Selected Poems 1971-2016

<p>“Duggan’s is a poetry that determines to surprise: almost daring a reader to exclaim: you wrote like this about that?”   —Alan Wearne <em>Sydney Morning Herald</em></p><p>“Duggan’s poetry has the virtue that it never ‘abandons the local’. Like Paul Blackburn—a poet Duggan manifestly admires—he builds his work out of what he finds in on or about the premises.” —Tony Baker <em>Jacket</em></p><p>“How ferociously Duggan attends both to the there of the world . . . and the here of writing.”  —John Latta <em>Isola di Rifiuti</em></p><p>“The small poems … slowly build up to a much larger narrative; a narrative of time and memory of thinking and looking and being in the world a kind of history that is happening on the sidelines.” —Fiona Wright </p><p>“The poems of <em>Allotments</em> and <em>Under the Weather </em>can often seem easily-done casual jottings but there is a complex pattern behind their conception and an extraordinary quality of poise about their execution. Both books remind us what a remarkable poet Duggan has become.”   —Martin Duwell</p><p>“I think of how Pound defined the image as ‘that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time’; and still being thoroughly sane back in 1913 he went on to say: ‘the natural object is always the adequate symbol’. Such an imagist doctrine has always been at the heart of Laurie Duggan’s sharp-eyed work ever since the days when he was at the core of a group who got together at Monash back in the 1960s.”  —Chris Wallace-Crabbe</p><p>“The immediacy of Duggan’s perceptions possess a life which is not held in by the contours of the field but which realises the geography of “range”. This fine collection is more than “singular spaces” and lives as a “world of transactions” between poet and reader. Our guide through the spaces is a perceptive wit which looks closely at the world and concludes.”    —Ian Brinton <em>Tears in the Fence</em></p><p> </p>