Bruce Dawe



But Why Am I Telling You this? You Are Not Even Here: Against Defining the Suburb

When I was 17 and finishing my high school exams the petrol station around the corner from our house exploded. I didn’t hear it but my twin brother did: he jingled the keys and we drove in his Subaru ute to check out the damage.

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Boxing On

‘Little boxes, little boxes …’ – so went that sixties song, along with other youthful Woodstock sneers -and still suburbia’s moving right along, undaunted, in both human hemispheres … Media focus on those odd disputes concerning trees, and rights-of-way and …

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Andrew Fuhrmann Reviews Bruce Dawe’s Plays in Verse: Kevin Almighty and Blind Spots

Some poets are sublime and ridiculous at the same time. James Kenneth Stephen was only being felicitously expressive of what oft was thought of Wordsworth when he wrote:

Two voices are there: one is of the deep;
It learns the storm-cloud’s thunderous melody,
Now roars, now murmurs with the changing sea,
Now bird-like pipes, now closes soft in sleep:
And one is of an old half-witted sheep
Which bleats articulate monotony,
And indicates that two and one are three,
That grass is green, lakes damp, and mountains steep
And, Wordsworth, both are thine ...
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The Auction

Sometimes it seems we were brought here only to mourn –That all our happiness, our future plans, Are fruits of the salesmen’s lure to ‘get us in’, To have us bid more eagerly in an auction Which (despite the glowing …

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Martin Downey Reviews Bruce Dawe

This suite of poems provides a remarkable insight into the troubled times that Australia, and the rest of the world, are only now beginning to realize. It is not the charitable/humanist/philanthropic gesture made by both poet and publisher (see Postscript) through this collection of poems that drives me to speak of Bruce Dawe's latest writings.

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