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Paul Kane

'Doo Town', a poem by Paul Kane ... (read more)

The languid water of a fountain
rises to a steady height, collapses
upon itself, splashing

a stone bowl on a pedestal.
The elliptical pool ripples
in the afternoon’s light air.

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Rarely does one come across a book that is both intensely ‘literary’ – stylised, sophisticated, deeply engaged with its antecedents – and achingly moving, so viscerally raw that it takes one’s breath away. A Passing Bell: Ghazals for Tina – an elegy-sequence for Tina Kane, to whom Paul Kane was married for thirty-six years – is such a work ...

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Renga: 100 poems by John Kinsella and Paul Kane

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March 2018, no. 399

Poets aren’t generally known for being great collaborators. Wordsworth and Coleridge’s 'Lyrical Ballads' (1798) is a rare example of a co-authored canonical work of poetry. 'Renga: 100 poems', by John Kinsella and Paul Kane, has some similarities to 'Lyrical Ballads'. Like those of its ...

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Collected Poems by by Mark Strand

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March 2015, no. 369

It is tempting to say that when Mark Strand died last November American poetry lost one of its most distinctive voices. But it isn’t quite true. First, Strand had already retired from poetry several years earlier (before Philip Roth and Alice Munro caused a stir by doing so from fiction). Strand returned to his first career as an artist (a very talented one, according to his teachers at Yale’s Art and Architecture School), constructing a series of collages that were shown in galleries in New York. Second, Strand’s voice is of course very much present in the poems he leaves behind, collected in this handsome edition, which came out a month before he died. Though it is a voice of loss, it is not lost to us.

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Books of the Year is always one our most popular features. Find out what our 41 contributors liked most this year – and why.

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The Peter Porter Poetry Prize – now open to all poets writing in English – is one of our most prestigious prizes of its kind. Read this year’s four shortlisted poems.

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Peter Steele once described his teaching and writing as ‘acts of celebration’. He is – and was – quite literally a celebrant: in his role as a Jesuit priest, and as a poet of praise. Those acts of celebration extend to his prose works as well, both his homilies and his literary essays, especially those that take up the matter of poetry. Peter Steele passed away, after a long illness, in June of this year, but not before his latest offering was presented at a book launch he attended the week before he died and a few days after he received a national honour. Unable to speak, he had his brother read a list of five major concerns that animated his poetry and which he looked for in others: ‘Imagination; learning from experience; fascination with experience in all of its many forms; the world imagined in a different way; and earth and spirit interlocked.’ This new book, of eighteen essays and six poems, bears out those concerns, establishing his voice among us in a kind of afterlife, not of fame, but of familiarity, someone we might turn to, that is, as an intimate or a familiar.

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'Co. Kerry', a new poem by Paul Kane. ... (read more)

‘To choose the best, among many good,’ says Dr Johnson in his ‘Life of Cowley’, ‘is one of the most hazardous attempts of criticism.’ The truth of this maxim is borne out nicely in the controversy surrounding – or perhaps emanating from – Rita Dove’s new selection of twentieth-century American poetry. That The Weekend Australian should have felt moved to comment on the situation (Frank Furedi, ‘Culture War Highlights the Banal Message of Politically Sanctioned Art’, 7–8 January 2012) is a good indicator of just how hot the issue has become. As a result, it is no longer possible simply to review the book; you have to review the controversy as well. The literary world is always set a-twitter by dust-ups between luminaries, and this one is a doozy: it features the former Poet Laureate Rita Dove, defending herself against the redoubtable literary scholar and critic Helen Vendler. Vendler attacked Dove’s anthology (and Dove herself) in the New York Review of Books of 24 November 2011, and Dove returned the favour in the 22 December issue. Thereafter, the controversy spread like algae bloom in the press and blogosphere.

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