Emerging Critics

The interest around Hall’s new novel gives us the occasion to look again at his poetic oeuvre, which was once thought to be among the most outstanding in Australia but which now is seldom discussed or anthologized, and remains out-of-print. The most striking feature of Hall’s poetry is its emotional intensity, often built upon dramatic and soliloquized speech capturing moments of distress, desire, and decision-making. Hall concentrates pain and longing into memorable phrases and lines that are marked by strangeness. The aesthetic value of pain is thus that it fortifies retention, especially when expressed with intensity and with formal control.

Robert Wood is a recipient of a 2017 SRB-CA Emerging Critics Fellowship. This is the third of three essays by…

Robert Wood is a recipient of a 2017 SRB-CA Emerging Critics Fellowship. This is the second of three essays by…

Rita Horanyi is a recipient of a 2017 SRB-CA Emerging Critics Fellowship. This is the second of three essays by…

Robert Wood is a recipient of a 2017 SRB-CA Emerging Critics Fellowship. This is the first of three essays by…

Imre Kert√©sz is Hungary’s sole winner of the Nobel Prize for literature

‘Australia’s critical culture is a living culture, constituted moment-to-moment by many interdependent parts, the decline of which has been exaggerated.’

‘What is left is the real South, the South of this real world, where most of those present in this room were born and most of us will die.’

The invention of electronic mailing lists made it possible for Australian poets to talk to poets from everywhere, and to talk to each other.

Galicia is made strange through the English language; Australia is made strange by non-native English and a Galician worldview. In this collection, the teeming social world of the village takes over, threatening to spill beyond the boundaries of the short form. This collection firmly establishes Calvino as an English prose stylist. The influence of Anglophone modernist minimalism is apparent and appropriate. Through absence and implication, the stories register feelings of loss the characters themselves often lack the language to articulate. If, as Rosal√≠a de Castro wrote, to sing of Galicia in the Galician language offers ‘consolation against evil, relief from pain,’ to write of it in English implies something else entirely.’