Christopher Pollnitz

Born in Adelaide, Christopher Pollnitz lectured for over thirty years at the University of Newcastle.  He remains a conjoint lecturer of that University and over many years has spent many months in Manuscripts and Special Collections at the University of Nottingham.  He has written articles on the Australian verse novel and a range of Australian poets, including Judith Wright, Peter Porter, Les Murray, Alan Wearne and John Scott.  In the 1980s Paul Kavanagh and he ran the Mattara Poetry Prize, since re-established as the Newcastle Poetry Prize, and edited the annual anthologies.  Picaro Press has brought out a Wagtail pamphlet of his own poems, Little Eagle (2010).  He is the editor of D. H. Lawrence’s Poems for Cambridge University Press’s critical edition of Lawrence’s Works.  The first two volumes of the Poems, including all the verse Lawrence collected or planned to publish, will appear later in 2012.  Examining the original manuscripts of Lawrence’s verse has involved considerable travel in the USA, including a visit to the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, which (as reported in the “Idylls”) holds just one Lawrence manuscript poem.  Only in recent years has he ventured outside the libraries and private collections of North America to see and reflect on some other aspects of the continent.