Cirrus@Austlit

'Iris spoke to Robert Wood about return and renewal, balance and purpose, and how poetry matters across borders.' 

'Kim spoke to Robert Wood about belonging, belief, and reading.'

'Kaya spoke to Robert Wood about language, heritage, and routes.'

Bella Li talked to Robert Wood about ekphrasis, assemblage and palimpsests.

'An editor at a nationally-prominent, poetry-specific publishing house and I were recently talking about “the industry.” After reading my manuscript, she relayed that, despite the fact that she found the poems to be of “high enough standard,” her press would not be able to publish it. This was simply for the reason that the press wasn’t taking on any new work whatsoever. I was both surprised and dismayed, and not only for reasons of self-interest. This news came amidst the recent downturn in Australian poetry more generally, and to see yet another press fold made me concerned for all the poets I knew, and the hungry readers of poetry that I know exist.'  (Introduction)

'A continual thread of thoughtful reflection that connects the suburbs to Australian national identity. It harks back, in particular, to a discursive moment just after the second world war, when suburbia as a demographic reality and set of lifestyle choices sprawled into new territory. The 1950s was ‘the suburban moment’, a moment which was seen as the owl of Minerva flew at dusk, when writers like Donald Horne and Robyn Boyd expressed a mood of intellectual despair a decade later, and took evident pleasure in negating ‘the common man’. They, and others, were reflecting on the sudden material changes, on how the car, television, bungalow became the norm, when Australia lost something fundamental in the dialectic of its suburbanisation.' (Introduction)

'I had read criticism of Tony Birch’s short story collection Common People before I read the book itself. I had heard the author speak on national radio, stumbled across reviews and read literary journal articles. What I quickly gleaned from the commentary was that Birch has ‘compassion’ and his common people are ‘resilient’. I read the book and I could not disagree. Some of the stories in Common People are based on Birch’s own personal experiences, but all of them display a striking intimacy with the lingua franca of grit, scrabble, labour. They are stories about mundane and quotidian lives on the margins of Australian society. Other critics asked: what keeps his characters going in the face of hardship? Sometimes it is alcohol, sometimes it is humour, sometimes it is small acts of kindness. All of these things allow Birch’s downtrodden to find ways to live another day. Often the hardship his characters face is structural and the forces they struggle against are greater than themselves. Power is out there. Yet it manifests in particular ways, and oppressing individuals in ways that are specific to their lives.'  (Introduction)

'Written over a period of nine years, Australia Day is a book of short stories by Melanie Cheng. It was the winner of the Award for an Unpublished Manuscript at the Victorian Premier’s Prize in 2016. Along with Maxine Beneba Clarke, Omar Sakr, Lachlan Brown, Michelle Cahill and Alice Pung, Cheng is part of a rising wave of culturally diverse writers concerned with the idea of Australia itself. Cheng herself has glossed Australia Day as a collection about ‘chance encounter, family, multiculturalism, identity.’' (Introduction)

'There is a prevalent myth among academic poets that there is an ‘official verse culture’ in Australia. It could also go by the name of ‘conventional verse culture’ or ‘state verse culture’. The most cited gatekeeper for official verse culture is often Geoff Page (see Bonny Cassidy’s ‘Wild Ecology of Thought’ in Australian Poetry Journal) though one would suggest that others matter as well. And yet, official verse culture is hard to pin down when it comes both to publications and influence. The straw man of official verse culture in Australia is precisely that when we compare it transnationally. The presence of diversity in the Australian Book Review and the importance of Corditewould only seem to support this.'  (Introduction)

'There has been an important groundswell of recent feminist poetries and poetics in Australia. As Siobhan Hodge wrote in her review of Bonny Cassidy and Jessica Wilkinson’s anthologyContemporary Feminist Poetry, there is:

…a subtle, cresting sense of activism.'   (Introduction)

'Life: REGINALD CHARLES INGAMELLS (Rex Ingamells) 1913-1955 was an Australian poet and generally credited with being the founder of the Jindyworobaks Movement.' (Introduction)

'One way to read poetry in Australia is to see it as being in a constant state of conflict. For the most part, this is a cold war where poets argue with poets in very poetic ways – the outcry about Geoff Page’s Southerly blog probably counts as the outer limit of this activity, which manifests more often in email exchanges, reviews that are compliment sandwiches or gossipy asides. Sometimes this breaks out into the open, as we saw when John Kinsella took out a restraining order against Robert Adamson and Anthony Lawrence and which the Sydney Morning Herald covered in 2006.' (Introduction)

'History & the Poet is a series of essays on contemporary Australian poetry. In language clear and precise, Robert Wood poses philosophical and ideological questions that matter for poetry now. History & the Poet offers an entry point to a rich and complex world, and is a compelling vision of what poetry can become. It includes discussion of Wood’s own experiences and identity as part of a broader conversation about who we are and why poetry matters.' (Publication summary)

'You could be forgiven for thinking that ‘Australia’ was simply this place, rather than an imagined community. It is of course not only a phantasm or a figment that is whole, but also real and divisible. In poetics, it is not a stretch to suggest that there is a heuristic, ascendant, paradigmatic separation between those in a transnational sphere sipping turmeric lattes and those authentic patriots tilling the soil. This fault line, which is, of course, anachronistic and dialectical, exists in the selected texts and influences as well as the paratextual selling points that tell us something is ‘traditional’ or ‘experimental’, ‘Romantic or ‘modern’, ‘country’ or ‘city’; in what claim ‘this is Australian’.' (Introduction)