Cirrus@Austlit

Editor's note: [Although Robert Wood has reviewed for literary journals in Australia, the US and UK, here he focuses on reviews for recently released books. In a type of suburbanism it covers contemporary poetry from Australia, attending to social, historical and philosophical aspects. For an introduction to the series, and to read the reviews, please click on the links above. To read the Endnotes see the ends of files 3,4 and 5. — J.T.]

'This essay emerged from a general and particular set of feelings, concerns, observations about philosophy and poetics. Although it situates itself in regards to ‘Australia’, its primary target is not contemporary poetry that sees itself as being from that place. This subject is simply an entry point for cultivating an interpretive lens that responds to our world now. It offers commentary on individual books as well as the discourses that surround them. Yet when read together I hope that the essay will accumulate into an understanding of language, change and status that allows the reader to contemplate power and place.' (Introduction)

'In critical writing by Peter Minter, Bonny Cassidy and Stuart Cooke, the question of decolonisation in ‘Australia’ is figured to be a question of land. They tend to mean ‘land’ here in the way that it approximates nature, which is to say land resembles undeveloped frontier. There is, of course, an Aboriginal presence to these places, but land is, for the most part, a location that is not urban or built up.'  (Introduction)

'A.J. Carruthers has been admirably busy — academic monograph, blog posts for Southerly, a new index of experimental poets on Jacket2, job in Shanghai, daily Tweets. And there is a lot in his project of promoting ‘the Australian avant-garde’ to be sympathetic towards, particularly as a project after his Stave Sightings. But can we make a distinction between his formulation of ‘the Australian avant-garde’ (or its variations such as ‘neo’ and ‘experimental’) and ‘the avant-garde in ‘Australia’’? And how might that matter for suburbanism?'  (Introduction)

'In Poetics for ‘Australia’, I have been writing back to poetry and the nation. ‘Australia’ is a place I care about but am not convinced by, a place I want to see as a world of possibility. Although I seem to live ‘in’ it, I think of myself as living in my body most of all, even though, at present, I live on Noongar land and know that I was born and raised in Wembley, which informs part of my locatedness in a way that Bunyah informs Les Murray or Fitzroy informs Pi O.'  (Introduction)

'If one wanted to, one could find antecedents for Suburbanism anywhere in the network — Romanticism, Modernism, Negritude, Tabi, Sangaam have all mattered as cohesive bodies of poetic thought. But it is important to look closer to home, to interrogate a discourse that matters in ‘Australia’, namely John Kinsella’s ‘international regionalism’. '  (Introduction)

'The ‘banal’ expression of occupation in settler societies today is the ‘suburbs’. This is the case in Australia, New Zealand, the United States and Canada. This is not to suggest that we do not see cases of direct violence or that there are not sovereign peoples in them or that suburbs do not exist in other nations or that the suburbs are categorically distinct from city or country.  It is that we fail to think through the collective material and ideal life that inheres in them in a language game that is from them. ' (Introduction)