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Loading... End of dream-timeby Kevin Gilbert
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)821Literature English & Old English literatures English poetryLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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This book is a beautiful object, handset and printed on creamy, textured paper, with illustrations by the author in a range of single PMS colours. Phil Roberts, the poet founder of Island Press, treated his early books as labours of love. This is one of the most lovingly laboured over. The presentation is a clear message to anyone tempted to read the poems as sociological specimens (a book by an Aboriginal man was a rare thing in the early 1970s, and any spurious sociological appeal was made all the greater by its having been at least partly written when Gilbert was in prison for murder). These poems, the design announces emphatically, are to be read and respected as poems.
Yet Kevin Gilbert ‘repeatedly and publicly’ disowned the book. Roberts did substantial editing without his permission. The poems here and elsewhere are full of rage and despair at the callous, complacent attitudes of whites toward Aboriginal peoples. He saw this editorial intervention as a case in point. ( )