Hull, Coral
HULL, Coral
Nationality: Australian. Born: Paddington, New South Wales, 1965. Education: University of Wollongong, B.A. in creative writing 1987, Doctor of Creative Arts 1998; Deakin University, M.A. 1994. Career: Works as an Animal rights advocate and full-time writer; director, animal Watch Australia. Editor, Thylazine electronic literary journal. Agent: Clive Newman, PO Box 2112, Kardinya, Western Australia 6163, Australia.
Publications
Poetry
Broken Land. N.p., Five Islands Press, 1997.
How Do Detectives Make Love? Ringwood, Victoria, Penguin Books
Australia, 1998.
*Critical Study: "Working with Coral Hull on Zoo" by John Kinsella, in Overland, 154, fall 1999.
* * *Coral Hull came to prominence as a poet in Australia in the mid-1990s and has been a poetry editor of the important magazine MEANJIN. Although there is a lyrical edge to her work, which shows itself to advantage in the way her metaphors superimpose themselves over her narrative voice and in the often sharply vivid endings to her poems, Hull's natural tone is narrative-reflexive, and it achieves its effects by accretion and the use of often immensely long, flowing sentences that express streams of thoughts or associations. In this sense she carries echoes of an older poet in Australia, Bruce Beaver, especially as they both have achieved some of their most memorable work in long autobiographical sequences drenched in old childhood disturbances that come to focus through often small and particular images.
Beaver's memorable sequence "As It Was" takes as its starting point the memory of his first bee sting. Hull's book How Do Detectives Make Love? (1998) is most remarkable when she is delving into a childhood dominated by her ex-detective father's brutalized profession. The poem "The Black Gun," for instance, is eleven pages long, and the slow unrolling of its impact depends on the way it circles and recircles around the image of her father's hidden revolver in the living room. The long, rambling sentence structure, with its internal slash marks, has the effect of suggesting almost an alternative set of line divisions and does much to keep the reader alert to cadential tensions and tightenings within the general rhythmic flow. In some of the long pieces in the book, such as "Royal Park Stalker Sequence" and "Ex-Cop on the River Bank," there is a danger of becoming prosy, but the former—in keeping with the idea of stalkers themselves—actually gains from the lack of pace. It relies upon an almost mesmeric slowness to build upon the corner-of-theeye sense of hunter and quarry. In an autobiographical sense Hull's father emerges over the span of the book as a memorable literary creation, even if the poet herself remains the chief protagonist.
Dorothy Porter is one of the few other contemporary women poets in Australia to have tackled with individuality the challenges of the longer poem, but she has honed her style to a clipped and almost cryptic café talk. Hull, on the other hand, takes a different tack. It has something of the Western Australia spaces in it but also the confined backyards of suburbia, which in childhood seem full of treasures but all too often contain claustrophobic defensiveness and dysfunctional families. Despite all the bleakness in these poems, however, there is quite a surge of spiritedness and even delight in the possibilities of language, so that the final effect is more generous than disgruntled. And as a notable animal liberationist, Hull has an unerring quickness of response to creatures. Nevertheless, she is a long way removed from the misanthropy of Robinson Jeffers, who once wrote, "I would rather kill a man than a hawk."
Hull's determinedly nonlyrical style has challenged many readers, but its rugged individuality is impressive.
—Thomas W. Shapcott