The Whispering Gallery : Art into Poetry, by Peter Steele. Macmillan Art Publishing, 2006. ISBN 1 876832 85 1, RRP $88.00.
Peter Steele’s poems are miniature essays, assemblies of words and ideas compacted into easeful lines with well-tempered rhythms. Steele is well-tempered, even when the subject is not. Aphoristic gambits, different sides of a paradox, colours occasionally nailed to the proverbial, the personal in play with the like-minded or other-minded, criss-cross paths of the argument — all good features of an essay — animate the Steele poem. He is insistent on the conjunction; we can sense the word 'but' about to turn a vignette about face. It makes us pay closer attention.
A lifetime of university teaching and marking has shaped his special form of address, though his poetry is blessedly free of the post-modern jargon some writers feel a necessity to use in poetry of ideas. He is old-fashioned enough to employ 'thesis, antithesis, synthesis' as though it were normal. Steele relishes the multiplicity of the world and the mind, while desiring to square things up in verse. If a poet is the line manager of his own language, then Steele is the model of sober good manners; words are taken on their merits, so we find nothing excessive or wildly eccentric, likewise nothing mean or tyrannical.
Steele may avoid the new jargon but not the old strays of English. 'Pond', his poem on Edward Haytley’s 'The Brockman Family at Beachborough', purposefully contains 'abroach', 'ambages', 'sparkish', 'gasconading', 'brandling', 'routiers', and 'gudgeons', so some knowledge of 18th century British mores and a familiarisation with these words aids enjoyment. The poem itself shows us, in a mannerly way, why manners aren’t everything.
This second collection of picture poems gives further access to his manner of talking. In Plenty: Art into Poetry (2003) Steele enthuses about ekphrastic poetry, his chosen practice, as a way "in which poems 'speak forth' real or imagined works of art." I hesitate to agree that this is the central thing going on in all of these poems, some do little more than prompt a broader response or force an issue into the open, but the richest are making new out of old. Not glosses, but glorifications.
What is Steele’s pursuit? To make, in the same measured tones, educated observations of human dreams and human dilemmas. In 'In Memory of Anthony Hecht' he asks that American poet to