DUGGAN, Laurie

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Nationality: Australian. Born: Laurence James Duggan, Melbourne, 30 May 1949. Education: Monash University, Melbourne, B.A. 1976; Sydney University, 1973–74; Melbourne University since 1991 (Ph.D. in progress). Career: Lecturer in media studies, Swinburne College, 1976, and the Canberra College of Advanced Education, 1983; freelance scriptwriter, 1978–83; art critic, The Times on Sunday, Melbourne, 1986–87; poetry teacher, Victoria University of Technology, Melbourne, 1994. Awards: Anne Elder award for a first book of poems, 1978; ANZ New Writing award, 1988; Wesley Michel Wright award, 1988.

Publications

Poetry

East: Poems 1970–1974. Melbourne, Rigmarole, 1976.

Under the Weather. Sydney, Wild and Woolley, 1978.

Adventures in Paradise. Adelaide, Experimental Art Foundation, 1982.

The Great Divide: Poems 1973–83. Sydney, Hale and Iremonger, 1985.

The Ash Range. Sydney, Picador, 1987.

All Blues. London, Northern Lights, 1989.

The Epigrams of Martial. Melbourne, Scripsi, 1989.

Blue Notes. Sydney, Picador, 1990.

Memorials. Adelaide, Little Esther, 1995.

Selected Poems. St. Lucia, University of Queensland Press, 1996.

New and Selected Poems, 1971–1993. St. Lucia, University of Queensland Press, 1996.

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Critical Studies: Topopoesis: Laurie Duggan's "The Ash Range" by Philip Mead, Melbourne, Scripsi, 1988; "A Place in History: The Ash Range, Landscape and Identity" by Lawrence Bourke, in Westerly (Nedlands, Australia), 38(1), autumn 1993.

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Laurie Duggan is one of a group of poets associated with Monash University in Melbourne, which in the 1960s was a center of student unrest and challenge. Other poets connected with this group are Alan Wearne and John A. Scott, both of whom have established strong claims to attention in extended book-length verse sequences.

Duggan is best known for his book-length collage of poetry and documentation, The Ash Range (1987), which won the Victoria Premier's award. It is a personal and historical exploration of Gippsland, home of his forebears. The book has a clear ancestry in precedents set by William Carlos Williams and Charles Olson in America, and Duggan contributes significantly to the adaptation of such precursors to an Australian context and tone. The tenor of quizzicality and fascination with the ruthlessness of settlement that displaced Aboriginal cultures brings the work into the Australian preoccupation with invasion and the largely unacknowledged guilt that falsified earlier records. Since the bicentenary of white settlement (invasion) in 1988, this has become one of the overriding subjects in Australian writing.

From the perspective of The Ash Range it is possible to reexamine Duggan's earlier volumes—East: Poems 1970–1974 (1976), Under the Weather (1978), Adventures in Paradise (1982), and The Great Divide (1985). The early work is characterized by a playful and fanciful enjoyment of language and a determined refusal to be trapped in the serious. These qualities are characteristic of much writing of the so-called Generation of '68, but from the outset Duggan reveals real technical skill and finesse. His parodies of contemporary Australian poets are rare for their accurate pitch of voice, and they also reveal a poet with an intelligence lively enough to engage in such badinage with cultural predecessors. Throughout these volumes there is an anticipation of the techniques of organization that reach their summit in The Great Divide: juxtaposition; notation of minutiae of observation; a fine ear for the niceties of laconic Australian speech inflection, whether of city or country; and the skilled placement of words, lines, and phrases so as to have minimum text achieve maximum effect.

In 1989 Duggan published a highly acclaimed series of modern versions of Martial's epigrams that revealed him to be a challenger to the esteemed older Australian poet Peter Porter in this area. Blue Notes (1990) includes more versions from the Italian futurists and a return to Gippsland territoriality.

—Thomas W. Shapcott