Book Reviews
FRESH Monday, February 6th, 2012
Chemistry by Jamie King-Holden
Whitmore Press, 2011
Love and Fuck Poems by Koraly Dimitriadis
Self published, 2011
Jamie King-Holden is the 2010 winner of the Whitmore Press/Poetry Idol Manuscript Prize and this is her first collection of poetry. I am reminded, upon finding this out, of a series of miniature chapbooks published by the Australian Poetry Centre which I reviewed for Cordite a year ago. Whereas those prize-winning new poets were underrepresented by poor editing and production quality, Whitmore Press have done King-Holden’s poems due justice by publishing a tight little collection that boasts charming presentation for a limited edition chapbook.
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Monday, July 11th, 2011 
:etchings 9 – Love & Something edited by Sabina Hopfer et al
Ilura Press, 2011
Love & Something is the sub-header of :etchings 9, and the something seems to stand for the multitudinous meanings the word love can inspire – familial, romantic, love of nature, passion for work – and the variety of things that sit beside it such as desire, heartbreak, longing and memory. The vehicles for these themes range from poems both direct and symbolic, art created from and inspired by history, and fiction both realist and speculative. With the broadness of the theme and mishmash of styles, the issue lacks a certain cohesion, although this might be an attempt to avoid any homogenisation of the concept of love.
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Monday, June 27th, 2011 
HEAT 24: That’s it, for now… edited by Ivor Indyk
Giramondo Publishing, 2010
This issue of HEAT being named as the magazine’s last could indicate two separate things. One is the opportunity that arises from this; with each ending a new beginning could take place. The other is that the magazine might not be ending. In his editorial, Ivor Indyk cleverly opens with “Though there is always the possibility of a return, this will likely be the last issue of HEAT magazine in print form.” So we might endure a hiatus of feeling the sheer weight of each issue in our hands. Or we might have to convert to reading it online (an option with which Indyk seems quietly animated). Or we might have to say goodbye to the publication altogether. Whichever the outcome, this is somewhat monumental in the scope of Australia’s literary landscape, especially for poetry. Few high quality literary magazines have such a high percentage of poems per issue. I, and many out there like me, will miss that. But Indyk doesn’t play the over-romanticised gimmick card a reader like me might benefit from; this final issue has been produced just like any other issue of the magazine.
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Monday, June 13th, 2011 
Graphic by David McCooey
Whitmore Press, 2010
Porch Music by Cameron Lowe
Whitmore Press, 2010
Though relatively young, Geelong-based Whitmore Press’ poetry series already boasts strong collections by Barry Hill, Paul Kane and Maria Takolander, amongst others. With Graphic by David McCooey and Porch Music by Cameron Lowe, Whitmore’s winning streak continues. Both books brim with inventive, surprising and thought-provoking new poetry.
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Monday, May 30th, 2011 
Ghostly Subjects by Maria Takolander
Salt Publishing, 2009
Swallow by Claire Potter
Five Islands Press, 2010
In his 2007 essay ‘Surviving Australian Poetry: The New Lyricism’, David McCooey identified the prevailing mode of poetry in contemporary Australia as a negotiation between experimentalism (the new) and traditional composition (lyricism). This view is apposite in describing the work of many important poets of the last couple of decades; but a number of newer Australian poets have gone beyond and broken with this conciliation. Among these poets are Maria Takolander and Claire Potter, whose startling debut book-length collections can be seen to illustrate what the radical philosopher Alain Badiou has called inaesthetics.
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Monday, May 16th, 2011 
A Whistled Bit of Bop by Ken Bolton
Vagabond Press, 2010
The cover of A Whistled Bit of Bop makes use of a cool, spare design, reminiscent of 60s jazz album covers. It’s a change from the handmade look of many of Bolton’s earlier collections. The O and P of ‘BOP’ are also the record and arm of a turntable; the circular author photograph on the back cover – showing Bolton in a thumb-to-chin thinking pose – might then be the sticker in the centre of the disc about to be played. The collection contains twelve poems, nine of them long or longish ones. There are poems here which begin by describing the scene or occasion of writing and find their way from there, collaging thoughts, questions, quotations, references to R & B and jazz musicians, and imagined meetings with others (poets living and dead, a talking pigeon).
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Monday, May 2nd, 2011 
Best Australian Poems 2010 edited by Robert Adamson
Black Inc., 2010
It’s hard to write about a collection as diverse as this. It has no theme really except what Adamson mentions in his introduction, quoting Baudelaire’s poem ‘Correspondances’, a poem, to paraphrase blandly, about mysterious relations between things of different kinds. Anything can be compared to anything else, but is there a “ténébreuse et profonde unité” (“dark and deep unity”) in this collection, as Adamson seems to imply? I’m not sure what he means by “poetry is one way to decipher lyrics from electronic jargon”, but I guess that the reference to Baudelaire’s poem is a way of saying that the book as a whole is big and diverse, giving rise to a chance network of interrelations.
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Monday, April 18th, 2011 
Sand by Robert Drewe and John Kinsella
Fremantle Press, 2010
Sand is a substance which suggests abundant contradictions. Abundance and scarcity is one; others are leisure and hardship, isolation and revelry, and most starkly the infinitely small and the infinite. Yet, it is rarely held up as something sacred. It is not often treasured for its feel and its ubiquity. While not a paean, Sand, a collection of poetry and prose by John Kinsella and prose by Robert Drewe, does explore this element as a condition of place, in this instance Western Australia, and place as a condition of experience and memory. As such, place in this collection is not a passive subject. It is something constructed through artistic engagement.
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Monday, April 4th, 2011 
Mommy Must be a Fountain of Feathers by Kim Hyesoon
(translated by Don Mee Choi), Action Books, 2008
The Morning News is Exciting by Don Mee Choi
Action Books, 2010
It is refreshing to be introduced to a literature through its contemporary women poets. For that reason, I was extremely happy to receive these two titles, both published by Action Books (a small U.S. publisher doing great things). Neither book, though, is entirely Korean. Mommy is a selection of translations into English by Don Mee Choi, while The Morning News is a collection of Choi’s own work originally composed in English.
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Monday, March 21st, 2011 
Girls Like Me by Teri Louise Kelly
Wakefield Press, 2009
Apparently for some it’s abhorrent to assume that a writer writes about herself, but I’ve always loved that bit: the drama of a writer talking about her own life, or about the lives she leads. So I really appreciate Teri Louise Kelly’s Girls Like Me, because she makes no secret about it. It’s about her life: the drugs, the druggy friends, the fuck-you atmosphere, the I-am-here stipulations. In short, I love the shear drama of it all.
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Monday, March 7th, 2011 
Sundecked by Rachel Petridis
The Weeping Grass by Michelle Leber
A Question of Translation by Ann de Hugard
The Mermaid Problem by Chloe Wilson
Australian Poetry Centre, 2010
The Australian Poetry Centre has published four mini-chapbooks of poems by new poets selected to workshop at Varuna with Ron Pretty in 2010. Each little collection sells for AU$10, a price that reflects the production quality more than the quality of the poems published in each. The books are intended to introduce new Australian poets, but given the miniature, low-budget presentation and editorship of the project, the poets are at some risk of being misrepresented. While any initiative to nurture and develop new poets is a welcome one, the value of this kind of publication experience to the poets themselves is worth some consideration.
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Monday, March 7th, 2011 
Letters by Chris Mansell
Kardoorair Press, 2009
Poet Chris Mansell has been active in publishing and editing since the 1970s. In Sydney, she co-edited and founded magazines of poetry and prose; and she later helped inaugurate Five Islands Press, which continues to produce successful and award-winning volumes of Australian poetry. She has lectured in creative writing, mentors poets for the Australian Society of Authors, and has published over a dozen volumes of her own poetry. Letters is her sixth full-length print collection.
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Monday, February 21st, 2011 
Out of the Box: Contemporary Australian Gay and Lesbian Poets
Edited by Michael Farrell and Jill Jones
Puncher and Wattmann, 2009
Out of the Box: Contemporary Australian Gay and Lesbian Poets is an elegantly-published product. The shape of the book looks like a miniature hatbox, the title of the collection leading a reader to anticipate exciting and colourful content. This ground-breaking anthology is a reasonable gathering of poets, currently writing under the descriptors of gay and lesbian in Australia.
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Monday, February 7th, 2011 
Dark Bright Doors by Jill Jones
Wakefield Press, 2010
An intriguing haphazardness is the first thing that strikes you about the language of Jill Jones’s new book. Dark Bright Doors is at once familiar and strange. The tone is highly personal with a slightly highfalutin touch to what seems a study in existentialism. Through a surprising vagueness, Jones encourages us to read her book very deeply. Furthermore, she is asking us to reflect on the reading as we proceed from line to line of each poem rather than from poem to poem. And, yet, as those lines clearly strive to be contemporary and colloquial, the book discusses the loss of individual space in the expanse of information technology and the ensuing isolation and over-exposure in a world where humans are globalised, where there is no place for secrets.
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Monday, January 24th, 2011 
An Absence of Saints by Rosanna Licari
University of Queensland Press, 2010
An Absence of Saints is one of those poetry collections you pick up and immediately sense all the effort and dedication that has gone into making it, the reader easily recognising those long hours that have since stretched into years where the poet shaped and reshaped poems to then be brought thoughtfully together into a manuscript of common themes. So, it is little wonder then that An Absence of Saints was winner of the 2009 Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize.
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Monday, January 10th, 2011 
Burning Bright by Caroline Caddy
Fremantle Press, 2010
A well known Western Australian writer, Caroline Caddy frequently explores culture as both familiar and unknown in her work. The most common of these explorations concerns the interaction between Chinese and Australian cultures. Her latest collection Burning Bright continues this theme, whilst also including poems that explore the south of Western Australia. The relationship between Australian and Chinese landscapes is vital in this work as the urban, rural and natural landscapes of the two are contrasted, compared and explored in depth. Caddy focuses on similarities that are often overlooked, while also documenting the varied and complex relationship that can develop between different countries and their landscapes.
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