This beautiful anthology gathers modern Australian poets working within, against and around the sonnet.

Geoff Page’s selection is an exercise in showing how durable the form remains once poets begin worrying at its edges: loosening rhyme, disrupting metre, compressing narrative and adapting fourteen lines to suburban life, migration, work, family, landscape and political history.

The range is unusually broad, placing canonical figures such as Gwen Harwood, Douglas Stewart, David Malouf, Chris Wallace-Crabbe and John Tranter alongside less familiar and emerging voices. Read consecutively, the poems become a miniature history of Australian poetry’s changing speech: formal and satirical, vernacular and experimental, intimate one moment and sharply public the next. The sonnet persists not because everyone obeys its rules, but because constraint gives poets something useful to resist.

A strong anthology for readers interested in poetic form without the embalming fluid, and a useful survey of how Australian writers have made an inherited European structure answer to local language and experience. The collection won the poetry category of the 2004 ACT Writing and Publishing Awards.

Indigo, 2003 paperback. Light cover wear and handling marks; internally clean.