Why you should still love Les Murray

I felt so tired this morning that I promised myself an early night tonight. Why is it not possible to get more done? I am making progress but I wish it were quicker.
I am working on my Les Murray chapter. I like his work very much. I’m not sure my chapter will do him justice. [...]

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Postcolonial writer medievalizes his own country

Chinua Achebe is visiting his homeland of Nigeria at the moment, and this is what he says:
In The Trouble with Nigeria, Mr Achebe wrote that “there is indeed no better place to observe the thrusting indiscipline of Nigerian behaviour than on the roads: frenetic energy, rudeness, noisiness”.
He described their indifference to safety as of “truly [...]

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Why medievalism?

In response to some questions from Penni, this is the first in a series of posts – or second actually, if you count this one on why Australian poetry – on how I ended up doing the phd I did ( – er – am doing. Can’t wait till I can use past tense here!).
When [...]

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Ezra Pound sings cuckoo

The things you find on Wikipedia. I must confess, I’ve never been able to get into Ezra Pound. I never had the chance to study his work formally, and the few times I opened his collected poems as a conscientious undergraduate in the library on rainy afternooons, I found them impenetrable. But I was looking [...]

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Ahah!

Thinking about homes and houses – in a strictly academic sense – and have solved a niggling problem at the end of my best chapter. Ie – what to make of Randolph Stow’s very strange book The Suburbs of Hell. It’s still not my favourite of his novels, and it won’t be the most interesting [...]

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Walled Cities

I finished reading the most beautiful novel the other day. Gatty’s Tale, by Kevin Crossley-Holland. I first realised what a lovely writer he was when I read his translations of Norse Myths, and I vowed to get hold of his King Arthur trilogy. I did, and have read the first one so far, and loved [...]

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A medievalist in New York

In New York I couldn’t keep my eyes off old things, or echoes of old things. When we were discussing potential tourist destinations, possibly art galleries, one of Micheal’s colleagues only wanted to see contemporary art, the really new stuff, because she always thought of New York as new. But mock medieval spires crown the [...]

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Anglo-Saxon Identity?

Just now I googled ‘Anglo-Saxon identity’, looking for a book I like but can’t remember the title of, which talks about how Anglo-Saxon cultural myths of migration (coming over the sea to Britain) are encoded in the poetry, eg Exodus. I didn’t find the book. The second and third top references are to another book [...]

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Did you know…

that the governor of South Australia between 1899 and 1902, and the Governor General of Australia between 1902 and 1903, was the son of celebrated poet Alfred Tennyson?
Me neither. But it’s kinda cool (and kinda creepy – British imperialism, and all that…).
I discovered this whilst poking around at fodder to use for my introduction. Tennyson, [...]

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Why you should read Francis Webb (with a medievalist interlude)

Because he’s different from anything you’ve ever read, or ever will read. Because he fools you into thinking he’s naive or obtuse before you realise he’s something else altogether. Because he knits his stanzas together with rhyme schemes so cleverly that you don’t even know they’re there. Because – just sometimes – his words make [...]

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