'Can one be an insider in international affairs—or does being international condemn one to a kind of permanent outside, even within one’s original nation? This question may not be at the top of most people’s list of priorities, unless you are Edith Campbell Berry in Frank Moorhouse’s Grand Days, his novel from 1993 set in Geneva in the 1920s—or me as a Dane teaching anglophone postcolonial literatures in present-day Geneva. For Edith it is an urgent matter of identity; for me more an intriguing balancing act where identity (which I really don’t understand or approve of, anyway) for all practical purposes gives way to finesse. Or for both of us, a balancing act of survival in a situation where inside and outside are completely imbricated in each other, yet still active as opposites.' (Introduction)

In this essay, both an obituary and a critical overview of Stow's work, Leer aims to 'honour the single soul who was Randolph Stow - and explore how the idea of the single soul informs his writing' (p.2).

'This essay traces what it sees as a geopoetic trope in Australian literature: the poetic verse-line as a boundary-fence. Basing itself on poems by John Kinsella, Judith Wright, Phillip[sic] Hodgins, Randolph Stow and Les Murray, the poem argues for a development of this trope in the context of the wider geopoetic endeavour in which Australian landscape poetry has been involved: of coming to terms with a new environment and the Aboriginal culture already geopoetically there.

Following Tim Ingold's reinterpretation of the line in human culture in Lines: A Brief History, it sees the line, rather than metrics or rhythm (or the line as a reflection of breaks in rhythm) as the defining characteristic of verse in an age of writing. The verse-line is how poetry spatially imprints the temporal order of a culture on a perceived world, but also how it reflects on that world within the space of a poem. Traditional European poetry measures the verse-line as a plough-furrow (the etymology of versus), a retracing of patterns, which the essay argues, New World postcolonial literatures de-measure: in Canadian landscape poetry the line becomes the overwhelming horizon; in Caribbean poetry the tidalectic wave; in Australian poetry the boundary fence, ambiguously demarcating what is inside and outside.' Source: Martin Leer.