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Paris has gone crazy and the tennis courts will soon be awash with celebrities. There are flags and banners everywhere. Every hotel is booked out. The queues at the stadium are huge, and the worldwide television audience is tipped to be in the billions. If these players aren't careful they're going to be among the most famous people on earth. Jean Cocteau wants the lights cut. William Burroughs tests positive to 12 banned substances and is sent home. Franz Kafka is disorientated by the presence of his father in the stands. Pavlova dashed from side to side like a dervish. Dali appeared on a silver tray with an apple in his mouth and Nijinsky stood at the net, glaring at a cloud. Albert Einstein, A. A. Milne, Amelia Earhart, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf and Enid Blyton are here. Picasso, Freud and Tony Chekhov, Garbo and Nellie Melba; they will all fight it out, round by round, until the amazing final on Centre Court.
For many years it was erroneously assumed that poetry's spiritual home was England. But, painstaking and detailed research has highlighted this terrible misconception and at last revealed the truth. Here, to set the record straight, is inconvertible proof of this cultural iniquity. In what can only be described as a unique and long-overdue collection of Australian verse, a wondrous diversity and inspiring wealth of imagery and ideas, lost and unjustifiably forgotten till now, is here apparent, for all to see. Of course English is a language relatively new to Australia, and obviously in a nation so young there can be no Icelandic Sagas, no Chaucer and no Shakespeare. In other respects, however, this is the most complete collection of Australian verse ever published. Works by major poets have been discovered in various parts of the continent and are published here for the first time. Their original oeuvre has been located and biographical details recorded. Many, as you will see, are surprisingly familiar: Fifteen Bobsworth Longfellow, Alain Frost, Emmy-Lou Dickinson, Very Manly Hopkinson, Jems Choice, R.A.C.V. Milne, Rabbi Burns, b b hummings, Sir Don Betjeman, W.H.
Auding, Dylan Thompson and Robert Bowell.
Auding, Dylan Thompson and Robert Bowell.