Cirrus@Austlit

'Asked what poetry could do for Australia, A.D. Hope is anecdotally reported to have replied that it could justify its existence. He likely did not intend it as such, but it is a succinct elucidation of the ineluctable connection between settler poetics and settlement, dynamically theorised by Paul Carter and Phillip Mead, among many others. This connection is evident in each of the formative moments adduced in the development of an Australian literary consciousness; from Marcus Clarke’s 1876 essay on weird melancholy to Henry Lawson’s 1892 Bush Undertaker, and Vance Palmer’s The Legend of the Nineties (1954). The structure of feeling manifested and practised in settler literature operates in an explicit or latent dialectic with Indigenous presence. Nadia Rhook’s book of poems Boots interrogates and revivifies some of the fundamental questions of this dialectic, with a direct lyricism.'  (Introduction)