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Australian Poetry

Collected Poems by Judith Wright

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September 1994, no. 164
Geoffrey Dutton reviews 'Collected Poems' by Judith Wright

In 1956, A Book of Australian Verse, edited by Judith Wright, was published by Oxford University Press. Her choice of her own poems included ‘Bullocky’ and a couple of others, the over-anthologising of which, at the expense of her other work, was later understandably to provoke her exasperation.

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Getting Judith Wright right

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September 1994, no. 164

Anyone who has had the experience of trying to translate a poem across even a fairly low-density language barrier (say German or French into English) will have tasted the near despair of finding oneself in danger of killing that in the creature that one most wanted to save. Sometimes it feels like cutting down the tree and whittling from the wood a mere mock replica of it  – the sap goes, the leaves in all their lively beauty disappear, and at best there’s an artifact which cleverly reproduces the mere outlines of what was once brimming with life.

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Anima and Other Poems by Bruce Beaver

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June 1994, no. 161
Simon Patton 'Anima and Other Poems' by Bruce Beaver

What do we do, where do we go to get beyond the routines of the self and the paradoxical alienation it produces in both ourselves and in others? Is it possible to break down the shell of separation and deal with others from a perspective that is neither ‘self- or need-observed’? These are the questions that occupy Bruce Beaver in many of the poems in this collection, and one that he traces through an engaging variety of forms and themes.

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A Bruce by any other name

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June 1994, no. 161

When I visited Bruce and Brenda Beaver in their Manly flat it was a sparkling day. The water of the Harbour was glittering, and the pines on the foreshore were stirring only slightly in the breeze. But, however soothing the weather, I was nervous. For me, Bruce Beaver is huge, a poet of the first order, and his extraordinarily difficult life, the periods of debilitating sickness and the various almost mythic stories that attach themselves to his history, all added up to make me feel very nervous indeed.

And his wife, Brenda had made it very clear that my being able to come to see him was a privilege. She protects him fiercely, with constant courage, and if I hadn’t read Bruce Beaver’s superb love poems to this woman, I would have been even more nervous when my companion and I knocked on their door.

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Dispossessed by Philip Hodgins

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April 1994, no. 159
Mark O’Flynn reviews 'Dispossessed' by Philip Hodgins

With unsentimental compassion and irony, Dispossessed tackles the weighty topic of the rural crisis. In a sense the title of Phillip Hodgins’s verse novella gives too much away, casting a deliberate shadow over all that follows. Yet the manner in which Hodgins spins his yam is constantly engaging.

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'Poems against economics' by Laurie Duggan

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April 1994, no. 159

Despite the protestations of my close friends I choose to regard myself as a normal person. Only at certain times of the year do I realise how tenuous are my links with the mundane world.

One of these trou­blesome occasions is when I prepare my income tax form.

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On My Empty Feet by Rhyll McMaster & The Catullan Rag by Peter Rose

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October 1993, no. 155
John Foulcher reviews 'The Catullan Rag' by Peter Rose and 'On My Empty Feet' by Rhyll McMaster

Both of these volumes of poetry claim to deal with the ordinary. Peter Rose’s publisher, Picador, states in its back-cover blurb that the author of The Catullan Rag chooses ‘to focus ... sharply on the urban, the everyday, the seemingly ordinary’, while Heinemann suggests that ‘McMaster has a sure ear for the rhythms of everyday speech’. 

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The Ern Malley Affair by Michael Heyward

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September 1993, no. 154
Alister Kershaw reviews 'The Ern Malley Affair' by Michael Heyward

Well I’m damned! Ern Malley of all people! It’s been fifty years since I last laid eyes on him. Seeing him again recalls my vanished youth as nothing else could. Angry Penguins, Cecily Crozier’s valiant Comment magazine, the ‘social realists’ upbraiding everyone like so many Marxist Savonarolas, the Jindyworobakians quarrelling with the ‘cosmopolitans’, the Contemporary Arts Society quarrelling with itself – stirring times! But Ern was the epicentre of our cultural storm in a teacup.

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second degree tampering: Writing by women edited by Sybylla Feminist Press

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December 1992, no. 147
Tina Muncaster reviews 'second degree tampering : Writing by women' edited by Sybylla Feminist Press

This is a powerful and accomplished anthology. The fiction, poems, and autobiographies of thirty-seven women writers offer a collection where the individual pieces coalesce into much more than the sum of the parts.

The editors have chosen writing from a field of over 350 manuscripts, seeking that which challenges and revises dominant versions of national identity.

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Boundary Conditions: The poetry of Gwen Harwood by Jennifer Strauss

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December 1992, no. 147

In Boundary Conditions, Jennifer Strauss, taking her title from the Eisenhart poem of that name, points to the centrality of Gwen Harwood’s concern with ‘those littoral regions where the boundary terms that define themselves on either side of us also overlap and interact'. It is here, she claims, that ‘our most intense experiences, for better or worse, occur, and it is here that she correctly and perceptively locates Gwen Harwood’s major preoccupations as well as her recurrent images and settings.

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