Negotiating the liminal divide: some Italian-Australian diasporic poets

This essay offers a survey of some of the leading first-generation Italian-Australian poets, and does not attempt to be definitive. As Adam Aitken points out in his ‘Asian-Australian Diasporic Poets: A Commentary’ (Cordite, 1 August 2012), ‘Diasporic poetics raise more questions than they answer and are just as much about dis-placement as about place, just as much about a ‘poetics of uncertainty’ as about certainties of style/nation/identity.’ Diasporic poetics is, arguably, also very much a poetics of engagement with the liminal divide, a process that is not linear but cyclic, as crossings in liminal space and time join an implicit, complex and not altogether unproblematic but nevertheless positive Australian present to the recall of the joys and sorrows of an ever-present pre-migration past.