- 114: NO THEME 13
with J Toledo & C Tse
113: INVISIBLE WALLS
with A Walker & D Disney
112: TREAT
with T Dearborn
111: BABY
with S Deo & L Ferney
110: POP!
with Z Frost & B Jessen
109: NO THEME 12
with C Maling & N Rhook
108: DEDICATION
with L Patterson & L Garcia-Dolnik
107: LIMINAL
with B Li
106: OPEN
with C Lowe & J Langdon
105: NO THEME 11
with E Grills & E Stewart
104: KIN
with E Shiosaki
103: AMBLE
with E Gomez and S Gory
102: GAME
with R Green and J Maxwell
101: NO THEME 10
with J Kinsella and J Leanne
100: BROWNFACE
with W S Dunn
99: SINGAPORE
with J Ip and A Pang
97 & 98: PROPAGANDA
with M Breeze and S Groth
96: NO THEME IX
with M Gill and J Thayil
95: EARTH
with M Takolander
94: BAYT
with Z Hashem Beck
93: PEACH
with L Van, G Mouratidis, L Toong
92: NO THEME VIII
with C Gaskin
91: MONSTER
with N Curnow
90: AFRICAN DIASPORA
with S Umar
89: DOMESTIC
with N Harkin
88: TRANSQUEER
with S Barnes and Q Eades
87: DIFFICULT
with O Schwartz & H Isemonger
86: NO THEME VII
with L Gorton
85: PHILIPPINES
with Mookie L and S Lua
84: SUBURBIA
with L Brown and N O'Reilly
83: MATHEMATICS
with F Hile
82: LAND
with J Stuart and J Gibian
81: NEW CARIBBEAN
with V Lucien
80: NO THEME VI
with J Beveridge
57.1: EKPHRASTIC
with C Atherton and P Hetherington
57: CONFESSION
with K Glastonbury
56: EXPLODE
with D Disney
55.1: DALIT / INDIGENOUS
with M Chakraborty and K MacCarter
55: FUTURE MACHINES
with Bella Li
54: NO THEME V
with F Wright and O Sakr
53.0: THE END
with P Brown
52.0: TOIL
with C Jenkins
51.1: UMAMI
with L Davies and Lifted Brow
51.0: TRANSTASMAN
with B Cassidy
50.0: NO THEME IV
with J Tranter
49.1: A BRITISH / IRISH
with M Hall and S Seita
49.0: OBSOLETE
with T Ryan
48.1: CANADA
with K MacCarter and S Rhodes
48.0: CONSTRAINT
with C Wakeling
47.0: COLLABORATION
with L Armand and H Lambert
46.1: MELBOURNE
with M Farrell
46.0: NO THEME III
with F Plunkett
45.0: SILENCE
with J Owen
44.0: GONDWANALAND
with D Motion
43.1: PUMPKIN
with K MacCarter
43.0: MASQUE
with A Vickery
42.0: NO THEME II
with G Ryan
41.1: RATBAGGERY
with D Hose
41.0: TRANSPACIFIC
with J Rowe and M Nardone
40.1: INDONESIA
with K MacCarter
40.0: INTERLOCUTOR
with L Hart
39.1: GIBBERBIRD
with S Gory
39.0: JACKPOT!
with S Wagan Watson
38.0: SYDNEY
with A Lorange
37.1: NEBRASKA
with S Whalen
37.0: NO THEME!
with A Wearne
36.0: ELECTRONICA
with J Jones
CONTRIBUTORS
Siobhan Hodge
Introduction to Siobhan Hodge’s Justice for Romeo
Justice for Romeo, as a title, will seem both accurate and misleading for most readers; this is a book decidedly concerned with justice, and Siobhan Hodge’s sense of ethical responsibility pervades the poems. Hodge’s book includes as epigraph the exchange between Romeo and a servant in Act I, Scene ii of the most famous love story of all time; the servant asks, ‘I pray, can you read any thing you see?’, to which Romeo replies, ‘Ay, if I know the letters and the language.’
Posted in INTRODUCTIONS
Tagged Dennis Haskell, Kent MacCarter, Siobhan Hodge, Zoë Sadokierski
Siobhan Hodge Reviews Contemporary Australian Feminist Poetry
Contemporary Australian Feminist Poetry presents a compelling cross-section of feminist voices, experiences and engagements in Australia, picking up from where Kate Jenning’s 1975 feminist anthology Mother, I’m Rooted: An Anthology of Australian Women Poets left off.
Review Short: David Gilbey’s Pachinko Sunset
David Gilbey’s long-standing connections with Japan take centre stage in Pachinko Sunset, a collection that embraces simple, direct form to explore a layered series of issues linked with this relationship. The titular ‘pachinko’ refers to a popular Japanese game akin to pinball, in which a cascade of small metal balls are released to strike pins and be channelled off into different locations, with different prize implications for each. This image is a fair comparison for the text as a whole, as Pachinko Sunset delivers a sequence of poems in constant activity, heading in numerous directions at once, yet intrinsically caught up in the anxieties and ironies of travelling, translating, and relating Australia to Japan.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged David Gilbey, Siobhan Hodge
Review Short: Gina Mercer’s weaving nests with smoke and stone
Gina Mercer’s latest collection, weaving nests with smoke and stone, is a delicate assembly of sights and sounds, visually rich and focused on the natural. Mercer’s repetition of the word ‘fossick’ throughout the collection aptly summarises the poetic processes involved. This is a collection of quick, searching movements. Lyrically deft, musical and richly preoccupied with natural elements, the poems construct meeting points for nature and humanity, ceding more and more with each piece along the way.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Gina Mercer, Siobhan Hodge
Review Short: Shari Kocher’s The Non-Sequitur of Snow
Dr Shari Kocher’s The Non-Sequitur of Snow is her first full-length publication, following nearly two decades of feature poems in a range of Australian and international journals. There is an airy sense of activity throughout this volume. Kocher’s poetic settings range freely between the material and the imagined, forging connections across generations, yet coming through with surprising steel in some pieces. Structurally the collection is diverse, flowing, and occasionally more experimental.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Shari Kocher, Siobhan Hodge
Review Short: Rob Walker’s tropeland
South Australian poet Rob Walker’s latest collection, Tropeland, is exceptionally playful. Puns and wry twists in language are balanced with humour and a self-conscious sense of otherness, the speakers always slightly displaced from their subjects. Walker is not pessimistic in this process however; there is a consistently optimistic tone throughout Tropeland, as well as a canny awareness of failings and ironies in life.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged rob walker, Siobhan Hodge
Exploring and Renegotiating Transparency in Poetry Translation
To read poetry in translation, no matter how ‘close’ the rendering is to the original text, is to necessarily involve another figure in the reading and interpreting process. Readers of translations are not only receiving the work of the original …
Review Short: Susan Bradley Smith’s Beds For All Who Come
Susan Bradley Smith’s newest collection, Beds For All Who Come, is a delicate investigation into the lives of multiple historical figures, transitioning between the public and the personal. The collection is an excellent example of écriture féminine in that a range of individual female voices write to one another, but also acknowledge a fringe of male figures, assessing imagined and historical feelings and experiences, while also exposing some potential issues with this model.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Siobhan Hodge, Susan Bradley Smith
Stone Horses
Each horse in this frieze is unique in temperament and personality. No horse is a duplicate of any other; the arrangement of head, neck, body, and limbs differs in each, even if only slightly… – “Horse Care as Depicted on …
Posted in 66: OBSOLETE
Tagged Siobhan Hodge
Speaking Geographies: Collaboration Over Distance
When in transit and upon receipt, to whom does a postcard and its contents belong? This is one of the questions at the forefront of Speaking Geographies, a collaborative poetry collection by Siobhan Hodge and Rosalind McFarlane. This collection, composed …
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged Rosalind McFarlane, Siobhan Hodge
Crossing the Real
Each step is measured in potential thrust rivets twist and divide all strain banks curve away, harshness of lines ascend from hours lung squeeze we span miles all centred floats ghosting ferryways shift territory we revise borders steel shanked and …
Posted in 63: COLLABORATION
Tagged Rosalind McFarlane, Siobhan Hodge
Crossing in Real Time
How should we perform this act of – connection – ? Belief and bridges: ( a journey of suspension but the supports ) are a dissipating concave into this dragon harbour. Can we cantilever ^ this ^ uprising? Or perhaps …
Posted in 63: COLLABORATION
Tagged Rosalind McFarlane, Siobhan Hodge
Review Short: Vanessa Page’s Confessional Box
Australian poet Vanessa Page’s latest collection, Confessional Box, is equal parts personal and critical, examining emotional relationships with a terse, engaging style. As the title suggests, there is a strongly self-aware element to Confessional Box. The poems are relatively open, encompassing a range of points of view and personas, but these are not wholly simple reflections of human relationships. Rather, Page presents a series of evolving sections, embellishing on memories and balancing broader criticisms against more personally orientated notions of access and invitation.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Siobhan Hodge, Vanessa Page
Review Short: Kit Kelen’s China Years: New and Selected Poems
Australian poet Christopher Kit Kelen’s most recent collection, China Years: selected and new poems, contains English and Chinese pieces, presented side by side in translation, along with original artwork. Kelen’s strong interest in translation is immediate on the front cover and throughout the collection, highlighting a focus on creating points of access. When paired with Kelen’s original ink and watercolour drawings, interspersed as breaks throughout the text, a reading approach that is both fluid and inclusive is encouraged.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Kit Kelen, Siobhan Hodge
Siobhan Hodge Reviews Bonny Cassidy
Bonny Cassidy’s Certain Fathoms encourages readers to feel for the full extent of her poetic linkages, presenting a series of poems broken into two parts, inviting immediate and further reflection. The poems outwardly celebrate subtlety and linkage through their fragmentary structures, including much natural imagery and a quiet but definitive speaking voice.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Bonny Cassidy, Siobhan Hodge
Bersyarat | Conditionals
Bersyarat Jurang pemisah membuka dan di sekitarnya retakan-retakan bumi menggigit sulur rasa dari mulut tinggal mengering, simbiosis retakan tepi merah. Perkataan perempuan itu terlepas dan berlari menertawai lainnya tak berlipat, lengan sang lelaki kokoh dan hangat bila dipegang menggerogot memompa …
Posted in 53: INDONESIA
Tagged Dorothea Rosa Herliany, Siobhan Hodge
Siobhan Hodge Reviews Eileen Chong
Eileen Chong’s Burning Rice is steeped in images of food, family and connectivity. The poems thematically span geographical and chronological distances in order to make links between cultural and ancestral origins. Culinary references combine to create comforting images of solidarity in the face of isolation and anxiety. However, this is not a chapbook wholly steeped in nostalgia.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Eileen Chong, Siobhan Hodge
Transmissions: 3 Translations of Sappho
‘Transmissions’ comprises of creative translations and selective re-orderings of some fragmentary works of ancient Greek poet Sappho. These compilations emphasise the occasionally violent and manipulative nature of Sappho’s poems, the potential for multiple interpretations through lacunae, and some possible implications of imposing narratives on a poet about whom we know so little and whose works survive only in pieces.
Posted in TRANSLATIONS
Tagged Sappho, Siobhan Hodge
A Field Report from This is Not Art
It didn’t really sink in that I was going to This is Not Art (TiNA) until about halfway through the flight from Perth to Sydney. I largely did not know what to expect, having done relatively little research beforehand and being chronically distracted by PhD studies/life as I know it.
Siobhan Hodge Reviews Over There: Poems from Singapore and Australia
Over There: Poems from Singapore and Australia is ambitious. This anthology reads as a sample of more to come, rather than a clear achievement of the sizable task that it sets out in its introduction. Over There is not, as the title might initially suggest, a collection of travel poems, nor is it a comparison of different postcolonial reflections arising from Singapore and Australia.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Alvin Pang, anthologies, John Kinsella, singapore, Siobhan Hodge
The Gendered Gothic: Dorothy Hewett’s Alice in Wormland
Dorothy Hewett and ‘zombies' are not generally found in the same sentence. However, Hewett liberally utilises Gothic tones and imagery in her poetry. These Gothic trappings do not serve only as motifs: they permeate the mood, conflicts and resolutions of Hewett's Alice in Wormland. This collection, published in 1987, combines pseudo-autobiographical elements with parody, mythology, and morbid images to ultimately reach a strangely optimistic resolution.
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged Dorothy Hewett, Siobhan Hodge