Earth Hour is consciously a late collection. Like the poems of Thomas Hardy, which are all late, the poems in Earth Hour are concerned with memory. The way a poet’s memory works offers one key to his style. For Hardy, memory makes a play of early and late perspectives, a moral drama of hope and regret, perhaps most beautifully in the poem‘Afterwards’, with its line: ‘He was a man who used to notice such things.’ Malouf, though, is more interested in how memory creates a place outside time, a place of renewed possibility. In his poem for Chris Wallace-Crabbe, also turning eighty this year, Malouf describes memory as ‘the dearest / and cheapest of luxuries / and of its kind one of our rarest / gifts’. His description of a memory works as an account of memory itself: ‘a new mode / of being O completely Neither / earthbound nor even maybe / sky-bound.’ Such ‘footloose’ syntax, unusual in Malouf, suggests the nature of memory, which connects things outside time, as in this poem each phrase connects with phrases around it as much as those immediately before and after.

In a 1983 essay on À la recherche du temps perdu for Scripsi, Malouf writes: ‘All the years and events of what is to be unfolded are contained in that timeless suspension of time with which the book opens; the great sad changes, discoveries, disappointments and losses to come are already there in the elegiac note it sounds, which is also the medium of their recovery.’For Malouf, too, memory is a medium of recovery: in memory, forfeited possibilities flourish at last. The poem ‘Retrospect’ opens these dream perspectives into the past. It starts,

A day at the end of winter. Two young men,
hooded against the silvery thin rain

that lights the forest boughs, are making towards
a town that at this distance never gets closer.

One of them not me, as he turns, impatient
for the other to catch up, wears even now when I meet
     his face

in dreams, the look of one already gone, already gone
too far into the forest; as when, last night

in sleep, I looked behind me out of the queue for an old
      movie and you
were there …

This radiant and strange poem seems to me to work at the centre of Malouf’s art. The poem starts like a story, but this one, which appears real, is built from memories and dreams. It works between the two realms: realms those long lines first set apart and then fold together. ‘Even now when I meet his face’ appears to ground the memory in immediate life – a place transformed by the start of the next stanza (‘in dreams’).

Malouf’s writing is often shaped by the realisation of myth in everyday life. This poem recalls Ovid’s account of Orpheus and Eurydice – the poet who looked back too soon and left his beloved in the underworld. That myth concentrates much of what Malouf is wondering about in this collection: about what memory can do, and poetry; and also what the earth keeps for itself. Earth, as he puts it in the title poem: ‘our green accommodating tomb.’

‘He is eighty.’ In this collection Malouf returns to the ground of ‘Early Discoveries’. There is still a child in the garden: Earth Hour is lit up by memories of childhood and youth. ‘Touching the Earth’, first in the sequence ‘Garden Poems’, brings the young man’s and the old man’s perspectives in play: ‘Spring, when a young man’s fancy turns, / fitfully, lightly, to idling in the sun,/ to touching in the dark. And the old man’s? // To worms in their garden box …’ Here, Malouf sets these perspectives in play like two musical themes. The lines turn from quick light rhythms to low-pitched, slow-paced, one-syllable words. It is this that makes the poem intimate, its form inward to the turns of a mind thinking.

Beyond even memories of childhood, the collection is concerned with what Malouf in the poem ‘Radiance’ calls ‘the mutinous struck infant / in us’. Malouf’s radiant novel An Imaginary Life (1978) takes dramatic force from the encounter between an old man’s perspective and the experience of a child. These poems are alike concerned with that encounter: between what works in language and what persists beyond its reach. That opposition gives dramatic force to Earth Hour’s lyric poems. Take the book’s first poem, ‘Aquarius’:

             … This is the day,
we tell ourselves, that will not end, and stroll
enchanted through its moods as if we shared
its gift and were immortal, till something in us
snaps, a spring, a nerve. There is more to darkness
than nightfall. Caught reversed in a mirror’s lens,
we’re struck by the prospect of a counterworld
to so much stir, such colour; loved animal
forms, shy otherlings our bodies turn to
when we turn towards sleep; like us the backward
children of a green original anti
-Eden from which we’ve never been expelled.

‘And stroll’, ‘As if we shared’: these phrases, running over the line breaks, show that unconsciousness of ending which the poem names; but the whole poem breaks on the word ‘snaps’. It is as if the rest of the poem were a mirror image in which the syntax itself, and thought, are ‘caught reversed’. In this second part, its counterworld, the poem takes its meaning from reversals, double turns, double negatives, prefixes that reverse a word’s meaning. In Earth Hour, Malouf’s rapturous sense of things takes its spring, its nerve, from his fascination with what is ‘counterworld’; original in our bodies, and on the other side of the mirror.

In An Imaginary Life, Ovid as an old man dreams of himself as a pool of water in which a child without human language is reflected, another being contained in himself. In its fascination with the relationship between age and youth, and between language and what is outside language, Earth Hour seems to me to recall An Imaginary Life, and to rediscover in poetry the essential dramatic force of that encounter. ‘Dot Poem, the Connections’ remembers experience before writing and reading: ‘Before I had words / at hand to call the world up / in happenings on a page, there were the dots, a buckshot scatter / of stars, black in a white sky …’ In his dream, Ovid meets strange beings who enter into himself: ‘And something came out of the depths of my sleep towards the point where we stood facing one another, like a reflection rising to the surface of a mirror.’ The end of ‘Dot Poem, the Connections’ perhaps recalls that episode: ‘I’m still waiting, as star-dots click / and connect, to look up and find myself, with nothing I need say / or do, in its magic presence // as from the far / far off of our separate realms, two rare / imaginary beasts approach and meet …’ Here again, the poem builds mirror-reflections into its language. That encounter – between what is inside and what is outside – gives a sort of votive power to windows in these poems. Malouf’s poetry takes much of its life from the life of houses – or, as he puts it in his essay ‘A First Place: The Mapping of a World’: ‘how the elements of a place and our inner lives cross and illuminate one another, how we interpret space, and in so doing make our first maps of reality.’

Earth Hour returns to the places of Malouf’s earliest poems: rooms and gardens. Malouf once said, ‘People frequently talk to you about how much material you need for writing. I would guess that by the time anybody is twenty they have accumulated enough experience for seven or eight lifetimes of writing.’ Malouf’s first collection, called Interiors, came out in Four Poets in 1962. From this beginning he was interested in the way interiors open out into history, nature, memory, and desire. The sense of place that he discovered in those early poems sustains his poetry still. It is remarkable how early he discovered his nature as a writer, how early he discovered those themes that would sustain him throughout his writing life.

Malouf’s conception of memory as a medium of recovery means that when he returns to the place of his earlier poem, and to the place of his first experience, this is a work not of repetition so much as renewal. Malouf has been publishing his writing for more than half a century now. Poems, a libretto, plays, short stories, essays, novels; works set in the world of the The Iliad and in the present: Malouf’s work ranges remarkably across times and places and literary forms. Yet these many and various works often catch up, in their new worlds, what you might call his private topoi: breath and the body, rooms and windows, touch and fingerprints, stars, gardens, and the encounter between an old man and a child, between a life in language and the life outside it. In an interview with Jim Davidson, printed in Sideways from the Page in 1983, Malouf himself remarked: ‘I really do think of them [these recurrent figures] as rather like a whole set of annunciating angels ... Certainly more and more what I try to do in writing, and also in moving towards what I think of as the occasion of a poem, is to put yourself in contact with these obsessive figures … there’s no subject of any poem; just yourself and those figures.’

Ruskin, in Frondes Agrestes (1906), writes of seeing the Alps. That sight, shared with people throughout history, brings a ‘sense of its perpetualness, and your own transientness, as of the grass upon its side; – then, and in very sadness, a sense of strange companionship with past generations, in seeing what they saw’. Malouf, in his writing, discovers a nearer version of the sublime. Many of the places and images that he draws on repeatedly are those that have been present in Western literature from the beginning. Malouf discovers these places and images in his own life; or, rather, he discovers his own life in them: daily things, sensible and intimate, which open out perspectives into other times and places; images which bring private experience in touch with human history. Take Malouf’s descriptions of breath, for instance.

I drink at the open window
heady mouthfuls
of breath, as the body,
guardian angel
of the ordinary
and of this world, reassembles

what sleep for a time has scattered …

The short lines themselves work as ‘heady mouthfuls / of breath’. For Malouf, breathing rhythms often determine the line breaks; the form of his poems shapes the relationship between breathing and thought. These images of breath, these breathing patterns, which are so intimate, also open out into history. In ancient Greek, breath was pneuma, the life of the soul, or spirit; and it is often in this sense that Malouf uses the word – as a presence in his own life and in the sky and weather: ‘We catch / at a remove what passes / between packed leaves and Heaven’s / breath.’ It is not only through his brilliant translations of Horace that the ancient world is present in Malouf’s work. It is there at every point: human history opening out from his most intimate and familiar images.

Images exist in writing because of how we come to know things in our lives, not as things only but as tokens of the hours that we have spent with them. But writing itself is an experience. In his essay ‘Imagining the Real’, Malouf writes:

There is only one way of experiencing the reality of the world we live in – that is through our bodies, our senses. But we humans are fortunate in having two ways of attaining that experience, either through actual events or, when it is working at its most powerful, through the imagination. And I would want to insist, myself, that what we experience in this second way, if it is deep and immediate enough, is every bit as real, every bit as useful to us, as what we experience in the everyday.

The imaginative continuity in Malouf’s writing means that when he writes he enters again into the place of his own dreaming, deep and immediate, and every bit as real as other experience. What is astonishing in Malouf’s work is the way it opens to his readers the experience of writing itself, the state of experiencing reality through the body and imagination at once.

In this respect, Malouf’s work is comparable to that of Andrew Marvell. The tone is different, and the idea of form (the sense of how the poem relates to time); but Marvell’s poetry alike turns certain images, certain characteristic places, into a landscape of thought, and opens long perspectives out from small familiar things. Marvell captures what it is like to be in two worlds at once. His writing achieves its combination of sensuousness and rapture because it holds familiar things at once in the world of touch and in the light of dreams. The green in Malouf’s is like the green in Marvell: an experience that opens out into paradise and abyss.

In Earth Hour, ‘Blenheim Park’ works as a tribute to Marvell’s poems ‘The Garden’ and ‘Upon Appleton House’. Lord Fairfax, commander of the Roundheads in the Civil War, lived at Appleton House; the Churchill family lived at Blenheim Park. Malouf’s poem starts: ‘This green park might be nature as / we dream it …’ – itself a tribute to Marvell’s description of the mind’s ‘green thought in a green shade’. Like Marvell in ‘Upon Appleton House’, Malouf opens this vision of a peaceful garden out into history: ‘In fact a battle plan is laid out here.’ Malouf is not polemical; this poem illustrates how his writing’s moral force works through the awareness of history, of the years that have gone into the making of the garden.

Perhaps it is only on the surface paradoxical that this profound experience of reading and of writing is what gives Malouf’s writing its distinctive sense of reality. His is not the sense of reality confusable with realism, with accurate descriptions of the surface of things, but the sense of reality that Virginia Woolf defines in A Room of One’s Own (1929): ‘It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying. It overwhelms one walking home beneath the stars and makes the silent world more real than the world of speech – and then there it is again in an omnibus in the uproar.’ This is the sense of reality that Malouf’s poetry is always bringing to light. ‘Arran Avenue, Hamilton, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, the World. That is the address that appears in my school books,’ writes the narrator of Johnno (1975); and continues, ‘But what does it mean? Where do I really stand?’ In his poetry Malouf is always opening perspectives out, not in the orderly sequence of a school book inscription, but by flashes, by that sudden intimacy which brings the question close: ‘Where do I really stand?’