BOOK REVIEWS
Review Short: Judith Bishop’s Interval
Interval is the fourth book for Judith Bishop and her first with University of Queensland Press. The book is divided into four sections. The first begins with an epigraph from the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard that ‘childhood is certainly greater than reality.’
Liam Ferney Reviews Kate Lilley and Pam Brown
In 1915, H G Wells published Boon, a satirical novel that featured long passages pastiching the literary style of his erstwhile friend, Henry James. It kicked off an epistolary barney over what art should be about.
Review Short: Corey Wakeling’s The Alarming Conservatory
The Sydney launch of Corey Wakeling’s second collection of poetry The Alarming Conservatory at Frontyard Projects in Marrickville upended the traditional build up of acts that most expect from a poetry launch, with poets reading in an order drawn from a hat.
Daniela Brozek Cordier Reviews Dominique Hecq
To some readers, like me, Dominique Hecq’s Hush: A Fugue may be daunting at first appearance. This starts with the cover, which has the sort of self-assured, intellectual air I find a little intimidating. A wary look inside reveals unstable text formatting – blocks of dense prose broken by verse, haiku, couplets, one-liners.
Christopher Brown Reviews John Mateer
Of the 62 sonnets that make up John Mateer’s João, 58 are given to ‘Twelve Years of Travel’ and only four to the second and final section, ‘Memories of Cape Town’. This weighting emphasises travel not so much as the mode of exception but as regular or even habituated experience, while suggesting only a marginal place for the ‘home’ of Mateer’s South African origins.
Review Short: Oscar Schwartz’s The Honeymoon Stage
Confession: I should not have read Michael Farrell’s launch speech for Oscar Schwartz’s The Honeymoon Stage before attempting this short review. I had a large attack of Bloom’s anxiety of influence, but I simply couldn’t help myself because I truly appreciate Farrell’s wit and (worldly) wisdom. And now the damage is done.
Review Short: Philip Mead’s Zanzibar Light
For experimental poet and jazz drummer Clark Coolidge, words are never impressions. They are sonic inscriptions, vectors, movable actualities. They alter by degrees in the company of others and in time. I started with Coolidge for many reasons; first among them, his stellar understanding of improvisation.
Carmine Frascarelli Reviews Nguyễn Tiên Hoàng
It’s with an almost exquisite eccentricity that Nguyễn Tiên Hoàng’s Captive and Temporal unfurls, immersing the reader in a discursive cartography over composite planes of memory, history, heritage, culture and dreams in surreal and interpenetrative riddles, dedications and elegies.
Review Short: Therese Lloyd’s The Facts and Helen Heath’s Are Friends Electric?
These lines have come from feeding the collection into an online text randomiser. What sounds and looks like decisions made by a person is the work of a consciousless algorithm capable of capturing a question that charges the whole book: What does it mean to be ‘you’?
Review Short: Selina Tusitala Marsh’s Tightrope
I like the way a backyard door opens ‘parting sooty / veils of flies,’ in the first poem of Selina Tusitala Marsh’s Tightrope. Outside are Max V, Lima and Ono (‘knotted fur, nettling bones / fat eyes, fat hunger’).
Review Short: Charmaine Papertalk-Green’s and John Kinsella’s False Claims of Colonial Thieves
False Claims of Colonial Thieves weaves together two disparate voices, Charmaine Papertalk-Green and John Kinsella, in a demanding collection that reaffirms the troubling environmental era we are living through. Structurally, the book shifts between traditionally oppositional views – an Aboriginal woman and a white man.
Review Short: Andy Jackson’s Music Our Bodies Can’t Hold
The Music Our Bodies Can’t Hold’s premise is unique: 54 poems for the 54 chromosomes in the human body. Each poem is distinctive in typography and voice, gleaned from a primary source interview of a public or private figure believed to have Marfan syndrome.
Review Short: Rachael Mead’s The Flaw in the Pattern and Philip Nielsen’s Wildlife of Berlin
Holding each of these books is a pleasure. Their two-tone covers have different but complementary botanical design motifs while the master design elements of the UWAP Poetry series, pushing on 23 titles, of which they are part gives them a uniform appearance.
Johanna Featherstone Reviews History and the Poet
Although Robert Wood’s History and the Poet is described as essay, it defies being labelled as one genre. Perhaps like the definition of poetry itself, which shifts and changes between individuals and contexts, language and culture, so do Wood’s words.
Review Short: Shastra Deo’s The Agonist
Shastra Deo’s first volume of poetry, The Agonist contains many poems about corporeal life, and about the separation of bodies, problematising the connections between body and thought. The poems often turn the inside out, as it were, opening up a poetic anatomy of internal organs and interior life.
Review Short: Tracy Ryan’s The Water Bearer
‘… the poem / will cover a multitude of signs.’ This line, appearing early in West Australian author Tracy Ryan’s ninth poetry collection, can be read as connecting directly to what’s been posited as the very purpose of poetry: to confound or thicken language, to free it from its mere communicative dimension, as Walter Benjamin might put it, and allow it to bump up against things-in-themselves.
Review Short: Bulky News Press Chapbooks from Andrew Pascoe, Chris Brown and Marty Hiatt
Words and phrases in Andrew Pacoe’s cones, emerge and float through the page’s whitespace like ‘vacuum packed clenches / listing downstream’. It seems that if you were to unfold this book, so that all the pages were arranged on the same plane, phrases would flow from their current position and create new combinations.
Review Short: Susan Hawthorn’s Dark Matters
Susan Hawthorn’s Dark Matters is a culmination of over thirty years’ lesbian feminist activism and fifteen years’ research focused on violence – specifically torture – against lesbians in a global context.
Catherine Noske Reviews Alison Croggon
Alison Croggon has worked across many forms in her career, and connections to several are represented in these pages – the nine-part poem ‘Specula’, for example, comes from a larger work of the same title which also involves an essay and a radio play.
Alex Kostas Reviews Peter Goldsworthy, Jill Jones and Heather Taylor Johnson
Garron Publishing was started in 2010 by Gary MacRae and Sharon Kernott as a means of self-publishing work, but has since expanded into a successful run of poetry chapbooks by established and emerging South Australian poets.
Israel Holas Allimant Reviews Poems of Olga Orozco, Marosa Di Giorgio & Jorge Palma
In 2017, Vagabond Press launched its Americas Poetry Series. This is a brave and much needed venture, one that borders on the quixotic: an Australian editor offering publications from poets from the Americas to the Australian reading public, for the love of poetry and the art of translation. So far, the series has three excellent entries focused on the translation of Spanish language Latin American poets into English.
Review Short: Rose Hunter’s Glass
Glass is a collection of elegiac poems, a memoir of free verse about the poet’s travels through Mexico and her own debilitating ailment. The ‘you’ in book is addressed with a certain fondness (‘where are you / i feel of course now we would have the most wonderful conversation’) and an intimacy that suggests the poet is speaking to someone she was once romantically involved with.
Review Short: Owen Bullock’s River’s Edge
Owen Bullock stated in his ‘The Breath of Haiku’ article in Aoeteroa that ‘the modern haiku can be about anything, not just nature’. Readers of his previous collection, Urban Haiku (Recent Work Press, 2015), will be well aware of this position.
Review Short: Aidan Coleman’s Cartoon Snow
South Australian poet Aidan Coleman’s previous book of poetry, Asymmetry, was published in 2012. It charts Coleman’s traumatic experience of a stroke, and the resulting loss of symmetry in his body, life and writing. The book strings together revelations made startling through poetic bluntness, from the initial shock of incapacitation to the excruciation of gradual rehabilitation.
