Gods Fool: The Life and Poetry of Francis Webb

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She was in conversation with Robyn Williams, and they are clearly kindred spirits, science journalists passionately concerned about the current attacks on science. My main take-home point was that scientists and, I would add, others have a deeply held belief that the facts will speak for themselves. But this is manifestly not so on matters with big emotional charges on them.

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Posted in Books , Diary. Bill Ashcroft, The Gimbals of Unease: Some of his letters and poetry Old Sage Press I can now assert that I have read every book published on the subject of Francis Webb. Michael Griffith was also in the Department then, and interested in Webb. Both of their books were published in the s. I believe Bill approaches Catholicism as an outsider, since he seems to miss references to Catholic liturgy and lore, but his analysis may be all the more useful for that, as he goes instead to major spiritual and intellectual traditions within Catholicism namely the Thomist—Ignatian and the Augustinian and locates tensions between them in the poetry.

As might be expected, then, his prose is heavy with theoretical ballast, and occasionally reaches dizzying heights of abstraction. In particular, it is fascinating to learn details of his early connection to Norman Lindsay, and to consider his poetry of the s in the context of the resurgence of Christian, even Catholic, themes in Australian poetry and art at that time.

The September issue of Poetry Australia was devoted to Webb, who had died nearly two years earlier. There is also a poignant memoir by Sister M.

Francis Webb (poet)

These essays are a striking reminder of how the language of literary criticism has changed in the last 40 or so years. The compatibility of schizophrenia and the post-colonial, or to put it a different way, the schizophrenic discourse of post-colonialism, is seen most markedly in the similarity between the absence of the metacommunicative mode in schizophrenic language and [the] metonymic gap [of post-colonial discourse]. But Vin as Webb called him says a lot more about the immediate experience of reading the poetry.

Four things shine through: The reason for his repeated confinement in psychiatric institutions remains of course obscure: The Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama lives in a mental hospital in Tokyo, and is able to go to her studio regularly. Yet the miracle of it is that he too created marvellous works:. Are gestures stars in sacred dishevelment, The tiny, the pitiable, meaningless and rare, As a girl beleaguered by rain, and her yellow hair? I started out on my edition, with its copious pencilled annotations by twenty-something me, but about a third of the way in I bought a copy of the new edition and switched to that.

No one would disagree that wrestling is involved: Italy, and a nom de plume — better than in the van Of France defeated: Love, hate, ambition mustered at his bugle, Sorties of good and evil were in vain.

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With watchful eye and towerings of the eagle He must disarm the priests, immobilize pain. He writes about sunsets, fog and wind as if they contain all the deepest struggles of the cosmos. My mother, no lover of difficult language, wrote to me in a letter: You can feel the labour of getting the words down, squeezing meaning onto the page, into the shape of the poem.

Even at his most difficult, he is working at communication, never being difficult for its own sake. Moored in a lulled spinny of sun and shadow, With an impotent tremor in the sails, the ketch nosed down To the long lunge of the swell, rose dripping, gasping As if with eagerness to suck in air again. And the men, snug in this casual pediment of time, Their gestures grouped and restricted and interlocking, Felt the haul stubborn to their hands, an eye-tooth wrenched From the iron gums of the sea-bed, shuddering and aching. Compare the first five stanzas of the version published in the Bulletin on 8 October , when Webb was 22 years old:.

Certainly, three fishermen out on the bay And the shaping of a miracle are rarely aligned, History bells hours only, clock on the walls of speeches: Work and silence tick unnoticed with the second-hand.

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Moored to drifting banks of sun and shadow, With an impotent tremor in the sails, the ketch nosed down, plunged to the bowsprit in the swell, rose dripping, gasping As if with eagerness to suck in air again. And the men grouped snugly in this leeward pediment of time, With their slow gestures of toil, felt a curious lagging in the strands Of their sunken net, as if parallel action under the water Passed on a sort of nerveless shock to the hands.

Your touch on a net-load of fish short-circuits life: The cargo is arteries stabbed in their element and shaking, But this haul yielded stubbornly like an eye-tooth wrenched From the iron jaws of the sea-bed, shuddering and aching. I love the way he pared those stanzas down, even at the risk of making his meaning harder to grasp. And the revisions towards the end of the poem are even more telling.

The last stanza changed from. Beauty comes baleful as a skull, comes riven from the sea: There were some to roll back the heavy stone of the sea; There was none to ponder the mortal, the living token. But later, men polished, incised, established at last What that raised hand once clutched and years had broken.

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With great economy, the resurrection of Christ is invoked, and the contrast between the practicalities of dragging up the statue and understanding it is conveyed as a further piece of narrative rather than in a slightly priggish address from the author. I plan to be there. I happened to be in Glebe this morning, and as I had earned a little bit of money last weekend I allowed myself to yield to the allure of the bookshops.

There were a number of tempting morsels — enough to make me think that a Sydney poetry lover had recently died or radically downsized. The birthday girl later denied all knowledge of having given the book away, so I was left with a nagging sense that one or other of my dear friends was a book thief, a liar or an ingrate. His younger sister Leonie flew to England and retrieved her brother in , stopping off at Rome on the trip home. The creative product of these years, including his famous poems 'Birthday' about Adolf Hitler 's last hours and 'The Canticle' a poem about the life of Francis of Assisi , was self-published in his third collection simply entitled Birthday In late Webb returned to England.

But once in England he was confined at a number of asylums over a period of seven years. During this time he wrote many of the poems, including 'Eyre All Alone', which would comprise his fourth collection Socrates and other poems , eventually published in His passport was returned to him and he came home to Australia in late Webb spent the rest of his life in and out of New South Wales and Victorian psychiatric facilities. In , Webb was praised by Read as "one of the greatest poets of our time. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Rose Park , Adelaide, South Australia.

These 2 locations in Tasmania: These 11 locations in Victoria: These 4 locations in Western Australia: None of your libraries hold this item. Found at these bookshops Searching - please wait We were unable to find this edition in any bookshop we are able to search. These online bookshops told us they have this item: Other suppliers National Library of Australia - Copies Direct The National Library may be able to supply you with a photocopy or electronic copy of all or part of this item, for a fee, depending on copyright restrictions.

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