AustLit

'One way to witness the futility of defining the contemporary is to read someone attempting it twenty years back. Geoff Page's A Readers Guide to Contemporary Australian Poetry (1995) opts, after some vacillations ("does it include last year, last decade or even the last three decades?") to locate it in the poets of the late 60s, "whether they were later considered conservative or radical"—Tranter, Forbes, Adamson, Murray, Lehmann, Gray (1-2). While Page finds it "hard to think of any woman born between 1940 and 1950 who has rivalled the impact of most of the male poets cited so far", Jan Owen (b. 1940), Jennifer Rankin (1941), Joanne Burns (1945), Jennifer Maiden (1949) all are given entries of roughly the same length (8). The critical and commercial success of the slightly younger Dorothy Porter (b.1954) proved a little too contemporary for Page, with The Monkey's Mask reduced to "the verse detective novel she is now working on", even if, four lines below, his own bibliography gives the title and its publication date of 1994—the year prior (228). While the "general loosening up" caused by the "Woodstock generation", paperbacks and live performance has proven fruitful, Page concedes that the majority of his sixty-four chosen poets are no longer writing, with only twenty-four remaining active, the rest "lost to journalism, academia, early death, arts administration, the novel and the counter-culture of northern New South Wales" (2-3)...' (Introduction)