BOOK REVIEWS
Ryan Scott Reviews New European Poets
The editors of New European Poets have made their intentions quite clear. They aim to reinvigorate the transatlantic conversation between American and European poets. Such an ambitious task is not without compromise. In order to achieve their aim, the editors have had to set some constraints, some they admit are arbitrary.
Bridie McCarthy Reviews Going Down Swinging and Indigo
At the level of function, a literary journal produces a collection of writing on a periodical basis. However, a journal is also another kind of machine, an apparatus which generates a readership, presents writers, exercises its own ideological assumptions (however loosely formed or evolving), and which makes claims to a certain cultural space. At this discursive level, Going Down Swinging and Indigo are very different animals.
Emmett Stinson Reviews Kent MacCarter
The three sections of Kent MacCarter's excellent debut collection are marked by recipes of an imaginative kind. In 'Fruit Salad with Papaya-Mint Sauce' he instructs the reader to include 'Ounces of fresh goddamn seedless everything', which serves as an apt description of the collection as a whole. MacCarter's poetry is a sort of mulligan stew that seamlessly blends landscape, as Japan, New Zealand, Australia and various locales in the United States coagulate into a coherent vision.
Heather Taylor-Johnson Reviews John Foulcher
I read the first three quarters of John Foulcher's What on Earth Possessed You: Poems 1983-2008 in one sitting, without picking up my pen. So enraptured was I with these twenty-five years worth of collected poems and a handful of new ones that I ignored my call to duty as reviewer in those first fifty-one pages, avoiding even mental notes, because I didn't want to break the seamless stream of one poem to the next.
Matthew Hall Reviews Les Wicks
In Les Wicks' The Ambrosiacs visual and tonal senses, shown through a series of relentless escapes and endscapes, create a striking depiction of the poet's perceptions and observations. The fundamental basis of Wicks' collection, and the manner in which the reader is encouraged to approach them, is as an elegy: a series of memories and dedications aiming for the preservation of the instant, even if the instants are acknowledged as fleeting.
Moya Pacey Reviews P. S. Cottier
This debut collection by Canberra poet, P.S. Cottier, is striking in its eclecticism. Nothing much escapes this poet’s perceptive eye; her world is crowded and busy, and her poems reflect on and respond to a wide range of mostly contemporary topics and ideas. These include, among many others, injustices (big and small), the marginalised and forgotten, environmental concerns, as well as the nag of the everyday such as how to dispose of a tea bag responsibly or how to take care of one’s teeth.
Benjamin Dodds Reviews Carol Jenkins
Carol Jenkins's first collection of poetry, Fishing in the Devonian, has been identified as a body of great 'scientific' poems. Michael Sharkey's quote on the publication's back cover and Judith Beveridge's pick of the best books of 2008 in Australian Book Review both single out Jenkins's work for its strong use of science.
Ryan Scott Reviews Petr Borkovec
Petr Borkovec has been referred to as the leading poet in the next generation of Czech poets. But who are this next generation? How do they relate to the old? And what is Borkovec's place among them? The most general answer to the first two questions, which the translator Justin Quinn addresses in his insightful introduction to From the Interior: Poems 1995-2005, is that Borkovec differentiates himself from earlier poets in that he is not obviously political.
Seamus Barker Reviews Kate Middleton
Fire Season is Kate Middleton's first book of poetry, after numerous publications in journals and newspapers in Australia, England and the US. Middleton has trained as a librettist, and we see a classical influence permeating this book, with narrative voices discovered for literary figures from Penelope, to Leda, Desdemona, and even the Minotaur's previously undiscovered, equally bullish, sister.
Liam Ferney Reviews Tim Thorne
History is a con. Every second year undergrad haunting a uni bar knows that. Understanding history is not who did what to whom when, it is how the narrative reflects on the teller and the audience. I Con: New and Selected Poems, the justly deserved retrospective of Tasmania poet Tim Thorne published in a beautiful hard cover edition by Salt, works its playful magic in the fluid space between fact and myth.
Ali Alizadeh Reviews Bronwyn Lea and Kevin Hart
One of the most prominent features of these two recent titles – by two of Australia's most successful poets, published by one of the country's most exciting literary publishers – is their emphasis on the erotic. By engaging with unambiguously sexual themes and imagery, Bronwyn Lea and Kevin Hart have produced texts that beguile and entertain their reader through the evocation of, or a yearning for, romance and sensuality, whilst also running the risk of reducing allusion and openness in meaning by describing a definite, rather familiar, concept.
Adam Ford Reviews Joel Deane
Magisterium is the second collection by Joel Deane, following on from his debut collection Subterranean Radio Songs and his debut novel Another. In an interview with Paul Mitchell published in Cordite in 2006, when asked about the interplay between his work as speechwriter for the Premier of Victoria and his other life as a poet, Deane cited American poet Eleanor Wilner, who said of poets that, 'We need to take back the rhetorical high ground from the politicians who degrade it'. Deane went on express the hope that the poems contained in his next book might approach 'the kind of apocalyptic public language' hinted at by Wilner.
Alice Allan Reviews Ten Years of Things That Didn’t Kill Us
When Paroxysm Press sent out their call for submissions in March last year for an anthology titled Ten Years of Things That Didn't Kill Us, they had just one piece of advice for writers: 'we want it to be as Paroxysm as hell'. The result – a collection of poetry and prose from writers well-known to Paroxysm followers along with a number of new contributors – isn't intended to please everyone.
Angela Costi Reviews Poetry Without Borders
There is a deep sigh of relief when we come across Poetry Without Borders, an anthology willing to cross unknown terrain to bring us the voices of poets rarely heard. Whether it's due to language, cultural, economic or psychological factors, those poets who have migrated or are considered to be 'new arrivals' are hardly published.
Tim Wright Reviews Nicholas Manning
These words came to mind when I tried to list the main concerns of this twenty-six poem sequence: light, love, perception and apperception, rapture, thought, things, stars, source, memory. The poems in Novaless I-XXVI are highly sensual, their strange disjunctive images always in the process of forming or resolving in the mind. The sequence as a whole seems to be concerned as much with the operations of thinking and sensing as with any outside objects of reference.
Jill Bamforth Reviews John Jenkins
John Jenkins' narrative verse, Growing Up with Mr Menzies, begins with an imagined visit by the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Menzies, to the Elwood home of the infant Felix Hayes. Like a Wise Man at a nativity, Menzies bears a gift, a 'considerably handsome' pocket watch, which he dangles over Felix's cot.
Ryan Scott Reviews The Best Australian Poems 2008
When an anthology purports to represent the best poetry of a time or region, it's fair to assume someone will question the validity of its publication. 'On what criteria is this judged?' some readers might wonder. 'Can poetry really have a best?' others will ask. 'Why wasn't I included?' a few may dare voice aloud.
Susan Fealy Reviews Alex Skovron
Alex Skovron is a thoughtful poet, one who confronts the complexity of living in the 21st century with its burden of human history. Of Polish-Jewish background, Skovron emigrated with his family from Poland at the age of eight and arrived in Sydney via Israel in 1958. Autographs is Skovron's fifth collection and it arrives five years after his previous collection, The Man and the Map.
Heather Taylor-Johnson Reviews Ouyang Yu
While we awaited the arrival of Ouyang Yu's The Kingsbury Tales, a small treat came in the form of Reality Dreams. It is not at all surprising that Yu has put out two books of poetry in one year; in fact he has put out three, one written in Chinese. And that does not even touch upon his fiction and non-fiction. The man must be one of the most prolific writers in Australia.
Bridie McCarthy Reviews Yvette Holt, Javant Biarujia and Martin Harrison
To read these three recently published collections of Australian poetry is to appreciate the breadth of the field, the many different modes employed within it, and the individuality of its practitioners. Radically divergent in their interests, these poets nonetheless share a strong undercurrent of compassion in their work, even though it finds varying forms of expression.
Deb Matthews-Zott Reviews Michael Sharkey
The Sweeping Plain is Michael Sharkey's fourteenth collection of poetry and follows the publication of History: Selected Poems 1978-2000 in 2002. On the cover of this collection is Eliel Saarinen's 1912 design for the Australian Federal Capital, which was runner up (second place) to Walter Burley Griffin's design in a town planning competition for our capital city.
Felicity Plunkett Reviews Phyllis Perlstone and Meredith Wattison
Phyllis Perlstone's the edge of everything, which was short-listed for the 2008 Kenneth Slessor Prize, is an imaginative cartography, its careful perceptions laying out ways of looking at the crucial ideas the book returns to: ideas about love and the ways it might fade or be lost; about violence and humanity; about perception itself, and how words work to map its contours.
Ali Alizadeh Reviews Philip Mead
Once every decade, it seems, a scholar succeeds in writing an all-encompassing account of the practice and development of poetry in modern Australia. The 1980s saw Andrew Taylor's Reading Australian Poetry; and in the 1990s we had Paul Kane's Australian Poetry: Romanticism and Negativity. Now, Philip Mead, senior lecturer at the University of Tasmania's School of English, Journalism and European Languages, has provided what is perhaps the most ambitious and provocative overview of the agonistic and at times conflicting discourses of Australian poetry in the 20th century.
Paul Mitchell Reviews Tim Metcalf
Australia is home to a number of clinician poets, including general practitioners such as Peter Goldsworthy and Shen, and mental health specialists such as Jennifer Harrison, Robyn Rowland and Doris Brett. Tim Metcalf, a GP from Bega NSW, joined their ranks in 2001 when he published his first collection, Corvus (Ginninderra Press). The book included 'Stages of Dying', winner of the 2000 WB Yeats Prize, a spare poem that offered a confronting yet tender meditation on Elisabeth Kubler-Ross's teachings about death and dying.
