Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

Snap!

Making the familiar truly strange
by
August 2023, no. 456

In the Photograph by Luke Beesley

Giramondo, $26.95 pb, 144 pp

Snap!

Making the familiar truly strange
by
August 2023, no. 456

For a long time, Australia has had a conservative poetry culture. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when modernist poets in Europe, Asia, America, and – somewhat belatedly – the United Kingdom revolutionised international literature, Australian poets continued writing mainly conventional verse.

Modernism brought poetry and prose together as more or less equal partners. Notably, in France, these developments were foreshadowed by the 1842 publication of the book of proto-prose poetry, Gaspard de la Nuit: Fantaisies à la manière de Rembrandt et de Callot, by Aloysius Bertrand. The modernist order was subsequently ushered into France through the publication of works such as Charles Baudelaire’s ground-breaking prose poetry collection Le Spleen de Paris (1869), and two radically brilliant collections of prose poetry and poetic prose by Arthur Rimbaud: Une saison en enfer (1873) and Illuminations (1886).

These works spread like a slow earthquake across the international literary world, but, perhaps unsurprisingly, a politically and culturally backward Australia felt barely a ripple. Then, after the catastrophe of World War I and surrealism’s arrival in the 1920s, many Australian poets decided that the unconscious mind and surrealism’s tenets were undeserving of serious attention.

In the Photograph

In the Photograph

by Luke Beesley

Giramondo, $26.95 pb, 144 pp

From the New Issue

You May Also Like

Leave a comment

If you are an ABR subscriber, you will need to sign in to post a comment.

If you have forgotten your sign in details, or if you receive an error message when trying to submit your comment, please email your comment (and the name of the article to which it relates) to ABR Comments. We will review your comment and, subject to approval, we will post it under your name.

Please note that all comments must be approved by ABR and comply with our Terms & Conditions.