It's hard to imagine in hindsight, but before he found his characteristic prose voice with Frost in 1963 and stopped using the carriage-return key within works, Thomas Bernhard was mainly known as a lyric poet. He published three full-scale poetry collections in the 1950s, as well as several shorter bundles of poems that appeared in magazines, and two longer poems, Die Irren     Die Häftlinge (1962) and Ave Vergil (written 1959-60, published 1981). All in all, including a few bits and pieces and some revised versions, it comes to a respectable 330 pages of poetry in this posthumous collection.

As we would expect, Bernhard's verse is uniformly pessimistic in its view of the world. I think I counted eight poems that didn't make any obvious reference to death (four of them were from an anomalous early set of sonnets about Salzburg). There are signs of his bleak sense of humour, but the jokes, if they are jokes, are less obvious than in the later work.

What I did find surprising is the way Bernhard adopts quite a different persona in his poetry from the I-narrator of most of his fiction. The lyric narrator seems to be a complete Austrian countryman, drawing most of his metaphors from cowsheds, fields, and woods. Where the real Bernhard at this time had no idea who his father was, the poet has a father who has farmed these hills for many generations and has suffered in the war (in various different ways in different poems). And in a couple of poems he even gives himself some rather unconvincing children. Of course, he doesn't adopt this Heimat-persona for patriotic reasons: he wants to force us to contrast the comfortable world of nineteenth century romantic lyrics with the real darkness of a world where recent history has blasted away any thought we might have had of taking comfort in religion, human company (something which is almost always absent in these poems), or the eternal cycles of nature.

In the collection In hora mortis (talk about a redundant title..!), he largely replaces countryside imagery with language borrowed from the Psalms, to create a sequence focussing on the failures of religion to comfort us. This is about as bleak as it gets.

Another interesting thing about the lyrics when you see a lot of them together like this is the way they seem to foreshadow the "variation form" Bernhard uses in his prose — very often, later poems in a collection will pick up images from earlier poems, twist them around in different permutations, and add some unexpected depth to something that looked straightforward the first time around.

Die Irren     Die Häftlinge is the only really obviously political work here, two long poems printed on facing pages so that we read them in parallel, the lines on the left pages celebrating the (illusory) freedom of the mad, those on the right pages showing us how we are all the prisoners of an oppressive state.

Ave Vergil is an oddity: a long poem in the style of "The Waste Land," mostly written whilst Bernhard was studying in England. In a note he added when it was published in 1981, Bernhard effectively dismisses it as juvenilia, but says he's allowing it to be published because of the way it illustrates how much he was influenced by Eliot, Pound & co. — that's certainly not something you could easily deduce from his prose work. ( )