Pinions

Posted on February 1, 2016 by Ellen van Neerven

I want to know what that hawk got in the grass, what it ate alive.
Long grass where a Fogarty, a Sandy, a Currie walked
Shining for bones, a boomerang’s hand
‘You were the last we expected to do this’
I don’t know how I feel, except for mountains
And if they bring the artefacts back
Will we be restored?

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Dust and Drag

Posted on February 1, 2016 by Samuel Wagan Watson

*The American Express* Platinum Edge Credit Card application form makes for an ideal canvas to capture poetry. Section #1 Personal Details is easily followed by Section #2 Your Contact Details. But Section #3 Your Employment and Income Details, snags appear, rapids, a flow of consciousness broken and stuttering … Full-time/Part-time, Casual, Self-Employed, Retired, Student, Home duties, Unemployed, and nil a box, “Writer – All of the above” This is the end of a beautiful trail, nothing but dust and drag now, empty wallet, empty bottles and plenty of empty promises to myself that tomorrow is another day, a commission is due next week and the next writers festival is paying cash per diem …

‘If one can’t accurately define both
the velocities of particles at one time,
how can one predict what they will be
in the future …’
-Steven Hawking

Rich in this lifestyle; no end of doubt, no end of time, no end of chaos and no end of words that can be used over and over again, and dictionaries on the shelves full to no end of unwritten manuscripts and all the Dostoyevskis in unplanned cells of crime and punishment will continue to write inconceivable manuscripts on toilet paper smuggled to the New Yorker to no end. You’ll be lucky to even meet a pessimistic butterfly in their 24 hours of life, and how that butterfly would appreciate potential and solace in what seems the dust and drag of our own mortality.

When even in space
Light impatiently runs,
From means to an end …

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Don’t Want Me to Talk

Posted on February 1, 2016 by Charmaine Papertalk Green

You don’t want me to talk about
Mining or its impact on Country
You don’t want me to talk about
The concept and construct of ‘whiteness’
Its dominance and power in society
You don’t want me to talk about
The art vultures here and everywhere
Modern day missionaries – the art kind
Saving us on the great white canvas
You don’t want me to talk about
Invasion of this land or a Treaty
It’s a shared true history – let’s heal
You don’t want me to talk about
Past injustices, cultural cruelty, cultural genocide
And the cultural pain that is left behind
It’s a shared true history – let us heal
You don’t want me to talk about
How reconciliation could be the wrong word
On its own and without truth
You don’t want me to talk about
Native titles process being for the white man
You don’t want me to talk at all
Most of the time – you have your ‘exotic’ pets
You want me to nod, smile and listen to you
And it doesn’t really matter if I don’t hear you
You don’t want me to talk about
How I have got a voice
And you don’t listen.

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Remote Community

Posted on February 1, 2016 by Jeanine Leane

In 2007 by the colonial calendar commands
were given from afar.
Suspend the Racial Discrimination Act
for Aborigines –
they can’t handle their rights anyway.
Troops marched in.
Then – Alpurrurulam, Anmatjere,
Bathurst Island, Bulman, Echo Island,
Gapuwiyak, Gove Peninsula, Gunbalanya,
Haasts Bluff, Hermansberg, Imanpa,
Jay Creek, Kaltukajara, Kintore, Ltyentye,
Maningrida, Melville Island, Mirrngadja,
Mount Theo, Mutitjulu, Numbulwar,
Palumpa, Papunya, Ramingining, Titjikala,
Tjunti, Utopia, Wadeye, Wurrumiyanga,
Yarralin, Yirrkala and Yuendumu
all came under the dictatorship
of a remote community on Capital Hill
called Canberra.

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Numinbah Valley in Spring

Posted on February 1, 2016 by Melissa Lucashenko

In the Yugambeh there exist three genders: male, female, and a gender used specifically to refer to trees.


Twenty thousand moons shone here upon the People
and twenty thousand more before that
showed themselves crystal in the rushing streams
flanked with green lichened giants, beloved brothers
our other selves who have endured so much

Now the People are few here, and pale
white men came six seconds ago with their bibles and noise
the People left, bleeding
we left, torn from our mother’s arms to be made white

Our tallest selves on this mountain remain, strong and beautiful
Our tallest selves use the wind to speak, asking
Why are we lonely?
Where have our families gone?

Here, I answer, singing them a new song
jarjum yanbelillah mobo
the children of the People will return
goorie jinungilellah numinbah jagan mobo
your other selves will be standing alongside you again tomorrow
we will not cry long; we will not salt the earth of our grandmothers
be happy in your waiting Tall Ones
we are coming
we are coming
we are coming

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Introduction to Tony Birch’s Broken Teeth

Posted on January 29, 2016 by Stephen Muecke


Cover design by Zoë Sadokierski

Don’t think you’ll get away with lightly reading these Tony Birch poems. They are not just words whistling on the wind. They come laden with other gifts. With a whole place: Melbourne. With a long history: from before the bay filled with water, from after whitefellas came in boats and called it Port Phillip, through to today when others desperately try to reach Australian shores. The refugees’ boats, the poet tells us, are still made from trees that were once earthbound, but stretching upwards. Then, like poems, they are laid down and recomposed for voyaging.

Few writers love their hometown as ardently as Birch. Read his novels and stories, look at his photographs, listen to him tell tall stories about it, run with him along the contours of its creeks, or stroll with him in the Melbourne cemetery to chat with the dead. It makes you long to ‘… rest along the / bluestone gutter…’. That hard, polished bluestone that cobbles the back lanes of Melbourne. They are the half-secret byways where Fitzroy kids can escape, play footy, get up to mischief and hiss a warning about the ‘toe-cutters’.

Sound parochial? Sure, the inner city is Birch’s local run and his knowledge runs deep. But the arc of reference is greater than for many whose compassion is not tested by suffering. You can be inner-city and global at the same time, and refuse the kind of insularity forged by fence-building for property protection. The elegy for our Japanese friend, Minoru Hokari, who jumped the fence between anthropology and history to make a journey with the Gurindji, still makes me want to weep each time I read it. And ‘Michael’, who I didn’t know, and the boat people who no one in Australia knows. They will find a welcome in this poetry that understands how to express sovereignty without border protection.

Birch also delves into another place where things are half-concealed, the documentary archives. They turn up the most poignant letters from earlier days when, for Aboriginal Australians, even moving around was a trial or a life-threatening experience. The pages from the archive are here turned, and once again recomposed. Or ‘The True History of Beruk [William Barak] (archive box no. 3)’ spills the history of William Beruk, and this remarkable text goes on to experiment with lists of objects and with prose.

Objects proliferate in ‘The Anatomy Contraption’ sequence, where, in a singular assemblage of technology, modern science and early- twentieth-century eugenicism it is easy to coolly dissect ‘three infant hearts’ for a cabinet of curiosities, which ‘congeals together / like a song’. It makes you wonder what elements must thus congeal to sustain the songs, the poems, across all these pages without once faltering, without missing a beat. Perhaps it is in what they call ‘tone’ – no pun intended, mate. What is ‘it’? A combination of sounds, feelings and meanings (you can’t afford to sound flippant, insincere or, if sincere, not earnest); it’s such a fine line! The right tone is what makes these poems happy with themselves in this space they now inhabit, hovering between performance and reception. Birch is not immaterial in this composition – he forges it, and gets the tone right by having a felicitous and easy-going relationship with resonant words bearing honest feelings and just thoughts.

GET YOUR COPY HERE

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Introduction to Jen Crawford’s Koel

Posted on January 29, 2016 by Divya Victor


Cover design by Zoë Sadokierski

The koel is called after its call – its name is onomatopoeic, from the Greek ὀνοματοποιία: ‘ὄνομα’ for ‘name’ and ‘ποιέω’ for ‘I make’. The koel becomes itself as it sings out and is heard by a we. We, its human neighbours, find its name by listening to the lilting stretch of two plaintive notes that repeat and ascend in pitch until the whole neighbourhood pulses with its alarm – until the everyday is translated in the carousel call of the koel.

Koel tracks the fecund and chimerical crawl of life – bios – across the topography of New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, the Philippines, and into the warm terracotta of domestic spaces occupied by lovers, mothers and infants. The book offers us a phenomenological terrarium, a lush microcosm of urban and natural life that photosynthesises in the new, synthetic glass globe of late capitalism. Here, human identity grows like tangled filaments; its articulations sprawl like lichen from the cracks between national borders and embrace the cool stones of our foundations. Koel swells with the drama of symbiotic and parasitic life forms, where bodies intermingle and create each other through the hybridities of migrant identity and transnational belonging and are drawn together by the gravity of gravidity.

Mother. Moss. Migrant. These are the lines of consciousness that contour the book. Jen Crawford folds together a transnational atlas of ecopoetic forms. Crawford’s lexicon treks between the scientific, the architectural, and the philosophical, like the U S American poet, Mei- mei Berssenbrugge, tripping boundaries and feralising our cognitive attention. Like Chilean poet Cecilia Vicuña, Crawford reflects on settler-colonial politics, as Koel’s voices take over homes and the dislocation of a ‘self’ – a post-colonial cuckoo driven by dint of geopolitical churn, destroying life in its wake. The poems choreograph a phenomenology of the human as animal, roving between the trans-rational surrealism of tropical wilderness and the hyper-rationality of the biological, inspired by the verdant motifs of modern German dancer, Pina Bausch.

The French horticultural engineer and botanist Gilles Clément has recorded how industrial wastelands can become optimised for bio-diversity, blooming into post-apocalyptic utopias of ‘the third landscape’. Moving like a graceful rhizome between this ‘third landscape’ and an autobiographical one, Crawford tills the ecological value of mnemonic and affective archives – where an early subjective attachment to the natural overcomes exploitive human–nature relationships. Koel creates a third mindscape that explores cohabitant intimacies across species within the warm and dewy contexts of childhood memory, adolescent desire, and the adult effort to survive without harming other creatures.

Koel enacts the saccade of our attention through geographic landscapes and gives an account of how the feminine emerges from what it attends to; through those it tends to. It is the refracted story of how a life grows from a girl rustling among thrush nests in dresses, into a mother with ‘arms knit together as a shroud-knot as an ought / shade,’ and in doing so describes how one life becomes the world for another. Koel is a single day or it is all the days of life moving in grand and feminine interdependence between biological causality and phenomenological existence – between love and violence. Woolf described this place of the feminine when she wrote of Mrs. Dalloway: ‘She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on …’ The feminine, running its own attention to the natural world like a high fever, is a visionary memorising the world that is about to break her apart. Each poem in Koel is, in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, a haecceity – an absolute limit of being entangled in assemblage with ‘an atmosphere, an air, a life.’

GET YOUR COPY HERE

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Introduction to Autumn Royal’s She Woke & Rose

Posted on January 29, 2016 by Maria Takolander


Cover design by Zoë Sadokierski

She Woke & Rose introduces us to a poet, Autumn Royal, who is unafraid to spark light in the darkest of places. The poems in this impressive debut collection illuminate the uneasy space of the body, the tomb of emotional memory, the ugliness of misogyny, the abyss of consumerism, and the violent desire for communion.

Royal may have grown up in the vast light and expanse of the South Australian outback, but her poetry is marked not only by its dark subject matter but also by the claustrophobic: the claustrophobia of being inside a skin; of being haunted by childhood memories that ‘still rumour’ despite ‘the development / of my fontanel’ (as we read in the disturbing ‘After-dinner Mints’); of domestic interiors in which gender weighs intimately and heavily; and of the straitened sphere of the intermittently employed – the poet describing herself with distinctive wit and pathos (in the superb ‘Viticulture’) as ‘casual, yet seeking commitment / like a lamb bleating against a fence.’ Perhaps most oppressive, however, is the claustrophobia of silence.

In Royal’s characteristically hesitant and unsettling verse, the poet self-consciously struggles to liberate herself into being in lyric poem after poem. Often the poet’s skin is represented in association with paper or writing. In ‘Melting Ice’ the poet is ‘blue cellophane’; in ‘Trying to Write a Romance Novel’ she is ‘the inkling of myself’. ‘In Motion’ describes the poet’s project as one of ‘opening spaces with my mouth.’

Certainly Royal is a poet who can be brilliantly ‘mouthy’ and often in a feminist mode. In the beautifully sarcastic ‘Mirror Stage’ – the title a nod to psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s theory of identity formation – we read: ‘I open my mouth to create a new void … somewhere down below, perhaps it’s that endless / pit you eagerly spoke of as I sat on the bed / adjusting my thighs to ease boredom.’ ‘Hey Lady’ – heir to Sylvia Plath’s ‘The Applicant’ – riffs on the epithets associated with femininity, rejecting the ‘space for miss’ available on a form.

Thus Royal’s poems refuse self-identification even as they seek self-expression. This is apparent in the literariness of the poet’s self-stylings (with many poems featuring citations), in the fragmentary style of many of the poems, in their wit and dynamism, and in the transformations they often thematically play out. Typically, the persona of the poet dissolves or multiplies. In ‘The Wreck & the Raft’, which rewrites a passage from John Fowles’s The Aristos and pays tribute to a poem by Judith Goldman, the poet outlines the seven women who inhabit her psyche: the pessimist, the egocentric, the observer (the one ‘writing poetry’), the optimist, the altruist and the stoic, all of them trying to ‘ignore the crying / child — conceived in the breast of the beast / staggering to carry us up the stairs.’

Royal’s poems feature dedications to other poets too, such as Adrienne Rich, Plath and Anne Sexton. Royal’s work owes much to that intimate and edgy tradition of verse, but her voice is also her own: unpredictable, startling, sometimes devastating, but never self-piteous. Indeed, to return to the ironic personae of ‘The Wreck & the Raft,’ one might say that it is the optimist who triumphs with this book. As announced by the eponymous and final poem, this collection ultimately represents the exciting awakening and rise of a new poet.

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Introduction to Claire Nashar’s Lake

Posted on January 29, 2016 by Ann Vickery


Cover design by Zoë Sadokierski

In Lake, Claire Nashar navigates the connections between people and between person and place in a striking elegy not only for her grandmother, leading geology academic Beryl Nashar, but also for Tuggerah Lake, an estuary on the Central Coast of New South Wales. Just as Beryl spent a lifetime investigating the composition of rocks, so too does Nashar explore the philological chemistry of how words, letters and space combine to make poetic form. Lake becomes both meeting place and hinterland for a history of place, a family history, and a history of language through an individual’s sedimented context. The personal here is always part of something larger, interacting within an ever-changing biosphere. Reflecting on the dynamics of composition and decomposition, Nashar considers how words, like a physical environment, are shaped by human use and how the deleterious effects of commercial fishing translate to the poem or the page. Pollution and land clearing becomes the contamination and reduction of meaning, a fragmentation or dissolution of the line. As weeds increase and slime transforms the foreshore, language becomes sluiced and dispersed, resulting in a scattering of a pluralising letter ‘s.’ Here, there is lyric impurity and erosion, but also experiment and a searching for ‘new air’. The family, like the long poem, has its inheritances but also its absences and rubble. Nashar looks at what is carried across and what is lost.

Stories, memories, and scientific theses are not discrete. Much of Lake traces how we make meaning or try to hold meaning together. Types of bird, weed and fish are grouped through family relation. Place becomes a map, a human body known through its anatomy. Punctuation brackets off parts of a line or poem, guides us towards where to take breath, and stops the reader from becoming ‘out of breath’. What is a mode of measure or enclosure, however, is undone and revealed to be morphic instrument. Following a day in the life of her family, Nashar considers how a poem, like a place, person or moment, is not reducible to an equation or box. What might be thought of as qualitatively or quantitatively known becomes a landscape of plasticity combined with dissipation. ‘[E]rasure admits an understanding of circumstance,’ says Nashar, and this is a poem where the words of a favourite poem or the memory of a particular person fails to be caught. Just as she demonstrates the slide between the human and the natural world, there is a slide in the sound between words, as remainders become reminders, ‘daughter’ is linked to ‘water’, and ‘read’ and ‘reed’ becomes interchangeable. These slippages foreground the connectedness between thing and name, act and thought.

As Nashar shows, absence is not necessarily emptiness. The blank space has echoes. Ash, too, has its bones. Not only is Beryl Nashar a part of Lake, but also Marianne Moore in Nashar’s naturalist eye and her ability to playfully open up a poem to its paratexts, like the index. Both precursors to Nashar direct our attention to layering and complexity. Lake also has resonances with Lyn Hejinian and Emilie Clark’s collaboration The Lake. It is a poem which reworks ‘much-little’ into a ‘little-much’. Return becomes a turn, a redirection. Lake is a stunning debut and I expect it will itself become both impetus and node for many … leaving a mark that is simultaneously touching, fecund and mobile.

–Ann Vickery, December 2015

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Introduction to Javant Biarujia’s Spelter to Pewter

Posted on January 29, 2016 by berni m janssen


Cover design by Zoë Sadokierski

In Javant Biarujia’s poetry, language matters – matters as in important, and matter as a unifying substance, a material to be transformed, and in so doing, becomes transforming. Particles of language are pounded out, splintered, spliced and mixed. Language is the matter from which his poems are sculpted into refined and polished objects. Matter is energy and these poems vibrate. Emit light, shimmering multiverses.

In Spelter to Pewter, the lineage of Biarujia’s poems is clearly acknowledged; from Zukofsky and the Objectivists, experimentation, shape, syntactic fragmentation and ‘the poem as object’. From Pound via Zukofsky, ‘a poem containing history’, and history not as ‘official’ but history as the all-encompassing lived experience of poets. Biarujia offers us remarkable and capacious poems ‘thinking with the things as they exist’, on matters personal, literary, spiritual, mythological, artistic, political and more. Always playful. Inventive. Incisive. In Spelter to Pewter we see the continuance of a tradition, a liberation of language, that still challenges.

Spelter to Pewter is both the title of the book and its first poem. Split this title, and in the particles exist clues. ‘Spelter’ was once synonymous with zinc and now refers to zinc alloy. The word ‘pewter’ is thought to be derived from the word ‘spelter’. Thus, spelter to pewter, the transformation of language. Pewter, a tin alloy. Both alloys are used to make objects decorative, detailed, hybrid and intriguing.

Split spelter to spell. Spelt.

‘Spell’, a splinter, or chip; language fragmented, where interruption, absence, disjunction and slippage endlessly generate.

To spell out, read letter by letter. Sound out. Each sound of a word is weighed. Each word, an arrangement. Textual elements – possessing the same particles and occupying the same place – are typographically disrupted, recombined and multiplied, and are weighted differently. Biarujia’s are isotopic poems.

Study closely, make out slowly, decipher. Sets of particles, casting a spell, create constellations of vital particulars.

‘Spelter to Pewter’, the poem, is the companion piece to Resinations. Both have 512 lines (8 x 8 x 8, a numerological affair). Where each ‘resination’ was a resin, each stanza in Spelter to Pewter has an element of the Periodic Table spelled out down its spine à la mesostics, a form that John Cage invented. We are spelling out, up and down. ‘Only the imagination of the reader limits the number of the poem’s possible meanings’, said Cage.

‘Brancusi Études’ is distilled and elegant. They have presence on the page as sculptural elements. Brancusi said that an artist should know how to dig out the being that is within matter. Biarujia has done just that.

‘Obje(c)t Fou(nd)’ is composed from others’ texts. This crazy mix-up, as revolutionary as Surrealism in its time, is framed by footnotes, typography and dualist titles – both placing and thickening, and adding weight to the matters political, intellectual, artistic.

Javant Biarujia is a master of transforming the base matter of living language into precious poetry of light and grace. Know that transformations have unexpected tours and divagations, surprises and perplexities. Be spellbound. Be captivated by this incantation of language. Discover awe, bewilderment, hilarity and the sheer delight of reading work that pleasures the word.

As Zukofsky said, ‘Felt deeply, poems like all things have the possibilities of elements whose isotopes are yet to be found. Light has travelled and so looked forward.’

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Introduction to Rachael Briggs’s Common Sexual Fantasies, Ruined

Posted on January 29, 2016 by Felicity Plunkett


Cover design by Zoë Sadokierski

The polka originated in nineteenth-century Bohemia. A dance for two, it is reputedly simple to learn. Three steps and a hop, in fast duple time, with various steps – Turning Basic, Pursuit and Waltz Galop – an array of positions, sequences and rules. Do this, but not that. Proscriptions and prescriptions, as David Buchbinder puts it, talking not about the polka but the push-pull teaching of gender regulations.

Word pairs can work this way too: push and pull, good and bad cop shoving the subject in different directions, three steps and a hop, a one-two punch from one angle, now another. Common sexual fantasies, ruined. A cliché – ‘pull the rug from under you’ – shorn of its verb, twisting your attention to the eroticism of its nouns: ‘the rug from under you’.

Writing about Rachael Briggs, Justin Clemens recently noted how rarely you find yourself in the presence of ‘such incandescent genius’. He calls her debut collection, Free Logic, ‘a truly strange and brilliant book’. I was surprised to read this. Osip Mandelstam wrote of a poem’s having a ‘secret addressee’, and when I read the incandescent, strange and brilliant manuscript that became Free Logic I had no doubt its secret addressee was me. Briggs writes directly to you, invoking, challenging and interrogating with disarming and seductive focus. Her poetry holds your gaze.

Do you, she asks, in the prefatory mesmerism of a ‘guided meditation, proceeding backwards’ (of course) through the book’s four parts, have secrets up there? Up there in ‘the inside of your own head … more tractable than any pumpkin or melon’. The meditation swirls around logic and equations, language, closets and metaphor with the whip-smart hospitable wit and whimsy of this poet-philosopher who speaks only to you. It suggests the scope of the poems’ – but not, perhaps the extent of Briggs’s own – exuberant imaginative and formal playfulness.

Philosophical problems abound. In ‘Belief and Knowledge’ the protagonists are imagined as twin-like: ‘can hardly tell / themselves apart’. In ‘The Access Problem’ the alternative lines of a querulous interlocutor hack away at the poem’s fairytale narrative, dramatising a bifurcation between concrete and abstract realms. ‘Ambition’ posits that ambition itself is a ghazal, its refrains, like its ‘puffy-proud …chest’, stuffed with feathers.

The ghazal’s signature is ‘Rae’. The chimeric Rae moves through the poems’ hall of mirrors, catching the irreverent poet razoring the seams (of form, propriety, pretence), catching her eye in the mirror, catching her out and in, catching your breath and hers. Shrike and butcherbird chorus: ‘it serves you right, you pervert, Rae— / you dream the blade; you cut your waking throat’, a friend comments: ‘Jesus, / friends have boundaries, Rae’. There is a letter from ‘your faithful daughter, Rae’. Lipstick kisses are blown to Ray, but a receipt is ‘made out to Rae’.

Love may be, conventionally, ‘tab A in slot B’ (my rhyme, not Briggs’s), but in this ‘secret spacetimey, / disguised-as-a-phone-booth / armoire’, the labels itch, and it’s better to ‘snip off all the tags’. Poems are not dances, not always, or only when they believe themselves to be, but Briggs’s high, wild intelligence knows all the steps and all the trip-wires. In the poems’ rush and energy, Briggs tugs at the corner of the rug and the loose stitches at its edges, compelling the hook-line-and-sinker fall as you, her reader, tumble headlong, heartstruck, into the fray and frisson of her poems’ dazzling address.

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Robert Wood Interviews Alan Loney

Posted on January 28, 2016 by Robert Wood

I first met Alan Loney at the University of Pennsylvania in 2004. I was studying there at the time and Alan had been invited as a guest of Robert Creeley at SUNY Buffalo. As part of his American tour Charles Bernstein hosted Alan at Penn, where he gave a reading at the Kelly Writers House and met with students of Charles’ experimental writing class entitled ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’. Continue reading →

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Philip Salom Launches Judith Crispin

Posted on January 25, 2016 by Philip Salom

What’s immediately significant about Judith Crispin’s poems is how strange they are. They bring into focus a world which is vital, lit, emotionally open and compassionate, but one which is also other-worldly, subject to laws and visions and visitations which are not those of conventional dailiness. This world of The Myrrh Bearers is animistic, shadowy, elegiac, and is certainly not routine and logical. Despite many who believe otherwise, our world isn’t routine and logical either. If it were so, would we bother getting up in the morning?

Continue reading →

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Rob Wilson Reviews Best Australian Poems 2015

Posted on January 21, 2016 by Rob Wilson

Best Australian Poems 2015 edited by Geoff Page
Black Inc., 2015

Australian poetry, and indeed poetry in Australia, always seems to be undergoing something of a personality crisis. From the bush ballad to Angry Penguins and beyond, Australians have a knack for producing poetry, and a unique language from which to create it, but it’s a cottage industry. Even ‘industry’ seems too strong a term for what Australian poetry produces, though we have (and have had) no shortage of skilled writers working at various levels of poesy and doing remarkable things.

Continue reading →

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Simon Eales Reviews Jennifer Maiden and Stefanie Bennett

Posted on January 18, 2016 by Simon Eales

The Fox Petition by Jennifer Maiden
Giramondo, 2015

The Vanishing, by Stefanie Bennett
Walleah Press, 2015

We are already vanishing. Believe that!
Believe with the same candour
You show in believing me. (Bennett, ‘Believe That’, The Vanishing)

Stefanie Bennett woke up alongside Jennifer Maiden one morning, remarking, ‘An enemy is nothing to sneeze at: / Often his eau-de-Cologne’s / All embracing’ (‘Stratum’). This might be the too-cute, not-clever start to an amalgamating take on these two books from two poets with similar concerns and different styles. Continue reading →

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Interior Spaces: Reading Landscape through Jill Jones

Posted on January 15, 2016 by Catherine Noske


Image by Annette Willis

There is a photograph I have returned to several times. It was taken during the drive from Melbourne to Perth, at the petrol station which marks the town of Nullarbor, while Lucas was filling our tank. In it, a storm front is approaching, the sky a deep violet-blue which emphasises the red scrub of the plain and the bright yellow of a limestone road skirting round behind the buildings and out of sight, blocked by a makeshift white fence and hand-painted red ‘no entry’ sign.

It fascinates me, this image, in the same way the experience of the place did in the moment I took it. Continue reading →

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Submission to Cordite 56.1: EKPHRASTIC

Posted on January 13, 2016 by Cassandra Atherton

Ekphrastic

Poetry for Cordite 56.1: EKPHRASTIC is guest-edited by Paul Hetherington and Cassandra Atherton.

NOTE: due to the nature of what we’re seeking, we’re going to be accepting submissions to this special issue for a considerable amount of time; submissions close 1 NOVEMBER 2016.

Ekphrastic poetry has a long and rich history. While the meaning of ekphrasis has changed over time, ekphrastic poetry – however it is defined – has played an important part in many poetic traditions. Ekphrasis now generally refers to poems that evoke and / or respond to a work of visual art. Indeed, John Hollander (echoing Simonides) has said that ‘Works of art are silent; poetry speaks its mind’ – and ekphrastic poetry speaks of works of visual art with new inflections and, often, unexpected emphases. There are myriad well-known examples of ekphrastic poetry, including Rainer Maria Rilke’s ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’, Anne Sexton’s ‘The Starry Night’, Marianne Moore’s ‘No Swan so Fine’, John Ashbery’s ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’ and W H Auden’s ‘Musée des Beaux Arts, re-imagined by William Carlos Williams as ‘Landscape with the Fall of Icarus’.

Notional ekphrasis is a term that usually refers to poems that evoke a work, or works, of art imagined by the poet rather than referencing an actual artwork. Such poems are doubly creative. They imagine and ‘create’ in words, one or more works of visual art and also, and simultaneously, imagine and create a poem. Perhaps the most famous English-language examples of such poetic works are Keats’ ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ and Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’, and there are many others besides.

For this issue of we are looking for:

poems that are conventionally ekphrastic (such works should be identified on the manuscript as ‘an ekphrastic poem’ and we would like the work(s) of art referred to in the poem clearly identified – including title(s), artist(s), dimensions in centimetres and, where appropriate, the institution in which the work is held);

and

poems of a notional ekphrasis (such works should be identified on the manuscript as ‘a poem of notional ekphrasis’).

Artworks directly referenced in ekphrastic poems may include paintings, photographs, sculptures, multimedia works, etc. If contributors would like to suggest that specific works referenced by a poem are reproduced as illustrations for the issue, they may do so providing they include a digital copy of the relevant work(s) and written evidence that they have all relevant permissions to permit the reproduction of the work in Cordite Poetry Review. Cordite Publishing Inc. cannot accommodate reproduction fee of any artworks and the decision about whether to reproduce a work will be solely at the discretion of the editors. No poems should be submitted that depend for their success on the reproduction of the artwork(s) they refer to, instead ekphrastic strategies should be employed to explore this connection between art and poetry.

Please note that we are also interested in receiving prose poems. More generally, we are looking for poems that persuade us that we are ‘seeing’ an interesting work of art through the medium of language while also reading a lively and inventive work of literature (however, we don’t need to ‘see’ it all; please do not send purely descriptive poems).

Please submit only once, with a maximum of three (3) poems in one (1) document … but first, please read the submission guidelines.

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Review Short: Rachael Munro’s Indigo Morning

Posted on January 12, 2016 by Emily Stewart

Indigo Morning by Rachael Munro
Grand Parade Poets, 2014

Rachael Munro is a keen observer who writes in a language of nettles and nets, establishing a daily mood via the accumulation of certain details. This is a book of apricot tissue petals and fences-turned-crystal lattices; of the world in its weather and a poet caught in the tangle.

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Review Short: Pam Brown’s Missing up

Posted on January 12, 2016 by Nathanael Pree

Missing up by Pam Brown
Vagabond Press, 2015

From the cover, let alone the first lines, the title appears apt: a sense of levitation, humming along wires, strands of illumination flickering through a work of direct and intimate voices, understated in its deftness and density, with light touches that lift the lexis, and air pockets in its seams of meaning. Spread out across the pages are samples of complete, if not absolute contemporaneity interspersed with work that decries the shortcomings of an age in which culture is so often presented as a commodity. Pam Brown’s latest collection showcases self-objects and articulates responses to salient concerns, providing masterful representations of the everyday and outré that take their time to settle into the spaces and absences within which they are framed.

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Review Short: Anna Kerdijk Nicholson’s Everyday Epic

Posted on January 12, 2016 by Alyson Miller

Everyday Epic by Anna Kerdijk Nicholson
Puncher & Wattmann, 2015

In the untitled preface to Everyday Epic, Kerdijk Nicholson describes how ‘the poet grinds down / a sum of parts / to atoms’. The result is a world in which the most quotidian of instances and images are made ‘alchemically new’, an echo of Ezra Pound’s credo to repeat, but with difference. These lines also suggest that the process of grinding down is at once violent and erotic, displacing and magical, disturbing and strangely familiar. Continue reading →

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Review Short: Frank Russo’s In the Museum of Creation

Posted on January 5, 2016 by David Gilbey

In the Museum of Creation by Frank Russo
Five Islands Press, 2015

‘…Poetry … puts the whole world out of whack’ according to MTC Cronin in her latest collection The Law of Poetry (2015) echoing the 1930s structuralist definition of poetry as ‘language made strange’.

I think the first poem in a first collection should carry some whack – should both seduce and disturb a reader. And so it is with ‘The Archivist’ at the beginning of In the Museum of Creativity: there are strange and confronting images and phrases which tease partly by problematising what and how we understand language and poetry. Continue reading →

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Review Short: Chloe Wilson’s Not Fox Nor Axe

Posted on January 5, 2016 by Martin Duwell

Not Fox Nor Axe by Chloe Wilson
Hunter Publishers, 2015

On a first reading, Not Fox Nor Axe is likely to leave you a little breathless, not only as a result of the brio of the poems – as there is plenty of that in them – but from their relentless variety. They start with the evil knitters at the foot of the guillotine in Revolutionary France, and go on to the contents of Tchaikovsky’s desk, a female Ukrainian sniper of the second World War, Lady Jane Grey, William Stark (an eighteenth century physician who, experimenting on himself, predictably died young), shipwrecks, Marie Curie and a host of others.

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Peter Kenneally Reviews Jan Owen and Tim Cumming

Posted on December 21, 2015 by Peter Kenneally

Rebel Angels in the Mind Shop by Tim Cumming
Pitt Street Poetry, 2015

The Offhand Angel, by Jan Owen
Eyewear Publishing, 2015

Every so often a reader will come across a book that seems custom-crafted for – or even, disconcertingly, out of – their own matter and marrow. For me Rebel Angels in the Mind Shop by Tim Cumming ticks boxes at a machine gun rate, even in its insouciantly avuncular foreword. There, Cumming gives an account of buying The Rebel Angels by William Robertson Davies (dense, curious, intricate), and then at Treadwells (a bookshop for occult fanciers) picks up a copy of Oral Folk Tales of Wessex, published in 1973 (‘a year I like – it’s got a nine, a seven, a three and a one in it, all powerful numbers’).

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‘Crazed recuperant earthling’: The Use of Humour to Portray Psychosis in Three Australian Poems

Posted on December 16, 2015 by Amy Lin

The word ‘psychosis’ is derived from Greek, and etymologically means ‘life of the spirit’, or ‘to give animation to soul and mind’. This sense of ‘life’ or ‘animation’ has manifested through literatures of madness in a plethora of movements and forms. We’ve had the comically deluded protagonist of Don Quixote; the lunatic fool on the Renaissance stage; the manic villain in the superhero film; and, in the contemporary Australian context, caricatures of madness in films such as Cosi and Mental. Continue reading →

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