By and Large by Chris Wallace-Crabbe

September 2001, no. 234

Brandl & Schlesinger, $21.95 pb, 98 pp

By and Large by Chris Wallace-Crabbe

September 2001, no. 234

Chris Wallace-Crabbe’s new book, By and Large, is, despite its hundred pages, a thinner book than most of his recent volumes. The familiar features are there: a baroque and intense intellectual ambit combined with playfulness; a deep love of the sharp ‘thinginess’ of the world combined with a love of the expressiveness of the words we use to contain it; and, last but far from least, enjoyable phrasemaking. It is just that, in By and Large, the reader’s pleasure seems more attenuated.

What stands out as a new departure is an intriguing forty-sonnet sequence called ‘Modern Times’, the second of the book’s three sections. Given that the third section is called ‘One Life’, we might expect a simple division of authorial attention: one to look at the world and the other to look inwards. In reality, things are a bit more complex than that.

Martin Duwell

By this contributor

Martin Duwell was born in England in 1948. He taught for thirty-five years in the School of English, Media Studies and Art History at the University of Queensland, where he received his doctorate in 1988. He is the author of A Possible Contemporary Poetry (1982) and an edition of the selected poems of John Blight. He was one of the editors of the Penguin New Literary History of Australia (1988) and has edited, with R.M.W. Dixon, two anthologies of Aboriginal Song Poetry. He has written extensively on postwar Australian poetry and publishes monthly reviews of new books of Australian poetry on his website.