Review of A.D. Hope: Selected Poetry and Prose, The Double Looking Glass: New and Classic Essays on the Poetry of A.D. Hope, and Lost Angry Penguins: D.B. Kerr and P.G. Pfeiffer: A Path to the Wind

Abstract

At one point in his 1991 collection Orpheus, A.D. Hope wondered if poems might have an afterlife, lingering in the skull of some dead poet just as a shell 'holds murmurs of the sea'. A more certain way for poetry to survive is to stay in print and this new selection of Hope's writing from Halstead Press can only help to maintain his reputation, both here and abroad, as one of Australia's finest poets. The editor David Brooks explains in his introduction that the poems in this selection were chosen to represent Hope's astonishing stylistic range—epic, satiric, erotic and so on. Some Hope readers may demur at the inclusion of epistolary poems like 'The Isle of Aves' (which runs to over 240 lines), rather than shorter (and perhaps better known) lyric works like 'Splätlese' or the elegiac 'Trees'. Nevertheless, this is a reliable coverage of all the major poems from a writing career that spanned over half a century.