Reviews for This land

The average rating for This land based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-04-19 00:00:00 James McIntyre As the foreword warns you, there are a lot - A LOT - of poems collected within this anthology of classics that have not aged well over the decades. We're talking arduous poems trying desperately to recapture the finery of Wordsworth and Blake with ham-fisted attempts at shoehorning in Australian nature. Personal preference here, but I am not a huge fan of poetry that uses nature as a crutch - if there is stanza after stanza of lacklustre description of the Aussie Bush, ya gal is out like a girl scout. Moreover, there were innumerable poems that referenced Hellenistic imagery - which, oh my God, shut up, unless you have Greek heritage, Australian claim to Hellinistic imagery is even more incongruous than English. In fact, I hereby veto any reference to Aphrodite or, in fact, ANY Ancient Greek / Roman goddess in any poetry I have to read, ever again. It's! Not! Interesting! You're! Being! Lazy! That being said, amongst the muck there were some shining favourites. Dorothea Mackellar, predictably, brought it with multiple fun, slim poems that were punchy and actually got to the point. Barcroft Boake's poem Where The Dead Man Lie had heart-stopping urgency and rhythm that forced the reader, who at that point had turned off their brain because of the aforementioned poems, to attention. C J Dennis' The Play was basically what you'd expect if Romeo and Juliet was performed at Kath and Kim's community theatre, beginning lovably with, "'Wot's in a name?' she sez... An' then she sighs" It's an Australian slang reworking of Romeo and Juliet and let me tell you, it was worth the time I spent reading the entire anthology - I was cackling on the tram. Another favourite line was: "Wot's in a name?" she sez. 'Struth, I dunno. Billo is just as good as Romeo. Geoffrey Dutton, as always, was another favourite contributor. So, that is to say, there were some diamonds amongst all of the rough, and overall, it was great to read this anthology. But my God, our self conscious national identity in the 1800s as an irrelevant colony striving for legitimacy sure shone through in the main glut of poems.

Review # 2 was written on 2009-06-02 00:00:00 Anatole Manniste Excellent book to using for teaching in social studies.