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‘Love is the subject’

A welcome new edition of Martin Johnston
by
December 2020, no. 427

Beautiful Objects: Selected poems by Martin Johnston

Ligature, $29.99 pb, 182 pp

‘Love is the subject’

A welcome new edition of Martin Johnston
by
December 2020, no. 427

There has as yet been no comprehensive critical study of the poets associated with the ‘Generation of ’68’, of whom Martin Johnston was perhaps the most naturally gifted and certainly the most intellectually expansive representative. This is because the project of these poets, to fully incorporate the stylistic innovations of modernist poetics and its development in postwar American models within local practice, is still ongoing. If we examine only those poets gathered in the 1979 New Australian Poetry anthology – in which Johnston’s lengthy experiment in parataxis, ‘The Blood Aquarium’, appears as a signature work – we find major authors even today in the process of developing their practice.

John Hawke reviews 'Beautiful Objects: Selected poems' by Martin Johnston

Beautiful Objects: Selected poems

by Martin Johnston

Ligature, $29.99 pb, 182 pp

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