Cirrus@Austlit

'The new millennium has witnessed a resurgence in poetry as its condensed form, attention to feeling, and capacity to capture the zeitgeist attracts more readers than ever before. Australia has been at the forefront of experimenting with emergent and hybrid forms such as the verse novel, prose poetry, digital poetries, and poetic biography. Among the first to realise the potential of the Internet to create a vibrant cross-cultural dialogue around poetry and poetics, Australians initiated online journals that reached out globally like Jacket and Cordite Poetry Review. Australia’s poets have increasingly garnered international recognition. Les Murray was dubbed “one of the superleague that includes Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott and Joseph Brodsky” by the Independent on Sunday (quoted in Davie) while Dan Chiasson discerned in The New Yorker that Murray was “routinely mentioned among the three of four leading-English language poets.” In 2017, Australian poet Ali Cobby Eckermann was the first Indigenous writer worldwide to be awarded Yale University’s prestigious Windham Campbell Prize.'

Source: Abstract

'This essay investigates the development of seeing as an affective, political and potentially transformative practice across the course of John Kinsella’s poetic career. It analyses how seeing becomes a means for Kinsella to apprehend the relationship between self and environment and to consider how local-scale is tied to broader-scale change. At the same time, it traces Kinsella’s concern at the ways in which Western theories of vision shape and reinforce structures of power, particularly in terms of gendered and colonial violence. Moving through and then past ekphrastic debates, I argue that Kinsella considers how poetry and art might, in their own ways, ethically engage with both the human and more-than-human and actively navigate and reflect upon states of connection.' (Publication abstract)

'Growing up in Australia in the 1970s, I much preferred the hijinks of Han Solo and Chewie to Princess Leia’s sexualised damsel in distress. My sister and I spent an entire summer pigging out on Choc Wedges and Barney Bananas so we could collect the men’s cricket team on specially marked sticks. Feminism seemed a world “far, far away”. Yet what Australian girls could and couldn’t do was being explored through a glut of screen adaptations of classic novels.' (Introduction)