Product Description
Bruce Dawe has received wide recognition as Australia’s most popular poet, his books often being set for study at secondary and tertiary levels. Slo-Mo Tsunami offers a typically wide range of poems covering personal, social, political, and religious issues.
Some critical opinions
“It is because no single Dawe poem strains to grasp the totality of life that Dawe can summon a kaleidoscope of public and private feeling with poems that continually delight and surprise. He is an eligible popular poet because he is accessible in both language and attitude. Attitude is key: Dawe’s audience is generously included in the poems through his eschewal of an overly forceful poetic persona.” – Nicholas Birns, Australian Book Review.
“Equally evident is Dawe’s intense involvement with and response to every experience. Like William Blake, he demonstrates the ability ‘To see a world in a grain of sand’. Dawe bestows on the minutiae of life a mythic significance, both gently mocking and affectionately admiring. He celebrates the milestones and familiar icons of our existence and our culture, insisting on their value…”- Margaret Saltau, The Age.
“It is very difficult to assign Dawe’s poetry to a particular genre. Obviously his place is secure among the great Australian poets and he shares with some of his contemporaries a passionate engagement with the social needs and pressing issues of this century… Much of his poetry is in the public domain; his concerns shared by many working men and women… He is modern without being avant garde, contemporary without being radical. In this respect he could be likened to W. H. Auden.”- Kilian McNamara, Wizard Study Guide.
“More than any other poet in Australia, Bruce Dawe has assimilated the influences of his generation of poets and combined them in a set of interests and a style that spread across from popular poetry into literature. He is the one contemporary poet who is genuinely literary and genuinely popular. He writes about matters of social, political and cultural interest to the great middle mass of the Australian population.”-K. L. Goodwin, York Notes.
REVIEWS
“Although this is merely a personal preference, I have always responded most to the Dawe poems that embody very intense feelings, usually of grief, in syntactic as well as conceptual modes in which the play of tones is very complex. Many of these have, over recent years, revisited the death of his first wife, Gloria. Slo-Mo Tsunami opens with two such poems, and they are typical of Dawe at his best: the first exploiting the metaphor of white-water rafting for the experience of going through the dying process with one’s partner.”- MARTIN DUWELL, Australian Book Review
