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Thomas Shapcott
Thomas Shapcott is an Australian poet, novelist, playwright, editor, librettist, short story writer and teacher. He has received numerous rewards and accolades for his work, and in 1989 was appointed an Officer (AO) of the Order of Australia.
Only the young can wholeheartedly love ancient music. It is fancy-dress, sound pared to its bones As if the naughty flesh were simply the prop for the idea of fabulous costumes, or sackcloth and ashes Such as we never dream of today. &nbs ... (read more)
This excellently produced little paperback from a new Australian publisher, Common Ground Publishing, comes with a story behind it. Dusan Velickovic may be remembered by some Australians; he came to this country for several months back in the mid-1980s under a Literature Board Familiarisation scheme, and on his return to Belgrade he did much to publicise Australian writing. Frank Moorhouse, B. Won ... (read more)
The phenomenon of the Fremantle Arts Centre Press in Western Australia is one of the instructive publishing success stories of the past decade.
It is a frankly regional venture, and by concentrating on the local market and the immediate writing scene it has built up a secure base of interest – and sales. Out of a real or imagined (but widespread) sense of slight, or exclusion, has emerged the o ... (read more)
This is a book that is unashamedly intended for the Aunty market, not the arty market. It will flourish in circulating libraries and must have solved many a Christmas dilemma (the publishers, I’m sure, budgeted on that). It is happily and old-fashionedly enthusiastic in tone, and tells the story – as authorised – with admiration and lots of incident. As a Helpmann compendium, it is sufficien ... (read more)
It is five years since Rowbotham’s Selected Poems, one of that extraordinary number of summing-up volumes that has been, perhaps, last decade’s most telling and characteristic factor. The need to gauge one’s own work (and focus) from some working perspective has always been the basis of a living poet’s Selected Poems. But this decade’s perspective makers have, almost without exception, s ... (read more)
This book, researched, written, and published in the United States, fulfils an immediate Australian need. Sweat on that you local academics, publishers, and timid promoters of the Oz product. It is called ‘A guide to information sources’, which makes it sound very ‘Australian Literary Studies’, but in fact it is an eminently readable, browsable volume.
... (read more)
After the painting by Rick Amor
Wait. Sometimes the waiting seems interminableBut that is the trick with water. The darkGathers up your apprehension and you seekSome other way of confronting, if you are able,The idea of storm. It is not possibleTo think of wind and rain without every black Possibility of destruction. The bleakSea ensures that. This always was fate’s timetable.
Sometimes t ... (read more)
The intention of this anthology is to sharpen our understanding of what was distinctive in the poetry of ‘the generation of ‘68’ (Tranter’s label).
Though he himself, as well as Robert Adamson, Michael Dransfield, and Tim Thorne, were publishing before 1968, and the ‘senior’ figures (Bruce Beaver, Ken Taylor) were certainly fully formed, the tag is useful. It raises more questions, bu ... (read more)
Geoff Dutton was a man-of-letters who for many years made (with Max Harris) Adelaide seem one of the lively centres of Australian literary culture. One thinks of him in association with the magazines Angry Penguins, Australian Letters, and the original Australian Book Review, not to mention the inauguration of an Australian publication list for Penguin Books, and then, when that soured, the settin ... (read more)