Ruth Dallas

Anna Jackson (Victoria University of Wellington)
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Ruth Dallas was born in 1919 in Invercargill, New Zealand, where she grew up in a close-knit working-class family. She later claimed to be “at a loss to account for the fact that I wrote poetry in an environment where I knew no one who was interested in poetry”, although she also describes, in her autobiography

Curved Horizon

(1991), the books her grandmother gave her, the ballads her grandmother sang at the family piano, and the long narrative poems her mother used to recite. Her early poetry quickly attracted the attention of

Landfall

editor Charles Brasch, who included her as one of six young poets selected for a special edition of

Landfall

in 1948, and her first collection of poetry,

Country Road and Other Poems

, was published in 1953. She has published eight further collections…

902 words

Citation: Jackson, Anna. "Ruth Dallas". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 02 July 2004 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=1122, accessed 19 March 2024.]

1122 Ruth Dallas 1 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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