Chris Wallace-Crabbe



Reflective Insulation

You just walk out of the world and into Australia Lawrence Dozing your afternoon away hot and salty, outside time you do not see the powderblue of distant hills, beyond that cape. Everything has become quite marine with gulls for …

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Altogether Elsewhere

(Auden’s hundred) Your first words that I read were “Look, stranger,” which really stuck. You hymned environmental danger and illness welling up from bottled anger in the out-of-luck. Stranger than any of us was your thanatology: mental mapping was a …

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Review Short: Gwen Harwood’s The Best 100 Poems of Gwen Harwood

Here is a new selection from that marvellously ardent poet, Gwen Harwood, a crafty voice that was heard from both Brisbane and Tasmania. In welcoming it, let me declare that Greg Kratzmann and I have a Harwood selection in print, but our book bounces back here from Manchester and must, as a result, be rather more expensive.

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Review Short: David Malouf’s Earth Hour

It is a delight to have, after seven years, a new collection of poems from David Malouf who remains, in his ever-modest way, one of the central figures in Australian writing. As a poet, he glimpses the big currents, but is constantly alert to the tiny epiphanies of dailiness, as when he evokes ‘Shy gifts that come to us from a world that may not/ even know that we are here. Windfalls, scantlings.’

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Geoff Page Reviews Chris Wallace-Crabbe

Now a youthful 79, the Melbourne poet, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, has been an important figure in Australian poetry since the early 1960s. As a teacher, scholar, anthologist and organizer – as well as a poet with at least fourteen volumes to his name – Wallace-Crabbe has been central to much that has happened in Australian poetry over the past fifty years, especially in Melbourne. As with his friend, the late Peter Porter, Wallace-Crabbe’s lightly-worn erudition and distinctive sense of humour have ensured that his work is admired by many poets (and readers) across the aesthetic divisions in our poetry reaching back to the 1970s.

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Ratiscan

The male stands simply enough in regulation grey. It has two tall slab sides, an informed roof, and three red lights which continually flash in dumb warning. As might be expected, the short female is more complicated. Broadly built like …

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