Laurie Duggan: Compared to What – Selected Poems 1971-2003
Published April 2005
Paperback, 224pp, 9x6ins, £11.95 / $20
ISBN 9780907562610
Laurie Duggan was born in Melbourne in 1949 and lives in Brisbane. He is the author of eleven collections of poetry in Australia, including the remarkable volume The Ash Range (1987, new edition, Shearsman Books, 2005), which won the Victorian Premier's New Writing Award, and also a volume of cultural history Ghost Nation: Imagined Space and Australian Visual Culture 1901-1939 (2001). This book is Duggan's first collection to be published in Britain and the USA, and is a career overview which introduces a vibrant and colourful new voice which will sound familiar at first — with its obvious influences from the New York School — but will then sound stranger, as a distinctive Australian element emerges, an element moreover that communicates well across borders.
"Laurie Duggan does so many kinds of poem well it's too much of a task to adequately convey his range and skill. He's written something of a geographical narrative called The Ash Range which perhaps owes as much to William Carlos Williams' Paterson as anything else. His translations of Martial's Epigrams are much admired by Hugh Kenner; and the late Peter Whigham, before his recent, tragic death, had been actively encouraging Duggan in these translations." (August Kleinzahler, Poetry Flash)
"Duggan's technical and emotional range, his grasp of history and ability to let the record stand – all take on a richness and freshness rare in local poetry." (Carl Harrison-Ford, Sydney Morning Herald)
"Mr Duggan is a stylist in an area of poetry where style is notoriously difficult to maintain . . . a form which demands absolute sureness of touch if it is not to collapse like a shattered mosaic. His lyrics of circumstance . . . catch the tone and peculiarity of urban Australia convincingly . . . He makes structures which are more than the facts and opinions they employ. That, I think, is poetry." (Peter Porter)
"His development has been governed by a restlessness, a refusal to be tied down to any theory or position . . . That the same poet could produce the subtly unfolding documentary poem The Ash Range, The Epigrams of Martial and then a poem like 'The Front' within half a decade is astonishing. A Selected Duggan, when it appears, will be dizzying in its variety. What other Australian poet is able to inhabit a number of 'styles' as though each were his only one?" (Gregory O'Brien, Scripsi)
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