Stuart Cooke

If for the fact that there are hundreds of thousands of Filipinos living in Australia wasn’t reason enough to take an interest in Filipino poetry, the fact that Filipino poetry shares a tremendous amount in common with Australian poetry should. Those fissures that have dominated so much of the past half-century of Australian poetry – between ‘the tradition’ and ‘the postmodern’, between an indigenous or nationalist poetry and a poetry that stretches to North America and elsewhere, between poetry that centres on the nation’s landscapes and poetry that sees in its cities and other locations a manifestation of global and/or North American trends – are quite central to poetry in the Philippines, too.