Backyard Poem

Welcome eveyone to the poetry festival-perspectives on Autralian cultural identity. I chose to present this concept through works of John Tranter. An amazing poet who presents his ideas about life through words, especially poetry. I will be using two of his poems. Debbie and co and backyard. I wil base most of my ideas on Debbie and co and refer to Backyard

The poem Debbie and co is set on a public pool on a Sunday afternoon and backyard is based on a family or two having a barbeque in the backyard. Two typical things Australians would do. Through these activities John Tranter tries to show the tranquil nature of Australian culture and Australians laid back attitude towards life.

This is shown in both poems in many ways. If we look through Debbie and co the first line says the council pool is chockablock. This gives the poem a specific setting. John tranter used collaqiual language here in order to emphasize the lack of space at the pool area. This is unlike backyard where the poem never mentions about amount of people. In backyard it says ¡°the god of smoke listens idly
in the heat to the barbeque sausages speaking the language of rain deceitfully as their fat dances¡± Here John tranter uses personification of the smoke as a godly figure and the sausages fat talking and dancing as it is heated on the barbeque. This helps with the imagery where the reader would imagine the smoke rising above the sausages like a godly figure as if it is looking down on the sausages. This is very similar in the way John tranter says in Debbie and co, ¡°awash with bubbles and chlorines chemical gossip.¡± And ¡°the piss-tinted water slaps the tiles¡± This again is the use of personification which helps with the reader imagining the visuals and sounds of a particular scene.

In backyard, there are not as many people interacting with each other. This can lead to the second line in Debbie and co where it says ¡°with greek kids shouting in italian¡± through this line John Tranter tries to show that today in Australian culture a large amount of multiculturalism exists.

The third line is a rhetorical question saying ¡°isn¡¯t it Sunday afternoon?¡± in other words this is saying ¡°shouldn¡¯t we relax?¡± these rhetorical questions put the reader in a position wehre he or she asks him or herself the same question, answer it and eventually agree to what the poem is saying.
In backyard this concept is presented in the last stanza when it says ¡°but don¡¯t ask too much: some cold beer, a few old friends in the afternoon¡± beer, friends, afternoon. John Tranter puts this character in the perfect setting where he should relax. Drinking beer with his friends in the afternoon at a backyard barbeque. In the second stanza another rhetorical question can be seen. It says, ¡°who cares?¡¯ this again accentuates the laid back attitude Australians have to life. In this case not caring about what is happening around them but only trying to enjoy life at that specific
moment

In the last stanza it says, ¡°under the democratic sun her future drifts in and out of focus¡± personification is used again to present the sun as being individual. This is very similar to backyard where it refers back to the smoke as being a godly individual figure watching over all when it says, ¡°turn now to the god of this tattered arena watching over the rites of passage¡± the rest of the stanza says ¡°marriage separation, adolescence and troubled maturity¡± this refers to a time lapse in the poem just like Debbie and co where it starts from kids dabbling ice cream into the cement, then to sexually active teenagers mucking about behind the dressing sheds and lazy adults smoking, browsing through adult magazines and going to sleep.

John tranter sees this as being paradise in Debbie and co. it says, ¡°Yet this is almost Paradise: the coke, the takeaway pizza, a packet of camels¡± this represents what Australians are like. Laid back attitude to life in their tranquil nature. And this is what makes Australians.. Australians! This is the Australian culture.
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