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.
In a talk she gave recently at Writers’ Week in Adelaide, Dorothy Hewett praised Gwen Harwood as:
Working in isolation as the woman hero, charring like a cartographer the uneasy, shifting, violent, broken world of Australian women and finally, in the teeth of all opposition. proclaiming the right to love and be a hero.
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i.m. Peter Porter
I should have seen
all those words crowded at the door
of Peter’s apartment
when I stayed with him –
so many jostling verbs
outstretched adjectives
and nervy adverbs all
rubbing shoulders with those little
ands and buts and ors, etc.
But I didn’t. His shepherding voice
and kind manner ushered me
past them. They were there
as usual, but for another time
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Have you ever noticed how otherwise intelligent journalists find it almost impossible to write seriously about Adelaide Festival’s Writers’ Week? Predictably, they seem compelled to joke about the prodigious quantity of booze consumed – but perhaps they have never attended a business or an academic convention. Then well-known visiting writers apparently must be called ‘literary lions’ ... (read more)
So much activity outsidewhere sunlight spills across the snowlike cream –
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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 q ... (read more)
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