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THE COLLECTED VERSE OF MARY GILMORE. VOLUME 2 1930–1962

Edited by Jennifer Strauss

General editor Paul Eggert

Mary Gilmore was Australia’s foremost woman poet during the first half of the twentieth century and it was as a poet that she wanted to be remembered when she died in 1962. More attention however has been given in recent years to her long and eventful life, her role as feminist, her championing of Australian literature as an instrument of national identity and her activism for various forms of social justice.

This two-volume edition honours her wishes by bringing together for the first time all of Mary Gilmore’s copious published poetry. Volume one covers the period from 1887 to 1929. These poems reflect her affiliation to the Bulletin in the value placed on pioneering bush traditions, the Australian working man, and the ANZAC tradition, but are also vitally and distinctively interested in the roles and rights of women. 

The poems of Volume two, from 1930 to 1962, not only demonstrate increased poetic maturity in the control of form and tone, but also reflect a more complex response to social and political issues. Deeply, sometimes quixotically, patriotic, she nonetheless developed, from the late 1920s on, serious concerns about what Australians had done to the continent’s Indigenous people and its natural environment. This concern for the natural environment, and the threats posed to it by atomic warfare, underpinned her support for the peace movements that followed World War Two, and found expression among the poems of her final collection, Fourteen Men. If no systematic thinker, Gilmore was, to the end, in love with ideas and with words.

Volume 2 contains:

• Preface covering Gilmore’s Aboriginal translations, supplementing the comprehensive general introduction in Volume 1
• Complete annotation of contemporary references and allusions that might otherwise be unclear to the modern reader
• Documentation of the often revealing alternative readings when the poems were republished for different audiences in journals, collections and anthologies
• Chronology of composition dates for all poems in Volumes 1 and 2
• Index of first line and index of titles for Volumes 1 and 2

Volume 1 Reviews
‘... accomplished poems emerged among a sizeable body of verse that is generally considered not to have transcended its time and place. This judgement, however, has usually been made without access to Gilmore's complete published oeuvre, which the Academy Editions of Australian Literature has now made available. The editor, Jennifer Strauss, contributes an illuminating introduction to this first volume and it contains a number of useful indexes, a satisfyingly detailed chronology and a note on the manuscripts.... this book demonstrates the overall competence of her writing and includes a variety of accomplished works. It reveals a feisty and inventive, if not always subtle or original, mind. Gilmore was ahead of her time in her concerns but fairly orthodox in her views on sexual politics. The work collected here helps to define a period when Australian literary culture began to come forcibly into its own.’
– Paul Hetherington, Times Literary Supplement

‘The volume is a triumph of scholarship and industry, and a real work of recuperation and restoration. It gives us new material for rereading Australian literary culture from the 1890s to the 1950s.… Now in this authoritative new edition, we come in contact again with a vanished world that has so many threads connecting it with our own.’
– Vivian Smith, Australian Book Review

Contents:
General Editor’s foreword
Chronology of biographical events
Preface
The Poems, 1930–1962: headnote for each poem listing all republications; their textual differences, Gilmore’s own notes and glosses; editor’s annotation
Chronology of composition dates for all poems in Volumes 1 and 2
Index of first line and index of titles for Volumes 1 and 2

About the editor
Jennifer Strauss was Associate Professor in the Department of English, and is now Honorary Senior Research Fellow. The author of a number of critical works, in particular on the poetry of Judith Wright and Gwen Harwood, Strauss’s own poetry has been published in many journals and in several collections, and her work has been widely anthologised.