A tragic television star, the brain of a genius, and a prize-winning pig – 3 new books are brilliant examples of contemporary Australian poetry

By Sam Ryan, PhD Candidate, Literary Studies, University of Tasmania

All art comes from some abstraction of reality. What is written on the page or painted on the canvas is the artist’s representation of something real. Through that representation, the real becomes abstracted and is transformed into art.

There are different degrees of abstraction. There is the real of reportage, the quasi-real of television, the semi-real of thought. We take journalism to be based on real events. We know television pretends to display the real, but has no need to base itself in reality. And our thoughts are certainly subjective abstractions of reality.

This…

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