Forty-six years ago, I knocked on Peter Steele's door in the Melbourne University English Department and asked, in my convent innocence, if he would explain Jonathan Swift to me. I might as well have asked him to corral the wind. But now, a lifetime later, I still remember being struck by the man's courteous patience. He seemed to take my puzzlement seriously and did his best to untangle it. But I also remember a spark, a glint — I was not so naïve as to miss that — a shimmer of wit that almost subverted the serious courtesy. And I thought, there's a wild mind at work and play here, and I will have to run prodigiously fast even to catch at its stirrups.
And so it has proved: it's been a long, vigorous, and exultantly grateful following.
But it's been more than that. To read, to grasp Peter Steele, you have to grow up, not just bask — though that's an abiding and surely allowable pleasure because he is a poet, a writer of such brimming praise, a hunter-gatherer of all that might beguile a human. His mind is 'a dulcet google', as Chris Wallace-Crabbe puts it in his poem celebrating Peter's 70th birthday, and published in Peter's book, A Local Habitation: Poems and Homilies.
And yet, that dulcet mind takes you with it into places to confront, to daunt even a brave soul. 'If you write poetry,' Peter says in his introduction to A Local Habitation, 'it's part of your own freedom, a freedom which the poems offer to share.' Yes, and the freedom his writing heralds and shares is, for the reader who is game enough to accept the offer, an initiation into habits of moral acuity and exploration — if we can weather it, if we can bear the freedom, the vulnerability and the responsibility that comes with it.
There are some lines in one of Peter's earlier poems, 'At Tim Healy's Grave' (published by John Leonard in White Knight with Beebox: New and Selected Poems, 2008), lines that might flesh out my groping abstractions. Tim Healy, as many of you will know, was a Jesuit priest, onetime President of both the New York Public Library and of Georgetown University, where Peter himself has often happily lived and worked. A formidable man. Here are the lines I mean, from the first stanza of