Language English Media type Print Followed by Poems Country Australia | Publication date 1955 Pages 73pp Originally published 1955 Genre Poetry | |
Publisher Edwards and Shaw, Sydney Poetry books My Black Me, I like stars, The mercy seat | ||
The Wandering Islands (1955) is the first poetry collection by Australian poet A. D. Hope. It won the Grace Leven Prize for Poetry in 1955.
Contents
The collection consists of 39 poems, most are published in this collection for the first time and others are reprinted from various Australian poetry publications. The earliest poem in the collection dates from 1943.
Contents
Critical reception
In a retrospective of A. D. Hope's work originally published in The Times Literary Supplement, Clive James wrote: "The first collection of poems by A.D. Hope, The Wandering Islands, belatedly appeared in 1955, and consolidated the position he had already established as the leading Australian poet of his time. The book had to appear belatedly (Hope was already 48) because if it had appeared much earlier its author might have been prosecuted. Australia was still a censored country and several of Hope's poems dared to mention the particularities of sexual intercourse. Without his air of authority, Hope might never have got his book into the shops before old age supervened. But an air of authority was what he had. He spoke from on high. His vocabulary was of the present, but it had the past in it, transparent a long way down. And it was all sent forward like a wave by his magisterial sense of rhythm."