BOOK REVIEWS
Review Short: Omar Musa’s Here Come the Dogs
Primarily known as a performance poet and rapper, Omar Musa has embarked on another textual form with his latest publication, Here Come the Dogs. Written in a combination of verse and prose, Here Comes the Dogs offers an intimate portrait of three young men negotiating issues of identity and marginalisation in an unnamed Australian city. Musa, who is Malaysian-Australian, positions his poetry and prose in a manner that allows for his book to confront themes surrounding cultural and ethnic identities, intersectional discrimination and problematic expressions of masculinity and power.
Review Short: Rebecca Jessen’s Gap
Winner of the 2013 Queensland Literary Awards for Best Emerging Author, Gap is Rebecca Jessen’s debut verse novel and a bold entrance into a strong line of Australian verse novels.
Review Short: Alan Loney and Max Gimblett’s eMailing Flowers to Mondrian
There are challenging layers to Alan Loney and Max Gimblett’s twenty-page poem, eMailing flowers to Mondrian. The first may appear self-indulgent, the second impenetrable, and the third overly personal; but, taken as a whole and meditated upon, this aesthetically pleasing saddle-stapled book turns out to be a cunning memoir.
Review Short: Ania Walwicz’s The Palace of Culture
Ania Walwicz’s first book in more than twenty years, Palace of Culture, confirms her reputation as one of Australia’s leading conceptual poets. It consists of fifty (almost) prose poems, each between two and five pages length. The poems use the suggestion of narratives as a key organising principle. But suggestion is as far as any of the narratives get.
David McCooey Reviews Jennifer Maiden
Jennifer Maiden’s Drones and Phantoms opens with ‘Diary Poem: Uses of Live Odds’, a poem that juxtaposes – in a way characteristic of Maiden’s intensely synthesising work – politics, aesthetics, and gambling. Poetry, of course, is a kind of gamble, one in which the stakes are at once ridiculously low (financially speaking) and ridiculously high (personally speaking). Writing a poem – like any creative act – is a risky venture. One’s subjective experience of being creative never fully underwrites the created artefact. And as a communicative act, poetry runs the ever-present risk of obscurity and/or inconsequence.
Review Short: Susan Hawthorne’s Lupa and Lamb
Lupa and Lamb is a beast of a collection – it spans literally all of time and features every woman that has ever lived. Ambitious is not too strong a word. Curatrix, our guide and commentator, leads us through archives of lost women’s texts on the way to a party held by the Roman Empress Livia Drusilla. It is through this trail that Lupa and Lamb tells women’s histories and their multiple, often contradictory roles in family and society.
Review Short: Libby Hart’s Wild
Poetry might be whispering these days, but only fools fail to hear it. The whisper might be the tough sibilance of protest, it might be the swirl of nostalgia for what will soon be lost and irretrievable, it might be the resilient, gnomish murmur that tells of what cannot be suppressed, and cannot either ever be quite directly expressed. And so, Huginn and Muninn open Libby Hart’s new collection of poetry.
David Gilbey Reviews Lisa Jacobson
For three weeks in Japan I’ve read and re-read Lisa Jacobson’s new collection of poems: in subways, on shinkansen, in parks, cafés, restaurants and my apartment – up on the twelfth floor of the hilly suburb, Dainohara, in Sendai. The poems, now fiercely dog-eared, have become my familiars; challenging, apostrophising and snaking/drifting/sidling into my consciousness, they have shaped my thinking and insinuated themselves into my conversations with ‘native English-speaking’ colleagues, Japanese friends and ex-students.
Review Short: Luke Beesley’s New Works on Paper
I’ve been meaning to write this review for a year – in fact, there’s a wine stain on my copy and I can pinpoint the exact date that I first put it on my to-do list (i.e. engaged in other work → frustration → tipped glass). Despite all of my sideways swerving, a year is a good amount of time to let Beesley’s recurring bees swirl around the head; a year helps one to figure out their tune. Or, as the poet writes, ‘It’s not about bees. There are no bees.’ Have I tipped the wine glass again?
Review Short: Andrew Burke’s One Hour Seeds Another and Nicola Bowery’s married to this ground
Addressing the quotidian in writing is an ongoing practice for many poets. Andrew Burke’s One Hour Seeds Another and Nicola Bowery’s married to this ground approach this preoccupation with a robust commitment and urge to render it lucidly, but each is in conversation with different lineages. Burke’s cycle is cross-fertilised with jazz and folk music, with Hindu and Buddhist references, with playful abstraction, but it is the intentional elegiac timbre in this collection that lingers in the reader’s mind.
Sam Moginie Reviews Breaking New Sky: Contemporary Poetry from China
Breaking New Sky is a happily variegated collection of work by contemporary Chinese poets, edited and translated by Chinese-Australian poet, novelist and translator Ouyang Yu. Strangeness produced by means of a ‘neutral’ or ‘plain’ English (a ‘Yu signature tone’) gives the poems and their objects a riddle-like quality whose pleasures and dramas implicate food, sex, work, river systems, animals, domestic space, relationships, the medical system, nostalgia, death, farming and sleep. This plainness is put to work as the material of an aphoristic narrative mode that defines this anthology; making small claims continuously and thereby amassing charm.
Review Short: Collected Poems: Lesbia Harford, edited by Oliver Dennis
In the foreword of this long overdue volume, Les Murray writes that he considers Lesbia Harford to be ‘one of the two finest female poets so far seen in Australia; the other has to be Judith Wright’ (xviii). This is an extravagant contention, but it is not without foundation.
Alice Allan Reviews Nola Firth, Richard James Allen, Liz McQuilkin, Sandra Thibodeaux, and Wendy Fleming
Whether new or established, it’s part of a poet’s work to ask: How far can my words go; how much can they capture; where are their limits? The five Australian poets reviewed here each have their own methods of asking these questions. As a reader and writer of poetry I’ve learned a lot from the sometimes quiet, sometimes bold and always courageous ways they’ve answered them.
Paul Hetherington Reviews The turnrow Anthology of Contemporary Australian Poetry
John Kinsella is an Australian poet with a high profile and a long record of achievement, including winning the 2013 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry. He is also an assiduous anthologiser. Most notably, he edited The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry (2008), one of the more successful of recent attempts to establish an indicative canon of Australian poetry (although this was not, perhaps, Kinsella’s avowed intention with that book).
rob mclennan Reviews 70 Canadian Poets, Fifth Edition
The fifth volume in editor Gary Geddes’s series of anthologies is 70 Canadian Poets. Predominantly produced as a mainstream-leaning overview of Canadian poetry for university courses, the anthologies exist as worthy introductions to the past century-plus of Canadian poetry. The series is now nearly fifty years old, and began with the original 15 Canadian Poets, co-edited with Phyllis Bruce (Oxford, 1970), before heading into 15 Canadian Poets Plus 5, also co-edited with Phyllis Bruce (Oxford, 1978), 15 Canadian Poets x 2 (Oxford, 1988) and 15 Canadian Poets x 3 (Oxford, 2001), with the new volume existing as a kind of 15 Canadian Poets x 4-and-two-thirds.
Robyn Rowland Reviews Margaret Bradstock
Barnacle Rock is time-travelling through poetry. Its significance lies in Margaret Bradstock’s successful inscribing of a journey, from the search for a land of plenty by various explorers, to the position we find ourselves in now: a climate in crisis, a civilisation in error and a country which has displaced its indigenous people, replacing their knowledge with a rusted ‘progress’. Dense, a rich read, it alerts the mind into awareness.
Review Short: Angela Meyer’s Captives
Fittingly tiny by way of physical size, Captives is a beautifully produced collection of micro-fiction by the Melbourne author and critic Angela Meyer (known also as the blog writer, Literary Minded). While in a poetry-dedicated journal such as Cordite Poetry Review, it may seem odd to be reviewing a book that makes no explicit claims to being poetry – or, more specifically, the difficult-to-define mode of prose poetry – Meyer’s micro-fictions do seem to invite comparisons with contemporary prose poetry.
Review Short: Andy Kissane’s Radiance
In ‘Percy Shelley’s Heart’, Kissane writes with gusto and surreal humour. But he is equally at home portraying domestic intimacies within the poet’s own relationship (‘Sea of Tranquillity’), or hardship and joy as a child plays soccer with his friends following a day scrounging a living in Phnom Penh’s garbage tip (‘On Smoky Mountain’).
Martin Duwell Reviews Petra White
Petra White’s A Hunger is a kind of Collected-Poems-so-far, containing her two previous books, The Incoming Tide and The Simplified World, and a new collection that provides the overall title. It is not a large body of work but it is an impressively consistent one and a third book is often a good place from which to get a grip on a poet’s overall orientations.
Gig Ryan Reviews Emma Lew, Bella Li, Kate Lilley, and Jennifer Maiden
Elegy intensifies around the objects that remain, those keepsakes that must signify a spent life. In Kate Lilley’s Realia, the first poem ‘GG’ is an auction listing from Greta Garbo’s estate in which the repetition of Garbo’s name intones like a docked requiem. Only things exist timeless, immutable, saleable, as shining representatives of the once-living. Life’s fraught event is reduced to its acquisitions, and transformed, satirised, into capitalism’s ultimate wearer of labels: the former consumer of commodities is now more amenably cast purely as a selection of those objects, whose value her absence increases.
Review Short: Chris Mansell’s STUNG
Chris Mansell is a widely published poet with a lively range of interests, a multi-talented writer who bridges various creative worlds; her work sometimes fusing with music, the visual arts, and theatre. Her departure from a narrow specialisation in poetry is highly admirable, but may have made her somewhat under-appreciated both as an energetic innovator and important poet of her generation. Mansell’s first book of poetry appeared in 1978, and she has published more than 25 books and chapbooks in the intervening decades; while her Schadenvale Road, a collection of short stories, appeared in 2011.
Review Short: Lucy Williams’s Internal Weather
While Lucy Williams’s Internal Weather is split into the unavoidable cycle of life – birth, childhood, and death – the collection as a whole is a love song, a tribute to ‘difficult events’ and ‘unattended shadows’. The poems emphasise how the ‘forming of words’ and the ‘making of stories’ locates these instances in specific moments of memory and time. Indeed, love is the lung-set of Internal Weather: love for a child, first love, romantic love, love lost, love for the dead, love that ‘surprises … like religion’ and thickens ‘doubt into determination’.
Andy Jackson Reviews Ivy Alvarez and Janet Galbraith
How do we truly belong here on this continent, come to terms with our collective and personal history and build a genuine home for the future? And what of the ongoing legacy of violence on an intimate scale, by men against their partners and children – how can this be challenged and interrupted, changed into mutual trust? These are crucial questions; complicated and painful, yet unavoidable. Two new books recognise this and respond with what, to me, are poetry’s great strengths: the generation of an empathic interpersonal encounter, and that aching paradoxical space of both knowledge and productive ignorance.
Adam Aitken Reviews Nicola Madzirov and Jan-Willem Anker
I am holidaying in a small farming hamlet in the south of France. I have brought two books of poetry written by contemporary Europeans and republished in handsome Vagabond Press European Series editions. A Sydneysider most of my life, I’ve been coming to France regularly since the mid-1990s, accompanied by my wife who’s English and whose parents live in the region. I’m enjoying my dose of the old world, but thinking, what is home? And what is home to me and to these farmers? More precisely, what is it about Europe today that we value?
