A local inhabitant - Morag Fraser

Recently Morag Fraser launched a beautiful new book by Fr Peter Steele sj, A Local Habitation: Poems and Homilies. This is part of what she said on the occasion.

Forty-six years ago, I knocked on Peter Steele’s door in the Melbourne University English Department and asked, in my convent innocence, if he would explain Jonathan Swift to me. I might as well have asked him to corral the wind. But now, a lifetime later, I still remember being struck by the man’s courteous patience. He seemed to take my puzzlement seriously and did his best to untangle it. But I also remember a spark, a glint, a shimmer of wit that almost subverted the serious courtesy. And I thought, there’s a wild mind at work and play here, and I will have to run prodigiously fast even to catch at its stirrups.

But it’s been more than that. To read, to grasp, Peter Steele, you have to grow up, not just bask - though that’s an abiding and surely allowable pleasure - because he is a poet, a writer of such brimming praise, a hunter-gatherer of all that might beguile a human. His mind is ‘a dulcet google’, as Chris Wallace-Crabbe puts it in his poem celebrating Peter’s 70th birthday.

And yet … that dulcet mind takes you with it into places to confront, to daunt even a brave soul. ‘If you write poetry’, Peter says in his introduction to A Local Habitation, ‘it’s part of your own freedom, a freedom which the poems offer to share.’ Yes, and the freedom his writing heralds and shares is, for the reader who is game enough to accept the offer, an initiation into habits of moral acuity and exploration—if we can weather it, if we can bear the freedom, the vulnerability and the responsibility that comes with it.

What a great thing to have done, to have put together this antiphonal work, with its 53 poems and 62 homilies talking across at one another, threading in and out and through as Peter’s worlds strand, plait and unplait again into their distinctiveness. In the poems and in the homilies, he moves constantly between the street, and the sacred, between the conundrums of scripture and the graffiti of pell-mell life.

This interweaving, this moiré patterning of poetry and prose, is the structural device of A Local Habitation. We seethe same mind, the same man questing, testing himself in different modes, asking questions, resurrecting dead men and women that we might think anew about them and what they mean to us.

Look, for example, at the three homilies on the eloquence of the body, ‘Spittle’, ‘Hearing’, and ‘Seeing’. What they share with the poems is an incarnational grittiness; they are down-to-earth, as Peter so often insists we must be to save our souls. For a poet, as for a homilist who wants to hold his listener, that grittiness, that solid conjuring is an imperative as a well as a gift. And Peter has the gift, as we say, in spades.

It is a wonderful thing to see, to hold, this poetic and homiletic record of Peter’s long time at, particularly, Newman College, which has been what a university college, indeed a university, ought to be: hospitable, authentic in it prophetic role, a haven for honest enquiry, for debate, for fellowship, for freedom to think, to make, to commune. The photographs, historical and contemporary, in the volume are never merely illustrative; they are a testament to a long tradition of scholarship and friendship, to brotherliness - Peter’s word. I love particularly the several images of Peter with the other two musketeers ordained with him, so long ago, Andrew Hamilton sj and Brendan Byrne sj, concelebrating Mass, grinning for the camera.

There is so much in here. I could talk for days just about the pithy joy to be had from Peter’s parentheses, his digressions, his interlinear commentary. Here’s the briefest snatch, from a homily on the Our Father, through the perspective of the Son who taught us the prayer: ‘He sounds like us’, writes Peter, ‘which of course is exactly what he is – one of us, only more so, if I can put it in a rather Irish way. And speaking of the Irish, I read recently that, during the fierce fighting in Belfast some time ago, it was a common view that the best long-range snipers in the city were teenage girls.’

Peter tells us elsewhere that his father taught him the habit of looking, remembering and then trying to make some sense of the apparent randomness of what he saw. And he does, and because he does, so, in our way, can we.