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emphasised (I think) in the reference to intentionand communication. It is Porter's great recurrenttheme that communication and knowledge areto be sought but not found except at bestintermittently: the notation of pain is not pain,and how can something which exists outsidelanguage ever be agreed upon? The clubbableold veteran, the buffer at the Mars Bar "knows"reality is straightforward, its meaning iscommonsensical and rock solid and he will hityou with it if your commonsense disagrees. Theexperience dramatised in Porter's poetry is of aworld constantly invoking then evading ourattempts to order it, and better represented bythat anarchic element, the wind, which the"unsavoury" others tangle with - whethersurfing or writing modern poetry.If I had to make a final choice, then, for meMars is less satisfying formally as poetry thanPorter's other recent works, The AutomaticOracie, Fast Forward and Collected Poems. Butas Porter's poems reveal, what is final is beyondour saying, and the reader interested in one ofthe most rewarding contemporary poets canhappily choose all.Lawrence BourkeRobert Gray, Piano, Angus & Robertson, 1987,$12.95.In his column in the Sydney Morning Herald,Don Anderson recently posed the question:"Can the rumoured Decline of Poetry have beenprovoked by the absence from modern verse offorms and satisfactions previously available?"I would suggest, however, that rumours ofsuch a "decline" are no mere modernphenomenon. They have been rife since theTrojans first deplored Homer's prostitution ofthe Muse in that well known piece of Greekpropaganda, The [Iliad. This suggests, at anyrate, that it is not simply an absence of "forms"that generates them. Heather Cam, respondingto Anderson, declared that Australian poetry, atleast, far from being in decline, is alive and well,and heading in many directions: "towards more'womanspeak', more Aboriginal and traditionaloral material, more multicultural voices, andpossibly more experimentation with collaboration."Cam thus envisages the revitalisation of106poetry from the fringes, the creation of newpoetic wealth from the conquered territories ofnew worlds.Robert Gray, however, in his latest volume ofpoems, Piano, has returned to the Old World torevitalise his poetry. The book is, in part, a reevaluationof the idyllic dharmic days of hisimagistic nineteen seventies. The haiku,although still present is no longer quite thesupreme ideal it once was. Instead, there areexperiments with traditional rhyme, half-rhyme,assonance and alliteration. There is nothing yetquite so formal as a sonnet or regular as blankverse, but, as its title may suggest, this volumehas been written more obviously with an ear tosound than has previously been the case. Thischange is-not only formal. There is evidence thatGray has re-evaluated the ahistorical perspectiveof his old imagistic attitudes. There is arealisation that there is more to change than alamentable, eternal transience.There are still haiku (" 17 Poems from theJapanese'') and still dharmic sentiments. "AGarden Shed", for example, concludes with thepoet describing the circumstance when he beganto understand thatthe less we think we arethe more we can bear; and someone who seeshe is nothing, lightly will bear it all.Despite the poem's sentimental attachment ofthese ideas to an experience in his grandfather'sgarden shed, there seems little intrinsicconnection between the image of the shed itselfand the lesson of the final lines. One feels thatjust about any experience could be made toproduce the same result. Perhaps it is the lessonitself that has become too trite and a little toomuch like the iteration of dogma instead of agenuine discovery. Similar observations may bemade of "The Shark", a too-neat allegory aboutdelving into the psyche, discovering the sharklikeid that needs to be controlled by dharmicmeans. "Plurality", on the other hand, is a moreinteresting piece. It reviews the "tranquil earlyeighties", but then tires itself out in the thinatmosphere of Tibet, and the observation thatlife is "oneness, always plural".Overall, however, Piano is not a tired book.It is a book searching for a way out of thistiredness. "A Summer Evening", "Nine Bowls ofWater", "Walking Around at Night" and "BlackLandscape" are outstandingly successft:'WESTERLY, No.2, JUNE, 1989