Collected Poems of John Shaw Neilson

John Shaw Neilson and introduction by Helen Hewson

Regular price $24.95 Sale

Format: paperback
Edition: First published in 1934 by Lothian Book Publishing Company
226 pages
ISBN: 9781743320334

Publication: 04 Sep 2013
Series: Australian Classics Library
Publisher: Sydney University Press

John Shaw Neilson (1872–1942) is Australia’s great lyric poet and Collected Poems (1934), dedicated to Louise Dyer, bears his imprimatur. Encouraged by his editor, Robert Croll, Neilson was totally involved in its publication and promotion, selecting the poems, rewriting lines, adding new stanzas and restoring A.G. Stephen’s earlier changes.

Photographic sittings and book signings followed as well as favourable reviews. Neilson modestly attended readings in his honour at the Bookshop of Margareta Webber and enjoyed the concert broadcasts of Margaret Sutherland’s compositions, which included ‘The Orange Tree’. After reading the Collected Poems she wrote to Neilson: “I have set your voice to music.”

A new introduction by Dr Helen Hewson, an honorary associate in the School of Letters, Art and Media at the University of Sydney, explores some of the influences that have shaped Neilson’s poetry – his Celtic background, religious upbringing, reading and writing, and love of art and music.

Helen Hewson is an honorary associate in the School of Letters, Art and Media at the University of Sydney,

John Shaw Neilson: songs of love and loss by Helen Hewson
Introduction by R.H. Croll

1. Heart of spring!
2. Green singer
3. Song be delicate
4. Petticoat green
5. Greeting
6. The land where I was born
7. The sun is up
8. Pale neighbour
9. To a blue flower
10. Old Nell Dickerson
11. Along a river
12. Julie Callaway
13. At a lowan’s nest
14. Old Granny Sullivan
15. May
16. Maggie Tulliver
17. Break of day
18. Sheedy was dying
19. The eyes of little Charlotte
20. Meeting of sighs
21. Old violin
22. Love’s coming
23. The lover sings
24. The girl with the black hair
25. ’Twas in the early summer time
26. As far as my heart can go
27. Her eyes
28. The hour is lost
29. Surely god was a lover
30. You, and yellow air
31. Dear little cottage
32. Roses three
33. The sacrifice
34. Little white girl
35. In the street
36. Child of tears
37. The petticoat plays
38. The loving tree
39. Inland born
40. The child we lost
41. Under a kurrajong
42. The luckless bard to the flying blossom
43. From a coffin
44. All the world’s a lolly-shop
45. It is the last
46. The white flowers came
47. The wedding in September
48. The hour of the parting
49. The song and the bird
50. The scent o’ the lover
51. At the end of spring
52. For a child
53. The dream is deep
54. The quarrel with the neighbour
55. His love was burned away
56. For a little girl’s birthday
57. When kisses are as strawberries
58. Schoolgirls hastening
59. Dolly’s offering
60. To a schoolgirl
61. ’Tis the white plum tree
62. The unlovely player
63. The eleventh moon
64. The evening is the morning
65. The orange tree
66. In the dim counties
67. Show me the song
68. The woman of Ireland
69. Ride him away
70. The magpie in the moonlight
71. The birds go by
72. The sweetening of the year
73. Out to the green fields
74. Green lover
75. Stony town
76. To an early-flowering almond
78. Those shaded eyes
79. The blue wren in the hop-bush
80. April weather
81. The Irish welcome
82. Colour yourself for a man
83. The hen in the bushes
84. The moon was seven days down
85. The flight of the weary
86. Love in absence
87. The child being there
88. He sold himself to the daisies
89. So sweet a mouth had she
90. Lament for early buttercups
91. Half a life back
92. The lad who started out
93. To a lodging-house canary
94. Native companions dancing
95. Stephen Foster
96. The stolen lament
97. The Whistling Jack
98. The good season
99. The soldier is home
100. The poor, poor country
101. The winter sundown
102. The bard and the lizard
103. Song for a honeymoon
104. The ballad of remembrance
105. The gentle water bird

'The collection would make an excellent addition to any English faculty book room, offering scope for a range of thematic studies centring on the Australian experience in the early twentieth century. Neilson’s poems are accessible to younger students and could be a valuable tool for teaching poetic form in a conceptual study of people and landscape, distinctive voices and discovery'
Rebecca Ross mETAphor