Landscapes with Figures

Invaders of the Heart by Lee Knowles; Interactive Press, 2008, $25.

From the late 1960s Australian poetry became dominated by a group that Mark O’Connor has described as “The Bubble”, and Richard Packer as “The Epigones”. One of their leading lights stated they specifically rejected poetry dealing with: “ethics, morality, religion and mythology”. This, while possibly in some cases simply sour grapes, was good news for ethics, morality, religion and mythology.

Had they gone off to play with their own trivial conceits, little harm might have been done. However, tightly organised mutual promotion was accompanied by an equally intense if generally unspoken campaign to exclude and silence all those not in the group. The reading and book-buying public had its own opinion, and tended to simply turn away from poetry altogether. The good suffered along with the bad.

Anyway, the bubble eventually went away somewhere, leaving hardly a single memorable line behind (save, of course, for…