Paper Bark Press
Calyx 30 Contemporary Australian Poets
Edited by Peter Minter and Michael Brennan
2000, 328 pages, softcover, 215x150mm
ISBN 1 876749 18 0
Cover photograph by Olive Cotton, courtesy Josef Lebovic Gallery
Calyx: 30 Contemporary Australian Poets is a groundbreaking anthology. Covering work published throughout the 1990s, Calyx showcases the most exciting developments in recent Australian poetry, drawing on the poetics of a generation which has come of age at a time of rapid change. Both national and international in its perspective, Calyx explores the evolution of Australian poetry's increasingly global interactivity, and its broad correlations with contemporary notions of identity, gender, the environment and the postmodern political landscape.
Calyx is the first collection of a strong new breed of committed and unique voices. Bringing together poets from across Australia, this anthology provides readers of poetry with a broad cross-section of all that is contemporary and energetic in work that embraces a commitment to the craft and history of Australian poetry, while confidently challenging that history and creating new ways of seeing and speaking.
Edited by Michael Brennan and Peter Minter, Calyx brings together the critical and editorial expertise of two poets who have an intimate knowledge and feeling for the dominant trends of new Australian poetry. Both Brennan and Minter are widely published in Australian and international critical and poetic domains, and are known for their energetic pursuit of new ideas, their successful creation of new arenas for Australian poetry publications, and their links with poets and writers on poetry from around the world. Calyx is the defining anthology of the Australian poets of the new millennium.
'Michael Brennan's and Peter Minter's new anthology of contemporary Australian poetry is unique: a space in which poetry is organic, rhizomic, molecular and alive. What runs through every mini-oeuvre presented here is a sense of the language itself, of the relationship between the self and the poetic voice, between experiment and tradition.'
~ John Kinsella
'The poets in Michael Brennan and Peter Minter's exciting new anthology represent the cutting edge of current Australian practice and demonstrate, in case US and UK readers still don't know it, that theirs is a poetry no one can afford to ignore.'
~ Marjorie Perloff