Born in 1959, perhaps his best-known book is ‘Down the Lake with Half a Chook’. He was brought up on a dairy farm at Katandra and educated at Geelong then Melbourne University.

‘Blood and Bone’ from 1986 is the work of a 24 year-old poet diagnosed with leukaemia. In it he confronts the question of God:

An Education

At first there was a dairy farm

with subjects coming from the soil-

a grid of paddocks big with time,

about a hundred cows, one bull.

Regrettably it didn’t last.

The subjects got more difficult.

I studied Love but didn’t pass

and gave up God with no result.

I couldn’t think what else there was

until I went up to a ward

where people died, and met a face

that gently told me what I had.

The final subject has been set.

I’m concentrating hard on Death.

This poem is a Shakespearean sonnet in its rhyme scheme. Shakespeare wrote in iambic pentameter. Hodgins has trimmed it back to a tetrameter: the sound is sometimes notated thus: ‘di-dah di-dah di-dah di dah’. The emphasis is on the second, or even-numbered syllable. The opposite to this, ‘dah-di dah-di dah-di dah-di’, is called a Trochaic meter, and is most commonly used today in blues music. In poetry, in general, an iamb is held to be useful for serious subjects, the trochee for lighter verse. As the trochee is said to ‘trip along lightly’ it is commonly encountered in ballads and longer narrative structures. Consider the opening of arguably Australia’s best-loved poem, ‘The Man from Snowy River’ (A.B. ‘Banjo’ Paterson):

There was movement at the station, for the word had passed around

the colt from ‘Old Regret’ had got away

and joined the wild bush horses: he was worth a thousand pound

so all the traps had gathered for the fray

from ‘Apologies’, Hodgins writes

‘…two married people

sitting in a hospital corridor

gazing down the length of sorrow.

Their only child will not bury them.

I must tell them how sorry I am.’

In several poems he reflects upon animals he has killed as a boy: fish, rabbits, drowned kittens. He does not see holy revenge, or endless karmic regression; instead, he sees not much.

‘The book said Rilke* had

four weeks of pure, relentless pain.

I think he would have found his God

useless as morphine.’ (‘The Change', stanza 2)

(*Rainer Maria Rilke, Poet, born Prague 1875)

Michael Dransfield

‘ a needle spelling XANADU

in pinprick visions down your arm’

Michael Dransfield lived to the age of 24, dying from tetanus acquired from a heroin needle. He wrote 7 books, was highly regarded as a poet in his home-town of Sydney, and was something of a darling of ‘the set’.

Heroin, the needle, and overdose all figure prominently in his work. I have selected a few fragments from his poems that give us an idea of what might go through the mind of some people with heroin addiction:

‘Solitudes. Pacing impatiently the cage of body, of self. An exit glitters brightly in my hand.’

‘Cooking up, tying up, shooting up

in the dim room

I look at the arm

the surface of it

a moon landscape

needle craters of old hallucinations.

‘Past’, ‘Future’, are not even terms of reference.’

‘Overdose. Nothing left but the

whim of survival. Consciousness

demands vigilance’

‘there is no real thing.

none of these things is real.

he takes another book from the shelf, glances, puts it

aside, jabs a needle in his arm, listens to the wireless, kills it

with a touch. there is no real thing. he rises, and the face of

the mirror empties.’

Consider: This last fragment is typical of much of his work in that he is very distant from himself. Would this have given us a clue that he might be suicidal?

This next poem is complete: what clinical signs does it suggest to you?

Fix

It is waking in the night,

after the theatres and before the milkman,

alerted by some signal from the golden drug tapeworm

that eats your flesh and drinks your peace;

you reach for the needle and busy yourself

preparing the utopia substance in a blackened

spoon held in candle flame

by now your thumb and finger are leathery

being so often burned this way

it hurts much less than withdrawal and the hand

is needed for little else now anyway.

Then cordon off the arm with a belt,

probe for a vein, send the dream-transfusion out

on a voyage among your body machinery. Hits you like

sleep-

sweet, illusory, fast, with a semblance of forever.

For while the fires die down in you,

until you die down in the fires.

Once you have become a drug addict

you will never want to be anything else.

Consider: Your attitude to ‘junkies’: what is it and why?

References and Further Reading

Hodgins P (1986) Blood and Bone Angus and Robertson

Hodgins P ( ) Down the Lake with Half a Chook ABC Books

Kinsella J (2002) (ed.) Michael Dransfield: A Retrospective

updated: 22/03/2010