Bookblog #48: My pretties



Philip Roberts (editor), Poet's Choice 1971 (Island Press 1971)
-----, Poet's Choice 1972 (Island Press 1972)
-----, Poet's Choice 1973 (Island Press 1973)

When I watch The Collectors, I feel very little kinship for those people displaying their accumulated objects, usually with diffident pride but always with affection. When I think of my bookshelves, however, I realise I have more in common than I think. Perhaps I'd be a serious book collector if my mother hadn't thrown out my treasured drawer full of Mad magazines while I was away at boarding school. (Perhaps, that is to say, I have even more cause to be grateful to my mother than I'm usually aware of.) Some of my favourite books-as-collector's-items are poetry books, Bob Adamson's first book, a collection of translations from Greek by Martin Johnston, and these three being at the top of the list. They were all published with love, on fine, textured stock and without much sense of economics (but then, as Les Murray implied, poems and economics tend not to mix).

These three anthologies (I don't think the series went any further) were edited by Phil Roberts, a Sydney poet who I believe was Canadian-born. He set them by hand and printed them on his own press, a run of 500 numbered copies of each. I've just re-read them, with much pleasure. It was a grace note to hear the editors of this year's best-of-2008 poetry collections on the radio recently, naming quite a number of the same poets as Phil gave a guernsey to all those years ago. There are also, of course, a number of voices hat have fallen silent in the intervening decades: Dransfield waxing romantic about his heroin habit (I never understood the fuss about him), David Campbell waxing equally romantic about Dransfield, AD Hope alive and witty, Judith Wright reinventing herself, etc. There's a poem by Rhyll McMaster that features chooks and so reads a little differently in post Feather Man days. Just as we're thinking about living more economically (like, within our means even) and visiting the library rather than buying books, I rediscover the joys of owning objects like this. bad timing!

Posted: Wed - December 31, 2008 at 12:27 PM           |

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