BOOK REVIEWS
Review Short: Arjun von Caemmerer’s Vice Versa: New and Selected Poems
Tasmanian poet Arjun von Caemmerer’s Vice Versa: New and Selected Poems (Collective Effort, 2016) is a chronological selection from an oeuvre that spans publications from Two’s Kisses (1992) to Recombinants (2015).
Review Short: Homer Rieth’s The Garden of Earth
You could be forgiven for thinking that ‘Australia’ was simply this place, rather than an imagined community. It is of course not only a phantasm or a figment that is whole, but also real and divisible.
Gabriel García Ochoa Reviews Poems of Mijail Lamas, Mario Bojórques & Alí Calderón
This second volume in the series, Poems of Mijail Lamas, Mario Bojórquez & Alí Calderón, focuses on contemporary Mexican poetry. It is translated by Sydney-based, Mexican-born Mario Licón Cabrera, a seasoned poet and translator. Licón Cabrera translates into both English and Spanish.
Review Short: Andrew Sant’s How to Proceed
The text is made up of sixteen essays, all adopting varied and general concerns, tracing a literary pilgrimage of ordinary experiences in mundane settings, from personal anecdotes of a bridge tower conductor in ‘On Employment’, to the dilemmas of commitment in ‘On Marriage’ and terminating in ‘On Curiosity’.
Review Short: Tusiata Avia’s The New Adventures of Nafanua, Samoan Goddess of War
Samoan-New Zealand poet and performer Tusiata Avia explores the intricate fate history and myth have sent her way in The New Adventures of Nafanua, Samoan Goddess of War. This slim volume is divided into two parts: the Nafanua poems, followed by lyrics gathered under the subtitle ‘How I Came into this World’.
Review Short: Michelle Cahill’s The Herring Lass
Michelle Cahill is well-known to contemporary Australian readers as a poet, editor and fiction writer. She is the winner of the 2017 UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing (one of the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards), the Val Vallis Award, and the Hilary Mantel International Short Story Prize, and has been shortlisted for other major prizes.
Review Short: Susan Fealy’s Flute of Milk
Award-winning Melbourne poet Susan Fealy’s first full-length collection is an engrossing and richly resonant volume, one that – like all good artworks – reveals greater connective complexity with each subsequent encounter. The work is divided into two parts, with section one’s epigraph drawing the first sixteen poems into a meaning formation that takes off from a Louise Glück work.
Review Short: Brook Emery’s Have Been and Are
Brook Emery’s new collection, Have Been and Are, continues in the vein of what might be called philosophical-demotic established in previous volumes such as Uncommon Light and Collusion. I don’t think that anyone else in the cohort of contemporary Australian poetry does this quite as well as he does.
Deconstructing Decolonisation: Victor Questel’s Collected Poems
For those unfamiliar with the Caribbean context, a pan man is a pan (‘steel drum’) player, and a mas’ man’ is a participant in the masquerade. They are key figures in the annual Trinidad Carnival: a festival which creolised the quasi-pagan, pre-Lenten festivities of the white plantation class in the slave era and Canboulay (French Trinidadian Creole for ‘cannes brulées’, or burnt cane), a celebration at least as old as emancipation (1834), in which those who had been enslaved re-enacted the rounding up of slaves that occurred when sugar cane illicitly had been burnt.
Review Short: Nikos Nomikos’s Noted Transparencies
Honest and intimate, transparency is the term and practice giving Nikos Nomikos’s Noted Transparency (or Σημειωμένες Διαφάνειες, pronounced ‘Simiomenes Diafaneies’) its immediate impact. Born in Alexandria, Egypt in 1934, Nomikos has published nine poetry collections, with Noted Transparencies the later work of a mature artist.
Review Short: Jen Webb’s Sentences from the Archive
Jen Webb’s small volume, Sentences from the Archive shows the sorts of things well-executed prose poems can and should do. Webb’s prose poems feel like they’re written in one long line, the rhythm lilting like everyday speech, then catching in the throat when the implications of an observation reveal themselves to their creator.
Chloe Wilson Reviews David McCooey
At first, David McCooey’s Star Struck appears to be a collection comprising four sections, each self-contained and corralled from the others. These sections range from a series of lyric poems meditating on a ‘cardiac event’, to poems investigating light and dark, a sequence of eighteen ‘pastorals’ on pop stardom (and fandom) and, finally, two longer narrative poems.
Review Short: Lynley Edmeades’s As the Verb Tenses
As the Verb Tenses is a rare debut collection of poems that dazzles and delights with a profane, childlike wisdom. Acts of movement and play energise an accomplished performance held together by rare precision and a gentle power.
Jen Jewel Brown Reviews Dig: Australian Rock and Pop Music 1960-85
Isn’t it time we invented a new handle for this ‘rock and pop’ stuff? ‘Rop’, for instance? Alternatively, ‘pock’ surely says ‘acne moonscape’: good for sounds designed to lure teens with condom-snapping haste. Regardless, I must say the droll and often delightfully irritated David Nichols brings a savoury palate to this tasting of Australian sounds.
Rachael Mead Reviews Stuart Cooke
Cooke has long been uneasy with the label of ecopoet, as he mentioned in a 2014 interview for Peril Magazine. While his previous collection, Edge Music (2011), focused on writing from the geographical and historical edges of landscapes, Opera pushes beyond an attempt to speak ecologically.
Review Short: Eileen Chong’s Painting Red Orchids
In his short story ‘A Little Ramble’, champion of the anti-heroic Robert Walser says, ‘We don’t need to see anything out of the ordinary. We already see so much’. In her third collection, Painting Red Orchids, Singaporean Australian Eileen Chong testifies to ordinary experience as the sensory and emotional kaleidoscope of the individual.
Review Short: Elif Sezen’s Universal Mother
There is something delicious about a collection that doesn’t open itself up to the reader on a first or even second reading and yet compels them to come back to it, something delightful about lines that lodge themselves in your brain and demand a third, fourth, fifth reading to reunite them with the poems they come from.
Paul Munden Reviews The Best Australian Poems 2016
In her introduction to this anthology, editor Sarah Holland-Batt claims for the work ‘a colloquialism, contrarianism and playfulness that separates it from its counterparts in the northern hemisphere’. Being hitherto more familiar with that northern hemisphere, this reviewer’s critical interest was immediately aroused.
Liam Ferney Reviews Cassie Lewis
Based on the poems in The Blue Decodes, Lewis is an artist who values silence as much as noise. The book’s ninety pages, which include a number of poems published in her chapbooks, represent well over two decades’ worth of work which provides an interesting purchase on the question of why write poetry in the first place, particularly if it seems like an adjunct to an already full life?
Alice Allan Reviews Watching the World: Impressions of Canberra
What is it about Canberra that invites so many definitions? Comparing where we live with where we don’t is an Australian fixation, but there’s a specific energy to the way that people with a connection to Canberra go about this – they will start deriding or defending the place minutes after you’re introduced.
Michael Aiken Reviews Dave Drayton
Dave Drayton’s Haiturograms is a brief but confounding volume, available as a free PDF download and print-to-order book from Sydney-based SOd press. Like Drayton’s other work, HaiturogramS is driven by formal constraint and innovation within that constraint.
Owen Bullock Reviews Alan Loney
The publication of these notebooks completes the series that begins with Sidetracks – Notebooks 1976-1991 (Auckland University Press, 1998) and ends with Crankhandle – Notebooks November 2010-June 2012 (Cordite Books, 2015), the latter winning the Victoria Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry 2016.
Review Short: Holly Isemonger’s Deluxe Paperweight and Jessica Cham’s premium pastoral poetry
Holly Isemonger is a promising new talent and it will be interesting to see her art develop from here. Though this chapbook doesn’t achieve the full potential of its ideas, Isemonger manages to showcase a surprisingly broad range for such a short collection. Like Isemonger, Cham’s poetry is juxtaposed against images, though here they appear to be the author’s original photographs. The poem is written seemingly as part of an email to independent filmmaker, musician, and actor Vincent Gallo.
Review Short: Anthony Lawrence’s Headwaters
Headwaters is Anthony Lawrence’s fifteenth collection and his first with Pitt Street Poetry, whose website memorably suggests the humble reader should ‘Find yourself a shot glass, take a seat, and take a shot.’ This is the first time I’ve seen a publisher suggest their books be read thus, though in their defence, they do so in relation to lines from Lawrence’s ‘Wax Cathedral’. Ah well, when in Rome … a thimble of Lagavulin scotch as required and I’m finally ready to review. Non-drinkers may read on as they are.
