Danijela Kambaskovic-Sawers



Danijela Kambaskovic-Sawers Reviews Graveyard Poetry: Religion, Aesthetics and the Mid-eighteenth-Century Poetic Condition

This book examines ‘Graveyard poetry’, a critical appellation described by its author, Eric Parisot (Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Research Award Fellow, University of Queensland) as an imperfect, but serviceable and (grudgingly) accepted construct, commonly used to discuss the work of a group of eighteenth-century British poets meditating on death and Christian salvation, and doing so in close proximity of the dead, usually in a crypt or at a graveyard. If this cruelly crude summary sounds like it describes a simple enough phenomenon, think again: Parisot’s book shows clearly that everything about this category – the names of the artists who should be included in it, including Robert Blair, Edward Young, Thomas Grey, John Ogilvie, John Cunningham, Thomas Wharton (to name but a few), different characteristics of their work, the different sentiments addressed or evoked, and the effects the works had on contemporary readers and readers in our own time – can be questioned, contested or excluded. And it often is.

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Enter Cordite Scholarly

Cordite Scholarly is a new section of Cordite Poetry Review devoted to peer-reviewed research on Australian and international poetry and poetics. Essays published in Cordite Scholarly are reviewed by at least two members of Cordite’s Academic Advisory Board (or see …

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Iseult to Tristan

1 A sudden wind brought the cold: I took my coat out of its shroud and closed my face against the icy dust. I put my hands inside my pockets and found you there.   2 Tiredness has a way …

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Sing to me of the woman, plaintive Muse,

Sing to me of the woman, plaintive Muse, the one with chalkdust in her shoes Let her spin Medusa’s curly premises and weave a syllogism of stone Give me words not my own but the steel and dust, and bone. …

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The Williad

Sing to me of the woman, plaintive Muse,

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