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Irrespective of their countries of origin, books by remarkable men must command attention in the expectation that they will add to or consolidate knowledge, provide grounds for thought or useful debate or, hopefully, entertain.

Uranium is a word which has become so highly emotive in this country that it is embedded in the national psyche; but not one person in 10,000 who would react instinctively and dialectically to the word knows anything about the element itself apart from connotations of Doomsday … the world on fire or the seeping shroud of radiation sickness laying waste the entire earth in sterile despair.

The publisher did scant service to the author by putting a ‘blurb’ before the book, emphasising ideas that are neither implicit nor explicit in it. Betty Roland does not claim to be a prophet.

The old cliché ‘I couldn’t put it down’ was literally true when I read her Caviar for Breakfast, the account of her year in the Soviet Union in 1934.

We all do silly things when we are young!

The intention of this anthology is to sharpen our understanding of what was distinctive in the poetry of ‘the generation of ‘68’ (Tranter’s label).

On one of the early chaotic army days of World War II in France, I was combining the disagreeable tasks of eating and censoring letters home written by the men in my section.

In his introduction to The New Australian Poetry, reviewed elsewhere in this issue by Thomas Shapcott, John Tranter declares that this poetry has no allegiance except to itself. Some characteristics of works regarded as modernist are: ‘self-signature’ – the work validates its own technical innovations – and self-reference, where the ‘method’ is reflected consciously in the ‘medium’. He contrasts this modernism with such work as Vincent Buckley’s ‘Golden Builders’, which elicits a response of ‘quasi-religious rhetoric . . . a natural outgrowth of Australian university English departments’, and one sufficient to explain the ‘anti-academic bias’ evident in much of the work of the new poets.