Short description:

Since the publication of his first poetry collection Kargun in 1980, Lionel Fogarty has produced some of the most complex, playful and strident poems written in English, and has been regarded by some as the greatest Aboriginal Australian poet of his generation. While over the course of his career, Fogarty has had relatively little recognition in awards or grants, recent attention to his work suggests a new turn in how his poetry is read and understood in Australia and overseas. Emerging from these conversations, Lionel Fogarty in Poetry and Politics illuminates the craft and art of Fogarty’s poetry in hand with his political activism in order to open his work for new readers and researchers. Bringing together a wide range of critical and creative voices in the first book-length study of Fogarty’s work, this essay collection represents a landmark moment for the study of Indigenous studies, poetry and poetics, Australian literature, and for future work on Fogarty’s poetry.

Philip Morrissey (senior editor) is the former Academic Coordinator, Australian Indigenous Studies within the School of Culture and Communication at The University of Melbourne, Australia. He has coedited a number of essay collections and poetry anthologies, including Kim Scott: Readers, language, interpretation (2019), Reading the Country: 30 years on (2018) and Lionel Fogarty: Selected poems 1980-2017 (2017).

Dashiell Moore is a DECRA Fellow in English and Writing at the University of Sydney, Australia. A prominent researcher in world literature, his first book, The Literary Mirroring of Aboriginal Australia and the Caribbean (2024), examined the relationship between Indigeneity and creolisation in Aboriginal Australian and Caribbean literature.

Long description:

Since the publication of his first poetry collection Kargun in 1980, Lionel Fogarty has produced some of the most complex, playful and strident poems written in English, and has been regarded by some as the greatest Aboriginal Australian poet of his generation. While over the course of his career, Fogarty has had relatively little recognition in awards or grants, recent attention to his work suggests a new turn in how his poetry is read and understood in Australia and overseas. Emerging from these conversations, Lionel Fogarty in Poetry and Politics illuminates the craft and art of Fogarty?s poetry in hand with his political activism in order to open his work for new readers and researchers. Bringing together a wide range of critical and creative voices in the first book-length study of Fogarty?s work, this essay collection represents a landmark moment for the study of Indigenous studies, poetry and poetics, Australian literature, and for future work on Fogarty?s poetry.

Table of Contents:

1. Reserve Language.- 2. '"lazy exterminator in their policies": Protest poetry in the age of 'practical reconciliation''.- 3. Violence and Guerrilla Poetics.- 4. ?Frisky Poem and Risky?: Lionel Fogarty and Poetic Play.- 5. 'Please Don't Take Offence': Hatred and Unpleasantness in Lionel Fogarty's Poetry.- 6. ?Art is hard, love is harder?.- 7. The Sacred and The Political in the poetry of Lionel Fogarty.- 8. Radical Inversions in Lionel Fogarty?s ?I am Not Santa?: lies of the ?gift?.- 9. Thinking Beyond Insiders and Outsiders in the Poetry of Lionel Fogarty.- 10. Images of Language Loss in the Guerrilla Poems of Lionel Fogarty.- 11. Lionel Fogarty and Transnational Blackness.- 12. The Power of Lionel Fogarty?s Poetry and Politics in American HBCUs* and Prisons.- 13. The Figure of the Tree in Lionel Fogarty?s Poetry.- 14. ?I and I, just mean you and we?: Ali Cobby Eckermann Interviews Lionel Fogarty.- 15. Afterword: ?Lionel Fogarty in Poetry and Politics?.