Book Review for Robert Wood's Suburbanism: Poetics (2019)

Born and raised in Western Australia, the young historian and poet Robert Wood travelled across continents. Having visited small villages in South India as well as metropolitan cities in the United States, he returned with fresh eyes to his home suburbs. These experiences helped him produce a book about suburbanism as a poetics; ‘a consciousness, a language and a lifestyle’ (115). Since his first collection of poetics, History & the Poet (2017), Wood has developed his poetic as a poet living between country and city, nature and culture, indigeneity and diaspora, journalism and philosophy, history and poetry, and the living and the dead. Suburbanism presents a poetic praxis that reflects on, revolts against and refashions the current way of living in the suburbs.