The collected verse of Mary Gilmor : volume 1 1887-1929

Edited by Jennifer Strauss
St. Lucia, Qld. : University of Queensland Press, 2005

ISBN: 0702234850

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Book description
Mary Gilmore was Australia's foremost women poet during the first half of the twentieth century as well as an activist who cared about what Australians had done to the continent's Indigenous people and its natural environment. Yet gilmore was intensely proud of her pioneer heritage. Her sometimes inconsistent ideas about European settlement, White Australia, the Church, sexuality, eugenics, heroism and warfare provide vivid insights into the social and ideological shifts and conflicts that have marked the course of Australian history.

Volume One of this two-volume edition of Gilmore's poetry covers the period from 1887 to 1929. It re-unites 388 previously uncollected poems with those chosen for her published collections of this period. For the first time we have a clear view of the poet of radical politics who co-existed with the bush balladist of The Tilted Cart and the singer of passion and domesticity, much approved for the 'womanliness' of Marri'd and Other Verses and The Passionate Heart. Gilmore was still working her way in middle age towards the control over form and voice that distinguishes the work to be found in Volume Two, due for publication in 2006.

In this variorum edition her poetry has benefited from a scholarly editorial scrutiny. Both volumes provide reliable texts of all her published poems as well as documenting the often revealing alternative readings when the poems were republished for different audiences in journals, collections and anthologies.

Annotation has also been provided for contemporary references and allusions that otherwise might be unclear to the modern reader.

About the author
Jennifer Strauss is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the School of Literary, Visual and Performance Studies at Monash University.

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