CONTRIBUTORS

Graeme Miles

Graeme Miles has published three collections of poems: Infernal Topographies (UWA Press, 2020) Recurrence (John Leonard Press, 2012) and Phosphorescence (Fremantle Press, 2006). After completing a PhD in classics at the University of Western Australia, he spent six months as an Asialink writer in residence at the University of Madras, then a year in Belgium as a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Ghent. He has lived in Hobart since 2008 and teaches ancient Greek language and literature at the University of Tasmania.

Later History of the Alphabeticals

Herodes’ son couldn’t learn his alphabet so the easiest thing was to buy twenty-four boys his age and rename each one after a letter. Their story ends there, as children bought to form an alphabet chart. Maybe some saved money, …

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Review Short: Aileen Kelly’s Fire Work: Last Poems

This is the last collection by a major Australian poet, and it is a firework in the tightness and effervescence of its poems. Like Aileen Kelly’s previous book, The Passion Paintings: Poems 1983-2006, it concentrates the work of many years.

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Graeme Miles Reviews David Musgrave

This new, book-length poem by David Musgrave remembers the life, and especially the voice, of Bill Maidment, who taught English Literature at the University of Sydney. Firmly in the tradition of poetic memorial, and given the character of its protagonist, it becomes a book concerned with the broader memory of a culture and the ways that a human being can inhabit it.

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Review Short: Krissy Kneen’s Eating My Grandmother: a grief cycle

Eating My Grandmother is the first collection of poems by novelist and short-story writer Krissy Kneen. As its blurb announces, it is a book written out of a sense of necessity: the imperative to record and to make sense of grief. These poems are autobiographical and confessional: their ‘I’ presents itself as the voice of the poet, and a photograph of the poet’s grandmother appears after the last poem.

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Review Short: Philip Salom’s Alterworld

Philip Salom’s Alterworld is much more than a standard ‘new and selected’. Two major books, Sky Poems (first published 1987, FACP) and The Well Mouth (2005, FACP) are reworked, and a new collection completes the three.

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Domestic Fauna

1: Wryneck Name: Wryneck. Description: The head is small but with a long beak, somewhere between an ibis and a toucan. The body is a coiled spring, feet long and avian. Movement: A jaunty, fairground rhythm with a little hop …

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Graeme Miles Reviews Tim Wright and Rob Wilson

For all their contemporaneity, both of these books work with themes, or better, anxieties, that have always been at the heart of lyric poetry. In different ways, they are concerned with avoiding easy comfort in language and shying away from time and mortality.

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Review Short: Marie Slaight and Terrence Tasker’s The Antigone Poems

The Antigone Poems is a collaborative work, made up of poetry by Marie Slaight and drawings by Terrence Tasker. Created in the 1970s when the writer and artist were living in Montreal and Toronto, and published in 2014, it is an attractively produced book. The drawings, most depicting faces like tragic masks, divide the five chapters.

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Review Short: Chris Wallace-Crabbe’s my feet are hungry

Readers of Australian poetry will expect a new collection from Chris Wallace-Crabbe to be a work of erudition and wit. In this they will not be disappointed. Wallace-Crabbe is entirely in command of his craft and possessed of intelligence that does not waste itself in trivialities.

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