Alexis Late



Alexis Late Reviews Bees Do Bother: An Antagonist’s Care Pack by Ann Vickery

In ‘Wintering’, the closing poem from her posthumous collection Ariel, and the last in her quintuple sequence about bees, Sylvia Plath writes: ‘will the hive survive, will the gladiolas/Succeed in banking their fires/To enter another year?’ At the time of editing, Plath was enduring one of the coldest English winters on record, one so cold that the Thames froze over.

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Alexis Late Reviews Felicity Plunkett’s A Kinder Sea

The writer Phillip Hoare, celebrated author of The Whale and self-confessed sea obsessive, once wrote: ‘Our bodies are as unknown to us as the ocean, both familiar and strange; the sea inside ourselves.’

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Review Short: Aidan Coleman’s Cartoon Snow

South Australian poet Aidan Coleman’s previous book of poetry, Asymmetry, was published in 2012. It charts Coleman’s traumatic experience of a stroke, and the resulting loss of symmetry in his body, life and writing. The book strings together revelations made startling through poetic bluntness, from the initial shock of incapacitation to the excruciation of gradual rehabilitation.

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Mansplaining Abortion in Alexis Late’s ‘Procedure’

In stanzas 1 to 3 the speaker begins in conversations experienced as attack, with a metaphor of a hunter trapping an insect, and the speaker expressing herself as insect under threat of being devoured.

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Alexis Late Reviews Stuart Barnes

Stuart Barnes’s early exposure to poetry reads like a literary fantasy. As a child he attended the same Tasmanian church as Gwen Harwood. The two struck up an unlikely friendship, and Harwood encouraged him to write. That formative experience saw him move to Melbourne to study literature where, in 2005, he was handed a notebook and, once again, urged to write. Barnes’ first collection of poetry, Glasshouses, is the culmination of years of carefully honed impressions, reflections and commentary.

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Review Short: Antigone Kefala’s Fragments

When casting an eye back at Antigone Kefala’s oeuvre, one finds a poet of the surreal, who has delicately combined reality, folklore, and dream state. She has expressed the trauma of migration and diaspora in hallucinatory ways; she once merged the ache of an old country’s absence with the comfort of myth, and heightened the contrast with dream-like and often disturbing symbolism.

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Alexis Late Reviews Paul Hetherington

Artistically, burnt umber is an earthy shade intensified by heat. It is a colour synonymous with this country – familiar to anyone who has trekked through Western Australia, from where Paul Hetherington originally hails. In this collection, it is also a metaphor for memory, which, through the heat of feelings in the present, attains an intensity that overwhelms the original events.

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Review Short: Sandy Jeffs’s Chiaroscuro

In her poem ‘The suicides’, Janet Frame writes: ‘know they died because words they had spoken/ returned always homeless to them’. Perhaps more deaths could be prevented if people were able to speak without fear of being shamed or ostracised, knowing that their words might lodge in someone’s mind or heart, and that language, if wrestled with, could offer healing.

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