Thomas Ford



Poetry’s magic circle: ‘By the incantation of this verse’

Dashiell Moore and Philip Morrissey’s collection on Lionel Fogarty in Poetry and Politics, launched last September, contains some valuable essays and is also – remarkably – the very first volume dedicated to the study of one of the greatest poets this country has ever produced. That poet passed away on 12 February 2026; his family have requested as part of cultural protocol around mourning that he be known for the next year as Dhoompoo Lionel Fogarty.

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Two Postscripts to Barron Field in New South Wales: The Resurrection and the Great Seal

We won’t rehearse the argument of the book at any greater length here. Instead, we want to append two postscripts that would need to be incorporated into any second edition, if such an unlikely publication were ever to transpire.

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The Linguistic Playground of Poetics: L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetry and Systemic Functional Linguistics

I wasn’t entirely prepared for the Canberran rain and cold. Late November, ostensibly summer, and my last trip to the capital at the same time of year almost a decade earlier had shocked me with a week of perfect blue-skied thirty-degree days.

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Notes on Bad Poetry

Maybe we’ll always disagree about poetry – about how it works, and what it’s for; about its modalities and affordances; about what makes a good poem; about why you might want to write or read one.

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Justin Clemens Reviews Poetry and the Trace

Sometimes irritating, often informative, occasionally incisive and sporadically genuinely interrogatory, the thoughtfulness evinced by (many of) the writings collected in Poetry and the Trace triggers further chains of association and dissociation. This is a genuinely critical collection in various senses of that word: at once analytic, hortatory, and urgent.

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