Rondo

Chris Wallace-Crabbe’s Rondo harvests a decade’s worth of new work by one of Australia’s foremost poets. The collection paints a vivid portrait of eucalypt Australia’s current state within an rapidly changing world. It dramatises historical figures and events with a light touch and distinctive humour, with counterpointing snapshots of the modern world and an eloquent anxiety about the current state of our ecosystem. Mortality is given a modern music in several elegies for close friends and family. 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’.`Prefacing one of his new poems, Wallace-Crabbe quotes D.â â H. Lawrence: “You just walk out of the world and into Australia.” Here it is the other way round. You walk out of a Wallace-Crabbe poem and into the world.’ (Alastair Niven)

Reviews of Rondo

'A witty, endearingly slangy, yet unostentatiously philosophical Australian poet'. – Times Literary Supplement