Abstract
This article examines three poems by contemporary Australian poets that use the lyric poem’s complex relationship with time to grapple with experiences of disruption, erasure and loss in relation to rented housing. Renting—once primarily a form of transitional housing, now frequently a longer-term form of housing for increasing portions of the Australian population—has been widely discussed in the context of Australia’s worsening housing crisis, but the ways in which Australian poets are responding to this crisis in their work has received little attention from literary scholars. I analyze three poems by established and emerging Australian poets whose recent work grapples with experiences of unsettled dwelling across a variety of geographical positions and forms of housing tenure: Queensland poet Zenobia Frost’s book After the Demolition; West Australian poet Tracy Ryan’s collection Rose Interior; and Victorian poet Harry Reid’s debut collection, Leave Me Alone. I explore the lyric’s unstable relationship with time and the ways in which each poet deploys this complex temporality to address a series of unsettled and unsettling experiences with attempts to construct or preserve a sense of home in rented houses.
Recommended Citation
Jeffery, Ella
(2024)
"“The last time I came here”: Insecure Renting and Unstable Temporality in Contemporary Australian Lyric Poetry,"
Antipodes: Vol. 37:
Iss.
1, Article 17.
Available at:
https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/antipodes/vol37/iss1/17