Selected Poems 1971-2016

Duggan's is a poetry that determines to surprise: almost daring a reader to exclaim: you wrote like this about that? -Alan Wearne, Sydney Morning Herald I think of how Pound defined the image as `that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time'; and, still being thoroughly sane back in 1913, he went on to say: `the natural object is always the adequate symbol'. Such an imagist doctrine has always been at the heart of Laurie Duggan's sharp-eyed work, ever since the days when he was at the core of a group who got together at Monash, back in the 1960s. -Chris Wallace-Crabbe Duggan's poetry has the virtue that it never `abandons the local'. Like Paul Blackburn-a poet Duggan manifestly admires-he builds his work out of what he finds in, on or about the premises. -Tony Baker, Jacket How ferociously Duggan attends both to the there of the world . . . and the here of writing. -John Latta, Isola di Rifiuti The small poems ... slowly build up to a much larger narrative; a narrative of time and memory, of thinking and looking and being in the world, a kind of history that is happening on the sidelines. -Fiona Wright The poems of Allotments and Under the Weather can often seem easily-done, casual jottings but there is a complex pattern behind their conception and an extraordinary quality of poise about their execution. Both books remind us what a remarkable poet Duggan has become. -Martin Duwell See more