'Dennis Haskell’s poetry persistently explores images of home and departure. As it does, it questions what we may know and depend on, suggesting that many of our understandings are provisional. Haskell’s poetry also contrasts what is imagined and desired with what is knowable – giving prominence to quotidian knowledge and observable reality – and restlessly explores the relationship of religious belief to lived experience. In this light, the elegiac strand in his work becomes a way of probing the gap between death and the limitations of language, highlighting the sometimes problematic relationship between thought and expression. Yet, poetry provides a means of access to otherwise unapproachable thoughts and feelings and connects the poet (and reader) to an articulate human community. It enables the delineation of a simultaneously observant, detached and engaged subjectivity that consistently seeks to find connections – whether at home, while travelling or in international settings. This poetry joins the familiar and unfamiliar in works that question how people understand one another and their unique circumstances, and how the ineffable, while it may be evoked in words, nevertheless retains its deep mysteries. Haskell is interested in the ways in which we make and disturb meaning, and in questioning how belief in God or an afterlife may be understood despite scepticism and doubt.' (Publication abstract)
'The following interview with Dennis Haskell was commissioned by Donna Ward, who was then editor and publisher of Indigo: Journal of West Australian Writing. The issue appeared in the Autumn of 2008. In this sense it is a snapshot of Haskell at a particular moment of his rich and on-going career. My particular intention was to trace the ways in which Haskell’s aesthetic and moral orientations as both a poet and a critic stem from his formative experiences, including family background, class, education, reading and the place in which he grew up. Beneath his honest and acute responses one can trace not only the lineaments of Australia’s “poetry wars” but also the impacts of those real wars (WW II, Vietnam and Iraq) on his imaginative life and stance as a poet. Haskell is not a predictable subject to interview. For instance, his statement that “it is important to write about domestic spaces” would perhaps sit at odds with a male poet of his generation. Looking back down the years to this interview with a valued teacher and trojan worker for literature in many countries and many contexts, I would argue that it is Haskell’s iconoclastic character that has kept his practice sharp, surprising and “on song.” The question posed by the poem “Doubt and Trembling” that I discussed with him – “How do we get by/ in a dubious time” – seems in 2019 more relevant than ever.' (Publication abstract)
