Poetry’s popularity has been on the rise in recent years. Though it’s been a long time since poetry was a mainstream, best-selling form, it has remained a quiet achiever over the long haul. Poetry’s power, in many ways, resides in its watchfulness over language: untethered from the need to cover a lot of ground in a large-scale narrative (though poetry can do that too, of course—see Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey) poems can respond immediately to changes in language as we speak it, and can be molded the way clay or pastry can be molded.
Sometimes poets create new words—for example the many coinages of Shakespeare—and sometimes they record a moment in time. In his preface to Lyrical Ballads William Wordsworth wrote of the desire to write in “the real language of men”. At times poetry has continued to veer towards regular speech, and at times it seeks to find what is ornate in language or to create new words to capture new experience. Both impulses are important to our sense of our language as living.
In the past decades we’ve seen best-selling poets. Many of these are Instagram poets—Rupi Kaur has probably done as much as anyone to lead readers to the poetry shelves of the library—but some are also award-winners and writers whose strange and spiky uses of language remain haunting. The lives of the poets also continue to fascinate us: think of Jane Campion’s film of John Keats, Bright Star. (Keats’s complete poems and letters are available in the collection—just one example of classic poet whose life and work still fascinate us today.)
I’ve talked with a lot of people about poetry over the years. Most people tell me that they don’t like poetry... Nonetheless, I am yet to meet someone who doesn’t love at least one poem, whether it’s the zingy nonsense of Dr Seuss, the galloping rhythms of Banjo Paterson or the stately, considered craft of a Shakespearean sonnet.
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There are times in our lives that we turn to poetry traditionally: for all that most people feel no need in day-to-day life to read a poem, there is something about the important rites of life—weddings, funerals—that often invites a poem as participant, as witness. I think this speaks to poetry’s role in memory, a quality that is linked to its musicality. Language is bound up in music, and poems are attuned to this. It is not just rhyming that poets employ: sound patterns such as alliteration and repetition are equally important, contributing to the way a poem is often a memorable text capable of holding feeling over many years. This need for bringing poetry to ritual moments is captured in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral when John Hannah’s character Matthew reads Auden’s poem “Funeral Blues” a the assembled mourners.
I’ve talked with a lot of people about poetry over the years. Most people tell me that they don’t like poetry—a sentiment that the poet Marianne Moore herself echoes in a poem she titles “Poetry”: she begins the poem “I, too, dislike it”! Nonetheless, I am yet to meet someone who doesn’t love at least one poem, whether it’s the zingy nonsense of Dr Seuss, the galloping rhythms of Banjo Paterson or the stately, considered craft of a Shakespearean sonnet.
The Pleasures of Poetry
While sound is always important in poetry, it is not always the most important feature of a poem. I think of poems as exploring a number of pleasures: music, image, thought, narrative, emotion and technical dazzle are among these pleasures. A good poem can transform, in a short phrase or a perfect metaphor, the way we see the world.
Most books are designed to be read from cover to cover but a lot of poetry collections can be read according to whim. Many readers, skeptical of the commitment to the whole book, might page through a collection and look for a “short one”. If that passes muster, the reader might try another short one, followed by something a bit longer. While there are books written as single arcs, most poetry collections comprise poems written at different times, complete in themselves. These poems are often enhanced by being placed in conversation with the other poems in the book, but it is also just fine to pick up a book of poetry in order to read a small handful of individual poems.
I often think that because people usually love at least one poem, there is always the chance that they will learn to love another poem, or to entertain the possibility that they may love another poem. And there’s no right or wrong way to love a poem: even the poems that feel mysterious to us in meaning may still make what I call “a different kind of sense”. Allowing room for that different kind of sense—and allowing room for the stillness or density of a good poem—can be its own reward. See if, after all, there may be another poem out there for you to love.
Poetry has had a run in the public literary conversation in Australia in recent years, being recognised for the Stella Prize two years running, first with Evelyn Araluen’s sharp, funny Dropbear crowned in 2022, and then with Sarah Holland-Batt's elegiac The Jaguar in 2023.
Evelyn Araluen, Dropbear
Araluen jousts with popular narratives of Australianness and aboriginality from an indigenous perspective, making space for herself as an important voice in Australian literature. She takes on, in particular, nostalgia and the kitsch of Australiana in poems that are by turns acerbic and tender as she acknowledges “Straya is a wild straggly abyss”. Between poems that are searing in their anger, she also produces reflective lyric verse such as “Dirge” in which she write “the other history/ is a dream we tell/ to give the night ghosts”.
Sarah Holland-Batt, The Jaguar
Holland-Batt uses the form of poetry to create a monument to memory as she writes of her father’s Parkinson’s disease, dementia and death. In “The Gurney” she recreates in the reader the feeling of dread at anticipating a death when she writes of a “the gurney unattended/ in the hallway outside my father’s room”, while in “Terminal Lucidity” she writes of eyes “alive with the old intelligence” in the final hours.
The poet broads out the scope of the collection in a third section that sees the poet travel in many locations, cutting to very human experiences in a world as various as the imagination itself. In both cases, Australian poetry had a chance to stand centre stage on the Australian literary scene and reach a broader readership. YPRL’s collection also holds Holland-Batt's previous collection The Hazards and her book of essays on contemporary Australian poetry, Fishing for Lightning.
Amy Crutchfield, The Cyprian
In 2024 the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for poetry was won by Melbourne writer Amy Crutchfield with her debut collection The Cyprian. In taking the many facets of the Greek goddess Aphrodite as a loose organising principle for her collection of the now, Crutchfield reminds us that poetry can really last.
After all, it is from ancient poetry that we know the most about Aphrodite and her kin—and the figures of ancient gods and goddesses have continued to be important, transformative subjects for writers over millennia.
Grace Yee, Chinese Fish
Maria Takolander, Trigger Warning
Grace Yee won the Victorian Premier’s Award for Literature in 2024 with Chinese Fish. In her poems she focuses on migration stories, considering the lives of Chinese immigrants to New Zealand and telling the story of a particular Chinese family making a new life. It is a work that proves the long narrative power of poetry is still alive and well, and Yee is, like Crutchfield, a significant debut voice in Australian poetry. Victorian writer Maria Takolander previously won the Victorian Premier’s Award for poetry in 2022 with Trigger Warning, a book that reorients the way we think through individual poems that address in turn the poet’s relationship to other writers, to domestic life and to a planet under threat.