Poems on Paris 2 - Gary Catalano

If you knew the poetry scene in the 80s and 90s you might remember Gary Catalano, who had been an art critic for the Age and wrote 10 poetry collections before he died in 2002. In the Keesing studio there are about a dozen poetry books, including Catalano's UQP volume, The Empire of Grass. Here I only want to quote and comment on those poems of his that refer to Paris.

I post them, not because I think they are very good, but because I find them to be symptomatic of an imagistic trying to make discursive commentary, which is the temptation for the expatriate poet in Paris. The use of stereotype "Italian hug" also seems to be weak, and sentimental.

Here's an excerpt from a poem-sequence 'Postcards for Peter (Peter Lyssiotis)'. This is is probably not one of Catalano's best poems.

8.

Paris can 

be spooky.

Everywhere you go

you ask yourself

was Modigliani drunk

on this spot?

10.

When you are almost skittled

in the Tuileries

by a kid on a bike

with a black and white kitten

perched on his shoulder

you have to agree: the French are

a wee bit crazy

and don't deserve to be screwed

by Brezhnev's mob.

13.

On telling the waitress

at the Café des Beaux-Arts

that we were leaving France

I received a real

Italian hug

and big kiss

on each cheek

- and therefore

am walking on air.

In Jacket 4 he published these prose poems, which in theire abstraction in engagement with creative thinking and surreal imagination are more 'French' I feel, though in imagery are Australian, with a familiar feel for the bush iconography - hay bales, cockatoos, red dirt, the trees, the fly-swatter:

Thoughts
Those trees in the distance have gone through so many transformations that I hardly know where to begin. I could start with a thought-balloon, for that is what they initially appeared to be when I glimpsed them between the haybales' Maginot Line. Or should I start with a fly-swatter, for that is what they have become as we stretch our legs on the red dirt and brush at our mouths and eyes?

But already I have a better idea. If I can't think of them as parachutes just about to crumple as they touch earth, I'd like to propose that each one of them is a table-tennis bat. Look, if you listen really hard you'll even hear a ball whizz past your ear at a speed as fast as that of thought itself.