Wow! eBook
New and Selected Poems
Author(s): Chris Wallace-Crabbe (Author)
- Publisher: OxfordPoets
- Publication Date: 31 Jan. 2013
- Language: English
- Print length: 214 pages
- ISBN-10: 1906188076
- ISBN-13: 9781906188078
Book Description
This book distils an adult lifetime into the intense magic of poetry. Wallace-Crabbe is a nature poet in the broadest possible sense: his poems, ranging widely in tone and subject-matter, seek above all to convey the richness and variety of our world, his sense that we are ‘inserted headlong into life’ and must make the best of what comes to us. Throughout his work – at times wryly philosophical, at times gently elegiac – Wallace-Crabbe remains passionately committed to his quest, ‘troubling the stubborn world for meaning’.
Editorial Reviews
Review
‘This is poetry of fine technical resource, precise observation and sly wit.’ –Alan Brownjohn
‘As well as a source of such aesthetic (or political or philosophical) play, Wallace-Crabbe’s distinctive comedy is always shadowed by an equally distinctive elegiac sensibility […] As
New and Selected Poems illustrates, Wallace-Crabbe has long been aware of how humanity’s weather is ”troubled” by the body’s frailty, the bloodiness of history and mortality itself. But in his valuing of both the aesthetic and the ordinary as the realms of humanity, he always reminds us – despite what the end has to offer us all – of a different kind of weather, one where, even as darkness is falling, ”the lit clouds yet / sail sweetly over us / inhabiting a daylight of their own”.’ –David McCooey, The Sydney HeraldAbout the Author
Chris Wallace-Crabbe is professor emeritus at the University of Melbourne. He is the author of The Amorous Cannibal, By and Large, Read It Again, The Universe Looks Down, and Whirling and the editor of Oxford University Press’s Australian Writers and The Oxford Literary History of Australia. He is the chair of the Australian Poetry Limited and the recipient of the Christopher Brennan Award for Literature and the Dublin Prize for Arts and Sciences.
