Cirrus@Austlit

'The Australian Poetry Library (APL) aims to promote a greater appreciation and understanding of Australian poetry by providing access to a wide range of poetic texts as well as to critical and contextual material relating to them, including interviews, photographs and audio/visual recordings.

This website currently contains over 42,000 poems, representing the work of more than 170 Australian poets. All the poems are fully searchable, and may be accessed and read freely on the World Wide Web. Readers wishing to download and print poems may do so for a small fee, part of which is returned to the poets via CAL, the Copyright Agency Limited. Teachers, students and readers of Australian poetry can also create personalised anthologies, which can be purchased and downloaded. Print on demand versions will be availabe from Sydney University Press in the near future.

It is hoped that the APL will encourage teachers to use more Australian material in their English classes, as well as making Australian poetry much more available to readers in remote and regional areas and overseas. It will also help Australian poets, not only by developing new audiences for their work but by allowing them to receive payment for material still in copyright, thus solving the major problem associated with making this material accessible on the Internet.

The Australian Poetry Library is a joint initiative of the University of Sydney and the Copyright Agency Limited (CAL). Begun in 2004 with a prototype site developed by leading Australian poet John Tranter, the project has been funded by a major Linkage Grant from the Australian Research Council (ARC), CAL and the University of Sydney Library. A team of researchers from the University of Sydney, led by Professor Elizabeth Webby and John Tranter, in association with CAL, have developed the Australian Poetry Library as a permanent and wide-ranging Internet archive of Australian poetry resources.' Source: www.poetrylibrary.edu.au (Sighted 30/05/2011).

'Sense, Shape, Symbol is an investigation of Australian poetry. It explores the ways in which poets succeed, or fail, in their attempts to bring their experience to life.

Their primary raw materials are the five senses - sight, sound, smell, taste and touch - the means by which we all experience our world.

Poets also like to experiment with the shape of their writing, starting with the qualities of vowels and consonants, of syllables, and of rhyme, metre and rhythm.

Working poets make particular use of the metaphor, of the connections that they suggest between normally unlike things, to express their response to their subject.

The collection explores the work of five poets who have played an important, influential part in the development of Australian poetry: Judith Wright, Oodgeroo Noonuccal, David Malouf, Les Murray and Mark O’Connor.

The final chapter looks at some of the common concerns that can create conflict in our lives, such as gender, race, age, and socio-economic status, and other issues that create fear and that encourage hope.

The collection is intended to allow readers to become familiar with the techniques that poets use, and to develop their own poetic writing in an informed way.' (Publisher's blurb)