Inside Black Australia Book

I'm glad to have finished this. Glad to have persevered, but glad that it's finished.

I have to keep reminding myself that this book is twenty years old, and most of the poems older than that. That it was put together as a protest against the Bicentennial celebrations.

Many of these poems don't just seethe with anger, but rage and fury. Not just pain but agony. Fury and agony buried beneath years of repression, refined diamond-hard. (I'm sorry if the metaphor doesn't work, but I don't know how else to explain this.)

And so I found it difficult to read. Almost impossible at times. As though these poems were attacking me, raging against me in particular. And I found them threatening. Especially the poems by men. (And yet it surprised me that my favourites were those by Bobbi Sykes. She was radical black feminist, almost militant at that time. But her poems I could cope with, hers I could appreciate. And like.)

And it surprised me that in the end, one of my favourites is "The New True Anthem" by Kevin Gilbert. Because Kevin Gilbert was one of the most troubling writers in the collection. Gilbert was jailed for killing his wife. Not for some stupid little misdemenour, but murder. And tries to blame that on "the white justice system". Without ever even suggesting that he *didn't* kill his wife.

Anyway - I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the poetry of this man whose (again) radical militant remarks had been jumping off the page at me ever since I began.