Paul Kane
Paul Kane is poetry editor of Antipodes and artistic director of the Mildura Writers’ Festival. His most recent book is A Passing Bell: Ghazals for Tina (George Braziller 2019). He divides his time between New York and rural Victoria.
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)
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)
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)
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‘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)