Feeding the Ghost

Criticism on Contemporary Australian Poetry

Andy Kissane, David Musgrave, Carolyn Rickett

• Publisher: Puncher & Wattmann
• Print ISBN:
  9781921450358
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781925780116
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

This book is aimed at providing criticism on contemporary Australian poetry in a form that is accessible to general readers. It is intended to be the first in a series which will grapple with the bewildering diversity of the contemporary poetry scene. Australian poetry deserves a criticism that accompanies the astonishing momentum and luminosity that has developed, which both elucidates the scale of poetic achievement and is also not afraid to evaluate that achievement through a rigorous and disinterested critical lens. Australian poets have been feeding the ghost with extraordinary energy and acumen over the last quarter of a century; it is now time for Australian poetry criticism to catch up.

Table of contents

• Chapter 1, “Seeing what the hunger is”: current criticism on Australian poetry
• Chapter 2, ‘Bypassed Years’: TimeSpace and stasis in Gorton’s ‘Press Release’ sequences.
• Chapter 3, Mez Breeze Between the Centuries
• Chapter 4, Philip Salom: Feeding Time to the Contemporary
• Chapter 5, Sentimental Educations: The Poetry of David Malouf
• Chapter 6, “Singing in my careless hand”: Dorothy Porter’s verse novels
• Chapter 7, John Watson and the Comedy of Landscape
• Chapter 8, Pam Brown’s Ghostly Signature:“Half here/Half gone”
• Chapter 9, Randolph Stow’s “Hungry Waiting Country”
• Chapter 10, Les Murray’s Mannerist Grotesque
• Chapter 11, Matters Invisible: J. S. Harry’s Lyrical Poems
• Chapter 12, “The Final Subject Has Been Set. I’m Concentrating Hard on Death”: The Poetics of Loss in Philip Hodgins’s Blood and Bone
• Chapter 13, “But with a general groan”: Public and Private Voices in Jordie Albiston and Melinda Smith’s poetry
• Chapter 14, Between Housework and Carrying Her Home: Natalie Harkin’s Reparative Poetics
• Author Biographies