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Woodbine Press

Falling up into Verse by Edwin Wilson

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August 1989, no. 113
Bev Roberts reviews 'Falling up into Verse' by Edwin Wilson

The prospect of reviewing a ‘Survival Manual for Live Poets’ was daunting enough, but became positively intimidating when I came across its author’s views on critics. Critics, he says, are like leeches and there’s only one way to deal with leeches: ‘take a small stick and insert it into the ... anus of the leech, pulling the leech back over the stick like a condom, impaling it, inside-out, like a shiskabab, ready to heat’.

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Hypocrisy in Australia

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June 1985, no. 71

Edwin Wilson’s first novel, Liberty, Egality, Fraternity! is described by its dust jacket as being about

work, life, love; friendship, sex, marriage, birth, death, religion, and the nature of freedom ’ and ‘individual liberty’, set against Australian society in the fifties and sixties.

None of which I can quibble with, nor as the jacket goes on to say, the predictability of this theme for a first novel. For alas, Liberty, Egality, Fraternity! is yawningly predictable, far too long and strives after a symbolic significance which is never achieved.

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Peter Rose Editorial Cadetship
Monash University - June
Australia Institute