Starting from Melbourne: The Coherence of Chris Wallace-Crabbe

Chris Wallace-Crabbe has always been an engaging literary critic and acerbic commentator on Australian culture, and his literary essays, criticism, reviews and fiction have been generally discussed in isolation from his poetry. In this essay, I trace some of the illuminations that his essays, criticism and writings on poetics shed on the preoccupations revealed in his poetry. These preoccupations, pervasive and porous, include the phenomenon of poetry, the exploration in his poetry and prose (and that of other writers) of what he calls 'value', the yearning for some system of belief of which language is a volatile expression, and the correspondence of images or myths of individual and national identity with changing circumstances. They constitute a unified and coherent pattern of testing language’s capacity to foreground desired 'meaning' while holding in balance accretions that threaten the overthrow of precision.