Books

David Malouf
An Open Book

In her essay “Education of the Poet”, Louise Glück wrote, “The axiom is that the mark of poetic intelligence or vocation is passion for language … [a] delirious response to language’s smallest communicative unit: to the word ... This was not my experience ... What fascinated me were the possibilities of context ... the way a poem could liberate ... that word’s full and surprising range of meaning.”

I was reminded of this subtle yet potent distinction as I read these three reissued collections of poetry by David Malouf. Typewriter Music (2007), Earth Hour (2014) and An Open Book (2018) all embody that attraction for the unpredictable chemistry of words resonating with each other, building a cumulative emotional and bodily impact.

Malouf’s poems have a pleasurable mouthfeel that is almost oracular. They’re tactile and sinuous, building subtle constellations of sound as they take shape. Take, for example, “Nocturnal”, from Typewriter Music, where “Frosty stars / whirr above paddocks, breathless / treadle machines / in the pale grass hemming / sheets for a ghost dance”. Or “Cuisine”, in Earth Hour, which begins, “What’s magic here? Unique / ephemeral abracadabra / of whipped-up light-as-air / -on-the-tongue unstable Nature / reorganised, translated”.

Malouf’s evocations in “Cuisine” – “A spell reversed. The garden / dissolves, goes back to breath” – could easily serve also as a summary of how the poems themselves work. They usually open with a memory or scene, a question or supposition, then plunge swiftly into depths of unexpected meanings that are intuitive, open-ended yet non-negotiable.

In conversation with poet Lisa Gorton in 2014, Malouf said that, for him, “the music is very important, because that’s where the sense is, where the ideas are being worked out, partly in the way echoes occur”. The ideas that are being “worked out” are consistent across these three books. Mortality and time, memory and perception, the layers of meaning hidden within the everyday, are all approached with a sensitivity to what lurks deep underneath or just beyond us.

In “Still Life II” (An Open Book), objects “absolved of usefulness” are described as “a ghostly armada”. In “Dog Park” (Earth Hour), those “civil beasts … are ghost dancers on the feet of sleeping wolves”. And in “First Night” (Typewriter Music), an ironing board has “hoof-shaped scorchmarks” but is also “an angel / disguised by birthday wrappings”. In “Typewriter Music”, the machine’s hammers are “hinged grasshopper legs”.

By one measure, David Malouf is not a contemporary poet. You don’t reach for a Malouf poem for a hot take on what’s happening in the sociopolitical zeitgeist. The language, too, feels not so much timeless as distinctly pre-internet-era, light on irony and devoid of cynicism. Some readers, especially those who are extremely online, may consider these poems to be unengaged or quietist. This would be to assume, mistakenly, that what we need is more passionate intensity. Malouf is instead excavating perennial human quandaries, drawing our fragmented attention towards our experience as complex, cultured, mortal animals.

In the title poem of Earth Hour, Malouf returns us to the world which is both “airy / Schatzkammer and midden, our green accommodating tomb”. In “The Double Gift” (An Open Book), flowers on a table embody a “prescient déjà vu”, that our desire “is what we are that will outlast us”. Death is neither denied nor posited as life’s opposite but woven into its fabric in overwhelming bitter-sweetness.

Death appears again in its finality, yet also as continuity, in one of the most poignant poems of these books, “A Grace Note” (An Open Book), where “the softness / of my pillow in the spread / of my fingers assumes / again, after so long, the still longed for / round of your head”, the departed loved one returning “on a grace note / of unbodied restoration”.

These insistent reminders of our mortality are also reminders of love and interdependence, poems that are “loaded / with all that came strongest, a planet’s-worth // of sunlight, cooling green, the close comfort / of kind” (“Toccata II” from Earth Hour).

Malouf is also attuned to the play of details the page permits. Line breaks sometimes occur mid-word, with even the hyphen dropped to the following line, to heighten the reader’s sense of suspended, multiple meaning – “moon / -flower”, “free / -associating”, “Tree / -spiders” and “fear / -lessness”.

While Malouf, like Louise Glück, loves the possibilities opened up for words through new contexts, he is also fascinated by the aural alchemy of rare words and neologisms. Not only nippers and offing, but unhouseled, lebensraum, handsel and refulgence. Intriguingly, the language becomes much more direct, almost profanely vernacular, in Malouf’s versions of poems by Horace, Dante, Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Heine.

If there’s any distinction between these three books, the most recent, An Open Book, which includes a suite of seven new poems, feels more diverse, moving into directly philosophical, aphoristic territory, alongside the more abstract poems, which are even more impressionistic.

Yet the overwhelming impression left by these three collections is of a poet with a coherent, exploratory vision, a weave of concerns that will never be definitively resolved. Poems have sequels across books – two series of “Garden Poems”; “Still Life I” and “Still Life II”; “Windows” and “Windows II”, each poem distinct yet conjoined. Malouf’s poetry, as he says in the final poem of An Open Book, works at “piecing things together not to restore / what was but to configure / what might be”.

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This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on September 13, 2025 as "An Open Book".

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