Issue Details: First known date: 2019... 2019 Provisional Meanings : Belonging and Not-Belonging in the Poetry of Dennis Haskell
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'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)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Asiatic Special Issue on the Poetry and Poetics of Dennis Haskell vol. 13 no. 2 December 2019 18622942 2019 periodical issue 'This issue of Asiatic (Vol. 13, No. 2) is dedicated to the life and works of Dennis Haskell (1948-),a long-standing friend of the Journal, who has been on its Advisory Board since the Journal’s inception. He is also an ardent champion of Asian literature who has been at the forefront of literary representations of Australian-Asian interactions and has shown an extensive understanding of Asian cultures both in his creative and critical works.Together with Edwin Thumboo and late Bruce Bennett, he has been a driving force behind the Biennial Symposium on Literature and Culture in the Asia-Pacific Region, which began in 1982 and has been taking place since every two years in different countries of the region, two of which (2009, 2017) were, indeed, hosted by the same institution where Asiatic is also housed, International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM). Moreover, he came to IIUM as a visiting professor in 2018.' (Honouring Dennis Haskell : A Poet and an Amigo of Asiatic and Asian Literature, editorial introduction) 2019 pg. 58-69
Last amended 4 Feb 2020 13:14:26
58-69 https://journals.iium.edu.my/asiatic/index.php/AJELL/article/view/1691/968 Provisional Meanings : Belonging and Not-Belonging in the Poetry of Dennis Haskellsmall AustLit logo Asiatic
Newspapers:
    Powered by Trove
    X