Christopher Wallace-Crabbe – March 29 2020

Chris is an award-winning poet with more than a dozen published collections of poetry. He holds a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Melbourne and attended Yale University. Chris published his poetry volume, No Glass Houses, while still an undergraduate. His later poetry works include Selected Poems 1956–1994, which won the Dinny O’Hearn Poetry Prize; The Amorous Cannibal, which won the Grace Leven Prize for Poetry; and Blood Is the Water, which won the Farmer’s Poetry Prize. Chris has also published the novel Splinters and several critical works including Read It Again and Falling into Language. He has edited numerous anthologies, including Imagining Australia: Literature and Culture in the New New World (co-edited with Judith Ryan), The Oxford Literary History of Australia (co-edited with Bruce Bennett and Jennifer Strauss), and The Golden Apples of the Sun: Twentieth Century Australian Poetry. Chris has given many readings of his poetry around the world, and chairs the newly established Australian Poetry Centre in St Kilda, Victoria. He is also a commentator on the visual arts, specialising in artists’ books, and has won the Dublin Prize for Arts and Sciences. Chris’s academic career included being Lockie Fellow in Australian Literature and Creative Writing, the University of Melbourne, going on to become Reader in English then holding a Personal Chair; Harkness Fellow at Yale University; Professor of Australian Studies at Harvard, and Visiting Professor at the University of Venice. He was the founding director of the Australian Center at the University of Melbourne where since his retirement he has been Emeritus Professor. A recipient of the St Michael’s Medal, the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal, the Human Rights Award for Poetry and the Christopher Brennan Award for Literature, Chris was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1984 and awarded the Order of Australia in 2011.

Telling a Hawk from a Handsaw
Carcanet Press, 2008; ISBN 9781903039939
Chris Wallace-Crabbe writes with an alert curiosity about the world and the speculation it gives rise to. He celebrates household objects as well as the textures of the Australian landscape; European ancestors, both familial and intellectual, and the consciousness of animals; the damaged planet and the continuing possibilities of belief; science and soul. Humour and gravity inform his richly orchestrated language. Telling a Hawk from a Handsaw is a collection for a complicated world, both joyous and shrewd.
‘A witty, endearingly slangy, yet unostentatiously philosophical Australian poet’. – Times Literary Supplement
‘His allies are words and he uses them with the care of a surgeon and the flair of a conjuror.’ – Peter Porter

New and Selected Poems
Carcanet Press, 2013; ISBN 9781906188078
This book distils an adult lifetime into the intense magic of poetry. Wallace-Crabbe is a nature poet in the broadest possible sense: his poems, ranging widely in tone and subject-matter, seek above all to convey the richness and variety of our world, his sense that we are ‘inserted headlong into life’ and must make the best of what comes to us. Throughout his work – at times wryly philosophical, at times gently elegiac – Wallace-Crabbe remains passionately committed to his quest, ‘troubling the stubborn world for meaning.
‘…in his valuing of both the aesthetic and the ordinary as the realms of humanity, he always reminds us – despite what the end has to offer us all – of a different kind of weather, one where, even as darkness is falling, ”the lit clouds yet / sail sweetly over us / inhabiting a daylight of their own”.’ – David McCooey, Sydney Morning Herald