AustLit

'During the past 80 years Australian poetry has developed some distinctive characteristics. In the next 80, however, will it survive our passion for narratives of enlargement?'  (Introduction)

'In 2017 Alan Wearne quite rightly decided that the work of Robert Harris deserved to be more widely available than through a scattering of individual volumes, and crowd-sourced funding for a selected—which may be an example of Australian poets taking a bad situation into their own hands, but which should never have been necessary if the rest of the country was even remotely aware of the achievements of its writers. Judith Beveridge came on board as editor, and the result is this very handsome and user-friendly edition.'  (Introduction)

'Few things have puzzled us more, in recent times, than out relationships with our environments: not just rural and "natural» environments but built ones as well. Increasingly, it all seems like the one bewilderment: perplexity about how to see the green world is inseparable from anxiety over how to imagine the constructed one, As recently as 1978, Les Murray was able to write, "our culture is still in its Boetian phase, and any distinctiveness we possess is still firmly anchored in the bush" (179). The fact that poets like Peter Porter, engaged in a dialogue with Murray about this that stressed alternative - "Attic" — sources of authority: "the permanently upright city where speech is nature" (23), felt that they had to pursue such things overseas, only confirmed the weight of Murray's argument. The key thing, however, was that we inhabited a polarity, and that what one saw when one looked at either country or city depended on which viewpoint one looked from.' (Introduction) 
 

'Two generations ago, the proponents of free and metrical verse were locked in battle. Now, without fanfare—and with no pretension to being the only way of doing it—free verse seems to be everywhere. This has not happened by chance. In the process, it has developed some powerful disciplines, many of which still seem to be poorly understood.'' (Introduction)

'Like many poets, Martin Langford has long been intrigued by the genre of aphorism. The neat snakes collected here have been compiled over many decades. An alternative way of articulating what might otherwise be explored in poems, they nevertheless retain the poem’s elegance, and its characteristic tension between emotion and idea. Neat Snakes is a very different addition to Australian writing.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Misreadingsand othering aside – did Π.Ο. actually read any of the poems, or did he just know they were wrong? – there are important issues raised by Π.Ο.’s review. It may be worth saying something about the most important – regarding the level of understanding that the reader brings to the poem. Poetry’s role has changed over the last century or two. Most of our stories are now told in other formats – novels, films, TV. Most of our declarations of desire or loss are now sung for us as pop songs (though not all: there are still great love poems). Most of our declarations of loyalty and tales of patriotism have, thankfully, receded into a past of bad newspaper verse, and earnest recitals. But poetry has continued to do some things better, perhaps, than any other art-form: to find clear ways of saying what is otherwise only partially understood, to weigh those articulations emotionally, and, sometimes, to make them sing. It works a frontier: not just of our understandings, but of our responses to them: a complex edge of meanings and the weight of meanings. We think Π.Ο. has completely missed the innovation, the distinctiveness and the radicalism of contemporary verse.' (Introduction)

'Chorale at the Crossing ‘gathers together the work Porter completed after the publication of his final collection, Better than God’. It is an uneven book, with some very good poems, and some, such as ‘A Chip off the Old Blog’, which are little more than creative doodles: one suspects a few of its inclusions are for the sake of having enough poems for a book. That said, there are a dozen or so fully realised pieces, and a few that would make it into the most compact of Porter selecteds. Sean O’Brien has contributed a brief but useful introduction, and Christine Porter has written a thoughtful little afterword on one poem, ‘The Hermit Crab’—a genre we could use a lot more of, judging by the puzzlement with which unpractised but otherwise intelligent readers so often meet contemporary poetry.' (Introduction)

'The quality of Australian poetry has never been higher, nor the number of distinctive voices greater. A landmark publication, this collection presents the astonishing achievements of Australian poetry during the last quarter of a century. Over ten years in preparation, gathering over 200 poets and 500 poems, it makes the case for this country's poetry as a broadening of the universal set for all English-speakers. 'Somewhat astonishingly,' the introduction notes, 'and while no-one was looking, Australian poetry has developed a momentum and a critical mass such that it has become one more luminous field in the English-speaking imagination. Increasingly, anyone who seeks to explore the perspectives or music available in English will also have to consider the perspectives and music which have originated here - Australia having turned itself, too, into a place in the mind.' Both survey and critical review, this anthology offers a rare opportunity to explore the major national achievement of contemporary Australian poetry. (Publication summary)'

'Ground is a meditation on the evolution and nature of Australian spaces. The collection is governed by the tensions which characterise Langford's work: between the way our spaces are projections of enlargement narratives, and the need to resist them by acknowledging the others with whom we interact.

'Enlargement narratives place the self at the centre of the world, and share an obsession with a point of arrival which is only meaningful in terms of the story from which it has arisen. Against them, Langford proposes the idea of the dance: by which he means any relationship with another in which neither is privileged which is based on attention and respect, rather than on the relegation of the other in the face of one's needs. Loosely chronological, the collection begins by locating us within the natural world, and continues with poems about our disjunctive attempts to rationalise the nature of settlement.

'There are sequences on the nature of Australian silences, on transitional periods in the nation's interior life and on the cultural layering of our suburbs. One section explores ways in which Australia has been represented, and another explores what Langford nominates as seven of the Sydney seasons. The collection culminates in a title sequence in which our interactions are conceived as dances. Grounded in ideas, this is, nevertheless, a very lyrical poetry.' (Publication summary)