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ARTS AND CULTURE

The beauty that was Peter Steele's mind

  • 29 June 2012

Peter Steele SJ – priest, poet, teacher, essayist, homilist, and friend – died on Wednesday 27 June 2012. 

During Eureka Street’s first months, in 1991, Peter Steele gave its editor some riding instructions. Media magnate was not his style. As Jesuit Provincial, he’d had to learn the rigors and language of authority, but cant, prescription, or proscription – they weren’t his style either. ‘Publish the very best writing you can lay your hands on’, he said. That was it. 

But it was more than enough. From a poet and a man as subtle, mercurial and profound as Peter Steele, the words were both guide and challenge. Anyone who had experienced his classes at Melbourne University, read his books, shared a meal or heard one of his pithy, grounded-in-life homilies, would understand what he meant, know how freighted his words were. How they pointed to integrity and élan in the wielding of language.   

We were sitting at the time in a pub in Richmond. It was called the All Nations, an old city hotel jammed in between Housing Commission high risers and the flats that were home to the Vietnamese who’d come here by boat in less politically expedient times. There was an old tailor’s dummy in the dining room corner, costumed and feathered to conjure the pub’s heritage of hospitality. She became a kind of totem for Eureka Street. And Peter Steele became its guardian angel. 

He’d grimace, or just laugh at my description. And in an ideal world, we would then have an argument or a meander about the varieties and meanings of angels. And how some of them are swooping, formidable presences, always at one’s back. Peter’s friend and fellow poet, the ever questing, unbelieving Peter Porter, wrote about angels in a way that struck home for both of us. In An Angel In Blythburgh Church Porter’s angels, in their ‘enskied formation’, are mute but exhortatory. He calls one a ‘stern-faced plummet’. ‘The face is crudely carved, simplified by wind / It looks straight at God and waits for orders.’

Over the years, I’ve waited for Peter’s orders to be transmitted to me, down here on the ground. They’ve come in code, in the poems, in the essays and reviews that he wrote for Eureka Street, and in all his books and talks and homilies.  I am still deciphering the code, and will for the rest of my life, with the kind
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