Kevin Gilbert (1) (1933–1993)

http://shawjonathan.wordpress.com/2012/04/17/re-reading-kevin-gilberts-poetry/

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 show more 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. show less

http://shawjonathan.wordpress.com/2012/04/17/re-reading-kevin-gilberts-poetry/

The back cover describes these poems as written ‘in the language used by living Aboriginals, without editing, without politeness or hypocrisy as practised in “cultured” verse’. And that is the beauty of many of them – at a time when Aboriginal English was seen as simply incorrect, Kevin Gilbert used it to make musical verse. Not that the book is a comfortable read, at least for non-Aboriginal readers: it show more sets out to 'educate', and pulls no punches about the oppression of Australian Aboriginal people and the sometimes despairing responses to it. show less

Kevin Gilbert has talked with his people and taped their story - in the bush, in small country towns, and in the black ghettos of Sydney and Melbourne.
'What emerges is a damning indictment of the white man for his despicable discrimination, his injustice and intolerance, his ignorance and above all his failure to recognize the Aboriginal as a fellow human being with a deep sense of pride, a history as old as time and an affinity with his land that the white man will never show more understand.'
Herald
'A frank and compelling social document which exposes themes and issues important in everyday lives of Aboriginal Australians. Its criticisms and lessons should not be ignored.' Neville Perkins, Australian
http://blackwebs.photoaccess.org.au/~kevingilbert/books/books.html show less