BOOK REVIEWS
Magdalena Ball Reviews Adrienne Eberhard
Adrienne Eberhard's collection Jane, Lady Franklin can almost be described as a poetic novel. It contains a clear storyline, based partly on the real life voyage of Lady Jane Franklin, who traveled with her husband, Lieutenant-Governor John Franklin, from England to Hobart in 1837.
Steven Farry Reviews Amy King
Antidotes for an Alibi is at once intriguing and irritating. The surrealist poems are complex, evocative, and a danger to review: am I overlooking something? Is there an obvious reference I've missed? Am I just an insensitive clod?
Ali Alizadeh Reviews Geoff Goodfellow
The concept of working-class poetry may seem like an oxymoron to the uninitiated. Isn't poetry, after all, as Harold Bloom would have it, “the crown of imaginative literature”; an elitist, royalist member of the family of letters, on par with other 'high art' and upper-class forms and genres such as Classical music, opera and ballet?
Andy Jackson Reviews Patricia Sykes
In spite of poetry's continued insistence on its own marginality, its retreat into abstract stylistic expression or into words that act as anaesthetic or lullaby, there is still the possibility that words can undermine the way things are.
Magdalena Ball Reviews Mike Ladd
Mike Ladd's poetry works best when it traverses the line between prose and poetry, creating meaning in the face of irony. Simultaneously satiric and poignant, Rooms and Sequences takes the reader to a modernised first century AD through the eyes of an anachronistic Roman functionary, a Kerouac inspired look into life via various hotel rooms `on the road', pain and loss distilled through portentous animals, a series of short stories which look into the heart of loneliness, the human side of politics, and a series of self-referential poems about the writing process.
Ashley Brown Reviews Angela Costi
To begin with, it should be noted that Angela Costi's Prayers For The Wicked – a CD of “spoken word, song, music and sound” – tells a tale of Greek Australians, deals with many traditional topics, and occasionally features Greek dialogue; and I myself am not Greek, and know none of the language. Some would argue hence that I am inappropriate to review this work, but it must be remembered that much of the potential audience of this work – and surely they should be taken into account – will not be of Greek descent, thus not possessing the bilingual luxury that I too lack.
Ela Fornalska Reviews Andy Jackson
Andy Jackson writes with immense skill. His poetry seems effortless, yet it is haunting, requiring contemplation. That is not to say that it is inaccessible. On first reading of a Jackson poem you experience sensation, but then you feel compelled to think about the poem, and read it again to marvel at the skills employed in writing the piece.
Paul Mitchell Reviews Pushing Words
“Pushing Words”, a poetry reading held as part of the Castlemaine State Arts Festival, featured Melbourne poets Dorothy Porter, Ian McBryde, Lauren Williams, Kevin Brophy, Ali Alizadeh, Jennifer Harrison and Myron Lysenko.
Organiser Ross Donlon promoted the event as a chance to catch top poets who you'd never see reading together on the one bill. Each poet gave a strong performance, no doubt influenced by the company around them.
Jess Star Reviews Cate Kennedy
Cate Kennedy's Joyflight is distilled memory. It is a manifestation of time, place and history, both intensely personal and instantly recognisable. Joyflight is a book divided. It begins with `that pure torn-open moment': A collection of small epiphanies in which the individual is forever altered.
Tim Wright Reviews D. J. Huppatz and Sebastian Gurciullo
'Please don't make confused noises while chanting,' a sign in a Kunming monastery read when I visited there a few years ago. Another sign, not far from a thick wad of burning incense sticks, announced 'No conflagration!' D.J. Huppatz's Book of Poem!is written with a sharp sensibility to similar glitches in translation, specifically as they're found in the spiky readymade phrases of Japanese English, or 'Engrish', in the consumer world of packaging, t-shirts and instruction manuals.
Michael Aiken Reviews Louis Armand
The title of this book is an early manifestation of its endless intertextual referencing, as well as one example of the author's restrained penchant for relatively silly puns. It is also an understatement of the viciousness of some of this poetry.
Ian MacNeill Reviews John Kinsella
With his appearances on ABC TV's 'Critical Mass' program John Kinsella is becoming something of a public intellectual. His severe demeanour and combative stance suggest an aggressive priest, Savaranola maybe. The poems in this collection do not dispel this impression, there is a savagery in them, of tone, image and spirit.
James Stuart Reviews Words and Things
“Despite my slightly over-the-top and easily pregnable assertions about what are to my mind the lesser works enclosed therein, it became clear to me as I read (looked?) that Words and Things had a significant contribution to make to our understanding of contemporary poetics.
Claire Stewart Reviews Benito di Fonzo
The first thing that struck me when reading 'Her, leaving, as the Acid hits' was that it embodied, like the muse of the story, a lament of an era long gone. Di Fonzo has successfully recreated the zeitgeist of the pre-gentrification time of cosy inner city dwellings before real estate went up and the well worn homes that gave these areas their character went down to make way for sterile, so-called architecturally designed apartments.
Claire Stewart Reviews Paul Mitchell
The first comparative poet who came to mind as I was reading this collection was Bruce Dawe, who shares 's alternating ocker flippancy and grave sensitivity. Like Dawe, Mitchell finds beauty and solace in the most seemingly mundane of subjects. His poems have a tendency to oscillate between sensory osmosis and abstract observation.
Michael Brown Reviews Paul Hardacre
If one name stands out as a hero and influence among the present generation of Australian poets it's Michael Dransfield. B. R. Dionysius has dedicated a poem to him. Jayne Fenton Keane has penned an adequate parody of one of his most recognisable works and Jaya Savige claims that discovering Dransfield's work prompted him to pursue writing instead of law. There is also John Kinsella's recent retrospective of Dransfield's work. However, Paul Hardacre in his first volume The Year Nothing, is perhaps closest not only in style but also in intent.
Rob Walker Reviews Tony Page
Writing a book of poems about abstract scientific theories is a high-wire act. The danger is that those who comprehend the science may not appreciate the poetry and those who dig the poems may not comprehend the science. Writing a review on this little gem was somewhat daunting, too. To begin with, a succinct review forming an introduction to the work has already been written by one Phillip Adams, whose intellect and eloquence I admire greatly.
Diana Young Reviews Sean M. Whelan
In reading Sean Whelan's Love is the New Hate, I was invited on a journey into the hinterlands of evasive emotion, decorated by the wreckage of cryptic personal revelations. Whelan's ten poems combine a strong narrative orientation with a casual conversational cadence to pull us into his native terrain.
Maria Christoforatos Reviews Jill Jones
As I sat reading Struggle and Radiance in my local laundromat and occasionally looked out at the pub or the tendrils of exhaust fumes across the road, I found there was plenty that was unapologetically radiant in these poems and the word ‘struggle' in the title suggested an unnecessary weight or polarity to this collection.
John De Laine Reviews John Tranter
Salt Publishing's decision to republish three 1970s collections by John Tranter under the title Trio nicely bookends the army of books no doubt already occupying the home library shelves of his most ardent and serious fans.
Bev Braune Reviews Peter Boyle
Peter Boyle strikes me as a poet who likes the air, much as Peter Minter likes water; Robert Adamson, leaves; Jordie Albiston, defined/confined spaces; John Tranter, lines or, rather, the lineage of the cursive. Boyle most reminds me of Robert Adamson with his gentle, probing style, his yearning approach to all that should be desirable–an understanding of ourselves in space and time, wherein we point all our limitations.
Scott Thornton Reviews John Jenkins
In John Jenkins' eighth collection, Dark River, the question he asks the reader is, 'Are we apes or cobalt clouds?' Throughout the collection, a poetic narrator directs the reader towards a continual reassessment of science and aesthetics.
Ali Alizadeh Reviews Ouyang Yu
´Multiculturalism', when all has been said and (often very little) has been done about it, remains a difficult, even paradoxical, idea. It is an English-language term invented by, and used for the purposes of, the dominant Anglo-Celtic culture; yet it supposedly represents the reality of being from the ´minor' cultures that, at least in Australia, do not have English as a first language.
Ali Alizadeh Reviews Ian McBryde
In the media release for Ian McBryde's latest collection, Domain, Peter Porter states that World War II and the Holocaust — the content of McBryde's collection — have been “subjects defiant of poetry”. Here, I think, Porter is trying to make a claim for this collection's uniqueness.
