Cirrus@Austlit

In this essay, both an obituary and a critical overview of Stow's work, Leer aims to 'honour the single soul who was Randolph Stow - and explore how the idea of the single soul informs his writing' (p.2).

'Taking a letter from English poet Thom Gunn, resident in California, to Stow in Geraldton, WA, as a starting point, the author explores 'correspondences' between the two poets. He examines the way in which their 'mirroring movements between England and the New World enact comparable tensions and preoccupations in their work, between cosmopolitanism and localism, Romanticism and demotic contemporary cultures, which may account for the affinity between them that Gunn's letter asserts so categorically and intriguingly' (p. 33). Brown discusses Stow's education and involvement in literary life at the University of Western Australia and his reading of Gunn's early poetry in The Sense of Movement 'focusing upon some telling resonances and contrasts' it has with Stow's own work' (p.33).

In' this discussion of Maiden's poetics, Cassidy looks at the way she has 'developed and refined a poetics motivated by her belief in "living out an idea" in poetic form', 'using the idiom of warfare to compare various scenarios of human conflict: from Vietnam to Iraq, and from the White House to the kitchen sink' (p. 51). She shows how Maiden, despite using an extended trope of war 'has continued to suspend the poetic space above political partisanship, through ironic approaches to voice and form, such as parataxis, compounded similes, and pastiche of tone and image. This heightened poetics has provided an enlighteningly self-reflexive enactment of her earliest poems. By demanding that her readers make a decision about how they encounter the poetic space, Maiden's poetry possesses a politics without being political, just as it possesses an ethics without morality.' (p. 68)