Time and Motion: New and Selected Poems by Julian Croft, Puncher & Wattman, 2026, was launched by Peter Kirkpatrick at MacLean’s Booksellers, Newcastle on 24 June 2026.
Though it’s a while since he lived there, Julian Croft is quintessentially a poet of Newcastle, of both its beaches and its industrial and maritime past. The beach featured on the cover of Time and Motion: New & Selected Poems is Adrian Feint’s oil painting Collaroy – 1940, a location some distance south of the Newcastle perhaps, but it captures well the strongly littoral mood of the book, as well as something of Croft’s attraction to the mid-twentieth-century world of the city—an attraction also expressed in his 2014 novel Out of Print (set there during Queen Elizabeth’s visit in 1954). The close proximity of Newcastle’s ocean beaches to its former steelworks and shipyards has shaped the city’s very special character, and it provides the basis of a nature/culture dialectic that runs throughout these poems.
Both sea and heavy industry offer images of raw, greater-than-human energy, and Croft is fascinated with the kind of language attached to those respective environments and the poetic sounds they can make. Here, for example, is Croft in an early poem, “a walk to the bogey hole”, which describes the landscape around a popular ocean pool that was cut out by convicts:
rock shelf barebacked to the sea swept
by the surf fetching smack into the small of a cliff
scratching stones out of sandstone ribs
you run like hell here to dodge the greenwhite lash
over susan gilmour’s naked sand to the gulf
(Susan Gilmour is a nearby beach, named after a ship wrecked there in 1884.) Here the alliteration generates an onomatopoeic picture of the coastline in a way that summons the ghost of ancient Anglo-Saxon poetry—but also an element of the style, perhaps, of Harri Jones, the Welsh-Australian poet who was found drowned in the Bogey Hole in 1965, and whose work Croft has both edited and written on. By way of contrast, here is a poem from the sequence “Industrial Waste”, written in the 1990s. This is the opening of “Dockyard”, and it describes a ship being built:
Mother’s sewing room but run by men.
Filthy with rust and dust, steel fabric is cut
by flaming scissors; sparks, blobs of hot metal
glue the gusseted bits, and seams of rivet pins
run round the paunch of the belted keelson,and over there is a mangle bending
crusted sheets, wringing the last drop
before the steel sets into complex curves
hung out to dry on a bony bush of ribs.
Only the word keelson is specialised and potentially obscure (it’s a beam that supports a ship’s keel). As in “a walk to the bogey hole”, ordinary language is used to generate powerful sound effects, noises inherent in the activities they describe. This is poetry of great beauty and technical skill. Human agency would almost appear to be absent from this scene, having been surrendered to massive machines, but then recall the opening line, which puts a metaphorical cast on all that follows: “Mother’s sewing room but run by men”. Now the “mangle bending/crusted sheets” which are then “hung out to dry” takes on a new meaning, for the ship under construction “with its fields of force,/steam, fire, oil, water”, as Croft later puts it, is also what he calls “the womb of men” (58). And, of course, the ocean upon which it will be launched has, by ancient seafaring tradition, been gendered as female—as the nineteenth-century English poet Swinburne expressed it in “The Triumph of Time”, “I will go back to the great sweet mother,/Mother and lover of men, the sea”. So a poem which, at first glance, would seem to celebrate the masculine energy involved in making gigantic maritime vessels out of metal is itself constructed within metaphors of female power and agency. The dockyard may be run by men, but it’s where a kind of mother’s work, the work of the sea, gets done.
Both the sea poems and the industrial – now post-industrial – poems are evidence of how much Croft’s verse is invested with the history of Newcastle, and his own growing up and early life within that once very polluted city: a “brown town”, as Les Murray recalled it in his poem ‘The Smell of Coal Smoke’. Indeed, throughout Time & Motion Newcastle unfolds into a kind of memory palace for Croft, who can occasionally be wistful, but I wouldn’t characterise the retrospective disposition of his poetry as nostalgic. It’s darker and more elegiac, and has more to do with the complex relationship between one’s lived experience of time and the ways in which memory later shapes and adapts it. Yet it’s only through memory that we can begin to know how time inevitably brings loss, and so come to understand what the implications of historical change might mean. Even so, the manner in which memory may vividly summon up certain fragments of the past also offers us glimpses of a space potentially beyond of the ravages of time and tide. In the famous words of Kenneth Slessor’s ‘Five Bells’, “Time that is moved by little fidget wheels/Is not my time, the flood that doesn’t flow”. Croft has written critically on Slessor, has edited his light verse, and also, I feel, shares some of his seaborne sensibilities.
In Croft’s more recent verse, the gesture of retrospection, of looking back, becomes associated with the figure of Orpheus, who stands as the archetype of the poet in Ancient Graeco-Roman mythology, and “Orpheus” is the title of what I see as a cornerstone section of the new poems of Time and Motion. Though the legendary singer barely appears in propria persona in the group of poems that appear under his name, he might be said to inhabit them as a metaphor, a kind of Platonic symbol of poetry itself, what it is, and where it comes from. So in the poem ‘I have been blessed’, Croft tells us that poetry is the Angel who appeared to him as a child, and with whom he has wrestled, like Jacob in the Bible, ever since:
I heard Him. The sounds that poetry, that only Gods
or their Messengers can speak, and all my life since
I have tried to find those words again,
the ones which lifted me from moonlit garden to the stars.
On the following page, however, in ‘Vegetable Thoughts’ – another of the ‘Orpheus’ poems – the mature poet, feeling the burden of his years, finds he is no longer such a poetic astral traveller. For he has become passive and potato-like, “sessile as a spud/happy in the dirt I’ve dug myself into”. Yet to imitate the action of the potato also means that, given the right conditions, “green dreams” may sprout, “tendrils/of memory stir in the air” and “mountains of thought/[make] eyes in the dark of winter soil”. I like that image very much indeed: how the solitary potato, a lonely lump buried in the dark earth, will always remember its destiny, what it’s meant to be, and thus come to bounteous life again. It’s a fine metaphor for the relationship between one’s working life and one’s poetry, especially if you happen to work in the academy as Croft has done, which can be a very dark and lonely place indeed, and one where you seem to spend periods of your life covered in manure. But what I like most about Croft’s potato is its quality of everyday transcendence, by which I don’t mean that it transcends the everyday, but that it discovers a transcendental glamour in perfectly ordinary things when they’re seen in their proper light.
Apropos of which, in the group of poems which conclude the Orpheus sequence the poet may be said to come home to his craft. This is a sequence of poems about a shed, that traditional domain of masculine handiwork. Each of the tools one is likely to discover there are reimagined so that, rather than be employed to repair an engine or fix a broken chair, they become instead implements with which to make poems. A feeler gauge therefore opens into “leaves of steel rice paper”, an old-fashioned brace and bit is “Bent like a broken arm”, and a glass-cutter is like a pen that leaves “a frosty trace/across a pool of glass”. But here is the first stanza of ‘Spirit Level’, in which the Angel makes a reappearance in the form of the bead of air that indicates when the tool is plumb:
pick up the oiled wood
grooved and shaped to hold
the brass cage
inside is the impossible angel
the essence of nothing
which shapes this world
which makes surfaces flat
lintels square
walls upright
In Croft’s rendering, the level is an old-fashioned object, made of wood rather than modern-day plastic or alloy, with its bubble “trapped in our space/to give us the outline/of a world outside time”.
I said that the figure of Orpheus was associated in these poems with the gesture of looking back, of retrospection. In the Greek myth, when his wife Eurydice is killed by a snake, Orpheus travels to the Underworld to claim her back from Hades, its ruler. His singing charms the lord of the dead, so he is permitted to return with Eurydice above so long as he doesn’t turn to look at her during their ascent. Of course, on the very point of reaching the surface, Orpheus anxiously looks back to check that she follows—and so his wife is lost to him forever. It’s a story with many implications (Rilke wrote a moving poem on the theme) but it also speaks deeply to the sense of loss that necessarily attaches to memory. Throughout this book that loss is primarily connected to the figure of Croft’s father, who had been a prisoner of war in Changi, and died not long after his return home. In the poem ‘Emoh Ruo’, for example, the Orphic search for him plays out through the passages of the old family house:
eyes shut I see
my back in the mirror
know the photograph off by heart
they live in the chthonic dark
of sleep and memory
and I am here to pick you up
take you with me and make again
the world we once shared
Jack Croft is also there in the poem ‘Aeneid Book VI’, which draws on Aeneas’s prophetic meeting with his father Anchises in Hades in Virgil’s epic poem:
… My father, not dressed in armour
or trailing Lethean fogs, but shapeless formless,
just a feeling, but real, nevertheless,
for loss is an absence, and can only be felt not touched.
The French situationists coined the phrase “Sous les pavés, la plage”, or “Under the paving stones, the beach”. For Croft it’s more a case of “Sous la plage, la guerre”, or “Under the beach, the war”.
The sequence of poems ‘The Art of War’ was first published in Australian Poetry Journal in 2015, and each engages with a series of six famous British paintings depicting the impact of World War Two, such as John Piper’s semi-abstract rendering of the ruins of Coventry Cathedral, and Laura Knight’s The Nuremberg Trial – January 1946. In Time and Motion Croft has now added an introductory seventh poem, ‘the visitor’, which reflects on a local painting, namely Adrian Feint’s cover image of Collaroy Afternoon – 1940. Here the poet imagines himself entering the picture – “I’ve let myself in” – and considers the young couple who live in the featured house, wondering if they may be “expecting” him—at one level, almost as if they’re his actual parents. These imagined people are newlyweds, they have just made love and now gone for a swim:
they’re on the beach
he’s got a towel and eye out for the sharks
while she’s impulsively let everything drop
the hat, the towel, the robe
But this is 1940 and there is about to be a separation:
but now it’s noon and all hangs in the balance
and I wait, time means nothing to me now,
and soon he’ll move, she’ll cling to him,
while all the while his uniform hangs in the dark.
If this is a departure – the young man, like Croft’s father, is about to go off to war – it is also, it seems, an arrival, for the painting is used to foreshadow the poet’s own appearance in the world: the 1940 world of Feint’s painting (Croft was born in 1941), but also the world of the present, as the author reflects on both how he came to be fashioned in the world, and on his own self-fashioning as the poem’s speaker. It’s moments of suspension like this, which are often bittersweet, when time and the motion of the sunlit world sit poignantly suspended, that I feel best characterise Croft’s poetry: the sense that beauty is not the absence or the opposite of loss but is instead made wholly out of it.
– Peter Kirkpatrick
Peter Kirkpatrick is the author of three poetry collections, and also publishes widely in Australian literary studies and cultural history. His most recent book is The Wild Reciter: Poetry and Popular Culture in Australia 1890 to the Present (Melbourne Uni Press, 2024), which was shortlisted in the history category of the 2025 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards.
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Time and Motion: New and Selected Poems by Julian Croft is available from https://puncher andwattmann.com/product/time-motion-new-selected-poems/
