The Office of Literary Endeavours 1.
Mark Roberts
5 Islands Press 2025
ISBN 9781923248090
Reviewed by MARGARET BRADSTOCK
In his third poetry book, The Office of Literary Endeavours, Mark Roberts embraces many interlinked themes, dealing mainly with the relationship of the poet, or any individual, to the land we stand upon. The eponymous poem, whose title smacks of Orwell’s Ministries in Nineteen Eighty-Four, encapsulates the collection, its three parts coming at the beginning, middle and end of the book.
In part 1, maree, on her way to the office, “before beginning her poem…slipped and fell/ into the valley/ her death”. However, the poem finds its true home:
the poem remained
etched into her bones
as her skin fell away
the words in her fingers
toes belly and heart
dissolved into the earth
(p.2)
This interconnection reverberates with the issue of land and Aboriginal dispossession:
even in daylight
stories are hidden here
at night they call to us
singing across country
(p.3, “Returns”)
and Black history:
language carried on wind
a history
we can’t read ………….
built over silenced
genocide
this was never
our country
(p.22, “Wolgan Valley”)
2.
In “Gweagal Shield,” we’re reminded of the battles during first contact:
For the English
this is empty country terra nullius−
the confrontation an inconvenience.
and the theft of weapons for display in the British Museum:
A shield pierced by shot is dropped.
Collected and catalogued
it becomes the first spoil of a long war.
(p.22)
Like the campaign for return of the shield to country, “river poem” is a plea for the return of Aboriginal place-names:
I want
to know
the real name
of this river
not the name on your map
I want to know the name it has had for ever
(p.24)
Closely linked to this theme are poems recalling Roberts’ heritage and the relationship between his progenitors and the land. “Returns” is a sequence of four poems detailing a journey from Melbourne to Ireland, where the family began:
We have left behind my great grandmother’s
sea chest which contained all her possessions
when she travelled to Sydney 150 years ago.
(p.3)
Leaving Strokestown Park, the poet recalls his grandfather’s stories of “home”:
We drive out through the gates
the chill in our bones
a reminder of a history
that follows us down
these short country roads.
A land that tugs at memory.
(p.4)
3.
Back in Australia, poems revisiting places inhabited by the immigrants reinforce the connectedness with country, despite colonisation:
This is a return
to a place, a connection with country stretching through my family,
the hints and suggestions of a buried history, a land that fills the
imagination. (“Gaanha-bula”, p.10)
Other poems exemplifying this subject are “Wassail, Cargo Road, Lidster, N.S.W., 1937”, “Learning to Shoot” and “cargo road”.
The second half of the collection is thematically more diverse. Poems like “Sediment” speak of the difficulty of maintaining this connection:
history
layering onto a recent garden
hard to sense connections
buried by guns
and imported gods
(p.33)
The future is bleak, an unreal city, its citizens lacking in empathy:
Meanwhile we rush towards the station anxious
to make the train home, giving the man in a dirty sleeping bag,
sheltering in the pedestrian tunnel, a wide berth.
Then on Friday night, gathered on the rooftop ,
we watch the pretty explosions of fireworks
and listen to dogs barking in the street below.
(p.31,“Armistice Day 2023”)
Yet rejuvenation is still possible, as in “cutting the grass”:
he told them that he remembered
where the grass had been
they took away his mower
within days
the first green shoots
appeared through cracks in the concrete
(p.43)
4
Many of the poems in this section wittily re-invent movies and plays of the modern era.
“The Office of Literary Endeavours 3” concludes the volume. Here we learn that maree’s books and papers have not arrived, the road to the town has been cut by rebels, a bridge blown up and a levee bank destroyed. It is not clear when the office will be reopened.
Like his subject matter, Mark Roberts’ poetic language can be humorous, contemporary or, at its finest, evocative and lyrical. One last poem, “limestone,” deserves special mention:
memories of fish
swim through the darkness
of an ancient coral mountain
above
fluorescence
from horizon to a forgotten shore
we shrink
to an imagined significance
a point between a grounded history
and an infinite curve of time
a choreographed immigration
of rock and earth
a beauty that no ideology
can prevent
*
Margaret Bradstock, a Sydney poet, critic and editor, lectured at UNSW for 25 years, has been Asialink Writer-in-residence at Beijing University, co-editor of Five Bells for Poets Union, and on the Board of Directors for Australian Poetry. Poetry collections include The Pomelo Tree (winner of the Wesley Michel Wright Prize) and Barnacle Rock (winner of the Woollahra Festival Award, 2014). Editor of Antipodes, the first Australian anthology of Aboriginal and white responses to “settlement” (2011) and Caring for Country (2017), Margaret’s ninth poetry collection is Alchemy of the Sun (Puncher & Wattmann, 2024).