BOOK REVIEWS
Review Short: Jeri Kroll’s Workshopping the Heart: New and Selected Poems
Workshopping the Heart brings together poems from Jeri Kroll’s five previous books of poetry, with thirty or so pages of new poems and the opening chapter of a verse novel. Her distinctive voice – lyric, tough and spare – is evident early.
Fiona Hile Reviews Lionel Fogarty
Lionel G. Fogarty is an indigenous Australian poet who is recognised for the excavation of a poetic space in which, as Michael Brennan has written, ‘his community and culture is recuperated and asserted’ whilst ‘dominant discourses, both political and poetic’ are subverted and destabilised. These qualities make Fogarty’s work difficult to review in a context in which the status of indigenous literature remains, for some institutions at least, seemingly unapproachable.
Review Short: Stu Hatton’s Glitching
‘Glitching,’ sharp and immediate, is a – word that sounds like it belongs to this modern internet and computer age: moments of fracture as a website struggles to load, fragmented by popups, weird demands of your exact location and the failure of Flash to connect properly. It suggests twitching and distorting monitors, the crackle of an old modem and illogical videogame surrealism, frustrations and interruptions ‘Not of substance but of form’ (‘entheogen’).
Review Short: Angela Gardner’s The Told World
Angela Gardner’s The Told World is a collection that made me feel homesick for Brisbane. Gardner is a Brisbane poet, and while some of the lines in this book specifically reference the city, it is not actually a Brisbane book of poetry. Many of the poems are pastoral, but not grounded in a specific landscape, generally the ‘here’ could be anywhere.
Simon Eales Reviews A J Carruthers and Jessica L Wilkinson
In 2013, Jessica L. Wilkinson and A J Carruthers collaborated directly on The On-Going March Box (Stale Objects dePress), a poetic object collection consisting of words and alphabet arrangements printed on oddly shaped sight cards contained in an aged box. Startlingly bold affirmations like ‘HORNS’ or ‘SHORN’ or ‘S-HORN-S’ in black and white, and ‘TO THE FORE,’ quivering with seismic formatting, behave as unapologetic provocations to the reader. Their affect is confirmed by the project’s extension of craft beyond the word: to the physical object and to the website documenting their existence.
Review Short: Tim Thorne’s The Unspeak Poems and other Verses
I first came across Tim Thorne’s work through his fifth book of poetry The Atlas, published in 1983. I was struck by the cover – a globe featuring Tasmania at its centre, huge, and taking up more than half of the earth. The rest of Australia stretches away in the distance, small, a fraction of the size. As for the rest of the world, I could only assume that it was crammed away on the dark side of the Earth.
Review Short: Rachael Mead’s The Sixth Creek
Rachael Mead is part of a fine group of contemporary Australian poets writing about nature in nuanced and resonant ways. She brings her own slant to the genre with her first collection, The Sixth Creek, while doffing her hat to celebrated writers like Mary Oliver, Thoreau, and Judith Wright.
Graeme Miles Reviews Tim Wright and Rob Wilson
For all their contemporaneity, both of these books work with themes, or better, anxieties, that have always been at the heart of lyric poetry. In different ways, they are concerned with avoiding easy comfort in language and shying away from time and mortality.
Tamryn Bennett Reviews Paul Carter
If Paul Carter’s debut collection opened with a dedication, perhaps it would read, ‘For the gaps in history and those that have tried to fill them.’ Threaded with Carter’s critical work on the palimpsest of public spaces, Ecstacies And Elegies creates a fabric of human traces that patches the holes in our histories. From myth and exile, to design ecology and radio static, Carter’s poetics is archaeological, piecing together the hidden maps and inventories of existence
Review Short: Julie Maclean’s When I saw Jimi, Kiss of the Viking and Kristin Hannaford’s Curio
Poems of England in the 1960s, youthful romanticism, experimentation and love are threaded with a wry understanding of gender relations and choices made, then move to more sober reflections. In ‘Brides that Never Became’, standing in an English church the speaker wonders about a relationship that might have been, had she not ‘looked over the lichened / fence, dry stone wall, / swollen ocean to another land’ (When I saw Jimi, 31). Outside by a river she finds a ‘flimsy tribute to a young Indian couple’ who have died there; their wedding also ‘never became’.
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.
Nicholas Birns Reviews Another English: Anglophone Poems from Around the World
This anthology’s editors are forthright about its flaws; in their introduction, Catherine Barnett and Tiphanie Yanique admit that their partition of the Anglophone world (excluding the US and UK) into seven parts is ‘woefully inadequate,’ (xiii) and that their decision to concentrate on Ghana, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the Caribbean, and India left out many other regions and nations where English was natively spoken (much of this is simply reflecting the dominant biases of postcolonial study in general).
Duncan Hose Reviews Best Australian Poems 2014
Being in and of one’s time (in favour of it, in fact) means producing work that is sensitive to the discursive furies of the day – the atmosphere of mutating code that the poet must stick to poems in new and strange forms. All else is nostalgia and denial. No-one knows what it means that Australia’s imperial republic, whose god has finally been revealed as cosmopolitan capitalism, is, in the history of colonies, still in its infancy yet so impressively seems to be approaching an end of days. If you’ve got burnt chaps and a warm six-shooter (cowgirl), these are exciting times.
Review Short: Gwen Harwood’s The Best 100 Poems of Gwen Harwood
Here is a new selection from that marvellously ardent poet, Gwen Harwood, a crafty voice that was heard from both Brisbane and Tasmania. In welcoming it, let me declare that Greg Kratzmann and I have a Harwood selection in print, but our book bounces back here from Manchester and must, as a result, be rather more expensive.
Review Short: Amy Brown’s The Odour of Sanctity
The Odour of Sanctity is New Zealand poet Amy Brown’s second collection, and a substantial one too, weighing in at 240 pages. It is a speculative work which postulates the potential canonisation of six historical figures, three granted sainthood (St Augustine of Hippo, St Rumwold of Buckingham, St Elizabeth of Hungary) and three non-saints in Margery Kempe, Christina Rossetti, and contemporary American indie rocker Jeff Mangum. The Odour of Sanctity takes these six subjects through six sections of the sainthood process, finishing with a seventh sestinesque envoi section in which the subjects converse in three pairs.
Review Short: Joanne Burns’s Brush
Brush, the latest collection of poetry from Joanne Burns consists of layers juxtaposed in a profuse and generous abundance, styles not fused so much as flipped over and filed into an album as much as an anthology. What may appear to be random sections and selections on closer inspection consist of a gathering that implies a duty of care, assembling shared cultural and oneiric artefacts stripped of extraneous affects and putting on record that which is weird and wonderful and way out there.
Review Short: Beth Spencer’s Vagabondage
Twenty years ago Beth Spencer’s first collection of poetry, Things in a Glass Box, was published and reviewed to critical acclaim. Since then she has published individual poems and two volumes of multiple genre selected works that have included poems. It could be said that it’s a long time between drinks, though Spencer has been busy with fiction, essays, and memoir (and a PhD) in the meantime. Vagabondage is her first full collection of poems since, and widely anticipated because of that.
Greg McLaren Reviews Phillip Gijindarraji Hall and Benjamin Dodds
These two debut collections cast shade and light upon one other. Both poets construct a complex, convincing and engaging sense of place, exploring belonging (or not) and being in it.
The strongest poems in Phillip Gijindarraji Hall’s Sweetened in Coals quiver and hiss with profusion, connections and abundance. These poems are firmly and specifically situated in place and in country that is constituted both ecologically and culturally. There’s a deep and rich conversation here about place and habitat. Hall’s representation and evocation of specific places is a consistently powerful presence in these poems – dynamic, in flux and abundant with the presence of animal, plant and cultural life.
Review Short: Zenobia Frost’s Salt and Bone
In its own words, Zenobia Frost’s Salt and Bone slinks ‘between ibis-legged houses / and wakeful graveyard’, and belongs to ‘the hour of the curlew’, a liminal space that speaks of ghosts and transformation. As a collection, the poems are pervaded with a sense of haunting, plagued by abject bodies ‘aching for salt and bone’, the suffocating presence of water, and the archeology of death. It is noteworthy that Frost’s work both begins and ends with a warning of the power of unknown and strange things; a reminder, perhaps, of the gaps that exist between the ‘real’ and the imagined.
Review Short: Andy Jackson’s The thin bridge
‘Poetry from a body shaped like a question mark’ That is the tag line for Andy Jackson’s blog, and it perfectly sums up the to and fro in his work. Jackson, who has Marfan’s Syndrome, has said that he came to write poetry partly ‘ to control the way people see me. I’d lived with the staring and comments that having an unusual body brings, and I wanted to be in charge.’
Review Short: Marie Slaight and Terrence Tasker’s The Antigone Poems
The Antigone Poems is a collaborative work, made up of poetry by Marie Slaight and drawings by Terrence Tasker. Created in the 1970s when the writer and artist were living in Montreal and Toronto, and published in 2014, it is an attractively produced book. The drawings, most depicting faces like tragic masks, divide the five chapters.
Lucy Van Reviews Michelle Leber
Medical diagnosis could be thought of as a form of storytelling; an analytic as well as creative process that translates the unclear expressions of the body into a plausible narrative, ideally one that directs the way to healing. Just as diagnosis might be con-sidered an art – a speculative performance that is highly contingent, at times inspired or risky – the discipline of medical observation has itself often inflected and animated art forms.
Review Short: p76’s Cornelis Vleeskens Special Issue
The first indication that the contents of this special issue hovers in the Venn overlap of art and poetry lies in its ‘curation’, not ‘edit’. Spence’s project was to ‘sample from a mass of work … to (make) a small but intense window’ (p. 5), and he does this by being true to the materiality of Vleeskens’s visual output. The nostalgic production values of the journal itself – photocopied in black and white on A4 paper, stapled, and with no frilly bits – is a perfect match for Spence’s vision and Vleeskens’s visual practice, which was firmly embedded in the intersections of text and image.
Review Short: Nicholas Walton-Healey’s Land before Lines
What Nicholas Walton-Healey’s photograph collection Land before Lines emphasises is not difference (the notion that every poet is completely individual, different, unique, special), but sameness (the complex social bind of community). The notion of the poet as ‘genius’ or ‘original’ is broken. In place of the genius is the obscurity of the face, what I would like to call the inidentity of the poet, the poet (re)framed, without identity, and most importantly, without centre.
