McMaster, Rhyll
McMASTER, Rhyll
Nationality: Australian. Born: Brisbane, Queensland, 13 August 1947. Family: Married Roger McDonald in 1967 (divorced 1994); three daughters. Career: Secretary, University of Queensland, Brisbane, 1966–71; nurse, Canberra Hospital, 1976–78; farmer, Braidwood, New South Wales, 1980–92. Poetry editor, Canberra Times, 1994; since 1994 manuscripts assessor, National Book Council. Awards: Harri Jones Memorial prize, 1971; Victorian Premier's prize, 1986, and Grace Leven prize, 1987, both for Washing the Money; Literature Board of the Australia Council fellowship, 1992; Grace Leven prize, 1995, for Flying the Coop; CAPO fellowship, Capital Arts Patrons' Organisation, A.C.T., 1997. Address: P.O. Box 96, Braidwood, N.S.W. 2622, Australia.
Publications
Poetry
The Brineshrimp. Brisbane, University of Queensland Press, 1972.
Washing the Money. Sydney, Angus and Robertson, 1986.
On My Empty Feet. Melbourne, Heinemann, 1993.
Flying the Coop (new and selected poems). Melbourne, Heinemann, 1994.
Chemical Bodies. Sydney, Brandl and Schlesinger, 1997.
Plays
Radio Play: On My Empty Feet, 1996.
*Manuscript Collection: National Library of Australia, Canberra.
Critical Studies: "Recent Australian Poetry: The Ordinary and the Extraordinary: Rhyll McMaster, Andrew Taylor, Bruce Beaver, Robert Harris and Jan Owen" by Alan Gould, in Quadrant (Victoria, Australia), 30(10), October 1986; "'Vital Organ with Strings Attached': The Poetry of Rhyll McMaster" by Peter Alexander, in Southerly (Australia), 55(4), summer 1995–96.
* * *Rhyll McMaster's first collection of poems, The Brineshrimp, was published in 1972. It immediately established her as a distinctive poet and was awarded the Harri Jones Memorial prize. Patrick White bought copies to give to his friends. David Malouf wrote of the collection, "Spare, tough, eloquent, these poems poke into corners of the ordinary and come up with discoveries that are sometimes scary, often hilarious, always enlarging of our sense of the pathos and mystery of things."
It was fourteen years before McMaster's second collection, Washing the Money, appeared. A tiny volume of forty pages, it is padded out with home photographs of characteristic acerbity and with an ultrasound of her third daughter, Stella, in utero at fifteen weeks. A young woman's precise observations have been overtaken in this book by a meticulous, intense will to tease out both precision and resonance from tiny domestic moments from childhood, and the second half explores with characteristically quirky imagery the neighborhood world of contemporary living.
On My Empty Feet (1993) is a more substantial volume that explores with chilling coolness and power the effects of a stroke suffered by McMaster's mother. The book also has a range of suburban voices in which the poet's ear for the rhythms of everyday speech are balanced by her always quirky and vivid sense of image.
Only a year after this volume, McMaster published Flying the Coop, a book of selected poems that contains a substantial selection of new work. It is clear that, after the constraints of years of domestic priorities, a changed lifestyle has released a dramatic and sometimes terrifying new flow of creativity. This new energy has been further exemplified in the collection Chemical Bodies (1997), though the personal here has been displaced by a more intellectual wit and curiosity.
—Thomas W. Shapcott