Braiding the Voices

Book excerpt: In Braiding the Voices, Peter Steele brings to bear a lifetime of reading, writing, and teaching prose and poetry. With gusto and focus, these essays concert poets and poems of different tempers and aspirations. They are by Gwen Harwood, Les Murray, Peter Porter, Vincent Buckley and, further afield, Fleur Adcock, Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht, W.S. Merwin, Deborah Randall, Ben Belitt, Norman MacCaig, R.S. Thomas, P.J. Kavanagh, Seamus Heaney and Gerard Manley Hopkins. The writing of some of his own poems is also addressed. Characteristically, Steele refers copiously also to much else. The book investigates some of the ways in which individual poets have found what they most wanted to say, and how their art takes its place in the general conversation of humanity itself. Applauding the dexterity and the variety with which this feat is carried off by the poets, Steele's distinctive prose is deliberately fashioned to be as hospitable to insight as possible.