Foreword

	The influence of the Postmodern is waning and in its place I perceive the advent of the Contemporary. In Marc Marusic's poetry we have a strong, vibrant pre-echo of this new era! In this Foreword let me detail some of my reasons why I hold this opinion.

	An awareness of the Postmodern figures in Marc's poetry as witnessed in the first poem titled Deconstruction Site where we have the line:

		postmodern trendoid wankers!

	This line is quite in your face, a prominent element that I feel indicates this Contemporaneous flavour, the shock value of this line being eclipsed, however, by the penultimate line. This use of gritty language is not meant to just offend being part of the very fabric of the poem, an aesthetic where current, colloquial speech is said directly and not just reported or merely inserted as an added extra; the text often being constructed with minimal punctuation. 

	In the Postmodern period margins, titles and other meta-textual elements of the text were played around with. In the process such poems became increasingly self-reflexive about their own state of being as 'poems'. So we often had a poetry talking about poems. In the Contemporary era this process continues apace with poems seemingly indicating that they are becoming increasingly aware of 'their' audience as well. The use of direct, strong, earthy speech almost being self-aware of the impact its having on this 'audience'. In the same mode of connection we find the use of rhetorical questions as a coda whose silent answers bring a number of these poem to their conclusion. Near the beginning of the poem titled It's A Cat's World we find the line:

		desex the toms - cruel you say?

	Then at the end of this same poem Marc 'answers' his own reflections on the life of cats… a process that virtually involves an audience - the 'you' as noted above.

	Another feature of the Contemporaneous is the invocation of a national or tribal point of view as opposed to the international or American style that seems to have its ubiquitous roots spread and entrenched in the seemingly mindless repetitions of the Postmodern world where any one town or city has begun to look like any other. In this pursuit of an indigenous culture there is a re-searching for local colour, a nostalgia uprooted and brought back into the present. The Contemporary with its interest and emphasis upon this sense of the present therein truly earns its keep and I find this temporal flavour ever present in the immediacy of these poems. Marc has encapsulated this desire for a personal reconstitution of our lot in the poem about road building titled A Free Way where in his last two lines he rhetorically tells us, or, asks:

		to enjoy this living space,
		in our own free way?

							Noël Tointon, Sydney, 21.8.03.