History of Shipping', which celebrates the feats of endurance and courage of the early seafarers - 'The Phoenician Helmsman', 'An Arab Merchant', 'The Norse Ship', 'Portuguese Carracks' and 'A Dutch Jacht'. The Twofold Place takes its title, however, from the imagination, that faculty that allows us to be wherever we wish, in the here and now or the there and then, and to see beyond the object to its deeper significance. Some autobiographical poems, 'Learning to Think', deal with Gould's boyhood of boarding schools, when he encountered two of his chief influences: the Ipswich River which ran alongside the school inspired thoughts of the vast oceans, and the school subject history, 'a constant B grade cinema', provided similarly expanded mental horizons. Years Found in Likeness brings another sea sequence, the extended voyager series 'The Great Circle', dealing with the life and explorations of Captain James Cook. Part of the poem was the libretto for a choral symphony commissioned for the 1988 Bicentenary. Years Found in Likeness also contains one of Gould's loveliest poems, 'Austral Bluebells in Molonglo Gorge'.

Momentum sees Gould in more experimental mode, using a striking array of poetic and verbal devices to explore emotional states. Intrigued by the archetypal Australian workman, Gould writes observantly and amusedly of the casual dexterity, laconic humour and good-natured contempt for those with more intellectual skills (including poets) characteristic of electricians, roof-tilers, tree-loppers, mechanics and the like. Formerlight, the Selected volume, which begins, appropriately, with a 'Homage' (from Icelandic Solitaries) to another lover of the sea, Joseph Conrad, gathers together an attractive, wide-ranging group of his best poems, establishing his claim to be one of Australia's finest contemporary poets.

Gould has also, however, achieved similar distinction as a fiction-writer. His first novel, The Man Who Stayed Below (1984), about a young apprentice's first experiences on a sailing ship under a demonic alcoholic captain, won the James Cook University's Foundation for Australian Literary Studies Award in 1985. The Enduring Disguises (1988) contains three linked novellas, autobiographically based. 'The Clayfield' is the story of a young boy growing up in the 1950s at an army base in the English countryside; 'Decay and Honour' is based on the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations in the early 1970s; 'A Paperknife and a Broken Oar' is the story of a friendship between two young men. Gould's fictional tour de force is the novel To the Burning City (1991), which won the NBC Banjo Award for fiction. It concerns two half-brothers, Len Hengelow and Jeb Corballis. Len's father, Crispin Hengelow, is a bomb-aimer in the RAF in the Second World War; his mother, Elizabeth, an Australian girl who joins the WRAF; Len, aged 4, is sent to a boarding school. Those war years, with the aura of his father as hero-airman and his loving mother, are the only happy times Len is to know. After the war his father leaves them to go on a lifelong crusade of restitution for the damage he had done to individuals in the 'area bombing' of German cities. Len's mother remarries and has another son, Jeb, but Len, bitterly missing and resenting his father, feels an outsider in the new family, and grows more difficult, becoming estranged from all except his father's sister, Aunty Eva. In her house he constructs with enormous care the front end of a Lancaster bomber, in which he plays out his boyhood fantasies of the war years. Len's major purpose, however, is eventually to confront his father with the guilt of his desertion of family. Jeb returns with his mother to Australia to live but goes off, eventually, to search for Crispin Hengelow, now a cult figure in Germany and loved by all whose lives he has helped to reconstruct. Jeb arranges the ultimate confrontation (in the Lancaster cockpit) between Crispin and his son Len, when Crispin is brought to realise the destruction he has caused in the lives of the boy and his mother. Much later Jeb realises the extent of his mother's suffering from Crispin's self-satisfying gestures of restitution to the rest of the world.

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