RA Simpson

If any volume of Selected Poems must be in part the autobiography of an imagination, it is subject to the vicissitudes and ironies which attend all autobiography. One gazes at it and finds familiar lineaments, but one also finds mobilities and stands made more evident than a more partial acquaintance can show. The very title is a warning that the whole story –whatever that might be – is not to be found here: a ‘Selected Poems’ is the outcome of recurrent options.

The poet John Ashbery, now a considerable force in American poetry, has said: ‘I think that any one of my poems might be considered to be a snapshot of whatever is going on in my mind at the time…’ Like John Ashbery – and Frank O’Hara (who was involved with the Abstract Expressionism scene in New York before being killed by a dune buggy in 1966) – John Forbes and Gig Ryan are, in Australia, poets who must be linked to the broad automatic writing phenomenon which gained strength with so-called Action Painting (or, to use its other name, Tachisme). The foundation of that art movement was surrealist painting, sculpture, and writing; and these were made familiar to young American artists when writers and painters such as Max Ernst and André Breton escaped from Europe before Hitler took over.