'This essay traces what it sees as a geopoetic trope in Australian literature: the poetic verse-line as a boundary-fence. Basing itself on poems by John Kinsella, Judith Wright, Phillip[sic] Hodgins, Randolph Stow and Les Murray, the poem argues for a development of this trope in the context of the wider geopoetic endeavour in which Australian landscape poetry has been involved: of coming to terms with a new environment and the Aboriginal culture already geopoetically there.
Following Tim Ingold's reinterpretation of the line in human culture in Lines: A Brief History, it sees the line, rather than metrics or rhythm (or the line as a reflection of breaks in rhythm) as the defining characteristic of verse in an age of writing. The verse-line is how poetry spatially imprints the temporal order of a culture on a perceived world, but also how it reflects on that world within the space of a poem. Traditional European poetry measures the verse-line as a plough-furrow (the etymology of versus), a retracing of patterns, which the essay argues, New World postcolonial literatures de-measure: in Canadian landscape poetry the line becomes the overwhelming horizon; in Caribbean poetry the tidalectic wave; in Australian poetry the boundary fence, ambiguously demarcating what is inside and outside.' Source: Martin Leer.
'This essay works within the lines of the partnership literary theory and it focuses on the importance of analogical thinking in literary criticism. Its aim is to demonstrate how the literary text (in all its possible expressions), especially in postcolonial literatures, is influenced by 'native' oral traditions and narratives that work within an analogical rather than logical framework. The Aboriginal mythological story "Murgah Murrui" and Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines (1987) will be shown as working within similar narrative structures. Chatwin is inspired by an Aboriginal world-view, mirrored in his use of an analogical style and language that imitates and evokes the rhythms of oral narrative. In both The Songlines and "Murgah Murrui" the expression of a partnership, life-enhancing and cooperative mode is an ancient instrument of wisdom, unveiling the immutable and sacred truths of the universe.' Source: Antonella Riem Natale.