Laurie Duggan, The New Weather

‘The small poems slowly build up to a much larger narrative; a narrative of time and memory, of thinking and looking and being in the world, a kind of history that is happening on the sidelines.’ Fiona Wright

The New Weather is a journal written over the last few years, following whatever those seasons have become, taking time out here and there to look at art, read other poets and listen to music. These innocent activities take place in a world where climate and the body (or bodies) politic have become forces impossible to anticipate, in which any notion of the ‘normal’ has been left well behind. Yet it is still a world where the pleasures of the imagination and the craziness of everyday experience survive. These are strange days indeed. 

‘I think of how Pound defined the image as "that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time'; and, still being thoroughly sane back in 1913, he went on to say: “the natural object is always the adequate symbol”. Such an imagist doctrine has always been at the heart of Laurie Duggan’s sharp-eyed work.’ Chris Wallace-Crabbe

‘Hilariously and pointedly, he defines poems as “momentary lapses of inattention”. Delivering a specifically antipodean nostalgia, Duggan’s work may well compel us to consider which kinds of poetry can come from places where histories have been silenced, murderously broken, and forcibly overlaid with the very language from which one may hope to shape poetry.’ Dan Disney

Laurie Duggan (b.1949) was involved in the poetry worlds of Melbourne and Sydney through the 1970s and 80s, publishing several books of poems including The Ash Range (Picador 1987; Shearsman, UK, 2005), The Epigrams of Martial (Scripsi 1989; Pressed Wafer, USA, 2010) and a critical work Ghost Nation: Imagined Space and Australian Visual Culture (UQP 2001). He has taught media studies, art history, and cultural studies at various institutions. In 2006 he moved to the UK and lived in Faversham, Kent until 2018. He has published some twenty books of poems. His first book, East, won the first Anne Elder Award. Mangroves (UQP) won the 2004 ALS Gold Medal for outstanding work, The Passenger (UQP) won the Judith Wright Calanthe Award for Poetry in 2007, and in 2013 The Collected Blue Hills (Puncher & Wattman) won the Grace Leven Prize. His most recent books are Homer Street (Giramondo, Sydney, 2020), which was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Award, and Selected Poems 1971-2017 (Shearsman, UK, 2018), which received a special commendation in the UK Poetry Book Society Awards that same year.

Laurie Duggan, The New Weather
September 2026. 148mm x 210mm. 128pp.
ISBN 978-1-925735-90-1

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body.