The emergence of young and energetically committed poets in 1968–69 was dramatic, a landmark. Tranter is right to place this in its socio-political context. The introduction of combat conscription in Vietnam was without precedent (World War II had only non­combative conscripts) and it forced on a generation of Australian youth, as it had in America, an immediate and profound questioning of the whole basis of their society. It was also a period of intense idealism: the Flower People of the 1960s were the Children’s Crusade of their time. The turning to drugs and a disaffiliation from imposed social values lie behind much of the youthful writing of this period.

The accompanying technological largesse is also well pointed up by Tranter: cheap printing techniques are the most obvious, though I would add the extraordinary growth of the long-playing record industry which created new musical forms, especially in innovative rock albums of almost symphonic density: they underline the ambitious spirit of growth and of new possible horizons of that time. The paperback publishing boom provided access to work of a whole new generation – one’s immediate contemporaries overseas. If we were dragged into Vietnam, we were also caught up in the wider climate of exploration and re-definition.

Most of the ‘generation of ‘68’ began writing as a result of these stimuli. Many were remarkably ignorant of what had been attempted (or achieved) in their own country. Their starting-off point was the ‘clean slate’ or pioneering fervour and echoes of this are strong throughout the volume. The most engaging quality that results is a willingness to take risks, to be vulnerable to whatever presents itself as being available for getting onto paper. We have been a notably timid culture, always, and this breakaway from bourgeois cautiousness is one of the best things to have happened in our writing.

The most spectacular consequences have been in the way many established poets (‘the generation of ‘48’?) rethought their language, forms, and poetic intentions: David Campbell, John Blight, and Vincent Buckley, the list extends through to the middle generation (Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Rodney Hall, David Malouf) and perhaps, indeed, should end with Tranter and Adamson themselves. There seems no doubt that many poets found new vigour and sharpness as a result of being forced to re-examine their poetic imperatives.

Having established the premise of this ‘New Australian Poetry’, John Tranter has (sensibly, I think) opted to make his selection from within that declared parameter. It is a ‘committed’ anthology in this sense. Is it a ‘coterie’ anthology as well?

The test is whether the overall result suggests exclusiveness or inclusiveness. In 1969, when I edited Australian Poetry Now, I frankly attempted to define that moment by making a very broad sweep – sixty-four poets. It is the sort of thing that can only be done once. By the end of 1972, or 1973 when Dransfield’s death followed that of Buckmaster, that first ‘generation’ and its energy had been absorbed. The New Australian Poetry implicitly confirms this by including just about all the big poems of that period: Adamson’s ‘The Rumour’, Tranter’s ‘Red Movie’, Martin Johnston’s ‘The Blood Aquarium’.

The New Australian Poetry includes the work of only twenty-four poets. Given this selection, what actually follows?

There is, as I have suggested, a clear focus on important achievements of the period 1968/73. Because of the small numbers there are significant (and regrettable) omissions: Richard Tipping is perhaps the most spectacular, but also J. S. Harry, Rhyll McMaster (only two women make the anthology at all: Vicki Viidikas and Jennifer Maiden), as well as important names who later disappeared from view: Ian Robertson, for instance.

In the ‘consolidation’ period of the later 1970s, selection becomes more curious. Phil Roberts’s ‘Will’s Dream’, or Fay Zwicky’s ‘Kaddish’ are pinnacles of recent innovative writing whose absence glares out – especially as this period is represented by amiable but distinctly marginal poems of Philip Hammial and Clive Faust.

At the end of his introduction, Tranter excuses his omission of ‘many other young poets whose developing work shows sympathy with the writing included here . . . but this book is not meant as a state-of-the-art review. I see it as an attempt to give shape and body to a historical period in our writing that began around 1968, and that I feel is now drawing to a close.’ This is too narrow a viewpoint. Within the ‘historical period’ of his survey the later 1970s have produced two significant new generations of poets, one of which expands rather than consolidates the direction of the new ‘movement’. Omission of work by the group that includes Ken Bolton, Tom Thompson, Denis Gallagher, Anna Couani, and Dane Thwaites seriously undermines the authenticity of the book – and emphasises a complacently middle-ageing viewpoint of the decade’s achievement.

The introduction makes a brief sortie into theory on modernism. The underlying intent appears to be to underline the provisional nature of recent work, with its immediacy, conscious ephemerality, dissociation from didactic or moral programming, and its willing vulnerability to living as process and language as its own reference. But only Tranter, Forbes, and Hammial seem entirely modernist in this sense. All the others, including Hemensley, Jones, Krausmann, and Wearne (to name only a few) use language as game or absurdist conjunction, but the overwhelming authority behind most of the work is that of the experiencing mind with its need to impose conscious shaping force upon impression or perception. In other words, moral values and issues are implicit. Tranter’s theory of modernism in the Australian context seems more willed than revealed.

The time was certainly ripe for a survey. The New Australian Poetry is the best attempt so far – the achievements are there, pretty largely. But my real regret is that the editor ends up playing favourites rather than following through the logic of his own guidelines. It is not the exclusion of rival groups or ‘schools’, it is the imbalance between an attempted ‘historical’ survey and an implied ‘merit’ listing that makes it less conclusive than it should have been. It lacks a certain generosity – exclusiveness rather than inclusiveness. This implies, also, a certain timidity perhaps. The time was ripe for framing and mounting the decade’s exhibits, for seeing how good and energetic they look, for learning and absorbing. The New Australian Poetry is more than an interim report, but it is not the final say.