BOOK REVIEWS
Caitlin Maling Reviews Alison Whittaker
Gomeroi poet Alison Whittaker’s debut collection Lemons in the Chicken Wire is a necessary addition to contemporary poetry. Deftly handled at both the level of the poem and the book, Whittaker’s work introduces us to the worlds of queer Aboriginal women living on the rural fringe of New South Wales.
Review Short: Dennis Haskell’s Ahead of Us
‘Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything,’ wrote C. S. Lewis in a work of prose, published soon after his wife died. Under such conditions poets are apt to explore their grief by way of lyricism, and, while it is uncommon in the Australian context, recent years have seen several international male poets producing collections in just these circumstances. From the United Kingdom, for instance, we have Douglas Dunn’s Elegies and Christopher Reid’s A Scattering, and, from the United States, Donald Hall’s Without.
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.
Dominique Hecq Reviews Charles Baudelaire: Selected Poems from Les Fleurs du Mal
Les Murray endorses Jan Owen’s translation of Charles Baudelaire’s Selected Poems from Les Fleurs du Mal (1857) on the book’s back cover: ‘Jan Owen’s Baudelaire brings the French conjuror closer to me than any version I’d ever read.’ Although we could take umbrage to the term ‘conjuror’ being used in relation to Baudelaire, it is, on closer reflection, quite apposite. In fact it may apply to the French poet as well as his Australian translator, for both are magicians in their own way. Given Baudelaire’s impact on Anglophone poetry, poetics, and criticism, he needs no introduction to many readers of Cordite Poetry Review.
Phillip Hall Reviews Mick: A Life of Randolph Stow
Suzanne Falkiner describes her aim in writing this biography of Randolph Stow as being ‘to contextualise the [literary] works within the broad arc of Stow’s life’. She notes that Stow’s desire for an ‘authorial invisibility – and an accompanying silence – extended to a desire for a chameleon-like camouflage in his personal life’. This camouflage included a retreat from Australia and ‘from the world of published books, in a gradual progression towards silence and into a richer inner landscape’. But, Falkiner shows, this ‘richer’ inner life was always plagued by depression (and one serious suicide attempt), a one-time addiction to prescription drugs, a very complicated (dependency) relationship with alcohol, a fear of madness and a failure to establish long term sexual relationships and to acknowledge and accept his sexuality.
Andy Jackson Reviews Mary Cresswell and Natasha Dennerstein
In a recent essay for the London Review of Books, Ben Lerner provocatively suggested that the reason that we dislike poetry (as Marianne Moore does in her infamous ‘Poetry’, which begins ‘I too dislike it’) is that all poems are failures. Each poem is an attempt to translate experience, research, idea or desire into language, and in that leap something is invariably lost – and, I would say, gained – because success is not the polar opposite of failure, but its way of proceeding. The success of a collection of poetry depends upon how the poet, rather than denying this inevitable ‘failure’, acknowledges and incorporates it.
Tim Wright Reviews Lê Văn Tài, Nguyễn Tôn Hiệt & Phan Quỳnh Trâm, Edited by Nguyễn Hưng Quốc and Nhã Thuyên
The academic Michael Jacklin who launched the present collection, has written that there is ‘ongoing neglect of literature produced in Australia in languages other than English,’ citing as one example the Australian-based, international journal of Vietnamese writing Tien Ve, which appears to be little known in Australian poetry circles.
Michael Farrell Reviews Grant Caldwell
Publishing a selected poems is an act of confidence. While no one who writes poems would want to be judged on their worst effort, a selection suggests these are the poems that – if readers must judge – the poet be judged upon. The act is, however, doubly denied by Caldwell in the qualified title, Reflections of a Temporary Self, and by the front cover author photo: is he asleep or isn’t he? The I-don’t-necessarily-give-a-fuck attitude is part of the package. I qualify the attitude because Caldwell, in producing an eighth book (consisting of poems from six previous books and new poems), clearly does give one.
Review Short: Π.O.’s Fitzroy: the biography
For Π.O., ‘Fitzroy is what you, bump into/ when you leave home’ (599). It was outside his family’s first front door after they escaped the Bonegilla migrant reception centre in 1954. After sixty years and homes in other suburbs, it is still the place that his poems gravitate towards. If anyone were to attempt writing the biography of Melbourne’s first suburb, Π.O. is the poet.
Review Short: Quinn Eades’s all the beginnings: a queer autobiography of the body
The world can never be understood in quite the same way after having seen Eades’s ‘body’ written into these pages. It is an intimate connection, sometimes an embracing, but sometimes a turning away from that which feels too exposed but still draws the eye.
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.
Autumn Royal Reviews Martin Langford and Dan Disney
Matters of identity in relation to land are a major concern for poets writing in Australia. In the introduction to The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry (2009) John Kinsella points out that since its earliest forms Australian poetry expresses ‘a sense of urgency about communicating the uniqueness and significance of the Australian landscape, and the relationship between individuals and community and country/place’.
Bonny Cassidy Reviews Contemporary Australian Literature: A World Not Yet Dead
As Feature Reviews Editor and sometime reviewer for Cordite Poetry Review it is an unusual (and therefore fun) privilege to consider a title in which poetry is critically addressed in the company of other forms. Too often it is it either quarantined within poetry-only criticism, or mentioned as an embarrassing aside to discussions of prose.
Review Short: Audacious 1, Benjamin Solah, ed.
Coming straight at your inner eardrums is the debut volume of Audacious, the audio journal of Melbourne Spoken Word. Like a night at Passionate Tongues, or an afternoon at the Dan, this collection presents a variety of poets at different levels of artistic development. Some are seasoned and in full flight, while others are up-and-comers still finding their voice. In this volume at least, Audacious offers more of the latter.
Review Short: Louis Armand’s East Broadway Rundown and The Rube Goldberg Variations
Louis Armand’s poetry is unbending in its loyalty to the aesthetic and moral responsibilities of the avant-garde. In these new chapbooks, both published by Vlak Records, Armand mines culture for its buried messages, showing how fraught with uncertain track is any search for truth and authenticity in a world made knowable by language.
Matthew Hall Reviews Writing Australian Unsettlement
In his essay on Charles Olson, ‘Open Field Poetics and the Politics of Movement’, David Herd bridges the geopolitical gulf between Hannah Arendt’s conception of ‘statelessness’ and Giorgio Agamben’s ongoing inquiry into the state of exception, biopolitics and nationhood. Herd contends that:
… [f]or complex and evolving reasons, the modern political state has become, by the early part of the Twentieth Century, synonymous with the idea of nation. The consequence of this was that citizenship came to be identified with national affiliation. Simply put, to fall outside of one national jurisdiction was to fall outside of all jurisdictions.
Review Short: Linda Weste’s Nothing Sacred
Linda Weste’s Nothing Sacred provides an eclectic, erotic and sometimes profane insight into the private and public lives of Republican Rome. The combination of historicity with sensory poetics provides an immersive, visceral reading experience. And there is immediacy about the submersion in place – the reader is there from the first line, walking through the ‘peat bog haze’ and ‘streamers of blood’ of the eternal city.
Review Short: Alan Loney’s conStellations
The value of information is in its organisation. Twin impulses to present and re-present data (words, text, images, worldly phenomena) inform Alan Loney’s recent chapbook conStellations, from work & tumble press.
Review Short: Ken Bolton’s London Journal / London Poem
Readers of contemporary Australian poetry will most likely need no introduction to the work of Adelaide-based Ken Bolton. In a career extending back to Four Poems (1977), Bolton has established a distinctively discursive poetry, one that weaves observations of the poet’s everyday environment with musings on art, culture, and society more generally.
Chloe Wilson Reviews Tracy Ryan and Jill Jones
These two slender and handsomely designed volumes of poetry are the result of the closely con-tested 2014 Whitmore Press Manuscript Prize, of which Tracy Ryan and Jill Jones were joint winners.
Rob Wilson Reviews Best Australian Poems 2015
Australian poetry, and indeed poetry in Australia, always seems to be undergoing something of a personality crisis. From the bush ballad to Angry Penguins and beyond, Australians have a knack for producing poetry, and a unique language from which to create it, but it’s a cottage industry. Even ‘industry’ seems too strong a term for what Australian poetry produces, though we have (and have had) no shortage of skilled writers working at various levels of poesy and doing remarkable things.
Simon Eales Reviews Jennifer Maiden and Stefanie Bennett
Stefanie Bennett woke up alongside Jennifer Maiden one morning, remarking, ‘An enemy is nothing to sneeze at: / Often his eau-de-Cologne’s / All embracing’ (‘Stratum’). This might be the too-cute, not-clever start to an amalgamating take on these two books from two poets with similar concerns and different styles.
Review Short: Rachael Munro’s Indigo Morning
Rachael Munro is a keen observer who writes in a language of nettles and nets, establishing a daily mood via the accumulation of certain details. This is a book of apricot tissue petals and fences-turned-crystal lattices; of the world in its weather and a poet caught in the tangle.
Review Short: Pam Brown’s Missing up
From the cover, let alone the first lines, the title appears apt: a sense of levitation, humming along wires, strands of illumination flickering through a work of direct and intimate voices, understated in its deftness and density, with light touches that lift the lexis, and air pockets in its seams of meaning. Spread out across the pages are samples of complete, if not absolute contemporaneity interspersed with work that decries the shortcomings of an age in which culture is so often presented as a commodity. Pam Brown’s latest collection showcases self-objects and articulates responses to salient concerns, providing masterful representations of the everyday and outré that take their time to settle into the spaces and absences within which they are framed.
