SKRZYNECKL, Peter

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Nationality: Australian. Born: Imhert, Germany, 6 April 1945; immigrated to Australia in 1949. Education: St. Patrick's College, Strathfield, New South Wales; University of New England, Armidale, New South Wales; University of Sydney. Family: Married Kate Magrath in 1980; two daughters and one son. Career: Formerly a primary school teacher. Since 1987 lecturer in English, University of Western Sydney, Macarthur, New South Wales. Awards: Captain Cook Bicentenary award, 1970; Grace Leven award, 1972; Henry Lawson award, for short story, 1985. Agent: Curtis Brown Ltd., P.O. Box 19, Paddington, Sydney, New South Wales 2122, Australia. Address: 6 Sybil Street, Eastwood, New South Wales 2122, Australia.

Publications

Poetry

There, behind the Lids. Sydney, Lyrebird, 1970.

Headwaters. Sydney, Lyrebird, 1972.

Immigrant Chronicle. St. Lucia, University of Queensland Press,1975.

The Aviary: Poems 1975–1977. Sydney, Edwards and Shaw, 1978.

The Polish Immigrant. Brisbane, Phoenix, 1982.

Night Swim. Sydney, Hale and Iremonger, 1989.

Easter Sunday. Sydney, HarperCollins, 1993.

Novel

The Beloved Mountain. Sydney, Hale and Iremonger, 1988.

Short Stories

The Wild Dogs. St. Lucia, University of Queensland Press, 1987.

Rock 'n' Roll Heroes. Sydney, Hale & Iremonger, 1992.

The Cry of the Goldfinch. Sydney and New York, Anchor, 1996.

Other

Editor, Joseph's Coat: An Anthology of Multicultural Writing. Sydney, Hale and Iremonger, 1985.

Editor, The Breaking Line. Sydney, Youngstreet Poets, 1995.

Editor, Influence: Australian Voices. Sydney and New York, Anchor,1997.

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Manuscript Collection: University of New England, Armidale, New South Wales; Australian Defence Forces Academy, Canberra, Australia.

Critical Studies: "Return to the Homeland after 40-Year Journey" by Peter Fuller, in Migration (Canberra), October/November 1988; "Peaks and Troughs of New Fiction," in The Age (Melbourne), 15 October 1988; The Poetry of Peter Skrzynecki by Barry Spurr, Sydney, Pascal Press, 1992; "Asking What Life's Purpose Should Be," in New England Review (Armidale, New South Wales), 1993; "Peter Skrzynecki: 'The Revelation of a Landfall"' by Michael Griffith, in Southerly (Sydney), 54(3), September 1994.

Peter Skrzynecki comments:

I have always been interested in the human and physical landscapes of existence—in the exile of immigrants from Europe after World War II and their settlement in this new, strange land. My poetry has mostly been concerned with this generation and also with the expression of my fascination for the physical and spiritual features of Australia.

(1995) The notion of spirituality has crept into my work more, the grapplings between pure states of being and our human frailties. The concept of dark or evil forces, also, with our abandonment of original self. The paradox of extremes, of joy, grief. These concepts find their outlets either in poetry or prose.

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Peter Skrzynecki is perhaps the most traditional of the contemporary Australian poets, standing in a direct line of descent that may be traced through the lyric poets of the previous generation— Campbell, Wright, Stewart, McAuley, Robinson—back to Slessor, Shaw Neilson, and Brennan.

This is remarkable in a way, given Skrzynecki's Polish/Ukrainian background and his migration to Australia as a child. It is this experience that provides the subject for much of his best poetry and the note of loss that is its most powerful characteristic. Yet it is precisely this elegiac note that sounds through the Australian lyric tradition, and since the experience of migration and displacement, however distant, is at its source, it is not surprising that the tradition should prove fertile ground for later comers. There is a second point of convergence, for, like the earlier "nature poets," Skrzynecki turns to the landscape for identification that the old culture and the old ways of life no longer afford him.

The landscape that dominates Skrzynecki's early poetry, and that haunts the later, is that of the New England plateau in northern New South Wales, where he took up his first teaching position. Finely observed and presented with a clarity that owes something to the particular qualities of the region's light, but more to the poet's sense of being an outsider looking on a strange new world, this landscape is both alluring and menacing. It is appealing in its intensity and yet unrevealing, as if some vital part of it were beyond the poet's reach. In "Bullock Skull," from the collection Night Swim, Skrzynecki compares such a landscape to "a distant planet / once glimpsed at the edge of a dream":

grey paddocks sheeted with frost
and cattle standing mutely
under shrouds of rising mist;
sheep feeding beside yellowdust roads
or the edge of granite ravines—
crimson lowries streaking through forests
and over waters of the Styx.

The river in question is actually called the Styx, and so the symbolism is unforced. But often in the early poetry, particularly in Headwaters, Skrzynecki deliberately heightens the symbolic effect through mythological, biblical, or cosmological associations, allegorizing the landscape in a way that dramatizes his own sense of exclusion even as he presses his claim to possess it imaginatively. The following is from "Wallamumbi":

In the ancient forest of gorges
He listened to the whisper of birds:
Heard the chant of midnight prophecies
And a name spelt out into the darkness of gullies;
Saw the migration of men and wings
Along the frozen river in the Kingdom of the Dead:
The begin-all, end-all landscape
From which no one before him had returned,
Where all mists rise, frost hardens bone,
And each granite boulder, like a stationary planet,
Becomes a landmark under a galaxy of tableland stars.

In his later poetry Skrzynecki eschews this kind of inflation in favor of a quiet insistence on the significance of ordinary things. At the same time his subjects are usually observed from an elegiac perspective. They are significant because they have been remembered, so that absence and loss are an essential part of their meaning. His mastery of the elegy (he uses the form more extensively than any of his contemporaries) and his sure command of rhythm and line impart a processional quality to his recollections:

For nineteen years
we departed
each morning, shut the house
like a well-oiled lock,
hid the key
under a rusty bucket:
to school and work—
over that still too-narrow bridge,
around the factory
that was always burning down.

This quality is also evident in Skrzynecki's elegiac catalogs, his habit of enumeration suggesting both a desire to preserve the past and an awareness that it falls some way short of a living inheritance:

For nineteen years
we lived together—
kept pre-war Europe alive
with photographs and letters,
heated discussions
and embracing gestures:
visitors that ate
kielbasa, salt herrings
and rye bread, drank
raw vodka or cherry brandy
and smoked like
a dozen Puffing Billies.
 
Naturalized more
than a decade ago
we became citizens of the soil
that was feeding us—
inheritors of a key
that'll open no house
when this one is pulled down.

These stanzas are from "10 Mary Street," one of the poems on the migrant experience collected in The Polish Immigrant. Skrzynecki explores the psychological consequences of migration with great insight and sensitivity. Perhaps the most telling effect, since it defines his own perspective as a poet, is the strain placed on the relationship between parent and child. The strength his parents still draw from the old ways stands in marked contrast to the sense of guilt and unworthiness caused by his own defection from those ways. Many of Skrzynecki's elegies celebrate heroic parental figures, their value heightened by the awareness of what it is in them that is lost or unavailable to the son. The portraits tend to have the quality of icons. Both the form and the attitude of veneration it implies may derive from the poet's orthodox Roman Catholic upbringing. Hence the opening of "Feliks Skrzynecki":

My gentle father
kept pace only with the Joneses
of his own mind's making—
loved his garden like an only child,
spent years walking its perimeter
from sunrise to sleep.
Alert, brisk and silent,
he swept its paths
ten times around the world.

The rhythm of Skrzynecki's elegiac catalogs is like a bell tolling out the measure of loss, but his poetic icons present a counterbalance, gathering their elements into a vision of order and value. Their power is particularly felt in Skrzynecki's volume Night Swim, a collection again haunted by the specter of loss—in this case the breakdown of the poet's first marriage—but one that also celebrates his rediscovery of his children and his new marriage. The landscape here is suburban for the most part, the detail humble and ordinary, but in such poems as "Burning Off," "A Green Memento," or "Weeding" these suburban settings are transfigured by a religious spirit of affirmation:

Sweat stains our limbs
in the sunset's light. A shiver ripples
along the downhill breeze.
We tug at knotted roots
like a pair of servants
working on hands and knees.
The child within you
has not yet started to move—
though
you laugh and strain at the toil.
We turn up roots, white as flesh,
and our fingers touch
in the warm, black soil.

—Ivor Indyk