Australian Poetry Research Articles

The Blue Hills Archipelago: Longform poetics & the ecological anti-epic

This essay puts forth Laurie Duggan’s decades-long serial poem, Blue Hills (1980–), as a radical antimythic and ecological approach to longform ‘epic’ poetics – or what I term the ‘ecological anti-epic’. The essay first reflects on the mythic ambitions of twentieth century Anglo-American modernist epic poets, such as Ezra Pound and TS Eliot, before turning to what I call the North American ‘antiepic’ postmodernist serial poem tradition. Centring on Robert Duncan’s Passages – a key influence on Duggan’s own series – I argue this ‘anti-epic’ approach to the long poem replaced the ‘mythical method’ (Eliot 1923: 483) of early modernist epics with a compositional method. Reading Blue Hills through the guiding principle of Duncan’s series, ‘grand collage’ (2014: 298), the essay then posits that Blue Hills – as a localised re-deployment of Duncan’s grand collage method – can be read as both a continuation, and subversive settler Australian reimagination, of the North American anti-epic serial poem tradition. Drawing on Peter Minter’s archipelagic approach to reading Australian poetry, Blue Hills is then read as a type of archipelago of poetic islands, one which challenges not only the epiccum-mythic ambitions of modernist longform poetry, but also the racially charged environmental myth-conceptions of early settler Australian poetic movements, such as the Jindyworobaks. I conclude with a brief reflection on the links between the process-based aesthetics of post-modern anti-epics and what Connor Weightman calls the ‘ecological long poem’ (2020: 3), ultimately positing that Duggan’s Blue Hills refutes the modernist penchant for speaking declaratively about the world and instead affects a sense that the world is reveling in its own wording.

Towards an Indigenous Hydropoetics: Human-River Interdependencies in Aboriginal Australian Poetry

This article delineates the idea of an Indigenous hydropoetics as an ancestral outlook on rivers grounded in Aboriginal cultural traditions of, and everyday interactions with, rivers. In particular, two features—embodiment and relationality—prove integral to conceptualising Indigenous hydropoetics in response to the hydrological precarities of the present. Recognising rivers' capacity for agency, the idea is developed in relation to contemporary Aboriginal Australian poetry narrating long-standing human interdependencies with rivers. The hydropoetic verse of Jack Davis, Samuel Wagan Watson, and Jeanine Leane reveals embodied relations to—and relational epistemologies of—rivers and their habitats through a focus on Derbal Yerrigan (the Swan River) of Western Australia, Marrambidya Bila (the Murrumbidgee River) of New South Wales, and Maiwar (the Brisbane River) of Queensland, respectively. Their writing integrates Dreaming narratives and elicits river poiesis, while also confronting aquatic conservation urgencies in Australia. Evoking sacred rivers whose origins lie in the Dreaming, their work also presents a medium for reverent listening to the fluvial world. While Leane’s hydropoetics centres on the mediating role of memory—hers and the river’s—Watson’s poetry calls attention to fractured river ecologies in Brisbane's urban environment. For Davis, bodily relationality between humans, plants, and rivers presents a potent means of ecopolitical resistance through multispecies solidarity. Immersed in Aboriginal creation narratives, an Indigenous hydropoetics foregrounds the multidimensional intersections between humans, rivers, and all life, thus energising new imaginings of rivers and encouraging receptivity to their biocultural complexities.

Witnessing, Trans-“Species” Trauma Testimony, and Sticky Wounds in Contemporary Australian Poetry

Literary trauma theory has traditionally been a humanist concern, and the concept of witnessing, so central to the theorization of trauma, has focused on human experience and relationships. This article stages an interdisciplinary intervention by conceptualizing trans-“species” trauma testimony as a literary encounter involving a double-layered witnessing; the human artist witnessing nonhuman animals’ witnessing to the failings and crises brought about by human society. Focusing on a selection of contemporary Australian poems, a view emerges of poetic witnessing and testimony that exceeds and complicates the sub-genre lenses of old such as “nature poetry,” “ecopoetry,” and “protest poetry.” I propose a new conceptual category that testifies to traumatic structures and consequences of human practices. I explore how this testimony proceeds through a two-way channel of witnessing in which nonhuman animals are active witnessing agents and not merely witnessed by humans. I concentrate on witnessing as primarily experiential, as a corporal, affective operation in which the senses figure centrally. I argue that when poets witness nonhuman animal experience in poetry, testimony advances as an ethical engagement in an act of solidarity and advocacy. Poetry offers productive potential in this respect due to its affinity for engagement with the senses, its capacity to communicate heightened affect, and its scope for expression, articulation, and evocations of meaning outside of conventional sense-making and the limits of rational understanding.

Poetry d’amour: The love theme in contemporary Australian poetry

Poetry d’amour: The love theme in contemporary Australian poetry

General Tenancy Agreement: Rental stress, memory and home in contemporary Australian poetry

Notions of home and unhomeliness have long been discussed by scholars in relation to Australian poetry, but little scholarly work has explored how contemporary Australian poets interrogate the relationship between renting and constructions of home. As the great Australian dream of homeownership becomes increasingly inaccessible and the availability of public housing declines, a larger proportion of the population privately rent their houses in a lightly regulated and highly competitive rental market (Morris et al 2021: 72). Poetry has long been used to record and preserve the affective dimensions of home, and in this paper I examine a series of poems concerned with finding rental properties, moving in and out of them, and with attempts to create a sense of home in houses that always already belong to others. I discuss the work of three poets whose recent collections grapple with notions of home, stability and security in relation to rented houses: Zenobia Frost’s After the Demolition (2019), Omar Sakr’s These Wild Houses (2017), and Fiona Wright’s Domestic Interior (2017). I argue that in these collections, houses are sites characterised by anxiety, instability, and erasure, rather than stable and secure archives of personal identity and domestic ritual.

How do we protect the mutant from annihilation by the "normal"

How do we protect the mutant from annihilation by the "normal" Andy Jackson (bio) and Gaele Sobott (bio) Keywords poetry, disability poetry, Andy Jackson, Gael Sobott, sloth, fractal, DNA, helix a sloth-slow strength stretches like lines of longitude / sighing through my lingering life and other lives before / oh above and parallel to mine gently curving / a fierce kink in meridians of knowledge / systems fixated on fixes without a north / still our limbs think or south / our minds reach outward / unplans into fractal / ever-shifting maps brokenness / surveyed by genetic engineers glittering in the face / searching for repeat palindromesof maskless eugenecists / about thirty letters long each side this double-helix of fragility / of the midpoint a snip here and genius a twisted ladder draws us up / a snip we wake up into our / there bodies / deformed deviant / real dirty unworthy of / the earth life laughter curiosity / calling to us fromclandestine desire what we've been / our wounds what we are to become / a promise against being erased / we ghost the agencies and clinics who defines / revolting in our flux our suffering / this new illness / abnormal wellness / we are custodians / continuous realms of blemish all this / our power as bruised endangered infinite / and sweet as a persimmonentangled for the helix there is no outside and no other [End Page 693] Andy Jackson andy jackson is a poet, creative writing teacher, and the inaugural Writing the Future of Health Fellow. The poem "how do we protect the mutant from annihilation by the 'normal'" was written in collaboration with Gaele Sobott as part of this fellowship. He has co-edited disability-themed issues of Southerly and Australian Poetry Journal, and his latest poetry collection is Human Looking, which won the 2022 ALS Gold Medal. Gaele Sobott gaele sobott is a writer who lives on Dharug land, western Sydney. Her publications include Colour Me Blue and My Longest Round. Gaele received a 2020 fellowship from the City of Sydney to create internationally award-winning animated poems. She was shortlisted for the 2021 Queensland Poetry Awards Older Poets Mentorship and received a 2021 Varuna Writers Space fellowship. She is the founding director of Outlandish Arts. Copyright © 2022 The Massachusetts Review, Inc.

Triggers, beginnings, and poetry making: the literacy practices of older Australian poetry writers

ABSTRACT Compared with other age groups, the literacy practices and creative outputs of older adults (50+ years) have been seldom researched. Generally, research about older adults has tended to focus on decline and agential passivity, rather than potentiality. In this article, we report on a small ethnographic study of older Australians who were part of a University of the Third Age (U3A) poetry group in Melbourne, Australia. We examine the literacy practices of the group in writing poetry, especially focusing on the triggers for poetry ideas and the beginning processes of poetry writing. The reported research centres on a session of the group conducted online in 2020. Employing ideas from David Hume, particularly his notion of the empirical basis for the development of concepts, as well as the idea of dialogism from Mikhail Bakhtin, the transcript of the focus group was analysed using themes that the participants discussed. Results suggest that the older adults in the study employed sensory images together with imagination, life memories and feeling states to create and form highly individual poetry of significance to their lives in the context of the positive rapport and dialogic engagement that developed within the poetry group.

Caesura and the Deforming Poem: Rupture as a Space for the Other

How does poetry deal with disability? At the level of theme and voice, Australian poetry – including the theorising and criticism of it – has rarely given overt priority to disabled experience. This essay seeks to contribute to a correction of this neglect by adapting the philosophical approach of Emmanuel Levinas, who wrote of the phenomenological preeminence of the Other. It considers how disability – defined expansively as a bodily otherness which also implicates the self – might become apprehended not only within thematic content, but through the disruptions of poetic form.

Representations of Jesus in Australian Poetry in the 1950s

Studies of Australian poetry in the 1950s are preoccupied with the form, function and style of the genre. Poetry was regarded as high art cultivated by learned men and women, and published by international publishers such as Oxford University Press. Religious poetry is occasionally represented in these anthologies, but poems of or about Jesus are noticeable by their absence. By contrast, poems about Jesus can be found in newspapers and in self-published or boutique anthologies of religious verse. These personal expressions of faith, outside the sphere of high art, often show both European and Australian imaginings of Jesus. A study of religious verse of the period outside of the canonical literature illustrates the variety of the genre in the 1950s and the significance it held for Australian Christians.

“Time Has Caught on Fire:” Eco-Anxiety and Anger in Selected Australian Poetry

This essay discusses fire as a significant factor shaping Australian social and cultural life. It focuses first on the climate-change induced emotions such as eco-anxiety and anger that can be tied with the Australian landscape, and then moves on to a discussion of the presence and function of fire in selected contemporary Australian poetry. The reflection on the poetics of trauma in the second part of the essay is accompanied by a discussion of solastalgia connected with land dispossession as an experience of the First Nations expressed in the Aboriginal literature in English.

A very online subjectivity: Poetry, embodiment and digital spaces

In 1991, Marjorie Perloff wrote, in her book Radical Artifice, that modern media challenges poetics to engage in a ‘dialectic between the simulacrum and the other, a dialectic no longer between the image and the real … but between the word and the image’ (1991, p. 92). She further acknowledged how digital technology had altered the relationship between reader and text through new formats and possibilities of interaction, but also asked ‘(W)hat about its effect on our human interactions?’ (Perloff, 1991, p. 188). This article focuses on three contemporary Australian poetry publications, varying in format and presentation – Shastra Deo’s ‘Self-Portrait as Goro Majima’ (2019); Devotionals by Marcus Whale (2018); and Holly Isemonger’s digital chapbook Deluxe Paperweight (2016) – all of which navigate concepts of anonymity, authenticity, the (un)returned gaze, and the experience of physical alienation in digital spaces. Through close reading and analysis of these works, and drawing on interviews (conducted by the author of this article) with the respective poets, this article considers the possibilities of constructing self and subjectivity in the digital age in poetry and digital spaces.

Poetics, Self-Understanding and Health

In the thick of the global plague, Richard, Justin and Valery agreed to hold a conversation on the topic of poetics, self-understanding, and health. An analysis and discussion of this trinity requires love of poetry and philosophy. Both supreme human practices take common root in mythology and religion, and also share a notorious categorical divide, that of reason against affect. Is this Platonic divide indeed categorical, given both practices rely on language and creativity to compose their meaning? Interestingly, the practice of poetics does not have the reputation for boosting one’s health, in the mainstream understanding of that concept. If anything, poetic practice gained notoriety for corrupting one’s mind and, possibly, life. Like philosophy? We touched on these and other classical aporia, on the political struggles in American and Australian poetry. Here is a written record of this encounter, countries and miles apart, three persons simply getting to know one another.

The black b-double

The black b-double Tom Coverdale (bio) It leaves so soon, that thrill of the hitchyou had when you set out, in the dayswherever you ended up was good.He never comes back, that jubilant rideyou sang along with all the way to Jacksonvilleor Quito, whose favourite songs were also yours.It comes, sure as arthritic knees, that hikeall day without a lift, walking forwards,walking backwards, crooning to the roadkillto bewilder the aches in your deltoidsand your supplicant thumb. How heavyyour pack then, as vehicles snarl and whipon by with shrugs, blanks, smirks, grimaces,thunder stared from lofty cabs, all sighingoff into wist, how heavy with things you zippedaway in pockets whose zips no longer unzip.They never mend, those synapses, they swingin the wind like the sorry halves of brokensuspension bridges, as you plod and failto remember your handful of words in Hindi,those sentences in Borges, or street namesin some city. After noon, it all compounds,the chronic ennui, the pains, fatigue, the creepof obliviscence. The wind screams like a drillsergeant, irate at your unfitness, till you can'traise a thought, save an arm, to save yourself.No sound then but the wind, gone hoarse,and the trudging of your breathacross an Atacama of the mind.It comes, in time, the rumbleof the ride we know is coming:quivering as it passes throughthe vertical lake back there.Its chrome and glass absorb the glare.It dopplers down through the gears now,preparing to stop for you. Its grille is cakedwith gore. It tows too many trailers.And the driver—the driver pullulates,like the mirage, with swallowed faces. [End Page 259] Tom Coverdale Tom Coverdale's childhood was divided between the Northern Territory and Queensland cattle country and South Australia sheep country, and for much of it, there was no television, just books. Since marrying a Polish woman, he has lived a life divided between Melbourne and Warsaw. His poetry and stories have appeared in Australian literary journals including Antipodes, Southerly, Overland, Cordite, and Quadrant and anthologies including Black Inc's The Best Australian Poems and Les Murray's selection of Australian poetry in Another English: Anglophone Poems from Around the World. Copyright © 2022 Wayne State University Press

Ribbon Kelp

Ribbon Kelp Audrey Molloy (bio) after H.D. Bronze stem ochre crowned whip-haired siren lit with sapphire leafless stipe where otters glide what gravity buoys you to the ceiling of the sea? Saline bathed satin blade scent of iodine— what anodyne land tree holds as fast as you? [End Page 257] Audrey Molloy Audrey Molloy is an Irish-Australian poet based in Sydney. Her first collection, The Important Things, was published by The Gallery Press (2021). Her work has appeared in Meanjin, Overland, Cordite, Southerly, Verity La, Rabbit, and Australian Poetry Journal. In 2019, she was awarded a Varuna Residential Fellowship. She is currently undertaking a master's in creative writing (poetry) at Manchester Metropolitan University. Copyright © 2022 Wayne State University Press

Rich and varied portrait of a great man

Rich and varied portrait of a great man Nathanael O'Reilly Good for the Soul: John Curtin's Life with Poetry. Toby Davidson. Crawley: UWA Publishing, 2021. 452 pp. RRP A$34.99. A respected scholar, editor, and poet, Toby Davidson is the author of Christian Mysticism and Australian Poetry (Cambria Press, 2013), editor of Collected Poems: Francis Webb (UWAP, 2011), and author of two collections of poetry, Beast Language (Five Islands Press, 2012) and Four Oceans (Puncher and Wattmann, 2020). Although other poets have higher public profiles, often thanks to their social media presence and writers' festival appearances, Davidson is highly regarded within the Australian poetry community by fellow poets. Davidson is also an outstanding scholar, as his monograph, academic articles, and work as Francis Webb's posthumous editor proves, and thus he is well qualified to conduct the research project that culminated in the publication of Good for the Soul: John Curtin's Life with Poetry, a hybrid text combining biography, history, and literary criticism. In addition to Davidson's experience and skill as a scholar, editor, and poet, he is also the great-grandson of Australia's third wartime prime minister, which gives him unique access and insight into John Curtin's life and archives. At 452 pages, Davidson's book provides weighty evidence of extensive research into Curtin's life and career as a journalist and politician and, especially, his relationship with poetry, which began in childhood. Davidson draws on hundreds of sources, including letters, speeches, newspaper and magazine articles, academic and biographical studies of Curtin's life and political career, the Curtin family library, parliamentary records, Curtin's official schedule while prime minister, interviews with Curtin and his associates, and a multitude of poems that Curtin read, quoted, and paraphrased. Davidson's exhaustive research has produced an impressive, fascinating book that is a significant contribution to the fields of Australian politics, history, and literary studies. Good for the Soul: John Curtin's Life with Poetry provides new understandings of Curtin as a politician and leader and the role of poetry in Australian politics during the first half of the twentieth century. Davidson repeatedly demonstrates that Curtin engaged deeply and frequently with poetry, quoting and paraphrasing poets in articles, speeches, and conversations on a seemingly daily basis for four or five decades. Curtin's favorite poets included Dante Alighieri, Robert Browning, Dame Mary Gilmore, Adam Lindsay Gordon, Victor Hugo, Omar Khayyam, Rudyard Kipling, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Lord Byron, James Russell Lowell, John Milton, Bernard O'Dowd, William Shakespeare, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Alfred Tennyson, Walt Whitman, and William Wordsworth. Curtin reportedly memorized impressive quantities of the works of Milton, Shakespeare, and Tennyson. Davidson's book also makes one wish that we had political leaders in Australia that read and value poetry and argue that it should be a fundamental part of Australian culture, as Curtin did repeatedly. As Davidson emphasizes, Curtin insisted that "without writers, poets, thinkers, dreamers, artists and musicians, Australia 'would be but a material place, well fed, perhaps, but not happy or enduring.' More poetry, more culture, was needed, not less" (379). I cannot imagine any Australian prime minister since Gough Whitlam echoing Curtin's argument. [End Page 389] The structure of Good for the Soul is clear, logical, and effective. The book contains an introduction and fourteen chapters. The chapters are organized in chronological order, beginning with Curtin's childhood (chapter 1) and ending with his death in 1945 (chapter 12), with the exception of chapter 13, which focuses on Dame Mary Gilmore's relationship with the Curtins, and the conclusion (chapter 14). The back matter contains a brief selection of Curtin's light verse, a list of the poetry titles contained in the Curtin Family Library, extensive notes on the chapters, a general index, and an index of 244 poets referred to by Davidson. Notably absent is a works cited or bibliography, which means that readers wanting to scan Davidson's sources in search of a particular author or text are unable to do so. Rather, they must sift through 987 notes printed across forty-two pages. I have enough publishing experience to know that the absence of a works cited...

Reading Lionel Fogarty

ABSTRACT Lionel Fogarty occupies a curious place in Australia letters. Widely regarded as the most important Aboriginal poet of his generation and even, as John Kinsella declares, ‘the greatest living Australian poet’, he has nevertheless received relatively little attention from scholars and is published by small, independent presses. Where considered at all, his politically charged, singular poetry is often treated with baffled awe or else conceived as a method of resisting the coloniser through an idiosyncratically ‘creolised’ English. This paper returns to various critical attempts to think Fogarty’s poetry, from ‘deep reading’ to ‘re-reading’ – some of which, like the trope of ‘unsettlement’, have yielded influential hermeneutics for the reading of Australian poetry per se – and treats these past readings as an entry point for an analysis of the complex rhetorical and poetic games of address in Fogarty’s poetics. It considers, in turn, the poetic importance of Fogarty’s sustained commitment to internationalist, liberationist, and anti-colonial politics, which it conceives as a poetics of solidarity.

“A Touch of Recognition”: Wetlands in Australian Poetry

Ecopoetry—the practice of writing, reading, and critiquing poetic works that thematize the natural world and issues of sustainability—is hampered by its reliance on the terms “environment” and “nature” as undifferentiated catch-alls. As typically invoked, the terms tend to cover ecology, nonhuman life, oceans, rivers, rocks, animals, plants, forests, fungi, and so on without distinguishing sufficiently between these diverse animate and inanimate agents in the context of their material interrelationships. In this regard, J. Scott Bryson, for instance, characterizes ecopoetry as a poetic mode that “while adhering to certain conventions of traditional nature poetry, advances beyond that tradition and takes on distinctly contemporary problems and issues” (2). Leonard Scigaj, moreover, highlights ecopoetry’s prevailing emphasis on “human cooperation with nature conceived as a dynamic, interrelated series of cyclic feedback systems” (37). These assessments and others, however, often skim over the “specific” forms of “environment” and “nature” that engender the making—the poiesis—of “specific” forms of poetic expression. Nonetheless, with the emergence of critical studies of animals (McCance) and plants (Gagliano, Ryan, and Vieira)—coupled with theoretical advances in the geo-humanities (Dear et al.) and, more broadly, the environmental humanities (Emmett and Nye)—a movement toward greater more-than-human heterogenization within ecopoetic scholarship is slowly evolving. Encouraging precision beyond “environment” and “nature” as blunt descriptors, these interdisciplinary frameworks have compelled recent formulations of zoopoetics (Moe), phytopoetics (Ryan Plants), and bioregionalist poetics (Lynch, Glotfelty, and Armbruster) that aim to particularize the natural phenomena and subjects narrativized in poetry.

Preoblikovanje identitet v Temnih skrivnostih avstralske staroselske pesnice Jeanine Leane

Prispevek obravnava sodobno avstralsko staroselsko poezijo in še posebej pesniško zbirko Temne skrivnosti Jeanine Leane. Z razcvetom sredi osemdesetih let 20. stoletja je avstralska staroselska poezija postala pomemben medij za artikulacijo kritičnih misli staroselcev. Z edukativno in zdravilno vlogo, ki jo opravlja s poseganjem v navidezno neukinljiva binarna nasprotja avtoritativnega diskurza, predstavitvijo zamolčane avstralske zgodovine in zahtevo po spremembah, je ta poezija postala del produkcije, ki je bila do nedavnega v izključni domeni Evropejcev. Z izhodiščem v kritiški misli o pomembni družbeni vlogi književnih besedil in opirajoč se na kritiko koncepta evropocentrizma, pričujoči članek raziskuje, kako Leane s problematizacijo stereotipov kot glavne strategije kolonialnega diskurza intervenira v javno dinamiko rasne separacije in destabilizira domneve o legitimnosti reprodukcije kolonialnih razlik. Končna ugotovitev je, da njen pesniški svet opravlja osebno in kolektivno opolnomočenje avstralskih staroselcev in ustvarja pogoje za boljšo kvaliteto medrasnih odnosov.

Monologue to a Wayward Niece

Monologue to a Wayward Niece Geoff Goodfellow (bio) Listen Krystal it might well be 28°C& a lovely sunny day but your aunty& i don't want you sitting out hereon the front lawn with your homedetention bracelet wrapped aroundyour ankle. we've put up a two grandcash surety to keep you out of jail& we don't want you messing up again.you can sit out on the back lawnin the sun but we don't want you outon display. if one of your old mateswanders past & offers you a choof ontheir ice pipe you'll finish up fallingfor the three card trick & failingyour next urine test. then your aunty& i will have to forfeit our bail money.so come around the back now. youknow what i mean. i don't want anyarguments & i don't want any dramatics.now don't go giving me that sullen face.we're trying to help you as best we can.we both know that no-one else waswilling to put their hand up again. thisis ya last chance. ya do understand that don't ya? [End Page 116] Geoff Goodfellow Geoff Goodfellow has worked as a writer in schools, jails, youth detention centers, drug and alcohol rehabilitation units, building and construction sites, and factories, as well as in universities in Australia and overseas. His collection Poems for a Dead Father was shortlisted for the Age Book of the Year award in 2002. His poems have appeared in Best Australian Poetry (2009) and in Best Australian Poems four times. Copyright © 2021 Wayne State University Press

Missing the Rain

Missing the Rain Ross Gillett (bio) I think of waking her before the rain arrives,but fatigue, that quiet stormin her life, claims her and I surrender to it.I know she would love the downpour for the mercy it represents, its slantblessing on heat-threatened shrubs,young birches, the grass, our stifling home.But observed mercy isn't sleep. When it comes, the rain is a shudderin the air, a stuttering runacross the roof, and then a savingfreshness hitting everything at once. It's a summer squall, a brief uproar.I open a window in her room,wanting the cool aftermath to reach her.Even sleeping she is lost to exhaustion. She wakes to find she's missed the rain.What else can this house thrown open mean?She walks outside to check the garden,the world she's worried about for weeks. She has been abandoned by her own body.She bends to a weather-blessed massof flowers and foliage, then kneels.Rain spills from the leaves onto her hands. [End Page 117] Ross Gillett Ross Gillett's poems have appeared in The Age, The Australian, Meanjin, Quadrant, Overland, Island, Blue Dog, Australian Poetry Journal, and three times in Black Inc's The Best Australian Poems. His awards include the Robert Harris Poetry Prize, the Broadway Poetry Prize, the FAW John Shaw Neilson Award (twice), the Melbourne Poets Union Poetry Prize, and the Reason-Brisbane Poetry Prize. In 2108, he won the Newcastle Poetry Prize for his poem "Buying Online." His most recent collection, The Mirror Hurlers, was published by Puncher & Wattmann in 2019. Copyright © 2021 Wayne State University Press