'Half a century, as I’ve noted elsewhere, can be a very long time in poetic history: it’s the time between the death of Dr Johnson, for example, and the publication of Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott”. It’s now fifty years (more and less) since the publication of Les Murray’s Poems Against Economics. It’s his third book if one counts his contribution to The Ilex Tree (made up of sections by himself and Geoffrey Lehmann) as a single book but perhaps it would be more realistic to describe it, ala Fellini, as Murray’s second and a half. Poems Against Economics was the first complete book of Murray’s poems which I read and I remember, even today, how impressed I was by the long sequence “Walking to the Cattle-Place” which makes up almost half the book. Fifty years on seems a good time to revisit it to see how much it has changed.' (Introduction)
'Stephen Edgar’s new book relates to the new poems in his Selected – significantly called The Strangest Place – by a process of extension. If those slightly earlier poems seemed obsessed by the weirdness of the world of appearances, the poems of Ghosts of Paradise could be said to be preoccupied by the nature of the organism that perceives that strangeness. Perhaps it’s true that our minds are weirder than the world they spend their limited life interacting with but at any rate it is the mind, consciousness itself, that comes to the surface as the overriding theme of these poems. And it is the idea of ghosts – chimera produced by the mind – that is the main vehicle for this theme.'(Introduction)
'Peter Boyle now has such an established place in contemporary Australian poetry that it isn’t really necessary, once again, to go over the features of his distinctive poetic sensibility and the kinds of poems it produces, beyond repeating that his approach to poetry has its roots not in English language poetry but in the poetry of the Romance languages two of which, French and Spanish, he speaks fluently. He is also a translator and the task of translating brings a poet into a greater intimacy with the work of another poet than simply reading does: in a sense it requires a very special kind of reading. Unlike the comparatively unified earlier books Enfolded in the Wings of a Great Darkness and Ideas of Travel, Companions, Ancestors, Inscriptions is something of a compendium. It is made up of five sections, each with varying degrees of coherence, usually distinguished from the others thematically.' (Introduction)
'I usually think that David Brooks’s third book, Urban Elegies, provides readers with the first sight of what he is – a great contemporary poet. It replaced a tendency towards a kind of gestural lyricism in his earlier work with an aggressive, free-wheeling personal style that has formed the basis of subsequent developments. This selected poems provides a good opportunity for an overview of the shape of his career. Like most modern selecteds, it begins with a new, book-length work and then selects from earlier volumes beginning with the most recent and concluding with the first. It probably suits readers who are interested in new work and it certainly suits the poets for whom, understandably, what they have done most recently is what occupies their minds. Early work gets relegated to the back of the book. But for critics – who want, among other things, to map changes in theme, mood and mode – it’s a frustrating arrangement: we have to read books like this in reverse order. Doing so, reveals that many of the characteristics of Urban Elegies and the later poems can be found in a single poem in Brooks’s second book, “Depot Elegy”.' (Introduction)
'Rereading Petra White’s poetry since her first book, The Incoming Tide of 2007, it’s hard not to feel that the main task she faces in her poetry has been to find ways of getting her life into it. Nothing unusual about that, of course, but you get a sense in her work of life as a continuously developing experience plotted against, and in tension with, the unchangeable matters of temperament and childhood background. And the developing life develops at quite a speed so that in the poems of this new book, That Galloping Horse, we find her in Germany, married and with a growing daughter living through the Covid experience. Some of the themes are consistent: she writes brilliantly about office work (the title of this new book is a metaphor for that sort of work) and sensitively about her unusual childhood in Adelaide. What her career so far shows is a desire to get crucial material into forms that will work well poetically. Is office life dealt with best in a multi-part, multi-perspective sequence as it is in “Southbank” from The Incoming Tide or is it best dealt with metaphorically and allusively? Does the life-changing experience of travelling across the Nullarbor as part of a kind of hippie convoy work best as a narrative sequence – and so on?' (Introduction)
'There’s a certain kind of poetry which gets its strength from a combination of an intriguing and original conception for each poem with a forceful expressive power. This latter can come from an intensity of language or from an ability to follow ideas through – and generate new ones – with a rapidity that often leaves the reader behind: what rhetoricians of old called “a copiousness of invention”. Damen O’Brien seems exactly this kind of poet to me, both in his first book, Animal with Human Voices, and this impressive new one, Walking the Boundary. He brings together invention and expressiveness at a high enough level to make him stand out among his contemporaries. A look at the opening section of each book will give me a chance to explain a little further.' (Introduction)
'We have been living with Judith Beveridge’s marvellous poetry since the publication of The Domesticity of Giraffes in 1987. With that length of exposure, I feel I should be more confident about the shape of her work but I always feel that I don’t have enough of a grasp of her “poetic-self” to generalise with any degree of certainty about what these poems actually do. At one level they are very similar – the tone, for example, seldom changes and neither does the pace: the poems tend to be expansive. But at another level they are immensely varied: she seems just as much at home in lyrical personal expression as she does in dramatic monologues, where she enters the personalities of very different characters: the Buddha, Marco Polo’s concubine and Hannibal, to name a few. Looking at the poems from this point of view – the stance of the poet vis a vis the human consciousness that the poem is dealing with – raises another difficult issue, or at least an issue I used to find difficult before I learned how to relax and not worry about it. That is that often we aren’t sure whether a particular poem is “personal” or “imagined”. “Making Perfume”, the fourth poem of The Domesticity of Giraffes, is written in the first person and luxuriates (a feature that runs throughout Beveridge’s poetry) in names, and, in this poem, the way in which they match the scents being created. It’s always worried me whether this is “personal” or not – ie is it a poem about the author’s adolescent hobbies? The answer is “probably not”, but the evidence for that would only be a matter of probabilities and one wouldn’. Was her father a birdwatcher with a special pair of binoculars (“Sun Music”) did she have a dog which died in 2016 (“Bandit”) and so on? It’s a complicated issue in reader’s responses to poems and Beveridge isn’t the only poet where it turns up, but it isn’t resolved by treating this as a voyeuristic desire to know intimate details about someone’s life. Somehow it relates to authenticity. There’s a big difference, for most of us, between seeing a host of golden daffodils and imagining that you have done so. Or of actually having a gorgeous girlfriend who is as beautiful as a red, red rose and imagining that you do. Somehow we want lyric poets to recognise the significance of special experiences they have had and to make them the basis of exploratory poems. In contrast, of course, imaginative, dramatic enterings into unfamiliar personalities – Marco Polo’s concubine, for example – must, by definition, not arise from personal experience but from imaginative reconstructions.' (Introduction)
'Alan Wearne’s new book stands somewhere between his other two books with unified narratives. The Nightmarkets was a set of dramatic monologues reflecting on a single story while The Lovemakers investigated the stories of a large set of characters. Mixed Business is seven monologues covering a number of different stories but put together they make up a kind of history of political and social life in the suburbs of Victoria from just before the first World War to just about the present day: let’s say a span of a century. Wearne’s poetry is always about this kind of documenting but the precise topic and the precise mode of approaching it vary.' (Introduction)
