Alan Wearne



Alan Wearne Reviews Ross Gibson

This is a volume of (mainly) prose poems, derived by its compiler/adaptor/author Ross Gibson, from a large dossier of New South Wales Police records. If these can be described as ‘found’ poems (even if they have been edited) it would be as likely to refer to them as ‘accidental’.

Posted in BOOK REVIEWS | Tagged ,

Mixed Business

The speaker is… Reliable as anyone I’ve known, Bob Arnold is the kind of man for whom life works because (please excuse my sentimental aphorisms) he loves life’s work; he’s lucky too, since he makes his luck: wife, two girls, …

Posted in 62: MELBOURNE | Tagged

Cassidy on with Feature Reviews and Future Themes

The bad news first … I am sorry to see the departure of Lisa Gorton as Cordite’s Feature Reviews Editor. Over the past 18 months, her astute eye, impeccable judgement and gracious style has produced – and leaves us with – a superb legacy of robust and engaging feature reviews. Gorton’s work is testament to what can happen with excellent writing from reviewers and an engaged editorial acumen.

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

Review Short: Alan Wearne’s Prepare the Cabin for Landing

Prepare the Cabin for Landing, as with much of Alan Wearne’s poetry, draws on popular culture, social observations and the Australian vernacular. I recall reading a review of an earlier Wearne collection which warned the reader that they would require a Wearne dictionary in order to understand the cultural references being made. Of course, no such dictionary exists, and as Adam Ford has argued previously in Cordite Poetry Review, Wearne’s poems can be difficult unless you are ‘either amazingly well-read or precisely of Alan Wearne’s generation (and interested in the same things as him) to have the right combination of knowledge, memory and experiences to understand or empathise with every poem in this book.’

Posted in BOOK REVIEWS | Tagged ,

Jessica Wilkinson Reviews Lisa Jacobson

The verse novel is a peculiar organism: descended from the sweeping epics that chronicled the birth of nations and the misadventures of wayward heroes, we can still find characters struggling on their ‘grand’ journey – likely to be a personal, emotional and/or psychological journey – with the occasional battle scene (though, this is more likely to take place on a much smaller, personal level). As a distinctly modern form, there is certainly much less aggrandisement of the natural world via mythical and magical hyperbole in the verse novel.

Posted in BOOK REVIEWS | Tagged , , , , ,

NO THEME Editorial

The young PhD was applying for a ‘Theory for Practising Writers’ teaching position in a Creative Writing degree. He had devised a three year course, the first year of readings, lectures, tutorials and essays which though extending as far back …

Posted in ESSAYS | Tagged

Walker Norris: Magicked Away

“When D’arcy Niland’s novel The Shiralee came out in the mid-fifties, the Australian film industry was in its twenty-five year coma, but such was the book’s popularity that film rights were quickly snapped up by overseas interests and the film …

Posted in 42: CHILDREN OF MALLEY II | Tagged

Ryan Scott Reviews The Best Australian Poetry 2009 and The Best Australian Poems 2009

If we seek a division in Australian poetry, we will not find it represented among the poems in these two anthologies. Wearne puts it adroitly in his introduction when he says about the Poetry Wars, ‘for all the legendary brouhaha it may have all happened at one party (and perhaps that's how the eventual movie will see it). If some of us played for different teams (and still may) remember the operative words are 'play' and 'teams'.

Posted in BOOK REVIEWS | Tagged , ,

Adam Ford Reviews Alan Wearne

It seems to me that a poem should – in general – be a self-contained unit, either easily understood or a puzzle that contains the key to its solution. I'm happy to make exceptions for poems written in different eras or countries – such poems might need annotations to compensate for unfamiliar historical or cultural contexts.

Posted in BOOK REVIEWS | Tagged ,

Ballade for Alan Gould

Alan Wearne is one of Australia's most important poets. He is one of the foremost exponents of the verse novel in the world. His works include The Nightmarkets and The Lovemakers: Volume 1 &2.

Posted in 19: ANTI/HEROES | Tagged

Girls on the Avenue

Read Alan Wearne's “My Old Man's A Groovy Old Man”, from our Driver issue.

Posted in 18: ROOTS | Tagged

My Old Man’s a Groovy Old Man

Alan Wearne is an internationally renowned poet and verse novelist. His book The Lovemakers won Book of the Year and the Kenneth Slessor Prize for poetry at the NSW Premier's Literary Awards in 2002. Part Two of The Lovemakers is being published in 2004. He is a Melbourne poet who lives and works in the Illawara & Fremantle.

Posted in 17: DRIVER | Tagged