BOOK REVIEWS
Ryan Scott Reviews David Prater and MTC Cronin
It would be unfair to David Prater and MTC Cronin to construct some tenuous link between their new collections for the sake of this review: each volume is stylistically unique, showcasing two skilled, albeit different, voices on the Australian poetry scene. While in Prater we have a poet for the digital age who can twist its soundscapes and textures and still retain an artistic core, in Cronin we have an author who demonstrates again her understanding of timeless themes such as pain, loss and love, and attests to their permanence.
Gus Goswell Reviews Barry Hill
The lines below, part of the long poem 'Canto 1: Ice', go some way towards representing the tension that exists within Barry Hill's fifth collection of poetry. Written over ten years, some of the poems in Necessity: Poems 1996-2006 are political poems, some are spiritual poems, some are nature poems; many are all three.
Liam Ferney Reviews John Ashbery
At an athletics meet in Salamanca in 1993, Cuban high jumper Javier Sotomayor began his run up with a customary sprint that mellowed into half-a-dozen languid, bouncy strides. His best leap that afternoon was an improbable 2.45 metres bettering his own world record for the second time in six years. After almost a decade and a half, the record remains unbroken.
Felicity Plunkett Reviews Julian Croft and Yve Louis
Watching waves breaking on the shore, the rhythms that emerge are, of course, only part of the larger pattern of the ever-mobile natural world we seem to observe. The poems in Julian Croft's Ocean Island suggest the occluded and multifarious that lies beneath the surface, gesturing towards the tidal, and larger worlds that dwarf human concerns.
Paul Mitchell Reviews Claire Gaskin
There is no firm ground in Claire Gaskin's new collection, A Bud. If you're looking for poetry that announces itself as a place to have your psychic tremors explained, your yearning reflected or your misappropriations mended, look elsewhere.
Andy Jackson Reviews Carl Rickard and Diane Fahey
Carl Rickard's Lost Places and Diane Fahey's Sea Wall and River Light are distinctly Australian, both in their themes and as products. They indicate something about how writers living in Australia see their place in the world, and how they try to make themselves heard.
Heather Taylor-Johnson Reviews Luis Gonzalez Serrano and Ali Alizadeh
If Australian poetry is meant to reflect the lives and times of the people who inhabit this red and green land and its blue surf turf, then it is essential that the diminutive canon embrace the émigrés. They are the voices of a multi-culturally inclusive (or exclusive, as sometimes the case may be) society and what is truly unique is that they have a certain amount of inherent distance from the Australian culture which enables them to go where others have not the means to consider.
Bev Braune Reviews Peter Minter and Nathan Shepherdson
Peter Minter's latest book blue grass and Nathan Shepherdson's début collection Sweeping the Light Back into the Mirror work with extraordinary images to convey the demands made on memory for accuracy in its language. Both poets set out, deliberately, to interrogate such a language and its subsets – naming, recognition, and the calculation and politics of categories.
Heather Taylor-Johnson Reviews The Best Australian Poems 2006
I've long been a fan of Dorothy Porter, the poet, and I can now say loudly and proudly that I am a fan of Dorothy Porter, the editor. Skimming through the index, I am immediately impressed by the range of texts drawn upon to assemble the collection. The poems were not all plucked from the 'best of the best', and this, I am confident, attributes to the range in voice.
Nicholas Manning Reviews Claire Potter and Esther Ottaway
It's difficult not to detect an implicit whiff of politics in Poets Union's choice of two rather different poets for their 2006 Young Poets Fellowships. The coupling of Claire Potter and Esther Ottaway seems to incarnate a certain intriguing editorial magnanimity, a technique that might be termed that of 'covering all bases'. On the one hand, Poets Union can in no way be accused of neglecting an open, communicative and fundamentally accessible poetic, because they have Ottaway; but nor can they be accused of neglecting a more 'experimental' tradition, because they have Potter.
jeltje Reviews The Moosehead Anthology X
For the 2005 (and tenth) issue of the Canadian Moosehead Anthology guest editor Todd Swift has added an X ('the X-Files aspect') to the publication's title. Although retrofitted with fifties B-grade movie genre characteristics and preoccupations, it claims to deal with 'exceptionally pressing contemporary issues, images and invasions'; and the editor muses on the possibilities of a new 'B-grade' genre of poetry and prose which, like the fifties sci-fi and horror movies, would manage to break through the surface 'to speak of the hopes and fears of the time'.
Ali Alizadeh Reviews Anthony Joseph
One of the great challenges facing artists from post-colonial and/or ethnic minority backgrounds is meeting the demands of two potentially conflicting ideals. As surrogate – and often unwilling – cultural ambassadors, such artists are required to be 'responsible' and represent the reality of their communities/ethnicities for a mainstream Western audience; but as artists they need to be adequately 'irresponsible' in order to produce provocative new works that do not merely replicate but (as Russian Formalists would have it) violate reality.
Tim Wright Reviews Luke Beesley and B. R. Dionysius
'The shape of sunlight cutting up your arm'. This was the line that first drew me to Luke Beesley's work. Around the same time I read a biographical note that mentioned how Beesley had written many of the poems in a light-filled studio in the middle of Brisbane. There was the suggestion that light had entered the poems in some way, and I liked the idea that poetry could do that.
Adam Ford Reviews Michael Farrell
I've been puzzled by Michael Farrell's poetry for a long time. Sometimes I think I get it; but his writing is mercurial, and for every one of his poems that I've understood or enjoyed, there's another that leaves me cold or just confuses me. It's impossible to decide whether Farrell is doing something incredibly formal and intellectual that I'm not smart enough to understand, or whether he's tricking his reader into thinking that there's something deeper taking place when he's in fact only mucking around and playing crazy games with language.
Heather Taylor-Johnson Reviews Ken Bolton
The best way to read Ken Bolton's poetry is to sit down and read Ken Bolton's poetry. Trying to decipher or even appreciate his style can be frustrating if the reader is only given the odd poem in a random literary magazine; and such a reading could result in Bolton appearing indulgent in his verse, perhaps working too hard (or not hard enough) at being clever.
Nicholas Manning Reviews Jean-Michel Espitallier
To begin with a tentative hypothesis: what is taken from mathematics, in its application to literature, is by definition never its “content”, its undeniable positivism, but rather its formal elements: patterns, figurations, configurations, molds, models, fractals. Mathematics, seen in poetic terms, is thus largely concerned with such questions as the same and the variable, the one and the multiple, the arbitrary and the contingent; and whereas for mathematicians such questions are mere means to achieve verifiable solutions, for poets, they become unique and autonomous ends.
David McCooey Reviews Craig Sherborne
As illustrated by his extraordinary memoir, Hoi Polloi (2005), Craig Sherborne has many strengths as a writer. He has immense tonal control (and can range from the tragic to the farcical in a breath); he has an extraordinary ear for the language and hypocrisy of class; he is one of our great contemporary satirists; and he has a genius for the telling anecdote and detail.
Ashley Brown Reviews LeAnne Howe
Huksuba, or chaos occurs when Indians and Non-Indians bang their heads together in search of cross-cultural understanding. The sound is often a dull thud, and the lesson leaves us all with a bad headache.
So begins the second section of Choctaw American poet LeAnne Howe's fourth collection Evidence of Red. Within its one hundred and one pages, which have already won a number of major awards such as the Oklahoma Book Award earlier this year, this book incorporates many literary mediums such as poetry, theatre, prose, character dialogue and adapted transcript.
Ali Alizadeh Reviews Ian McBryde and Tim Sinclair
Two recent Australian poetry titles – one from a 'cult' adult (and at times 'adults only') poet, another from a newcomer writing for 'young adults'; the former published by a new small press and the latter by one of the world's most recognisable publishing empires; the former experimental and minimalist and the latter conventional and extensive; and so on – offer formally different yet discursively complimentary views of the state of the poetic word.
Paul Mitchell Reviews Les Murray
Given the title of Les Murray's latest book, you'd perhaps expect that 'The Shining Slopes and Planes' – the poem in which the term “biplane houses” appears – would provide a key to unlocking this collection. In a sense it does: the poem evokes a runway full of simple Australian houses, entities that appear the least likely to sprout wings, organic or mechanistic, and fly.
Benito Di Fonzo Reviews B. R. Dionysius
The title poem of Bacchanalia by B. R. Dionysius is a muscular, vivacious and absorbing piece of prose poetry that starts like a fifteen year old's diary entry but morphs darkly into something more akin to a police statement. It is original and exciting. Unfortunately, however, many other poems in this collection do not share these qualities.
Ali Alizadeh Reviews Mohsen Soltany Zand
There is a spectre haunting Australian poetry – it is the spectre of spoken word. The explosion of spoken word publications (mostly in the form of CDs) and live events (such as poetry soirees, 'slams' and 'open microphones') across Australia's poetry scene over the past decade or so may in due course determine the future of Australian poetry.
Andrew Craig Reviews Louise Waller and Kristin Hannaford
It was with anticipation and trepidation that I approached Swelter, an audio and text CD compilation of Louise Waller's Slipway and Kristin Hannaford's Inhale. At first I expected some type of multi-media explosion – always a hit-or-miss affair, as most multi-media 'experiments' entail artists getting overly excited about something old-hat in the 'new' commercial sphere.
Scott Thornton Reviews Liam Ferney
Liam Ferney's Popular Mechanics is a collection of poetry that transforms words into a quick moving train of images and syntax. The author changes tense and pace rapidly and this causes the reader to be somewhat disorientated. At first glance these poems appeared to be jumbled masses of words; the writer appeared to be moving too fast; and the conceits that he builds out of modern Australian life looked far too incongruous and fragile to involve the reader.
