Description
Suburbanism is a book of twelve essays on contemporary poetry. Robert Wood looks at New York, consumerism, lifestyle, birds, the Western Pilbara, diaspora, theorising, India, republics, malls, and supermarkets. He offers a fresh take on poetry as it relates to the suburbs, encouraging the reader to reflect on meaning in our own time, and to think about the field of New World Literature.
‘Wood’s Suburbanism is a book of poetics, but not in the traditional sense of a discussion of the way words can be used in poetic forms; rather it offers an exploration of poetic ways of being in the world. It provides a Blakean combination of philosophy, allegory, and analysis; like poetry itself, its meanings come through its rhythms and imagery as much as through the words’ literal meanings. The title might suggest a cosy locatedness, but his book sails into an archipelago of ideas about language and the myriad nature of human experience.’
Dennis Haskell AM
author of Attuned to Alien Moonlight
Emeritus Professor, University of Western Australia
