"Blue Glass"? I was in a hurry - Blue Grass, of course.
I've been writing a little about Minter's work, which I really like - below
some comments about this collection -
All best
Alison
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.
--
Editor, Masthead: http://www.masthead.net.au
Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Home page: http://www.alisoncroggon.com
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