The Oxford Book of Australian Women's Verse

Abstract

The Oxford Book of Australian Women's Verse is the first anthology to offer a full record of Australian women's poetry from European settlement to the present. Beginning with Fidelia Hill's recollections of her arrival in Adelaide and Eliza Hamilton Dunlop's indictment of the Myall Creek massacre, it surveys the nineteenth-century landscape poetry of writers such as `Australie' and Catherine Martin, the radical nationalist verse of the 1890s, through to the abundant verse of the last three decades. The anthology offers popular works such as Caroline Carleton's `Song of Australia', Dorothea Mackellar's `My Country', and Robyn Archer's `Menstruation Blues'. It also includes generous selections from such key poets as Judith Wright, Rosemary Dobson, Gwen Harwood and Oodgeroo. Here, women poets express the most personal feelings, as in Zora Cross's sonnets of love and motherhood, and declare their outrage at public folly, as in Marie Pitt's `Australia's Tommy Atkins' and Gig Ryan's `Disinformation'. The poets celebrate the natural environment and regret aspects of its use. Their poems - rarely unengaged or sentimental - often have an ironic and satirical edge. The anthology collects the diverse voices of 88 women, including some newly arrived from Europe and representatives of the oldest traditions of the land. The result is a moving, passionate book that will broaden our conceptions of Australian poetry.