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 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.