Sydney Poetry

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Another one from the archives.....a review of Dransfield's Collected Poems from Southerly 1988.......

Michael Dransfield Collected Poems Edited by Rodney Hall. University of Queensland Press 1987. Southerly Volume 48. No 4. 1988.

When Michael Dransfiled died on Good Friday, 1973 at the age of 24 he had already published three collections of poetry and established a reputation as one of the most successful and popular of the new wave of young Australian poets who had emerged in the late 1960s. Since his death a further four collections have appeared, culminating in the Collected Poems (UQP 1987). When one considers Dransfield’s rapid rise to prominence, together with the attention focused on his lifestyle and the tragedy of his early death, it was almost inevitable that, to some extent, his life would come to overshadow his poetry. In fact, in the fifteen years since his death, the ‘Dransfield myth’, together with the decline in fashionably of the romanticism at the heart of much of his poetic imagery, has meant that his reputation as a poet has been attacked by a number of critics. In such a context, the publication in one volume of all of Dransfield’s published work, provides us with the opportunity to review his overall achievement and, hopefully, to reach a more realistic assessment of his work. Keep Reading

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Comment by Rochford Street Review on February 8, 2012 at 10:08: And to continue on the Dransfield theme...I noticed that one of the Google search strings used to find the Printed Shadow site today was "urinal poem"....I wonder if they were looking for Dransfield?

Comment by alan jefferies on February 8, 2012 at 21:32: any anthology without dransfield's work, simply invalidates the (any) anthology of australian poetry. period. not only for the lyrical quality of his best work but also for the many other poets he inspired to run carelessly into the breach... the big unacknowledged driver of oz-poet-inc is envy and petty jealousies. gray will never write a lyric anywhere approaching the brilliance of a dransfield and that's where his role as an editor ends. sadly

Comment by Justin Lowe on February 9, 2012 at 7:44: Yes....small ponds can make for some very nasty little fish. What our community needs is more largesse and less sharp elbows. But I think maybe what the editors of this particular "anthology" suffer from most is the lingering effects of that cultural cringe in which (transplanted) rules are paramount and spontaneity and sense of place come a very poor second.