AustLit

'Andrew Johnson argues that "[w]hile poetry in Australia might broadly be read under the aegis of Romanticism, the various Orphic poems could be used as an index of different styles and schools," and claims that "the different approaches and interests of various poets could be measured by their varied responses to the Orphic material." Johnson applies this framework to a close reading of several key Australian poets, including A. D. Hope and the notorious "mythical" poet, Ern Malley.' (Source: Introduction p. 2)

'Atherton reads the work of Kinsella and Wallace-Crabbe as an exploration of Morpheus's transmutable form, as an ambiguous figure of both pleasure and pain, "both seductive and sinister, a giver of dreams and yet, often, the thief of time."' (Source: Introduction p. 2)

'...Eleni Rivers and Gita Mammen—remind us how mythology and poetry are interminably linked with the visual arts, and indeed with the trials of everyday experience. Rivers's preoccupation with botanical forms explores an elemental concern at the heart of myth: the natural cycle. By situating herself in relation to the rhythms of nature (germination of seeds, growth, decay, and fertilisation), Rivers explores the role of the artist in the cycles which give birth to myth. Mammen's juxtaposition of visual art and poetry in "Inanna of the Storms" revisits some of the oldest myths known—those of Mesopotamia and Ancient Sumer—but in doing so, sheds light on such contemporary concerns as "water shortages and war, spirituality and love."' (Source: Introduction pp. 3-4)

'In his analysis of Judith Beveridge's poetry, Mike Heald contrasts poetic and philosophical engagements with Buddhism, arguing that "the imagination produces a conception of transcendence very different from that found in the meditative tradition," with the effect that in Beveridge's Siddhattha, the reader encounters "a figure who bodies forth the ineluctable suffering of the human condition, and thus the perennial elusiveness and implausibility of transcendence, rather than one who embodies the promise and indeed successful realisation of transcendence." This appears to be an occasion in which affect-driven literature diverges substantially from philosophical myth narratives, albeit in a complementary rather than a mutually exclusive manner.' (Source: Introduction p. 4)

'...Duncan Hose examines the personal mythopoeic tendencies of John Forbes and Ted Berrigan "as a synthetic poetic praxis of mythography and mythopoesis; that is, a constant rereading and re-writing of one's own myths." The everyday and the mythological are thus seen to enter into a dialectical exchange even as Berrigan's collage method works against self-mythologising. Hose claims that Forbes's poetry reminds us "that our everyday thinking, our being interpellated as subjects by our culture, our families, our literature, places us immanently within the processes and logic of myth." He identifies, in these poets' work, a tension between identity/Self as a composite product of myth and the active production of the Self through myth.' (Source: Introduction pp. 4-5)