THE POET WHO FORGOT

When Catherine Cole was a young undergraduate student of Australian Literature she sent a letter to world-renowned poet, AD Hope.

Her note sparked a lively correspondence between the two that would
continue over a number of years. A deep and lasting friendship ensued. Hope died in 2000. Cole by then had become a writer herself.
Cole now offers these previously unpublished mentor-apprentice
exchanges. Viewed from London, Paris and Australia, she uncovers unique discussions in topics as varied as poetics, Australian identity and culture,
friendship, memory and forgetting. She also examines the ways in which writers are shaped and the frustrations and anxieties they often feel.

This superb book not only offers exciting new perspectives on AD Hope’s considerable literary legacy – it provides a very personal insight into the poet. Through supportive and often humorous observations on life, literature and writing practice, Hope’s letters also reveal the generosity
which influenced an emerging writer.

Reviews

(Cole's) is a willful discursiveness, based on the assumption that the quality of the writing will persuade us to stay the journey. As indeed it does...Cleverly crossing boundaries of genre, Cole's book is arresting from its first moment until its plangent last words.

- Peter Pierce, The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald

One interesting thread, among many, (in The Poet Who Forgot) running through Cole's letters in particular, is the developing conflict between her academic work and her own poetry. Finishing the essays and finishing the thesis always seem to be more important, the poetry she is trying to develop takes second place every time, for all of Hope's persistent encouragement. Inevitably perhaps, much of the correspondence is taken up with the small matters of arranging meetings, setting up house-sittings (and cat-mindings), etc, in the busy life that both were leading at the time.  They reveal Hope as playful, humorous and ironic far from the ''august personage'' his poetry, by itself, might sometimes suggest. Hope, as already noted, was never less than encouraging to Cole's youthful writing efforts and her ambitions to establish herself as an academic. Cole, on the other hand, had (and retains) a clear sense of Hope's poetic virtues and his essential kindness as a human being (though perhaps not all the subjects of his earlier reviewing had this impression including, notoriously, Patrick White)...

All the genres Cole employs have their own traditional criteria for excellence but for such a mixture there are as yet, and conveniently, no accepted rules. It's tempting to argue that these ''rules'' were set up by the ''patriarchy'' and that by mixing genres so freely Cole is courageously asserting her womanhood and breaking free from these male bonds. She quotes Hope as believing that women had a different (and equal, if not more interesting) way of thinking from that of men. Perhaps she intends to illustrate his point. It may be significant too that the UWA New Writing series of which this book is a part has eight out of nine authors who are female. ...The Poet Who Forgot certainly does do justice to the complexity and contradictions of a much-admired Australian poet who almost certainly will remain an important figure in our literature and, indeed, in world literature.

- Geoff Page, The Canberra Times