David McCooey

In a 1996 interview Chris Wallace-Crabbe observed: 'There was a stage when those of us who wrote about the scorned suburbs were looked down on by scions of the squattocratic gentry, like Judith Wright and Geoff Dutton. Subconsciously, they treated…

There is a quality of indirection and resistance - perhaps a reflection of the work's agonistic nature - which makes Thomas Shapcott's poetry a challenge. One of the most sustained considerations of Shapcott's poetry to date is Livia Dobrez's discussion…

Among poetic forms, the elegy has best survived the twentieth century's antiformalist thrust. However, as Jahan Ramazani demonstrates in Poetry of Mourning, modern elegy has largely continued because of anti-elegiac impulses, producing a tension between the 'consolatory' effect of…

Vivian Smith's poetry occupies an ambiguous position in Australian literature: it is highly regarded, but intermittently discussed. Perhaps some critics continue to find Smith's formalism anachronistic, an indication of how 'progressive' notions of poetry can in themselves be anachronistic or…