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In Blue Notes ( p.96) Duggan has described his Blue Hills poems as a 'discontinuous sequence begun in ... The Great Divide.' (1985). The sequence continued in later selected works and elsewhere.
Duncan Hose in Jacket 39, 2010, makes this comment about the sequence;:
Blue Hills was a serialised radio program produced in Australia from the late 1940s until the 1970s, and the Australian poet Laurie Duggan picked up the name for a long series of occasional poems about being in Australia. As they have advanced numerically ('Blue Hills 14', 'Blue Hills 15'... 'Blue Hills 60'), these poems really have become thrilling little instruments of sensitivity, proceeding by plucking out the contingent details of scenes of Australian life, and resting everything upon them. There is nothing that cannot go into a 'blue hills' poem, yet as little mobiles, Duggan's structures are, gravitationally, extremely precise, and plainly an aesthete's delight. In many parts of Australia, if you haul yourself over one set of blue hills, you are likely to see the horizon replicated as endless blue hills: it is a flat figure of surface abstraction and a figure of echo. The poems are little complexes of ideologies, aesthetics, and the ethical charting of Australia's historical deliverance to the commodity market. Duggan's 'Blue Hills' open up an invitation to trespass on new ways of thinking Australia through poetics, and is one of the more lively mechanisms of the modern Australian canon.'
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Related Works
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y
The Collected Blue Hills
Glebe
:
Puncher and Wattmann
,
2012
Z1932689
2012
selected work
poetry
'In late 1980 Laurie Duggan began writing the Blue Hills poems as a kind of respite from the 'poetry wars'. The series mostly spread itself out over a number of books running in parallel with other more ostensibly 'worthy' projects like The Ash Range and The Epigrams of Martial. These poems now gathered here are at the heart of what Duggan sees as his poetic work.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
Works about this Work
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The Blue Hills Archipelago
2023
single work
essay
— Appears in: Axon : Creative Explorations , November vol. 13 no. 2 2023;'This essay puts forth Laurie Duggan’s decades-long serial poem, Blue Hills (1980–), as a radical antimythic and ecological approach to longform ‘epic’ poetics – or what I term the ‘ecological anti-epic’. The essay first reflects on the mythic ambitions of twentieth century Anglo-American modernist epic poets, such as Ezra Pound and TS Eliot, before turning to what I call the North American ‘antiepic’ postmodernist serial poem tradition. Centring on Robert Duncan’s Passages -- a key influence on Duggan’s own series -- I argue this ‘anti-epic’ approach to the long poem replaced the ‘mythical method’ (Eliot 1923: 483) of early modernist epics with a compositional method. Reading Blue Hills through the guiding principle of Duncan’s series, ‘grand collage’ (2014: 298), the essay then posits that Blue Hills -- as a localised re-deployment of Duncan’s grand collage method -- can be read as both a continuation, and subversive settler Australian reimagination, of the North American anti-epic serial poem tradition. Drawing on Peter Minter’s archipelagic approach to reading Australian poetry, Blue Hills is then read as a type of archipelago of poetic islands, one which challenges not only the epiccum-mythic ambitions of modernist longform poetry, but also the racially charged environmental myth-conceptions of early settler Australian poetic movements, such as the Jindyworobaks. I conclude with a brief reflection on the links between the process-based aesthetics of post-modern anti-epics and what Connor Weightman calls the ‘ecological long poem’ (2020: 3), ultimately positing that Duggan’s Blue Hills refutes the modernist penchant for speaking declaratively about the world and instead affects a sense that the world is reveling in its own wording.' (Publication abstract)
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Across Time : Laurie Duggan's Blue Hills
2017
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Antipodes , December vol. 31 no. 2 2017; (p. 252-269, 462.)'The poem as a whole reads, Chinese characters, a shelf on which stand burnt sticks of incense and three oranges, wind gusts broken branches mauve shadows under the jacaranda and oddly, a row of cypress pines along the tin wall of the Rheem factory Apparent gaps in the poem give the visual record of omission. Unlike the previous poems discussed, "Blue Hills 38" is not aerial but works at ground level, describing the historical layers of a suburban area of Melbourne; the poem as a whole reads, Lanes I will never trace of sheoak and flowering gum fork through these suburbs under the campanile, Mentone, where the rail curves towards the bay and its townships: median clock towers and creek borders, overtaken by the city, the lowlands between, drained, filled in, overlooked by railway stations, a vista from Edithvale to Wheelers Hill. The speculation here regards the question of art's relationship-in this case, of non-Aboriginal art-to its environment in Australia and its willingness to allow its language and conventions to be thereby changed. [...]the line democratizes art and heat as simply two small words, two potentially volatile ingredients. The properties of art and heat in "Blue Hills 48" are mirrored by a transformative exchange between architecture and art: australian mercantile lanD concrete lettering embossed around the warehouse entablature broken off on one wall leaving the infill of words in red brick, a negative space with the unexpected gravity of a Magritte.' (Publication abstract)
-
Across Time : Laurie Duggan's Blue Hills
2017
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Antipodes , December vol. 31 no. 2 2017; (p. 252-269, 462.)'The poem as a whole reads, Chinese characters, a shelf on which stand burnt sticks of incense and three oranges, wind gusts broken branches mauve shadows under the jacaranda and oddly, a row of cypress pines along the tin wall of the Rheem factory Apparent gaps in the poem give the visual record of omission. Unlike the previous poems discussed, "Blue Hills 38" is not aerial but works at ground level, describing the historical layers of a suburban area of Melbourne; the poem as a whole reads, Lanes I will never trace of sheoak and flowering gum fork through these suburbs under the campanile, Mentone, where the rail curves towards the bay and its townships: median clock towers and creek borders, overtaken by the city, the lowlands between, drained, filled in, overlooked by railway stations, a vista from Edithvale to Wheelers Hill. The speculation here regards the question of art's relationship-in this case, of non-Aboriginal art-to its environment in Australia and its willingness to allow its language and conventions to be thereby changed. [...]the line democratizes art and heat as simply two small words, two potentially volatile ingredients. The properties of art and heat in "Blue Hills 48" are mirrored by a transformative exchange between architecture and art: australian mercantile lanD concrete lettering embossed around the warehouse entablature broken off on one wall leaving the infill of words in red brick, a negative space with the unexpected gravity of a Magritte.' (Publication abstract)
-
The Blue Hills Archipelago
2023
single work
essay
— Appears in: Axon : Creative Explorations , November vol. 13 no. 2 2023;'This essay puts forth Laurie Duggan’s decades-long serial poem, Blue Hills (1980–), as a radical antimythic and ecological approach to longform ‘epic’ poetics – or what I term the ‘ecological anti-epic’. The essay first reflects on the mythic ambitions of twentieth century Anglo-American modernist epic poets, such as Ezra Pound and TS Eliot, before turning to what I call the North American ‘antiepic’ postmodernist serial poem tradition. Centring on Robert Duncan’s Passages -- a key influence on Duggan’s own series -- I argue this ‘anti-epic’ approach to the long poem replaced the ‘mythical method’ (Eliot 1923: 483) of early modernist epics with a compositional method. Reading Blue Hills through the guiding principle of Duncan’s series, ‘grand collage’ (2014: 298), the essay then posits that Blue Hills -- as a localised re-deployment of Duncan’s grand collage method -- can be read as both a continuation, and subversive settler Australian reimagination, of the North American anti-epic serial poem tradition. Drawing on Peter Minter’s archipelagic approach to reading Australian poetry, Blue Hills is then read as a type of archipelago of poetic islands, one which challenges not only the epiccum-mythic ambitions of modernist longform poetry, but also the racially charged environmental myth-conceptions of early settler Australian poetic movements, such as the Jindyworobaks. I conclude with a brief reflection on the links between the process-based aesthetics of post-modern anti-epics and what Connor Weightman calls the ‘ecological long poem’ (2020: 3), ultimately positing that Duggan’s Blue Hills refutes the modernist penchant for speaking declaratively about the world and instead affects a sense that the world is reveling in its own wording.' (Publication abstract)
