Selected Poems 1971-2016

"Duggan's is a poetry that determines to surprise: almost daring a reader to exclaim: you wrote like this about that?" -Alan Wearne, Sydney Morning Herald "Duggan's poetry has the virtue that it never 'abandons the local'. Like Paul Blackburn-a poet Duggan manifestly admires-he builds his work out of what he finds in, on or about the premises." -Tony Baker, Jacket "How ferociously Duggan attends both to the there of the world . . . and the here of writing." -John Latta, Isola di Rifiuti "The small poems … slowly build up to a much larger narrative; a narrative of time and memory, of thinking and looking and being in the world, a kind of history that is happening on the sidelines." -Fiona Wright "The poems of Allotments and Under the Weather can often seem easily-done, casual jottings but there is a complex pattern behind their conception and an extraordinary quality of poise about their execution. Both books remind us what a remarkable poet Duggan has become." -Martin Duwell "I think of how Pound defined the image as 'that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time'; and, still being thoroughly sane back in 1913, he went on to say: 'the natural object is always the adequate symbol'. Such an imagist doctrine has always been at the heart of Laurie Duggan's sharp-eyed work, ever since the days when he was at the core of a group who got together at Monash, back in the 1960s." -Chris Wallace-Crabbe "The immediacy of Duggan's perceptions possess a life which is not held in by the contours of the field but which realises the geography of "range". This fine collection is more than "singular spaces" and lives as a "world of transactions" between poet and reader. Our guide through the spaces is a perceptive wit which looks closely at the world and concludes." -Ian Brinton, Tears in the Fence