'This paper explores the representation of contemporary space in the work of Australian poet Laurie Duggan. Focusing upon Duggan’s Crab & Winkle (2009)—a work ‘situated’ in the United Kingdom—the paper contends that such a text presents an example of ‘spatial mapping’, one in which the representation of place and space is both a thematic preoccupation and a determining feature of the poem’s structural concerns. In Crab & Winkle, a book-length record of Duggan’s first year living in East Kent, the reader is offered a diaristic mapping of an environment largely unfamiliar to the poem’s (autobiographical) narrator. In this expatriate work, Australia—as physical and social space—becomes a ghostly presence, an imagined space that is nevertheless a vital component of the cognitive map the text constructs through a collage of everyday materiality and the mental spaces of memory and imagination. Situating Duggan’s work within a tradition of process-based aesthetics, the paper argues that Crab & Winkle constructs experiential, yet necessarily provisional maps of contemporary space that roam from the local to the global.' (Publication summary)
'This paper explores the representation of contemporary space in the work of Australian poet Laurie Duggan. Focusing upon Duggan’s Crab & Winkle (2009)—a work ‘situated’ in the United Kingdom—the paper contends that such a text presents an example of ‘spatial mapping’, one in which the representation of place and space is both a thematic preoccupation and a determining feature of the poem’s structural concerns. In Crab & Winkle, a book-length record of Duggan’s first year living in East Kent, the reader is offered a diaristic mapping of an environment largely unfamiliar to the poem’s (autobiographical) narrator. In this expatriate work, Australia—as physical and social space—becomes a ghostly presence, an imagined space that is nevertheless a vital component of the cognitive map the text constructs through a collage of everyday materiality and the mental spaces of memory and imagination. Situating Duggan’s work within a tradition of process-based aesthetics, the paper argues that Crab & Winkle constructs experiential, yet necessarily provisional maps of contemporary space that roam from the local to the global.' (Publication summary)
