Chris Wallace-Crabbe
Chris Wallace-Crabbe AM is the author of more than twenty collections of poetry. His most recent books of verse include The Universe Looks Down (2005), and Telling a Hawk from a Handsaw (2008). He is Professor Emeritus in Culture and Communication at Melbourne University. Also a public speaker and commentator on the visual arts, he specialises in ‘artists’ books’. Read It Again, a volume of critical essays, was published in 2005. Among other awards he has won the Dublin Prize for Arts and Sciences and the Christopher Brennan Award for Literature. His latest book is Rondo (2018).
Below great ears like galleon sailshangs an off-grey trunk – odd word –more than the puny dangling tailmarking this leatherjacket.So much overcoat in our tropics, then?But why is any creature as it is?
The ark’s gangplank must have been sturdy,shipping creatures from those Turkish hillsbefore due discipline on deck. Sailing,the very devil: not a Tasmanian one,since that’s not in the book, ... (read more)
All those hominids stood around to watch,scratching their heads and hairy armpits.So like them it was, well, sort ofbut ever so puny, while more or less rosepink.
Was this bod somethi ... (read more)
Ah, the ever-lyrical, even ifstared into from a cabin up above:snowy cloud-sonata which thenrecedes into softness with its airy iceberg flocks
can be the stuff of verse orcounterpoint, say, but can’tfeed serious fiction forthe yarnspinner has to eatthe heavy middle of our sandwich
rampaging all the way fromBaghdad Prepares for Attackto an ashtray smell orpuckered brocade on a chair.Novels know ... (read more)
Chris Wallace-Crabbe AM is the author of more than twenty collections of poetry. His most recent books of verse include The Universe Looks Down (2005), and Telling a Hawk from a Handsaw (2008). He is Professor Emeritus in Culture and Communication at Melbourne University. Also a public speaker and commentator on the visual arts, he specialises in ‘artists’ books’. Read It Again, a volume of ... (read more)
The legendary Dylan has now been dead for a century and his fumy glitter has probably faded a little. But then, how far do any poets these days really have glamour to show for themselves, no matter how hard they drink? Very few, in the Anglophone world at least: there’s nobody around like Wales’s roaring boy.
... (read more)
What you sayabout poetrycould very wellbe stone-cold factualbecause this artcan serve you uptruth without evenso bloody much asactors or make-up.
... (read more)
... (read more)
Simonides of Ceos is said to have declared that ‘Painting is mute poetry, poetry a speaking picture.’ All of us know something of what he means, about our thirst for information from the arts: and, if you like, our scrabbling for the visible within a text. One half of his mirrored pronouncement is verified by those people who, in an art museum, hurry to the curatorial information alongside a p ... (read more)
State governors hold a curious role across Australia, one that will be called into question when – one of these fine days, but none too soon – our nation becomes a republic. There will be lots of fine-tuning to be done before that, from the roles of Her Majesty’s representatives here all the way down to Royal Park, Royal Melbourne Golf Club, and the RACV. But this book is the biography of a ... (read more)
