BOOK REVIEWS
Review Short: Amelia Dale’s Metadata and Thalia’s A Loose Thread
The question what are we to do at and with the limits of language presents itself as the central question in the two books under review here. That they frame themselves as poetry means that the context in which this occurs is different from art or graphic design – two fields into which both could easily be placed. One does not ‘read’ these works but apprehends them.
Review Short: Sandy Jeffs’s Chiaroscuro
In her poem ‘The suicides’, Janet Frame writes: ‘know they died because words they had spoken/ returned always homeless to them’. Perhaps more deaths could be prevented if people were able to speak without fear of being shamed or ostracised, knowing that their words might lodge in someone’s mind or heart, and that language, if wrestled with, could offer healing.
Review Short: Philip Salom’s Alterworld
Philip Salom’s Alterworld is much more than a standard ‘new and selected’. Two major books, Sky Poems (first published 1987, FACP) and The Well Mouth (2005, FACP) are reworked, and a new collection completes the three.
Review Short: Philip Salom’s Between Yes and No
Philip Salom is a poet and novelist who has, like several others of his generation, made a career straddling academia and a kind of award-and fellowship-winning literary writing (see the long list on his personal website) that has enabled him to retire in his late fifties to write full time.
Michael Farrell Reviews Hong Ying, Translated by Mabel Lee
Hong Ying’s I Too Am Salammbo is a selection of poems from 1990-2012, based on a Chinese selection published in 2014. Though almost all the poems contain conceptual, or imagistic, interest (bar some of the ‘city’ poems: ‘Berlin’, ‘London’, etc.), the formal repetition gets a bit wearing.
Tim Wright Reviews Caitlin Maling
Few writers seem to get the viciousness of Perth. John Mateer’s early poems do, and some of Deborah Robertson’s short stories. There’s also Laurie Duggan’s one-liner, ‘you can see why all the really savage punk bands came from here’ (‘Things to Do in Perth’), and for the encyclopaedic and lyrical, John Kinsella’s wonderful, aptly sprawling ‘Perth Poem’.
Review Short: Ali Cobby Eckermann’s Inside My Mother
Celebrated South Australian writer Ali Cobby Eckermann’s fourth volume of poetry, Inside My Mother, is her most substantial and diverse collection to date. Although the book includes a handful of reworked earlier pieces, most of the seventy-three poems are new. Across four sections, these poems enrich and intensify the politically urgent subject matter that Cobby Eckermann’s oeuvre has, over the past decade or so, addressed so effectively. As an Aboriginal descended from the Yankunytjatjara language group, Cobby Eckermann’s chief concern is to express what she sees as the untold truth of Aboriginal people, both in terms of vital aspects of their culture, as well as regarding the (ongoing) detrimental impact of European colonisation. In this new work, Cobby Eckermann’s personal story provides a strong substructure in relation to which these larger issues are artfully explored.
Review Short: John Tranter’s Heart Starter
What is more old-fashioned than modernity? New York in the 1960s; Paris in the 1920s; Edwardian England: how entranced we are by the bygone milieu of modernity. John Tranter has long appreciated the poetic potential of the almost-new, almost-old, as seen in his poems on movies, jazz, the New York School, and so on. But as seen in his latest book, Heart Starter, his interest in such things is not merely nostalgic. Rather, his work is obsessed with remixing the magic pudding of modernity. The past, in other words, is there to be used, not revered or sentimentalised. Tranter’s poetic revisionism treats source texts and forms as transitional objects (to use Winnicott’s term) that offer open-ended play and creativity, rather than demand compliance.
Review Short: Shane McCauley’s Trickster
It is something of a paradigm in literary criticism (poetics included) to couple West Australians with place. Of late Tim Winton and John Kinsella have occupied this ground, but it is there in thinking about Randolph Stow and Dorothy Hewett and many more besides. It was Winton, after all, who wrote – ‘we come from ‘the wrong side of the wrong continent in the wrong hemisphere”. The place, thought of quite literally as location, is simply ‘wrong’, meaning not quite right, meaning askew. This is to say nothing of the spirit here, or how, for a great number of people (some Noongars and others included), this always was and always will be the very centre of the world.
Review Short: Lucy Dougan’s The Guardians
‘The dog ran in there / It had been a mistake / to take up his old trail.’ The bold lines that open ‘The Old House’ (48) from Lucy Dougan’s latest collection, The Guardians, deliver a fine sample of Dougan’s deceptive simplicity. What better emblem for the concept of guardianship than the family dog? But the sentimental cocktail of love and loyalty embodied by this familiar friend is immediately crosscut by the ‘mistake’ of memory, an error of the senses that leads directly to the unheimlich.
Review Short: MTC Cronin’s The Law of Poetry
MTC Cronin’s ‘The Flower, the Thing’ is a favourite poem; one to which I often return. What strikes me immediately – and what stays with me – is its first word: ‘urgently’. That word sucks its reader in; it says that what comes after is ‘urgent’, is going to pull at you. It says, read on.
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.
Review Short: Luke Beesley’s Jam Sticky Vision
Luke Beesley’s long-term preoccupations with film, visual art, writing and literature, return to the fore in Jam Sticky Vision, with the poet now expanding the scope of his work to include 90’s alt-rock bands, like Silver Jews and Pavement. With allusions to filmmaker David Lynch and lo-fi rock musician Bill Callahan couched unselfconsciously beside poems about James Joyce or Henri Matisse, Beesley’s poems may seem to be drawn from something of an eclectic palette. What links the poems nicely together, though, is a close examination of the here and now. In the epigraph from John Dos Passos’s essay ‘The Writer as Technician’ (1935) this idea is more precisely expressed as ‘a time of confusion and rapid change like the present, when terms are continually turning inside out and the names of things hardly keep their meaning from day to day’.
Review Short: Clive James’s Sentenced to Life: Poems 2011-2014
Clive James’s Sentenced to Life is a poetic autopathography outlining his years living with emphysema and leukemia. While illness biographies ‘present information about diagnosis, treatment and outcome trajectories’, more importantly, they ‘share how the illness has affected the sufferer’s wider life course, social network and views of health care institutions.’, as Rachel Hall-Clifford puts it in her Autopathographies: How ‘Sick Lit’ Shapes Knowledge of the Illness Experience. However, James’s poetry is most often centred on his personal discomfort, regrets and ultimately his quest for reassurance that his writing and memory will survive his death.
Sally Evans Reviews Lisa Samuels x 2
Water, Lisa Samuels asserts in her 2010 manifesto for ‘archipelago poetics’, is ‘the unsettling undefined’: the tactile yet formless flow that both separates and joins groups of islands just as language separates and joins groups of selves. With her finely honed, comprehensive poetic and critical capacities, Samuels is a transcultural LangPo marvel – hiding in plain sight here in the wide wetness of the Pacific Ocean since relocating from the US to New Zealand in 2006.
Brigid Magner Reviews Kerry Hines
The relationship between Australia and New Zealand has often been characterised as one of sibling rivalry, between an older and more established nation and a younger and less populous country. As the Honourable MP Phil Goff has commented, it contains ‘the closeness and the rivalries, the expectations and the tensions this implies.’
Review Short: Murray Edmond’s Then It Was Now Again: selected critical writing
The essays and reviews in this collection, all previously published, span roughly thirty years of New Zealand literary history, the earliest having been published in 1973 and the most recent from the late 2000s. With one or two exceptions, these pieces tend to focus either on New Zealand poetry or New Zealand theatre, and on the surface this might seem to limit the appeal of this collection to an international audience.
Simon Eales Reviews John Kinsella
In the first rabbit poems by the late J S Harry, her rabbit-character, Peter Henry Lepus, is thrown into a number of desolate or alien environments. Peter is ‘dumped … on the Desert of Sense’, ‘comes to … FORTY-THREE BLENDS / OF DUSTED-OFF & SUNDRIED RATIONALISM’, and ‘gets lost in “Calcutta” / on his way to visit Farmer McGruber’s vegetable patch.’ He is displaced most comprehensively in the middle of Iraq, 2003, a warzone that amplifies his naïve and interlopic perspective. Such meaning-deprived contexts let Harry explore belonging, identity, and the stability of concepts themselves. In the poem, ‘Small & Rural’, for example:
Review Short: Robert Adamson’s Net Needle
Net Needle begins with the thoughtful interlacing of seven poems. The first poem, ‘Listening to Cuckoos’, highlights the bird’s ‘two unchanging notes’ during the start of spring. Then, ‘Summer’, with its ‘pallid cuckoo call’ through the poet’s garden threads into ‘Garden Poem’ and how sunlight spans the course of a day until ‘patches of moonlight’ travel into the next poem, ‘Dorothy Wordsworth’. Here, we find the Romantic poet’s sister ruminating near a window where the moon moves ‘across the star-decked dark’.
Review Short: Ken Canning/Burraga Gutya’s Yimbama
Reading a book by an Indigenous Australian author comes with a certain mythos attached. There is an uncritical expectation of explanation, of being taken by the hand and taught profound lessons that are appropriable, then displayed as trophies to liven up ‘Western’ society. Because indigeneity is often imagined as oppositional to modernity – and because modernity is assumed to belong to the ‘West’ – it’s as if the reader is sneaking off and doing something a little naughty, a little rebellious, by peeking over the fence at the fascinating and magical world of the ‘ethnic’ writer. And there is a reward for this, be it gratitude from the authors for deigning to listen, or kudos from one’s own cohort for being so very brave and ‘open minded’.
Review Short: Ian Gibbins’s and Judy Morris’s Floribunda
How far we are from the radical days of realism. Prior to Adorno’s dismantling of Lukacs and the Stalinist led state institutionalisation of it, realism may have laid claim to being an innovative aesthetic with agreeably progressive political inclinations.
Shale Preston Reviews Christine Townend
Christine Townend’s debut poetry collection is powerful, important and timely. Indeed, owing to its sustained and compassionate focus on animals, it could well come to be viewed as a watershed in terms of Australian poetry. Townend, founder of Animal Liberation Australia and a number of shelters for street dogs in India, is a woman who has been on the front line in terms of animal rights activism, and has performed some extremely valuable work therein.
Oliver Shaw Reviews Michael Aiken
Reading Michael Aiken’s A Vicious Example is like walking out of the pub and wandering city streets at 4 am, half-drunk and in sub-conscious wonder. The strangeness of it all: What year is it again? Where are we? Aiken’s collection is fragmented, forming thought-voices into obscure imagery that settles and unsettles on the mind. Aiken’s voice is lethargic, hopeless. There is only one narrative to this text that I can find, which from the beginning locates us and the poems in the Australian city. In the opening poem Aiken welcomes us to ‘come and see …’ what the rest of the country looks like after colonisation’s ‘Theft by Discovery’.
Review Short: Ivy Ireland’s Porch Light
By way of introduction permit me to share that for some reason I keep conflating this poet’s name with the title of her latest book. The result is a hybrid of name and place, forming a vague ‘place-name’ in the utterly made-up signifier ‘Porchland.’ Working back, this topos, to my mind, alluding to a libidinous, transgressive and, above all, fertile ground, is formed out of the name of the talented poet, Ivy Ireland, and the title of her second collection of poetry, Porch Light, whose eponymous poem quotes Tom Waits in the epigraph: ‘How do the angels get to sleep when the Devil leaves the porch light on?’
