Book Reviews
FRESH Friday, May 4th, 2012
New and Selected Poems
Giramondo Publishing, 2011
New and Selected Poems by Gig Ryan
Giramondo Publishing, 2011
In her piece in The Reader titled ‘Some Random Notes about Contemporary Poetry’, Gig Ryan asserts that, ‘Poetry is our response to the world, but it’s also the thing we poets find the most taxing, the best of engaging our brains. Ideally – like all good art – it should make us think.’ Yet, as she also acknowledges, meaning is often secondary when reading poetry. That is, it is intensified and made more complex by the poem’s sensual materiality and the affect it may evoke. Both an avid reader and teacher of Ryan’s poetry for the last past two decades, I had been excited to hear that Giramondo was publishing her New and Selected Poems. And when it arrived, it did not disappoint. Being of a comparable size and quality of production to Brandl & Schlesinger’s Collected Poems of John Forbes, I think it will become, much like Forbes’ Collected, one of those staples among the bookshelves of local poetry lovers and eventually of a more international audience, for it includes some of the best Australian poetry written over the past thirty years.
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Monday, March 19th, 2012 
Knuckled by Fiona Wright
Giramondo Publishing, 2011
Knuckled is the debut collection from Fiona Wright, and can I just start by saying that ‘knuckled’ is a great title for a book of poems? It’s a word that’s easy to understand, one that immediately brings images to mind (hands, fists, gnarled trees, walking-sticks) but also one that you don’t hear that often. It’s also a fabulous word to say out loud over and over again. On first read, my thoughts were that this was simply another collection of lyric poetry: a bunch of measured short free-verse observations (some wry, some earnest) and descriptions of things (a frangipani, cutting open a persimmon, bushfires, bus rides in Sri Lanka), one observation per poem, one poem every one-to-two pages. An interesting collection: diverting but unremarkable.
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Monday, March 5th, 2012 
Surface to Air by Jaya Savige
University of Queensland Press, 2011
In an essay for The Australian titled ‘Poetry Lives, OK?’ Jaya Savige examines the ongoing debate about the state of contemporary Australian poetry. Essentially, he argues that this debate is not so much “current” as “perpetual.” Each new generation of literary talent faces a backlash from those who would conserve the old order. As Savige notes, this process defines literary production and indeed all cultural production. He cites the example of Geoffrey Chaucer who, in 1372, as the English diplomat to the area now known as Italy, discovered the vernacular poetry of the Sicilian school and decided that English, too, would make an excellent medium for poetry. Rejecting French and Latin was a bold move, but it paid off for Chaucer: his work is still on the curricula of universities the world over.
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Monday, February 20th, 2012 
‘A Tingling Catch’: A Century of New Zealand Cricket Poems 1864-2009 edited by Mark Pirie
HeadworX, 2010
While waiting for this book to arrive, I found myself wondering what the best known cricket poem in the world might be. I’d say that it’s still the absurdly patriotic ‘Vitai Lampada’ by Henry Newbolt. Fortunately, many of the poems in this New Zealand anthology, ‘A Tingling Catch’ (the name drawn from a 1907 poem by Seaforth Mackenzie) are less thumpingly patriotic and rather more challenging than Newbolt’s less than subtle hymn to unshrinking school-boy masculinity.
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Monday, February 6th, 2012 
Chemistry by Jamie King-Holden
Whitmore Press, 2011
Love and Fuck Poems by Koraly Dimitriadis
Self published, 2011
Jamie King-Holden is the 2010 winner of the Whitmore Press/Poetry Idol Manuscript Prize and this is her first collection of poetry. I am reminded, upon finding this out, of a series of miniature chapbooks published by the Australian Poetry Centre which I reviewed for Cordite a year ago. Whereas those prize-winning new poets were underrepresented by poor editing and production quality, Whitmore Press have done King-Holden’s poems due justice by publishing a tight little collection that boasts charming presentation for a limited edition chapbook.
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Monday, January 23rd, 2012 
The Sons of Clovis: Ern Malley, Adoré Floupette and a secret history of Australian poetry by David Brooks
University of Queensland Press, 2011
‘Ern Malley? Again?’ asks David Brooks at the outset of this new reading of what is, arguably, the central event in the history of modern Australian poetry. Brooks’s account is an engrossing, at times exhilarating journey through the landscape of early-mid twentieth century Modernist poetry, but it also leaves the question of the need for yet another volume about the infamous hoax more or less unanswered. This avoidance may be the result of unwillingness rather than inability on the author’s part; he perhaps wishes for the reader to reflect on the enigma of the hoax’s enduring appeal, while he himself goes about the task of unravelling the mystery of the famed poems’ origins and allusions. Brooks’s enthusiastic detective work and his explication of the poems’ notoriously abstract mechanics and symbols make for a fascinating and thoroughly readable work of literary scholarship; but he also leaves his reader unsure of the intentions and implications of this ‘secret history of Australian poetry’.
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Monday, January 9th, 2012 
Electricity for Beginners by Michelle Dicinoski
Clouds of Magellan, 2011
Electricity for Beginners, Michelle Dicinoski’s first poetry collection, has been dedicated in its title and opening pages to “beginners”. Dicinoski has been published previously in a number of publications including Meanjin, The Australian and The Best Australian Poems. So while this is a first collection, it is also a mature book of poetry and much more than a beginner’s exercise. The poems traverse different states of being and explore shifts in time in order to tell stories of love, family, friendship, and childhood, and often change focus and move seamlessly from momentary observations to future possibilities or predictions.
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Monday, December 26th, 2011 
How to be hungry by Stu Hatton
Self published, 2010
Stu Hatton’s How to be hungry is predominantly a charnel house of modern, urban, party-going, substance-abusing youth. Hatton crams in the details of the worst of youthful socialising — friends as necessary accessories, drugs, sexual frustration, disappointment, aversion to boredom, lies, stealing, compulsions, addictions, the highs and the lows, even the consumption of adverts rather than proper food. In poem after poem layer upon layer of detail is accumulated like so much sediment, perhaps by way of a barricade against drug-fuelled forgetfulness. At their worst, these list-like poems are perhaps drafts of better poems — hasty, truncated, raw, a bunch of punch-lines tangled together, unresolved. True, there are many finely gnomic observations, but Hatton links them together fuzzily.
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Monday, December 12th, 2011 
glass clouds by Grant Caldwell
Five Islands Press, 2010
For nearly three decades Grant Caldwell has been writing some of the more interesting and fearless poetry in Australia. A relentless observer of the absurd and odd, Caldwell’s predominant tone has been a wryness capable of quiet awe. His poetry is pulled taut between these points. The lines are clipped and his narratives drift to punch-lines that rarely miss. At times he seems to reiterate Berryman’s quip that, “Life, friends, is boring”, but also that poetry and resilience are often located in the strangest, most overlooked places.
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Monday, November 28th, 2011 
thempark by Michael Farrell
BookThug, 2010
Illuminations by Arthur Rimbaud
translated by John Ashbery
W.W. Norton and Co., 2011
In her review of John Ashbery’s new translation of Illuminations in The New York Times, Lydia Davis reminded us that: “When Rimbaud’s mother asked of A Season in Hell, ‘What does it mean?’ — a question still asked of Rimbaud’s poetry, and of Ashbery’s, too — Rimbaud would say only, ‘It means what it says, literally and in every sense.’”
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Monday, November 14th, 2011 
amphora by joanne burns
Giramondo Publishing, 2011
joanne burns has been publishing experimental poetry in Australia for over four decades, and amphora is her thirteenth collection. At 135 pages, it is substantial and generous, of a breadth that allows for the prose poems burns is best known for along with a number of spectacular short poems and some longer series. amphora to my mind affects a very strange hybrid of both 1970s Aussie experimentalism of chance operation and intertextual sophistication, and a preoccupation with the subjects of metaphysical poets both of the tradition, as well as modern.
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Monday, October 31st, 2011 
Vishvarūpa by Michelle Cahill
Five Islands Press, 2011
Michelle Cahill’s second collection is marvellously named Vishvarūpa, Sanskrit for “manifold, having all forms and colours”. The cover is classic black and silver, with a close-up photograph of a Hindu deity’s sculpture. If the package says anything, it’s intelligent. And the package does not lie. Cahill may laze in the splendour of nature or love, as is the way with so many poets, but she does so with extensive layering. In varying odes and confessions she incessantly challenges her multi-cultural identity through an inability to both grasp and contain language. With an overload of foreign words in any given poem, Cahill presents her readers with the difficulty of language and its translation.
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Monday, October 17th, 2011 
Letters from Ausland by Louis Armand
Vagabond Press, 2011
To say Louis Armand is a thoughtful poet is both obvious and an understatement. His reach extends beyond the expression of an idea to capture the sensation of the thought itself. He gives thought its heft, urgency and gravity and thus separates himself from being a mere poet of ideas. In his latest collection, Letters from Ausland, he finds that elusive ground between intellect and artistry.
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Monday, October 3rd, 2011 
This Floating World by Libby Hart
Five Islands Press, 2011
This Floating World is Libby Hart’s long-awaited follow-up to her 2006 Anne Elder Award-winning Fresh News from the Arctic. Like Arctic, the collection is heavily dependent on both the natural world and the nature of humans in relation to that world. I am making an educated guess that the book is a product of Hart’s residency at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in County Monaghan, Ireland, as the structure of the second and major part is a songline of the area. From what I glean, Hart went to Ireland, fell in love with its extremities, saluted the wind again and again through a measured and responsive verse, dreamt of what the ocean might say, spied on lone figures, imagined their thoughts and longings and gave them voices. I love the concept. A map would have given readers a worthy visual, but I am willing to set aside the issue as it could well have been an aesthetic choice and, truly, the poems as maps speak for themselves.
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Monday, September 19th, 2011 
Family Room by Yasuhiro Yotsumoto
Vagabond Press, 2009
Watashi by Shuntaro Tanikawa
Vagabond Press, 2010
At the outset I will say that, though my own latest book Apocrypha was published by Vagabond Press, I hold no financial interest in the press nor any motivation to promote these two books other than the merits I find in them. The first collection under review, Yotsumoto’s Family Room, masterfully transcends the opposition between tradition and experiment; and Watashi, Tanikawa’s 20th collection to be published in English translation, certainly confirms this reviewer’s impression of being in the presence of a major poet.
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