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Anne Elder (1918–1976)

Auteur de Chess (Gamer Baby)

7 oeuvres 15 utilisateurs 1 Critiques

Œuvres de Anne Elder

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Partage des connaissances

Nom légal
Elder, Anne Josephine Chloe
Autres noms
MacIntosh, Anne (birth)
Date de naissance
1918-01-04
Date de décès
1976-10-23
Sexe
female
Nationalité
Australia
Lieu de naissance
Remuera, New Zealand
Lieu du décès
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Études
St. Catherine's School for Girls, Toorak
St. Margaret's School, Berwick
Professions
poet
ballerina
Courte biographie
Anne MacIntosh was born in Auckland, New Zealand, and went to Australia with her family in early childhood. Educated at home by a governess and at St. Margaret's School, Berwick, she travelled with her family to England and Scotland at age 15. In 1940, she married John Stanley Elder, a solicitor; the couple had two children. Inspired by Anna Pavlova, Anne Elder began taking ballet lessons in the 1930s and went on to have an impressive career dancing with Colonel de Basil's Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, the Australian Ballet Company, and the Borovansky Ballet Company. She also was a poet and in the mid-1960s, she began to publish regularly in newspapers and periodicals. Among her works were two highly regarded collections of poetry, For the Record (1972), and the posthumously published Crazy Woman and Other Poems (1976). A commemorative volume, Small Clay Birds, was published by Monash University in 1988. The Anne Elder Trust Fund Award for first works of poetry was established in her memory by the Fellowship of Australian Writers.

Membres

Critiques

The work of Anne Elder, the poet whose life is celebrated in The Heart's Ground (see my review) has been reviewed by some of Australia's most preeminent poets and she is mentioned in The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature so it is not for me to attempt anything like what might be called a review of this collection. Rather, I shall simply share some of the poems compiled by her daughter Catherine Elder in The Bright and the Cold, Selected Poems of Anne Elder.

The book begins with a tribute by the late Judith Rodriguez (1936-2018) in which she says that in Elder's first collection For the Record (1972), she wrote lovingly of houses, with familiar references to Melbourne, and a love of key nineteenth-century English writers. Rodriguez also quotes the poet Philip Martin, reviewing Elder's second posthumously published collection Crazy Woman and Other Poems (1976) as expressing 'many tongues of love'. He noted that Elder rued her poetry as 'domestic' when war and mythology were supposed to offer grander topics but he found her a risk taker in subject as well as tone. I find all these comments to be true of the poems in this new collection:

My favourite of all of them is 'The Bachelor'.
There was an old friend through all our childhood
who talked with my father, reliving the batching days
of cream flannels and the nicest girls in Perth
with pink pomade complexions that still warmed his memory. (p.65)

Written with intense compassion, this poem tells how trained in the law, this man could not settle to it or anything else after the war. After a life circumscribed by not quite enough money and a painful loneliness, he died in a hospital for old soldiers, having shaped Anne Elder more than he knew with the delicate finger/ of eccentricity.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2019/01/27/the-bright-and-the-cold-selected-poems-of-an...
… (plus d'informations)
 
Signalé
anzlitlovers | Jan 27, 2019 |

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Statistiques

Œuvres
7
Membres
15
Popularité
#708,120
Évaluation
4.0
Critiques
1
ISBN
8