ann vickery



Invisible Walls: Poetry as a Doorway to Intercultural Understanding

The selection of poems we offer here is written by poets participating in a two-year intercultural exchange program between Korean and Australian poets.

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Seasonal Feminists

(to Jin Eun-Young) In spring, we planned our futures Yes to a thousand stars cradling the canopy, the hope of power in multitudes. In summer, the fragrant drift Yes to lovers and the early climb across glass peaks, unwalled and …

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Perfect Timing

The work of the cloud is lonely and continuous. The rider from Brazil unable to find other work during lockdown. Whose bike and capacity to ride remained unchecked, lucky to leave with just a broken arm. In such jocund company, …

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In a Nutshell

The shape of a son hidden in the tablecloth green. The cherries were painted, smiled as the dish was stirred with the spoon that occasionally doubled as a knife. You had a ready mouth for ripeness. She taught you that …

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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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Manky Bandaid Sandwich

Mammalian life trying hard not to exist as manky bandaid sandwich. The fillings that serve as the space between us, flesh echoes in the conversational cloud. Miry, like margarine, swan songs of a sensory condition that lies mute, inarticulate, in …

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Concept Creep

It’s not a reflection on you, climbing the stairs to happiness (what flights?), trying to leave at the door the low-tops of ambivalent love. Whose turn is it to shock absorb the ordinary once more? Emotional labour slides in restaged …

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In Confederates we Couple

(Q.E.D.) To speculate on compound vision, the world reprizes: one and one is one. Each arc of a lover’s conjecture creatures toward incendiary light. The soul’s algebra draws upon an angle of landscape at once perishable and precise. We sup …

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Un(dis)closed: Reading the Poetry of Emma Lew

As with contemporaries like Claire Gaskin (Paperweight) and Kate Lilley (Versary, particularly ‘Mint in Box: A Pantoum Set’), Emma Lew has turned to fixed poetic forms like the pantoum and the villanelle. Constraint is both formally enacted and thematically explored.

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On Not Giving an Account of Oneself

for Dann & bindlestiff cyberpunk I am telling a story without prehistory. Pocket rockets of pink, the go to temple of gum blossom. Rays of morning sun settling on the driver’s side. By way of warning, I would say I …

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David Gilbey Reviews Ann Vickery and Brendan Ryan

These two recent volumes from the distinguished Hunter Contemporary Australian Poets series are about as different from each other as umeboshi and camembert, and – as I’ve found when wanting to impress Japanese visitors with a striking new taste combination that has the energy and disorder of a good poem (to cite Tom Shapcott’s useful terms) – such obverses delight with both surprise and recognition.

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Popping Candy by the Kerb

This suburb is getting crowded. Trying to Pokémon Go with a Baudelaire avatar and running into the usual night terrors. Replaced footpaths, replaced neighbours, discovering how to accessorise with greys. Can we have a plebiscite vote over the return of …

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An Object exists only as it might exist to Another

The melancholia of not being Anne Boyer. The melancholia of melancholy, of listening for factories out there in the sea when everyone else was searching for whales. The melancholia of a word without a poem, of the poem as pristine …

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Introduction to Claire Nashar’s Lake

Cover design by Zoë Sadokierski In Lake, Claire Nashar navigates the connections between people and between person and place in a striking elegy not only for her grandmother, leading geology academic Beryl Nashar, but also for Tuggerah Lake, an estuary …

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Dan Disney Reviews the deciBels Series

These ten tiny tomes each speak (squawk, swoon, glitch, muse, lyricise, confess) of how there is something not ticking precisely inside the reality machine. Or perhaps these books shine light onto how we’ve all gone slightly spectral within our anthropocenic phantasmagorias, lost and unmoored in an experiment that’s become dreadfully strange. Some of these books turn exclusively toward the world, others perhaps come from particular critical engagements; each serves to extend conversation both on what poets do, and what poems are for.

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Against Colony Collapse Disorder; or, Settler Mess in the Cells of Contemporary Australian Poetry

Colony collapse disorder describes a phenomenon whereby worker bees suddenly and inexplicably disappear from a hive. It has recently been identified as a syndrome following the rapid vanishing of Western honeybee colonies across North America and Europe. Justin Clemens also uses the term to describe an aesthetic collapse, whereby poets can only demonstrate their existence as ‘being caught dead’ given the fragile conditions of poetry and the inevitable, deadly effects of the past.

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Justin Clemens Reviews Poetry and the Trace

Sometimes irritating, often informative, occasionally incisive and sporadically genuinely interrogatory, the thoughtfulness evinced by (many of) the writings collected in Poetry and the Trace triggers further chains of association and dissociation. This is a genuinely critical collection in various senses of that word: at once analytic, hortatory, and urgent.

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Silénzio / Scienza: Registering 5 in Joan Retallack’s Errata 5uite

Joan Retallack describes her second major book, Errata 5uite, published with Edge Books (Washington, D.C.) in 1993, as a ‘silent suite.’

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MASQUE Editorial

The theme of this issue was suggested by the Poets and Critics seminar (run by Vincent Broqua and Olivier Brossard) on the work of British poet Redell Olsen last year. Olsen’s book Punk Faun: A Bar Rock Pastel (subpress, 2012) revels in masques and anti-masques, in variants and endlessly shifting suggestiveness that has influences back to the sixteenth century but also resonates with Frank O’Hara’s ‘In Memory of My Feelings’.

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Another Chardin in Need of Cleaning

Forearmed is foredefeated, a spragged illusion that had me forever check the silver-leafed backing. What seemed like a vermillion mirror of sea, the work of rash gods competing over nose-powder and light. Salient image as tonnage of froth, the superficial …

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Submission to Cordite 43: MASQUE is now open!

Ann VickeryThis issue is the Masque. It extends an invite to displays of Devices and Mythic Mayhem. It desires to entertain Bold Interiors of Poetic Fancy and Brocaded Rewindings, Lyricised run-ons and flirtatious Kinks in the Narrative. A toying with Masks and Anti-Masks of identity, gender guises and human conceit.

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Vivienne; or, A Little Local History

Style: the Sibyl’s only available expression. Reversible epigrams filched as seasonal must from the fathers. You think assassination a pretext for kindness. Love in the time of your own good collar her bag of ferrets, the hide, not the fathoms. …

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Re: NO THEME II Submissions

Just a quick thanks to the 423 of you – and your accumulated snowfall of 1200+ poems – who submitted to Cordite 42: NO THEME II with poetry guest-edited by Gig Ryan. That’s quite the crush of submissions from around …

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Enter Cordite Scholarly

Cordite Scholarly is a new section of Cordite Poetry Review devoted to peer-reviewed research on Australian and international poetry and poetics. Essays published in Cordite Scholarly are reviewed by at least two members of Cordite’s Academic Advisory Board (or see …

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