BOOK REVIEWS
Lisa Bower Reviews Kerry Scuffins
Litmus measures the world's volatile climate and shows the reader the cracks beneath the surface of society. The tongue-in-cheek title of this poetry collection acknowledges the binaries of society and then smashes through them with strong language and an even stronger sense of line. Kerry Scuffins is a loud poet: her lines are broken for meaning and for sound, her metaphors are in your face, and she makes no apologies for inserting politics and her opinions into her poetry.
Peter Mitchell Reviews Connie Barber
According to AUSTLIT: The Australian Literature Resource, Connie Barber's fourth collection of poetry, Between Headlands, has only been reviewed on one occasion by any print or on-line journal in this country since its publication. I am surprised by this lack, as I believe Barber has an established writing career and a public presence.
Nicholas Manning Reviews Judith Bishop
To speak of Judith Bishop's poetry is perhaps to speak, necessarily, of the image. Of course, in the context of 20th century poetics, this term carries within it an unfortunately thorny and convoluted lineage. From Ezra Pound's use of the concept against the Georgians to Ponge's against the Surrealists, the image has always constituted a controversial node, its problems and paradoxes traversing diverse ideological mires of competing poetic modernities.
Bev Braune Reviews David Malouf
In the very appropriately titled Revolving Days, David Malouf has put together a selection of poems that addresses the past, place and its importance to self-definition, the memory of houses emptied of family and objects yet full of what's left behind and filling up the present. The poems exhibit a quality which, with political comments more subtle than Les Murray's and longings less romanticised than Robert Adamson's, declares that the places where the emotions taken from another world rendezvous are always present and clear in comprehending the discrepancy between place-and-mind and feeling-and-emotion.
Stuart Cooke Reviews Michael Farrell
Apart from a solitary '1,' the first page of a raiders guide is blank. Note the presence of the comma. What it suggests of the pages that follow is a transience between the concrete ('.') and the absent (' '). The book's entry functions as much as a point of departure as one of beginning; we all delve into different interstices. So we come to the first poem: unanchored by a table of contents (which, along with page numbers, a raiders guide does not have) yet, unlike the rest of the poems, it is ordered into dense blocks of text.
Heather Taylor-Johnson Reviews Mike Ladd
I find it a rare and lovely treat when a poet can become androgynous, or cross over discretely from a masculine voice to one that is feminine. While some of my favourite poets are steeped entirely in one gender or the other and that, indeed, can be their strength, I do want to draw attention to Mike Ladd.
Adam Ford Reviews Alan Wearne
It seems to me that a poem should – in general – be a self-contained unit, either easily understood or a puzzle that contains the key to its solution. I'm happy to make exceptions for poems written in different eras or countries – such poems might need annotations to compensate for unfamiliar historical or cultural contexts.
Pam Brown Reviews Miriel Lenore
In response to the effects of global climate change, and probably informed by earlier exponents like natural historian Henry David Thoreau, Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold, Eric Rolls and so on, the literary genre 'nature writing' has been re-invigorated and a new genre, 'ecopoetry', has emerged in the first decade of the twenty-first century.
Ali Alizadeh Reviews Charles Simic
An interesting aspect of Serbian-born Charles Simic's being chosen as the United States' 15th Poet Laureate is that Simic, partly due to his experience of a European childhood during the Second World War, has often been something of an 'anti-war' poet. What makes this dimension of Simic's work somewhat odd is that the United States is, of course, currently engaged in an interminable 'war on terror'.
Deb Matthews-Zott Reviews Peter Skrzynecki
Peter Skrzynecki is renowned for his poetic rendering of migrant experience, over three decades, and was awarded a Medal of the Order of Australia 'for his contribution to multicultural literature' in 2002. His Immigrant Chronicle (1975) is a prescribed text for the New South Wales HSC, which has ensured continued exposure for Skrzynecki's poetry, as well as sales of over 20,000 for Immigrant Chronicle.
Liam Ferney Reviews Billy Jones
Billy Jones is, by his own admission, 'a recluse in the forest/ with a hardon blissfully alone/ and alive to the fire of cosmic joy' (from 'Riverbank… Extracts'). This is perhaps why, despite seven collections stretched across four decades, Jones has often been ignored by anthologists.
Kristin Hannaford Reviews Matt Hetherington
I met Matt Hetherington briefly one year at the Queensland Poetry Festival, mingling in the post-reading foyer space; he impressed me as someone who was calm amidst the storm of poetry and red wine enthusiasts. He discussed his passion for haiku and I got a glimpse of the composed, almost meditative and reflective voice which infuses his poetry.
Gus Goswell Reviews LK Holt and Elizabeth Campbell
These latest releases from John Leonard Press are further evidence of this newish publisher's determination to make room for new poetic voices in Australia. Both Holt and Campbell are young, born in the first years of the eighties, and with Man Wolf Man and Letters to the Tremulous Hand respectively, Holt and Campbell have released their first full-length collections.
Briohny Doyle Reviews Five Islands New Poets Series 12
There are about 75 poets in Australia today whose first collection was published as part of the Five Islands New Poets Series. I arrive at this figure taking into account the number of years that the series has been published, allowing for what is referred to in several places as the 'slight hiccup' of 1997. If it is a little inaccurate it hardly matters.
Heather Taylor-Johnson Reviews Jordie Albiston
One might think a collection devoted entirely to a break-up could become tedious or lamentably repetitive, but Jordie Albiston ensures that each poem in Vertigo: a cantata has a unique vibrancy and separate tone. This is a book one can read again and again, since so much of it resonates with a universal experience of love and loss. But a personal identification with the book's themes would not be the only thing compelling this reviewer's return to this something-like-a-verse-novel collection; I also find its lyricism stirring.
Bev Braune Reviews Angela Gardner
Angela Gardner's Parts of Speech shows what a substantial first book of poetry is all about. Gardner has responded, above all, to an ideal opportunity to show what excites her thoughts and propels her into action as a poet. Her ability to turn that initial energy into a form of words both excites and challenges the reader.
Ali Alizadeh Reviews Dimitris Tsaloumas
In a recent article titled 'Only Pinter remains to question authority', English literary theorist and thinker Terry Eagleton bemoans the decline of politically-engaged writing in English. He criticises, among others, the once radical, now conservative migrant writers like V.S. Naipaul and Salman Rushdie who, after an initial period of producing exciting work, have become 'more interested in adopting than challenging the conventions of their place of refuge'.
Gus Goswell Reviews Les Murray
One of the most revered, most hated, most praised and most criticised figures in Australian literature, Les Murray is Australia's best-known living poet. He has been awarded the Mondello prize, T.S. Eliot Prize, Queen's Gold Medal for poetry and many other local and international titles. In 1999 he helped John Howard draft a preamble to the Australian Constitution.
Nick Powell Reviews Robert Hass
'Poets are turtles', the American poet William Matthews once remarked, meaning that with few exceptions, the good ones mature slowly, often producing strong verse into their sixties, an age that he, unfortunately, didn't reach. Matthews shared with Robert Hass a rare skill for the long, intricately made, rhythmic lyric, which Hass has been perfecting for over thirty years.
Jessica Alice Reviews Robyn Rowland
Striving to decipher the vast desolation of silence is – as Robyn Rowland has us so emphatically experience – a 'difficult' journey, to say the least. Her latest collection of poems, Silence & its tongues, expresses this not only as a 'cold' language, but also an elusive one; varied in the boundless possibilities of voice, tone and dialect.
Moses Iten Reviews Paul Hardacre, Terry Jaensch and Cyril Wong
Although Love in the place of rats and Excess Baggage and Claim – both published by the independent Melbournian press transit lounge – arrived in the mail together, it was the disquieting title of Paul Hardacre's second poetry collection that grabbed me first.
Nicholas Manning Reviews Eileen Tabios
In this new century, the writing and rewritings of the poetic self seem to be at the crux of a burgeoning genre; a genre in which the self is less a 'basis' for certain convictions about 'what poetry is' than an opening: an aperture or aporia to diverse inventions, collaborations, languages, traditions, and histories. Seeking diversity over singularity, this 'radical autobiography' seeks articulation across many forms, genres, dialects and discourses.
Heather Taylor-Johnson Reviews The Best Australian Poetry 2007
Anthologies which wrap up the year's 'best' are always greatly anticipated. We want to be reacquainted with our favourite poets, see what sort of spin they've taken on our world during the past twelve months. But of greater interest is often the introduction to new writers. We're curious if the poets who have recently found their way into small press publications have made the cut.
Angela Meyer Reviews Alison Croggon and Lucy Holt
Of the two chapbooks under review, Lucy Holt's exquisitely crafted poetry in Stories of Bird pecks at single moments, both from an intimate as well as a bird's-eye view. Her use of symbolism is focused and sensory. Hers are deep and personal poems, with some empathetic politics, that draw the reader in. Alison Croggon's chapbook Ash, on the other hand, speaks with a more despairing voice.
