The Quick and the Dead: The Breadth of Australia's Poetry in the Last Decade

Abstract

This confidence, which Dawe indicates as a definite short-term possibility, has not yet arrived in Australian poetry. But thanks to the genuinely exciting work of the four poets here in question-and Dawe himself is one-the present Australian poetry map reflects a widening range of experiment, and has a depth of insight which, in the early Sixties, could not have been anticipated. Others could have been chosen, but I feel the poetry of Charles Buckmaster, Michael Dransfield, Bruce Dawe, and Les Murray effectively gauges the increased maturity of Australian poetry in the last decade-the freshest, and certainly the most innovative in our comparatively short history. Not surprisingly, this sophistication has come about through the recognition, by many of the younger poets, of the need to escape the entrenched conservatism and restrictive nationalism of the mainstream of Australian verse since the Twenties, and the need to carve out a more