"North Country" (1939) is a poem by Australian poet Kenneth Slessor.
It was originally published in the poet's collection Five Bells : XX Poems, and was subsequently reprinted in the author's single-author collections and a number of Australian poetry anthologies.
Synopsis
The "North country" is filled with trees which are gradually being felled. The poet sees this activity as a battle between nature and the need to fill the land "With butter-works and railway-stations/And public institutions,/And scornful rumps of cows". The trees are the victims which lie "Dripping red with blood."
Critical reception In his study of the poet for Oxford University Press, critic Adrian Caesar noted in this poem that "Slessor fashions seven quatrains into a single sentence, giving the poem a passionate momentum as he explores a sense of death, decay and incipient violence which is both intrinsic to the landscape, and exacerbated by human interventions." Oxford Australian Writers : Kenneth Slessor by Adrian Caesar, Oxford University Press, 1995, p79
A. C. W. Mitchell commented that the poem “relies heavily on the sudden fusion of unusual components in the images for their effectiveness."UQP Studies in Australian Literature : Kenneth Slessor : Critical Readings edited by Philip Mead, University of Queensland Press, 1997; Chapter 4: "Kenneth Slessor and the grotesque" by A. C. W. Mitchell, p56
In a review of the poet's collection Selected Poems, Peter Kirkpatrick noted that in this poem "the empty, uncanny bush hides a history of ecological and human violence. 'North Country' teeters into gothic: here the forests of ringbarked and felled trees resemble a massacre site".
Publication history
After the poem's initial publication Five Bells : XX Poems in 1939 it was reprinted as follows:
One Hundred Poems : 1919-1939 by Kenneth Slessor, Angus and Robertson, 1944 Poems by Kenneth Slessor, Angus and Robertson, 1957 The Collins Book of Australian Poetry edited by Rodney Hall, Collins, 1981 My Country : Australian Poetry and Short Stories, Two Hundred Years edited by Leonie Kramer, Lansdowne, 1985 The Faber Book of Modern Australian Verse edited by Vincent Buckley, Faber, 1991 Kenneth Slessor : Poetry, Essays, War Despatches, War Diaries, Journalism, Autobiographical Material and Letters edited by Dennis Haskell, University of Queensland Press, 1991 Australian Poetry in the Twentieth Century edited by Robert Gray and Geoffrey Lehmann, Heinemann, 1991 Kenneth Slessor : Collected Poems by Kenneth Slessor, Angus and Robertson, 1994 Fivefathers : Five Australian Poets of the Pre-Academic Era edited by Les Murray, Carcanet, 1994 Australian Poetry Since 1788 edited by Geoffrey Lehmann and Robert Gray, University of NSW Press, 2011
Notes You can read the full text of the poem on the All Poetry website.
See also "South Country" by Kenneth Slessor 1939 in Australian literature 1939 in poetry
References