AustLit

‘At 1090 pages, containing 'over 1000 poems from 170 Australian poets', Geoffrey Lehmann and Robert Gray's new volume is a large collection, dwarfing its rivals The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry, edited by John Kinsella (2009, about 300 poems) and The Puncher and Wattmann Anthology of Australian Poetry, edited by John Leonard (also 2009, about 450 poems). All three anthologies come at the end of a relatively fallow period when, although there have been many anthologies with a specific brief (contemporary, women's, religious), with the exception of John Leonard's 1998 Oxford Anthology there have been no synopses of the Australian oeuvre since Rodney Hall in 1981 and Les Murray in 1986. Leaving aside the effort involved, and the economics of realising such large projects, one reason for their scarcity must surely be because it has become increasingly difficult to master the variety of perspectives and the sheer number of publications involved in researching recent Australian verse.’ (Publication abstract)