Poetry

Slo-Mo Tsunami and Other Poems by Bruce Dawe

by Martin Duwell •

December 2011–January 2012, no. 337

Puncher & Wattmann, $24.95 pb, 82 pp, 9781921450433

Poetry

Slo-Mo Tsunami and Other Poems by Bruce Dawe

by Martin Duwell •

December 2011–January 2012, no. 337

The title of Bruce Dawe’s first collection, No Fixed Address (1962), pointed to an early working life of innumerable casual jobs. This was covered to some extent in Stephany Steggall’s excellent biography, Bruce Dawe: Life Cycle (2009). As the working life of an Australian poet, this would be incomprehensible now (it seems closer to the world of John Shaw Neilson), but I mention these early details to point out that one way of looking at this new book, Slo-Mo Tsunami, is to see it as occurring half a century after Dawe’s first, fifty years during which Dawe has been one of Australia’s most loved and respected poets.

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.