New Directions in Contemporary Australian Poetry

This book sets out to navigate questions of the future of Australian poetry. Deliberately designed as a dialogue between poets, each of the four clusters presented here—“Indigeneities”; “Political Landscapes”; “Space, Place, Materiality”; “Revising an Australian Mythos”—models how poetic communities in Australia continue to grow in alliance toward certain constellated ideas. Exploring the ethics of creative production in a place that continues to position capital over culture, property over community, each of the twenty essays in this anthology takes the subject of Australian poetry definitively beyond Eurocentrism and white privilege. By pushing back against nationalizing mythologies that have, over the last 200 years since colonization, not only narrativized the logic of instrumentalization but rendered our lands precarious, this book asserts new possibilities of creative responsiveness within the Australian sensorium.

“Dan Disney and Matthew Hall have produced a critical anthology that is much more than a showcase for a particular poetic nationalism. Rather, as their twenty poet-critics demonstrate so elegantly, the aim is to remodel poetic community itself as an active site of political contestation. Whether exploring the indigeneities that distinguish Australian poetry from others, or exploding the common myths about its animating nature and culture, the essays, written by the leading practitioners in their field, will force you to rethink what it means to be an Australian poet in the twenty-first century. An exemplary collection!” (Marjorie Perloff, author of Unoriginal Genius: Writing by Other Means in the New Century (2010))

“New Directions in Contemporary Australian Poetry is a genuinely decolonizing anthology which reveals many of Australia’s best writers addressing us in their most cogent and renovating voices. Whereas others would assume rhetorical innovations areenough to express resistance, and still others would lean upon the political as a prefabricated base, the essays and poetic inventions Disney and Hall have assembled stage a real dialogue between affordances of ramified form and networks of critical practice.” (Nicholas Birns, New York University, USA)

“While the nation state may be a barrier to a more interconnected practice of poetry, before crossing that line we do well to acknowledge––even while deranging and unsettling––actually existing poetry cultures. New Directions in Contemporary Australian Poetry takes on this work, illuminating the contours and recesses, multiplicities, contraventions, and Aboriginalities of Australian poetics with brio, ingenuity, heat, and light. This book is notable not only for the great individual poets and poems that it illuminates, but also for the case it makes for the power of newly emerging poetries in Australia. All that’s left is to join the conversation.” (Charles Bernstein, Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature, University of Pennsylvania, USA)

“The last decade has brought a surge in Indigenous poetry that uses fresh modes of language to refuse the intransigent and systemic injustices of past and present Australian settler mentality. It is timely that this book begins with Indigenous voices. This expansive critical presentation of Australian poetics affirms poetry as performing the work of the social and opens the field to a future imagined as a continuum of diversities, biopolitics, ethics, experiment, and connectivity. It's an indispensable resource.” (Pam Brown, author of Missing up (2015) and click here for what we do (2018))

“A new generation of poetry is growing from the network of songlines that are reconnecting across flood-ravaged highways. There are new movements: a burgeoning Aboriginal renaissance, co-creations with animals and plants, other diagrams for being, feeling, and belonging. When poetic language resplices ancient myths new powers are released, that is what this book of brilliant essays taught me: denationalise, hit the track, listen for the songs.” (Stephen Muecke, Professor, Flinders University, Australia)

“Ambitious and playful, this collection seeks nothing less than to redraw (to unsettle and de-range) the boundaries, histories, and practices of Australian poetry. Disney and Hall have brought the lively and critical voices collected here into conversation, and in doing so they illustrate how the project of decolonising poetry in Australia is one that should be approached with hope.” (David McCooey, Professor, Deakin University, Australia)

Dan Disney has published four collections of poetry, and his writing appears in Angelaki, Kenyon Review, Antipodes, Orbis Litterarum, and CounterText. He is an associate editor with the Journal of English Language and Literature, and a regular reviewer with World Literature Today. He teaches with the English Literature Program at Sogang University, in Seoul, South Korea.

Matthew Hall holds a doctorate from the University of Western Australia. He is the author of numerous books, including the monograph On Violence in the work of J.H. Prynne, and has published scholarship with Angelaki, Contemporary Women’s Writing, and The Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, among others. He works as a designer and education consultant in Melbourne, Australia.