True Wit & Beauty

Description

True Wit & Beauty, the first in a series of chapbooks from Poesis Press by Anna Kerdijk Nicholson, takes a wild ride through the young Colony of Victoria with the Kelly Gang. It explores that very special juncture of myth and photography at 1878.

The poems are, predominantly, ekphrastic responses to photographs of gang members. But the whole work evolves to be a paean to the gang’s physical and verbal wit, and their early, formidable use of newfangled technology—letters to the newspapers via Cobb & Co mail deliveries, railways and telegraph lines—to sway influencers and public opinion. Social media and marketing at their boisterous but bedevilled best. 1878-style.

These poignant poems about the Kelly gang perfectly capture the caustic larrikin wit and vernacular of their subjects. The popular yarn tradition is here used and transcended in the layered poetry of the accomplished narrative lyric. Ironic anachronisms, moving photo ekphrastics, filmic shifts transform the stock tragi-comedy of the Kelly canon into something wholly new and original. —PETER LACH-NEWINSKY

This is the tragic Kelly—the Kelly for whom the wrong combination of culture, event and character could only lead in one direction. No commentary here—Kerdijk Nicholson trusts her readers to see for themselves—but this is as sharp an articulation of one of the haunters of the Australian imagination as one is likely to find. —MARTIN LANGFORD

Of Possession (Five Islands Press, 2010):
Books like this should be unavoidable nodes in the vast network of Australian poetry, culture and politics in the early twenty-first century. —STUART COOKE

Of Everyday Epic (Puncher & Wattmann, 2015):
… a sharpness of mind, a penetrating focus of image and diction, a resonance that lingers. —JUDITH BEVERIDGE

Product details
ISBN: 978-0-6459294-6-1
Published: 2 May 2025
Pages: 29
Cover: paperback
Weight: 124grams
Dimensions: 148mm (w) x 209mm (h) x 4mm thick
Printed & bound in Australia

Click here for samples pages:
True Wit & Beauty sample pages