Volume 18 No. 1 — 1 May 1997

‘What Is Gone Is Not Gone’: Intimations in the Poetry of Thomas Shapcott

David McCooey

Abstract

Discusses Shapcott's poetry as 'intimations', 'especially concerned with intimating (which can be a way of avoiding closeness), intimacy and hearing intimations (often, of course, of mortality). Argues that 'rather than a poetry requiring diagnosis', Shapcott's verse 'requires a teasing out of the difference between intimacy and intimation.

The full text of this essay is available to ALS subscribers

Please sign in to access this article and the rest of our archive.

Published 1 May 1997 in Volume 18 No. 1. Subjects: Poetic techniques, Use of language, Writer's craft, Thomas Shapcott.

Cite as: McCooey, David. ‘‘What Is Gone Is Not Gone’: Intimations in the Poetry of Thomas Shapcott.’ Australian Literary Studies, vol. 18, no. 1, 1997, doi: 10.20314/als.335d898a8f.

    Related essays and reviews

    David McCooey
    Neither Here Nor There: Suburban Voices in Australian Poetry

    Despite over three decades of critical discourse on Australian suburbia Australian poetry on the subject seems strangely under-represented Television and tupperware, not terza rima, are…

    1 November 1998
    David McCooey, Thomas Shapcott
    An Interview with Thomas Shapcott

    Shapcott discusses his career, approach to poetry, and his work's relationship to Australian literary cultures.

    1 May 1997
    David McCooey
    Still Life: Art and Nature in Vivian Smith’s Poetry

    Vivian Smith's poetry occupies an ambiguous position in Australian literature: it is highly regarded, but intermittently discussed. Perhaps some critics continue to find Smith's formalism…

    1 October 1995
    David McCooey
    Leisure and Grief: The Recent Poetry of Chris Wallace-Crabbe

    Among poetic forms, the elegy has best survived the twentieth century's antiformalist thrust. However, as Jahan Ramazani demonstrates in Poetry of Mourning, modern elegy…

    1 October 1996