With the contemporary poems in Kinsella’s anthology in mind, it struck me that this suburban scene is the stuff of modern Australian poetry. It is the milieu of older poets such as Bruce Dawe, Chris Wallace-Crabbe and Vivian Smith. The uncanny ordinariness of it can also been found in mid-career and younger poets such as Jill Jones, Tracy Ryan and Bronwyn Lea (whose brilliant poem ‘These Gifts’ was eerily apposite: ‘A late heatwave has bleached / the lawn, burnt off the last tree ferns’).

But while the milieu is obviously Australian – eighty-eight per cent of Australians live in urban centres – so is the strangeness. Australia is essentially an uncanny nation. Its imported language(s), its histories from elsewhere, its architecture and gardens ghosting those from other times and places, and its inability to properly acknowledge its ever-present history, all illustrate this condition. Walking with my dog under quintessentially Australian conditions (a heatwave) in a quintessentially Australian space (a suburb), I was struck by how much the strangeness of the poems in Kinsella’s anthology matched the uncanniness of my suburban street. The strangeness of Kinsella’s anthology is especially centred on the uncanny nature of the Australian landscape, an emphasis that brilliantly links poems as disparate as Charles Harpur’s ‘A Mid-Summer Noon in the Australian Forest’ and Ouyang Yu’s ‘Moon over Melbourne’.

If the publication of The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry is a major event, it is so partly because such an ambitious project – to cover ‘the range of Australian poetic achievement’ from colonial to contemporary times – is not often attempted. While anthologies of Australian poetry are far from rare, modern anthologies that attempt to cover the entire history of Australian poetry (rather than a particular theme, region or historical period) are much less common. Since Harry Heseltine’s The Penguin Book of Australian Verse (1972), there have only been a handful of anthologies that deal with ‘Australian poetry’ as a whole. Most notable are Les Murray’s The New Oxford Book of Australian Verse (1986) and John Leonard’s Australian Verse: An Oxford Anthology (1998).

Perhaps because of the rareness of such works, anthologies that cover the whole history of Australian poetry habitually raise anxieties among critics and poets. The almost embarrassing bluntness of inclusion (you’re either in or you’re not), and the apparent attempt to ‘sum up’ an entire literature, mean that such anthologies raise questions along the lines of ‘What is the purpose of an anthology of poetry?’ and ‘Is there a “canon” of Australian poetry?’. As seen in Andrew Riemer’s recent Sydney Morning Herald review of Kinsella’s anthology, such anxieties can even lead to questions along the lines of ‘what is “Australian poetry” anyway?’.

To some extent, ‘Australian poetry’ is a category that exists not simply because ‘Australia’ exists and because people write poetry here, but also because of the funding, policy and publishing exigencies that flow on from the existence of Australia as a nation state. Perhaps surprisingly, The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry has not received external funding (such as a publication grant from the Australia Council), but it remains the case that such works exist in part because there are bodies that will fund them, institutions (such as schools) that will use them, and other institutions (such as libraries) that will purchase them.

The anxiety that nationalist anthologies commonly provoke is often covertly concerned with their nationalist condition and whether it is relevant or not to, in this case, poetry. The idea that we might have moved beyond Australian literature per se is one addressed by Robert Dixon, Professor of Australian Literature at Sydney University, in his speech (published in Southerly) at the 2007 conference marking the retirement of his predecessor, Elizabeth Webby. Dixon noted that when Australian literary studies formed, primarily in the 1970s and 1980s, the necessary institutional and publishing moves were made to establish a national literature. ‘This meant establishing and critically justifying a national canon; setting separate courses of study; building up scholarly resources such as bibliographies and histories of the national literature; producing reliable editions of canonical texts; and publishing biographical and critical studies of Australian authors.’

On the face of it, a work such as The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry may appear to belong to such a ‘curatorial’ project, one that some may see as outdated. Dixon, however, is quick to point out that his idea of ‘the critic as curator includes both preservation and innovation’. In as much as anthologising is a kind of literary criticism, Kinsella has similarly balanced the demands of both preservation and innovation. He has also, I would argue, addressed what Dixon sees as the current ‘internationalising’ phase of Australian literary studies, one which moves beyond defining the literature in narrowly nationalist terms. While Kinsella’s anthology is necessarily limited in the ways it can chart the intersection between Australian and international poetry (no matter how influential the Symbolists have been to Australian poets, for instance, he cannot include Mallarmé or Rimbaud), Kinsella is nevertheless extremely sensitive to the complex interplay between the national and the international, the local and the general. Such sensitivity is seen in his useful introductory essays and biographical notes, as well as his choice of poems.

As Kinsella implies, the international condition of Australia can, in any case, clearly be seen in the country’s earliest literature. Poetry such as ‘On Receiving from England a Bunch of Dried Wild Flowers’, by Elizabeth Deborah Brockman (described by Kinsella as ‘an entirely neglected, though major, poet from “bush” Western Australia’), may be utterly generic and reliant on British antecedents, but it also ‘carries with it an intensely unsettled sense of belonging and estrangement’. The estranging relationship between ‘mother country’ and colonial Australia simply highlights the fact that, prior to the twentieth century, ‘Australia’ didn’t even exist as such. Colonial ‘Australian poets’ were usually English and Irish people spending time (by choice or otherwise) in one of the Australian colonies. They ranged profoundly in circumstance and social status, from the convict Francis MacNamara (‘Frank the Poet’) to the Supreme Court judge Barron Field. With regard to these earlier ‘Australian poets’, Kinsella, like Murray and Leonard before him, has benefited from the scholarship of the last couple of decades in both colonial and early indigenous writing. Heseltine’s anthology begins with Charles Harpur; in Kinsella’s, Harpur appears as the twentieth poet.

The problematics of ‘Australian poetry’ go beyond historiography and the constitution of a national literature. The condition of poetry itself is placed under considerable pressure by the unequal relationship that exists between traditional Aboriginal song and Australian poetry, a relationship that has existed ever since Europeans first took an interest in recording, translating and appropriating this oral literature. Kinsella places indigenous song at the head of his collection, a move which he explains after the fact. This strategy is a powerful one. By forcing the (Anglophone) reader to begin an encounter with ‘Australian poetry’ through indigenous language without editorial contextualising, Kinsella suggests that ‘Australian poetry’ can only be understood as existing within a pre-existing, and continuing, indigenous context.

The opening poetic words of the anthology are Jimmy Murray’s words in the Girramay dialect:

Mungga walmanyu murrul ngumarrangu
Murrul walmanyu mungga ngumarrangu
Mada nyiburu gubu guraragu

These are translated as:

A mighty noise rises up, roars as it rushes by
Rushes and rises, a mighty noise that roars
Hurl out a leaf that is soaked in sweat

The energy and symbolism of these lines is a propitious start to an anthology that is (like its editor) marked by an attraction to energy and poetic strangeness. That the author or translator(s) of the lines had Blake’s radical ‘Holy Thursday’ in mind (‘Now like a mighty wind they raise to Heaven the voice of song’) is unlikely, but the echo again suggests something of the complex, powerful and even accidental connections between ‘Australian’ and ‘indigenous’ poetry and the wider world. The danger with such an opening move is to present these indigenous voices as if they speak from some vague prehistory of Australian consciousness. Kinsella avoids such a possibility in two ways. Firstly, he includes Paddy Lando-Naddi’s ‘White Engine against Black Magic’, which explicitly presents indigenous knowledge within the context of a colonial modernity. Secondly, Kinsella includes indigenous song (sometimes untranslated) in the body of the anthology, as well as numerous indigenous poets, from David Unaipon to Lionel Fogarty and Lisa Bellear.

In addition to emphasising indigenous work, Kinsella’s broad editorial selections are strong ones, though his decision to structure the collection into three centuries (eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth) is a little curious. A poet born in the eighteenth century is not necessarily an eighteenth-century poet. Almost all of the earliest Australian poetry is in fact nineteenth-century poetry. The structure does allow, however, useful introductory material to be presented by Kinsella along broadly historical lines.

One of Kinsella’s most significant editorial decisions has been to emphasise contemporary work. This emphasis is based on the belief that ‘the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries have proven and are proving to be fertile periods for poetry’. And Kinsella’s decision to select single poems for most contemporary poets allows him to ‘give a sense of the diversity, strength and uniqueness of the poetry that is available today through books, journals, the internet and performance’. The reference to performance here is notable. While Kinsella emphasises traditional ‘literary’ poetry, the inclusion of performance and audio-oriented poets such as Jas H. Duke, Gabrielle Everall and Miles Merrill means that Kinsella’s anthology has a scope that its predecessors lacked.

The decision to select single poems for most contemporary poets frees Kinsella from trying to give ‘representative’ selections of any individual poet’s work (though he inevitably moves towards that with the more canonical poets who receive more than one poem, such as Les Murray). Instead, the collection of poems as a whole illustrates the range and strength of contemporary Australian poetry. In addition, many of Kinsella’s choices are powerful precisely because they are not expected, canonical or representative. This does not mean, as Kinsella points out in his introduction, that ‘canonical’ poems are not included. They are. It is extraordinary to discover yet again the power of a poem such as Kenneth Slessor’s ‘Five Bells’, or the comic gloom of Barcroft Boake’s ‘Where the Dead Men Lie’, or the oddity of Bernard O’Dowd’s ‘Australia’. But in other instances (especially with the contemporary poets), Kinsella repeatedly singles out poems that I, at least, have overlooked, underestimated, forgotten about or just not read. These include Thomas Shapcott’s superb ‘Chekhov’s Mongoose’, Martin Johnston’s early post-modern ‘Gradus Ad Parnassum’, and Chris Mansell’s comically informative ‘Definition Poem: Pissed as a Parrot’.

Such inclusions generally support Kinsella’s main contention that ‘much Australian poetry has been consciously or unconsciously experimental and innovative’. Related to this experimental and innovative nature is an ‘urgency about communicating the uniqueness and significance of the Australian landscape, and the relationship between individuals and community and country/place’. Such emphases suggest how much anthologising may be a covert form of autobiography, given their centrality to Kinsella’s own writing. Kinsella’s practice powerfully suggests that one model of strong anthologising is to allow the anthologist’s own interests and procedures, rather than convention or precedence, to determine the nature of the selections.

Certainly, the anthology presents a memorable picture of Australia and its poetry. It is a picture in which the strangeness and violence of Australian colonial poetry, rather than its conventionalism and sentimentality, are emphasised. It is one in which nineteenth-century light verse is included to illustrate its surprising oddity to contemporary eyes (as in J. Brenchley’s ‘Odorous Melbourne’). It is also one in which the possibility of a link between literary innovation and social change is repeatedly, and seriously, entertained.

It is extraordinary how much Kinsella has managed to fit into his 450 pages. Much of the richness can be seen in the effect that migrant poets have had on Australian poetry, from the Iraqi-born Yahia Al-Samawy, the Iranian-born Ali Alizadeh and the Macedonian-born ∏O. Inevitably there may be some names one might have liked to have seen appearing here (Kevin Brophy and Evan Jones are on my wish list), but Kinsella has managed to pack in an extraordinary number of poets, some of whom may be little known or unknown to even well-informed readers. (Some readers may notice a few notable omissions among the contemporary poets. Penguin tells me that this is because they refused Penguin permission to reprint their poems in Kinsella’s anthology.)

It strikes me that poetry anthologies such as these aren’t really for ‘experts’. One of the strengths of such collections is that we cannot wholly determine what uses people may put them to. Someone may find an elegy in Kinsella’s collection that can be put to use in their own ‘work of mourning’. A bored student may one day suddenly discover the brilliance of John Forbes or Jennifer Maiden. Or else someone may walk out of a house in the middle of a heatwave and see things altogether differently.