Having received universally positive but non-committal responses from publishers when he approached them about publishing his collection of poems, Dawson Hann - Wesley legend of the English classroom and the Adamson Theatre Company, former editor of the Lion - was understandably thrilled when he opened a letter from London publishing house Austin Macauley offering him a contract.
‘The Board was keen to comment on the emotional response your words invoked,’ read the letter. ‘Many were impossible to read with dry eyes - unique while communicating the profound impact poetry has had on your life.’
There is surely no more emphatic a validation of a writer’s work than that.
Bottled Oddities: The Collected Poems of Dawson Hann is the result of Dawson having ‘written a poem now and then’ over the past 25 years. As the title implies, the poems are all highly individual, the blurb on the back cover aptly positioning the collection thus: ‘They sit upon a shelf of life’s varied experiences, inviting you to sample, through compelling imagery and a diversity of poetic forms, the meaning the poet has extracted from a remarkably rich life of travel and human engagement.’
As a Wesley teacher for over 40 years, human engagement has obviously been the stuff of life for Dawson, and many of the poems are inspired by interactions with colleagues and students, within the classroom and without. There’s the overriding sense that, aside from travel and his obvious love of literature, the poet’s relationships with others have provided an opening to an understanding of the self.
Not that making sense of yourself and the world you live in is always a serious business. Here’s the opening stanza to a poem sparked by an ‘infelicitous utterance’ made by a colleague:
“To do here was,” she said, exactly like that,
Leaving me upended in a grammatical vat,
No strategies to hand that might help me find
Just what exactly was on her mind.
‘I truly bless the four decades of the perspectives, both mature and less so, which surrounded me at Wesley,’ says Dawson. ‘Not forgetting the humour too, of course. There are ways in which a teacher's life is full of fun. And fun is what empowers expression (and poetry).'
Getting things published isn’t easy, but the obvious quality of the work - and another passionate believer in it - have helped it happen. On the dedication page, Dawson states he is ‘forever indebted to a former student and lifelong friend, Ian Thomas (OW1982), for his unqualified faith in the merits of this collection and who worked tirelessly as my agent and editorial assistant to see it through to publication’.
A well-travelled man, Dawson offers us many poems about journeys, into the Outback, South East Asia and across the United States of America. But perhaps the most affecting journeys he offers us are those into memory and matters of the heart. There’s an undercurrent of nostalgia for warmer, simpler times in this collection.
Near the end, Du Temps Perdu lovingly reflects on the ‘lives lived close’ in the neighbourhoods of vanished years… of recipes in yellowing exercise books, of homemade preserves passed through gaps in backyard fences:
It seemed so simple, then, but it always does in a world apart;
Bottled oddities slipped cannily through fences round the heart.
To dip into this collection of oddities is to taste a variety of extraordinary stories drawn from ordinary life and to be warmed by their sustaining glow - the harvest of a Wesley life well-lived.
You can order your copy of Bottled Oddities at amazon.com.au
Book Launch
Bottled Oddities: The Collected Poems of Dawson Hann
Monday 2 March
Cato Room, St Kilda Road Campus
For more information, contact wesley.events@wesleycollege.edu.au
