Cirrus@Austlit

'This paper examines the philosophic and political potentials of lyric poetry through an archaeology of its ideological participation, situating a critical moment of the form’s partial liberation in the poetry of Paul Celan.' (Publication abstract)

'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)

'Health, wellness, well-being, words which resonate with the most basic social questions of how we are toward one another. This year our answers have been drastically rearranged – we care for one another with distance, and forego almost all the habits of flourishing or eudaimonia. Not that it’s ever been simple: our essayists for Overland 239 approach these problems from a wide variety of intersecting experiences and disciplines.' (Publication summary)

'Bridget Grogan’s monograph Reading Corporeality in Patrick White’s Fiction articulates a welcome challenge to a number of the assumptions of White studies. Her compelling primary thesis is that White doesn’t endorse a dualistic paradigm between spiritual transcendence and corporeal abjection, but rather stages it as an immanent critique of rationalist modernity. This argument draws on the concept of what Grogan calls the “somatic spirituality” which critically diverges from the Platonic and Pauline view of the flesh as the prison of the soul. This is salutary in a number of ways; critics have long recognized the importance of physical abjection in White’s novels, but often in unhelpful and contradictory ways.' (Introduction)

'When monuments fall, they create ripples, shockwaves, fragments, pyroclastic flow – pick your metaphor. Les Murray was definitely that. Over his long career, he produced more poetry, more critically well-regarded poetry, and – stranger still – more commercially profitable poetry than pretty much anyone else in the Australian landscape. Unlike the famous expatriate coterie of his peers (Peter Porter, Germaine Greer, Robert Hughes, Clive James and so forth), he did it mostly from his own paddock, without modulating his principles to fashion or his prejudices to progress. You could think of Murray as the problematic old bastard grandad some of us had, if he’d been an internationally renowned poet. Structurally rarer, Murray’s work created and sustained an entire idea or moment or myth of Australia pretty much on its own. Let’s be blunt, there just aren’t that many writers who can pull off a feat of that magnitude.' (Introduction)