Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

Philip Martin

Philip Martin taught English and Australian literature at Monash. He published several books of poetry.

Philip Martin reviews 'Marching On Paradise' by Peter Steele

September 1986, no. 84 01 September 1986
Peter Steele is a meditative poet with a gift for aphorism: joy / has more of gravity than of gaiety’; ‘You cannot find / your way, but it is finding you’. And of God he saysZ: ‘I’m lost for words except for those to ask / He’ll look my way and make me see it his.’ The taste for aphorism is matched by a taste for formal verse. Steele is fond of the iambic pentameter (as I am), of th ... (read more)

Philip Martin reviews 'The Three Fates and Other Poems' by Rosemary Dobson

November 1984, no. 66 01 November 1984
Sometimes I’ve written reviews ‘because I was invited’, or felt I should. But this is a book I really want to review. And I wasn’t invited: I applied for the job. For close on thirty years I’ve been grateful to Rosemary Dobson, especially for her third book, Child with a Cockatoo (1955), the one through which I came to know her work. Her latest, despite obvious continuities, gives a rat ... (read more)