David Malouf enjoys a distinguished reputation, nationally and internationally, as a writer whose lyrical mappings of identity, place, and the body also bear upon questions of belonging and national i...
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Critical Essay by Katha Pollitt
"How close to where I live lie the ultimate ends of the earth," Ovid wrote from Tomis, the semisavage Black Sea village to which he had been exiled by Au...
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Critical Essay by Cecil Hadgraft
[If] you are committed to literature and have written poems, which are shorter and do not require the persistent physical effort—among other efforts—tha...
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Critical Essay by John M. Wright
Many of the poems in First Things Last … seem overwrought, as if Malouf were struggling to find forms in which to embody his lyricism. There is often a laboure...
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Critical Essay by Fleur Adcock
David Malouf is a … mature poet, and … [an] accessible one; his long looping sentences twining over their line-endings need to be followed carefully, but ...
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Critical Essay by David Guy
The coupling of two so different novellas as ["Child's Play" and "The Bread of Time to Come"] seems peculiar at first: one concerns a yo...
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Critical Essay by Peter Kemp
Surreally hard-edged, the world [the short novel, Child's Play, and the short stories, "Eustace" and "The Prowler," project] is one whe...
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Every reader comes to a text with an understanding of what they expect from it. This can be determined by your previous knowledge of a writer's work from critical reception such as reviews or popular ...
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