Shortlisted for the 2019 Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry in the NSW Premier's Literature Awards

Chris Wallace-Crabbe's Rondo harvests a decade's worth of new writing by one of Australia's foremost poets. It paints a vivid portrait of eucalypt Australia's current position in an rapidly changing world. The poet asks for fresh meanings from Gallipoli and Scotland, from physics and from 'Art's porous auditorium', where poetry can still be heard. 'The words are only the words,' he writes, 'which is more or less everything.'

Critic Eric Ormsby dubbed Wallace-Crabbe a 'genial smuggler of surprises': 'his uncommon affability, even when treating the gravest subjects, leaves the reader unprepared for his sudden luxuriance of phrase.' (TLS)



Chris Wallace-Crabbe is a leading Australian poet and essayist, with a special interest in the visual arts. He has published more than twenty collections of poetry, including Telling a Hawk from a Handsaw (Carcanet) and Afternoon in the Central Nervous System (Braziller, NY). His New and Selected Poems was published by Carcanet in 2013. The son of a pianist and a journalist, he was raised 'to be interested in everything'. He is a Professor Emeritus at Melbourne University, and has held posts at Harvard and Ca' Foscari, Venice. He received the Dublin Prize for Arts and Sciences in 1987, the Philip Hodgins Prize for Literature in 2002, and in 2011 the Order of Australia.