'These are poems woven from an elevated and passionate rhetoric. In a world which he recognises as fallen and broken, Jurgensen clings to his sense of poetry as a sacred art, as a high calling. In poem after poem he is driven by a sense that "the world still makes us in its image" or that the words which have slipped away from us were "lost entries to another life". We live in a little age of linguistic analysis, linguistic scepticism, baffled secular gestures. But to Jurgensen it is only language which can be adequate to life's presences and to its absences. Only through language, orchestrated into a musical order, can we begin to come to terms with displacement, loss, pain and the sexual mysteries. Many of Jurgensen's poems are couched in a spacious, original blend of the modern prose poem with old alliterative measures, others are essentially lyrical. But they all come out of European traditions of poetry as an elevated, stubborn and impassioned art. What he variously calls voice, names, the sovereign code, love's counter-speech and the vintage of song is for him a kind of magic which recurrently redeems our damaged lives.'
Chris Wallace-Crabbe
The Partiality of
Harbours,
Paperbark Press,
Sydney 1989
rain
once we wore it on our
skin
when early evenings brought gifts of tales
and other tongues.
memories were raised
by smell and touch as we listened to it pour.
dressed
in speech not of our making
lips were on time. the ocean wind set sails
on
gliding arms, lowered chin
and back as we raced clouds in our endeavour
to
be the first one home. each move praised
its shadow. our hands were
shaking.
chasing sense, we sensed
it then.
and got so close to it. words forecast
speech separated from our
being.
we live in absence, as if we did not know
our stubborn nature's
otherness.
it falls into the fall of our past
with present tense. we
reason
it away. our language is the afterglow
of speaking: the thing is
not the thing.
the child's first word is motherless.
david of florence
that day, crossing the
arno, he suddenly appeared. i felt
his arms around my neck as if our passion
bottled up for years
had burst. his laughter
wiping away the past. we crouched
over the balustrade, torn images reflected
in the desiccating
river-bed. in our hair
noises of summer. no explanation.
his hands already italian, the open shirt
unveiling a tanned torso.
i remembered his
presence, its totality. no feature time could
erase. his eyes adapted to the
light, today they were dark blue
again. he smoked with
pimpish grace, i looked away. we walked
among the crowd, driven by its aim.
entering the cloister of
san lorenzo, he showed me
how to steal from tourists. i tried to
understand how someone so physical
could make things disappear.
it is an art, he said,
and i recalled our nights in carlton, the
thefts that never were repaid. he
spoke of leonardo, fra angelico,
botticelli, caravaggio,
michelangelo: he had come home at last.
the flights of statues cast as
beauty's rape: polyxena's fate
rehearsed in first-year
digs. back in the streets we hugged in
time's surrender. another statuary,
cellini's masterpiece. we
split, his words 'all
lovers sleep on bridges' ringing with sweet
alarm, my watch keeping vigil
over his bed on the ponte vecchio.