Bruce Dawe Poet Of Suburbia Analysis

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Poet, Born 1930, Geelong Vic One of the biggest selling and most highly regarded of Australian poets, Bruce Dawe, 'The Poet of Suburbia', lives an unconventionally conventional life. He grew up in a household where his father, a farm labourer, was often unemployed and often absent from home. His rather eccentric mother longed for the kind of stability and success in life that circumstances always denied her. Dawe drifted through his early years showing promise as a writer but finding little direction for his life. The variety of his many occupations - labourer, postman, university failure, air force officer, father and teacher - has served to give Dawe extraordinary empathy with people from all backgrounds, which characterises his poetry…show more content…
It's a story of sort of banished hopes, or at least obliquely realised ones, I suppose. I was ... I wasn't a bad student. I did my best, but maths weren't my long suit, and the further I went with them, the more they became a mysterious world beyond my comprehension. And I think by the time I left in my sub-senior year, I was doomed to go and find my way somewhere else. So I wasn't able to ... She put me in the commercial stream, because of course that sounded like the money stream but I would have been better off in the professional stream, where I might have tackled languages. I had to pick up French somewhere along the line and I'd been reasonable in Latin, at least to intermediate ... to junior level. But I was in the commercial stream, and it wasn't meant for me. I couldn't ... commercial principles and practices, which was a sort of bookkeeping thing, was beyond me. I can still remember, you know, DR, B black, P purple, CR and all that sort of jargon. But I was never good at keeping the books. My wife looks after the family finances, and it's just as well that she did, because I wouldn't have been able to handle it I don't think. But again, that was ... the stress I suppose on maths into the commercial stream was something that inevitably led to my departure from school when I was

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