Anthropologist of space: the poetics of representation in Laurie Duggan’s Crab & Winkle

Authors

  • Cameron Russell Lowe University of Melbourne

Keywords:

Laurie Duggan, Space, Poetry

Abstract

This paper explores the representation of contemporary space in the work of Australian poet Laurie Duggan. Focusing upon Duggan’s Crab & Winkle (2009)—a work ‘situated’ in the United Kingdom—the paper contends that such a text presents an example of ‘spatial mapping’, one in which the representation of place and space is both a thematic preoccupation and a determining feature of the poem’s structural concerns. In Crab & Winkle, a book-length record of Duggan’s first year living in East Kent, the reader is offered a diaristic mapping of an environment largely unfamiliar to the poem’s (autobiographical) narrator. In this expatriate work, Australia—as physical and social space—becomes a ghostly presence, an imagined space that is nevertheless a vital component of the cognitive map the text constructs through a collage of everyday materiality and the mental spaces of memory and imagination. Situating Duggan’s work within a tradition of process-based aesthetics, the paper argues that Crab & Winkle constructs experiential, yet necessarily provisional maps of contemporary space that roam from the local to the global.

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How to Cite

Anthropologist of space: the poetics of representation in Laurie Duggan’s Crab & Winkle. (2015). Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, 14(5). https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/JASAL/article/view/10010