Back to Earth by Tony Page #

Book Review - by Charles Klassen for the Melbourne U3A.

Tony Page excavated his travel diaries of the past four decades to capture the intensity of his travel experiences.

Tony conscientiously records his impressions in a prose diary within 12 hours of each event, to capture the immediacy of his experiences, illustrating Ceridwen Dovey’s theories about the secret pleasures of writing.

Marshall McLuhan, channeling Aldous Huxley, foresaw the implosion of information, a proliferation of writing, competing for limited attention spans. The hardest part, for Tony, was cutting or paring down to the bone, while maintaining the intensity and essence of the experience.

Back to Earth – a poetic travelogue following Aristotle’s profound observation that:

“The superiority of poetry over history consists in its possessing a higher truth and a higher seriousness”.

Tony Page is a peripatetic poet, referring to himself variously as a wanderer, venture, pilgrim or explorer. Born and raised in Melbourne, he worked and lived in Thailand and Malaysia for twenty years and traveled extensively off the beaten tracks for fifty years before returning to live in Melbourne, now an authoritative teacher of poetry and drama at the Melbourne University of the Third Age.

Back to Earth, launched on March 31, 2019, his fifth published collection, deals with journeys taken over five decades with more than forty countries intertwined with numerous quests of self discovery; personal, political, cultural and psychological. Though using the language of the masses to honestly depict various experiences of the wandering poet, the sounds, cadences and allusions resonate poetically.

Poetry is an aural medium, so his poetry came alive when Tony agreed to read some aloud to his U3A class.

‘Nothing replaces the reader’s responses: the sound of poetry on both the outer and inner ear, the visions of fiction in the mind’s eye, the kinaesthetic assault of total theatre’ (Guerin)

After Tony’s short back story, various class members critically commented on his poetry, recognising Ted Hughes’ acknowledgement that poems belong to the reader as much as to the writer and Eliot’s advice that

“The reader’s interpretation may be different from the author’s and be equally valid – it may even be better. There may be much more in a poem than the author is aware of.”

In Locking up the House, The Alpha poem, personifying the house, allows Tony to portray himself from an external perspective, contemplating his mortality; “Assuming he dies”, evoking Prufrock’s ubiquitous image of the “eternal footman”.

Also in “The Amazon Tracker, Augustin” Tony self -effacingly portrays himself from the outside, as his skilled guide might see him:

This Tourist is a strange one.
Why does he travel alone? .. He doesn’t know how
Sharply I assess him.

Poetry comes in all shapes, sizes and formats, each using distinct techniques to express deep impressions.

In Hopkin’s tradition, Tony pierces the facades of life to reveal the real or essence of the “other world” and an honest portrayal of himself. In Super-sized Sin he depicts the tinsel reality of Las Vegas in stark contrast to its garish opulence; its vacuous, plastic, meretricious pretence.

Another poem, The State of the Union, (1988)is an inside take of the shallowness and hollowness of Regan’s celebrations. The contrast of the pomposity and grandeur of the ceremony with the grubbiness and decadence of the celebratory parties in sumptuous surroundings, foreshadows the fall of empires:

“The champagne flows, the TV’s switched off, no one any longer pretending to care about Regan. Or the Union.

Let’s get stoned instead. There’s a jacuzzi on the roof.
Everybody in! They float towards the bath, puffing incense to the stars frozen above.

Though the overarching motif of Eliot’s “In the end is my beginning” illustrated the symbols of Alpha – α, and Omega Ω, the order is not chronological. This leaves any pattern beyond the reach of my discernment.

We have a primal need to “get away” hoping for some sort of change, release and new visions and to experience life through the eyes of others.

One of the greatest works in the English language is Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales where the author presents us with an invaluable portrait gallery of the rising middle class of the late 14th century journeying on a Pilgrimage. Not a nobleman or lady in sight.

The notion of learning or being taught along the way is neither new nor alien to anyone who has experienced mainstream stories of Jung’s archetypal hero, in passing from innocence (ignorance) to adulthood (maturity) goes through three stages, separation, transformation and return. Journeys enlighten us. It is in the return, poignantly captured in Home where the daily routine resumes.

he’s traced deeper prints
here at home, trajectories
to keep the body alive. ….. curl like an infant asleep
in the one and only bed.
the truest harbor of all.

Tony’s trips are about the thrill of discovery, of not knowing what comes next. Forget organised tours or detailed itineraries that look like a shopping list. As Kerouac said: “There was nowhere to go but everywhere, so just keep rolling under the stars.”

When you get lost, simply justify it with “seeing parts of the country you had no intention of seeing”. His range includes, the jungles of the Amazon, chancing on a dead body on a Bombay railway station, adventures in Africa with Kalahari Bushmen or confronting a domesticated tiger in Laos….

Tourism has become one of the world’s most lucrative industries and Australians embrace it. Its origins could be traced to the early days of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, to pilgrimages where people hoped for renewal through visiting the sites of early martyrs, to modern day; recreational, adventure, eco, historical, atrocity, to relaxation, culinary, artefacts … odysseys..

Like Hopkins, Page’s observant eye, pierces facades to depict the essence of his subjects; the reality instead of superficiality, like Lowell he abandons the mask or persona in favor of brutal personal honesty. Like Dickinson he pares the language to the bone, without resort to any form of cliché.

From Comfort House on the Amazon:

A high heeled woman
parades, slipping
in make up and mud.

Early poets, Hesiod, Solon…. used the language of the gods and so were highly revered. Traditional poetry is often constrained by highly disciplined, rigid forms. Page, well schooled in traditional poetic technicalities, adopts Coleridge’s trend, preferring the language of ordinary people with more natural cadences and speech patterns.

Back to Earth fulfils W.H. Auden’s chief criterion for reviewing poetry:

“Pleasure, may not an infallible guide, but it is the least fallible.” The Ω.