Chris Wallace-Crabbe

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Christopher Keith Wallace-Crabbe

After leaving school, Wallace-Crabbe set out to be a metallurgist, but was drawn back to his childhood interest in books and art. After training in the Royal Australian Air Force, he worked as an electrical trade journalist while studying for his B.A. in the evenings. He published his first book of poetry while doing his final honours year. In 1961 he became Lockie Fellow in Australian Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne.

Over the next decades he became a reader in English and then held a personal chair from 1988. On the initiative of

Wallace-Crabbe's early collections were published in Australia, but in 1985 he began to publish with Oxford University Press, reaching an international public. Although he published some of his criticism and his one novel elsewhere, he remained with Oxford until 1998, after which date the Press ceased publishing live poets. He then took his work to Carcanet Oxford Poets, in Manchester. Back in Australia he brought out two books with the Sydney firm of Brandl & Schlesinger. One of these was a highly experimental long poem, or "zany epic", on which he had been working for a dozen years. It would be fair to say that this dense and difficult poem divided the poet's readers.

Reviewers over the years have drawn attention time and again to the energetic mixture of demotic and elevated language which very often marks Wallace-Crabbe's poetry. For the poet, this not only testifies to his wide interest in language but also to his sense of the stubborn plurality of our experience. Such mixed diction certainly persists in his very latest books, particularly in his sonnets and in the "Domestic Sublime" sequence of lyrics. This corresponds to his sense that poetry is, residually, a sacred art with its attention divided between ontology and finely-detailed epistemology. It should be added that for Wallace-Crabbe our lives unreasonably mingle the comic with the tragic.

Since his retirement from university teaching he has continued to live in inner Melbourne, adhering to poetry, reading history and playing tennis.

In May 2014, Wallace-Crabbe alluded to the possibility of a collaboration with a Melbourne writer, Christopher Bantick, however, he is currently^[when?] working on the history of Western magic, and on a series of prints, with Kristin Headlam, based upon his long poem mentioned above.^[1]

Awards

• 1958 – John Masefield Prize for Poetry
• 1984 – Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities^[2]
• 1986 – Grace Leven Prize for Poetry
• 1987 – The Dublin Prize for Arts and Science, awarded through the University of Melbourne
• 1992 –
  Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission Poettry Award with Kerry Flattley for From the Republic of Conscience ^[3]
• 1995 – winner of "The Age" Book of the Year, and the D.J. O'Hearn Prize for Poetry
• 2002 – winner of the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal at the Mildura Writer's Festival^[4]
• 2002 – Centenary Medal
• 2006 – Doctor of Letters honoris causa (Melb.)
• 2011 – appointed a Member of the Order of Australia (AM)
• 2015 – Melbourne Prize for Literature
• 2019 –
  NSW Premier's Literary Awards, Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry, shortlisted for Rondo.^[5]

Bibliography

This list is incomplete; you can help by adding missing items. (August 2015)

Poetry

Collections

• 1959: The Music of Division, Sydney: Angus & Robertson
• 1962: Eight Metropolitan Poems, Adelaide: Australian Letters; with John Brack
• 1963: In Light and Darkness, Sydney: Angus & Robertson
• 1963: Eight By Eight, Brisbane: Jacaranda Press, 1963: anthology of eight poems each by Vincent Buckley, Laurence Collinson, Alexander Craig, Max Dunn, Noel Macainsh, David Martin, R.A. Simpson, and Chris Wallace-Crabbe.
• 1967: The Rebel General, Sydney: Angus & Robertson
• 1971: Where the Wind Came, Sydney: Angus and Robertson
• 1973: Selected Poems, Sydney: Angus & Robertson
• 1976: The Foundations of Joy, (Poets of the Month Series), Sydney: Angus & Robertson
• 1979: The Emotions Are Not Skilled Workers, Sydney: Angus & Robertson
• 1985: The Amorous Cannibal, Oxford: Oxford University Press
• 1988: I'm Deadly Serious, Oxford: Oxford University Press
• 1989: Sangue e l'acqua, translated and edited by Giovann Distefano, Abano Terme: Piovan Editore
• 1990: For Crying Out Loud, Oxford: Oxford University Press
• 1993: Rungs of Time, Oxford: Oxford University Press
• 1995: Selected Poems 1956–1994, Oxford: Oxford University Press
• 1998: Whirling, Oxford: Oxford University Press
• 2001: By and Large, Manchester: Carcanet; and Sydney; Brandl and Schlesinger
• 2003: A Representative Human, Brunswick: Gungurru Press
• 2004: Next, Brunswick: Gungurru Press
• 2005: The Universe Looks Down, Brandl & Schlesinger,
  ISBN 1-876040-74-2
• 2006: Then, Brunswick: Gungurru Press
• 2008: Telling a Hawk from a Handsaw, Manchester Carcanet Oxford Poets
• 2010: Puck, Brunswick: Gungurru Press
• 2012: New and Selected Poems, Manchester: Carcanet Oxford Poets
• 2014: My Feet Are Hungry, Sydney: Pitt Street Poets
• 2018: Rondo, Carcanet Press

• Wallace-Crabbe, Chris (June 2011). "'Free as the hawks above us' : art in the happenstance of the organic".
  ISBN 9781921401534
  .