Brian Edwards

That Homer Rieth is one of the finest lyric poets writing in Australia was apparent with the publication in 2001 of his collection The Dining Car Scene. Now, with Wimmera, his lyric strengths are displayed in epic form. Presented in twelve books and 374 pages, initially titled ‘A Locale of the Cosmos’, grand in conception and impressively detailed in execution, this is a significant achievement indeed, and a major contribution to Australian literature.

In the first part of his new collection, Graeme Hetherington returns to the cultural territory he presented, differently registered, in In the Shadow of Van Diemen’s Land (1999). This is the west coast of Tasmania, reconstructed this time, in ‘West Coast Garden of Eden’, as the provocative place of his childhood, an Eden after the Fall in which innocence has long before succumbed to temptation. The twenty-seven parts of ‘For Boyd’ present Boyd as the narrator’s schoolmate, a son of working-class parents who has Paul Newman looks, a careless disregard for all forms of authority, an impressive and precocious sexual appetite, and a rebel’s capacity for mischief.