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Article Excerpt
New Selected Poems, by Philip Hodgins; Duffy & Snellgrove, 2000, $22.
New Selected Poems, by Peter Goldsworthy; Duffy & Snellgrove, 2001, $22.
WHILE THE New Selected Poems of Philip Hodgins is without a failure, it is nonetheless possible to detect a steady growth through the collection as the poet's voice, seemingly keeping pace with his cancer, matured to become one of the finest in Australian letters. The most notable development occurs in the third collection, Animal Warmth, where in the relief conferred by the cancer's remission--after the "deadline", as Hodgins called it, had passed--the poet diversified his range of poetic forms and applied his trade, with increasing dexterity, to a variety of subjects other than his cancer.
Death, of course, "the overwhelming fact of our existence", is never far beneath the surface in Hodgins' work. Just as cancer feeds on the poet's "decaying form", so do crows feed on the eyes of cows, a pig feeds on an unlucky farmer and we feed on our livestock. As such, the inane cruelty of the creature that "expands in my guts, in my being" is reflected in poems about our and the...
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