The Ash Range

Author: Laurie Duggan

Publisher: Shearsman Books (2005)

The Ash Range is a long documentary poem that mixes prose, poetry, reportage and illustrations — somewhat in the manner of William Carlos Williams' Paterson — to narrate a history of the settlers' engagement with Gippsland, a southerly region of Victoria State. Like Paterson, which concerns itself with small-town New Jersey, The Ash Range is not constrained by its locality, but instead finds the universal in its extended examination of the local. While the work is enormously ambitious in its mix of materials, the whole is welded into a solid structure that facilitates communication of the theme, even to an audience that is unaware of the territory it describes.