An anthology of Australian poetry between the years 1990 and 2015

This broad selection of Australian poets begins with Kenneth Slessor, and offers a challenging view of 'early modern' poetry up until the 1960s. It also presents the decade of turmoil from 1965 to 1975 in a new light, identifying currents of energy among the young writers and balancing new reputations with old. The years from 1965 to the 1990s are revealed as a time of growing vigour and diversity.

This book sets out to navigate questions of the future of Australian poetry. Deliberately designed as a dialogue between poets, each of the four clusters presented here—“Indigeneities”; “Political Landscapes”; “Space, Place, Materiality”; “Revising an Australian Mythos”—models how poetic communities in Australia continue to grow in alliance toward certain constellated ideas. Exploring the ethics of creative production in a place that continues to position capital over culture, property over community, each of the twenty essays in this anthology takes the subject of Australian poetry definitively beyond Eurocentrism and white privilege. By pushing back against nationalizing mythologies that have, over the last 200 years since colonization, not only narrativized the logic of instrumentalization but rendered our lands precarious, this book asserts new possibilities of creative responsiveness within the Australian sensorium.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1965.

This ground-breaking anthology collects poems written by Australian poets who are migrants, their children, and refugees of Asian heritage, spanning work that covers over three decades of writing. Inclusive of hitherto marginalised voices, these poems explore the hyphenated and variegated ways of being Asian Australian, and demonstrate how the different origins and traditions transplanted from Asia have generated new and different ways of being Australian. This anthology highlights the complexity of Asian Australian interactions between cultures and languages, and is a landmark in a rich, diversely-textured and evolving story. Timely and proactive this anthology fills existing cultural gaps in poetic expressions of home, travel, diaspora, identity, myth, empire and language.

Australia has been seen as a land of both punishment and refuge. Australian literature has explored these controlling alternatives, and vividly rendered the landscape on which they transpire. Twentieth-century writers left Australia to see the world; now Australia’s distance no longer provides sanctuary. But today the global perspective has arrived with a vengeance. In Contemporary Australian Literature: A World Not Yet Dead, Nicholas Birns tells the story of how novelists, poets and critics, from Patrick White to Hannah Kent, from Alexis Wright to Christos Tsiolkas, responded to this condition. With rancour, concern and idealism, modern Australian literature conveys a tragic sense of the past yet an abiding vision of the way forward. Birns paints a vivid picture of a rich Australian literary voice – one not lost to the churning of global markets, but in fact given new life by it. Contrary to the despairing of the critics, Australian literary identity continues to flourish. And as Birns finds, it is not one thing, but many. "In this remarkable, bold and fearless book, Nicholas Birns contests how literary cultures are read, how they are constituted and what they stand for … In examining the nature of the barriers between public and private utterance, and looking outside the absurdity of the rules of genre, Birns has produced a redemptive analysis that leaves hope for revivifying a world not yet dead." - John Kinsella

Australian poetry is popularly conceived as a tradition founded by the wry, secular and stoic strains of its late-nineteenth-century bush balladeers Adam Lindsay Gordon, Henry Lawson and ‘Banjo’ Paterson, consolidated into a land-based ‘vigour’ in publications such as the Bulletin. Yet this popular conception relies on not actually consulting the poetry itself, which for well over one hundred and fifty years has been cerebral, introspective, feminine and highly — even experimentally — religious. This book casts Australian poetry in a new light by showing how Australian Christian mystical poetics can be found in every era of Australian letters, how literary hostilities towards women poets, eroticism and contemplation served to stifle a critical appreciation of mystical poetics until recent decades, and how in the twentieth century one Australian Christian mystical poet began to influence another and share their appreciations of Dante, Donne, Traherne, Blake, Wordsworth, Brontë, Rossetti, Hopkins, Yeats, Eliot and Lowell.

'A very fine anthology, with exemplary introductions. It is refreshing to see how much has been done so well.' - Peter Pierce Wide in scope and bold in ambition, this exciting anthology covers the range of Australian poetic achievement, from early colonial verse through to contemporary work, with a strong recognition of Indigenous voices. This collection brings together great and familiar names with those that deserve better recognition. Including valuable introductory essays by John Kinsella, and biographical notes for all the poets, The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry presents the full measure of Australian poetic talent in all its richness and diversity.

A good poem is one that the world can’t forget or is delighted to rediscover. This landmark anthology of Australian poetry, edited by two of Australia’s foremost poets, Geoffrey Lehmann and Robert Gray, contains such poems. It is the first of its kind for Australia and promises to become a classic. Included here are Australia’s major poets, and lesser-known but equally affecting ones, and all manifestations of Australian poetry since 1788, from concrete poems to prose poems, from the cerebral to the naïve, from the humorous to the confessional, and from formal to free verse. Translations of some striking Aboriginal song poems are one of the high points. Containing over 1000 poems from 170 Australian poets, as well as short critical biographies, this careful reevaluation of Australian poetry makes this a superb book that can be read and enjoyed over a lifetime.