Poetry

Knuckled, poet and editor Fiona Wright’s highly anticipated first collection, arrives with an assuredness of style and voice that augurs well for Australian poetry. The overarching idea of ‘knuckles’ – of being knuckled, of beating knuckles, of the working joints of bare hands, even the throwing of knuckles in a game of chance – gives us a strong clue to the collection’s main themes. These fluent and highly evocative poems bring a sharply observed, sometimes bruised, sometimes raw and violent sense of the worlds they document. The poet as watcher and as reflector of such images is a robust filter through which to moderate the world of perception, and yet is inevitably precarious in the face of the onslaught from outside; of the intrusion of otherness into the vulnerable sanctuary of the self.

Although it has been almost half a century since 1968, a year readily mythologised in Australian poetry, the so-called Generation of ’68 are still the most talked-about contemporary poets. There have been few attempts to define the next generations of poets. Forty-three years is a long definition of what might be deemed ‘contemporary’.

Stumbling round the house absent-mindedly or in the off-hours, I wonder where the economy-sized fish tank came from; or the dictionary of some unexpectedly eloquent Oceanian language; or the errant slab of copper sulphate (did some friend or enemy leave it?). Then I remember that it’s the new Australian poetry anthology I am reviewing, the thick end of 1100 large pages – is it the format called royal? or republican?! – and I am in for another round of sleeplessness. It is even possible that, in the United States, I have read and written about the book mostly on Australian time.

Bronwyn Lea has chosen ‘Beginnings’ as the theme for the first issue of Poetry Australia’s new journal. The Editor has some interesting things to say about a poem’s ‘beginning’ in her Foreword, but the journal doesn’t as yet have the feel of something fresh, lively, and distinctive that a beginning promises ...

Gig Ryan is something of a postmodern classicist, deftly balancing John Ashbery’s slippery indeterminacy and Anne Carson’s lyric innovation. She is also a complete original. It is difficult to think of another poet who has more consistently and resolutely fashioned beauty from flat, broken English ...

Over nearly thirty years and ten books, Diane Fahey has made a significant contribution to Australian poetry. The Wing Collection, from Puncher & Wattmann, showcases a wonderful array of her work. This generous collection offers a rich journey through Fahey’s key images and the recurring preoccupations that ...

The title of Bruce Dawe’s first collection, No Fixed Address (1962), pointed to an early working life of innumerable casual jobs. This was covered to some extent in Stephany Steggall’s excellent biography, Bruce Dawe: Life Cycle (2009). As the working life of an Australian poet, this would be ...

This book of essays by the vegan-anarchist-pacifist poet John Kinsella on the relationship between political activism and poetry raises two big questions: how do we live in modernity? and what is it like to live beyond the mainstream? The first question lies behind the great cultural movements of the West, from Romanticism to postmodernism. Whether writers have embraced modernity or rejected it, they have long struggled with the very conditions that brought literary culture into existence. The utopian possibilities of modernity have always been in conflict with modernity’s material realities.

Jaya Savige’s first book, latecomers (2005), was an impressive début and won the New South Wales Kenneth Slessor Award for Poetry in 2006. Surface to Air is a more varied, equally impressive, volume. Savige meditates on the poet Tasso’s oak tree (inspired by Peter Porter’s ‘Tasso’s Oak’), a survivor of Hiroshima, the Big Brother television show, and, as this book’s epigraph by W.S. Merwin might predict, the loss of an uncontaminated natural world, or Eden: ‘kneel by the sky-blue bic that nests / in the shallow bowels of an albatross carcass’ (‘Recycling Night’).