[nevermind]

Thanks, Sam. I didn't know that book and will have to get hold of it.

I don't think total obscurity is likely in Hope's case but it is certainly a pity that even partial obscurity should have fallen on his later books. I hope it'll be possible to remedy that.

Cally is on the case, for a start...

i've been checking out Hope, not a great fan but I heard in an interview on the radio that he used 'dreamworkers' to help him write his poetry, so I'm with him on that score. Just thought I'd mention that if you are really keen there are bookfinders, companies that will find books for you, I would imagine what you are after would be easy to find in Australia, also if you look on Radio National, Australia's ABC, (Australian National Broadcaster), like the BBC, you will find an archive of poetry radio broadcasts, there's two I found on Hope, one has Clive James reading one of his poems, then a discussion, another I noticed had a reading list of local books about his work (including a collected old and new essays).
He was a weird bloke, from another time really, he seemed to have no affinity with the contemporary world, who can blame him? Some one who met him when he was old described it as like meeting Gandalf.

Thanks, Ross, for the advice. Here in fact is a link to one of the programmes you refer to (for which I also thank David Mason). A great discussion of "The Death of the Bird", with Clive James.

I stole a phrase from "The Death of The Bird" a few years ago for a poem. My poem languishes somewhere in a virtual drawer, but it pleased me at the time, and it was, in part, my hat-tip to A.D. Hope's mastery.

OK: the phrase was inane dominions. I still covet it.

You do right to covet it, Michael. I think Hope was remembering the last line of Act III of Shelley's Prometheus Unbound: "Pinnacled dim in the intense inane."

Bless you for blessing my transgression, Gregory! And thank you for the gloss / connection of the phrase to Shelley, which I hadn't made.

His light still flickers but we need more Ern Malleys.

People often use the Ern Malley hoax as a vindication of formal poetry over free verse, it's not that simple, apart from the closeness of the Ern Malley poems to the cut and chance pairing of sentences practiced by Ginsberg and Burroughs, among others, you can see from the example below (S1 of Sweet Willaim) that the 'poetry' was not nonsense, it was a clever hoax, perpetrated by experienced poets.

I have avoided your wide English eyes:
But now I am whirled in their vortex.
My blood becomes a Damaged Man
Most like your Albion;
And I must go with stone feet
Down the staircase of flesh
To where in a shuddering embrace
My toppling opposites commit
The obscene, the unforgivable rape.

Hope was a good friend of at least one of the perpetrators of the Ern Malley hoax, James McAuley, and if they hadn't done it probably he would have tried something similar.