I've Been Called Away

An uncompromising avant-gardist when young, Chester wrote brilliant poetry and strongly influenced younger friends he mentored. The names of some of them - Robert Hughes and Clive James - are familiar to Australian readers. But not Chester. Chester is the first Australian poet to write poetry in the jokey, colloquial style of what is known as the New York school - poets such as John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara and Kenneth Koch, who threw phrases at the page like an action painting, and treated meanings as objects to toy with and abandon. Ten years younger than the founding members of the New York school, Chester was writing poems like theirs at about the same time - starting in the second half of the 1950s. He is unlikely to have read their work.