|
A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Australian Poetry, Geoff Page, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1995 Australian Poets and Their Work: A Reader's Guide, William Wilde, Oxford University Press, Australia, 1996 "Skrzynecki was one of the first writers in Australia of his generation to articulate the contours of the post-war migration in the 1950s, and his anthology Joseph's Coat was one of the major collections to cover the increasingly multicultural nature of the evolving Australian society.........Skrzynecki's poetry is imbued with a sense of introspection and a European sensibility. Although he frequently writes about direct experience and the natural environment of Australia, his best work has a driven, worrying quality that reflects both an autobiographical obsession and a deep-seated alienation." from The Oxford Companion To Twentieth-Century Poetry, Ed. Ian Hamilton, 1994,pp.496-97 "Immigrant experience in new land is the dominant theme of Skrzynecki's gently lyrical and accessible poetry. In the earlier collections the dominant experience of loss is most closely associated with the father's irretrievable loss of home and the son's equally irretrievable separation from experience of that particular home....Technically assured and controlled, Skrzynecki's poetry is also remarkable for delicacy of observation and sensitivity to landscape, expressed in direct,precise and unaffected language. The same sense of premonition of loss and cherishing of memory expressed in his poetry colour his short stories. Although Skrzynecki focuses largely on the experience of growing up as a child of migrant parents, he also deals with experiences that are more general, such as youthful encounters with death, sexuality and grief....." from The Oxford Companion To Australian Literature, Second Edition, ed.William H. Wilde et al 1994. p.700
|