The sounds of sight: Jennifer Rankin's poetics

Abstract

Attention to Jennifer Rankin's poetry was spare within her lifetime. Twenty-eight years after her death, the time has come to challenge her critical reception and to recognise the importance of her poetics on its own terms. Her work has an antithetical relationship to the generation of '68, and the shadowy place that it takes among the poetry of her peers can be defined by its struggle against subjectivity; a poetics at odds with John Tranter's descriptions of a new Australian poetry. This article reads several of Rankin's poems closely, and in comparison with a poem by Robert Adamson, to demonstrate Rankin's approach to subjectivity and the influence of painting on her poetry.