Poems

Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo American Literary Relations 10.2 (2006): 167-185.

1990

This paper explores the ways in which poetic language might enact and facilitate the fundamental human experience of mourning, where mourning is understood theoretically to encompass the subject's always bi-directional relationship to loss. This concept of mourning as a process involving a concomitant acknowledgement of absence and an ongoing introjection of the lost object, is here considered through the particular focus of two poems which deal with the loss of the mother. The rupture of this dyadic relationship of mother and daughter is read as emblematic of the primary tearing upon which subjectivity is predicated. Through a focused literary critical analysis, involving both close reading of poems and a theorisation of the nature of a broader poetic language, and informed by a psychoanalytic framework, this paper describes mourning as a form of poesis and the poem itself as an ethical process by which to grapple with the rich interplay of loss and possibility, speech and silence. Keywords: Mourning, Poetry, Gender

Remembering the Myall Creek Massacre. Ed. Jane Lydon and Lyndall Ryan. UNSW Press, 2018

1990

Benin Journal of Literary Studies, 2019

This study examines Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s exploration of migration and social experience in his poetry as a vehicle of appraising Caribbean realities. Brathwaite’s poems will be interpreted using New Historicism as literary tool with a view to highlighting migration/journey motif as fundamental in exploring social realities as well as the human condition in the Caribbean society. This paper is a qualitative and library-based study of Brathwaite’s poems as literary art, focussing specifically on interpretation of their content which explores migration and social experience in the Caribbean world. Four selected poems are engaged in the study for their distinction in reflecting core concerns of the Caribbean enclave specifically dealing with social conditions and migration. These four poems are also used to highlight Brathwaite’s style to enhance the forcefulness of his message in them. Keywords: Caribbean literature, poetry, social experience, migration/journey motif

Artha - Journal of Social Sciences

The paper looks at texts selected from the Anthology of Australian Aboriginal Literature edited by Anita Heiss and Peter Minter as well as poets chosen from the website Creative Spirits from Oodgeroo (Kath Walker) to Zelda Quakawoot to understand how gaze invents and reinvents people and their culture. The metaphor of the museum is used to question the Empire‟s attempt at erasing and archeologically reinventing ancient societies, while interrogating how dispossession leads to silencing of communities. The second part analytically delineates the evolution from a victim position to, consciousness raising, resistance, recovering and reconstruction of one‟s cultural heritage and voice. The third section of the paper conclusively argues how modern aboriginal poetry has attempted at non-choral, esoteric as well as representational identity formulations as a prelude to dehusking the valance of prejudice and civilisational arrogance, which continue to indent the First Citizen in cultural sp...

In this thesis, I discuss how three poets with a connection to Wales, Gwyneth Lewis (born 1959), Pascale Petit (born 1953) and Deryn Rees Jones (born 1968), develop their poetic practice beyond ordinary notions of home and belonging. Drawing on Wendy Wheeler's <i>New Modernity? Change in Science, Literature and Politics</i>, this project is described as a poetics of `ecology,' using the broader meaning of the term, which refers not only to the study of plants and animals, but also to institutions and people in relation to their sense of place. I argue that Lewis, Petit and Rees Jones promote an awareness of ecology or interconnectedness and they achieve this project by going beyond personal or individual concerns in a kind of poetic exile. This poetic exile entails the rejection of a `whole' and `bounded' selfhood and the acceptance of otherness or difference in one's own identity means that the boundaries between the self and other disintegrate or blur. I proceed in the general introduction to the thesis to consider the problems of modernity as described by Wheeler and I use her model to identify the melancholy modernity of R. S. Thomas; Dylan Thomas' poetic mourning; and the preoccupation with maternity in Gillian Clarke's poetry. Wheeler suggests that such phases emerge from anxiety about lost teleologies or insecurity of the ontological self, and ecology is the acceptance that human beings are never hermetically sealed, secure units. In the body of the thesis, I explore how Lewis, Petit and Rees Jones exile themselves from ordinary selfhood to discover ecology with others. The chapter devoted to Lewis discusses her commitment to decreation, a project that unravels the dominance of the centre over the margin through poems praising angels of the minor, the diminutive and the bathetic. The next chapter considers Petit's exile to Latin America and I arguethat by interrogating the strangeness in other cultures, she forces Western culture to recognise its own strangeness unravelling the clear distinction between `civilised' and `barbaric' cultures. Rees Jones similarly focuses on the strangeness of the human self in her representation of liminal, marginal subjects, such as the clone passing for human. I conclude that the angel, Latin America and the clone are all poetic tropes by which these poets dissolve the oppositional binary of self versus other.

Commonwealth Essays and Studies, Vol. 36, No. 1, 2013

Though Kate Grenville's Colonial Trilogy 2 frequently signals the author's awareness both of recent Australian historiography and of postcolonial theorising on colonial rhetoric and colonising practices, the author seems oblivious of certain reflexes (both psychological and ideological) that infliltrate her writing, subverting her declared intention of telling the truth about Australia's frontier history. By analysing the function of names and naming in The Secret River, I show how Grenville's narrative works both to disguise the fiercely predatory logic that drives colonisation and to normalise the process of Aboriginal dispossession.