Review of The Gimbals of Unease: The Poetry of Francis Webb by Bill Ashcroft, and A Woman's Voice: Conversations with Australian Poets by Jenny Digby

Abstract

Bill Ashcroft's monograph on the poetry of Francis Webb is an eccentric but valuable book. Some of the eccentricity derives from the poet himself: Webb is, after all, the author of notoriously difficult poetry and somebody who requires, more than most writers, a lot of decisions about the relative significance of a whole host of biographical features including religious background and psychic state. But Ashcroft's book compounds an already difficult problem by being based on an admirably deep and evolving engagement with Webb's poetry stretching across an adult life-time. It is one of those books where one feels that, by the time it is finished, its author has been altered to the extent that it must be written again.