We invited John Leonard, an old friend to long-time readers of The Review, to select work from three Australian poets that in his opinion wrote what Robert Graves would call ‘necessary poems’. Thanks to John we are able to introduce you to Lucy Dougan, Edward Caruso, and Maurits Zwankhuisen. Here as well is John’s introduction.

Poems from Australia

John Leonard

For this issue of The Robert Graves Review, I have selected three works each by three notable Australian poets. Of the three, Maurits Zwankhuisen has acknowledged a Gravesian influence and two of his poems are modelled on actual poems by Graves; one of these is obvious, but the other is more subtle. Edward Caruso’s wintry poems with an Italian setting contrast with Mallorca-located poems by Graves which mainly have warm-weather settings. Lucy Dougan in her three poems mixes surreality and reflections on time, mental processes and human relationships in a way that readers of Graves will find familiar and grateful.

Lucy Dougan is a widely published Australian poet. Her three full-length collections, White Clay, The Guardians and Monster Field are published by Giramondo. With Tim Dolin, she is co-editor of The Collected Poems of Fay Zwicky (UWAP).

Edward Caruso has recently been published in A Voz Limpia, Live Encounters, Unusual Work and Well-Known Corners: Poetry on the Move. His third collection of poems, What Distance Means, was published by Hybrid Publishers (Melbourne) in 2025. He has twice featured on 3CRs Spoken Word program (Melbourne). Since 2024, he has co-judged the Ada Cambridge Poetry Prize.

Maurits Zwankhuisen has enjoyed writing in all forms and genres since primary school. He has written four novels, three novellas and many short stories. He has also had articles appear in Australian Geographic, New Matilda, Arena and HuffPost, and an Isle of Man travelogue published by Ginninderra Press (Adelaide).

Linda Stern has published poetry and nonfiction in a range of publications. Her book Why We Go By Twos (2015) was published by Barefoot Muse Press. Her poems have appeared in numerous publications including in American Arts Quarterly, Big City Lit, The New Criterion, and The Raintown Review. For six years, she co-published the magazine Endymion, and more recently, she was associate editor of the online journal Umbrella. She also organized Sweet Singers, a literary reading series. She works as an editor and lives in NYC.

John Challis has published two collections with Bloodaxe, most recently The Green Parcel (2026), which was a Poetry Book of the Month in The Observer and longlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection, and The Resurrectionists (2021). His pamphlets include The Black Cab (Poetry Salzburg, 2017), a New Writing North Read Regional Title, and Hallsong (New Writing North, 2022), written while he was writer-in-residence at the National Trust’s Seaton Delaval Hall. He is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at York St John University.

Fiona Sampson is published in 38 languages and has received a number of national and international awards. Her latest poetry collection Come Down won the Wales Poetry Book of the Year, European Lyric Atlas and Naim Frasheri laureateship. Her latest biography Two-Way Mirror was a New York Times Bestseller.

Lydia Kennaway’s pamphlet, A History of Walking, was published by HappenStance Press in 2019. She has an MA in Writing Poetry from Newcastle University and won the Flambard Prize in 2017. She was commended in the 2020/21 Magma Poetry Competition and was shortlisted for the 2025 Fish Poetry Prize, the 2024 Magma Pamphlet Competition and the 2022 Live Canon Collection Competition. Her work is in seventeen anthologies, and in magazines including PN Review, The Rialto and Stand. Lydia has read at the Ilkley Literature Festival, Poetry at Aldeburgh and Leeds Lit fest. She is a New Yorker living in Yorkshire.

Under her Highland matrilineal name MacGillivray, Kirsten Norrie has written four critically acclaimed poetry collections and two pamphlets: The Last Wolf of Scotland; The Nine of Diamonds; The Gaelic Garden of the Dead; Ravage; The Demon Tracts and Until the Twilight Fails. Her forthcoming non-fiction books are Scottish Lost Boys, Eight Renegade Essays (forthcoming from Strange Attractor Press, 2027) and Eagle Song (Wilton Square Books, 2028) and her novels High Aconite and American Book of the Dead (Wilton Square Books, 2027). She has three degrees from Oxford University, and her work has appeared in The Guardian, TLS, The Scotsman and on BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction and the Verb programmes. She was an AHRC Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress, a 2019 recipient of a Foundation Jan Michalski writer residency in Switzerland, and the 2024–5 Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellow at Cambridge University. Her poetry is taught as part of the SQA Scottish Highers curriculum and a permanent archive of her poetry is held at the Scottish Poetry Library. www.kirstennorrie.com.

Sean O’Brien’s twelfth collection of poems, The Bonfire Party, was published by Picador in 2026. Recent publications include the short story collection The Long Glass (Red Squirrel) and Eye of the Island (Poetry Translation Centre), an expanded edition of his translations (with Daniel Hahn) of poems by Corsino Fortes. A new poetry pamphlet, Back of Beyond, is to appear in November 2026, and a Selected Stories is in preparation. His work has received various awards, including the T. S. Eliot, Forward and E. M. Forster Prizes. His other writings include novels, plays, criticism and translation. His translation of Dante’s Inferno appeared in 2006, and the Collected Poems of Abai Kunanbayuli in 2021. In 2017 he was Weidenfeld Visiting Professor at St. Anne’s College Oxford. He is Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

John Leonard is an Australian poet with five poetry collections published. His poetry has been widely published, in Australia, the UK and the US, and on the Internet, and some of his poems have been translated into various languages and published. His novel Shakespeare in Virginia was published in 2024 in London.