Very interesting, thanks, Alison. Yes. And a fine sense of the line,
which I really cottoned to.
To me, he's a perfect example of what I call the anti-lyric lyric poet,
playing the lyric line & melody but also interrogating many of its
conceptual assumptions...
Doug
On 1-Aug-06, at 4:13 PM, Alison Croggon wrote:
> Like much poetry published since the 1990s, Minter's poetry
> synthesises many
> of the contradictions at work in Australian poetry, not by resolving
> them,
> but by embracing them. Minter's work is among the most subtly textured
> lyric
> poetry presently being written in Australia, animated by flashes of
> visionary excess and precise, intelligent feeling. Here the tensions
> between
> carnal, embodied experience and a modern awareness of the mediation of
> experience are held in erotic suspension. Minter's richly sensual
> language
> invokes an osmotic exchange between the human and the natural, between
> world
> and language.
>
> In his recent collection Blue Grass, the Romantic subtext in Australian
> poetry is picked up and rigorously questioned through modernist
> traditions
> exemplified by poets like Ed Dorn, William Carlos Williams, Charles
> Olson,
> JH Prynne and Zukofsky. His allusions include Mallarme, Homer and
> Chaucer
> and a melange of contemporary music (Radiohead, Pink Floyd, Devendra
> Banhart), although, interestingly, given the sensibility expressed in
> the
> poems themselves, none of the canonical Romantics. This poetry creates
> a
> layering of referencing and quotation that works in much the same way
> as
> composting, rotting down to create new matter. It is by this process of
> organic transformation and exchange that Minter's work indigenises
> itself.
Douglas Barbour
11655 - 72 Avenue NW
Edmonton Ab T6G 0B9
(780) 436 3320
http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/
Latest book: Continuations (with Sheila E Murphy)
http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/UAP.asp?LID=41&bookID=664
Perhaps, after all,
there is no polite way to withdraw
from the privilege of the first person.
Méira Cook
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