Ivor Indyk
Ivor Indyk is an Australian literary academic, editor and publisher. He is a professor at the University of Western Sydney, and the founding editor and publisher of award-winning literary imprint Giramondo Publishing and HEAT magazine.
Martin Harrison’s poems have a fine discursive quality, which means that they often read like essays. Take ‘Midday’, from his recent volume Summer (2002), where a hand-scythe and the ABC radio news produce a meditation on time and place not dissimilar in its conclusion to that offered on several occasions in the essays included in Who Wants to Create Australia? ‘Only a little can be added ... (read more)
Fremantle Arts Centre Press published its first collection of John Kinsella’s poetry in 1989, only eight years ago. Three years ago, his third collection, Full Fathom Five, took out the West Australian Premier’s Poetry Award. Last year, his fifth collection, The Silo, won the Adelaide Festival prize for poetry, and Kinsella was awarded a ‘Junior Keating’. The pace of publication, and of re ... (read more)
Don Anderson’s description of Peter Rose’s previous collection as having a fin de siècle mood to it, is surely appropriate to his new collection too. There is an air of decadence to Rose’s poetry, but while this may have much larger social implications – it is the end of the century after all – the decadence seems to me to have a more definite testament to offer. Rose’s is a starkly p ... (read more)
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, muc ... (read more)
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.
The Dog-star rages! ... (read more)
One of the benefits of a Collected is that it places individual poems within the context of the poet’s whole oeuvre, with often dramatic consequences for their interpretation. When Leonie Kramer brought out David Campbell’s Collected Poems in 1989, more than half of the volume was made up of poems written in the last decade of the poet’s life. What one had taken to be the definitive Campbell ... (read more)