Review Short: Toby Davidson’s ‘Beast Language’

Beast Language by Toby Davidson
Five Islands Press, 2013

In the introduction to the collected poems of Francis Webb, Toby Davidson observes that the immediate influences behind Webb’s poems ‘do not supersede his locales.’ Webb’s poems are informed by a topophilia, a love of place and its ambient lore, a topographical attentiveness to detail that includes not just spatial but also temporal resonances. Davidson has inherited this attentiveness to space and place, and his debut collection, Beast Language, attempts a topo or ecopoetics that traverses a spectrum of geographies, mapping the Australian continent from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific seaboard, attempting not only terrestrial readings but taking cosmological measurements as well.

Continue reading →

Michael Farrell Reviews MTC Cronin

The World Last Night by MTC Cronin
UQP (2012)

A book as an experience of sampling, and of reading over a long period of time, may be ideal for the writer; but it won’t be that for all readers, especially not reviewers.

MTC Cronin has published several highly structured books in the past: Talking to Neruda’s Questions, 1-100 and The Flower, The Thing. Here the double title functions in a looser, more umbrella-like way; the book apparently aims to use death as its guiding concept: the assertion that the poems are themselves metaphors suggesting flexibility in her use of death as her theme.
Continue reading →

Justin Clemens Reviews Pam Brown and Ken Bolton

Something Old, Something New

Four Poems by Ken Bolton
Little Esther Books, 2012 [first pub. 1977]
more than a feuilleton by Pam Brown
Little Esther Books, 2012

If there is one true love in the history of Australian verse, it’s perhaps the love of Pam Brown and Ken Bolton. As you should expect, it’s not a normal kind of love at all – or maybe it’s the only normal love, depending on how you’re predisposed to taking the word or the thing (‘normal,’ I mean), and depending whether you think you can tell the difference between the two (‘word’ and ‘thing,’ I mean).
Continue reading →

Andy Jackson Reviews Kevin Brophy and Nathan Curnow

Radar by Kevin Brophy and Nathan Curnow
Walleah Press (2012)

Radar. Green blips on a black screen. A large and vulnerable craft navigating a changeable world. A technological attempt to locate an invisible danger, or to give shape to darkness. All these associations emerge out of the poetry of Kevin Brophy and Nathan Curnow in their joint collection Radar, albeit in an intimate mode: these poets observe the ways in which we navigate through our lives in the contemporary world and improvise meaning. It is difficult, though, to talk about ‘the book’ because these two poets differ strikingly in their approaches.

Continue reading →

Review Short: Lachlan Brown’s ‘Limited Cities’

Wide suburban similes

Limited Cities by Lachlan Brown
Giramondo (2012)

A meditation on city limits – the literal and figurative limits of cities – and the edges of ‘urban’ definition, Lachlan Brown’s first collection, Limited Cities, conveys the extreme contrasts and contradictions of suburban environments via train-window views. Macquarie Fields, Parisian banlieues and Barcelona street scenes: each keen observation of the space through which he moves contributes to a nuanced description of the poet’s perspective, and in turn the reader’s too. What at first appears to be a collection concerned with the external – landscapes and cityscapes – is, in fact, more personal.

Continue reading →

Review Short: Toby Fitch’s ‘Rawshock’

Rawshock by Toby Fitch
Puncher and Wattmann, 2012

Sydney-based poet Toby Fitch’s first book-length collection, Rawshock, is a lively, artful and conceptually engaging excursion into the underworld of a profound poetic imagination; through the eponymous poem sequence, Fitch offers up the viscera and vital organs of the Orpheus myth for the delectation of contemporary readers. Everyday Static’ and ‘Oscillations’ – the two chapbook-length series that accompany this myth – present a sensuous and affable rendering of Fitch’s key theme; the relationship of the present to the poetry of the past.

Continue reading →

Bev Braune Reviews Kate Lilley

Ladylike by Kate Lilley
UWA Press, 2012

Kate Lilley’s second collection, Ladylike, is a tightly constructed and complex work on love and language. Reminding me of Welsh poet Gwyneth Lewis’ wry, poignant words concerned with Welsh language, use of English and meaning-frauds, Kate Lilley enlivens her readers to assumptions, contradictions and the various erections of judging behaviour that surround the definition of a woman today or in any recent age.

Continue reading →

Review Short: Robert Gray’s ‘Cumulus’

Pruning the Book of Nature

Cumulus (Collected Poems) by Robert Gray
John Leonard Press, 2012

Though Robert Gray’s status as a major poet is well established, both in Australia and overseas, he is sometimes dismissed as ‘merely’ a nature poet or, worse still, a poet of description. While Gray is narrower in scope than say Yeats, Auden or Murray, this charge is, of course, irrelevant to both the reader’s enjoyment and the place his poetry will find in any canon. Many leading poets of the second half of last century – Plath, Larkin, Wright, R.S. Thomas – could, to varying degrees, be similarly accused.

Continue reading →

Bonny Cassidy Reviews Rosemary Dobson

Rosemary Dobson: Collected by Rosemary Dobson
UQP, April 2012

Edited by the poet shortly before her death, Rosemary Dobson: Collected reminds us not only that Dobson was one of the last Eurocentric formalists in Australian poetry, but also that her very late poems turn away from that distant, ornate tradition.

This ultimate edition contains Dobson’s eleven collections of poetry, poems published but not collected, plus a short selection from her tender and bold translations with David Campbell. Its tour of Dobson’s poetic dwelling is clear and fascinating.
Continue reading →

Review Short: John Kinsella’s ‘The Jaguar’s Dream’

the end allowing no closure and adulated

The Jaguar’s Dream by John Kinsella
Alma Books, 2012

The Jaguar’s Dream is a collection of ‘cover’ poems by the celebrated, and prolific, John Kinsella. The poems covered by Kinsella all originate in languages other than English – gestating in mother tongues as diverse as Latin, French, German, Russian, Chinese and others, before fusing with Kinsella’s own ‘Wheatbelt Western Australian, mid-Ohioan, and Cantabrigian English.’ Cover, interestingly, is also a verb meaning to mate, particularly of a stallion to a mare: the poems are similarly interbreedings, by Kinsella (Western Australian English) out of Virgil (Augustan Latin).
Continue reading →

Review Short: Vivian Smith’s ‘Here, There and Elsewhere’

Here, There and Everywhere by Vivian Smith
Giramondo, 2012

It’s a long time since I’ve read Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, but I find myself lifting it off the shelf again and flicking through the contents page. I’ve been reading Vivian Smith’s new book, Here, There and Elsewhere, a reflective collection that is mostly linked by notions of memory, age and time, enduring themes that Smith handles with dignity and sleight of hand. But space is interestingly also central to this collection, in subject as well as craft. In Bachelardian fashion, Smith, in many of these works ‘explores the significance of the various kinds of space that attract and concentrate the poetic imagination’ (The Poetics of Space. Beacon Press, 1964). It’s not surprising therefore, that almost all of the poems in this book are sonnets, the poetic form which to my mind makes the most adroit demands on space.

Continue reading →