Welcome to Australian poetry - May 2007

April 27, 2007 Along with many new poems from Pam Brown, you will also find Lyn MCredden in critical mode, hot on Pam Brown’s heels, unraveling “the slippery poetics of knowledges warping” and giving due critical regard to one of the great poets of Australian inner-urban life. Martin Harrison’s pages have been updated with a selection that seems to offer something of a commentary on the poet’s deepening and profound awareness of the interstice between place, sense and language. Reading Harrison’s work is always transformative. It offers the reader the chance to slip between a moment of sensual awareness and its being given into expression. If David McCooey is right in his determination of Australia’s “new lyricism” then Gig Ryan’s work might be seen as a central and vital force in the tough critique and reinventions that have seen Australian poetry survive and more recently flourish. As with Pam Brown’s and J.S.Harry’s work, Ryan’s poetry has not as yet received the critical attention that is its due. I hope the larger selection of poems here will bring new readers and new responses to one of Australia’s more aggressive poetic intellects. Jane Gibian’s second collection, Ardent, is soon to appear from Giramondo Press, and it’s a pleasure to present a selection of new poems here of a poet able to contain and control the dark and raw edges of experience.

Over the coming issues, PIW Australia will continue to update the pages of poets already on the site while including new voices from the contemporary moment and the past. The aim of this site is to place Australian poetry in the greater context of Poetry International, and so see it read alongside the other vital poetries on the site, while also providing a growing resource and archive for readers outside of Australia. Long-term readers of PIW Australia will note that I have recently started including more critical material. I aim to include more as the year progresses and am keen to hear from critics working outside of Australia as well as in, should they be interested in offering work to the site.

For this issue, I hope new readers and old will enjoy the suppleness, the odd wry sideways glance and the intertwining of the sensual and the intellectual, of language and experience, the literary, the revelatory, the critical and the commonplace, which each these poets each achieve in differing ways. If nations are imagined communities as Benedict Anderson famously commented, then the poets presented here are very much a part of the awakening of ‘Australia’s’ self-consciousness, a part of the ongoing project of imagining what ‘Australia’ means and is in the moment. David McCooey notes in ‘Surviving Australian Poetry’ a certain worldliness to the new lyricism, a “ceasing to care about looking ‘Australian’”. That may be so, but the problem might more simply be the ongoing questioning of what ‘Australia’ might look like these days, as an imagined community and as a nation. Is it simply a deathly dry landscape and a fiscal policy? The poems here do create ‘Australia’ in ways, allowing it to enter the imagination as a place of multiplicity and diversity, a community of differences drawn across the inner city and inner lives, dead rivers and dry wit, irony and celebration, critique and communion. As harsh, tough and strange as its poetry, ‘Australia’ can be found surviving, here, in its poetry; forming and reinventing itself as a point of converging differences, voices and critiques, inhabiting this ongoing imagining where Ithica was never really the point.