BOOK REVIEWS
Review Short: Cameron Lowe’s Circle Work
The poems in Cameron Lowe’s Circle Work swing across each page at a strangely measured, athletic tilt. The scope is local and vast, the gaze muscular, and Lowe sweeps the vistas (from Corio to the universe) for details apprehended as preternatural. His rapture typified in the lines, ‘the body’s cruel admission// that close is never close enough’ (56), these poems skirt edges of realness without entering the domain of things. Lowe’s is a poetics of evanescence, not arrival, and Circle Work frames the contours of human habitats as noise-filled within <
Review Short: Anthony Lawrence’s Signal Flare
Some months back, I ended up sitting next to a fairly eccentric white-bearded bloke on a Sydney bus. Upon hearing I was an Australian poetry researcher, my new acquaintance exclaimed ‘Australian poetry!’ with obvious distaste, followed by ‘Fu–ing Anthony Lawrence!’ He went on to detail how feral Aussie upstarts like Lawrence and ‘bloody Adamson’ were bastardising the great tradition of English Romanticism. As he rose to hop off, I asked for his name. He cheerfully declined.
Andrew Fuhrmann Reviews Bruce Dawe’s Plays in Verse: Kevin Almighty and Blind Spots
Some poets are sublime and ridiculous at the same time. James Kenneth Stephen was only being felicitously expressive of what oft was thought of Wordsworth when he wrote:
Two voices are there: one is of the deep; It learns the storm-cloud’s thunderous melody, Now roars, now murmurs with the changing sea, Now bird-like pipes, now closes soft in sleep: And one is of an old half-witted sheep Which bleats articulate monotony, And indicates that two and one are three, That grass is green, lakes damp, and mountains steep And, Wordsworth, both are thine ...
Nicholas Birns Reviews Contemporary Russian Poetry: An Anthology
Dalkey Archive Press has long been known as a premier publisher of cutting-edge international fiction; here the Illinois-based firm continues its venture into poetry. This massive book, including forty-four poets, all with English translations facing their Russian originals, and supervised by both an ‘editor’ and a ‘translation editor’, is an anthology of Russian poetry written by living poets, or those born late enough to still be plausibly alive today. It is not, in other words, just inclusive of the latest generation, or those explicitly linked to postmodern or experimental practices; or those coming to prominence only after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Nicholas Jose Reviews Speaking the Earth’s Languages: A Theory for Australian-Chilean Postcolonial Poetics
If poetry registers ‘internal difference, Where the Meanings, are’, in Emily Dickinson’s deep phrase, then indigenous poetry creates meanings that are more different still. Growing from an alternative poetics that questions conventional procedures and challenges what we know, indigenous poetry gives us a chance to change. That is true whoever or wherever we are, Indigenous, indigenous or invited in. It may be more broadly true, across other art forms too, but to start from poetry, if poetic language is speech at its most highly charged, then in indigenous poetry there’s a glimpse of a potential for overturning and renewal. Dominant practice has its own built-in obsolescence. Paradoxically, given its acknowledgement of the timelessly old and absent, indigenous poetry suggests a new way forward.
Review Short: Stephen Oliver’s Intercolonial
Intercolonial, a new book-length poem by Stephen Oliver, focuses its attention on New Zealand, Australia, and the sea that lies between them. With sweeping long lines, Stephen Oliver zooms in on the details of place and geology: the poem is full of cinematic pans over landscape, seascape and human history, fulfilling what is often a purview of the long poem in naming the world and its inhabitants.
Review Short: Sarah Day’s Tempo
There is much poetry about currently which does not value rhythm and music as integral to its sense. Day’s poetry absolutely does; filled with assonance and internal rhyme which renders many individual lines beautiful and suggestive. The first poem, ‘El Iskandariya’ is one of the best, capturing a moment without labouring it:
When marsh birds pooled out of the sky like ink on water to devour the barley flour that Alexander’s men had laid to mark the city’s boundaries, the hour seemed lost beyond recall ... (p. 1)
Review Short: Carol Jenkins’s Xn
Xn has been described as a ‘mathematical metaphor for poetry’ and Carol Jenkins as a science-poet, but these are misleading claims. Jenkins’s vocabulary may derive from the sciences, but her themes are firmly grounded in the domestic. From the cosmic to the most mundane, nothing is beneath her scrutiny:
nothing is too large to think into being or too small to overlook once I turn my mind that way, such as this pen the poem and even you.
Mathew Abbott Reviews Justin Clemens
What was mock epic? I use the past tense because the genre is thought to have died in the nineteenth century. According to a recent study by Professor Ritchie Robertson, a Queen’s College fellow and Taylor Professor of the German Language and Literature at Oxford University, mock epic died because epic lost its authoritative status: it was only possible to write a real mock epic in a time ‘when serious epics were being written and read in large numbers, manag[ing] to attain a position of cultural authority remotely comparable to that of Homer, Virgil, or Milton.’ Mock epic needed something prestigious to mock; when the epic lost its prestige mock epic lost its reason for being.
Review Short: Luke Fischer’s Paths of Flight
In Shakespeare’s last great poem, The Phoenix and the Turtle, the owl is banished from the allegorical proceedings of the bird funeral:
But thou, shrieking harbinger, Foul pre-currer of the fiend, Augur of the fever's end, To this troop come thou not near
Review Short: Andrew Sant’s The Bicycle Thief & Other Poems
It’s no current reference, but reading Andrew Sant’s recent collection, The Bicycle Thief, Andrew McGahan’s Praise springs to mind. When I studied McGahan’s novel, a more astute student than I pointed out that Gordon’s only romantic relationship was with his car, and that, accordingly, his only romantic response was towards the sad demise of that Holden.
Review Short: Jane Williams’s Days Like These: New and Selected Poems 1998-2013
Days Like These: New and Selected Poems 1998-2013, by Jane Williams, includes new work and selections from Outside Temple Boundaries (1998), The Last Tourist (2006) (both published with Five Islands Press), Begging the Question (2008) from Ginninderra Press and City of Possibilities (2011) from Interactive Press. It’s always a pleasure to discover the writings of a poet who you have not read before. In Days Like These Jane Williams delivers poetry that wants to feel the ‘pulse of every living thing’; she is a writer sensitive to the world.
Maria Takolander Reviews Bronwyn Lea
It is a tribute to the quality and readability of Bronwyn Lea’s poetry that a selection of her work forms the second volume in the new George Braziller series (edited by Paul Kane), which aims to introduce contemporary Australian poets to American readers. True to lyric poetry, Lea’s poems are musical in their composition, and they can be intimate in their subject matter. However, Lea’s work is never just about crafting agreeable verse, and it is never just about her personal experience.
Review Short: Anne M. Carson’s Removing the Kimono
Every poem in Anne M. Carson’s collection is appealing on account of the distinctive cast of mind revealed in a precise language that registers the author’s alertness to all senses. Three groups of poems establish a pattern of mortality and rebirth, of natural forces and human emotions.
Review Short: Outcrop: radical Australian poetry of land
As I write this review, sunlight filtered through a pall of smoke casts a dull orange glow over my kitchen bench. The Blue Mountains are burning. Sydney’s haze resembles downtown Beijing’s and it’s only October. Such an apocalyptic scene – part of the ‘Australian experience’ I am assured by our Prime Minister – provides context for the world into which Outcrop and its ‘radical poetry of land’ emerges. This is not to suggest that the anthology’s outlook is primarily environmental, but that alternative ways of examining land are sorely needed.
Timothy Yu Reviews Contemporary Asian Australian Poets
A decade ago, Cordite Poetry Review asked me to write a review of its tenth issue, ‘Location: Asia-Australia.’ In my review, I wrote that while the issue did a splendid job of showing the intersection between two separate places called ‘Asia’ and ‘Australia,’ it was less clear whether the ‘Asian-Australian’ could also be a thing unto itself, a kind of writing that might be visible within domestic as well as international spaces.
Review Short: Steve Brock’s Double Glaze
In his most recent collection, Double Glaze, Steve Brock moves the orderly reader from the very public realm of ‘Work’, via ‘The Commute’, to dwell with ‘Writing’ and finally to settle in, arguably the most intimate of registers, ‘Family’. Although poetic work rarely arrives in convenient clusters, a poet’s choice in manuscript arrangement is not arbitrary; it intimates the conceptual webbing informing the collection’s central aesthetic, thematic, and in this case, socio-political, preoccupations.
Review Short: Damian Balassone’s Daniel Yammacoona
The first three poems in Damian Balassone’s Daniel Yammacoona are about women who have been left by men. In each case the man appears to be the hero of the story, yet the woman is not necessarily unheroic; in at least two of the poems the heroism is one of steadfastness.
Review Short: Susan Adams’s Beside Rivers
The poems in Susan Adams’s Beside Rivers are arranged in three sections: Awash, A Wonder, and Wander By Water. The cover blurb states ‘Susan Adams’s first book shines with imagery and clear eyed veracity …’; although many poems do shine, I’m not convinced that I found the ‘clear eyed veracity’ worked as well as the blurb suggested, nor that the imagery was always as successful as the poet intended.
David Gilbey Reviews Jordie Albiston and Liam Ferney
Jordie Albiston’s the Book of Ethel and Liam Ferney’s Boom illustrate two dramatic obverses in contemporary Australian poetry. Both are cleverly crafted; both have levels of subtlety and manifest strength; both are linguistically sinuous and inventive, taking liberties with conventional style and syntax; both use local vernaculars in contexts of global cultural pressures; both focus, often minutely, on particular individuals caught at moments of historical change and significance and, therefore, articulate and explore ‘political’ consequences and issues; both play – gloriously, ironically, iconoclastically – with language registers as a way of exposing implied ‘bigger pictures’. And yet these two collections are worlds apart in focus, style, nuance, framing and poetic affect.
Keri Glastonbury Reviews Australian Love Poems 2013
In his 1951 essay ‘Against Poets’, Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz describes the poet ‘as a being who can no longer express himself as much as someone who must express – a Poem’. With such sentiment in mind I approached Australian Love Poems 2013 with some apprehension. Despite all the lofty rhetoric surrounding love poetry – and, understandably, there is plenty of it in the eloquent, generous introduction to this anthology by editor Mark Tredinnick – would it ultimately prove, as Gombrowicz might suggest, to be a ‘boring orgy’?
Review Short: Rachael Briggs’s Free Logic
Winner of the 2012 Thomas Shapcott Prize, Free Logic is the debut collection from poet and philosopher Rachael Briggs. The book is divided into nine sections, each poetically exploring themes of love, identity, and sexuality. Briggs infuses her poetic explorations with surreal allegories, moments of metamorphosis and a constant teasing of the ‘logical’, which allow for her poetry to forge an opening towards new possibilities. Briggs strikingly connects insightful fantasies with philosophical considerations.
Review Short: Lucy Todd’s Listening to the Mopokes Go
‘Mopoke’ is the onomatopoeic nickname of the Southern Boobook or Tasmanian Spotted Owl, known in New Zealand (where I come from) as a ‘morepork’. This bit of idiom in the title of Lucy Todd’s debut chapbook prepares the reader for a collection attuned to its locality.
John Jenkins Reviews Rae Desmond Jones
For more than 40 years, Rae Desmond Jones has remained one of Australia’s most challenging and rewarding poets, and in my opinion a major one, who has pursued an often hilarious, always astonishing and sometimes grimly confronting campaign against dullness, comfortable formulas and poetic complacency; and Grand Parade is to be applauded for drawing together some of his best work here.
