`Big poems burn women': Fredy Neptune's democratic sailor and Walcott's epic Omeros.(Derek Walcott)

From: Australian Literary Studies | Date: October 1, 2001| Author: | Copyright information

The dust cover and the epigraph of Les Murray's Fredy Neptune (1998) draw our attention to the episode that provides the prerequisite for the poem's narrative: `the incineration of defenceless Armenian women by a mob' early in World War I. (1) The German-Australian sailor Fredy Boettcher becomes the involuntary witness to the tragic event. As a result he is numbed. Within the poem the episode is narrated in one single stanza, the eleventh in the poem (Fredy Neptune 5). The unspeakable character of the traumatic experience may account for its principal relegation to the paratext, ...

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