Darlinghurst Funeral Rites/Poems From the South Coast/Phone Poems

Darlinghurst Funeral Rites concerns Newcastle-born Mordue in his 20s, from his arrival in Sydney in 1981 to the middle of that decade.

The Australian culture of the time derided tenderness in men. Mordue’s vulnerability, receptivity to art and social injustice marked him as an outsider, and the resulting sense of otherness has always informed his work.

Mordue is familiar with profound and contained suffering. In this respect he is, perhaps, one of Australia’s truest beat poets, shaped not only by Walt Whitman, John Keats and WH Auden but also by Bob Dylan, Marc Bolan and the Jam, and with everything that entails.

There is an integrity to the looseness [of his poems], a quality of space through which his yearning for love - can be sensed.

– fr. Antonella Gambotto-Burke, The Australian, reviewed 21 Oct., 2017