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Chargement... Collected Poemspar Francis Webb
   Aucun Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre. 1   shawjonathan | Apr 26, 2011 |  aucune critique | ajouter une critique
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"For many of us, readers and poets alike, Frank Webb's verse has been the gold standard by which complex poetic language has been judged...a master of last lines, of last stanzas and final phrases." - Les Murray *** Francis Webb (1925-1973) grew up in North Sydney with his paternal grandparents, who encouraged his love of music, books, and the sea. In 1942, during his final year of secondary school, his writing first appeared in the Bulletin, which led to friendships with Douglas Stewart, Nan McDonald, Rosemary Dobson, and Norman Lindsay, who illustrated his debut collection A Drum for Ben Boyd. In 1943, Webb joined the Air Force, completing his training as a Wireless Air Gunner in Canada in late 1944. After a sea voyage from Canada to England in 1949, he suffered the first of a series of breakdowns which increasingly restricted his life, but not his prodigious poetic gifts. Despite being regarded as one of Australia's greatest poets, Francis Webb has been out of print for 20 years. Webb's final changes to several poems in 1969 were ignored by then editor Douglas Stewart, so this book is the first collected edition that is faithful to the poet's own wishes, which 'rewrites' the Webb legacy and several famous poems. The book is introduced by the Australian poetry researcher Toby Davidson, and it is accompanied by 100 pages of notes utilizing the latest scholarship and commentaries. Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
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 Google Books — Chargement...GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)821.91Literature English English poetry 1900- 1900-1999Classification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne: (4.5)
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The Aust Lit scholar Jim Tulip wrote that ‘reading Francis Webb is like wrestling with an angel’. No one would disagree that wrestling is involved: just decoding the syntax can be a challenge in many of these poems, then there are compacted metaphors, elusive rhyme schemes, buried religious references, and an expectation that the reader will be as alarmingly erudite as the poet.
The angel part is harder to describe – the exciting part, that makes you feel you’ve been through the wringer, but that the world is somehow clearer, richer and more harshly beautiful because of it. He writes about sunsets, fog and wind as if they contain all the deepest struggles of the cosmos.
If you haven’t read any of Webb’s work, I recommend you start with the relatively straightforward ‘Five Days Old’. My mother, no lover of difficult language, wrote to me in a 1972 letter: ‘”Five Days Old” is sweet. I have to concentrate to read poetry so I haven’t read the others yet.’ More ambitiously, you might try the two sequences, Eyre All Alone and Ward Two. I’d skip the radio plays about Hitler (Birthday, this one was broadcast on the BBC in 1955), the Holy Grail (The Chalice), the anthropogenic end of the world (The Ghost of the Cock) and the man who invented electroconvulsive therapy (Electric).
One of the things that I loved about Webb’s poetry from the start is that it’s work. You can feel the labour of getting the words down, squeezing meaning onto the page, into the shape of the poem. Even at his most difficult, he is working at communication, never being difficult for its own sake. (