The Moment of Touching: an Analysis of David Malouf's Poetic Experience

4 Introduction. The ‗Moment of Touching‘ in David Malouf‘s Poetical Experience In the yellow time of pollen, in the blue time of lilacs, in the green that would balance on the wide green world, air filled with flux, world-in-a-belly in the blue lilac weather, she had written a letter: You came into my life really fast and I liked it. 1 My very first encounter was with David Malouf the novelist, through one of his recent works, The Conversations at Curlow Creek. I clearly recall reading it in the space of one night, and deciding, in the aftermath, that it would be my favourite book. What I found most fascinating about his language was the poetic rythm of the prose, how the simplest words sewn together managed to offer glimpses of human power and fragility, facing, entering and overcoming the ineffability of a world sometimes too complex to be named, and yet utterly simple. Of course, after The Conversations at Curlow Creek I have read dozens of other ‗favourite‘ books, but somehow the first impression of that particular one still lies in my memory. I soon found out that David Malouf started out as a poet, before dedicating himself to the ‗steady gaze‘ provided by the literary means of prose 2 , even though he never gave up writing poems. Hence my second step was to move nearer to his poetical beginnings, firstly as a simple reader, and then trying to apply the insight and the methods of analysis of the scholar. I believe this work is a mixture of both the personal and the conceptual, the rational and the sentimental approach. However, in dealing with the subject matter and having, perhaps for the first time, to partially apply those ‗scholarly spectacles‘, possibly without missing on the intrinsic beauty of what I was studying, I found myself struggling towards the harmonization of the different feelings I had about it. Indeed, I hung between the fear of losing my trust in the possibility of explaining poetry, and the joy of discovering that it is actually so: poetry is and remains inaccessible with the sole means of rational analysis. And yet, I tried to remain firm in my engagement, without giving up to the conviction that nothing can be explained or revealed. I thus allowed myself to arrive just to the point where the poet‘s words take off, providing, as I said before, the hypotetical, partially ‗scientific‘ and partially personal reading of the 1 Luke Davies, Totem, in Totem Poem Plus 40 Love Poems, Sydney, 2004. 2 As the writer himself explaines in an interview with Candida Baker, Interview with David Malouf, in Picador, Yacker 3: Australian Writers Talk about Their Work, 1989, p. 235.