Gregory Kratzmann

Gregory Kratzmann reviews 'By the Book: A literary history of Queensland', edited by Patrick Buckridge and Belinda McKay

September 2007, no. 294 • 08 November 2022

The ten essays in this volume revisit the achievement of the late Cecil Hadgraft, whose Queensland and Its Writers, published nearly fifty years ago, is a masterly and non-doctrinaire exposition of a century of writing in Queensland. Hadgraft was one of the pioneers of the teaching of Australian literature at a time when academics trained in British traditions joked about what the hapless students ... (read more)

Gregory Kratzmann reviews 'The Cambridge History of Australian Literature' edited by Peter Pierce

February 2010, no. 318 • 07 October 2022

A suitable motto for any prospective compiler of a large-scale history of a national literature might be ‘No Place for a Nervous Editor’ (to adapt the title of Lucy Frost’s study of nineteenth-century women’s journals). A few of the portentous questions for this imagined figure include: how is ‘literature’ to be conceptualised at the beginning of the twenty-first century (witness the B ... (read more)

Gregory Kratzmann reviews 'Vincent Buckley: Collected Poems' edited by Chris Wallace-Crabbe and 'Journey Without Arrival: The life and writing of Vincent Buckley' by John McLaren

July-August 2009, no. 313 • 01 July 2009

Amnesia about writers of the past, even the not too distant past, is one of the besetting ills of our culture. How many readers of poetry under forty have more than a nodding acquaintance with the work of A.D. Hope, Francis Webb, Douglas Stewart or Vincent Buckley? All are fine poets, remembered now (if at all) through a handful of anthology pieces, partly because their published volumes usually d ... (read more)

Gregory Kratzmann reviews 'Westering' by Peter Kirkpatrick

June 2007, no. 292 • 01 June 2007

‘Westering’ is a resonant archaism which makes a wittily ironic title for Peter Kirkpatrick’s new volume. This is work which has a decidedly début du siècle flavour in its hard-edged urban perspective on ‘out west’. The dialectic of city/bush, with its history from Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson to Les Murray, is voiced in several registers through these finely crafted and sharply lit ... (read more)

Gregory Kratzmann reviews 'Bad Hair Days' by Pamela Bone

November 2007, no. 296 • 01 November 2007

Pamela Bone has written a remarkably brave book. She writes about how the chemotherapy which she underwent after the diagnosis of multiple myeloma in 2004 robbed her of the fearlessness of her life as journalist, human rights activist, feminist, and public speaker. She pays tribute to the late British journalist John Diamond, who insisted that writing about his cancer was not brave at all. Bone di ... (read more)

Gregory Kratzmann reviews 'Out Of The Box: Contemporary Australian gay and lesbian poets' edited by Michael Farrell and Jill Jones

April 2010, no 320 • 01 April 2010

Does the title of this anthology, heralded by its editors as the first collection of Australian gay/lesbian/queer poetry, refer to the myth of Pandora’s pithos? Hesiod’s version of the story, which sees Pandora as the unleasher of all manner of evils on the (‘rational’/patriarchal) world, has been interrogated by feminist scholars who see Pandora in an older incarnation of ‘gift-giver’ ... (read more)

Gregory Kratzmann reviews 'The Best Australian Poems 2007' edited by Peter Rose and 'The Best Australian Poetry 2007' edited by John Tranter

December 2007–January 2008, no. 297 • 01 December 2007

Given the Howard government’s recent proposal to include the compulsory study of selected aspects of Australian history for secondary school students, perhaps it is time for more educators to follow the lead of Nicholas Jose and others in urging that Australian literature occupy a more prominent place in the school curriculum. Literature – and poetry in particular – does not have the politic ... (read more)

'Postcard confessions: On Gwen Harwood' by Gregory Kratzman

August 1992, no. 143 • 01 August 1992

When Gwen Harwood has something private to say, she writes it on a postcard, so that ‘nobody takes any notice of it’. Writing the biography of this elusive poet has set Gregory Kratzman some teasers. Gwen Harwood’s poetry has been the subject of an increasing number of essays and articles during the last decade; in the last twelve months three books have appeared (written by Alison Hoddin ... (read more)

Gregory Kratzmann reviews 'Old Songs in the Timeless Land: Medievalism in Australian literature 1840–1910' by Louise D’Arcens

May 2012, no. 341 • 20 April 2012

Medievalism – the inspiration of the Middle Ages and their Gothic-Romantic and Aesthetic descendants for modern writing – is one of the more fascinating historical discourses to have emerged in Western criticism in recent decades. In Australia, this criticism has been led by Stephanie Trigg, Andrew Lynch, and Louise D’Arcens, who has written perceptively (among other topics) of the architect ... (read more)

Gregory Kratzmann reviews 'The Stranger's Child' by Alan Hollinghurst

July–August 2011, no. 333 • 29 June 2011

Weeks before its release, the Man Booker tipsters are laying short odds on Alan Hollinghurst’s new novel, the successor to his 2004 winner, The Line of Beauty. Booker cynics might agree that the great British literary race has in some seasons had more in common with pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey than the Derby, but here is surely a promising contender for 2011’s glittering prize. Where The Line o ... (read more)