Clubbing the Gunfire


Clubbing of the Gunfire : 101 Australian War Poems is a anthology of poems by Australian poets edited by Chris Wallace-Crabbe and Peter Pierce, published by Melbourne University Press in 1984.
The collection contains 99 poems from 71 different poets.
The poems here are grouped into four parts:
Part One: Imperial Wars 1885-902
Part Two: The Great war 1914-1918
Part Three: The Second World war 1939-1945
Part Four: Asian Wars 1950-1972

Contents

Critical reception

Gerard Windsor, in The Bulletin, found the volume "is an alternative history of Australia’s second century. I am not sure the book realises this itself. But the outline is there."
In The Canberra Times reviewer Peter Lugg noted that there "are really two collections in this rather interesting anthology of war poems...One group of poems was written by poets who lived at the time of the events described... poems were written at some remove from the events they describe, although this is not always true in relation to Vietnam." Lugg considered that the poems in the second group were more successful and that not "all the poems in this collection are memorable. Nevertheless they do provide an interesting text to be read alongside the histories".