Poetry
Fourteen Men: Verses
Mary Gilmore · 1954
Synopsis
Eighty-two poems, all previously unpublished. The one that gives the book its title evokes, according to the Research Starters database, fourteen hanged men, and relates to the massacre of Chinese during the Lambing Flat riots, on the goldfields, in 1860 and 1861. The others range, according to the contents lists, from the sword to barbed wire, from the atomic bomb to the dust bowl, from Singapore to radar, from a ford on the Barwon to a pear tree, from nationality to the day of the dead, and one of them bears the name of the modernist journal Angry Penguins.
Context
The last collection by its author, the book was published in Sydney by Angus and Robertson in 1954, in ninety-four pages, with notes on the poems. The same year it won the gold medal of the Australian Literature Society. The Cairns Post marvelled at the depth of a poet of eighty-nine writing about aeroplanes, radar and the bomb; A. D. Hope, in the Sydney Morning Herald, praised in it, apart from the patriotic and war poems, a concentration and a distillation of the essential.
Who it is for
Short pieces in English, simple in language, followed by the author's notes; no French translation.
Prizes and reception
Crowned with a prize in the year of its publication; A. D. Hope regarded it, in some respects, as its author's best book.
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