Cirrus@Austlit

'The veins of good work keep getting richer, and the number of poets capable of writing at a level that demands attention continues to grow. From Lisa Gorton's meditations on our emotionally inflected habitations, to Sarah Day's desire to find the words for the presences she encounters; from a selection of more than fifty years' poetry from Chris Wallace-Crabbe, to new work sparked by confrontations between Asian and eastern European traditions on the one hand, and the experience of Australia on the other: each year, Australian poetry is looking more and more like a world. Whatever forces encourage us to operate transnationally - and some of them are in evidence in these collections - one end of the continuum of practice will be grounded in the regional and national for many years to come. Whether such traditions eventually evaporate before technologies we can still barely imagine - to say nothing of the proliferation of texts, and the difficulty of tracking them - we are nevertheless powering ahead, making them deeper, richer and more various.' (Publication abstract)