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Chris Wallace Crabbe

Apart from those
occasional wrinkled socks
you are aristocratically pallid

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The painter and outdoor draughtsman John Wolseley is utterly unusual among artists in this country. Marvellously accomplished yet old-fashioned, he could be seen as an artist who cheekily leapt from  traditional to postmodern without passing through any of the intermediate stages. His deeply natural pictures can’t be categorised easily, for all that they are entrancing. In Lines for Birds, they are reproduced side by side with the comparably responsive poems of Barry Hill.

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The deeply troubled Francis Webb, a magician with language, is still one of the two or three most remarkable poets Australia has produced, if nation-states can be said to produce creative artists. His life proved dark and painful, wherever he was located, but he worshipped language, in parallel with his worship of the Christian trinity ...

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Human Chain by Seamus Heaney & Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney by Dennis O’Driscoll

by
December 2010–January 2011, no. 327

Auden wrote of the mature Herman Melville that he ‘sailed into an extraordinary mildness’. The same sort of thing could be found in Seamus Heaney, even though he has always written with a degree of calm, with hospitable decorum. It was this level-headedness that enabled him to write about sectarian violence in the magisterial Station Island poems (1984) ...

For W.B. Yeats, Ireland was the place and source of poetry, even when he was living in Oxford or London. It was also a mythical figure, enabling of ardour and of song, the desirable ‘Cathleen, the daughter of Houlihan’; and it became a delicately evocative crepuscule, mocked by Brendan Kennelly when he opens a poem with ‘Now in the Celtic twilight decrepit whores / Prowl warily along the Grand Canal’. The very phrase ‘Irish poetry’ sounds like a pleonasm. For that moist country has long seemed synonymous with verse and folksong: just as Holland is synonymous with painting and France with elegant thought. Further, when I think of contemporary poets in our widespread language, Seamus Heaney must surely be the dominant world figure and Paul Muldoon the most verbally dazzling, even if our Les is close to Paul in this caper.

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It is strangely affecting to see people’s lips moving as they sit silently reading to themselves. Apparently, when we read we can’t help but imagine speaking. Even silent reading has its life in the body: seeing words, the part of our brain that governs speech starts working. When we read poetry silently to ourselves, is it our own voice or the poet’s voice that we hear?

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   ‘It’s something like learning geography,’ thought
       Alice, as she stood on tiptoe in hopes of being able
       to see a little further.
                   Through the Looking-Glass

Our mob was fond of Tweedledee
Because it was cutely seen
That he would rustle up the tribes
And thump the old Red Queen.

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Are you a vivid dreamer?

Yes, in general I am, but I have three kinds of dream: those that are dully bureaucratic at root; those that revisit the emblematic landscapes or cities of earlier dreams; and wild, coloured dreams with a green welcoming ocean or dark monsters.

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Lawrence warned us not to trust the teller, but to trust the tale. Nevertheless, all writers are apt to suffer the fate of being confused or conflated with their works. Maybe it is part of what Goethe entitled Dichtung und Wahrheit. If truth is going to be let into poetry, many readers want to know the facts about the poet: both the jubilant facts and the disconcerting ones. This is not merely irritating nosey-parkerhood. The shimmering glamour of writers is inevitably part of their stock-in-trade. A Byron, a Plath, a Rimbaud, Dickinson or Dylan Thomas has become inseparable from that poet’s reported life, dazzle, sex and dirt. An early death helps no end. It is an example of fatedness which Al Alvarez explored years ago in The Savage God (1971), a title he derived from Yeats talking about Charles Conder and his decadent allies of the 1890s.

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John Brack (1920–99) is one of the most remarkable of Australian painters, and a salient figure in the generation that included Arthur Boyd, Fred Williams, John Perceval, Leonard French, and John Olsen, of whom only two survive. Many viewers would see him as the imagination that made our suburbs viable as art; others have been in two minds about his clarity and perfectionism. Hard edges can make for tough responses.

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