Review Short: Angela Meyer’s Captives

Posted on October 21, 2014 by Jo Langdon

Captives

Captives by Angela Meyer
Inkerman & Blunt, 2014

Fittingly tiny by way of physical size, Captives is a beautifully produced collection of micro-fiction by the Melbourne author and critic Angela Meyer (known also as the blog writer, Literary Minded). While in a poetry-dedicated journal such as Cordite Poetry Review, it may seem odd to be reviewing a book that makes no explicit claims to being poetry – or, more specifically, the difficult-to-define mode of prose poetry – Meyer’s micro-fictions do seem to invite comparisons with contemporary prose poetry. Continue reading →

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Review Short: Andy Kissane’s Radiance

Posted on October 21, 2014 by John Upton

Radiance

Radiance by Andy Kissane
Puncher & Wattmann, 2014

Percy Bysshe Shelley is sailing a boat on Sydney Harbour, steering with the tiller between his knees as ‘a cheesecloth moon floats above Pinchgut’, but his companion, Australian poet Andy Kissane, can’t bear to make eye contact:

… I’m a little spooked by the empty caves

where his eyes used to be, and the bald white hill
of his cheekbone where a hungry mackerel feasted
on his flesh like a Catholic breaking his Lenten fast.

Continue reading →

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Sustaining Oral Tradition: A Preface to Bulu Line: A West Kimberley Song Cycle

Posted on October 20, 2014 by Stephen Muecke

Stuart Cooke’s translation of George Dyuŋgayan’s Bulu Line: A West Kimberley Song Cycle: I cannot over-emphasise the importance of this kind of work. Australians are only too familiar with the significance and value of Indigenous arts as part of the national heritage and of the contemporary repertoire. We are familiar, but they still take us by surprise. In the late 1970s, those who had the habit of mourning cultural loss in the central desert, suddenly witnessed the flourishing – like desert flowers after rain – of an art movement that critic Robert Hughes dubbed ‘the last great art movement of the 20th century’. But when we compare it to the oral traditions of the continent, we have to marvel at the ease with which that visual art was translated from ochres into acrylics, then translated into art-commodities and transported to eagerly awaiting patrons around the world.

Compared to that art movement, the song and poetry traditions seem to be sadly languishing. Who has the expertise to accomplish the tasks of linguistic translation? Thoroughly bilingual poets are extremely rare. Poets and storytellers in traditional Australian languages have yet to be fêted on the literary festival circuits. Yet despite the disappearance of many languages, we should be wary of announcing the demise of these literary traditions too early. They have that power held by sustained longevity that could emerge again, like those desert flowers, and we can never be sure what form they will take.

This is why I stress the importance of this kind of work. It is conscious of the weight and importance of all those oral traditions in the continent; the ‘real’ Australian literature. It avoids the easy translations of the visual arts, where paintings can be interpreted in New York as ‘some kind of primitive abstraction.’ It takes seriously, by necessity, the task of the translator, at which point we must theorise a bit about what is going on, and for this I can draw on my own experience in Broome, Western Australia.

A few years ago, Paddy Roe, respected elder, teacher and storyteller in the West Kimberley, sang some songs that were composed by a Ngumbal woman some years before, and then helped me render them in English. Roe spoke a few traditional languages from around Broome, plus Broome English. I never got the impression, when he was talking about languages, that they were clearly delineated from one another. Rather they were ‘bordering’ on one another all the time.1 There was no-one doing that nation-building work of separating languages off from one another, standardising and unifying them. In theorising translation, Naoki Sakai rather cleverly shows that the unity of language is in fact a modelling, and an effort of the imagination. No one ever experiences a language in all its unity, but what we do experience all the time are acts of translation. So, as he says, ‘translation is anterior to the organic unity of language and […] this unity is posited through the specific representation of translation’.

We conventionally represent translation as bridging two languages, as a ‘communication model of equivalence and exchange,’ but that is not what it is, it is a ‘form of political labour to create continuity at the elusive point of discontinuity in the social’. Roe was working on creating continuity within the political grouping of the people called Goolarabooloo. This is not a ‘tribe’, since it is composed of different land-holding groups speaking different languages. It is a kind of political confederacy unified by ‘lines’ of significant ceremonies and responsibility for sites going down the coast from One Arm Point to south of Broome. So, what happened when I sat with Roe and we began to translate into English? The political labour was now across another social discontinuity: an Aboriginal cultural corpus can now link to a putative Australian nation, and the songs could now impinge upon what we think is the representation of the national literature. There are a lot of steps on that journey! So far, it is largely only Indigenous writers working in English genres who have mounted that national stage.

The complex process of translation spelled out by Bulu Line: A West Kimberley Song Cycle – from a spirit being to Dyuŋgayan to Roe and Butcher Joe, to Ray Keogh to Stuart Cooke; from Nyigina to Broome English to Australian English; from oral production supplemented with gestures and sand drawings via tape recorders and notebooks to alphabetic script printed on paper – reinforces the idea that translation is emphatically never about reducing the number of mediations, nor indeed facilitating the transfer of meaning.

Without Ray Keogh’s work this translation would not have been possible. The Bulu line might have halted, and not been repatriated to the community as it has now been in this book form. I got to know Keogh well when we worked in Broome in the 80s when he was doing the ethnomusicological recording that became his thesis. He loved to sing himself, and had a big resonant voice that often exploded into laughter. When working with the old men he would laugh, too, as he tried to get his tongue around those palatal sounds: ny and dy. And as he was transcribing expertly and meticulously he would sing the songs with them too, continuing the life of this Bulu. Who could have guessed that it would then travel to the University of Sydney, where Keogh would sing the songs to ethnomusicology students in his classes, for some short years before he was taken from us?

Consider this surprising idea from Andreas Lommel, remembering fieldwork in the Kimberley in 1938:

They, of course, taught the corroboree to others still roaming in the bush. I even met some Worora men months later in Broome who taught the corroboree for a fee to others who did not understand their language—this did not matter.

The poet made his songs in the language of his tribe, but, for rhythm and sentimental reasons he changed the language so that some of his songs could not be translated.2

The idea that clear understanding might ‘not matter’ and that obscurity might even be introduced, leaves us with what Cooke is calling the ‘haze’, the necessary obscurity in translation, and in poetry itself, which is a precondition for its vitality and sustainability. I am anxiously optimistic about the rich possibilities that this work offers. Anxious about the loss of the corpus of oral traditions and those still waiting for translators, but optimistic about their hidden powers searching for new forms and for the right occasions to erupt into the open again.

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Feature Poem with Judith Beveridge: Myrrh

Posted on October 1, 2014 by Mona Zahra Attamimi

Pablo Neruda said this:

It’s the words that sing, they soar and descend… I bow to them… I cling to them, I run them down, I bite into them, I melt them down. I love words so much… The unexpected ones… the ones I wait for greedily or stalk until, suddenly they drop… I drink them, I gulp them down, I mash them, I garnish them… Everything exists in the word.

I have extracted this from a much longer piece written by Neruda in his memoirs, but it gives you an idea of how much words meant to him. Most poets share a similar passion and compile lists of favourite words. Some of the words on my current list are: sassafras, pandemonium, mandolin, pasture, gondola, rubicund and myrrh. Thus, when I came across Mona Attamimi’s poem ‘Myrrh’, which is from her long poem, ‘The Sisters’, I was immediately drawn to it.

Of course, a poem is always more than its title, and this poem you’ll find has a powerful and exotic narrative. Straight away suspense and drama are evoked through the appearance of the ‘deaf white cat’. Making the cat ‘deaf’ is indicative of the power and suggestive nature of the language. The poem seems to me a masterpiece of economy, what is not said as important as what is said. The poet gives us just enough in order to hook our interest, the selection of detail evocative and resonant of strangeness. The cat sniffing the onyx ring on the finger of the hand that holds the bag of myrrh is wonderfully conceived, as is the image of Ruda ‘wrapped in the scent of burnt salt’ in stanzas 6-7. So much in the poem works through suggestion. We have forebodings of war and destruction, the wrath of warlords and gods, a story that you feel is going to plunge its readers and characters into darkness, before they emerge into light. The success of a long narrative poem depends upon how the details, the characters and the drama are dealt with, and I would say that restraint and judicious choice of image are essential ingredients for avoiding melodrama and keeping the reader’s interest. It is obvious that this poet knows very well the weight of certain words – their gravity, their lightness and all that’s in between – and she knows balance and poise, too, demonstrated by the poem’s pacing and by the tight stanzaic structure playing out against the poem’s looser rhythmical structure. After reading this poem, I feel the words have been a memorable gift, just as precious and exotic as one of those six hundred pouches of Nile myrrh. – JB

Myrrh


In the deep of night a deaf white cat
strays into a garden, leaps onto
a window, lands in the Grand Mafraz,

and stares at a horde of turbaned men
rewarding the Lord of Seiyun six hundred
pouches of Nile myrrh. Her tail

brushes the Lord’s wrist; he idly
strokes her dry nose; she sniffs the onyx
ring on the finger gripping a pouch

of myrrh, then the fur on her back
prickles, her spine arches and her claws
dig into the cold ground.

          *

In the corridor, under a thick cloak,
Ruda waits for her Lord to disburse
her a pouch of myrrh. At first light,

she pockets her prize and stands
by Lord Seiyun while he turns the key
to his daughter’s room. Wrapped

in the scent of burnt salt she enters
the dark alone, whisks the child-bride
from her cot and hides Khigala between

the folds of her thick cloak. In the silent
hall the air is still, and there is no sight
of Lord Seiyun. Like a ghoul riding

the wind, Ruda glides into secret
passages and chambers clutching the child
till she reaches a tunnel that opens

onto a parched meadow
beyond the city gates. She emerges
in the morning chill as the Lord’s army

prepares its journey into the Rub Al’ Khali.
Behind the fading moon and white sky,
a scar-faced god witnesses Khigala

quietly clinging onto Ruda’s sleeves
as they travel through the desert
in a caravan overflowing

with pepper, barrels
of pomegranates and a handful
of slaves: dowry for an ageing groom.
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The War Hero and His Poem

Posted on September 29, 2014 by John Mateer


Photo by Kent MacCarter

On the weekend after Tony Abbott, the Australian Prime Minister, announced that the Australian Defence Force would be assisting the US forces in attacking ISIS, the war hero Ben Roberts-Smith was featured in the magazine section of The Weekend Australian. The journalist detailed the process of painter Michael Zavros’s making a portrait of Roberts-Smith for entry in the nation’s most famous art award, the Archibald Prize.

There was a quality of déjà vu about this – Ben Roberts-Smith, a muscular, Anglo-Australian warrior, Australia’s most decorated soldier, came to national prominence when he was awarded the Victoria Cross for bravery, which took place at the same time that Australia’s withdrawal from the war in Iraq and Afghanistan was announced. There was widespread opinion then that Australia had made a mistake by joining the Americans in the ‘War Against Terror’, and that the withdrawal could be seen as a defeat.

It would not take a cynic to see that on both occasions Ben Roberts-Smith, an ANZAC archetype, has been conjured up to reassure the public, by all his image evokes, that Australian political decisions are not largely dependant for their direction on US policy. But what struck me was not this fairly typical manifestation of public/national image-management, but that deep in the article it mentioned that Ben Roberts-Smith was in Brisbane to read a poem.

To help raise the profile of Mates 4 Mates, a not-for-profit organisation that assists soldiers and their families to recover from the traumas of conflict, and to promote the British-sponsored Invictus Games, a kind of Paralympics for physically rehabilitated Commonwealth soldiers, Roberts-Smith was recording a poem I know well: William Ernest Henley’s 1875 ‘Invictus’.

It is a poem I once wrote an essay about, focussing on the role it played in the film of the same title by Clint Eastwood, a film that took South Africa’s campaign to win the Rugby World Cup in 1995 as metaphor for the nation’s psychological recovery following the dismantling of Apartheid. Several years ago, I presented a draft of the essay at the Poetry and Revolution conference at Birkbeck College in London under the title ‘Invictus and the Negotiated Revolution’, with the ironic subtitle ‘Or Clint Eastwood’s idea of the lyric poem’.

At that time, the effects of the post-GFC budget-cuts were being very strongly felt in the education sector in the UK – in fact the London Riots had taken place shortly before – and there was a lot of talk about revolution among the poets. So much talk, in fact, that I found it almost debilitating, and, probably, more so because my understanding of the politics of language, influenced by my experiences over the years in several countries – South Africa, Indonesia and Egypt – is in being conscious of language’s everyday power. Certainly, the kind of political articulation that the poets were hoping for in London suggested to me nothing but their own powerlessness.

Better, I thought, to look at a Clint Eastwood movie that claims that Nelson Mandela not only loved the Victorian era poem ‘Invictus’, allegedly reading and memorising it regularly in his prison cell on Robben Island, and that he gave it to Francois Pienaar, the captain of the South African rugby team, to help motivate him and his team so that – yes, this is Clint Eastwood’s version – they would defeat the All Blacks and unite multiracial, post-Apartheid South Africa for the future.

In my research for the paper I discovered that Timothy McVeigh, the notorious Oklahoma City Bomber, was also fond of this poem and that he presented it in lieu of a final statement after he was sentenced to death. A Google search revealed that there was a brief flourishing of amateur literatury criticism in the media at that time, many provincial college professors and journalists claiming that McVeigh had misread the poem, and on YouTube I found, among countless individuals reading the poem, many it seems for school assignments, the disturbing image of a Slavic man, his face heavily painted in camouflage, reciting the poem from memory.

That image, in my recollection, is more disturbing now, knowing of the conflict unfolding in the Ukraine, and especially because he gave the impression that immediately after his recitation he would be going off to fight.

On the site of Mates 4 Mates, Ben Roberts-Smith can be found reciting the poem, a poem that up until the last two decades or so was taught widely in British schools and, I imagine, until the 1960s throughout the British Empire. To such an extent that in correspondence Michael Schmidt, the editor of British poetry magazine PN Review, wrote to me, as he rejected the essay, that he strongly disagreed with my observation that ‘Invictus’ was an obscure 19th Century poem.

In Roberts-Smith’s voice the poem is just as it is in the mouth of Morgan Freeman/Mandela, and as it is on the page that passed from the hand of the condemned McVeigh to his legal representative. Whether it was McVeigh, his lawyer or the judge who read aloud those words to the court, I don’t know.

What impresses me in every circumstance in which the poem is read is how impersonal it is, how it unmakes the personal subjectivity I appreciate in the poetic. Clint Eastwood’s Mandela was right – ‘Invictus’ is motivational writing, like Sun Tzu’s The Art of War.

In listening to the Australian war hero read ‘Invictus’ I can hear again that it is simultaneously a poem about conflict and about suffering, that it is a poem that asserts the individual even while it is, like much lyricism in popular culture, nearly completely impersonal. In the sense that it is depersonalised, it is, to me at least, not a poem: it’s an anthem. While I am sympathetic to the goals and care of Mates 4 Mates and, with reservations to the military action against ISIS, Roberts-Smith’s performance elides what I appreciate in the politics of the poetic: the discovery of another’s inner life, their loves and doubts, the vulnerabilities and hopes, another’s – in a word – sensibility. Watching him robotically reading that poem on my computer screen, I worry that he, like so many of us, is trapped in a mediatised, politicised image.

I wish that, instead, he had chosen to read us a real, intimate, 21st Century poem.

Postscript: On the long weekend – the Queen’s Birthday in Western Australia – before this short essay was to appear in Cordite Poetry Review, Perth’s Sunday Times had part of a statement by Ben Roberts-Smith on Australia’s decision to assist in the fight against the IS. On its front page: ‘… they probably don’t deserve to share the Earth with the rest of humanity.’ (It should be remembered that Roberts-Smith is from Perth, and this statement was made on a visit to the city. Perth, too, is the main base for the SAS due to its shorter flying time to much of the world.) The absolute violence implied by this statement is startling. It demonstrates the way in which Roberts-Smith, now an MBA student and motivational-speaker on the corporate lecture circuit, is a figure who articulates, even embodies, government policy. Seen in light of my short essay, his ‘using’ the poem ‘Invictus’, I hope I can prompt some skepticism about his sort of conjunction of language, nationality and today’s imperial violence, and, let’s not forget, the consequences of having a war hero read a poem.

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Martin Duwell Reviews Petra White

Posted on September 24, 2014 by Martin Duwell

A Hunger

A Hunger by Petra White
John Leonard Press, 2014

Petra White’s A Hunger is a kind of Collected-Poems-so-far, containing her two previous books, The Incoming Tide and The Simplified World, and a new collection that provides the overall title. It is not a large body of work but it is an impressively consistent one and a third book is often a good place from which to get a grip on a poet’s overall orientations.

Continue reading →

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Gig Ryan Reviews Emma Lew, Bella Li, Kate Lilley, and Jennifer Maiden

Posted on September 18, 2014 by Gig Ryan

    Luminous Animals by Emma Lew
    Vagabond Press, Rare Objects series, 2014

    Maps, Cargo by Bella Li
    Vagabond Press, Rare Objects series, 2014

    Realia by Kate Lilley
    Vagabond Press, Rare Objects series, 2014

    The Violence of Waiting by Jennifer Maiden
    Vagabond Press, Rare Objects series, 2014

Elegy intensifies around the objects that remain, those keepsakes that must signify a spent life. In Kate Lilley’s Realia, the first poem ‘GG’ is an auction listing from Greta Garbo’s estate in which the repetition of Garbo’s name intones like a docked requiem. Only things exist timeless, immutable, saleable, as shining representatives of the once-living. Life’s fraught event is reduced to its acquisitions, and transformed, satirised, into capitalism’s ultimate wearer of labels: the former consumer of commodities is now more amenably cast purely as a selection of those objects, whose value her absence increases. Continue reading →

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Review Short: Chris Mansell’s STUNG

Posted on September 15, 2014 by John Jenkins

Stung

STUNG
by Chris Mansell
Wellsprung Productions, 2014

Chris Mansell is a widely published poet with a lively range of interests, a multi-talented writer who bridges various creative worlds; her work sometimes fusing with music, the visual arts, and theatre. Her departure from a narrow specialisation in poetry is highly admirable, but may have made her somewhat under-appreciated both as an energetic innovator and important poet of her generation. Mansell’s first book of poetry appeared in 1978, and she has published more than 25 books and chapbooks in the intervening decades; while her Schadenvale Road, a collection of short stories, appeared in 2011.

Continue reading →

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Review Short: Lucy Williams’s Internal Weather

Posted on September 15, 2014 by Alyson Miller

Internal Weather

Internal Weather by Lucy Williams
Walleah Press, 2014

While Lucy Williams’s Internal Weather is split into the unavoidable cycle of life – birth, childhood, and death – the collection as a whole is a love song, a tribute to ‘difficult events’ and ‘unattended shadows’. The poems emphasise how the ‘forming of words’ and the ‘making of stories’ locates these instances in specific moments of memory and time. Indeed, love is the lung-set of Internal Weather: love for a child, first love, romantic love, love lost, love for the dead, love that ‘surprises … like religion’ and thickens ‘doubt into determination’.

Continue reading →

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Jacinta Le Plastrier Interview Sarah Holland-Batt

Posted on September 10, 2014 by Jacinta Le Plastrier

Macanudo

Australian poet Sarah Holland-Batt, b. 1982 in Queensland, grew up in Australia and America and also writes fiction and criticism. She was a Fulbright Scholar at New York University where she attained an M.F.A, and is currently a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Literary Studies at the Queensland University of Technology and the new poetry editor of Island. Her 2008 book Aria (UQP) won multiple major awards, including the Arts ACT Judith Wright Prize, and was also shortlisted and in the NSW Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry. She has also been a MacDowell Fellow and an Australia Council Literature Resident at the B.R. Whiting Studio in Rome. Her next collection, The Hazards, will be published by UQP in June 2015.

Jacinta Le Plastrier: What is your current poetry project?

Sarah Holland-Batt: I don’t really have poetic projects, per se; my poems come to me one by one, often on fairly unrelated subjects. Lately I’ve been writing a fair bit about visual art; I’ve been particularly interested in works that engage with acts of violence by women, from Gentileschi’s Judith Slaying Holofernes to contemporary works. Truly clever ekphrastic poems are difficult to do well, although when they do work, they can tilt the axis on which we view the original slightly. I like that challenge. I also like that they demand a long engagement with the canvas or work; I find that sustained act of looking, and of translating the visual into language, pleasurable. I’m also in the early stages of working on a novel, which is a different affair entirely—one I am, for the moment, enjoying. It initially felt like a relief to escape into prose, although its demands are catching up with me now.

JLP: I read that you worked and studied with Sharon Olds on this MS at NYU. Can you tell us a little about that experience? Which also leads to a general question about how much you revise and edit your work with the assistance or feedback of others?

SHB: I studied with several poets I admire enormously at NYU—among them Charles Simic, James Fenton and Yusef Komunyakaa—and I was very lucky to work on the manuscript of my forthcoming book, The Hazards, with Sharon Olds. Sharon is both a stupendous poet and a generous and attentive reader, the rare kind that is able to focus on the poem and poet at hand. I feel very lucky to have spent time with a poet I admire so much. We’re very different kinds of writers, and we didn’t always see eye to eye aesthetically, but I have always loved the kind of intellectual frisson that comes from those disagreements. In general, though, I revise and edit my work almost wholly by myself; I’m not part of any writer’s groups, and I don’t feel the need for much assistance or feedback. My poems go through many, many drafts, and I discard and abandon far more than I publish. It helps that I’m incredibly hard on myself, that I’m essentially animated by doubt. You have to be.

JLP: Why do you think you write poetry? Were there early formative moments which influenced this choice?

SHB: I knew from when I was quite young that I would become an artist of one sort or another. There is a strong artistic bent on the English side of my family; my grandfather was a watercolourist, my father an amateur composer, and our house when I was young was always full of music and my grandfather’s paintings. My early ambition was to be a classical pianist, and I studied that intensively for many years; I do miss the discipline of that now that I’ve given it up. I came to poetry and poetics as a teenager, when I read Wallace Stevens, Eliot and Whitman at high school in Colorado. I understood the music of their poems before I understood the poems themselves, and I responded to it viscerally. Poetry for me has always consequently been a musical undertaking; there’s a mathematical pleasure in the patterns of language for me, just as there is in listening to, or playing, Bach. Intellectually, too, I love the challenge of distilling complex ideas into the small machine of the poem.

JLP: What is your rhythm for writing? I mean, do you work at set times, on set days? Or is it more organic than that for you? And … where do you work?

SHB: I like writing at night while drinking a gin martini. Unfortunately, life isn’t always like a Fitzgerald novel, so sometimes I have to make do with less than perfect circumstances. I prefer writing away from home, in cafes, bars, hotel rooms—there’s something about the anonymity of those public spaces that makes it easier for me to hear myself think. As far as routines go, I don’t believe those people who say that poetry is a job like any other job, and you have to be disciplined: write for four hours in the morning, that sort of thing. That’s absurd. Poetry is art, and art is mercurial, uncooperative and testing. Some days you can do it and others you can’t. I’m not terribly prolific and I prefer it that way. I know that I really mean it when I turn to write a poem.

JLP: How do you personally keep alert for writing poetry?

SHB: I don’t know that I do. I have long fallow periods. Sometimes the best way of writing a poem is to do things that are thoroughly unrelated to writing. I get ideas when I’m reading the morning paper, running, at an art gallery, etc. I never get good ideas when I think, I really ought to sit down and write a poem.

JLP: How consciously do you set out to create and work on a poem? How do they arise for you? And how conscious might be your intentions around technique, form and rhythm, for instance?

SHB: The act of writing a poem is painful and slow for me. I don’t dash off a draft; I eke the poem out line by line, often leaving it unfinished for a few days as I whittle the basic shape of it. My poems are acts of thinking; in them I am often advancing an idea or an argument, and it often takes me days to reach my conclusion. I know that this is different for other poets, who are perhaps more impressionistic and have a more Romantic conception of their own poiesis. For me, writing poetry is a wholly conscious process and my intentions are fairly transparent to me, although they often alter considerably during the writing of the poem. I rarely end up with the poem I set out to write.

JLP: What do you use to write (ie. what tools) and how do think this might influence what is written? For example, do you hand-write drafts and then type them up, or do you work from a computer from a poem’s beginning?

SHB: I like drafting in Moleskine notebooks with a Lamy rollerball pen. I’m a creature of habit about that; I use the same notebooks and pens year in and year out. I prefer to initially write by hand because it forces my thoughts to be more considered; I can only write so fast. By contrast, when I type, my fingers can move at the speed of my brain, which produces a lot of ‘first thought, best thought’ poetry—which, for me, is not particularly considered or interesting. Once I have a rough draft in my notebook, I assemble that on my MacBook. For one, I like to see how long the lines are visually, where the spaces are, etcetera, and I also find I see the poem more objectively if it isn’t in my own hand.

JLP: Can you talk about the role of ‘poetry editor’ and how you find that to be – in context of your new role at Island?

SHB: I’ve only been in the role since May, so it’s still very new. So far, though, it’s been incredibly enjoyable. It’s amazing to be able to put brilliant new poems into print. I love reading submissions and curating an issue, seeing how different poems speak to each other. Of course, it’s also difficult at times, as there are lots of good poems out there and only so much space to work with in each issue; I’m continually confronted with an embarrassment of riches.

JLP: Can you name two or three poets (or particular poems) whose work is important to you, and why?

SHB: Elizabeth Bishop is tremendously important to me. The more I reread her poems, the more moving I find them, despite their surface coolness and control. They skirt and codify the enormous losses Bishop suffered in her life so poignantly. Bishop was unable, or unwilling, to write frankly about Lota (de Macedo Soares) in both life and death, and that devastation comes through in odd and beautiful ways. She’s also a wonderful poet of place. Her Brazil poems have certain postcard-like qualities, immensely visual and painterly, outwardly-focused, supremely clear-eyed.

Another poet who is the inverse of Bishop but who was and is formative for me is Louise Gluck. Gluck is direct where Bishop is elliptical, plain-spoken where Bishop is filigreed, forcefully declarative where Bishop is reticent, but her poems are equally intelligent and controlled. I love her entire oeuvre, but particularly the poems of her middle period (in Ararat and The Wild Iris), where she writes about the death of her father and mortality, respectively. Gluck’s poems are like pieces of Socratic reasoning; unceasingly questioning and anchored in scepticism, they eventually find a through line and snap closed with mousetrap-like logic. She has a fantastic knack of making you feel as though the incontestable truths she articulates are both wholly new and entirely familiar.

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Three Poems by Martin Harrison

Posted on September 8, 2014 by Kent MacCarter

On 24 July, 2014, Martin Harrison sent along three poems to me. Two were recently published, one was new and hasn’t been read widely yet. I had asked Martin if he wanted to contribute a few works to a small collection of poems I am putting together for the Graz, Austria-based publication, Lichtungen. The book will feature about 15 Australian writers’ works, two to three poems each, all translated into The German, not to act as a whole representation of what’s going on in Australian poetics today, but as a sample to prompt further reading of our poetry. I was chuffed to have him on board. ‘It will be good to hear how the project develops, and I’m very happy to receive inquiries from the translator if that is appropriate’, Martin said. The book will be out in 2015.

This past weekend, Australia lost Martin Harrison. So did the world. We had never once met, exchanging ideas only through email in the past few years. I was never the recipient of what I understand to be unforgettable tutelage to many writers and thinkers, only the pleasure of an author / publisher exchange. His written words and recordings remain.

I have decided to publish these three poems here, now, to share with all the friends, peers and students who knew and loved him. The first is ‘White Flowers’ from 2011, which appeared in Poetry Review, Volume 101, No 4 (Winter), next is ‘Cloud’ from 2013, which appeared in Poem: International English Language Quarterly, Vol 1:2 (April), and lastly is ‘By the River’, heretofore unpublished.

I hope you enjoy them as much as I do. Thank you, Martin Harrison.

Posted in GUNCOTTON | Tagged

By the River

Posted on September 8, 2014 by Martin Harrison

Parked under trees
on the other side of the dusty area
where trailers often get abandoned a few days
by truckies who don’t want to pick up far from the freeway
and, yes, there’s a gap in the tree-cover
opening a view, blue and blank, across the escarpment
towards more tree-filled gulleys and ridges cramming out
westwards forever beyond this glimmering skylight –
that’s where I’ve driven the car and its honeyed duco –
the light’s amber sheath on its pale blue grey –
to get a sense of opennesss off-road and of where
the new routes, old roads and highways go
into backblocks, unformed crown land, sideshows,
areas half-settled, half-rich, half-nightmare,
into country without water apart from winter rain
and summer storms which once topped up dams
but now are rare ghosts from climates melted in the past –
in fact, the closest flowing water’s so far away
it’s hard to remember where –
so, here with the door open and the cicadas
buzzing thinner sprays than usual for summer
we could be out for a drive chatting, fixed on this or that,
something picked up and put away and then resumed
like you might with a memory or going back to a repair job
(“yes, I’ll get that two-stroke finally to work”),
questions re-encountered to shift direction
or perhaps to lose it, and then a breakthrough as startling
as the dry green slope with its applegums, blackboys, succulent ground cover,
in the way it never loses faith with air’s immensity
nor with its own crowded care for flowering and pollen.
Looked at, it asks where is it? What makes a zone –
borderless, no-place, jumbled – what makes it bring the flight
of nectar-sucking honey-eaters, seed-pickers, fossickers,
and the thousand pencil-lines of native bees and flies?
It’s nothing. Tomorrow it’s not here. (The light will have changed, Page | 44
we won’t recognise it or think it as a place.) Maybe we’d go on talking,
or perhaps not, and the slope’s richness will, most likely,
drift through us, seizing attention. Really, there’s nothing
to focus us, but so much to take in – so much already said,
just beneath saying, the other side of it. All the events
seem to open up, offering themselves; while a balance quivers
mid-air and settles. A branch etched against all that sky.
It’s the rip in the photo: white paper under the emulsion.
The line runs like a vein across bone, not quite buried,
a whisper of blue on forearms, wrist or breast. It’s
the line of water which once filled a crevice, now televised
from Mars – a tidal basin edged with corroded rock.
It’s a circuit of water doing its motion of out and return.
Two king parrots fly through at this point, splashing
their reds and greens landing upwards in higher breeze:
they’d dawdle there forever, sleek rustling things,
looking out at the horizon like me. They’re in the ironbark —
one side’s a white canopy, but the flowers can be pale pink too.
Hard to classify even if the names seem to connect
and the structure floats there unanchored. Underswell, pressure, pulse,
rhythmic chime and hum, colours glancing back creamed off
from black and white, a thought inhabiting a brew
of gum-leaves in their dangled swatches, a nest of random stones,
some declivity in the sun-struck, sandy ground that’s not yet decline –
an infinitude of timeliness in arrival and departure of
those moments between ourselves – you, me – :
even if really there’s no future, only a kind of happiness – a depth –
neither of us seeing how it had been flowering, drawing lightness to it.

Posted in GUNCOTTON | Tagged

Cloud

Posted on September 8, 2014 by Martin Harrison

Smaller than gnats, almost imperceptible, glistening flies
hovering in their edgeless clusters
shaping and reshaping sideways through winter sun’s white light –
mid-air thrips emanating between shadow and light-ray –
thirty centimetres above damp long grass, matted weeds, cool earth,
visible and invisible as they swarm and float,
dots and instants one moment, noiseless aircraft the next,
homing for a place at sunset where they can land,
bubbling molecules escaping yet returning as flashes
on the eyes when staring at brightness: all of them exploding into an event
because they’re seen or because, momentarily, they’re intersected
by a slanted glare-effect which now races from the sandhill world
back here to temporary green depth — the flies coiling and startling
in soon-to-be-dusk air,
evidencing themselves as minuscules,
as splits, splinters, glints,
dots of grit between shadow and amber spandrel
tubed – no, framed – under branches of turpentines and applegums
and in that way, quite possibly meaningless, quite possibly
microbes of non-significance suddenly there in the bare world’s
sinking warmth:
microbes below significance as is any sense
of being that’s brought into prominence when the context
seems lost, non-existent, a flicker darkening
in which (no less instantly) you remember details too terrible to
bring to mind of, say, a car-crash or a house-fire
(even of a murder or of a child drowned in the dam),
details a person will never fully remember, never accepting nor forgetting,
for they’re details too tragic to narrate, too instant and cloudlike,
moment of shattering micro-second which your mind still scans:
thus, the 8 mins 19 secs which it takes this light-blip, this hillock
of incandescence, to arrive and settle measures a tranquillity
never to be borne – like the provocation of virtual particles dancing –
though it occurs every day in a glance, whether in grief, or even ecstasy.

Posted in GUNCOTTON | Tagged

White Flowers

Posted on September 8, 2014 by Martin Harrison

The air the wind the outside and outsize
of what’s possible and imaginable
clear and clean endeavour into the atmosphere
of light on dark and glittering spaces
where crimson rosellas swerve sideways
into cascades of down-hanging white flowers
they land whistling in that snowy down
that galactic spray of weeping branches
now revealing themselves in an entirety
of whitenesses for a few days in a
suddenness which takes my breath away
because the enormity of the thousands
of pale-yellow-hearted four-petaled flowerlets
is an act of exposure on so huge a scale –
and to what? the wind, the next moon,
the rain-streaked winter light? the sun? –
and because the suddenness is
what suddenly and surreptitiously
strikes you (invisible, unthought
awareness) as the same naked revealedness
of your lover beneath you, beside
you or above you caught there
where humanness itself is flowering light
ecstatic with joy in the act of love

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Andy Jackson Reviews Ivy Alvarez and Janet Galbraith

Posted on September 7, 2014 by Andy Jackson

Disturbance by Ivy Alvarez
Seren Books, 2013

re-membering by Janet Galbraith
Walleah Press, 2013

How do we truly belong here on this continent, come to terms with our collective and personal history and build a genuine home for the future? And what of the ongoing legacy of violence on an intimate scale, by men against their partners and children – how can this be challenged and interrupted, changed into mutual trust? These are crucial questions; complicated and painful, yet unavoidable. Two new books recognise this and respond with what, to me, are poetry’s great strengths: the generation of an empathic interpersonal encounter, and that aching paradoxical space of both knowledge and productive ignorance.

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Submission to Cordite 49: OBSOLETE Open!

Posted on September 2, 2014 by Tracy Ryan


Tracy Ryan in Western Australia

Submission to this issue is now closed. Cordite 50: NO THEME IV with John Tranter is now open.

Poetry for Cordite 49: OBSOLETE is guest-edited by Tracy Ryan

What is obsolete? Are you obsolete … or do you fear becoming so? Can a poem, approach, or critical view become obsolete? Obsolete for whom and why, and who defines obsolete?

‘Old’ meanings fall into disuse: where do they go? Will your words be archaic, superseded, disused? Obsolete like a theory, like a species, like a vestigial organ or muscle. If you look into or after the obsolete, does that make you nostalgic or Luddite or Romantic? Is bigger-smaller-faster-easier always better? The sting in the accusation: outdated, passé – why? Obsolete in style, a matter of surface aesthetics, or obsolete in system, no longer compatible and forcing new choices, new purchases, pressures to spend, engendering envy. Any poetic interpretations of this theme will be considered.

Do you want to keep up?

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

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Adam Aitken Reviews Nicola Madzirov and Jan-Willem Anker

Posted on September 1, 2014 by Adam Aitken

Remnants of Another AgeI didn’t know what

Remnants of Another Age by Nicola Madzirov
I didn’t know what by Jan-Willen Anker

I am holidaying in a small farming hamlet in the south of France. I have brought two books of poetry written by contemporary Europeans and republished in handsome Vagabond Press European Series editions. A Sydneysider most of my life, I’ve been coming to France regularly since the mid-1990s, accompanied by my wife who’s English and whose parents live in the region. I’m enjoying my dose of the old world, but thinking, what is home? And what is home to me and to these farmers? More precisely, what is it about Europe today that we value?

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Feature Poem with Judith Beveridge: Laneway Tom

Posted on September 1, 2014 by Paul Scully

With a distant glance and nod to Alfred, Lord Noyes’s poem, ‘The Highwayman’, Paul Scully in ‘Laneway Tom’ creates a very modern tale, one that could be playing out in the lanes and backstreets of any contemporary city. The imagery in the very first line evokes the down-and-out circumstances of the main character, Tom: ‘The lane was a vein long exhausted by needle-prick, with pissed over paspalum’. Tom lives in a rented backyard shed with his dog, Bess. Scully creates much dramatic irony here by giving the dog the same name as the woman in Noyes’s poem, the lover of the highwayman who, by killing herself, alerts her lover to the fact that the King’s men are waiting to arrest him when he comes for her. Tom has nobody looking out for him. There are no gallant heroes or heroines in this poem, only Tom’s addiction to rum and the sad loyalty of his old, underfed dog.

The poem lays out Tom’s impoverished appearance and lifestyle in language that is gritty and arresting. His chin is “tufted rock-salt”. Drunk, he does a ‘cymbal and snare search for his key’ and he must suffer the contempt and disdain from a ‘manglewheel cat at fence-height vantage [snipping] at its paws’. In all this degradation, the dog I think gets the bulk of our sympathy, having to wait until Tom recovers from his drunken state before she can be fed, and then she only gets a share of a tin of sardines. This poem, by referencing the Noyes’s poem, makes a poignant comment on making narratives out of bravado and self-sacrifice, that perhaps in our times, the real stories come out of the sorrows of the underprivileged, the damaged and the poor. While the poem’s subject matter is down-beat, the muscular and sinewy texture of the language make it a great pleasure to read, and there is humour in it too. The long lines and formal structure deliver narrative and dramatic intensity. It was an excellent decision of the poet to abandon the rollicking rhythm of Noyes’s original and to keep the poem quieter, more befitting of an anti-hero. – JB

Laneway Tom

With thanks and apologies to Alfred, Lord Noyes


Part One

The lane was a vein long exhausted by needle-prick, with pissed-over paspalum
splayed against a rheumy wind and moon spat into the sky. Tom hobbled toward
the backyard shed he rented by the week. Where dreads should have billowed

the wind-sock beanie, his was a sucked-out dug, his chin tufted rock-salt 
and clothes ragged as the night. He jangled the few coins pocketed
on his right side. By the skewly hung paling gate scruffy Old Bess itched

for the company of more than fleas but sensed there was no use
scratching: the clammy pat would come with the same rhythm as the hi-hat,
ride cymbal and snare search for his key. Tom tripped over her as if on cue.

“Ah, Bess, truer than me rum, thy kingdom come, ne’er the twain shall meet.”
A manglewheel cat at fence-height vantage snipped at its paws as if to dislodge
something, then sprayed a mist of disdain in a four-legged leap to richer pickings.




Part Two

Morning woke in Tom’s head like a tribal conch. His eyes narrowed
from Saturn to Earth, then to a pin-hole camera: the light was as unwelcome
as the gulch in his throat. Still, nothing that rolling over wouldn’t fix.

Throughout the roiling intervening hours while Tom snored Bess kept
a lumpy vigil but, as the day began to fray, she forced out a whine and a yelp
to prevent hunger melting a rib in her scrawny hide, her eyes flitting

between the man and the cupboard where he stored the sardines. With a heave,
a grunt and a groan, crack of knee and scuff of slipper, a trailing, sieving sound,
Tom opened the can, shared out the fish and ladled the brine with an economy

lost to his laneway stumbling. Waving his fork as he ate, pausing to wipe his chops
with an incongruent serviette and frame a lascivious wink, “The night is as yet
a mongrel pup, no offence, old Bess, our duty is to give it some pedigree.”
Posted in GUNCOTTON | Tagged ,

2014 Val Vallis Award Winner: ‘Not Fox Nor Axe’

Posted on August 29, 2014 by Chloe Wilson

QPFChloe Wilson’s poem ‘Not Fox Nor Axe’ has won the 2014 Val Vallis Award. Part-travelogue, part-mosaic of memento mori, ‘Not Fox Nor Axe’ provokes the reader with an extravaganza of multi-layered detail as it elides historical and actual Central American experiences. The poem deftly assembles historic and contemporary views – its dizzying panorama of changing scenes are kept from spiralling too far into chaos by a series of recurring motifs, most notably that of chickens – of a world where the sublime and mythic jostle against the abject and violent with impressive force. And it is this force that forms the geology and climate of the poem, replete with Andean peeks and sea-level humidity. Chickens form the central economy of the poem, giving up their lives passively, ripped to shreds by a starved Cortes, and the metaphor the poem draws between fowl and the traumatised communities is both subtle and searing. The poem does not romanticise its subject, nor does it deign to elucidate any hard-fast ‘truth’ of the region – it’s wild, magical, yet also beautifully grounded, controlled and structured. It is pervaded by a sense of transience and mortality, but never cloying. Rather, it’s comical and energetic in its view of Central America as a place capable of both brutality and beauty – showcasing the duality of life and methods of extinguish – where bored guards fondle their guns in shopping centres, ‘howler monkeys rattl€ their bonus / throat bones at night’ and iguanas ‘hoar[d] sunlight in their skin.’ Tension created by presenting the ordinary and the extreme is palpable, creating lift toward the elevation this powerful poem archives.

– Sarah Holland-Batt, Judith Beveridge, and Kent MacCarter

Not Fox Nor Axe 
Central America, October-December 2013


This is for you – this rough assembly of memento mori: 
Mad Cortes, who curtseyed to his ships, then bent
to kiss each with a lit torch. The subtle buzz 
of an unseen rattlesnake. Chickens boxed on buses, chickens 
swinging from a limp wrist, chickens at the roadside 
under the watchful eye of roosters, slick as pimps. Faith 
that the sun becomes a jaguar at night. Mud that slurps 
you in up to the ankle, the insects, the dengue roulette. 
The astute Montezuma thinking oh shit, or the Aztec equivalent, 
as the whole flotilla’s breadth arose on the horizon. A toothless man 
who licks guacamole off the back of his hand. Those Franciscans 
who swarmed in and made the best inquisitors; the ascetic life 
tends to attract pedants. Howler monkeys rattling their bonus 
throat bones at first light. A skull stuccoed in turquoise. 
The endless succession of the goriest of Christs – Christ mannequins 
in fright wigs, Christ with wounds the gospels never mention, 
Christ’s face frozen in surprise at that last silence from heaven. 
The beggars to whom you are instructed not to give: 
ignore that colostomy bag hanging out like cleavage – that leg,
bloated like a bad potato, spongy to the touch. Chickens 
whose heads jerk up at the sound that rings when axe 
meets block. Chickens who listen to the patient fox, knocking 
on the henhouse door. The prisoners of war and too-perfect children 
arranged in the foetal position, then gifted to an irritable spirit 
by means of a blunt club. The pets kept in rusted cages – a white rabbit 
gnawing wire, a threadbare parrot screeching hola! hola! hola! 
The young nun who meets your gaze and holds it, her habit 
immaculate. The clap in the centre of a Mayan city, 
which brings its own sound back and back and back. Every night, 
the jaguar must swim the underworld’s black length, or else 
no sun will rise. A tarantula truck-flattened at the border. The planks 
which warped infants’ faces into god-masks. A girl who siphons gasoline 
like she’s sucking up a milkshake. A set of teeth with pits carved out 
for cabochons of jade, of onyx. A cathedral bell which rusts in stasis. 
Rain that comes hard when it comes at all. Plump iguanas splayed 
on ruins, hoarding sunlight in their skin. Bored guards, fondling 
semi-automatics at the doors of shopping centres. The rich 
who’d spill their blood at parties, and invite their friends to watch – 
a string of cactus spines through the tongue, a stingray barb piercing 
the outstretched foreskin with a pop. A bored child pissing 
on a Mayan altar. Those conquistadors eyeing Cortes; in the light 
thrown from the burning fleet, his skin shone gold 
like an idol. When Christ died the world went black, 
although this eclipse might have been a coincidence. Everywhere, 
the signs that promise pollo pollo pollo. Quetzalcoatl, razed 
and resurrected as St Thomas the Apostle. The fields 
thick with sugar cane, where almost anything could vanish. 
Those monks refinishing their tonsures, portholes 
for the huge eye of god to peek through. That street dog 
who’s just whelped, her vulva slack and swollen, swinging 
as she runs. Glamorous statue of Santa Lucia, who offers you 
her eyes on a platter. Any night the jaguar might fail, and plunge 
the whole world into darkness. Skulls of the sacrificed population 
calcified to the cave floor – see how they glitter 
like engagement rings. Chickens became substitutes 
for humans, and no one minds, no one holds the poultry sacred; 
chickens like glossy, animated wigs are slashed 
as they wriggle in panic. Starved Cortes ripped birds to shreds 
with his bare hands. Even Christ most likely preached 
through a mouthful of thigh meat. And us – my darling, 
what of us? Perhaps not fox nor axe, but something gives us chase – 
some distant Magdalena or Charles Quint to whom we should 
have paid homage, some hungry Chaac who bangs his bowl 
against the banquet table. So we wait. Our bodies regenerate 
for as long as they can. The jaguar shuts his eyes, and in the darkness, 
hear me whisper this: every cell I ever touched you with is dead.
Posted in GUNCOTTON | Tagged , , ,

How Poems Work: Elizabeth Bachinsky’s ‘God of Unfulfilled Longings’

Posted on August 26, 2014 by Lucy Van

Lately I’ve been listening to a lot of pop music. And I’ve been hearing really abstract arrangements, huge production, and big, inescapable metaphors. This is the cultural form for people that want to feel as loud as the music, as if their skin is all that’s stopping them from going everywhere at once. In some respects, pop’s big sound makes a space for those who otherwise feel small. Perhaps this is why it’s so popular with young girls. But who bears the magnitude of all this? There’s a really honed approach to metaphor that must feel constrictive as the thing – titanium, diamonds, a chandelier – gets well and truly milked. For all the soaring of synthesisers, pop stars are trapped in metaphor, stuck in on-topic angst. Perhaps, conversely, there’s happiness in drifting off point, wandering loosely away from the sign.

And this flaneur’s pleasure of straying off topic, escaping the jaws of metaphor, is one of the principle pleasures of Elizabeth Bachinsky’s ‘God of Unfulfilled Longings.’ In a flat, detached tone, three fragments are delivered to the reader. Given Bachinsky’s terrific gift for dramatic monologue, one might demur the poem suffers for its lack of obvious narrative. But there is drama here, hiding in plain sight in this inventory of impressions. The fragments read like fabula: ‘Gina – pretty, thirty-two, and who wears a lot of black … has started making love with a boy of nineteen on / a semi-regular basis’; ‘This one time, Gina’s boy (trapped in an elevator) thought: / I’m trapped in an elevator.’ These documentary statements evoke the brevity of journalism, the matter-of-factness of a crime sheet, the therapist’s notepad, and online dating copy. Textual echoes accumulate like debris: heterogeneous, contingent and contradictory elements growing into what de Certeau might call a ‘sieve-order’ poem. Surface order is punched and torn open by drifts and leaks of meaning.

The second fragment emphasises the unsettled disunity of the poem: ‘Elephants, having been hunted into near extinction, paint! / Sometimes better than people!’ In an elevation of indirection, the speaker shifts from the impersonal delivery of personal account to the effusive delivery of an unrelated fact. The elusion of legibility here feels intentionally absurd and staged, calculated to draw attention the human drama of fact itself. Like many of the human dramas, it’s a drama of accumulation. There are too many facts. What are we going to do with all these facts but put them with other facts? The paradox of the poem – that something so clear is so illegible – is also its revelation. Disarticulation of fact is the procedure of failed realism; it is also the freedom of everyday life.

In a kind of anonymous dream-state the speaker wanders through the poem’s facts like a walker in the city, accessing prohibited paths and narrative short cuts. The potential metaphors – the painting elephants, the elevator and its emergency button – are positioned within a form of rhetorical forgetting. One narrative moment fragments into something else, supplanting the previous image. Distraction and detachment are made the productive means of signification. The final line of the poem sees Gina’s boy literally exit the poem’s signifying system: ‘He walked right out.’ Earlier in the stanza he’s trapped in an elevator, rising ‘thirty-six floors at an astonishing speed.’ At this celestial height the story doesn’t truck: ‘I’m trapped in an elevator. You hear stories like this and never believe them.’ This almost prompts a gothic reading of pop music, as if all the lyrics say, ‘I’m trapped in a metaphor. You hear stories like me and never believe them.’

Bachinsky’s is a walking poem where narrative is set in motion at ground level – fragmentary, improvised and makeshift. An Eytan Mirsky lyric supplies the poem’s sonic metaphor, a piece of overheard nostalgia that hangs like a weak radio signal around the stanzas: ‘Happiness, where are you? I haven’t got a clue.’ The sonic cue is sentimental, tinny, and above all, small. There’s psychic space in the poem for anything to drift away from signification; that’s one clear intention of the work. Though not an obviously happy poem, I suspect the epigram is not entirely or simply ironic. The looseness of its imagery and the mobility of its actors imply the poem’s serious contemplation of this drift. It’s a strange yet everyday freedom that’s difficult to depict, to wander, happy and detached, through open metaphors without the ‘clue’ of determination.

Here the poem is again:

God of Unfulfilled Longings

Happiness where are you? I haven’t got a clue. —Eytan Mirsky


Gina—pretty, thirty-two, and who wears a lot of black, not
because she is in mourning but because she’s got nothing else
to wear—has started making love with a boy of nineteen on
a semi-regular basis, a practice she finds vastly rewarding
although occasionally problematic, which is not to say the boy
hasn’t demonstrated a remarkable learning curve.
 
Elephants, having been hunted into near extinction, paint!
Sometimes better than people!
 
This one time, Gina’s boy (trapped in an elevator) thought:
I’m trapped in an elevator. You hear stories like this and never believe them.
The elevator rose thirty-six floors at an astonishing speed before
he hit the emergency button which, to his surprise brought him
obediently, politely, to the ground floor. He walked right out.

‘God of Unfulfilled Longings’ from the collection God of Missed Connections by Elizabeth Bachinsky, published by Nightwood Editions. Used with the permission of the publisher.

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Review Short: David Stavanger’s The Special

Posted on August 25, 2014 by Francesca Sasnaitis

The Special

The Special by David Stavanger
UQP, 2014

David Stavanger won the 2013 Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize. The resulting book, The Special, is his first full-length collection of poetry, and is dedicated to ‘the dead/ who are bravely living/ (and to those who wake wild-eyed in the dark)‘, a salute to people who suffer the acute distress of mental illness. Continue reading →

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Review Short: Geoff Goodfellow’s Opening the Windows to Catch the Sea Breeze

Posted on August 25, 2014 by Peter Kenneally

Opening the Windows to Catch the Sea Breeze

Opening the Windows to Catch the Sea Breeze: Selected poems 1983-2011
by Geoff Goodfellow
Wakefield Press, 2014

Geoff Goodfellow has been a ‘people’s poet’ for thirty years. The qualifications he brings to the role seem simple enough, if a little generic: a rugged working class upbringing; a simple style and language that anyone can understand and relate to; time spent working with, and reading to, workers, prisoners, the unemployed. Continue reading →

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Emily Bitto Reviews Judith Beveridge

Posted on August 19, 2014 by Emily Bitto

Devadatta’s Poems

Devadatta’s Poems by Judith Beveridge
Giramondo Publishing, 2014

In her 1996 collection, Accidental Grace, Judith Beveridge published a series of six poems entitled ‘The Buddha Cycle’. The poems in ‘The Buddha Cycle’ are each spoken by individuals, predominantly low in the caste system, who look to the Buddha for some hope or guidance. This marked the beginning of what has become, for Beveridge, an enduring interest in the Buddha and Buddhist history, a subject she has approached from a number of shifting perspectives.

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Review Short: Ainslee Meredith’s Pinetorch and Joel Ephraims’s Through the Forest

Posted on August 15, 2014 by Fiona Wright

Through the ForestPinetorch

Pinetorch
by Ainslee Meredith
Australia Poetry / Express Media, 2013

Through the Forest
by Joel Ephraims
Australia Poetry / Express Media, 2013

The two latest chapbooks in Australian Poetry’s new voices series are remarkable because they occupy two very different kinds of poetic practice to equally interesting and impressive ends. Both are playful, and push against the boundaries of form, with a crisp lyric impulse at play in Meredith’s work and an almost psychedelic sensibility animating Ephraims’s collection.

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