Country Escaping Line in the Poetry of Philip Hodgins

Abstract

This paper reevaluates the work of late Australian poet Philip Hodgins (1959-1995) in the context of related inquiries into the work of other late poets Jennifer Rankin and John Anderson. The emphasis is on Hodgins's 'landspeak', or the unusual capacities for his lines to both delimit Australian country and to leave open the potential for what is unknown and/or unseen. This relates to tropes of provincialism and of geopoetics in other Australian poetry. The paper argues that, despite the apparent conservatism of his poetics, Hodgins's work actually interrogates the foundations of colonial Australian places.