Ivor Indyk

I would now like to begin with a plea for small literary magazines. I now have a vested interest in their survival (well, one, in particular), but then, I always thought I did. Little magazines are essential to the vitality of Australian literary and political culture. They play an important role in nurturing new poets, critics, storytellers, and reviewers. In the current book-publishing climate, there are few other opportunities for publishing short stories, experimental fiction, or poetry. Small magazines instigate and foster cultural debate and present a diverse range of opinions. Many of the most important issues in Australian public life today were first raised and discussed in literary magazines, including the stolen generations and racial ‘genocide’, the perils of economic rationalism and globalisation, the politics of One Nation, and the implications of new media technologies.

If we look back into past times, we find innumerable names of authors once in high reputation, read perhaps by the beautiful, quoted by the witty, and commented upon by the grave; but of whom we now know only that they once existed.

Samuel Johnson

Sometimes the situation in Australia, with respect to writers, resembles that in early eighteenth-century England.

These six poetry titles represent the third series of New Poets to be published by Five Islands Press. Each title runs to exactly thirty two pages – no more, no less. It is, in a sense, a mini-collection, or a semi-collection, midway between a reading and a book. The series as a whole is therefore like a showcase of new talent – you applaud some of the poems, and get impatient with others, much as you do with the poets themselves. This is a good thing – it presents poetry as the provisional affair it really is, most of the time, for poet and reader alike.