Review of Robert D. FitzGerald by A. Grove Day

Abstract

This book falls into quite distinct sections: a thirty-page biography of FitzGerald; a brief summary of FitzGerald's ideas on poetry and poetic craft; a poem-by-poem commentary on the contents of Forty Years' Poems; and an excellent bibliography which, though not as ambitious as that of the Libraries Board of South Australia, often has more real information and corrects some of the vagaries of the earlier work — 'Fern Tree Gully Lower', for example, has reverted to 'Lower Fern Tree Gully'. Of these sections the bibliography is the most important apart from the quotation from FitzGerald's letters. Grove Day has had free access to an immense range of material and his text is often illuminated by quotation from unpublished letters which one hopes will eventually be printed.