AustLit

'This book set me thinking of its rivals in late years- the glossies from other States with their happy snaps of writers, potted chronicles and modest one of several pages for each to strut the stuff that Plato banished from a State that was ideal. Like Professor Julius Sumner Miller, I asked myself why this should be so.' (Introduction)

In her tribute to Mary Gilmore in 1965, Dymphna Cusack observed : 'integrity is a lodestone even for those who do not possess it.' The comment was aimed at those who deprecated Gilmore's work during her life or after her death. No one belittled the work like Gilmore herself, though, and while self-deprecation requires self-knowledge, she could be sure she occupied a high place among Australian writers.' (Introduction)

'In the April Australian Book Review, I reviewed Wordhord, an anthology of contemporary Western Australian poetry. I asserted that it was the best of the State collections I'd seen to date. So far as contemporary work is concerned, I'll still hold this view.' (Introduction)

'I enjoyed Andrew Moore's "The Historian as Detective'  the more so I since my own game of detection concerning Bulletin editors and sub-editors between 1918 and 1926 has turned up one James Alexander Philp (1861-1935), author of Jingles that Jangle: A Book of Unpolished Satires (1918), and Songs of the Australian Fascisti (1923). A copy I investigated in the Mitchell Library is dated Brisbane September 1924. Philp was educated in New Zealand, and part of his collection Some Bulletin Stories (1916) is set there. Philp appears to have contributed verse and stories from Brisbane to the Bulletin, of which he was a sub-editor during the Great War. His Songs of the Australian Fascisti is a loose compilation of verse-journalism from various periods, brought together, I think, as a reaction to events since 1919 in Brisbane (the One Big Union Propaganda League which organized the March 1919 demonstration is directly alluded to in Philp's call for "Another Big Union," and in his title-page device).' (Introduction)

'Shelton Lea's path crossed with mine in Sydney in 1965. We both sojourned at Kings Cross in Sydney. Shelton ('Shelly") was already an identity as a poet. among other roles. He read and recited poems at the El Rocco jazz club in Brougham Street at the top of William Street. to the accompaniment of jazz musicians. He also performed poetry impromptu in pubs and coffee lounges like the Royal George, Windsor Castle, and the Piccolo. Eric Beach recently [1988] observed to me, 'Shelton's a rumour, even people who don't know his second name know Shelton all over Australia: Shelton Lea's poetry charts his picaresque life, but to see him only as Bohemian nonconformist is to overlook the seriousness of his dedication to the craft of poetry. The poetry and the life bear each other up: eight volumes in paint, besides countless magazine. journal, anthology, and chapbook appearances. recordings, and readings in every State for over twenty years.' (Introduction)
 

'First thing first. The dust-jacket of this collection sports a fetching Colin Lanceley painting. Circular design, bright colours, geometric shapes inside, appliqued shapes, very swish. Something to do with a Lark Ascending: someone at Angus and Robertson cares about appearances.' (Introduction)

'My engagement with Australian and New Zealand writing stems from early encounters with poems and stories in the Schools Magazine, a State-sponsored periodical distributed throughout New South Wales primary schools. The 1950s and early 1960s was another country, where Henry Lawson, Zora Cross, David McKee Wright, Elizabeth Riddell, and Douglas Stewart could inhabit the same territory without readers among us being the wiser for knowing that half the people we read had commenced their literary careers in New Zealand.' (Introduction)
 

'Zora Cross's fame was extraordinary in 1918. Her name was fashionably given to children born in subsequent years. and was even bestowed upon a racehorse. The publisher George Robertson had initially rejected her Songs of Love and life sight unseen but. on reading the poems in an edition prepared by his former employee James Tyrell. was so struck with the contents that he published a more handsome version. He offered Cross a contract equalled in generosity only by that signed with CJ. Dennis for The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke. Prior to this, Cross had worked as a schoolteacher, actress, and journalist. She remained a journalist from 1915 until her death in 1964. Her literary career readied its peak in the 1930s. In 1918, the success of Songs of Love and Life was consolidated with another collection of poems, The Lilt of Life, and The City of Riddle-me-ree, a narrative poem for children, and her splendid Elegy on an Australian Schoolboy appeared in 1920.' (Introduction)

 

'This review starts as a duty job and ends as a belated tribute to a writer of some of the most elegant and powerful poetry in the country.' (Introduction)

'Gwen Harwood's poetry seems to me distinctly accessible on account of its frequent address to a reader. I admire her cool narrative and dramatic experiments, her clever allusions to other artists' productions in a continuum of recording what it is to be alive and thinking of art and death.' (Introduction)

'David McKee Wright arrived in Australia for the second time in May 1910. He had first visited in 1887, an Irish youth direct from school London on his way to an uncertain future in New Zealand. The official cause of his emigration was the diagnosis of a spot on his lung, although Wrights early verse accounts of his situation would suggest that he was exiled as the result of a misdemeanour involving an unnamed young woman whom he associated with memories of Naples. The romantic explanation to himself and the world may not have been entirely mythical: he was in other ways a scapegrace and cause of disquiet to his family.' (Introduction)

'The Garden of Gethsemane aptly conveys a predominant mood the latest collection of poems by Mudrooroo (formerly Mudrooroo Narogin and earlier, Colin Johnson).— Mudrooroo's book titles, like his name changes, chart the vagaries of his concerns with perception and Identity. His superb first novels brought him to notice, even fame. Wildcat Falling and Dr Wooreddy's Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World respectively chronicle contemporary times and the period of European contact in Tasmania.' (Introduction) 
 

'For people who've followed his career as Aboriginal activist, playwright, and poet for the last twenty-five years, Jack Davis won't need an introduction. His first book, The First-Born and Other Poems, contained protest poems and laments for the loss of his Aboriginal past. His second collection Jagardoo, was published in 1978 and focused on Aboriginal life in urban settings. His plays have depicted incidents in Western Australian Aboriginal history since white settlement.' (Introduction)

'This book sets me between a rock and a hard place. Any consideration of sob Brissenden invites grateful acknowledgment of his gifts to reader and listeners over many years. This selection of poems for this volume was complete when illness when Illness woumd up his affairs. Regrettably. the selection is still far from complete. A really comprehensive anthology of light verse has been long overdue.  So has an expansive essay on the very nature of the beauty and anything Brissenden had to say about it would have been generous and distinguished by his authority as a writer of light verse.' (Introduction)
 

'Since it appears that everybody's doing it, I'll try my hand at a new history of Australian poetry.' (Introduction)

'There's no doubt about it: Philip Salom's poems are proof of the power that is possible in the form. His subjects are more urgent than most and his technique rises to brilliance. Commenting on Salom's earlier poems, a reviewer praised his "formidable talent and imaginative richness," and announced that Salom's Sky Poems made up "a substantial volume in more ways than one."' I share this view. Salom has always had things to say about history, philosophy, art, and poetry, and he has always said them in ways that run rings around a lot of fashionable verse that merely hopes it will chance on a subject so striking that it will excuse commonplace expression.' (Introduction)
 

'Precisely whom Sir Thomas Browne had in mind when he wrote this lovely description in Hydriotaphia, or Urne-Buriall is a question as puzzling as his teaser about the song the Sirens sang. But we can all supply a list of tedious beings who might better please us were they to embrace non-being. I admit to detesting certain beings. And certain non-beings who are ritually tricked-up and exhibited, like the toed remains of Bentham, to the gaze of people who honestly don't give a toss about the old spectre, and who hardly know who or what he ever was or did.' (Introduction)