Space, Place, Materiality in Contemporary Australian Poetry

This chapter examines key themes in the work of a number of significant contemporary Australian poets, including Mez Breeze, Astrid Lorange, Amy Ireland, and Lionel Fogarty. The chapter begins with a brief description of the work of Barron Field in the early nineteenth century—the founding instance of colonial poetry in Australia—which established the English language, the codex, print, and Romantic poetic concerns as the dominating conditions of subsequent Australian poetry. This chapter shows how the aforementioned contemporary poets are exemplary of a shift away from this colonial Romantic poetics, toward more complex and obscure formations that are concerned with multiple languages, both natural and artificial, the material virtuality of different kinds of productive technologies, new political affiliations, and so on