Paul Kane

'In the Luxembourg Gardens', a new poem by Paul Kane

May 2020, no. 421 • 27 April 2020

The languid water of a fountainrises to a steady height, collapsesupon itself, splashing a stone bowl on a pedestal.The elliptical pool ripplesin the afternoon’s light air. This is where people gatherto be alone or with others,where children lend their exuberance – festive – tothe otherwise tranquil scene.We are in the midst of a plague, but you wouldn’t know it, just aswe don’t know ... (read more)

Paul Kane reviews ‘The Poetry of Les Murray’ edited by Laurie Hergenhan and Bruce Clunies Ross, ‘Les Murray’ by Steven Matthews, and ‘Poems the Size of Photographs’ by Les Murray

May 2002, no. 241 • 01 May 2002

You might expect a book of eighty-eight new poems by Les Murray to be sizeable (most of his recent single volumes run to about sixty poems each). But Poems the Size of Photographs (Duffy & Snellgrove, $22 pb, 106 pp, 1876631236) is literally a small book, composed of short poems (‘though some are longer’, says the back cover). A few are only two lines, and most would fit on a pos ... (read more)

Paul Kane reviews 'Collected Poems' by Mark Strand

March 2015, no. 369 • 02 March 2015

It is tempting to say that when Mark Strand died last November American poetry lost one of its most distinctive voices. But it isn’t quite true. First, Strand had already retired from poetry several years earlier (before Philip Roth and Alice Munro caused a stir by doing so from fiction). Strand returned to his first career as an artist (a very talented one, according to his teachers at Yale’s ... (read more)

Paul Kane reviews 'Braiding the Voices: Essays in Poetry' by Peter Steele

October 2012, no. 345 • 26 September 2012

Peter Steele once described his teaching and writing as ‘acts of celebration’. He is – and was – quite literally a celebrant: in his role as a Jesuit priest, and as a poet of praise. Those acts of celebration extend to his prose works as well, both his homilies and his literary essays, especially those that take up the matter of poetry. Peter Steele passed away, after a long illness, in Ju ... (read more)

'Co. Kerry', a new poem by Paul Kane

September 2012, no. 344 • 27 August 2012

  ... (read more)

Paul Kane reviews 'The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry' edited by Rita Dove

March 2012, no. 339 • 01 March 2012

‘To choose the best, among many good,’ says Dr Johnson in his ‘Life of Cowley’, ‘is one of the most hazardous attempts of criticism.’ The truth of this maxim is borne out nicely in the controversy surrounding – or perhaps emanating from – Rita Dove’s new selection of twentieth-century American poetry. That The Weekend Australian should have felt moved to comment on the situation ... (read more)