Poetry

The Projectionist by Philip Salom

Item: The Projectionist
Author: Andrew Taylor

by Andrew Taylor •

June 1984, no. 61

Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 88 pp, $7.50 pb

Poetry

The Projectionist by Philip Salom

by Andrew Taylor •

June 1984, no. 61

The Fremantle Arts Centre Press is an example of what a state-oriented press can do. Under intelligent guidance and with sympathetic but not irresponsible state funding assistance, it has now established a solid reputation for publishing goodlooking and worthwhile books. If west coast writers are now better known in the east than they were several years ago, this is only partly due to their qualities as writers, good though some of them undoubtedly are. It is also because the Fremantle Arts Centre Press has actively encouraged and promoted west coast writers, giving them the confidence that only professional book publication can.

Purists of the marketplace would probably claim (as they do of Literature Board subsidies) that this positive discrimination nurtures and promotes mediocrity, so that we can’t see the trees for the wood. But any press which has published such diverse talents as Elizabeth Jolley, A.B. Facey, and Fay Zwicky – to name only three – need apologise to nobody.

Andrew Taylor

Andrew Taylor is the author of seventeen books of poetry, including Collected Poems (Salt, UK 2004), The unhaunting (Salt, UK 2009), Impossible Preludes (Margaret River Press, 2016) and also recently Coogee Poems, with Travis Taylor, (Baden Press, 2021). He has published much literary criticism, including Reading Australian Poetry (UQP, 1987), written the libretti for two operas, and translated poetry from German and Italian. In 1975 he co-founded Adelaide’s Friendly Street Poets, and later the South Australian Writers’ Centre. He is Professor Emeritus at Edith Cowan University and a Member of the Order of Australia. Since leaving Perth in 2014, he divides his time between Sydney and Wiesbaden in Germany.