From the Poetry Archives: Australian Poets

“I have a theory that Australian poetry renews itself with every generation,” wrote John Tranter in Poetry, nearly a generation ago. Tranter’s “Australian Poetry 1940–1980: A Personal View” appeared in a special October–November double issue in 1996, the first time Poetry devoted itself entirely to Australian poetry. Just as our May 2016 issue was edited with the help of Robert Adamson, our 1996 issue was edited with the help of John Kinsella. Kinsella’s “Towards a Contemporary Australian Poetics” considers his contemporary moment as well as several of the poets included in the issue, and you can also read a few of his own poems in the issue:

They’d been warned
on every farm
that playing
in the silos
would lead to death.
You sink in wheat.
Slowly. And the more
you struggle the worse it gets.
—From Drowning in Wheat

In the May 2016 issue, Jaya Savige writes “On Silence and Monsters in Australian Poetry,” so perhaps it is unsurprisingly that there are quite a few silences and strange creatures in the 1996 issue. Chris Wallace-Crabbe’s “Wittgenstein’s Shade,” for example, begins:

Dear Gwen,
I like to believe
that every softened evening
an austere, courteous ghost
comes in glidingly and stands
on your bed or chair…

The issue also marked Les Murray’s first appearance in Poetry, with “The Head-Spider”:

I’ve written a new body that only needs a reader’s touch.
If love is cursed in us, then when God exists, we don’t.

The issue includes nearly thirty poets, including Dorothy Hewett (“fumbling a pound note out from under her garter / she whispers     Don’t tell your mother”), Caroline Caddy (“Be precise / authority is magic”), Peter Boyle (“A woman dressed up for death / floated by along a watercourse”), Geoff Page (“neither needs it said / that these are two requited lovers / not long out of bed”), Peter Porter (“you’re stuffed into a novel full of plot— / you’d hate to read it; writing it is worse”), and many others. But only one poet appears in both the 1996 and 2016 Australian issues: Anthony Lawrence. In this month’s issue, we have his “My Darling Turns to Poetry at Night,” a poem which I found a bit frightening despite its tenderness (as I said on our May podcast), and one of his four poems in the 1996 issue features a similarly disturbing transformation:

Nearing the end of a forced march
through her chemically-troubled body,
her spirit faltered at the sockets
of the darkening skull when, as she paused

to lean at a bird bath deep in a winter garden
it saw itself in a glaze of leaf-stitched ice:
first, the thorny hind left leg of a lawn beetle
easing like sleep from her left eye.

You can read the rest of his “Insects” here. There is much more to see in the issue, so take some time to peruse it online. And this isn’t to say that we only publish Australian poets in special issues! Dig into our archive for more poems by Murray, Kinsella, Stephen Edgar, and many others. We even have an essay from Australian anti-nuclear advocate Helen Caldicott.