Angela Meyer



Alice Allan Reviews Rabbit, Verge and Cuttlefish

The Australian poetry scene, however you define it, is definitely thriving. So much so that it sometimes causes consternation. Perhaps you’ve been there at a poetry gathering or launch when someone wonders aloud whether, ‘thriving’ is one step removed from ‘overgrown’ – whether this healthy scene is actually in need of some ruthless pruning.

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Keys to Success

1. Whisky will take you back to a damp house on an island where your love dropped a rock on his own head and sat, dazed, in the caramel light 2. Dancing with a lover to Prince at 4am or …

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Review Short: Angela Meyer’s Captives

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.

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Angela Meyer Reviews Judith Rodriguez and Niall Lucy, John Kinsella

Judith Rodriguez’s The Hanging of Minnie Thwaites and Niall Lucy’s and John Kinsella’s The Ballad of Moondyne Joe are informative poetic explorations of the historical figures Frances Knorr, known as Minnie Thwaites, and Joseph Bolitho Jones, known as Moondyne Joe. The books are explorations and not interpretations, as the authors are aware of the trappings of context, of interpreting fragments of text from the past according to one’s own contemporary values. Of course, this is not completely avoidable and the postmodern notion of avoiding an authoritative account is itself, arguably, a condition of context.

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Angela Meyer Reviews Kristin Henry

Between the covers of All the Way Home is the life of a man called Jesse, up to middle age, written in clean, effective verse. The prologue explains that Jesse is looking back, his memories tangled like the roots of his plants: ‘If you don’t keep teasing out / the recollections / they get strangled’. We reflect first upon Jesse’s childhood on the road with his father, a travelling salesman, in the US. The image of his parents is striking: his mother’s hair ‘a blaze’, and his father’s the ‘colour of ordinary absence’. Later Jesse will fall for a woman whose hair is red, like the mother who died too young.

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Angela Meyer Reviews Etchings

Love & Something is the sub-header of :etchings 9, and the something seems to stand for the multitudinous meanings the word love can inspire – familial, romantic, love of nature, passion for work – and the variety of things that sit beside it such as desire, heartbreak, longing and memory.

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Angela Meyer Reviews Alison Croggon and Lucy Holt

Of the two chapbooks under review, Lucy Holt's exquisitely crafted poetry in Stories of Bird pecks at single moments, both from an intimate as well as a bird's-eye view. Her use of symbolism is focused and sensory. Hers are deep and personal poems, with some empathetic politics, that draw the reader in. Alison Croggon's chapbook Ash, on the other hand, speaks with a more despairing voice.

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