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Chris Wallace-Crabbe
Chris Wallace-Crabbe AM is the author of more than twenty collections of poetry. His most recent books of verse include The Universe Looks Down (2005), and Telling a Hawk from a Handsaw (2008). He is Professor Emeritus in Culture and Communication at Melbourne University. Also a public speaker and commentator on the visual arts, he specialises in ‘artists’ books’. Read It Again, a volume of critical essays, was published in 2005. Among other awards he has won the Dublin Prize for Arts and Sciences and the Christopher Brennan Award for Literature. His latest book is Rondo (2018).
My mother loved to read essays. I suppose it was pretty clear what an essay meant to her. Walter Pater, Edmund Gosse, Aldous Huxley, and Walter Murdoch were among its practitioners. Fine writing was part of its trademark; that, and a kind of shapeliness. It was not much like the journalism that my father practised, and not at all like the scholarly essays – now called papers – which nobody in ... (read more)
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You set down orange, with a dab of blueand this grows into artof a non-offender’s kind,innocent as a fart in the footy crowd.Meanwhile, the killing stumbles on
... (read more)
Greenly, intensely, oddly It is the day you wake up walking in A scape you wandered bluntly through Several hundred dreams ago or so:
The same tin sheds and staggered hed ... (read more)
The word ‘collected’ on a book of poems has its embedded dangers. Collected Poems are like autobiographies: they encourage readers to confuse them with the writer’s flow of life. And we can all see what’s wrong with that, I hope. That cagey old player, W.H. Auden, issued this injunction:
Great writers who have shown mankindAn order it has yet to find,What if all critics say of youAs per ... (read more)
Fancy an editor in this post-whatnot era using the word ‘great’ to describe the poems he publishes. Lord save us! It is almost as though recent decades hadn’t been, and we still wore the mild woolly clothing of the postwar years. But here is the Canberra poet and longtime schoolteacher Geoff Page offering us a high road through poetry in English: a series of touchstones, as our serious uncle ... (read more)
Laura Riding, sometime poet and citrus-grower has risen from the grave to deliver this series of attacks on poetry and its untruthfulness. She comes back to us now in a posthumous gathering of essays and shorter notes, The Failure of Poetry: The Promise of Language. It will certainly get people’s backs up.
There is something very strange about this collection of her essays and fragments, for al ... (read more)
Gerry Wilkes has done the state a great deal of service, and he should get full credit once again, as the eclipsed terrain of Australian literature emerges into the sunlight: which it seems to be doing right now, to judge from some recent movements in publishing. So let’s keep abreast of our language, all the while: that is to say, of our dominant or mainstream language, amid whatever others we ... (read more)
Approaching a new book by Sydney’s Peter Minter, we are afforded the opportunity to see where a maturing poet is headed. A few years ago, he was very much identified with cutting-edge poetics. More interested in the epistemology of language than most of our poets, he could be seen as an experimental ally of, say, Michael Farrell and the American, Andrew Zawacki. Yet there was sometimes a whiff o ... (read more)