Andrew Taylor

(1940- ), born Warrnambool, Victoria, studied arts and law at the University of Melbourne, where Vincent Buckley encouraged his interest in poetry. He graduated MA from Melbourne and studied and travelled in Europe and the USA, returning to Australia in 1965. From 1971 he taught in the English Department of the University of Adelaide and is now professor at Edith Cowan University, WA. Active in the Australian literary scene, Taylor has been involved in various writers' organisations and has officiated as chairperson of Writers' Week at the Adelaide Festival of the Arts. He has also been a member of the Literature Board of the Australia Council and was made AM for his services to literature. He took part in the poetry readings at La Mama in 1968 and was active in SA's Friendly Street poetry group, editing, with Ian Reid, the second Friendly Street anthology in 1978. His numerous collections of poetry began with The Cool Change (1971). Then followed Ice Fishing (1973), The Invention of Fire (1976), The Cat's Chin and Ears (1976), Parabolas: Prose Poems (1976), The Crystal Absences, The Trout (1978), Selected Poems 1960-1980 (1982, updated 1960-1985, 1988), Travelling (1986, regional winner of the British Airways Commonwealth Poetry Prize) and Folds in the Map (1991). He has edited a collection of short fiction, Unsettled Areas (1986), with Ian Reid the second annual Friendly Street Poetry Reader(1978), with Judith Rodriguez Poems Selected from the Australian's 20th Anniversary Competition (1985) and with Russell McDougall (Un) common Ground: Essays in Literature in English (1990); translated with Beate Josephi selected poems from four German writers in a collection titled Miracles of Disbelief (1985); written a book for children, Bernie the Midnight Owl (1984); and the first full-length deconstructive study of the Australian poetic tradition from Lawson to Tranter, Reading Australian Poetry (1987). He has also written the libretti for two operas, Letters of Amalie Dietrich (1988) and Barossa (1988). The two Selected volumes offer a good sample of Taylor's poetry; the 1982 edition has sections from The Cool Change (poems from 1960 to 1970), Ice Fishing (poems from 1970 to 1972), The Cat's Chin and Ears (1971 to 1973), The Invention of Fire (1973 to 1975) and a group of poems from 1975 to 1980, while the 1988 edition adds a substantial group from Travelling. Parabolas, short, often anecdotal, prose pieces that Taylor wrote while visiting Berkeley and Yale in 1975, are part of both books. Taylor has omitted The Crystal Absences, The Trout because it was conceived as a single poem and would not, he felt, benefit by division. That omission is unfortunate because The Crystal Absences, poems written on a regular basis while his wife Beate was visiting her parents in Germany, are sensitive and appealing love poems.

Because of his Melbourne academic background Taylor's early poetry has sometimes been regarded as based upon and influenced by the Melbourne University writers of the 1960s and 1970s, The Invention of Fire, for example, being linked to Chris Wallace-Crabbe. Taylor is, however, an innovative, individual and experimental poet. Although his poetry is wide-ranging in reflecting his extensive travels, it is also narrowly and finely focused, contemplative and inward. Open-ended and unemphatic, his poems are frequently meditations which record the irresolutions and disconnections of living and are receptive to the contradictions and ambiguities of an indefinite self: 'Better to choose what isn't you/ if you is what you want to find.' Both landscape and language figure prominently, often as persistent testimonies to the gulf between human need and actuality. Concerned with the substance, solidity and endurance of landscape, compared with the transience of human experience, Taylor is also preoccupied with landscape's unreliability and the way that its existence defies appropriation by ideas even as it is determined by them: 'Landscape without ideas of it/ hasn't been seen.' Writing a 'difficult' poetry, especially in earlier collections, Taylor seeks to transcend the imposed difficulties of language: 'there are times/ words have to be trodden on/ and ridden across and scraped over/ before they'll reveal the reticence/ that knows how to speak/ if you know how to listen' ('Yugoslav Triptych').

Travelling has three sections: a sequence of poems 'Parts of the World', where the landscape is seen as, above all, a landscape of the mind, whose true meaning lies not in its physical self but in the meaning and significance that the poet brings to it; a second section of lyrics on various themes; and a long poem of eighteen sections, 'Travelling to Gleis-Binario', based on Taylor's travels through Europe. To the uninitiated 'Gleis-Binario' might appear to be a geographical locality; Taylor explains that it, too, is a locality of the mind, conjured up by combining the German and Italian words for that part of a railway station where one boards the train. Travelling is Taylor in his characteristically wry, meditative, polished poetic mode. Folds in the Map (1991) has some droll, enigmatic and clever poems, mixing prosaic subjects such as 'Spoons' ('I count them, like my friends'), 'Radio', 'Dish Drainers', 'Wineglass', 'Letterboxes' with pertinent philosophic comments. In the final section the importance of relationships both to places and people, a regular characteristic of his poetry, notably in The Crystal Absences, is reaffirmed. 'Walluf am Rheim', a fine poem that integrates intellect and emotion, affirms the sanctity of family.

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