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COPYRIGHT 2008 Quadrant Magazine Company, Inc.
A Political Rake's Progress, by John Hyde; Access Press, 2008, $30.
POETRY CAN STRIKE without regard or respect for occupation. Among those generally acknowledged as among the greatest poets have been an actor-manager, a German professor, a French pickpocket, an American loafer, an Anglo-American banker and a librarian. No profession seems entirely safe.
However, an Australian farmer and federal Liberal MR best known as a leader of the economic Dries and, after leaving parliament for having, with others, founded and run political-economic think-tanks for twelve years, still seems at first glance a slightly unlikely poet.
John Hyde is a man of major accomplishments. He became a successful wheat farmer in Western Australia despite losing his right arm in an accident at the age of twenty-three; as a Member of Parliament from 1973 to 1982 he was courageous in rejecting strong pressures to become mere division-fodder and in pushing an economic reform agenda against the entrenched orthodoxies of the Coalition, offending many vested...
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