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John Hawke

John Hawke

John Hawke's books include Australian Literature and the Symbolist Movement, Poetry and the Trace (co-edited with Ann Vickery), and the volume of poetry Aurelia, which received the 2015 Anne Elder award. His most recent poetry collection is Whirlwind Duststorm (2021).

John Hawke reviews 'Contemporary Australian Poetry' edited by Martin Langford et. al. and 'The Best Australian Poems 2016' edited by Sarah Holland-Batt

March 2017, no. 389 26 February 2017
According to The Magic Pudding, Bunyip Bluegum’s erudition is established through his ability to ‘converse on a great variety of subjects, having read all the best Australian poets’, a questionable achievement in Norman Lindsay’s day. A glance through the Annals of Australian Literature reveals the paucity of quality Australian poetry volumes published through most of the twentieth century ... (read more)

'Zero Degrees' by John Hawke

November 2016, no. 386 26 October 2016
Rags of snow unmelting on the southern lawn.Those younger ones, whose death turns on the hair’s-breadth incidence of accident,avoid this perduration of slow misrecognition. He dreams his cotton blankets are combusting,but won’t press the hospital buzzer because the nursing staff are occupied extinguishing flames.That vandals have broken into the cupboard of the genial stroke victim in the ... (read more)

John Hawke reviews 'Pitch of Poetry' by Charles Bernstein

October 2016, no. 385 26 September 2016
When Viktor Shklovsky, in his famous 1917 essay 'Art as Technique', asserts that the fundamental task of the poetic function is one of 'making strange' the reader's customary perceptions, he is arguing for more than just the avoidance of linguistic cliché. Through the medium of poetic form, the accepted conventions of our habitualised view of the world can be defamiliarised: the political implica ... (read more)
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