Rondo

Shortlisted for the 2019 Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry in the NSW Premier's Literature Awards. Chris Wallace-Crabbe's Rondo harvests a decade's worth of new writing by one of Australia's foremost poets. It paints a vivid portrait of eucalypt Australia's current position in an rapidly changing world. The poet asks for fresh meanings from Gallipoli and Scotland, from physics and from `Art's porous auditorium', where poetry can still be heard. `The words are only the words,' he writes, `which is more or less everything.' Critic Eric Ormsby dubbed Wallace-Crabbe a `genial smuggler of surprises': `his uncommon affability, even when treating the gravest subjects, leaves the reader unprepared for his sudden luxuriance of phrase.' (TLS)