Martin Duwell

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.

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.’

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.

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.