AustLit

'A leading figure in Australian poetry, Laurie Duggan has been long celebrated for his vividly sensed observations of everyday life and his minimal and urbane style. This is his first publication with Giramondo.

'Laurie Duggan’s new collection begins with poems written during his last year in Britain, in Faversham, a market town in east Kent, with others written on a visit to Australia in 2016 and after his return in October 2018. They contribute to two ongoing sequences, ‘Allotments’, and ‘Blue Hills’, which alludes to the long-running domestic radio serial of the same name. These are made up of the brief haiku-like poems that Duggan has made his own: impressions, mysterious conjunctions, oddities and contradictions, the small details that express large forces, as in his observations of the landscape, the weather, domestic and suburban settings. In the final section, ‘Afterimages’, Duggan offers descriptions of paintings and comments on artists, and sometimes imaginary constructions of what a particular artist might have done, but the real point is to create poems which stand like art works in their own right.' (Publication summary)

'Sometime in 1953 my parents bought a house in Clayton (Victoria, Australia), then on the edge of south-east Melbourne. We moved there from a decidedly different environment: the guest house that my Grandmother owned. This was on Beaconsfield Parade in South Melbourne. In those years that suburb was largely working class with connections to the Port Melbourne wharf and the further dockside territory along the Yarra River. This guesthouse and the country around Ensay in the Tambo valley of East Gippsland where my father was born were ghost presences as I was growing up – imaginaries of an existence I might have had (urban / rural). We would visit my uncle and aunt in Ensay (travelling by train and bus until around 1960 when we finally owned a car) and we would venture into the inner suburbs occasionally where I would get to look at the ‘slums’. I’m not sure what significance these places had for my parents or even why they wanted to take me there. It could have been as a ‘this could have happened to you’ lesson, though I suspect this was not the case. The places we visited may have had more of an affirming effect for my parents. For me, the inner suburbs were simply ‘picturesque’. In art classes at Huntingdale High School I would often draw or paint decaying buildings from the images I had taken on my box Brownie camera. These were sketchy romantic visions lifted probably from the work of Sydney artists like Sali Herman or Donald Friend (encountered in the library rather than the art gallery).'  (Introduction)

'"Sceptical as I am about anti-poetry, of which there is a lot around and which can assume many different forms, the fully formed poems are not the only writing I can value in a book like this. There is too much wit, absurdity, and sheer verbal craft to be ignored." --Peter Riley

'"We've all seen how, after a night of drones, an experimental poet comes out to read, wielding the vernacular, and the room lights up. There's laughter, joy, play, confusion, a rmation, all the things that make poetry what it is. This is why poets in the generation including Duggan, Pam Brown and Ken Bolton are so accessible to readers and listeners, because of their interest in the page-as-field (perhaps an 'Olsonesque' sense), and the everyday vernacular. The only reason Conventional Verse Culture still claims to own the (ever-elusive) 'average reader' is because of the structures and frameworks in place that tell people they do. This is not because people on the street speak like CVC." --A J Carruthers' (Publication summary)