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Alive and barking

by
February 2007, no. 288

The Best Australian Poetry 2006 edited by Judith Beveridge

UQP, $24.95 pb, 143 pp

The Best Australian Poems 2006 edited by Dorothy Porter

Black Inc, $24.95 pb, 212 pp

Alive and barking

by
February 2007, no. 288

Seeing these two anthologies side by side in that obscure corner allocated to poetry by so many bookshops, a casual browser might note that both begin with Robert Adamson’s ‘A Visitation’ and conclude that uniformity rules and one volume will suffice. Not so: a full savouring of the past year’s poetic crop requires both. In fact, ‘A Visitation’ is the only poem common to both selections. Certainly, they share poets – and it is among these twenty that readers are likely to recognise ‘established’ names such as Alan Gould, Kate Llewellyn, Jan Owen, Peter Porter, Philip Salom (all in their egalitarian alphabetical order), but in each case the particular poem selected is different. Beyond that, there is substantial variation in the selection of poets: nineteen of Beveridge’s forty poets don’t appear among the eighty-two present in Porter’s more extensive volume.

Jennifer Strauss reviews 'The Best Australian Poetry 2006' edited by Judith Beveridge and 'The Best Australian Poems 2006' edited by Dorothy Porter

The Best Australian Poetry 2006

edited by Judith Beveridge

UQP, $24.95 pb, 143 pp

The Best Australian Poems 2006

edited by Dorothy Porter

Black Inc, $24.95 pb, 212 pp

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