No of Pages: 200
RRP: 29.95
Idle Talk – Gwen Harwood Letters
This volume edited and with invaluable notes by Alison Hoddinott, comprises Gwen Harwood’s fascinating, unexpurgated letters to Alison and Bill Hoddinott, during four crucial years from 1960-1964, a period which can be described as Harwood’s creative floreat. They are also years in which her life-long relationships with A.D. Hope, James McAuley and Vincent Buckley begin, her friendships with Vivian and Sybille Smith and others consolidate, and in which Harwood was briefly notorious for her scandalous Bulletin acrostics and her confounding publication under several male pseudonyms.
Approximately 10% of these letters have appeared already, in A Steady Storm of Correspondence (2001), but here we not only have the unedited versions, revealing even more than that volume, the complex and not always kind and tactful personality of Harwood (who more than once urges the Hoddinotts to ‘burn these letters’), but numerous others which it might have been felt unwise to publish earlier, and from which not everyone – even Harwood herself – emerges unscathed. The collection is rich in insights not only into Harwood’s mind, working methods, and circle, but also into the literary politics of one of the key periods in modern Australian poetry.
Gwen Harwood (1920-1995) has long been recognised as one of Australia’s finest poets of the second half of the twentieth century. Her floreat was in the 1960s, when she was also briefly infamous for the notorious acrostic poems published unwittingly by the Bulletin in 1961. She was a friend and protege of A.D. Hope, and of such other key figures of the period as Vincent Buckley and James McAuley. With these and numerous others she was also a fascinating and unbridled correspondent.
Reviews & Interviews
“This book cannot be recommended too highly” – Jamie Grant | Quadrant| June 2016 – Download PDF review
“This book is a valuable contribution to literary and cultural history. It affords a fascinating glimpse into the mind and life behind the poems, providing rich insight into Harwood as a tour de force who astutely recognised her own gifts and demanded to be heard.” – Sarah Day | Cordite Poetry Review | 25 July 2016 – Click here to read the full review.
“Gwen Harwood’s letters reveal an exuberant wit and sense of the ridiculous” writes Susan Lever in A Poet in the Provinces | Inside Story | 18 August 2016 – Click here to read the full review.
Granny’s Good Reads in Gleebooks, gleaner – Vol 25, No 9 – October 2018
To mark the centenary of her birth, ABR asked a number of her colleagues and admirers to record some of her poems. Happily, there are hundreds of them to explore.
Click here to listen.
About the Author
Alison Hoddinott was born in Hobart in 1931 and was educated at the Friend’s School and the University of Tasmania. She won a scholarship to Oxford University in 1954. She has written extensively on the poetry of Gwen Harwood, including The Real and the Imagined World (A&R 1991). She edited Blessed City (A&R 1990), Gwen Harwood’s 1943 letters to Thomas Riddell, which won the Age Book of the Year, and The Present Tense (ETT 1995), Gwen Harwood’s final collection of poetry, which was shortlisted for the Adelaide Festival Award and for the Banjo Award. With Gregory Kratzmann, she co-edited Gwen Harwood’s Collected Poems (UQP 2003). She has published a number of articles on the novels of Charlotte Brontë in the English journal Brontë Studies, and two articles on her family, and on its convict ancestors, in the Papers and Proceedings of the Tasmanian Historical Research Association. Her most recent publication is Idle Talk (Brandl & Schlesinger 2015), an edition of Gwen Harwood’s letters to her and her husband in 1960−1964. She taught for many years in the English Department of the University of New England, specialising in Victorian literature. She retired as a Senior Lecturer in 1996 and lives in Armidale.
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