BOOK REVIEWS
Kevin Brophy Reviews Geoff Page
In a 2007 review of one of Geoff Page’s previous verse novels, Lawrie & Shirley, Peter Goldsworthy names Page as a verse-novel ‘multiple offender’ in the excellent company of Murray, Porter, Wearne and Rubinstein. Goldsworthy approaches discussion of the form by reflecting, ‘If poetry is the most ancient literary form, as old as music, then the verse novel is surely the most ancient form of poetry, using the word novel loosely’ (Australian Literary Review, May 2007). The long and respectable polygamous marriage of poetry with narrative and history was, we might say, dissolved during the Romantic period, allowing the novel to find its ecological niche – and more than a niche, a whole territory.
Dominique Hecq Reviews Julie Chevalier and Cath Kenneally
Often, we are immersed in our world as in body-temperature water, treading along effortlessly, unaware of distinction between self and medium. We have to thank poets for splashing water in our faces, for reminding us of the distinction. The splash may also refresh – perhaps move us to stop treading and begin noticing the bubbly and at times murky stream of language in which we are immersed. I thank both Julie Chevalier and Cath Kenneally for their vigorous splash. Take a big breath. We are under water, where strange things happen.
Review Short: Mark Reid’s Looking out from Bashan: the republic of Og
Mark Reid’s poetry has always delighted and challenged me. His distinctive voice and finely-tuned ear for just the right music has given his work a potency that’s been hard-won. Reid is a craftsman. His tight phrasing and impeccable sense of where to break a line give even his more narrative poems an intense lyrical presence – particularly evident in these marvellous new poems. Reid’s invocation of and ruminations on the biblical giant Og never resort to parody or impose themselves as alternatives to autobiography. It’s hard to pin these poems down, and that’s what makes them so fresh and compelling.
Review Short: Jackson’s Lemon Oil
The final poem in Lemon Oil, titled ‘The right metaphor’, combines the thesis of independence with the antithesis of loneliness to synthesise a new metaphor for love. Love, Jackson tells us, is not a chain, a cage, or a leash, but a long elastic cord that lets us fly free yet binds us to each other, ensuring that ‘there’s always/ a way home’. This tension between two desires (one for freedom, the other for closeness) is emblematic of the book as a whole.
Bonny Cassidy Reviews Kelly Pilgrim-Byrne
In her second poetry collection, Domestic Archaeology, Perth-based poet Kelly Pilgrim-Byrne mines a personal narrative with mixed results. While she manages to achieve interesting self-awareness in some of these confessional poems, others lack such clarity and humour.
Review Short: Rebecca Law’s Lilies and Stars
It is often interesting to read a poet’s work in relation to comments they’ve made about their own poetry (with whatever cautions you may wish to place upon such self-readings). Rebecca Law’s poem ‘Mirror and Girl’ was commended for the 2011 Overland Judith Wright Prize for New and Emerging Poets, and in an interview with the prize’s judge – poet, scholar and Overland’s poetry editor, Peter Minter – Law commented on her writing more generally: “I am reading Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, Victor Hugo and Paul Eluard because I am interested in the surreal, the symbolic and the sublime as romantic concepts that displace and liberate the word from a human preoccupation with living and dying. Contemporary French authors such as Michel Deguy, Philippe Beck and Jude Stefan transcend these concepts a little further and ‘follow’ language, allowing the word to ‘say’ rather than be ‘said’.”
Review Short: Rhyll McMaster’s Late Night Shopping
The lyric that opens Rhyll McMaster’s Late Night Shopping begins with the recently deceased and ends in a majestic, albeit materialist, transcendence:
When molecules cease their high humming dark space appears. It radiates in waves and disperses in continuous air. (‘Shell’)
This sets the tone for a book concerned with the grand themes of life and death, time and age, philosophy and science. The poet Frank O’Hara longed to be a painter; many poets long to be philosophers. The poem ‘Philosophy in a Ghosting Universe’ is, among other things, concerned with the poet’s failure as a philosopher …
Chris Mooney-Singh Reviews S.K. Kelen
On the way back from the Frankston Motor Registry, my Singapore-born nephew, now the proud possessor of his P-plates, drove confidently and in a celebratory mood. I was happy that learner had turned ‘chauffeur’ so that I could revert to one of the idle contentment of life – reading aloud from a new collection of poems without pressing interruptions. I decided to try out The Poem Relevancy Test with a couple of random pieces. In his early twenties and now at university, this post-modern Everyman communicates mostly through text message and is one of the vast majority of non-poetry readers. Thus, Island Earth: New and Selected Poems became the tome for some stick-the-finger-in-the-page bibliomancy while we motored through death-camp quiet suburbia.
Review Short: Judy Johnson’s Stone Scar Air Water
Driven by elemental themes and images, Stone Scar Air Water derives its title from this collection’s penultimate poem as well as from the four sections that, albeit in different order, comprise the book. For Judy Johnson, ‘scar’, or scarring, its lines drawn by history and inheritance, joins the ranks of stone, air and water.
The poet’s long-held interest in history is everywhere in evidence. As Martin Langford notes in his cover blurb, this entails, in part, a shift to poems that invoke the poet’s personal history – or at least, proffer an outwardly autobiographical, first person voice – alongside other, sometimes narrative, poems that draw on the historical archive. As with Johnson’s previous collection, Navigation, the wider world is often brought to bear on individual lives.
Review Short: Kit Kelen’s China Years: New and Selected Poems
Australian poet Christopher Kit Kelen’s most recent collection, China Years: selected and new poems, contains English and Chinese pieces, presented side by side in translation, along with original artwork. Kelen’s strong interest in translation is immediate on the front cover and throughout the collection, highlighting a focus on creating points of access. When paired with Kelen’s original ink and watercolour drawings, interspersed as breaks throughout the text, a reading approach that is both fluid and inclusive is encouraged.
Review Short: Ron Pretty’s What the afternoon knows
For Ron Pretty, the everyday is marvelously complicated. He’s in a hotel bar in Wales, the Welsh Dining Club is ‘eating out in a language rich and strange’, a birthday party is ‘agog with singing’, two young men are flirting with a blonde waitress ‘who shocks me with her flush / of free flowing hair’. Then, suddenly, he’s back in Junta-ruled Greece 40–odd years ago, involved with a young woman who, ‘behind closed windows’ is ‘singing for love, singing for freedom’ in a town with ‘rifles guarding the bakery’. Then back to Wales, and the two young men exit the bar holding hands with each other, not the waitress, who ‘takes my empty / memories and smiles as I too climb the stairs’.
Review Short: Danijela Kambaskovic’s Internal monologues: (a romance)
Internal monologues: (a romance) is Danijela Kambaskovic’s first poetry collection in English. Her two previous collections, Atlantis and Journey, were written in Serbian. Each monologue is voiced with relative simplicity, but don’t underestimate Kambaskovic. She uses English most vibrantly, which sets her apart from the native speaker. Her choice of words and ‘word play’ seems entirely alive and vibrant, as if she was approaching English in new and exciting ways.
Alysia Nicole Harris Reviews Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry
Charles Henry Rowell’s expansive compilation of contemporary poetry beautifully archives some of the most lyric and provocative African-American voices of the last fifty years. Given the dearth of black poets celebrated within the American literary canon, Angles of Ascent is an essential text that pilots readers through the deep and yawning poetic traditions practiced by African-Americans.
Caitlin Maling Reviews Randolph Stow
In his masterful and extensive introduction to The Land’s Meaning: New Selected Poems John Kinsella, who edited the volume, writes that much of Randolph Stow’s work is metaphoric, weaving things together in a way that promises narrative but actually reveals very little. Reading through this new selected poems, I was struck by the tension of poetry as public utterance of private speech, which characterizes Stow’s work. Whether dealing with myth, landscape, colonialism or love, these are poems that are selective in what they choose to reveal and particular in the techniques they use to reveal.
Nathanael O’Reilly Reviews The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke and Searching for The Man From Snowy River
The son of Irish immigrants, C.J. Dennis was born in South Australia in 1876. He died in Victoria in 1938, having become Australia’s most popular poet during his lifetime. Dennis’ first collection, Backblock Ballads and Other Verses (1913), was not a commercial success, but Dennis’ second collection, The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke, first published by Angus & Robertson in 1915, arguably became the most popular book of poetry ever published in Australia.
Review Short: Paul Hetherington’s Six Different Windows
As the title of Paul Hetherington’s compelling and richly imagined new collection suggests, and the six sections confirm, Six Different Windows offers an array of contrasting perspectives on experience. Six framed visions: all of them to some extent haunted, or tainted.
Review Short: Philip Hammial’s Detroit
Philip Hammial is the author of over a score of poetry collections. With his new book, Detroit, he returns to the city of his birth taking us, the reader, on his helter-skelter ride. From the first, a poem entitled ‘Mayday’, we are already travelling at break-neck speed, suddenly materialised in an alley with three unlikely characters, plus a bear and a looming summary execution. We enter and leave the poem in the thick of action and must imagine for ourselves the backstory and outcome. In twelve short lines I am already empathising with the un-named first person speaker to imagine him slipping free of the medieval fresco sky-hook descending from the heavens.
Review Short: Warwick Anderson’s Hard Cases, Brief Lives
The manner in which poets divide their lives is of enduring, perhaps obsessive, interest to me. More specifically, I’m interested in what they choose to reveal or emphasise, and what they let slide to the background of their visible identity.
Review Short: Luke Davies’ four plots for magnets
The first book with this title, containing 13 poems, was first published in 1982 in an edition of 300 copies. This version contains the original 13, plus another 53 previously unpublished poems from the same era, a foreword from the poet and an afterword from the original publisher, S.K. Kelen. This is more than a reissue or a new edition. It is a comprehensive collection of Davies’ works from the early 1980s and it is to be valued for the light it sheds on the development of one of Australia’s best regarded poets.
Review Short: Cath Kenneally’s eaten cold
In The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, T. S. Eliot famously wrote, ‘Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.’
Justin Clemens Reviews Pam Brown
What does it mean to be ‘Home by Dark’? Is it a parental instruction to a potentially wayward child? Is it an expression of relief after a day of threat and uncertainty? Is it a navigational expression, a crepuscular refiguration of ‘North by North-West’? Is it a simple description of an accomplished movement, or another possibility altogether? To open this book is not to find such questions answered; it is rather to move and be moved with and by somebody who, as the epigraph from Kevin Davies has it, is prepared to ‘just keep staring into that English-language night sky.’
Review Short: Yan Jun’s You Jump to Another Dream
Yan Jun’s poetry works through his experience of contemporary China by employing an aesthetic that is traditionally grounded in observation of the momentarily significant. He is captivated by the dazzle of a new consumerist culture only when that dazzle is spectral and fleeting. In an interview with Cristen Cornell (‘Lost in the Supermarket with Yan Jun’, Artspace China blog, University of Sydney) he decries the consumption culture’s take on art as a ‘production process’ which removes ’the possibility for uncertainty’ and what is ‘unknowable in individuals’. He comments on the inextricable logic of cultural monuments such as the Forbidden Palace being preserved while the traditional living areas, the Beijing hutongs, are pulled down, symptomatic of a daily life becoming ‘more and more deprived’.
Review Short: Alan Wearne’s Prepare the Cabin for Landing
Prepare the Cabin for Landing, as with much of Alan Wearne’s poetry, draws on popular culture, social observations and the Australian vernacular. I recall reading a review of an earlier Wearne collection which warned the reader that they would require a Wearne dictionary in order to understand the cultural references being made. Of course, no such dictionary exists, and as Adam Ford has argued previously in Cordite Poetry Review, Wearne’s poems can be difficult unless you are ‘either amazingly well-read or precisely of Alan Wearne’s generation (and interested in the same things as him) to have the right combination of knowledge, memory and experiences to understand or empathise with every poem in this book.’
Geoff Page Reviews Chris Wallace-Crabbe
Now a youthful 79, the Melbourne poet, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, has been an important figure in Australian poetry since the early 1960s. As a teacher, scholar, anthologist and organizer – as well as a poet with at least fourteen volumes to his name – Wallace-Crabbe has been central to much that has happened in Australian poetry over the past fifty years, especially in Melbourne. As with his friend, the late Peter Porter, Wallace-Crabbe’s lightly-worn erudition and distinctive sense of humour have ensured that his work is admired by many poets (and readers) across the aesthetic divisions in our poetry reaching back to the 1970s.
