Excuse the length of this piece and it's journalistic nature. It's an 
unpublished thing I wrote about coming into contact with current British 
and Irish poetries from the distance of Australia. I don't know that I can 
speak for anyone else really, but here goes (the story starts in the mid-
1960s when I was 16 or 17):




Possibly the first poetry book I bought with a volition that was entirely 
my own was the Penguin anthology Poetry of the Thirties, edited by Robin 
Skelton. Skelton was, as far as I knew, Canadian (and there’s a 
significance to this which I didn’t grasp until much later). In that 
anthology, and Skelton’s further volume Poetry of the Forties, I discovered 
a range of writings I would go on to investigate, in particular both the 
Auden crew and the Surrealists. I was not initially fond of Auden himself; 
instead the ‘Macspaunday’ poet who appealed most to me was Louis MacNeice, 
particularly his ‘Autumn Journal’ and the very idea of a poetry of 
reportage or at least an ‘impure’ poetry. I saved up my pocket money and 
bought MacNeice’s Collected Poems on the strength of what I’d seen in the 
anthology.

MacNeice was easy enough to obtain, but British and Irish poetry not of 
the ‘mainstream’ was difficult to access (even to know about) in the 
Australia of the late sixties. The first inkling I had that there were 
other poetries about came with another Penguin, the much criticised 
Children of Albion anthology. In it I came across the work of poets like 
Gael Turnbull, Andrew Crozier and David Chaloner. Not long after this, or 
maybe even a bit earlier I stumbled across books (then, remarkably, on the 
shelves of a Melbourne bookshop) published by Fulcrum. My Poundian friends 
at Monash University had known about Basil Bunting and now, at last, here 
he was. I discovered for myself the work of Roy Fisher and Lee Harwood, 
even Pete Brown whom I’d known as the lyricist for Cream. Around the same 
time I bought Gael Turnbull’s two Cape Goliard volumes, A Trampoline and 
Scantlings.

Meanwhile an English poet, Kris Hemensley, had moved to Melbourne. By the 
late 60s he was involved in an inner-city poetry scene that was quite 
different to the one I inhabited twelve miles out at Monash University. 
Although both groups were involved in post-Poundian poetries, mutual 
suspicion meant there wasn’t much contact until the early seventies when I 
actually met Kris. He had been editing stapled, gestetnered magazines, 
first Earthship, then Ear in a Wheatfield: the first local sources of 
current innovative British poetries. For some Australians this was the 
first time their work could sit alongside that of poets from elsewhere 
without the sniff of condescension. I published some early poems in The Ear 
and around this time ‘loosened up’ considerably. I don’t think Kris’s 
contribution can be overrated. The Ear’s contents ranged widely 
across ‘postmodern’ anglophone poetries and delved deeply into translation 
(it was where I first saw the work of Jabes).   

A decade later, Scripsi, another magazine based in Melbourne (edited by an 
old University friend Peter Craven, together with Michael Heyward) moved in 
on the high end of all this. Though it tended to go for the authors who 
were already famous (i.e. canonized by the TLS and LRB) and though its 
ambition seemed to be to replicate Granta, there were some interesting 
writers on its list. Through this magazine I began to correspond with Gael 
Turnbull. I also met the American poet August Kleinzahler who, along with 
Christopher Logue, took part in a Melbourne literary festival that was more 
exciting than any before or since (the Scripsi editors had called on 
Kleinzahler at short notice due to John Ashbery’s illness). With these 
people I exchanged books and ideas and with Collected Works, the bookshop 
that Kris and others set up, it finally became possible to keep up with 
some of the current British and Irish work.
I especially owe to Scripsi my attempts to translate Martial which they 
published as a small volume with an issue of the magazine. Some of these 
poems also appeared in a special translation issue of the English little 
magazine Figs, edited by Tony Baker. 

It still wasn’t easy to know what was going on in the Northern Isles and 
anthologies were an important if belated source. Distance had its problems: 
when Carcanet brought out A Various Art I found myself out of sympathy with 
the characteristic Cambridge tendency to omit information that was 
considered extra-poetic. As an Australian I wanted biographical details 
(photographs even) though I broadly shared the editors’ feelings 
about ‘personality’.

Of course the ‘mainstream’ Australian poets already had their British and 
Irish connections. When I was asked to submit material to an Australian 
issue of Verse magazine I sent them a book from which to choose work. The 
editors published the shortest poem (three lines) and in an unsigned 
introductory article warned their readers not to bother with my poetry. 
Even since then, Australians of non-‘mainstream’ persuasion, on publication 
in the UK, have to run the gauntlet of reviewers (expatriates themselves 
often enough) who see themselves as gatekeepers.

Strangely, many of the critics who supported post-Poundian poetries were 
unaware of the ‘other’ British poetry. Hugh Kenner, normally astute, wrote 
what is perhaps his worst book, A Sinking Island, about English writing and 
managed to avoid mention of any of the poets who might have belied his 
thesis: that Auden, Larkin and their ilk were simply not worth the 
attention of adult readers. Beyond Bunting, Kenner seemed blind to any 
possible poetries from the ‘island’; this when even the TLS and LRB were 
starting to write about Roy Fisher and one or two others. Perhaps the 
paranoia of ‘post-avant’ writers didn’t help. More than is the case with 
the Americans there has been a tendency among British poets in particular 
to shield their own work from the uninitiated, so that the Cambridge scene 
could be viewed from a distance as a ‘closed shop’, nouveau Apostles if you 
like. There was certainly, through the seventies and eighties, a perceived 
need for the outsider to show credentials. This may explain a tendency of 
some poetries to present themselves, John Forbes astutely noted, 
as ‘endless prolegomena to the subject’. 

What has finally altered the shape of the poetry world (the ‘avant’ 
and ‘post-avant’ world at least) has been the advent of the internet and of 
print-on-demand technology with its associated ordering methods. I was 
finally able to obtain the books of poets who had been writing for as long 
as or longer than I had like Allen Fisher, Geraldine Monk, Denise Riley and 
Trevor Joyce to name a few. The new modes of production and distribution 
have also taken the preciousness out of the British ‘avant’ poetry world. 
It has become clear enough that there are people out there in cyberspace 
who might actually want to read the work; all that was necessary was the 
existence of an efficient system of distribution and storage.

I mentioned at the beginning of this piece the significance of a Canadian 
(Robin Skelton) editing the Penguin books of Thirties and Forties poetry. 
At the time I awaited the appearance of a Fifties volume, though now I can 
understand why Skelton just might not have been interested in doing it. In 
retrospect it’s hard to imagine an English editor of the time taking on 
such a task since the legacy of the Fifties had all but obscured the 
interesting writing of an earlier period (pretty much until Peter Riley 
excavated Nicholas Moore’s work). It’s significant too that one of the more 
interesting general anthologies of modern British and Irish poetry should 
be edited by an American, Keith Tuma, and that, though published in the 
States by Oxford, the English division simply didn’t bother. It was an 
interesting exercise, not least for the anomaly of birthdate placing Philip 
Larkin next to Bob Cobbing. This is the Phillip Larkin who, as Roy Fisher 
amusingly (and amazingly) noted, almost appeared in Cid Corman’s Origin.