Kenneth Slessor (1991) By Geoffrey Dutton
 
This is the first full-length biography of Kenneth Slessor, regarded by many as Australia's finest poet. This sensitive, fastidious master of his craft was also a highly successful journalist, happiest in the rough and tumble of the vulgar world of Smith's Weekly in the 1930s.
 
After editing Smith's, he worked as an Official War Correspondent to the Australian Forces in the United Kingdom, Greece, the Middle East, and New Guinea. They were a year of intense frustration that ended in bitterness when he resigned.
 
In despair at the lack of general recognition of his poetic achievements, for the last 25 years of his life, Slessor published no poems; he referred to himself as 'an extinct volcano'.
 
Geoffrey Dutton combines his personal knowledge of Slessor, interviews with many of Slessor's friends and colleagues, letters and papers, and close reading of his poetry, to examine the paradoxes of Slessor's life and to reveal Slessor as a poet of classic mind and romantic temperament, who was also an engaging companion, a bon viveur and a man with stormy relationships with the women in his life.
 
Soft Cover
377 Pages
In Fair to Good Condition