Claire Potter



After Chopin

Out from elms, floating and rising, shrouds of dust play across the sand. There’s something alarming in how quickly the shapes move against my will as if they might carry you away with them. Celestial. Pious. Cowled like monks. They …

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Review Short: Outcrop: radical Australian poetry of land

As I write this review, sunlight filtered through a pall of smoke casts a dull orange glow over my kitchen bench. The Blue Mountains are burning. Sydney’s haze resembles downtown Beijing’s and it’s only October. Such an apocalyptic scene – part of the ‘Australian experience’ I am assured by our Prime Minister – provides context for the world into which Outcrop and its ‘radical poetry of land’ emerges. This is not to suggest that the anthology’s outlook is primarily environmental, but that alternative ways of examining land are sorely needed.

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Pendaratan yang Salah | False Landing

Pendaratan yang Salah Membeli barang-barang yang dia inginkan perhiasan hati di angin – Minum krim brendi, bernyanyi bersama sesuai irama tusukan-tok jam. Tempatkan hasil uang kemenangan di bawah tumpukan kotoran sapi Menebar lavender ke dalam setiap baris Memasang kawat peledak …

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In Lieu of Feeling

In the dim hours, you’ll ask for a poem about chips, a request you think will unnerve me, but this morning, after a twilight of revolt and insomnia I realise, after reading the latest figures, that a disarmed heart is …

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Ali Alizadeh Reviews Maria Takolander and Claire Potter

In his 2007 essay ‘Surviving Australian Poetry: The New Lyricism’, David McCooey identified the prevailing mode of poetry in contemporary Australia as a negotiation between experimentalism (the new) and traditional composition (lyricism). This view is apposite in describing the work of many important poets of the last couple of decades; but a number of newer Australian poets have gone beyond and broken with this conciliation.

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Nicholas Manning Reviews Claire Potter and Esther Ottaway

It's difficult not to detect an implicit whiff of politics in Poets Union's choice of two rather different poets for their 2006 Young Poets Fellowships. The coupling of Claire Potter and Esther Ottaway seems to incarnate a certain intriguing editorial magnanimity, a technique that might be termed that of 'covering all bases'. On the one hand, Poets Union can in no way be accused of neglecting an open, communicative and fundamentally accessible poetic, because they have Ottaway; but nor can they be accused of neglecting a more 'experimental' tradition, because they have Potter.

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