BOOK REVIEWS
Michael Farrell Reviews Fremantle Poets 1: New Poets
There is an apt awkwardness and uncertainty in all three poets – Emma Rooksby, Scott-Patrick Mitchell, J.P. Quinton – here: in the expression of sentiment (‘Preparations’, Rooksby), in the use of syntax (Mitchell) and archaisms like ‘verily’ (Quinton). All three are skilled poets, but they are new, and there is a sense that they are still trying things out. As editor Tracy Ryan writes, the three are ‘extremely diverse in tone and approach’ and this diversity is pronounced in a way that would be tempered were there more poets in the book. Ryan’s selected poets represent three modes, rather than merely variety itself. This is not a sampler, however, but three books in one, and perhaps not designed to be read sequentially.
Libby Hart Reviews Kate Fagan
First Light is Kate Fagan’s long-awaited second full-length collection. It was published in March 2012, almost ten years to the day after her successful debut, A Long Moment, was released. Ten years is a mere blip in time for planet Earth, but what does it mean to a poet and her history? Ten years can bring a well of experience and an abundance of living – of living the poet’s life and the musician’s career, and of the academic’s savoir vivre. Labels such as lover, wife and new mother are also pertinent to this slow burning collection.
Adam Aitken Reviews John Mateer
Southern Barbarians is a book that explores both the colonised and the colonizing impulse through the inflections of the Portuguese epic Os Lusíadas by Camões, the explorer/soldier/poet-traveller and heroic poet of the Portuguese. The book ranges from Lisbon to Macao, taking in Indonesia, Malaysia, Warrnambool, and Japan on the way. This is a world where African businessmen in Macao see ‘African wildlife’ in a travel agent’s window, in an image of savannah they are no closer to than the Macanese.”
Susan Hawthorne Reviews Robyn Rowland
Robyn Rowland’s poetry career spans thirty years, with her first book, Filigree in blood, appearing in 1982. Reading this volume of new and selected poems is a journey in memory, an almost autobiography. I first heard Rowland read in 1982 at the Sydney Women Writers Festival and I was very taken by her ability to phrase poems in just the right way so that a listener can follow and take in her meaning. Indeed, for some of her poems in this collection, it was as if I had Rowland’s voice in my head – no easy task for a writer to achieve that. It means that the rhythm or pace or vocabulary is just right.”
Adam Ford Reviews Thirty Australian Poets
Thirty Australian Poets is a new anthology out of UQP that focuses on the work of poets born after 1968. It’s an intriguing conceit that invites comparison with the work of the Generation of ’68 without actually issuing a challenge per se, but at least prompting a ‘look where we are now’ conversation. Since this constraint naturally excludes both poets who make up Australia’s vibrant live poetry scene (who tend not to be as widely published on the page) and also talented poets whose work may not have yet been collected, the poetry on offer does tend toward the formal.”
Heather Taylor Johnson Reviews Young Poets: An Australian Anthology
I’ve respected John Leonard Press since its beginnings in 2006, and over the years a theme has formed across its publications. Leonard’s poets have a lot in common. There is nothing slapdash about any of them. These are poets clearly enticed by language and by the theories of life. Don’t expect rhyming. Don’t expect clichés. And do not, above all, expect anything simple.”
Gig Ryan’s New and Selected Poems
Gig Ryan asserts that, ‘Poetry is our response to the world, but it’s also the thing we poets find the most taxing, the best of engaging our brains. Ideally – like all good art – it should make us think.’ Yet, as she also acknowledges, meaning is often secondary when reading poetry. That is, it is intensified and made more complex by the poem’s sensual materiality and the affect it may evoke.
Adam Ford Reviews Fiona Wright
Knuckled is the debut collection from Fiona Wright, and can I just start by saying that ‘knuckled’ is a great title for a book of poems? It’s a word that’s easy to understand, one that immediately brings images to mind (hands, fists, gnarled trees, walking-sticks) but also one that you don’t hear that often.
Alison Clifton Reviews Jaya Savige
In an essay for The Australian titled ‘Poetry Lives, OK?’ Jaya Savige examines the ongoing debate about the state of contemporary Australian poetry. Essentially, he argues that this debate is not so much “current” as “perpetual.”
P.S. Cottier Reviews Mark Pirie
While waiting for this book to arrive, I found myself wondering what the best known cricket poem in the world might be. I’d say that it’s still the absurdly patriotic ‘Vitai Lampada’ by Henry Newbolt.
Tara Mokhtari Reviews Jamie King-Holden and Koraly Dimitriadis
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.
Ali Alizadeh Reviews David Brooks
‘Ern Malley? Again?’ asks David Brooks at the outset of this new reading of what is, arguably, the central event in the history of modern Australian poetry. Brooks’s account is an engrossing, at times exhilarating journey through the landscape of early-mid twentieth century Modernist poetry, but it also leaves the question of the need for yet another volume about the infamous hoax more or less unanswered.
Fiona Scotney Reviews Michelle Dicinoski
Electricity for Beginners, Michelle Dicinoski’s first poetry collection, has been dedicated in its title and opening pages to “beginners”. Dicinoski has been published previously in a number of publications including Meanjin, The Australian and The Best Australian Poems.
Cuttlewoman Reviews Stu Hatton
How to be hungry by Stu Hatton Self published, 2010 Stu Hatton’s How to be hungry is predominantly a charnel house of modern, urban, party-going, substance-abusing youth. Hatton crams in the details of the worst of youthful socialising — friends …
Nicholas Powell Reviews Grant Caldwell
glass clouds by Grant Caldwell Five Islands Press, 2010 For nearly three decades Grant Caldwell has been writing some of the more interesting and fearless poetry in Australia. A relentless observer of the absurd and odd, Caldwell’s predominant tone has …
Toby Fitch Reviews Michael Farrell and John Ashbery
In her review of John Ashbery’s new translation of Illuminations in The New York Times, Lydia Davis reminded us that: “When Rimbaud’s mother asked of A Season in Hell, ‘What does it mean?’ — a question still asked of Rimbaud’s poetry, and of Ashbery’s, too — Rimbaud would say only, ‘It means what it says, literally and in every sense.'”
Corey Wakeling Reviews joanne burns
joanne burns has been publishing experimental poetry in Australia for over four decades, and amphora is her thirteenth collection. At 135 pages, it is substantial and generous, of a breadth that allows for the prose poems burns is best known for along with a number of spectacular short poems and some longer series.
Heather Taylor-Johnson Reviews Michelle Cahill
Michelle Cahill’s second collection is marvellously named Vishvarūpa, Sanskrit for “manifold, having all forms and colours”. The cover is classic black and silver, with a close-up photograph of a Hindu deity’s sculpture. If the package says anything, it’s intelligent. And the package does not lie. Cahill may laze in the splendour of nature or love, as is the way with so many poets, but she does so with extensive layering.
Ryan Scott Reviews Louis Armand
To say Louis Armand is a thoughtful poet is both obvious and an understatement. His reach extends beyond the expression of an idea to capture the sensation of the thought itself. He gives thought its heft, urgency and gravity and thus separates himself from being a mere poet of ideas. In his latest collection, Letters from Ausland, he finds that elusive ground between intellect and artistry.
Heather Taylor-Johnson Reviews Libby Hart
This Floating World is Libby Hart’s long-awaited follow-up to her 2006 Anne Elder Award-winning Fresh News from the Arctic. Like Arctic, the collection is heavily dependent on both the natural world and the nature of humans in relation to that world. I am making an educated guess that the book is a product of Hart’s residency at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in County Monaghan, Ireland, as the structure of the second and major part is a songline of the area.
Peter Boyle Reviews Yasuhiro Yotsumoto and Shuntaro Tanikawa
At the outset I will say that, though my own latest book Apocrypha was published by Vagabond Press, I hold no financial interest in the press nor any motivation to promote these two books other than the merits I find in them. The first collection under review, Yotsumoto’s Family Room, masterfully transcends the opposition between tradition and experiment; and Watashi, Tanikawa’s 20th collection to be published in English translation, certainly confirms this reviewer’s impression of being in the presence of a major poet.
Tina Giannoukos Reviews Ali Alizadeh
Ali Alizadeh’s latest collection, Ashes in the Air, blows across the fault lines of our manifold present. These are poems of strong rhetorical force. With remarkable alertness to volatile complexities, they engage in an argument with barely comprehensible realities of exclusion and inclusion. They are radical, philosophical and profoundly affective.
Stephen Lawrence Reviews Andy Kissane and Alan Gould
Even in the earliest era of proto-literature, The Epic of Gilgamesh sought to represent human voice, its intonations and social communications. Yet the clearest sign of a versatile writer is the extent to which he or she can dislocate the voice, free it up, loosen it into multiplicity. And the more experienced the writer, the more likely they are to catch on to this.
John Jenkins Reviews Peter Boyle
“No one can count the number of people we have been in a single / life. One death is never enough.” These lines from Apocrypha sum up a theme that resurfaces through the poetic fragments which make up this fabulous cache of texts: fragments which survive from certain lost books by real and re-discovered authors of the ancient world, including Herodotus, Longinus, Theophrastus, Catullus, Plato and others.
