Lunch poem

Posted on August 1, 2015 by Ashleigh Young

These men are walking slowly.
They have angled their heads so they are not
looking at one another. They are wearing
plum-coloured jerseys with fresh, oxygenated
shirts pointing out their collars.
Their pants are rolling tyres.
They are moving very slowly now.
Their shoes are lead-bearing ores.
The napes of their necks, little flags.
Now their heads are lowered, forcing the men
to stare at the leaf-blowered path.
A rumble is coming. It is the rumble of large
submerged propellers
beginning to churn inside the men.
They are walking very slowly.
They are assembling a conversation.
We shall not pass them. There is no room.
One of us tries and is sucked into their propellers.
Should we call the police to make them walk faster?
‘Walk slower, walk slower,’ says the path they walk over.
‘A bit slower,’ say the windows
the men fill with plums and greys, as they go by.
The men are walking very slowly.
They are walking to the university.

Posted in 69: TRANSTASMAN | Tagged

the light in coal harbour

Posted on August 1, 2015 by Gillian Wigmore

molten one minute, smoked glass the next
looking up from underwater, in
down and empty
streetlights, office lights, pub lights
home

let there be one, in one window
of one float home: a ghost in the dark
cast iron candle light

be a man: shine that pale construct
like a lighthouse beam, like you mean it
grow the light in you a foetus
cobalt blue and iridescent

bold and true
and simple: taxi light
stop light, moonlight
home

Posted in 69: TRANSTASMAN | Tagged

Woman Praying

Posted on August 1, 2015 by William Direen

By this kneeling I beseech repeating with misformed body, for sons and sisters we prayed before your imitation of death. Even the daughter it’s that she will not seek you. A mother lives most in the least of the number, sickly, unlikely to succeed, safest in revolt.
They made their mistakes, all, and quickly.
The boy mishandled ashamed of me to be seen near the gates. Days for days of years I passed the hours he visits me Sundays, eat and laugh.
Morning and evening expecting effacing. I wish nothing for him, nor the girl, save him.
By day Lord meals for the gentleman who travels and his son visited wanting money. I was serving and they quarrelled. He gives bonuses and pays strict as the calendar I keep my mouth shut, Lord.
And pay homage to Thee, to strengthen in Thy great and forceful mind the recollection of these few, that Thou reduce the weight size and number of our needs. As syllables echoing on increasing silence in the hour of this visit when hands breathe earnestly there is one sense, honour Thee who knows and thinks things into being. Now and here we call Thee God and make no appeal but before Thee apply the whisper of our thoughts to infinity, Yours, to keep my family in employment and my own ones free from harm.
Nor loud, barely, as Thee, to underimport before Thee. Though this admission reduces. Thou asketh no more than the dust I am. We are. I give for all. We go.

Posted in 69: TRANSTASMAN | Tagged

I’m Not a Painter

Posted on August 1, 2015 by Vaughan Gunson

(after Frank O’Hara*)

I’m not a painter

I’m someone sitting in a gallery
at the front end of the 21st century
at the back end

of the end of an epoch



and I’m writing

because the words just roll

on from each other like this

and you don’t have to wait
for the paint to dry

and you’re not left with a painting

you have to put somewhere:

in a gallery, or in the home
of a wealthy collector —just words

on a screen

and it’s the end of the day
writing this poem which has nothing

to do with my job
or perhaps everything to do with my job, everything

to do with sitting here waiting

for the next person to come in

or thinking about what I need to do

to organise the next load of art

to be trucked in here and all this
is so mundane now, Frank



it must have been exciting

to write about ORANGE



(or to paint SARDINES)

in New York in 1971 the year before I was born

before it all petered out

—but

I have this wistful envious nostalgia
and I’m hoping something good
will roll out and onwards

for a few more years, even decades

and I agree, there’s many ways

you can write about ORANGE

if you don’t think it’s just a colour

but something you can ride on,

kick about,

poke your finger into,
lick, as well as suck

it’s ten minutes before 5 o’clock

when the doors can be closed
and I can go home but it feels good right now

every tap of the keyboard

echoing off the gallery walls it sounds like

I’ve got something to say

and it needs to be said


until it rolls no more

and the words are leaving

like the cars

that have started rolling

past the gallery

and out the gate.



*’Why I Am Not a Painter’ (1971).

Posted in 69: TRANSTASMAN | Tagged

L

Posted on August 1, 2015 by Ouyang Yu

every day is a loss of it
self

winter is now
baring it all

in its unloving look
even when it pre

tends to be fe
male

convenience is not square
but plural

to translate is to be always
chronologically challenged

there is fero
city in the feel

of the after
noon sun

the green bay but
an illusion from youth

that is youth
less

as every day turns
every night

Posted in 69: TRANSTASMAN | Tagged

from understory

Posted on August 1, 2015 by Craig Santos Perez


for my wife
and our unborn daughter [håga]

~

We cannot think of a time that is oceanless
Or of an ocean not littered with wastage

—T.S. Eliot from ‘The Dry Salvages’

~

[she] is
drinking a

glass of
filtered tap Brita Pitcher Plastic Water Filtration $24.99

water when
she first

feels [håga]
kicking—plastic

from fukushima
litters the

beaches of
oʻahu gathering

place [she]
is watching

an online
documentary about

home birth—
part of

a comb
corner of

a crate
piece of

bottle cap—
[she] is

craving poke
fish eat ʻahi poke : $17.99 per lb at safeway in mānoa
preserved with carbon monoxide to promote color retention
fish that
eat plastic

derived from
oil absorbed

by tissue—
the doctors

recommend [we]
schedule a

c-section—if
you cut

open the
bellies of

large birds
you will

find the
bristles of

[our] tooth-
brushes—because

amniotic fluid
is ninety

percent water
because every 4-pack replacement filters $24.99

body births
plastic never

dis- so-
lv- e- s

~

before i first
visit [her] in
kaʻaʻawa—before

we eat ʻahi
limu poke at
the beach—before

we wash [our]
hands in salt
water and forage

the tide for
shells—before we
learn [our] body

languages before
i mistake trade
winds for her

hair—before my
tongue dives—before
[we] come against

wreckage—before [we]
close our eyes
to see what

darkness asks [us]
to let go—
before chickens crow

the sun rising—
before i knew
i would stay—

before vowels and
consonants—before was
pō—first darkness

birthing [our] sea
of moving islands—

~

i tinituhon—

[she] is breathing—

at home under a muku moon—

every island is an end and a beginning—

we time the contractions—

neither ocean nor oceanless—

thirty minutes apart—

hacha hugua tulu fatfat lima—

“imagine each contraction is a wave”

says the voice on the hypno-birthing app—$9.99—

the alphabet is a collection of bone hooks—

neither arrival nor departure—

i place my hand on [her] darkened piko—

neither origin nor destination—

sounding lines measure night passing—

should [we] go to the hospital?

~

dear fu’una, first
mother, this is
my first prayer

to you, full
of questions: taotao
manu hao? where

are you from?
what made you
leave your first

home? war, disease,
rising tides? so
many of [us]

have left guåhan,
deployed to faraway
bases—dear fu’una,

dispensa yu’, i
lost [our] first
language in transit,

first words become
ghost islands—fu’una,
first sister, what

did you carry
aboard the canoe?
hacha hugua tulu

fatfat lima—i
carried my passport,
baseball cards, and

coin collection aboard
i batkon aire
to san francisco—

how did you
let go?

~

during RIMPAC 2014

~

when [håga]
was newborn

[she] rinses
her in

the sink—
atrazine in

the water—
a fat

pilot whale
deafened by

sonar washes
ashore hanalei

bay—now
that [håga]

is bigger
[she] bathes

her in
the tub,

cleans behind
her ears,

sings, “my
island maui,”

written by
her dad,

jeff, whose
ashes were

scattered in
māʻalaea harbor,

decades ago—
schools of

recently spawned
fish, lifeless,

litter the
tidelines of

nānākuli and
māʻili, koʻolina

and waikīkī—
when we

first take
[håga] to

the beach,
[she] carries

her into
the water,

hanom hanom
hanom, DU

munitions, PCBs,
SINKEX—[she]

secures [håga]
tightly to

her chest—
what will

the weapons,
ships, aircrafts

and soldiers
of 22

nations take
from [us]?

i wrap
them in

a large
towel when

they return
to sand—

“i introduced
[håga] to

grandpa jeff,”
[she] says—

is oceania
memorial or

target? monument
or territory?

economic zone
or mākua?

a cold
salt wind

surges across
the beach—

[we] shiver
like generations

of coral
reef bleaching—




Notes:

Understory: in ecological studies, ‘understory’ refers to the plant life that grows beneath
the canopy of the forest, and consists of a diversity of shrubs, saplings, fungi, and seedlings.

Pō: In the Hawaiian belief system, Pō is the creative darkness from which all things emerged.

Fu’una: In the Chamorro belief system, Fu’una is the mother of creation that gave birth to the
Chamorro people. Worship of Fu’una was displaced by the missionization of Guam and replaced
by Catholic beliefs of creation.

Poke: Hawaiian dish made with raw fish.

I tinituhon: Chamorro for ‘The Beginning.’

Hacha hugua tulu fatfat lima: Chamorro for ‘one two three four five.’

Dispensa yu’: Chamorro for ‘forgive me.’

Piko: Hawaiian for ʻnavel.ʻ

Mākua: Hawaiian for ‘parent.

I batkon aire: Chamorro for ‘airplane’ (literally, ‘air boat’).

Hanom hanom hanom: Chamorro for ‘water water water’

DU munitions: DU stands for ‘Depleted Uranium.’

SINKEX: Military term that refers to a ‘Sink Exercise,’ in which an unmanned target ship is
used for torpedo or missile testing, sinking decommissioned warships in the Pacific.

RIMPAC: Military term for ‘Rim of the Pacific Exercise,’ the largest international maritime
wartime exercise that takes place biannually in the waters around Hawaiʻi. In 2014, the year
my daughter was born, twenty-two nations participated in RIMPAC.

For more on the territorisation of the ocean.

Various covers of Jeff McDougall’s song, ‘My Island Maui,’ can be listened to on YouTube.

Posted in 69: TRANSTASMAN | Tagged

The last to know

Posted on August 1, 2015 by Lisa Samuels

It seems contusion ceremonies grace
the serious approach, yes I think so
do that, they deep and deeper consider and there is – lull
back – plunk and o touch
scratch bird come to announce
like turning a corner around a wall
the sound drops

I think constancy is the object
gather, a distant difference of – mmm.
A distant close. They keep talking and I want to listen
in the way. Oh that’s begin
we swivel forward, someone’s at the door
inside your mind you swing
your hand up answer it

the svelt passage wombs out wide
in the thin river inside
it has gotten in there spooky kind
of vibrate and its echo loving each other without
understanding how that is. Groups of forests
call out. Mmm, the voice cur shunts, the voice
cur shunts in the side showing you
crunch trees, the crunch tree forest beside you.

We wait the hollow grows
inside the crunch tree huh, the swallow rackets
soften down huh the swallow racks
lilt, clear dense beside you, then without you

grows over there, the lilt tends huh, you can hear the
swallow, the very large room is pleased
enormous spoons tunk the sides of the room, huh
the middle of the room yes thinks you
tiny and tinier closing around the river
high inside the sharp river (huh) errs out

Posted in 69: TRANSTASMAN | Tagged

The Black Drop

Posted on August 1, 2015 by Anne Kennedy

Suddenly they’re churning away from the misty sounds
in the little barque, drying books jawed-up with specimens

such as the tough leaf of a cabbage tree Joseph Banks
and Dr Solander classified according to Linneaus’

look book and named Coryline banksii because Banks
who lost his trousers one hot night in Tahiti

is paying. In the clammy cabin – clothes lines of blotters –
he frets at the needling New Zealand rainfall:

damp will humus the specs as if they’d never left
their forest and then what would be the point? Above all

the prizes must arrive home dry. (In Tahiti by contrast
the books were onion-skin under the Transit’s moon.)

Days later on the boxy coast of terra nullius, Banks croaks
a private plea to Father Linné (Jesus of the leaf, mentor

to Dr Solander), Guide me! And the barometer rises
like Eastertime. Meanwhile (no one knows this)

George III’s Yankee penal colony will soon be dead,
long live the penal colony. And Banks steps ashore

at Botany Bay. He dries the drying books open and open
under the fierce sun. By nightfall, saved, but more

cursedness: the Endeavour is broken, dry-docked,
the two remaining artists poorly (one died in Tahiti).

For seven weeks while the cartographer perfects his lines
and Cook his book of swells all hazy with experiment,

Banks and Solander, solid with their ballast of Latin,
light on the red turf, their green and pleasant Bible

held up against the continent and they find, classify,
name, take, for science’s sake and for London

where the repurposed coal hulks anchored off-shore fester
with felons, the streets glister with whisky and piss.

The jewel of their findings – well there’s the Eucalypt –
a fat cock ridged in bumps, nothing girly, but serviceable,

dusky red, ochre yellow, can’t miss it, obvious to bees,
and they call it Banksia because Banks (this is the chorus)

is bankrolling everyone – Dr Solander, the sickly artists,
five servants, their food, the materials, to the tune of £10,000.

Eventually they are churning back to England, all aboard
apart from the dead, all a success apart from that moment

in Tahiti when the Transit was simply a black drop and Banks
looked past the physical world into nothingness.

Back home he stocks Kew Gardens with the shoots
of pure science, his star rises and the Royal Society is born,

his sphere of influence expands to I see dead people
and the colony is born.

Next – this is much later – I, at 21, hogget-reared product
of the grand design, travel back (nod my head at where ugly

comes from), step off the Tube at Kew to a rush of machine-oil,
flowers, Mrs Dalloway, enter the vast botanical organization

and on a winding path smell childhood colds and come upon
Eucalypts peeling to a smooth sore pink like the skin

of an Englishman at the cricket downunder
and over there, Banksia, and across a small sea of bluegrass

a ludicrous leggy second cousin from home waving:
cabbage tree in an unaccustomed grove.

Posted in 69: TRANSTASMAN | Tagged

After Plato

Posted on August 1, 2015 by Chris Price

Days like these I’m squandering the circle
riding out on my hobby-horse, my long-nosed
metal detector, on a jaunty tangent
to forage among weeds.

Past the last of the smoking utilities
I saunter, humming an irrational
number by a latter-day monk.
There’s still some ground

out here that’s good for a
good-for-nothing, an in-
betweener neither fish
nor flesh, parboiled detective,

diviner of shoots and nuts
and bullets spent under the dust.
A picker-up and turner-over,
bad debt collector magnetised

by scrap and straggly growth,
against-the-grain survival of
perversity in adversity. It all goes
in my sack for due consideration

later, but today I aim to go
too far. I reach the limits
and approach the wire where
the corpulent border guard in blue

doesn’t shift from his post. I seen you coming,
kid, he says, and waves me ominously
through. Just keep moving—don’t stop
till I can see the back of you.

Posted in 69: TRANSTASMAN | Tagged

Man Up

Posted on August 1, 2015 by Emma Neale

Boys will be boys will
pine for lost dogs will
time travel in the space between soup scoop and spoon sup, will
knee-skid on dirt, moon-loop through tree tops, will
want friends who dream-share star sabres, infinity sugar, will
whisper in the dark at your door in pyjama-soft dread,
I just don’t know what to do
will curl atop you and suck muslin cloth, will
cry into the safe cave of your collar-bone, will
want your lipstick your eyeliner your skirts, will
sink silent into stories of orphans and cruel masters, will
dance with strange paper ziggurats calligraphed in cabalistic signs, will
want to be sheriff and diva, will
sketch doom castles in the sunpatch to piano sonatas, will
fight emperors with torch light, receive mortal wounds, will
find divine resurrection, because say that’s what happens?
And this time I’ve got the magic force?
So now the king-alien dies? Will
jump sofas and tables to thrash-metal drums, will
scuttle up the air’s skin like spiders, will
snout out the scent of your bed-musk for solace, will
sew purple felt flowers to clothing, thread clear-glass beads on blue string, will
sweat like ripe summer currants with rage at injustice
when boys will be boys who just misunderstood, will
punch you in the breasts for not listening, will
cry when they feel their own hard-ribbed shame, will
hold their galaxy-gasp fingers to a neonate’s knuckles
soft-soft as if to a pup’s wet nose, will
wear bruises like leopard skin they were born in, will
carry cuts like initiation rites into daylight, will
run to their fathers as if there were two words for mother, will
run to their mothers for skin-milk memory-shelter, or
boys will be boys as we all care to will.

Posted in 69: TRANSTASMAN | Tagged

Simon Eales Reviews John Kinsella

Posted on July 24, 2015 by Simon Eales

sack by John Kinsella
Fremantle Press, 2014

In the first rabbit poems by the late J S Harry, her rabbit-character, Peter Henry Lepus, is thrown into a number of desolate or alien environments. Peter is ‘dumped … on the Desert of Sense’, ‘comes to … FORTY-THREE BLENDS / OF DUSTED-OFF & SUNDRIED RATIONALISM’, and ‘gets lost in “Calcutta” / on his way to visit Farmer McGruber’s vegetable patch.’1 He is displaced most comprehensively in the middle of Iraq, 2003, a warzone that amplifies his naïve and interlopic perspective. Such meaning-deprived contexts let Harry explore belonging, identity, and the stability of concepts themselves. In the poem, ‘Small & Rural’, for example:

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Review Short: Robert Adamson’s Net Needle

Posted on July 24, 2015 by Libby Hart

Net Needle by Robert Adamson
Black Inc., 2015

Net Needle begins with the thoughtful interlacing of seven poems. The first poem, ‘Listening to Cuckoos’, highlights the bird’s ‘two unchanging notes’ during the start of spring. Then, ‘Summer’, with its ‘pallid cuckoo call’ through the poet’s garden threads into ‘Garden Poem’ and how sunlight spans the course of a day until ‘patches of moonlight’ travel into the next poem, ‘Dorothy Wordsworth’. Here, we find the Romantic poet’s sister ruminating near a window where the moon moves ‘across the star-decked dark’. Continue reading →

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Review Short: Ken Canning/Burraga Gutya’s Yimbama

Posted on July 20, 2015 by Nadia Niaz

Yimbama by Ken Canning/Burraga Gutya
Vagabond Press, 2015

‘Oppressors always expect the oppressed to extend to them the understanding so lacking in themselves.’ – Audre Lorde

Reading a book by an Indigenous Australian author comes with a certain mythos attached. There is an uncritical expectation of explanation, of being taken by the hand and taught profound lessons that are appropriable, then displayed as trophies to liven up ‘Western’ society. Because indigeneity is often imagined as oppositional to modernity – and because modernity is assumed to belong to the ‘West’ – it’s as if the reader is sneaking off and doing something a little naughty, a little rebellious, by peeking over the fence at the fascinating and magical world of the ‘ethnic’ writer. And there is a reward for this, be it gratitude from the authors for deigning to listen, or kudos from one’s own cohort for being so very brave and ‘open minded’.

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Review Short: Ian Gibbins’s and Judy Morris’s Floribunda

Posted on July 20, 2015 by Robert Wood

Floribuna by Judy Morris and Ian Gibbins
DIY, 2015

How far we are from the radical days of realism. Prior to Adorno’s dismantling of Lukacs and the Stalinist led state institutionalisation of it, realism may have laid claim to being an innovative aesthetic with agreeably progressive political inclinations.

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(m) those that have just broken the flower vase

Posted on July 15, 2015 by Aden Rolfe

I

For some, the relation between the body
and external objects is unclear, even
when buds are underfoot.

For others, it’s the symbolism of the vase
they fail to grasp.

For both kinds, the gap in understanding is
an effective tactic
to avoid censure.

For some, the vase marks the point
where the room ends
and nature begins.

For others, the petals imply
a garden.

For all, a change of scene
has dramatic value.

For some, the flowers use the vase
to express themselves.

For others, the scatter of porcelain
describes a constellation.

For other still, it’s not the fear of
disapproval but of thorns
that stops them chewing the stems.

For some, the water links the past
to the present.

For others, it’s a symptom of debts unpaid.

For none does any of this
signify your second
thoughts.

II

Do your ideas
correspond to the things around you? Picture
her lying here, for instance, writing

‘one is the start of the pattern
two is just where it reveals itself’.

Shoulder clefts and an ill-timed blush.
A season of pauses. Nearby a gentleman
plums in his mouth, thinking ‘not all answers
are excuses’.
Outside
you draw yourself up by the pond, still
in darkness or almost. The burrow discloses
an ambling mound, snuffling over
the threshold, thinking on what should’ve
happened yesterday, thinking ‘if not
why not?’ Only the curtain sees both sides
but––versed in discretion more than framing––
gives little away. Picture the parlour, then, with
she and he and a bearlike presence, where all
it takes is a careless glance
a sudden clutch of hearts, and a vessel
older than empires
meets its demise. The wombat jogs off
and no one is thinking ‘an iris
is also a flower’ or ‘regret is only a prelude’.
Light rain at daybreak. She is writing

‘three is
when it gets interesting’.

Posted in HEBK | Tagged

Shale Preston Reviews Christine Townend

Posted on July 9, 2015 by Shale Preston

Walking with Elephants by Christine Townend
Island Books, 2015

Christine Townend’s debut poetry collection is powerful, important and timely. Indeed, owing to its sustained and compassionate focus on animals, it could well come to be viewed as a watershed in terms of Australian poetry. Townend, founder of Animal Liberation Australia and a number of shelters for street dogs in India, is a woman who has been on the front line in terms of animal rights activism, and has performed some extremely valuable work therein. Continue reading →

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Oliver Shaw Reviews Michael Aiken

Posted on July 1, 2015 by Oliver Shaw

A Vicious Example by Michael Aiken
Grand Parade Poets, 2014

It’s 4 am. Nasruddin leaves the tavern and walks the town aimlessly. A policeman stops him. ‘Why are you out wandering the streets in the middle of the night?’ ‘Sir,’ replies Nasruddin, ‘if I knew the answer to that question, I would have been home hours ago!’ – Rumi, ‘On the Tavern’

Reading Michael Aiken’s A Vicious Example is like walking out of the pub and wandering city streets at 4 am, half-drunk and in sub-conscious wonder. The strangeness of it all: What year is it again? Where are we? Aiken’s collection is fragmented, forming thought-voices into obscure imagery that settles and unsettles on the mind. Aiken’s voice is lethargic, hopeless. There is only one narrative to this text that I can find, which from the beginning locates us and the poems in the Australian city. In the opening poem Aiken welcomes us to ‘come and see …’ what the rest of the country looks like after colonisation’s ‘Theft by Discovery’.

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Review Short: Ivy Ireland’s Porch Light

Posted on July 1, 2015 by Lucy Van

Porch Light by Ivy Ireland
Puncher & Wattmann, 2015

By way of introduction permit me to share that for some reason I keep conflating this poet’s name with the title of her latest book. The result is a hybrid of name and place, forming a vague ‘place-name’ in the utterly made-up signifier ‘Porchland.’ Working back, this topos, to my mind, alluding to a libidinous, transgressive and, above all, fertile ground, is formed out of the name of the talented poet, Ivy Ireland, and the title of her second collection of poetry, Porch Light, whose eponymous poem quotes Tom Waits in the epigraph: ‘How do the angels get to sleep when the Devil leaves the porch light on?’ Continue reading →

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The Sydney Launch of Harkin, Gibson, Loney and Hawke

Posted on June 28, 2015 by Peter Kirkpatrick

OBJECT: Australian Design Centre, Thursday 25 June, 2015

I’m pleased to say that I was at the launch of the very first issue of Cordite Poetry Review, way back in 1997. Good heavens, is that eighteen years ago? The journal is now old enough to vote and to enter pubs unaccompanied by an adult. Back at that 1997 launch at the Bondi Pavilion, Cordite was a broadsheet magazine; really more like a newspaper in appearance. I recall Adrian Wiggins, its co-founder with Peter Minter, spreading a copy against his chest and suggesting that it made an excellent gift – or was it that Cordite might be folded into a T-shirt and worn on special occasions?

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Posted in GUNCOTTON | Tagged , , , , , , , ,

Review Short: Maria Zajkowski’s The Ascendant

Posted on June 23, 2015 by Nick Xuereb

The Ascendant by Maria Zajkowski
Puncher & Wattmann, 2015

The challenge for any author in writing a book about death is to somehow make the subject seem both itself and new at the same time. Death is familiar, but poetry about death should not be. A good poet will give death impact without slipping into easy sentimentalism. Maria Zajkowski – winner of the 2011 and 2012 Josephine Ulrick Poetry Prize – undoubtedly succeeds in this regard with her debut collection The Ascendant, creating a vulnerable portrait of the poet through evocations of possession and loss.

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Review Short: Nathanael O’Reilly’s Distance

Posted on June 23, 2015 by Melinda Bufton

Distance by Nathanael O’Reilly
Picaro Press, 2014

Nathanael O’Reilly’s Distance is threaded with daily objects and locations pressed carefully against each other for maximum coverage within minimum space. O’Reilly’s poems can travel whole countries in a couple of phrases, or emotional landscapes that dart from comfort to the homesickness we glimpse via the sparse beats charged with its evocation.

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Review Short: Philip Hammial’s Ticket to Ride

Posted on June 23, 2015 by Ivy Ireland

Ticket to Ride by Philip Hammial
Island Books, 2015

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Review Short: Judith Beveridge’s Hook and Eye

Posted on June 16, 2015 by Maria Takolander

Hook and Eye by Judith Beveridge
George Braziller, 2014

Last year I heard Judith Beveridge interviewed by Bronwyn Lea at the 2014 Queensland Poetry Festival. Aside from being left with the enduring impression that Lea should have her own TV show, I was also struck by a number of Beveridge’s revelations regarding her praxis. Beveridge confessed, for instance, that she does not like listening to music. Nevertheless, she described the process of writing poetry in a way that resonated with the classical foundations of lyric verse in music. Beveridge revealed that she begins writing by mobilising rhythm, rhyme, feeling and alliteration to bring forth the words and images of her poetry. She begins, in other words, from an embodied experience of language – as the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes it in The Phenomenology of Language – that is essential to us all.

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Review Short: Laurie Duggan’s East & Under the Weather

Posted on June 16, 2015 by A J Carruthers

East & Under the Weather by Laurie Duggan
Puncher & Wattmann, 2014

It’s possible to say now, I think, that Laurie Duggan’s massive, monumental and documentarian long poem entitled The Ash Range (collected in 1987) has done for Australian expansive poetics what William Carlos Williams did with Paterson, and Charles Reznikoff with Testimony. Duggan is a practitioner of the serial and modular long poem par excellence. The long poem, in its weighty transfer from the epic, inaugurates a new kind of impure capaciousness, an ability to include modes, styles, citation and quotation, to document change, compromise, the whole mess of culture, all the rich materials that define the modern and contemporary long poem. A recent example of a modular long poem of the kind Duggan has engaged since the 1970s is Kate Middleton’s disjunctive, difficult and sprawling Ephemeral Waters (2013).

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