BOOK REVIEWS
Review Short: David Stavanger’s The Special
David Stavanger won the 2013 Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize. The resulting book, The Special, is his first full-length collection of poetry, and is dedicated to ‘the dead/ who are bravely living/ (and to those who wake wild-eyed in the dark)‘, a salute to people who suffer the acute distress of mental illness.
Review Short: Geoff Goodfellow’s Opening the Windows to Catch the Sea Breeze
Geoff Goodfellow has been a ‘people’s poet’ for thirty years. The qualifications he brings to the role seem simple enough, if a little generic: a rugged working class upbringing; a simple style and language that anyone can understand and relate to; time spent working with, and reading to, workers, prisoners, the unemployed.
Emily Bitto Reviews Judith Beveridge
In her 1996 collection, Accidental Grace, Judith Beveridge published a series of six poems entitled ‘The Buddha Cycle’. The poems in ‘The Buddha Cycle’ are each spoken by individuals, predominantly low in the caste system, who look to the Buddha for some hope or guidance. This marked the beginning of what has be-come, for Beveridge, an enduring interest in the Buddha and Buddhist history, a subject she has approached from a number of shifting perspectives.
Review Short: Ainslee Meredith’s Pinetorch and Joel Ephraims’s Through the Forest
The two latest chapbooks in Australian Poetry’s new voices series are remarkable because they occupy two very different kinds of poetic practice to equally interesting and impressive ends. Both are playful, and push against the boundaries of form, with a crisp lyric impulse at play in Meredith’s work and an almost psychedelic sensibility animating Ephraims’s collection.
Kim Cheng Boey Reviews Eileen Chong
In a suite of three poems praising the legendary beauty, Consort Yang Guifei, the Tang poet Li Bai draws on the virtues of the peony, a flower that with its luxuriant petals and luminous colours embodies feminine beauty and allure.
Review Short: Nandi Chinna’s Swamp: Walking the Wetlands of the Swan Coastal Plain
To introduce Nandi Chinna’s Swamp the reader is presented with the idea of poetic creation through walking. Chinna describes how ‘the legs move through time and space, marking the movement over grass, stones, hills, and through wind’ (8). Indeed many of her poems in this collection engage with just this sense of time, space, and movement as walking becomes a way for Chinna to trace the wetlands of the Swan Coastal Plain, those that have been lost, and those that are fragmentary.
Cassandra Atherton Reviews Anne Elvey
The kinship Elvey forges between her poems and ecological criticism lends both rigour and reverence to her first full-length collection of poetry. There is a radiant stasis at the core of her poems that encourages the reader to listen to the susurration of multiple, overlapping conversations to which Elvey is contributing.
John Kendall Hawkins Reviews Poetic Revolutionaries: Intertextuality and Subversion
As I read Marion May Campbell’s new book, Poetic Revolutionaries: Intertextuality and Subversion, I was reminded of the still seemingly sacred notion of a democratic historical progress. This notion celebrates cultural alterity (and all that that implies), and makes an urgent appeal to textual revolution as a means to political resistance. Campbell’s work is rooted in the relativist revolution – the book is part of publisher Rodopi’s Postmodern Series – and her intense, erudite study addresses a state of disunion that has loosely bound the dwindling body of progressives ever since.
Aaron Mannion Reviews An Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry
Reviewing a publication like Wes Davis’s An Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry feels like an act of hubris, a rash attempt to sum up an entire culture in a few pages. This problem stems, in part, from the collection’s strength: comprehensiveness. Davis gathers together fifty-three Irish poets of the post-World War II era, apportioning significant space for each in this almost one thousand-page book.
Justin Clemens Reviews Poetry and the Trace
Sometimes irritating, often informative, occasionally incisive and sporadically genuinely interrogatory, the thoughtfulness evinced by (many of) the writings collected in Poetry and the Trace triggers further chains of association and dissociation. This is a genuinely critical collection in various senses of that word: at once analytic, hortatory, and urgent.
Review Short: Jordie Albiston’s XIII Poems
XIII Poems might be seen as a snapshot of what Albiston’s main concerns have been since Botany Bay Document (1996) appeared culminating with, I think, Vertigo (2007). Her publications since the mid-2000s reflect on similar concerns but with more biographical tones. Albiston’s main interests have been history, limitations or framed lives, their voices and interpretations of them, often using easily located words to tie groups of poems (‘heart,’ ‘black,’ and ‘white’ feature in XIII Poems).
Review Short: Melinda Smith’s Drag down to unlock or place an emergency call
Melinda Smith’s Drag down to unlock or place an emergency call is her fourth collection, her work including substantial anthologisation and a number of prizes. Smith’s self-described aim is to for her poetry to ‘educate, inform and entertain … but mostly entertain’ (being the subtitle of her blog, Melinda Smith’s Mull and Fiddle).
Martin Langford Reviews Maria Takolander
Maria Takolander has grouped the poems in this, her second collection, to isolate three slightly different impulses in her work. Because the central section is comprised of poems whose point of view underlies those of sections one and three, I shall deal with it first. All of its poems explore the dark and unforgiving nature of the world.
David Dick Reviews Ken Bolton and B. R. Dionysius
Ken Bolton and B.R. Dionysius emerge from different traditions, respectively: a New York School sense of everyday occasion punctuated by the presence and shaping forces of contemporary art (Frank O’Hara and James Schuyler are clearly present in Bolton’s diction); and a modernised kind of Romantic pastoral, littered with juxtaposed objects of the natural and contemporary world. Yet, at admitted risk of over-generalising, both of their recent books can be seen to be dealing with notions of how to write memory in poetry: how to write a poem to be honest to the process, even the implication itself, of remembering. How can language be used in the service of this retrospective vision, they ask; how does language, shaped by differing poetic forms, illuminate, distort or neutralise it?
Review Short: Melinda Bufton’s Girlery
The title of Melinda Bufton’s debut collection, Girlery, asks be read ironically, but is in fact quite apt, bringing to mind a repository of all that is ‘girly,’ in the same way that a reliquary houses relics. Alternatively, it could be a verb: something close to a feminine form of tomfoolery. One imagines a stern injunction to ‘cease this girlery at once!’ With titles such as ‘Dealbreaker,’ ‘Bumper Book for Girls,’ ‘Lollyshop’ and ‘I will call you smitten because it suits your crazy eyes’ among the twenty-three poems collected here, both these associations are appropriate.
Review Short: Chris Wallace-Crabbe’s my feet are hungry
Readers of Australian poetry will expect a new collection from Chris Wallace-Crabbe to be a work of erudition and wit. In this they will not be disappointed. Wallace-Crabbe is entirely in command of his craft and possessed of intelligence that does not waste itself in trivialities.
Philip Mead Reviews Corey Wakeling
How do you hear the title to this volume of poems by Corey Wakeling? Goad Omen: two words that really slow you down as a reader, make you dwell on their unnatural pairing. Three dipthongal, molasses-slow syllables. They sound like a slip of the tongue, a conversational mishearing, or typo that should have been Good Omen perhaps.
Review Short: Paul Magee’s Stone Postcard
Unlike the recent Australian governmental fervour for signs of title (British, monarchist, hierarchical) and their accompanying anathemas contra entitlement (Australian, social democratic, welfarist), poetry titles struggle with self-authorization and singularisation.
Review Short: Christopher Barnett’s when they came/ for you elegies/ of resistance
Christopher Barnett is an enigmatic figure: an exile and outsider, an active and proud Socialist, Australian but long based in Europe because of feeling, as Mark Roberts asserts in the book’s foreword, ‘profound disillusionment with Australian society’ (ix)
Tina Giannoukos Reviews Notes for the Translators from 142 New Zealand and Australian Poets
Notes for the Translators from 142 New Zealand and Australian Poets steps into the fertile territory of literary exchange. It is a welcome invitation to poet-translators to immerse themselves in the work of contemporary Australian and New Zealand poets.
Review Short: Laurie Duggan’s Allotments
In 2012 Puncher & Wattmann published Laurie Duggan’s serial ‘Blue Hills’ poems in one collection. The ‘Blue Hills’ – a sequence that first appeared in Duggan’s The Great Divide (1985) and then reappeared intermittently through a number of subsequent books until being brought together in The Collected Blue Hills – are notational works concerned with the idiosyncrasies of place, or perhaps space, depending on one’s theoretical allegiances [if any].
Review Short: Robert Gray’s Daylight Saving: a selection of poems by Robert Gray
In ‘Minima’, Robert Gray writes that ‘the senses can mislead us, / …when we rely on only one of them’. Gray is in no danger of being misled. The dimension of synaesthesia in his perceptions has been widely noted, but it manifests itself in this collection as something both chronologically prior to, and conceptually broader than, the apprehension of one sense through another.
Jennifer Mackenzie Reviews Asia Pacific Writing Series Books 1-4
Vagabond Press has recently issued four attractively presented volumes of poetry from the Asia Pacific region. Each contains the work of three poets and represents China, Japan, Vi-etnam and the Philippines, respectively.
Lucy Van Reviews John Mateer
In his two most recent books, the prolific John Mateer presents work developed over the long haul. His concluding essay in Unbelievers is a reflection on the seven years of writing behind that body of work, and Emptiness emphasises in its subtitle the 14-year scope of that collection. Despite the years of writing they represent, both collections bear a freshness of focus, expressed through Mateer’s formulation: ‘the irony of Elsewhere’.
