Dan Disney - New Directions in Contemporary Australian Poetry

Founded by Rachel Blau DuPlessis and continued by David Herd, Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics promotes and pursues topics in the burgeoning field of 20th and 21st century poetics. Critical and scholarly work on poetry and poetics of interest to the series includes: social location in its relationships to subjectivity, to the construction of authorship, to oeuvres, and to careers; poetic reception and dissemination (groups, movements, formations, institutions); the intersection of poetry and theory; questions about language, poetic authority, and the goals of writing; claims in poetics, impacts of social life, and the dynamics of the poetic career as these are staged and debated by poets and inside poems. Since its inception, the series has been distinguished by its tilt toward experimental work intellectually, politically, aesthetically. It has consistently published work on Anglophone poetry in the broadest sense and has featured critical work studying literatures of the UK, of the US, of Canada, and Australia, as well as eclectic mixes of work from other social and poetic communities. As poetry and poetics form a crucial response to contemporary social and political conditions, under David Herds editorship the series will continue to broaden understanding of the field and its significance.

Editorial Board

Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Temple University

Vincent Broqua, Universit Paris 8

Olivier Brossard, Universit Paris-Est

Steve Collis, Simon Fraser University

Jacob Edmond, University of Otago

Stephen Fredman, Notre Dame University

Fiona Green, University of Cambridge

Abigail Lang, Universit Paris Diderot

Will Montgomery, Royal Holloway University of London

Miriam Nichols, University of the Fraser Valley

Redell Olsen, Royal Holloway University of London

Sandeep Parmar, University of Liverpool

Adam Piette, University of Sheffield

Nisha Ramaya, Queen Mary University of London

Brian Reed, University of Washington

Ann Vickery, Deakin University

Carol Watts, University of Sussex

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14799

Cover credit: piranka/Getty

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG

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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: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century (2010)

New Directions in Contemporary Australian Poetry is a genuinely decolonizing anthology which reveals many of Australias best writers addressing us in their most cogent and renovating voices. Whereas others would assume rhetorical innovations are enough 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 acknowledgeeven while deranging and unsettlingactually 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 thats left is to join the conversation.

Charles Bernstein, University of Pennsylvania (Emeritus), 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. Its 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.