Biography
Caroline Mavis Caddy (born 20 January 1944) is an Australian poet.
Biography
Born in Western Australia of an Australian mother and an American father, Caroline Mavis Caddy spent part of her childhood in the United States of America and Japan. She returned to Western Australia where she finished high school, and later worked as a dental nurse with the Road Dental Unit. According to Queensland poet Jaya Savige "Caddy writes with equal verve about the rural southwest of WA and her time abroad, particularly in China (though also Canada and Antarctica). ...Her relaxed, often conversational tone belies her sharp eye for detail which, combined with a knack for simile and metaphor, has remained acute throughout her career."
She has published the poetry collections Singing at Night (1980), Letters from the North (1985), Beach Plastic (1989, winner of the 1990 WA Literary Week Award for poetry) and Conquistadors (1991, winner of the 1992 NBC Banjo Award for poetry). Caddy's poetry highlights the WA physical landscape, the title poem series, 'Letters from the North', for example, reflecting the demanding climate and topography of the northern iron ore country:
Sometimes there is only heat, sometimes only wind.
I have stopped expecting definite rivers or mountains.
Other poems deal with beach and seascapes and with the life found there, such as the pelicans:
They preen
practise sawing each other in half
Her poems also range widely over personal experience - childhood in America and the family characters that live in her memory, the voyage back to Australia, school in Australia where she was looked on as a Yank, love that is love, neither surrender nor submission. Her wit, humour, sense of the absurd, crisp and shrewd assessments of events and situations and sensitive, if austere, description all add up to a considerable poetic talent. The density and intensity of her language are accentuated by her favourite devices of fragmented lines and staccato phrases, often brought together in a final, elucidating image.
Caddy?s poems, lingering in the landscapes of China, Antarctica, and western Australia, explore identity through the process of travel and observation. Floating free of the left-hand margins, her poems make use of caesuras to emphasize the connections and gaps between cultures and geographies. ?Creating a space that is both recognisable and uncanny, Caddy explores landscape in her early poems with both understanding and a deep seated wonder, the combination of which gives her poems great intensity,? observed Rosalind McFarlane in the Cordite Poetry Review. Caddy is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Singing at Night (1980); Working Temple (1997); Esperance: New and Selected Poems (2007), which won the Wesley Michel Wright Prize; and The Tibetan Cabinet (2010). Caddy has also won a Western Australian Premier's Book Award and a National Book Council Banjo Award. She divides her time between Shanghai and an olive farm in western Australia. ..
