Bruce Dawe

Bruce Dawe: Life cycle by Stephany Evans Steggall

February 2010, no. 318

The flyer for the Brisbane launch of this new biography of Australia’s most popular living poet described Stephany Evans Steggall and Bruce Dawe as ‘joint authors’, and while the title page lists Evans Steggall alone as its author, there is a sense in which the poet is indeed co-author of this collaborative account of his life. The title comes from one of his best-known poems, and the chapters take their titles from the poems with which they begin. Evans Steggall has also reordered poems written over many decades into a chronological sequence that enables the poet himself to tell much of his life story. She has added to this her own complementary account of that life, in which she has been assisted by the poet who, instead of writing his autobiography, has chosen to collaborate with his biographer. Such a venture has its constraints, which are increased when the subject is involved in the writing, but it also offers opportunities that the objectifying passage of time removes. In this case, the collaboration has produced an intimately personal account of a notable life viewed sympathetically and through the poet’s own eyes.

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A good innings on a sticky wicket

by Bruce Dawe •

October 1983, no. 55

Looking back over what I guess is my literary life (so hard to distinguish from the other that it’s a bit like leaving a forest and, in a clearing, trying to pick out the path among the trees!). I suppose I could lay claim to being one of the least disappointed or frustrated writers around the place. In part, this may be a tribute to my limited expectations which were nothing if not a reflection of a 1930s childhood when, if it was working-class and semi-itinerant, the philosophy one imbibed was not to ask too much. My brother who with my mother was the essential fountain from which I drew that sustenance which comes in the guise of folk wisdom, was fond of saying: ‘They (meaning whoever the authority-figure was) never put the roof on my lavatory!’ The sacred places were sacralised by a sense of independence which, now I come to think of it, depended upon what seems to me a very traditional Australian view not to expect too much whose lugubrious extreme is summed up in the national beatitude: Blessed is the pessimist, for he shall not be disappointed …

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Poetry as Necessity

by Veronica Brady •

June 1979, no. 11

It is usually true to say that poetry is difficult and criticism easy. In the present case, I am not sure that this is quite so true. What can any critic sensibly say about the present batch of books which range from Bruce Dawe ‘s Collected Poems 1954–1978, Sometimes Gladness, to reprints of minor colonial verse and includes the gentle nature mysticism of John Anderson’s The Blue Gum Smokes a long Cigar, reverently illustrated by Ned Johnson and produced by Rigmarole of the Hours, and the ambitious regionalism of the two books of Hunter Valley Poets, IV and V, edited by Norman Talbot?

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Our Lady of the Fence Post by J.H. Crone

by Peter Kenneally •

January–February 2017, no. 388

Peter Kenneally reviews 'Our Lady of the Fence Post' J.H. Crone, 'Border Security' by Bruce Dawe, 'Melbourne Journal' by Alan Loney, and 'Star Struck' by David McCooey

A book called Our Lady of the Fence Post (UWA Publishing, $22.99 pb, 105 pp, 9781742589121) by a poet called J.H. Crone is an irresistible proposition, simply as a notion ...

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Slo-Mo Tsunami and Other Poems by Bruce Dawe

by Martin Duwell •

December 2011–January 2012, no. 337

Martin Duwell reviews 'Slo-Mo Tsunami and Other Poems' by Bruce Dawe

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 ...

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Sometimes Gladness: Collected Poems 1954-2005 by Bruce Dawe

by Nicholas Birns •

November 2006, no. 286

Nicholas Birns reviews 'Sometimes Gladness: Collected Poems 1954-2005' by Bruce Dawe

People outside Australia are struck when Bruce Dawe is described as Australia’s most popular poet, just as people outside Ireland are struck when Paul Durcan or Brendan Kennelly is described as Ireland’s most popular poet. What about Les Murray, or Seamus Heaney? Are not these world-class poets ‘of the people’? Even more puzzling is that Dawe, like Durcan and Kennelly, is not necessarily an easy poet. Is their domestic popularity tied to how they seem to be ‘not for export’?

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