Chloe Wilson



The First Four Hours

‘Give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.’ – unknown; often misattributed to Abraham Lincoln However blunt the blade was to begin with, one must admit: the time allocated …

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Chloe Wilson Reviews David McCooey

At first, David McCooey’s Star Struck appears to be a collection comprising four sections, each self-contained and corralled from the others. These sections range from a series of lyric poems meditating on a ‘cardiac event’, to poems investigating light and dark, a sequence of eighteen ‘pastorals’ on pop stardom (and fandom) and, finally, two longer narrative poems.

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Winners for the Val Vallis Award for an Unpublished Poem 2016

Run by Queensland Poetry Festival, and named in honour of a distinguished Queensland poet, the Arts Queensland Val Vallis Award for an Unpublished Poem is committed to encouraging poets throughout Australia. 2016 Selection panel: Chloe Wilson and Robert Sullivan Winner …

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Chloe Wilson Reviews Tracy Ryan and Jill Jones

These two slender and handsomely designed volumes of poetry are the result of the closely con-tested 2014 Whitmore Press Manuscript Prize, of which Tracy Ryan and Jill Jones were joint winners.

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Review Short: Chloe Wilson’s Not Fox Nor Axe

On a first reading, Not Fox Nor Axe is likely to leave you a little breathless, not only as a result of the brio of the poems – as there is plenty of that in them – but from their relentless variety. They start with the evil knitters at the foot of the guillotine in Revolutionary France, and go on to the contents of Tchaikovsky’s desk, a female Ukrainian sniper of the second World War, Lady Jane Grey, William Stark (an eighteenth century physician who, experimenting on himself, predictably died young), shipwrecks, Marie Curie and a host of others.

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Tchaikovsky’s Tchotchkes

Tchaikovsky’s tchotchkes, cluttering up Tchaikovsky’s office. By which we mean the salon, its instruments, the vacant staves waiting for semiquavers to swing from them, like apes. Did Tchaikovsky crack his knuckles. Did he flex his toes, constrained though they were …

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Observable Phenomena

‘… it is human nature to believe that the phenomena we know are the only ones that exist.’ – Marie Curie Twenty observations from the séance: in approximate chronological order: One: a dim room: a chair upholstered: in Utrecht velvet: …

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

Chloe 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 …

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Suggestions for Lady Macbeth

Try vinegar. Our grandmothers trusted its knack for stripping back organic matter. Try bicarbonate of soda, try lemon, try tepid water spiked with alka seltzer. Work before the fizz dissipates. No success? If the affected area resembles a spilt cabernet, …

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Tara Mokhtari Reviews APC 2010 New Poets Series

The Australian Poetry Centre has published four mini-chapbooks of poems by new poets selected to workshop at Varuna with Ron Pretty in 2010. Each little collection sells for AU$10, a price that reflects the production quality more than the quality of the poems published in each. The books are intended to introduce new Australian poets, but given the miniature, low-budget presentation and editorship of the project, the poets are at some risk of being misrepresented.

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