Reviews for That shining band

The average rating for That shining band based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-03-30 00:00:00 Michael Demarco A vital book. Ackland dredges up a part of Australia's cultural history that is too often forgotten: the poets who tried to breathe life into the Australian spirit through the nineteenth century. He focusses on Charles Harpur, Henry Kendall, Catherine Martin, Adam Lindsay Gordon and Ada Cambridge, though he mentions a host of other poets besides. Ackland is a quietly iconoclastic literary critic. In an age where literary criticism has become increasingly historical, he focusses on the philosophical and religious dimensions of these poets works. He does not explain what it was like to work as a poet in nineteenth-century Australia. He does not put the poems in their social or political context, explaining their references to current events or to unfolding developments in Australian society. He never draws connections between the poems and contemporaneous developments in science or linguistics or history or any other intellectual discipline. In fact, he does virtually none of the things that most writers of academic literary history have done since the 1980s. Instead, he analyses these poets' imagery, and tries to work out their attitudes towards large questions of ethics, metaphysics, religion and the self. This approach pays dividends. Ackland is a subtle critic, and we get the sense of five very different poets, working through large problems in idiosyncratic ways. Harpur was a staunch republican, firm in his belief that each new person was a new birth of limitless possibility. Kendall was an introspective and self-critical seeker, perennially disappointed with his efforts. Cambridge was a deep mystic, voyaging on vast seas of speculation before arriving at a mature kind of faith apt to the modern world. There are other advantages to Ackland's narrow and precise focus. The book deals with a lot of poets, and is nonetheless only 200 pages long in a light paperback edition. There are few notes, few technical words, and few digressions from the main line of argument. This is a very pleasant book of literary criticism, clearly aimed at the general reader. If a non-specialist reader were willing to be patient with Ackland's dense analysis of unfamiliar texts, they would find here a paean to Australian settler culture, and an inspiring call for a broader and richer sense of our inheritance.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-08-06 00:00:00 Kristina Hallman An essential book for anyone trying to understand the forces that have shaped modern poetry. Michael Hamburger is himself a poet and translator of other poets.