Fay Zwicky



Review Short: The Collected Poems of Fay Zwicky

On 2 July, 2017, my father sends me an article about Jewish Australian poet Fay Zwicky’s passing in Perth. I am four months into my Masters in Brisbane, where I am writing a manuscript of poetry and a thesis about tensions between my Jewish identity, memory, mental illness and hybridity as mediated through cultural objects and poetry.

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Paul Munden Reviews The Best Australian Poems 2016

In her introduction to this anthology, editor Sarah Holland-Batt claims for the work ‘a colloquialism, contrarianism and playfulness that separates it from its counterparts in the northern hemisphere’. Being hitherto more familiar with that northern hemisphere, this reviewer’s critical interest was immediately aroused.

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Crawling Across Tram Tracks: Extracts from Volumes 5 & 6 of Fay Zwicky’s Journal

Fay Zwicky tells the story that in the early weeks of 2005, in the aftermath of the Indian Ocean tsunami, she was invited as one of WA’s ‘Living Treasures’ to write a public poem about the disaster, and to read it at the opening of the Perth International Arts Festival. She declined. It was too soon, she thought. This was ‘not a time for poems’ – was it? But already the politicians had weighed in with their ‘fine abstractions’ and preachers were parading their concern. Perhaps it was important, after all, to come out and speak with the words of the tribe about ‘true guilt’ that is ‘tongueless’.

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