'This volume collects all of Fay Zwicky’s poetry, including previously uncollected and unpublished poems. It reveals an erudite, passionate, and highly inventive poet, whose consummate control of her craft places her at the summit of Australian poetry.' (Publication summary)
Dedication: With thanks to all those who brought this book to life.
'Gathered here for the first time are Fay Zwicky's seven collections of poetry, published between 1975 and 2006, along with previously uncollected poems zwicky has chosen to preserve, and her essay 'Border Crossings' (hereafter 'BC'), which eloquently and engagingly recorded the growth of her imagination and provides valuable insights into the atmosphere and character of her formative years. Zwicky has had a long and distinguished career in the arts: first as a classical pianist; later as a literature teacher, literary critic, editor and sometime short-story writer; but foremost as a poet. She has not been in the public eye very much in recent years - like many of her generation she has chosen not to go online - but nor has she remained silent. She has written and published individual poems and maintained the journal that she has been keeping almost continually for more than forty years. a writer's companion book, a poetry workbook, and a record of Zwicky's response to public and private events, the journal integrates and impassioned dialogue with what she is reading, often satirical accounts of her dreams, and candid (as well as guarded) quarrels with herself, friends and family, ideas, opinions, and the whole business of living a literary and creative life. One of the journal's big recurring questions, indeed is : how does a poet sustain a creative life in the unpromising soil of an isolated city of the edge of a desert? How does she go on fighting, in James Tulip's words, to affirm over and against an oppressive Australian silence a human (and particularly a woman's) voice and feelings' (31-32).' (Introduction)
'On 2 July, 2017, my father sends me an article about Jewish Australian poet Fay Zwicky’s passing in Perth. I am four months into my Masters in Brisbane, where I am writing a manuscript of poetry and a thesis about tensions between my Jewish identity, memory, mental illness and hybridity as mediated through cultural objects and poetry. Fay Zwicky is one of my contemporary case studies and as I read through the article, I discover that the day before she died at age 83, The Collected Poems of Fay Zwicky was published, spanning her life’s work.' (Introduction)
'I met Fay Zwicky only once, at the 1996 conference of the American Association for Australian Literary Studies held in Arcata, CA. But this occasion turned out to be memorable for me and, in a different way, for her. I already knew her poetry; ‘Soup and Jelly’, a poem I had read a few years before, stuck in my head for its image of a once-vigorous man now in an old-age home, a once proud man reduced to accepting soup and jelly from ‘a dark-faced woman’, an image of white male privilege empathised with but also slightly rebuked.' (Introduction)
'On 2 July, 2017, my father sends me an article about Jewish Australian poet Fay Zwicky’s passing in Perth. I am four months into my Masters in Brisbane, where I am writing a manuscript of poetry and a thesis about tensions between my Jewish identity, memory, mental illness and hybridity as mediated through cultural objects and poetry. Fay Zwicky is one of my contemporary case studies and as I read through the article, I discover that the day before she died at age 83, The Collected Poems of Fay Zwicky was published, spanning her life’s work.' (Introduction)
'In the essay ‘Border Crossings’, included as an opening to The Collected Poems of Fay Zwicky, the poet recounts a memory. The night before she was to start at a new school, her mother sat on the end of her bed and taught her to say the Lord’s Prayer. This would be a rather commonplace recollection except that she and her mother were Jewish, the school she was about to start was the Melbourne Church of England Girls’ Grammar School, her mother’s alma mater, and when Zwicky described this memory to her mother, her mother said that such a thing had never happened.' (Introduction)
'I met Fay Zwicky only once, at the 1996 conference of the American Association for Australian Literary Studies held in Arcata, CA. But this occasion turned out to be memorable for me and, in a different way, for her. I already knew her poetry; ‘Soup and Jelly’, a poem I had read a few years before, stuck in my head for its image of a once-vigorous man now in an old-age home, a once proud man reduced to accepting soup and jelly from ‘a dark-faced woman’, an image of white male privilege empathised with but also slightly rebuked.' (Introduction)
'There is a minor but delicate problem with this book that arises right at the beginning and is reflected in the heading of this review: how should it be titled. Released, according to its publisher’s website, days before Zwicky’s death, The Collected Poems of Fay Zwicky, edited by Lucy Dougan and Tim Dolin, has a distinctly posthumous sound to it, rather like a scholarly edition of a classic author – The Collected Poems of Kenneth Slessor, for example. Marvellous as Zwicky’s poetry can be – and I have always felt that her intense ethical engagement with the world coupled with a very tough, intelligent and humorous scepticism about virtually everything including herself, has made her one of the Australian poets who speaks most sympathetically to me – it isn’t yet that of an established classic and the title might be criticised as an attempt to smuggle her in immediately after her death. It is, in the long run, a minor issue but one feels for the publisher and editors who must have pondered long and hard over the title.' (Introduction)
