Reviews for A Treasury of favourite Australian poems

The average rating for A Treasury of favourite Australian poems based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-10-15 00:00:00 Jim Casimiro This was an interesting, but not riveting book of criticism. Published in 1992, it discusses this movement in American experimental poetry (a movement I usually dislike but which occasionally generate(d)(s) some interesting texts) as a means of "rescue"--from the perceived insularity and boredom (and often complicity in capitalism--or so they say) of the late-twentieth-century American poetic scene as well as from the pressure of French literary theory. I was a little dubious about both of these claims, since LANGUAGE poetry often engages with and in theory, though Reinfeld makes a case (I'm not sure I found it convincing) that it works to subvert and escape the very theory with which it makes up its underpinnings by means of its very artificiality. The first claim is obvious--I'd have to find American poetry stifling and smothered to buy that this movement is a rescue from it. The book proceeds by giving close readings of In the American Tree/i> (an important anthology of experimental verse and theory that was a participant in the solidification of LANGUAGE poetry as such), Charles Bernstein's work, Michael Palmer's First Figure and Notes on Echo Lake (unfortunately not spending much time on the aspects of First Figure that I was interested in and enjoyed), and the early work of Susan Howe before ending with an overview of the field and its projects. Reinfeld pairs each poet with the theorist she believes is most productively engaged by the text: Derrida, Barthes, and Adorno. While I don't know that I found every aspect of the argument convincing, it was neat to see a defense of the movement from someone who clearly found it interesting and powerful right at the beginning--First Figure was published in 1984, In the American Tree in 1986, Articulation of Sound Forms in Time in 1987. These are truly new pieces for scholarship at the time this book was published. Reinfeld clearly found this to be a vibrant and exciting movement--which is neat to see after more recent scholarship that weaves it back into the history of American postmodernism and some currently active lyric poets who see it as a failed project that was never worth much and has already outstayed its welcome. Even if Reinfeld isn't fully convincing (and one of the reasons is that she seems too facile with the texts--she sometimes makes leaps that are interesting but feel impossible to reach as a reader and so I'm not sure how she does it), it's nice to see what can be found in experimental verse by someone who is excited about its experimentalness, in specific. She really sees this as a project of "rescue", which is cool to see as she proceeds through it. A neat introduction to some late twentieth century experimental poetry by one of its advocates.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-06-16 00:00:00 Alex Zielinski I enjoyed this book thoroughly as it gives an overview of Language Poetry-- its strong social and intellectual tradition and also its roots as response to the contemporary critical theory of Derrida, Adorno and Barthes. The three language poets, Charles Bernstein, Michael Palmer and Susan Howe each receive a chapter with an excellent discussion of specific poems which point to their poetic vision. The first chapter after the introduction allows the reader to explore "aporia" - (state of puzzlement) and see where Wittgenstein comes in: "Writing is rescue from nothing we can name... delivers us from the transparent logic of language to language of texture and uncertainty." I admit, I usually feel distress when I encounter a language we think is our own, represented to us as not our own, but something that is at one and the same time intimately familiar and unaccountably strange. To loosely quote discussion of the poem by Bernstein, "Standing Target" -- my notes read: an undefined garden and set of language games... to be moved by this poem, “all that is required is the experience of uncertainty or the memory of having been, even briefly, abandoned. Here is a demonstration of syntax in a state of slippage, permitting the novice reader to move ‘at just about’ the ‘verge’ of understanding—or as if at the edge of a presumably ‘polite society’ by which the wandering word is characterized. As play of word, or word of play, truth is nomadic—a matter of omission, not emission. if “I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden,” the garden may be no more than a mirage." Reinfeld is a scholar with a personable style.