November
1, 2002
Poet
Chris Wallace-Crabbe to Read November 4
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Chris Wallace-Crabbe
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Wustralian poet Chris
Wallace-Crabbe will read from his work and discuss Australian
poetry on Monday, November 4, at 4 pm in Mary Woolley Hall's
New York Room. His presentation, part of the English department's
series of readings by contemporary writers, is cosponsored by
the English department and the Odyssey Bookshop.
"Chris Wallace-Crabbe
is one of the liveliest voices in the lively Australian poetry
scene. A formal dexterity and moral seriousness underlie even
his most colloquial and amusing poems," said Emily Dickinson
Senior Lecturer in the Humanities Mary Jo Salter, who is moderating
a panel on Australian poetry at Harvard University's conference
Imagining Australia: Literature and Culture in the New New World.
The conference began October 31 and will continue through November
2.
In addition to prose
works, literary criticism, and varied anthologies, Wallace-Crabbe
has published fourteen volumes of poetry, including For Crying
Out Loud (Oxford University Press, 1990), Rungs of Time (Oxford
University Press, 1993), and Whirling (Oxford University Press,
1998). He was elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of the
Humanities in 1984 and is winner of the Grace Leven Prize for
Poetry (1986), the Dublin Prize for the Arts and Sciences (1987),
the Human Rights Award for Poetry (1992), and the D.J. O'Hearn
Prize for Poetry (1995).
Wallace-Crabbe has
traveled worldwide on behalf of the Department of Foreign Affairs
and Trade and the Australian Council. He has taught at Harvard
University and numerous other institutions in Britain, the United
States, Italy, and his natal Melbourne—a city, he writes,
that "bloats / Between the plains of water and of loam .
. . . ," where " . . . . chocolate soil throws up its
harvest of / Imported and deciduous platitudes, . . . ,"
a city where "much has died" and "little has been
born."
As director of the
Australian Centre at the University of Melbourne, Wallace-Crabbe
placed particular stress on the unique development of Australian
culture and on the ways in which it relates to the cultures of
other nations. He is now emeritus professor of the Australian
Centre and continues to share his work around the world. His most
recent book of poetry, By and Large (Carcanet, 2001), will
be for sale at the reading.
The next reading sponsored
by the English department will feature several MHC students of
creative writing. That event will take place Monday, December
2, at the Odyssey Bookshop at 4 pm.
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