Australian Poetry Library

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David Malouf, portrait by Juno Gemes©

David Malouf

David Malouf was born on 20 March 1934 in a private hospital in South Brisbane, ...read more

Features

Poets

  • Philip Salom

    Philip Salom

    Philip Salom was born in 1950, near Perth, Western Australia. He grew up on a ... more
  • John Kinsella, Cambridge UK, 1990s, photo by John Tranter

    John Kinsella

    John Kinsella fl. 1989– John Vincent Kinsella was born in Perth in 1963. His father ... more
  • Faye Zwicky, photo courtesy University of Queensland Press

    Fay Zwicky

    Fay Zwicky was born in Melbourne on 4 July 1933, as Julia Fay Rosefield.   An ... more
  • Reproduction of pen and ink sketch of Brennan, Fryer Library Pictorial Collection UQFL477 PIC779

    Christopher Brennan

    Christopher Brennan fl. 1897–1918     Christopher John Brennan was born in Sydney on 1 November ... more

Review

Amanda Stewart's 'Kitsch Postcards'

  In Poetry and Gender: Statements and Essays in Australian Women's Poetry and Poetics , Stewart writes, 'I am interested in displacement, hysteria and rupture within meaning. Forms which release the ironies of meaning.' 'Kitsch Postcards' is one of many of Stewart's poems that play with, and challenge, what we may accept as 'known' or traditional. The idea of what it is to be 'Australian', is 'ruptured' by the poet, exposing the ironies and superficialities embedded within, for example, symbols of national identity. From the opening paragraph, Stewart suggests that the concepts and symbols associated with national identity are merely ... ...read review

Poems

The Old Black Billy An' Me by Louis Esson

The sheep are yarded, an' I sit
Beside the fire an' poke at it.
Far from talk an' booze o' men
Glad, I'm glad I'm back agen
On the station, wi' me traps
An' fencin' wire, an' tanks an' taps,
Back to salt-bush plains, an' flocks,
An' old bark hut be th' apple-box.
I turn the slipjack, make the tea.
... more

My Fishing Boat by Robert Adamson

Mum and Dad are at it again
in the room
next to mine
their terrible sobbing
comes through the damp wall

they fight about something
I have done

I get out of bed ... more