Published October 07, 2014
Professors Jack Heflin and William Ryan from the English Department at the University
of the Louisiana at Monroe have produced the second volume in a series of international
anthologies—“The turnrow Anthology of Contemporary Australian Poetry.”
Heflin and Ryan co-direct the university’s creative writing program. The first anthology,
“Eleven Contemporary Chinese Writers,” appeared in 2010. Both projects grew out of
their interest in international literatures featured in “turnrow, a Journal of the
Arts,” which they edited from 2001-2009.
Published by Desperation Press and turnrow Books, “The turnrow Anthology of Contemporary
Australian Poetry,” is edited by John Kinsella, author of more than thirty books of
poetry and editor of several anthologies, including “The Penguin Anthology of Australian
Poetry” (2008).
The Australian anthology boasts 600 pages of works from 123 poets, and marks the largest
American publication of contemporary Australian poetry to date.
According to Heflin, the collection is both inclusive and diverse, and representative
of both the major award winning poets of the country and its younger poets who have
published only one or two books of poetry.
Readers will recognize a variety of styles and attitudes in the collection; they will
find poems which might be labeled as formalist, innovative, confessional, political,
pastoral, lyrical, narrative, and those poems which reflect a “new hybridization and
hybridity” of these styles.
In his introduction “Territories of Paradox and Resolution,” Kinsella comments upon
the ethnic and cultural diversity of Australian poetry and the lack of a monolithic
poetic that governs this nation’s, or any nation’s, literature.
“I wanted then to select ‘down,’ to create the diverse and sometimes contradictory
conversations which I feel are necessary to show ‘outsiders’ the complexities of the
many aspects and angles of ‘Australian’ poetry,” said Kinsella.
The anthology includes poets who have lived their entire lives in Australia, indigenous
poets, poets who have emigrated to Australia, and poets who now live in countries
other than Australia. What this collection presents, Kinsella states, is “one part—another
piece—of a jigsaw of contemporary world poetry.”
That the anthology is published in Louisiana is significant. Of all the books published
in the United States last year, only three percent were of foreign origin. Desperation
Press and turnrow Books are committed to expanding the dialogue between American literature
and the literatures of the world. It is available on Amazon and from a variety of
major book distributors at a cost of $35.
