Land Before Lines: A Photographic Portrait Series of Contemporary Victorian Poets. By Nicholas Walton-Healey. $69.95.
Melbourne, which UNESCO has declared one of seven "Cities of Literature" worldwide, is also famous for its energetic and diverse poetry scene. Those familiar with its performance poetry aspect might be tempted to say too energetic and diverse. Others might complain about the relative prevalence of its avant-gardism. In any event, it all makes for a heady blend.
In Land Before Lines, Melbourne photographer and poet, Nicholas Walton-Healey, handsomely and tellingly celebrates this diversity with about 70 photographic portraits (in colour) of the city's poets (or, inevitably, a subset of them). The photos are extremely stylish (perhaps too consciously so at times) and demonstrate Walton-Healey's considerable artistry. Nearly all the photos are head shots and many of them reflect a knowledge of the history of Western Art from Caravaggio via Vermeer through to Matisse. Some are extreme close-ups where the poet is lucky to retain more than his/her mouth and eyes, the rest being brutally cropped. The colours are nearly almost always rich and dramatic. Land Before Lines would certainly have been a very different book in black and white.
Facing each of Walton-Healey's photos is a (more or less) ekphrastic poem which he commissioned to accompany each portrait. Some poems philosophise effectively about the process involved. Others are extremely tangential. Many are not as good as the poet's best work elsewhere but a few (e.g. Peter Bakowski's Acrostic Self-Portrait) definitely are. Of course, trying to tie poets down to such a demand is akin herding felines and the results are predictably various - in mode and quality.
Whether or not a poet's photographic portrait can tell us anything useful about either the poet or his/her work has long been a difficult issue (well addressed - along with related problems - in the book's introduction by poet Justin Clemens. Among the numerous poets whose faces are known to this reviewer, very few could be considered "flattered" — though some are perhaps "glamorised". Others, such as that of Alex Skovron, are unaccountably harsh.
As photographs, Land Before Lines, is an impressive collection and a fine reminder of Melbourne's poetic richness and variety. As a collection of poems, however, the book does the city a little less than justice.
