Poet of the Month - Volume 1

3 June 2010 - Gregory Day

Gwen Harwood was born and raised in Brisbane.  She moved to Hobart after her marriage in 1945, where she lived until her death in 1995.  She began her artistic career as a pianist and organist, and her poetry from the outset is underpinned with unmistakebly detailed harmonics and an aural consonance often eschewed in 20th century poetry.

Harwood uses words to intimate the truth beyond language.  Truth perhaps that only music can touch.  She is the only Australian poet who has reduced me to tears and yet is a poet who demonstrated time and again in her art that we are not in fact at all ‘reduced’ by tears but rather expanded endlessly into a space resembling our soul’s truth.  As such Harwood’s oeuvre is deeply melancholic, but far from depressing, in fact her poems, in their extemporised formality, loving observation of nature, and capacity for joyful outburst, are imbued everywhere with a conscious cherishing of our time in the light.

Throughout a long career, in which she won the Robert Frost award and the Patrick White award among many others, Harwood combined her life as a poetess with a career as Australia’s most distinguished librettist.  Her innate musicality gives her poetry a subtle and welcome accessibility in which a richly philosophic imagination is suffused with the ‘salt air, soft stone and clear light’ of her adopted island.  It is true, as Oscar Wilde once said, that ‘all bad poetry is sincere’ but in Gwen Harwood’s poetry we find that rare combination:  emotional warmth and the finest calibrations of the poet’s craft.