'From near two decades, with well over 450 personnel employed in their making these group efforts are maddeningly memorable examples of what collective brain power can do when it bends the rules, and let's face it plenty of today's poetry could do with a solid amount of rule-bending. Name the muse and she was doubtless invoked.' (Publication Summary)
'Since the late 1980s, the work of John Kinsella has been protean and prodigious. At times a pastoral poet (some say anti-pastoral), such as with The Silo (1995), at others an experimental one. as in Syzgy (1993), Kinsella is best known these days as an eco-poet, a term to which his work has given an almost definitional focus.' (Introduction)
'Here are two books which, put together, show Wearne in three of his most important poetic roles: as maker of the best verse narratives Australia has produced, and as satirist and as teacher. Perhaps this final role should be modified slightly since With the Youngsters is not a book about how to go about teaching the writing of poetry at university level but rather an anthology of what students and their teacher have, over the years, produced when faced with the task of writing something collectively in two of the most demanding fixed forms. If anything, then, it might be more accurate to speak of Wearne in his little-commented-on role of explorer of fixed poetic forms. The big verse-narratives – The Nightmarkets and The Lovemakers – never seem happy to operate entirely in Wearne’s distinctive blank verse and are always ready to rise to the challenge of one of the available forms.' (Introduction)
'Since the late 1980s, the work of John Kinsella has been protean and prodigious. At times a pastoral poet (some say anti-pastoral), such as with The Silo (1995), at others an experimental one. as in Syzgy (1993), Kinsella is best known these days as an eco-poet, a term to which his work has given an almost definitional focus.' (Introduction)
'Here are two books which, put together, show Wearne in three of his most important poetic roles: as maker of the best verse narratives Australia has produced, and as satirist and as teacher. Perhaps this final role should be modified slightly since With the Youngsters is not a book about how to go about teaching the writing of poetry at university level but rather an anthology of what students and their teacher have, over the years, produced when faced with the task of writing something collectively in two of the most demanding fixed forms. If anything, then, it might be more accurate to speak of Wearne in his little-commented-on role of explorer of fixed poetic forms. The big verse-narratives – The Nightmarkets and The Lovemakers – never seem happy to operate entirely in Wearne’s distinctive blank verse and are always ready to rise to the challenge of one of the available forms.' (Introduction)
