"The Improvers" appears in blank verse of five verses of irregular length. Thiele begins his serious purpose rather colloquially in the everyday observation, "their bloody bulldozers . . are at it again" as an example of the common man's derision. This sets up the tension between improvers and poets. The irony, indeed the sarcasm, in the title emerges quickly.
In the second verse, the poet surveys the diversity of graders and 'dozers in their work by comic comparisons to "nightmare beetles butt about" gorging grotesquely and a crone waddling off with melons. Similarly powerful images of devouring, eating and destroying continue in Thiele's many metaphors, such an "iron mandibles"(19); he even provides an effective sound track in the onomatopoeic "slaver and yammer"(18). Alliteration is widely used in the media for comic effect, but in this poem it is often overused for no particular purpose but to display the poet's craft. At least I felt so.
At line 22 there is a change, at a climax of revelation if you like, when the poet declares his attitude to the improvers - that they "mutilate ... the miraculous earth". Here he exploits an irony against the improvers, that although the "earth lies lathed" after their work, as the source of life itself it will spring back despite them. The mock comic tone in the aaa endline rhymes of the third stanza supports his general view that making freeways is savagery because the improvers have mutilated the earth. The fifth stanza finishes with an effective pun on the word "highwaymen", for at the end of their work they unwittingly reveal their colours, "fly their proper flag", as robbers, thieves and rapists who "desecrate the green". Ironically this time for the poet, he opines that the "waywardness of each old byway" is in fact another virtue destroyed by Big Brother, rather than an unscientific and unsightly vice remedied by the new, straight highways the brutes create.
I believe this poem is less successful than it might be because Thiele is overly self conscious of his craft to the extent that he blunts his critical purpose. Is he a poet musing on the meaning of the bulldozer's work or a greenie making a protest? Or neither? Taking sides, can he meaningfully combine both purposes? I think not.
G. Smith 20/8/1998