Nicholas Walton-Healey

Ten long years have passed since the publication of Raffaella Torresan’s Melbourne Poets Live (2003). In that time the face of the Victorian or Melbourne poetry scene has changed considerably: some of the poets featured in that work have since moved or vanished while others have arrived or emerged. What appears on the following pages is but a sample or taste of a much larger body of work now being compiled into a book.

When complete, Land before Lines will constitute a document representative of the contemporary Victorian poetry scene. As the title of the project suggests, the poets featured in it are united not so much by age, literary prestige, politics, subject matter or stylistic/ aesthetic similarity as by a shared inhabitance of the Victorian landscape.