This broad anthology offers a challenging view of 'early modern' poetry in Australia up until the 1960s. It also presents the decade of turmoil from 1965 to 1975 in a new light, and reveals the years from 1965 to the 1990s as a time of growing vigour and diversity, showing the impact on Australian poetry of feminism, multicultural writing and postmodernism. It includes work by contemporary Aboriginal witers, as well as a selection of poems by the controversial hoax poet 'Ern Malley', a ghostly presence who caused Australian Modernism to self-destruct in the 1940s.

Edited by two of Australia's leading poets and critics, this was the definitive Australian poetry anthology when originally published as The Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry in 1992. It includes many poets already well-known outside Australia, such as Les Murray, Gwen Harwood, Judith Wright, Dorothy Hewett, A.D. Hope, Peter Porter, James McAuley and Chris Wallace-Crabbe, as well as many important writers who have long deserved international recognition (Kenneth Slessor, Francis Webb, Donald Campbell, Bruce Beaver), and the cream of Australia's exciting crop of newer voices – or new then – including Robert Adamson, Jennifer Maiden, Gig Ryan, J.S. Harry, John A. Scott, John Forbes, John Kinsella and John Tranter.

'This book answers the need for a widely-representative and credible anthology of modern Australian poetry, as seen from the last decade of the twentieth century. The emphasis is on enjoyment. In our experience, poets don't write poems merely to be graded, studied or analysed; they write them, above all, to create for readers the enjoyment of a complex and intensely aesthetic experience. In collecting these poems, we've kept that simple fact firmly in mind.' – John Tranter and Philip Mead