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Voyaging through Depth and Shallows single work   review  
Issue Details: First known date: 2016... 2016 Voyaging through Depth and Shallows
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'The book isn't much to look at.  It's a small-format paperback from Jacaranda Press in Brisbane, who used to produce educational texts that had an appeal beyond the classroom. The has a small drawing of seventeenth-century caravel, with a bowsprit sail, two mainsails on the foremast, and a lateen sail on the aft mast. The picture sits below the title and the name of the editor Douglas Stewart. The top left-hand corner bears the legend Australian University Paperbacks. (Was this an early advertising ploy, suggesting at once that the book was 'set' by universities and, more cunningly, reminding anyone who saw the thing that there were in fact such things as Australian universities? Nowadays, any sort of poetry book is 'set' for university study.) The poems are listed at the bottom left-hand corner of the page: "Five Visions of Captain Cook" by Kenneth Slessor, "Heemskerck Shoals" by Robert D. FitzGerald, "Worsley Enchanted" by Douglas Stewart, "The Wind at Your Door" by FitzGerald, "Christopher Columbus" by William Hart—Smith, and "Leichhardt in Theatre" by Francis Webb. Stewart didn't jib at including a work of his own in the anthology: an interesting matter to me, since Peter Porter told me years ago that it wasn't done to include one's own work in a book one was editing. Not that I've seen much evidence of lack of hubris in anthologies printed since that time (1977) — or before: including one's own work in an anthology of acclaimed writers can be taken merely as suggesting one wants to be regarded as 'seriously good'. But neither Stewart nor his publishers needed to convince anyone by the end of the 1950s that he was full bottle.' (Introduction)
 

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  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon The Poetic Eye : Occasional Writings 1982-2012 Michael Sharkey , Netherlands : Brill , 2016 10632316 2016 selected work criticism

    'This volume contains a selection of the Australian poet Michael Sharkey’s uncollected essays and occasional writings on poetics and poets, chiefly Australian and New Zealand. Reviews and conversations with other poets highlight Sharkey’s concern with preserving and interrogating cultural memory and his engagement with the practice and championing of poetry. Poets discussed range from Lord Byron to colonial-era and early twentieth-century poets (Francis Adams, David McKee Wright, and Zora Cross), underrepresented Australian women poets of World War I, traditionalists and experimentalists, including several ‘New Australian Poetry’ activists of the 1970s, and contemporary Australian and New Zealand poets. Writings on poetics address form and tradition, the teaching and reception of poetry, and canon-formation. The collection is culled from commissioned and occasional contributions to anthologies of practical poetics, journals devoted to literary and cultural history and book reviewing, as well as newspaper and small-magazine features from the 1980s to the present. The writing reflects Sharkey’s poetic practice and pedagogy relating to the teaching of literature, rhetorical analysis, cultural studies, and writing in universities'.

    Source: Publisher's blurb.

    Netherlands : Brill , 2016
    pg. 330-339
Last amended 1 May 2020 10:12:38
330-339 Voyaging through Depth and Shallowssmall AustLit logo
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