BOOK REVIEWS
Stuart Cooke Reviews Anna Kerdijk Nicholson
From at least as far back as Heraclitus, scholars have been warning us about the irresistible and irretrievable nature of history. The past provides little that is stable, other than an unwavering reminder of the constancy of change. The task of entering history, therefore, is fraught with complications.
Angela Meyer Reviews Etchings
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.
Heather Taylor-Johnson Reviews HEAT
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.
Amelia Walker Reviews David McCooey and Cameron Lowe
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.
Ali Alizadeh Reviews Maria Takolander and Claire Potter
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.
Tim Wright Reviews Ken Bolton
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.
Jal Nicholl Reviews Best Australian Poems 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?
Ryan Scott reviews Robert Drewe and John Kinsella
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.
Joel Scott Reviews Kim Hyesoon and Don Mee Choi
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.
Heather Taylor-Johnson Reviews Teri Louise Kelly
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.
Tara Mokhtari Reviews APC 2010 New Poets Series
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.
Stephen Lawrence Reviews Chris Mansell
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.
Peter Mitchell Reviews Out of the Box: Contemporary Australian Gay and Lesbian Poets
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.
Bev Braune Reviews Jill Jones
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.
Libby Hart Reviews Rosanna Licari
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.
Rosalind McFarlane Reviews Caroline Caddy
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.
Corey Wakeling Reviews John Tranter
John Tranter has been publishing poetry for forty years, and his latest book is published in tandem with a critical companion to his oeuvre, The Salt Companion to John Tranter. As Rod Mengham writes in the companion’s preface, Tranter is “widely regarded by critics as the most important member of the so-called ‘generation of ‘68’”. This generation of poets was in fact named as such by Tranter himself.
Matt Hetherington Reviews David Brooks
In a review originally published in Heat #6, David Brooks praised Peter Boyle’s The Blue Cloud of Crying as being influenced by the tradition of Cante Jondo or deep song, and as being more accessible, recognisable, and emotionally engaged than most Australian poetry. He then went on to observe: “There has been something of a tradition of emotional reserve in Australian poetry.
Joel Scott Reviews Southerly
Faced with the considerable range of work in Southerly‘s Golden Tongues: The Arts of Translation issue, I have resorted to the what’s hot/what’s not school of literary criticism, identifying what were for me the ten most notable elements in the collection.
Loula Rodopoulos Reviews Tom Petsinis
I chose to review this book wondering how a poet could possibly shape poetic imagery from mundane work tools. Also aware of the multicultural background of Tom Petsinis’ work, I wondered whether he was able to forge something new from well-known and perhaps stereotypic perspectives of the migration experience.
Greg Westenberg Reviews Jordie Albiston
To read Jordie Albiston’s The sonnet according to ‘m’ is to play the part of the village agnostic watching the reliquary in the local saint’s procession. “In this form,” William Carlos Williams said of the sonnet, “perfection is basic.” As with the skilfully worked metal of the reliquary, the sonnet is perhaps a little white these days from infrequent dusting, yet it stands on a high shelf among the household gods of the Western Canon.
Nick Terrell Reviews Jennifer Maiden
Since Jennifer Maiden began publishing in the early 1970s, her work has been charged with a commitment to frame the ethical challenges presented by manifestations of evil. It’s a commitment that was stated plainly in the title of her second volume, The Problem of Evil.
Ryan Scott Reviews The Return of Král Majáles
This book positively brims. With words, with pictures, with experiments and experiences. At eight hundred pages plus, it is as a definitive testament to Prague’s so-called International Literary Renaissance. Apart from the prose and poetry, there are photos of those involved and an extensive bibliography of journals, zines and newspapers which have been published in Prague over the last two decades.
Zoe Deleuil Reviews Indigo
In the interview with Tim Winton in this issue of Indigo, the acclaimed author provides a valuable reminder: it’s all very well to go to literary parties and drink lattes with the top Eastern States editors, but writers must also write. And read, widely.
