A Month For Australian Poets

Anyone who likes poetry — correction, “Australian” poetry can have a 'real wallow this month. No less than four volumes of verse are on offer.

FIRSTLY there is the collection, Australian Poetry 1962, selected by Geoffrey Dutton, containing samples of the work of about four dozen poets who range with their themes from mermaids to the city of Melbourne.

Then, for the more selective types, there is Rutherford and other poems by Douglas Stewart, which deal with such matters as Professor Piccard and silk-worms as well as the title-piece about the NZ scientist who was re sponsible for splitting the first atom.

And Robert D. Fitzgerald’s volume, which is called Southmost Twelve , which doesn’t seem to mean any thing in particular except that this poet has a fondness for numbers — some of his previous efforts being called Eleven Compositions and In sight: Six Versions.

Finally, there is Birds, Judith

Wright’s collection which naturally enough is about birds. Peacocks and willy-wagtails and about two dozen other species are immortalised.

Most of the poems are contem porary in construction —as this ex ample (second and last verse of Fitz- Gerald’s poem called Edge ) shows: The new image, the freed thought, are carved from that inert bulk where the known ends and the unknown is cut down before it—at the mind’s edge, the knife-edge at the throat of darkness.

As all old Squares will realise im mediately, these verses are just not for people brought up on a diet of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury.

(Australian Poetry, 1962, 15/-:

Rutherford, 17/6; Southmost

Twelve, 17/6; Birds, 12/6. All Pub

lished by Angus and Robertson Ltd.)