The Gossip and the Wine

The Gossip and the Wine offers poems that range from buoyant to ironic and sombre. Many of them are occasioned by biblical moments, which they read afresh. These include the remarkable sequence, 'Rounding a Year', which sees common human patterns in the key points of the Christian year. In general, the works and days of antiquity press claims on a sharply imagined modern world. Peter Steele embraces poetic formality as access to both comprehension and mystery: 'formality may itself be a kind of vivacity, and it is a poet's business to ensure that this is how things turn out'. The 'singing' element is present as both a means and a reward for the relishing of the particular. These poems celebrate the world as trove. Offering an abundance of events and items, they commonly imply that there is much more still to be found, appraised and rejoiced in.

Peter Steele

Peter Steele, who was born in Perth in 1939, moved to Melbourne in 1957 to join the Jesuits, of whom he remains a member. He is Professor Emeritus at the University of Melbourne, his base for a lifetime of teaching and writing, along with the equivalent of several years at universities in Chicago, New York and Washington DC. His poetry includes two illustrated books of poems prompted by works of art (Plenty and The Whispering Gallery). His White Knight with Bee-Box: New and Selected Poems was published in 2008, and he was awarded the Philip Hodgins Medal for poetry that year. He agrees with Dennis O'Driscoll that 'Poetry is music set to words'.

Review

Peter Steele is a Jesuit priest who is also a poet. It's not an unheard of combination, as the career of Gerard Manley Hopkins testifies.

Steele has the kind of priestly intelligence that passes for urbane. He was a famous lecturer in the University of Melbourne English department, the eloquence rolling out without a note in sight as he discoursed on Swift or Pope or Dr Johnson. He was, in his heyday, as distinguished an essayist as he was a poet but, as Peter Porter once said, it would be wrong to imagine that Steele's verbalism and wit were in any way at odds with a passionate belief in Christ.

It comes through with a moving gravity and intensity in The Gossip and the Wine, this richly textured book in which Steele sees the landscape of the world through what is, very frequently, a palimpsest of gospel references. They don't intrude with a reverberant or religiose rhetoric but he often gives chapter and verse at the start of a poem as if a religious vision were the gnomic precondition of this swirling erudite talk that has been made artifactual and poetic without losing the implication of a moral dimension.

Sometimes the reference is explicit, while also recapitulating other literary echoes: "Pity us Christ, niggards too often of pity/ for our flesh and blood, and yours." That, if I'm not mistaken, has an echo of Francois Villon's Epitaph, which is itself a stark homage to a religion of sacrifice and contrition.

But Steele, with a mind as full of trash as of treasure, can as easily talk of the soul or self as "Making a splash/ like Scrooge McDuck in his Money Bin". It's a sense of the fated journey that makes this book moving for all the bric-a-brac of its referencing and erudite innuendoes and inflections. There's a beautiful sombre line in a poem that is among other things a tribute to the high and hairy language of the Irish: "The road to Heaven is well enough signed,/ but it's badly lit at night." Yes, we know not the day nor the hour though this book of poems is luminous with the sense of a mortality costing not less than everything and the light that darkness is configured by.

Sometimes Steele's language has a stark epigrammatic savagery. Here's Lazarus, once a beggar, imagined by Tiepolo and given speech by the poet: "Bring me, he prays, to the banquet of the dead,/ And feed the heartless as I have been fed."

There's a lot of Latin and a lot of staring into the abyss that coexists behind faith, the temptation to rage that nourishes every starvation emotional as well as literal behind these lines. And everywhere, throughout this pensive and powerful book, there is the sense of how the imagination is the portal to what can be known.

It's easier, in a brief review, to indicate the pith and wit of these poems, the epigrammatic flashes, than it is the way a summarising and roving intelligence animates all of them. Here is Peter Steele on his namesake, Peter, the coward who became the first and definitive Pope, the rock on which the church was built, the guy with the keys of the kingdom: "So all the stranger, when the boat was beached/ At cockcrow, and the baskets cried success,/ That he should brood in silence, not to be reached/ Wherever he had gone in wretchedness."

Steele has a poem in honour of one of his heroes, George Herbert, another priest-poet. He has a poem in which he decries "gravitas" as if it were a besetting vice. But throughout this book with its moderated and muscular musicality, there is a voice that seems to have surrendered the trappings of urbanity as anything other than a conduit to truth.

It will fascinate people who want an accomplished poet's view of great artists as a window to the gospel drama and, beyond that, it will nourish those with an ear for the music and the wisdom of a writer who has done his best to sustain a vision of truth in the midst of the whirligig and enchantment of the world.

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