Read it Again - Reconstruction Author:Chris Wallace-Crabbe This is a wide-ranging, incisive study of contemporary poetry, its predicament and its rich traditions. While it focuses on Australian cultural conditions, it sees them in terms of the English-language ecumene, for example setting an Irish poet beside an Australian, and ranging from Keats, as our strong forebear, to the modern Polish poet Zagaje... more »wsky. In this book, Wallace-Crabbe examines the role of poetic discourse in the face of both popular and high cultures. He also asks what remains for us of the sacred, that wizened category of attention. Among his Australian protagonists are A.D. Hope, the Mallarmean John Forbes, and the painter, Sidney Nolan, whose images of the bushranger Ned Kelly have become powerfully iconic. These critical essays are coloured both by the abiding traditions of a formative landscape and by the postmodern city, with its dwindled, acerbic gaze. They should seize the attention of anyone concerned with the fate of poetry in a PlayStation age.« less