Literature12 Samuel Wagan Watson: Literary Criticism

The article offers poetry criticism of works by poets Vincent Buckley, Les Murray, and Sam Wagan Watson, focusing on the theme of sacredness in poetry. The author analyzes poems including "Golden Builders," by Buckley," "Nocturne," by Murray, and "The Dingo Lounge," by Watson. Topics include ambivalence, arrogance, and humility in the poems, as well as the themes of prophecy, sorrow, and Christianity.

Anita Heiss reviews some new Aboriginal literature: Larissa Behrendt’s novel Home and Samuel Wagan Watson’s poetry collection Smoke Encrypted Whispers.

Cars and roads traverse the poetry of Samuel Wagan Watson, a self-identified Aboriginal man of Bundjalung, Birri Gubba, German and Irish ancestry. The narrator/s of the poems in Smoke Encrypted Whispers are repeatedly on the road or beside it, and driving is employed as a metaphor for everything from addiction and memory to the search for love. Road kill litters the poems, while roads come to life, cars become men, and men have ‘gas tanks that can’t see empty’.

The title of this collection of new and selected poems describes a series of permutations that drift through the work: the idea of language as smoke — shapeshifting product of combustion, transformed material; the idea of transformation as generator of language; the idea of language as breath, life.

Mudrooroo pulled off the feat of writing Aboriginal poetry in India; Samuel Wagan Watson has gone one better by writing a global indigenous poetry.