CONTRIBUTORS

John Jenkins

John Jenkins is best known as a poet. He also writes short fiction, non-fiction and occasionally for radio and live performance. He has worked as a journalist and book editor and taught in universities. He lives near Victoria’s Yarra Valley, and is widely travelled. His most recent poetry book is Growing up with Mr Menzies (John Leonard Press, 2008).

http://www.johnjenkins.com.au/

Introduction to Chris Mann’s Whistlin Is Did

Chris Mann read at Melbourne’s La Mama in the early 1970s, where he first impressed me as a bold exponent of a sort of critical, larrikin and compositional linguistics, and seemed very much at home in the theatre’s performance space, with its nascent egalitarian ethos. Some listeners I noticed may have been equally perplexed as intrigued by his well-timed delivery, his knowingly artful shtick and highly patterned patter.

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Review Short: Chris Mansell’s STUNG

Chris Mansell is a widely published poet with a lively range of interests, a multi-talented writer who bridges various creative worlds; her work sometimes fusing with music, the visual arts, and theatre. Her departure from a narrow specialisation in poetry is highly admirable, but may have made her somewhat under-appreciated both as an energetic innovator and important poet of her generation. Mansell’s first book of poetry appeared in 1978, and she has published more than 25 books and chapbooks in the intervening decades; while her Schadenvale Road, a collection of short stories, appeared in 2011.

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John Jenkins Reviews Rae Desmond Jones

For more than 40 years, Rae Desmond Jones has remained one of Australia’s most challenging and rewarding poets, and in my opinion a major one, who has pursued an often hilarious, always astonishing and sometimes grimly confronting campaign against dullness, comfortable formulas and poetic complacency; and Grand Parade is to be applauded for drawing together some of his best work here.

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Manic at Night

The refrigerator’s humming outside and I like that. Outside of any use I could make of it. But I can’t see it now, cause I’m in a different suburb, but this reminds me of how I used to like the …

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Shock To The Screen Door

You can hear it banging in the wind, or when someone delivers something and lets it ‘have its will’. It causes you to jump, inevitably. “Trouble in your bubble, mate?” is what Dave says when I look morose. Which might …

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John Jenkins Reviews Peter Boyle

“No one can count the number of people we have been in a single / life. One death is never enough.” These lines from Apocrypha sum up a theme that resurfaces through the poetic fragments which make up this fabulous cache of texts: fragments which survive from certain lost books by real and re-discovered authors of the ancient world, including Herodotus, Longinus, Theophrastus, Catullus, Plato and others.

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The Wedgetails

Order falconiformes, family accipitidae Trees are wheeling in my dream. Diminish to a dot down here on green, my own face looks back up at me, as smaller ground-hugging birds erupt – warning shrieks from silver crowns – choughs and …

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Ern Malley: Pedestrian Verse

A gay, light-hearted bastard, ERN MALLEY cuts a moodily romantic figure within the dun Australian literary scene, his name inevitably conjuring perhaps that best known image of him, bow-tie askew, grinning cheerfully, at the wheel of his 1958 Jaguar sports car, El Cid. It is this image that also carries in its train the stories of later suffering-the affairs, the women, the bad teeth-and, speaking of teeth, the beautiful poems wrenched from the teeth of despair & written on the wrist of happiness “where happiness happens to like its poems written best” (in his inordinate phrase).

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Ern Malley: I have gone missing from this world

A gay, light-hearted bastard, ERN MALLEY cuts a moodily romantic figure within the dun Australian literary scene, his name inevitably conjuring perhaps that best known image of him, bow-tie askew, grinning cheerfully, at the wheel of his 1958 Jaguar sports car, El Cid. It is this image that also carries in its train the stories of later suffering-the affairs, the women, the bad teeth-and, speaking of teeth, the beautiful poems wrenched from the teeth of despair & written on the wrist of happiness “where happiness happens to like its poems written best” (in his inordinate phrase).

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