Contemporary Australian Poetry

such, it represents a broadening of the universal set for all English-speakers

If, however, one believes that a poem is the result of a unique interaction between its poetics and the world beyond it, then the idea of managing a readership with the right set of criteria becomes absurd. It is in the light of this latter understanding that this anthology has been constructed.

Besides, poems do not only engage with poetics and ideas, they also interact with the world beyond them

And if no-one, in these rhizomic and hydra-headed days, can quite believe in the one virtuous production, what chance is there of the one correct interpretation?

The world, however, is a much more complex place than it was fifty or a hundred years ago.

Combine this with the sort of arguments that are current everywhere, anyhow—about the constructed nature of the self, for instance, or the provisionality of the narrative—and one can see how our sense of the strangeness of the world has had relatively little to impede it.

Taken together, such factors have produced a kind of 'natural' post-modern country—

Our origin as an Enlightenment society, moreover, may have given us a slightly different set of behaviours to some of those American responses which were shaped by the Reformation.

At the heart of this is a doubt about the validity of claims to difference: one day, all ground will shift, and all distinctions prove unsustainable.

The 'tall poppy' syndrome continues today. If one does well, one will only be forgiven if one remains comfortable in all types of company.