Book details

Gwen Harwood (1920-1995) is one of the best loved Australian poets of the twentieth century - and a fierce prankster, who published poems under half-a-dozen names and identities. By turns poignant, sensuous and mischievous, passionately musical, her poetry is marked by sure intelligence and a quicksilver, anti-authoritarian wit.

 

This new selection of her poetry from 1943 to her death makes the full range of the work accessible for the first time to poetry-lovers in the northern hemisphere. With an introduction by the leading Harwood critic Gregory Kratzmann and the Australian poet Chris Wallace-Crabbe, who corresponded with Harwood, the selection includes hitherto little-known work along with poems which have become part of the central canon of Australian poetry.

Gwen Harwood was born in 1920 in Queensland, Australia and brought up in Brisbane, where she completed a music teacher's diploma. After her marriage in 1945 she moved to Hobart, Tasmania, where her husband held an academic position, and where she developed her interest in the works of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Her first collection was published in 1963. She produced poems under several other names and identities and, in addition to poetry, wrote a number of opera libretti. Harwood's anti-authoritarian wit was displayed in prose in her letters. She died in 1995.

Gregory Kratzmann, formerly Associate Professor of English at La Trobe University, is the editor of  A Steady Storm of Correspondence: Selected Letters of Gwen Harwood 1943-1995 (UQP, 2001) and with Alison Hoddinott, Gwen Harwood: Collected Poems 1943-1995 (UQP, 2003). He has written extensively in the areas of Australian literature and English medieval literature.

Chris Wallace-Crabbe was born in 1934. After graduating in English, he became Lockie Fellow in Australian Literature and Creative Writing, Melbourne University, from 1961 to 1963, and over the next decades he became Reader in English and then held a Personal Chair from 1988. He was Harkness Fellow at Yale University 1965-7, Professor of Australian Studies at Harvard, 1987-8, and visiting Professor at the University of Venice, 1973 and 2005. His first book of poems was published in Australia in 1959, but in the 1980s he began to publish with Oxford University Press, with the The Amorous Cannibal. His most recent books include; Telling a Hawk from a Handsaw (Carcanet, 2008), By and Large (2001), The Universe Looks Down (Brandl and Schlesinger, 2005) and the bilingual Each Line of Writing Still Is to be Done (L'Officina, 2006). Read It Again, a volume of critical essays, was published by Salt in 2005. Chris Wallace-Crabbe has given many readings of his poetry around the world, and chairs the newly established Australian Poetry Centre in St Kilda, Victoria. Also a commentator on the visual arts, he specialises in artists' books. Among other awards, he has won the Dublin Prize for Arts and Sciences and the Christopher Brennan Award for Literature. Since his retirement he has been Professor Emeritus in the Australian Centre, the University of Melbourne.