In 1956, A Book of Australian Verse, edited by Judith Wright, was published by Oxford University Press. Her choice of her own poems included ‘Bullocky’ and a couple of others, the over-anthologising of which, at the expense of her other work, was later understandably to provoke her exasperation.

What do we do, where do we go to get beyond the routines of the self and the paradoxical alienation it produces in both ourselves and in others? Is it possible to break down the shell of separation and deal with others from a perspective that is neither ‘self- or need-observed’? These are the questions that occupy Bruce Beaver in many of the poems in this collection, and one that he traces through an engaging variety of forms and themes.

With unsentimental compassion and irony, Dispossessed tackles the weighty topic of the rural crisis. In a sense the title of Phillip Hodgins’s verse novella gives too much away, casting a deliberate shadow over all that follows. Yet the manner in which Hodgins spins his yam is constantly engaging.

Both of these volumes of poetry claim to deal with the ordinary. Peter Rose’s publisher, Picador, states in its back-cover blurb that the author of The Catullan Rag chooses ‘to focus ... sharply on the urban, the everyday, the seemingly ordinary’, while Heinemann suggests that ‘McMaster has a sure ear for the rhythms of everyday speech’. 

Well I’m damned! Ern Malley of all people! It’s been fifty years since I last laid eyes on him. Seeing him again recalls my vanished youth as nothing else could. Angry Penguins, Cecily Crozier’s valiant Comment magazine, the ‘social realists’ upbraiding everyone like so many Marxist Savonarolas, the Jindyworobakians quarrelling with the ‘cosmopolitans’, the Contemporary Arts Society quarrelling with itself – stirring times! But Ern was the epicentre of our cultural storm in a teacup.

This is a powerful and accomplished anthology. The fiction, poems, and autobiographies of thirty-seven women writers offer a collection where the individual pieces coalesce into much more than the sum of the parts.

The editors have chosen writing from a field of over 350 manuscripts, seeking that which challenges and revises dominant versions of national identity.