Poetry

If I were selecting a Modern Australian Poetry XI, Wearney, like his near-namesake in another kind of XI, would be one of the automatic choices. To my mind (and ear), he is one of the best formal poets writing in Australia today.

Anne Carson is among that small number of contemporary writers who have achieved the unthinkable: she has produced poetry that has made the bestseller lists. Since the success of Autobiography of Red (1998), all of her books have sold big…

The Blue Hills poems are so palpably about place that one needs to try to ‘place’ their author before going any farther. If the English language poetry of (almost exactly) the last one hundred years falls into two broad groups – the Non-Poundian and the Post-Poundian – then Duggan belongs to the latter.

Leaving home, returning home, catching trains and ferries, watching the weather from the window of a hospital or hotel room, renewal and self-betrayal: these are the starting places of Gray’s poetry.

From her superbly accomplished first books Tactics and The Problem of Evil, to this, her sixteenth book of poetry, Maiden’s style has evolved from bitingly tense portraits and narratives with echoing dialogues and soliloquies, constructed in heightened, almost visionary imagery, to a more direct quasi-conversational tone.

MTC Cronin is a restless poet. Since her debut collection Zoetrope: We see us moving (1995) was published as part of Five Islands’s now defunct ‘New Poets’ series, she has released another seventeen books, including her latest offering The World Last Night.