BOOK REVIEWS
Heather Taylor-Johnson Reviews Southerly
The poets in this special poetry issue of Southerly stand for what is now, what is exciting/experimental and what is quality. But did Kate Lilley hand pick most of these poets, ensuring the issue would be tight, stylistically, and adhere to a chosen dogma? She does say in her intro that ‘Of the many poems that turned up in my inbox, already pre-selected by their authors, these are the ones that struck me most’.
Michael Farrell Reviews Richard Hillman
Richard Hillman’s new book has a compelling red cover. A giant black semi-colon portrays a synapse letting through the electrical signal of the poet and book to its readers. A brilliant design, but one hard to live up to. The poems in The Raw Nerve are, for the most part, of ordinary domestic life; a kind of poetry no easier than any other to realise.
Libby Hart Reviews Andrew Taylor
The Unhaunting is Andrew Taylor’s seventeenth book of poetry and comprises work written between 2003 and 2008. The collection is divided into five parts. The first, ‘The Importance of Waiting’, acts as a tidy introduction to the book’s themes of mortality, elusive truths and the environment, both as interior and exterior. Taylor begins with a vivid portrait of Perth’s suburban landscape where quiet concern spills over into the everyday.
Ali Alizadeh Reviews John Mateer
Since the publication of his startling first collection Burning Swans in 1989, John Mateer has established himself as one of the key Australian poets who, for the absence of a better term, can be broadly labelled post-Generation of ’68. What my clumsy terminology seeks to indicate is that Mateer (alongside other younger poets such as those appearing in the seminal 2000 anthology Calyx) follows in the general direction of earlier innovators while making crucial, although not necessarily generational, departures.
Anna Forsyth Reviews Going Down Swinging
This was my first full dip into the reputable journal Going Down Swinging and so I started with the index. It is not often that you find entries of such intriguing fragments as ‘shoot a harpoon into its golden centre' or ‘the dark play of your wet eyes'. The entries that drew me in the most were ‘terrorism, blah blah' and ‘would sever the possum's head'.
Siobhan Hodge Reviews Over There: Poems from Singapore and Australia
Over There: Poems from Singapore and Australia is ambitious. This anthology reads as a sample of more to come, rather than a clear achievement of the sizable task that it sets out in its introduction. Over There is not, as the title might initially suggest, a collection of travel poems, nor is it a comparison of different postcolonial reflections arising from Singapore and Australia.
Libby Hart Reviews Catherine Bateson
Marriage for Beginners is Catherine Bateson's fifth collection of poetry. As the title suggests, marriage, or more precisely the breakdown of the poet's first marriage, is a key component of this work. Bateson has structured the volume in three sections. Although the connections are not so obvious in the beginning, it soon becomes clear that these three individual parts unfold like a three act drama filled with an array of characters and conflict.
Libby Hart Reviews Angela Gardner
Angela Gardner's first collection of poetry, Parts of Speech, won the Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize for an unpublished manuscript in 2006 and was subsequently published a year later by University of Queensland Press. Views of the Hudson: A New York Book of Psalms is her second collection, although Gardner has published several books as a visual artist who also incorporates poetry with printmaking.
Aden Rolfe Reviews Marion May Campbell
Marion May Campbell's Fragments from a Paper Witch arrived not without anticipation. Despite the publication of four of her novels and the staging of several theatre works, this is her first collection, drawing together diverse works of poetry, prose poetry, fictocritical essay and performance writing.
Michael Farrell Reviews Rae Desmond Jones
Many of the poems in Rae Desmond Jones's Blow Out end with silence. This is effective in the poem ‘Witness', about a car accident, where ‘The policewoman leans in to press a button, / Then the street goes quiet'. (This poem also features the excellent verb ‘Bananas”.)
Ryan Scott Reviews The Best Australian Poetry 2009 and The Best Australian Poems 2009
If we seek a division in Australian poetry, we will not find it represented among the poems in these two anthologies. Wearne puts it adroitly in his introduction when he says about the Poetry Wars, ‘for all the legendary brouhaha it may have all happened at one party (and perhaps that's how the eventual movie will see it). If some of us played for different teams (and still may) remember the operative words are 'play' and 'teams'.
Toby Davidson Reviews Michael Brennan and Barry Hill
Unanimous Night and Four Lines East are very different collections physically, the latter being a limited edition chapbook of thirty-five pages, but they both revolve around a central theme of the Australian poet out in the world, away from home, discovering new dwellings for body and mind in the process.
Ali Alizadeh Reviews Tatjana Lukic
With the success of novels and short story collections such as The Slap and The Boat, it seems multicultural writing is enjoying something of a revival in Australia. Yet poetry written by non-Anglo-Celtic Australians does not usually garner much recognition. It is the prose narratives of dislocation and cultural transition, and not poetry dealing with these themes, which are de rigueur.
Toby Davidson Reviews The John Moran Corperation
Since renowned works such as Kenneth Slessor's ‘The Night-Ride' and Judith Wright's ‘The Trains,' trains have been natural subjects and carriers of Australian poetry. TrainRide by John Moran and his small posse of musicians is very much off the train, stuck in the kind of gritty, gothic country town that transfixed Wright in her debut The Moving Image.
Nick Terrell Reviews Kim Cheng Boey
In 1997, Kim Cheng Boey's feelings of alienation from his homeland had reached critical mass. After years of watching the Singapore of his childhood succumb to ‘the cycle of tear and build that is the philosophy of progress,' he emigrated to Australia. Boey has had four collections of poetry published and won numerous awards. His early collections, Somewhere Bound (1989) and Another Place (1992), earned him high esteem in his homeland.
Ryan Scott Reviews Nicholson Baker
Paul Chowder, poet and narrator of Nicholson Baker's novel The Anthologist, is trying to write an introduction to his forthcoming anthology of poetry Only Rhyme. Unfortunately, he is unable to say exactly why rhyme is important, and so like anyone with a seemingly impossible task, he procrastinates.
Helen O’Brien Reviews Christopher Kelen
The very first word of the title of Christopher Kelen's latest book – taken from a section from within the collection entitled ‘after Dinescu' – poses a question: is Kelen referring to God the omnipotent deity, or god as an exclamation or damnation? The title is probably written with those thoughts in equal measure as we discover oblique references to Christianity and also to the Roman novel, The Golden Ass.
Ali Alizadeh Reviews Jen Hadfield
Jen Hadfield's winning the 2008 T. S. Eliot Prize for this collection seems truly sensational. Since the UK's most prestigious poetry prize is usually given to older male poets, the 30 year-old woman poet's success could be seen as a radical event. Furthermore, the ecologically conscious discourse of Nigh-No-Place can also be seen as a new, exciting development in the context of mainstream English poetry.
Liam Ferney Reviews Pam Brown and Adam Aitken
Poetry doesn't pay the bills but it does have benefits; claiming your internet and a trip to Melbourne back on tax, for instance. Or the overseas fellowships distributing poets across the globe like water from a sprinkler, as is the case with the authors of the titles under review.
Matthew Hall Reviews John Watson
Erasure Traces is an experimental work, in terms of linguistic innovation, textual depth and in the application of theoretical constructs to the formulation of poetry. I feel that there is a great amount of depth to the work which may be overlooked at a preliminary read and so I undertake this review to underscore the possibilities and potentialities that I see as dominant substrates in Watson's work.
Libby Hart Reviews Dorothy Porter
The Bee Hut is Dorothy Porter's posthumous volume of poetry and her seventh collection to date, although her agent has indicated there are more books to come. Most poems assembled here were written in the last five years of her life and the final poem, ‘View from 417' was written only two weeks before her death from complications associated with breast cancer.
Sam Byfield Reviews the APC New Poets Series
I read the four New Poets chapbooks with a high level of curiosity and expectation. Published by the Australian Poetry Centre, these collections represent the rebirth of the Five Islands Press New Poets Series, which published the first chapbooks of approximately 75 Australian poets until its cessation in 2007.
Perri Giovannucci Reviews The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry
Since the 1990s, academic discussions about literature have challenged, if not deconstructed, the project of a national canon. These discussions have centered on the notions of representation, inclusion, aesthetics, and importantly, identity. While the debates may at times seem atomising, the effects have invigorated literature, both in how it is conceptualised as a discipline and in how texts are produced.
Libby Hart Reviews Judith Beveridge
Throughout Judith Beveridge's career we have seen her take an element from one volume of poetry and expand on it in her next book. Take for example her first collection, The Domesticity of Giraffes (1987) where she wrote of 'Hannibal on the Alps'. This theme was then redeveloped to become 'Hannibal Speaks to his Elephants' in Accidental Grace (1996).
