Martin Duwell

Martin Duwell has been in involved with Australian literature since Makar Press and the Gargoyle Poets Series in the 1970s. He taught at the University of Queensland for many years and worked on the scholarly journal, Australian Literary Studies. He now writes extensively on new poetry and publishes a monthly Australian poetry review.
All essays by Martin Duwell
Imaginative Expansions
Beveridge’s fascination with the tactility and suggestiveness of names is really only a part of her interest in the sounds of the language themselves. It’s something we expect from lyric (or lyrical) poets but it isn’t always as overt and developed as it is in Beveridge’s poems.
A Storehouse of Poems: Contemporary Australian Poetry
If Contemporary Australian Poetry with its size and inclusiveness is the defining work of the poetry of this period it raises the question of how successfully it meets the requirements of this task. Its making (like that of any other anthology) poses a lot of problems. Editors of general anthologies have to make two fairly tricky judgements: whom to include and omit, and how many poems one poet is represented by in comparison to another. Since, judging by the editors’ introduction, the impetus behind this anthology is as much celebrative as it is forensic, it seems that the answer to the first question is: As many as possible, since a celebration of richness necessarily involves including as many poets as possible.’
Inward illumination: On Antigone Kefala
Kefala’s output is highly accomplished and highly individual. She seems, like all real writers, to have been clear about what she was doing from the very beginning, even when what she was doing involved a lot of uncertainties.
Post- Poundian places: The Collected Blue Hills by Laurie Duggan
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.