As an addendum to my last blog post, it was very enjoyable to attend the launch of Adrian Flavell’s second book of poems, Shadows Drag Untidy, in Adelaide this evening. The book was launched by Professor Nick Jose, and follows Adrian’s 2014 book, On Drowning a Rat(Picaro Press). I first encountered Adrian’s poems as far back as 1998 or 1999. In my teenage years,The Weekend Australian’sReview served as my piecemeal introduction to contemporary Australian poetry.

Nowadays, we take it for granted that the internet is a reliable source of contemporary poetry, with the proliferation of websites, online journals, and blogs over the past two decades. But in the late 1990s it was only the newspapers that came into the household regularly that met my growing appetite for new Australian poetry.

It was in The Weekend Australian, and later The Age, that I first read…