BOOK REVIEWS
Review Short: Tracy Ryan’s Unearthed
Tracy Ryan’s seventh full-length collection of poems, Unearthed, comprises of an extraordinary series of elegies and elegiac poems. The elegiac mode here is both intimate and epic in scale. These poems commemorate the most private moments shared with lost lovers – those times ‘relished and wasted’ (12), ‘snug’ in ‘coffin-dark’ beds (32) – as well as the ways in which our inhabited environments – mountains, the plant and animal worlds, even glimpses of the moon – are ghosted by the dead.
Review Short: Fiona Hile’s Novelties
In Lacanian theory, ‘matheme’ and ‘patheme’ share an interesting correlation. While the matheme is, obviously, on the side of science, the patheme is part of the ‘logics’ of affect, whereby the body is an effect of language. Matheme and patheme don’t immediately have anything to do with sexual difference or ‘mechanistic’ versus ‘organicist’ understandings of the universe. There is nothing mysterious about the patheme. Rather, the patheme could be thought of as what the poem does to the poet’s body analogously to what a matheme does to a mathematician’s body: force it to work and, in some cases, give it pain.
Tina Giannoukos Reviews Ali Cobby Eckermann
Ali Cobby Eckermann’s work offers us a compass to our past and present. In poetry, memoir and verse novel, she maps a journey of Aboriginal identity and the historical and contemporary challenges to its integrity and resilience. What emerges is a profound engagement with healing and the articulation of Aboriginal space as always present, alive, intruded upon but utterly felt. She renders legible how ‘Footprints don’t fade / Culture / Kami May’ (‘Mai’, Love dreaming & other poems).
Review Short: Nicholas Powell’s Water Mirrors
Winner of the 2011 Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize, Water Mirrors is Nicholas Powell’s first full-length collection of poems. Structured around an interweaving of landscapes – some real, others dreamed or imagined – the forty two poems that lead up to ‘The True Map’, the book’s final poem, can read as an exercise in cartography.
John Tranter Reviews The Open Door: One Hundred Poems, One Hundred Years of Poetry Magazine
The blurb tells us that Poetry magazine was founded in Chicago by Harriet Monroe in 1912, and that is it ‘the oldest monthly devoted to verse in the English-speaking world. The magazine established its reputation early by publishing the first important poems of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, H.D., William Carlos Williams, Carl Sandburg and other now-classic authors.
Review Short: Michael Brennan’s Autoethnographic
Michael Brennan’s Autoethnographic requires a curious reader, one to read its sketch-like poems carefully. The title, a reproduced image by Erico Tonotsuka and epigraphs by Edward Sapir and John Grey (‘We see the world through eyes of ancient mud’) suggest we should be reading the language of the poems reflexively, with an eye towards their ontological implications. But the poems don’t fit into this frame, and employ plain speech, dark comedy and lyrical melange un-reflexively.
Review Short: Terry Jaensch’s Shark
You stare into the water, starkly aware of the ambiguous shadows there. So many of us are anglers in the Australian poetry scene; looking for something new, something fresh. Having landed this fish on my desk I will confess to a certain hesitancy to come too close. It’s not a large shark, some 60 odd pages generously spaced. There is more than a little empathy for this distressed, vibrant life. But I’m careful of the teeth.
Keri Glastonbury on Derek Motion
The title of Derek Motion’s recent poetry collection lollyology alludes to a theory of lollypops. If, as Urban Dictionary suggests, a ‘lollyologist’ (lollypop maker) is also street shorthand for the ‘most pointless job position in the world’, then Motion is willing to elevate this ‘pointlessness’ to a field of study, or perhaps an art. I’m not sure if this is intended as a comment on poetry and poetics, though with its lurid purple cover image of a toy truck the tone and aesthetics of lollyology appear punkish and juvenile, in a Bow Wow Wow ‘I want candy’ kind of way (although Motion’s ‘indie’ points of reference are more likely The Lemonheads, Dinosaur Junior and ‘another canberra bar / josh pyke’).
Review Short: B.R. Dionysius’s Bowra
B.R Dionysius’ Bowra is a collection of fifty-two prose sonnets of sustained intensity and engagement with place, from the fringes of southeast Queensland’s urban sprawl, west to Cunnamulla, with excursions to California and Kazakhstan. These poems count the human and environmental cost of various man-made tragedies. The fourteen-line constraint works to unravel an anecdote and/or piece of narrative sequence at once self-contained and part of the larger ambition of the book: to serve as a selective local history. The consistently restive and physical language is as uncompromised, and at times bewildering, as the landscapes and situations it describes.
Review Short: Laurie Duggan’s The Collected Blue Hills
I’m far too young to remember the Blue Hills radio serial, which ran for an incredible 27 years, or 5795 episodes. But in my mind, I’ve always aligned it somehow with the long-running serial of a different medium, A Country Practice, and the experience of watching on, for years throughout my childhood. Watching fictional relationships bloom and end and change, watching births and deaths, illnesses and weddings, floods and fires and droughts; and now that I’m older, I can still, sometimes, align parts of its fictional time to the timeline that I experienced in the world.
Review Short: Julie Chevalier’s Darger: his girls
Henry Darger’s reputation as an outsider artist – and the questions of morality lingering around his dark paintings – has inspired recent exhibitions, books, plays and a documentary. Julie Chevalier’s poetic biography Darger: his girls (subtitled a sequence of poems about the life of Henry Darger 1892 – 1973) has come at peak-Darger fever. Chevalier includes an introduction, familiarising us with the debate about what kind of man Henry Darger really was: child murderer, or misunderstood loner? The latter explanation is explored throughout this work.
Review Short: Luke Beesley’s Balance
The poems in Luke Beesley’s Balance, like Siobhan Hodge’s work in Picking Up The Pieces, tend towards brevity (with a few exceptions). In Hodge’s case we might consider this quality in relation to fragments, where the body and the reader’s attention is cut-up. Reading Beesley, the encounter is one that is instead cut-off – that is to say that this is poetry attuned to the momentary and to the sensing body moving through the world.
Review Short: Siobhan Hodge’s Picking Up the Pieces
Picking Up the Pieces is a compact debut of eight poems from West Australian poet Siobhan Hodge. Its publisher, Wide Range Chapbooks, is a Cambridge based small press run by John Kinsella. Wide Range publishes poets such as Redell Olson, Rob Mengham and Drew Milne mixed in alongside young and emerging local poets, many of them students like Hodge (who in 2012 undertook a research residency in Cambridge). The collegial spirit of Wide Range and the relatively modest production values – Hodge’s book comes stapled in a photocopied card cover – suggests a publishing model that favours immediacy and ease of circulation, in a town where poetry and thinking are a constant activity.
Angela Meyer Reviews Judith Rodriguez and Niall Lucy, John Kinsella
Judith Rodriguez’s The Hanging of Minnie Thwaites and Niall Lucy’s and John Kinsella’s The Ballad of Moondyne Joe are informative poetic explorations of the historical figures Frances Knorr, known as Minnie Thwaites, and Joseph Bolitho Jones, known as Moondyne Joe. The books are explorations and not interpretations, as the authors are aware of the trappings of context, of interpreting fragments of text from the past according to one’s own contemporary values. Of course, this is not completely avoidable and the postmodern notion of avoiding an authoritative account is itself, arguably, a condition of context.
Tara Mokhtari Reviews Amelia Walker
Amelia Walker has imaginatively approached the theme of the stories behind fake poets with Sound and Bundy, a collection of poems by three fictional poets and their collective, doubly fictional Ern Malley reincarnation named Jason Silver. Peter Lind, Shannon Woodford, and Angie Rawkins are the three protagonists in this very convincing work of fiction by Walker. A story emerges about these three poets who wrote together under the guise of Jason Silver, and the ways in which their lives and poetries intertwined. The result is something between an alarmingly realistic (but fake) anthology and a verse novel. It effectively sucks the reader into its reality – suburban Adelaide in 1998 until 2006 when both one of the poets, Lind, and the Jason Silver moniker commit suicide.
Ali Alizadeh Reviews Chris Andrews
In a recent article published in Sydney Review of Books, Emmett Stinson argues that Australian reviewers’ and readers’ responses to Australian short story collections are regulated by the receptions of these authors in the US. And so, according to Stinson, the so-called cultural cringe lives on. But is this really the case? And should we really be suspicious of internationally recognised Australian writers such as Chris Andrews whose second collection of poems has been published by Baltimore’s Waywiser Press, the publishers of such giants of US poetry as Anthony Hecht, Richard Wilbur and W. D. Snodgrass?
Review Short: Ellen Hickman and John Ryan’s Two with Nature
As a book quite different to what is usually seen in the poetry sphere, Two with Nature, Fremantle Press’s book combining the poetry of John Ryan with the botanical illustrations of Ellen Hickman, contains some interesting possibilities and contradictions. In his introduction Ryan notes how ‘the term ‘botanical poetry’ might seem an unusual juxtaposition of two quite different practices – science and poetry’ and it is here that the importance of the ‘with’ in the title can be seen as Ryan and Hickman’s aim appears to be with nature through a combination of scientifically accurate illustration and poetry.
Review Short: Martin Edmond’s Eternities
In this collection of prose pieces, memory and daydreaming are powerful forces, determinants rather than second-order effects. Its theme I take to be the transactions of past and present as they are occasioned by the spaces of a city (in this case, Sydney) or, to use another approach, Sydney’s ghosts. The title of almost every piece is or was an actual place in Sydney. The sites Edmond’s imagination gravitates towards might be seen as typical: the legendary once-sharehouse (‘The Caledonian’), soggy-carpeted nightclub (‘The Manzil Room’), harbour’s edge (‘Blackwattle Bay’). While the pieces mostly derive from Edmond’s personal experiences of the city, some are effected by the work of archival research, amplifying the double vision of the past being tangible in the present.
Review Short: Matthew Hall’s Hyaline
How does one review a book of poems that has no table of contents and no page numbers? More to the point, perhaps, is how does one read such a book? What do those absences signify? Individual poems have titles, yet they seem to move on, almost glide on, from what preceded them, and into what follows. “Artifice’, the book’s first poem in the section ‘Harm’s Light’ in fact has each section beginning with the last line or two of the preceding section, pausing, but resuming , then handing on to its successor.
A. Frances Johnson Reviews Jill Jones
‘Why wish for the moon when we have the stars’, Bette Davis famously aspirates to Paul Henreid at the end of the film Now Voyager (1942, dir. Irving Rapper). That, of course, was an iconic, melodramatic story of unrequited love given an optimistic gloss by two lovers sharing last cigarettes. Jill Jones’ ambiguously rendered celestial bodies serve up different ideas of love and loss in this new collection. Jones’ stars, moons, candles, clouds and smoky skies are part of an identifiable romantic lexicon.
Review Short: Toby Davidson’s Beast Language
In the introduction to the collected poems of Francis Webb, Toby Davidson observes that the immediate influences behind Webb’s poems ‘do not supersede his locales.’ Webb’s poems are informed by a topophilia, a love of place and its ambient lore, a topographical attentiveness to detail that includes not just spatial but also temporal resonances. Davidson has inherited this attentiveness to space and place, and his debut collection, Beast Language, attempts a topo or ecopoetics that traverses a spectrum of geographies, mapping the Australian continent from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific seaboard, attempting not only terrestrial readings but taking cosmological measurements as well.
Michael Farrell Reviews MTC Cronin
A book as an experience of sampling, and of reading over a long period of time, may be ideal for the writer; but it won’t be that for all readers, especially not reviewers.
MTC Cronin has published several highly structured books in the past: Talking to Neruda’s Questions,
Justin Clemens Reviews Pam Brown and Ken Bolton
If there is one true love in the history of Australian verse, it’s perhaps the love of Pam Brown and Ken Bolton. As you should expect, it’s not a normal kind of love at all – or maybe it’s the only normal love, depending on how you’re predisposed to taking the word or the thing (‘normal,’ I mean), and depending whether you think you can tell the difference between the two (‘word’ and ‘thing,’ I mean).
Andy Jackson Reviews Kevin Brophy and Nathan Curnow
Radar. Green blips on a black screen. A large and vulnerable craft navigating a changeable world. A technological attempt to locate an invisible danger, or to give shape to darkness. All these associations emerge out of the poetry of Kevin Brophy and Nathan Curnow in their joint collection Radar, albeit in an intimate mode: these poets observe the ways in which we navigate through our lives in the contemporary world and improvise meaning. It is difficult, though, to talk about ‘the book’ because these two poets differ strikingly in their approaches.
