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Jennifer Strauss
Jennifer Strauss is a poet, anthologist, and retired academic.
‘Dwelling in the Shape of Things’ is the title of Nicolette Stasko’s sequence of sixteen elegantly executed ‘Meditations upon Cézanne’. It could, however, serve as an appropriate epigraph to both these collections. Given that the natural world is Stasko’s and Adrienne Eberhard’s main locus for exploring and responding to ‘the shape of things’, each could be described loosely as ... (read more)
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Annual anthologies of Australian poetry are, or should be, a good way to get an overview of the local poetry scene, as well as an opportunity to greet new poets and to keep in touch with established ones. This selection from more than a hundred poets fulfils that function pretty well, having a range of old and new names, styles and themes, even if the sourcing of the poems does seem weighted in fa ... (read more)
I have commented before in ABR that literary criticism is a rara avis in Australia’s publishing world, so perhaps it is not surprising that Ann Vickery has had to find an overseas publisher for this important contribution to Australia’s literary and cultural history. Whatever its provenance, I have a particular reason for welcoming this contextualising study of the work and times of six women ... (read more)
How to convey the pleasures of a whole collection of Laurie Duggan’s poetry? They are so various, one reason why Duggan is a source of perplexity to anthologists in search of a definitively characteristic poem. Anything as long and wilfully extravagant in spacing and layout as the anti-rhapsody ‘September Song’ almost automatically excludes itself; something epigrammatic then, say ‘A Littl ... (read more)
The new English edition of a selection of Harwood’s poems comes with an excellent editorial pedigree. With his co-editorship of Gwen Harwood: Collected Poems 1943–1995 (2003) and his editorship of A Steady Storm of Correspondence: Selected Letters of Gwen Harwood 1943–1995 (2001), Gregory Kratzmann has established himself as the foremost of Harwood scholars. As a major critic of Australian p ... (read more)
In one way, this is a book to unnerve the teaching academic: it is so eminently cribbable. As a ‘handbook’ of Wright’s poetry, it ranges widely rather than intensively, offering lucid expositions and firmly delivered judgements. If these latter are sometimes, by the nature of the book, more asserted than demonstrated, they nonetheless seem usually sound and sensible: the lines quoted from ... (read more)
There are two reasons for celebrating this chastely elegant slim volume. One is the arrival of a publisher prepared, when major firms are retreating from the field, to declare that poetry is central to a flourishing literary culture, and to match that declaration by commitment to a new series, Brandl & Schlesinger Poetry. The other is the appearance of a new and striking collection from that f ... (read more)
Seeing these two anthologies side by side in that obscure corner allocated to poetry by so many bookshops, a casual browser might note that both begin with Robert Adamson’s ‘A Visitation’ and conclude that uniformity rules and one volume will suffice. Not so: a full savouring of the past year’s poetic crop requires both. In fact, ‘A Visitation’ is the only poem common to both selection ... (read more)