- 114: NO THEME 13with J Toledo & C Tse 113: INVISIBLE WALLSwith A Walker & D Disney 112: TREATwith T Dearborn 111: BABYwith S Deo & L Ferney 110: POP!with Z Frost & B Jessen 109: NO THEME 12with C Maling & N Rhook 108: DEDICATIONwith L Patterson & L Garcia-Dolnik 107: LIMINALwith B Li 106: OPENwith C Lowe & J Langdon 105: NO THEME 11with E Grills & E Stewart 104: KINwith E Shiosaki 103: AMBLEwith E Gomez and S Gory 102: GAMEwith R Green and J Maxwell 101: NO THEME 10with J Kinsella and J Leanne 100: BROWNFACE with W S Dunn 99: SINGAPOREwith J Ip and A Pang 97 & 98: PROPAGANDAwith M Breeze and S Groth 96: NO THEME IXwith M Gill and J Thayil 95: EARTHwith M Takolander 94: BAYTwith Z Hashem Beck 93: PEACHwith L Van, G Mouratidis, L Toong 92: NO THEME VIIIwith C Gaskin 91: MONSTERwith N Curnow 90: AFRICAN DIASPORAwith S Umar 89: DOMESTICwith N Harkin 88: TRANSQUEERwith S Barnes and Q Eades 87: DIFFICULTwith O Schwartz & H Isemonger 86: NO THEME VIIwith L Gorton 85: PHILIPPINESwith Mookie L and S Lua 84: SUBURBIAwith L Brown and N O'Reilly 83: MATHEMATICSwith F Hile 82: LANDwith J Stuart and J Gibian 81: NEW CARIBBEANwith V Lucien 80: NO THEME VIwith J Beveridge 57.1: EKPHRASTICwith C Atherton and P Hetherington 57: CONFESSIONwith K Glastonbury 56: EXPLODE with D Disney 55.1: DALIT / INDIGENOUSwith M Chakraborty and K MacCarter 55: FUTURE MACHINES with Bella Li 54: NO THEME V with F Wright and O Sakr 53.0: THE END with P Brown 52.0: TOIL with C Jenkins 51.1: UMAMI with L Davies and Lifted Brow 51.0: TRANSTASMAN with B Cassidy 50.0: NO THEME IV with J Tranter 49.1: A BRITISH / IRISH with M Hall and S Seita 49.0: OBSOLETE with T Ryan 48.1: CANADA with K MacCarter and S Rhodes 48.0: CONSTRAINT with C Wakeling 47.0: COLLABORATION with L Armand and H Lambert 46.1: MELBOURNE with M Farrell 46.0: NO THEME III with F Plunkett 45.0: SILENCE with J Owen 44.0: GONDWANALAND with D Motion 43.1: PUMPKIN with K MacCarter 43.0: MASQUE with A Vickery 42.0: NO THEME II with G Ryan 41.1: RATBAGGERY with D Hose 41.0: TRANSPACIFIC with J Rowe and M Nardone 40.1: INDONESIA with K MacCarter 40.0: INTERLOCUTOR with L Hart 39.1: GIBBERBIRD with S Gory 39.0: JACKPOT! with S Wagan Watson 38.0: SYDNEY with A Lorange 37.1: NEBRASKA with S Whalen 37.0: NO THEME! with A Wearne 36.0: ELECTRONICA with J Jones
David McCooey
Pyramid Scheme
Text by Maria Takolander. Photographs by David McCooey. 1. X’s parents had died, first one and then the other. There had been the usual shock and then the hell of clearing out their marital home. Fifty years, and the place …
Posted in 112: TREAT
Tagged David McCooey, Maria Takolander
Bathroom Abstraction
1. You once wrote the following in an essay in a book: ‘His poetry, ambivalent as a bathroom, acknowledges both the body’s pleasures and its incompetencies’. In response, a critic wrote that he only kind of knew what you meant. …
Posted in 92: NO THEME VIII
Tagged David McCooey
Review Short: Judith Beveridge’s Sun Music: New and Selected Poems
Judith Beveridge’s Sun Music: New and Selected Poems begins with the eponymous poem of her debut collection, The Domesticity of Giraffes (1987), concerning a giraffe in a zoo.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged David McCooey, Judith Beveridge
Questions of Travel
Elizabeth Bishop packs for Seattle, December 1965 Thus, liminality is frequently likened to death, to being in the womb, to invisibility, to darkness, to bisexuality, to the wilderness, and to an eclipse of the sun or moon. Victor Turner, The …
Posted in 86: NO THEME VII
Tagged David McCooey
But Why Am I Telling You this? You Are Not Even Here: Against Defining the Suburb
When I was 17 and finishing my high school exams the petrol station around the corner from our house exploded. I didn’t hear it but my twin brother did: he jingled the keys and we drove in his Subaru ute to check out the damage.
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged Alex Griffin, Bruce Dawe, David McCooey, Dick Diver, John Ashbery, liam ferney, Marcel Duchamp
Posing Cards
found poems i) Mom + Dad Hug Have the couple half hug with their arms crossing in the front. Tell Mom to slightly lean her head into Dad. ii) Family of 5 Standing Have Mom and Dad stand together and …
Posted in 84: SUBURBIA
Tagged David McCooey
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.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Chloe Wilson, David McCooey
Paul Munden Reviews The Best Australian Poems 2016
In her introduction to this anthology, editor Sarah Holland-Batt claims for the work ‘a colloquialism, contrarianism and playfulness that separates it from its counterparts in the northern hemisphere’. Being hitherto more familiar with that northern hemisphere, this reviewer’s critical interest was immediately aroused.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged David McCooey, Fay Zwicky, Laurie Duggan, Paul Munden, Sarah Day, Sarah-Holland-Batt, Tim Thorne
Is Contemporary Australian Poetry Contemporary Australian Poetry?
Poet, if you’re looking for your name in this essay, jump ahead a couple of pages. There I begin talking about poets collected in this anthology. Those of you interested in a review about contemporary Australian poetry, let’s begin here.
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged Alan Gould, Corey Wakeling, David McCooey, David Musgrave, J S Harry, James McAuley, Judith Beveridge, Judy Johnson, les murray, Martin Langford, Max Harris, Pam Brown, Paul Hetherington
Playing with Light and Dark: Amy Hilhorst Interviews David McCooey
I first became interested in David McCooey’s work while studying an Honours unit at the University of Western Australia, where for an assessment I responded to his essay on Chris Wallace-Crabbe’s poetry, only to learn that he too had taken the same unit some years before.
Posted in INTERVIEWS
Tagged Amy Hilhorst, D W Winnicott, David McCooey, Maria Takolander, Muriel Spark, Tomas Tranströmer
Intensive Care (ii)
There had been an earlier waking, though, in the ICU, a time you have deeply forgotten, when you had the worst of it—the pain, the detubation, the harrowing scenes of your return to life. Your wife witnessed it, graphically laying …
Posted in 75: FUTURE MACHINES
Tagged David McCooey
Jim Morrison’s Aubade
You grab my morning hard-on, and we are borne to the immortal motel where we will lodge a brief lifetime, sheltering from an Egyptian sun that burns down upon the illegible gravestones in the withered cemetery. The feathered Indian chants …
Posted in 72: THE END
Tagged David McCooey
Review Short: John Tranter’s Heart Starter
What is more old-fashioned than modernity? New York in the 1960s; Paris in the 1920s; Edwardian England: how entranced we are by the bygone milieu of modernity. John Tranter has long appreciated the poetic potential of the almost-new, almost-old, as seen in his poems on movies, jazz, the New York School, and so on. But as seen in his latest book, Heart Starter, his interest in such things is not merely nostalgic. Rather, his work is obsessed with remixing the magic pudding of modernity. The past, in other words, is there to be used, not revered or sentimentalised. Tranter’s poetic revisionism treats source texts and forms as transitional objects (to use Winnicott’s term) that offer open-ended play and creativity, rather than demand compliance.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged David McCooey, john tranter
David McCooey Reviews Jennifer Maiden
Jennifer Maiden’s Drones and Phantoms opens with ‘Diary Poem: Uses of Live Odds’, a poem that juxtaposes – in a way characteristic of Maiden’s intensely synthesising work – politics, aesthetics, and gambling. Poetry, of course, is a kind of gamble, one in which the stakes are at once ridiculously low (financially speaking) and ridiculously high (personally speaking). Writing a poem – like any creative act – is a risky venture. One’s subjective experience of being creative never fully underwrites the created artefact. And as a communicative act, poetry runs the ever-present risk of obscurity and/or inconsequence.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged David McCooey, Jennifer Maiden
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.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged ann vickery, Bonny Cassidy, David McCooey, Elizabeth Wilson, Emily Bitto, Emily Finlay, Jessica L. Wilkinson, John Hawke, John Kinsella, john tranter, Justin Clemens, Kate Fagan, Kate Lilley, Keri Glastonbury, Kim Cheng Boey, Lionel Fogarty, Melissa Boyd, Melissa Hardie, Nina Philadelphoff-Puren, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Simon West, Susan Stewart, Thomas Ford
David McCooey Reviews Peter Rose and Ken Bolton
The opening poem of Peter Rose’s Crimson Crop – which recently won a Queensland Literary Award – brings together illness, noise, and madness in a powerful vision of human frailty. In that poem, ‘Prelude’, the poet relates seeing a man at the Rome Railway Station banging his head on vending machines, while his countrymen ‘rushed to their trains, / fearful, cashmered, blinkered, / avoiding this glimpse / of what their brother had become’.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged David McCooey, ken bolton, Peter Rose
Collective Hypnosis (Found South American Poem)
[audio:http://cordite.org.au/audio/McCooey_CollectiveHypnosis.mp3|titles=Collective Hypnosis – David McCooey] Collective Hypnosis (Found South American Poem) (1:41) Written and produced by David McCooey
Posted in 46: ELECTRONICA
Tagged David McCooey
Amelia Walker Reviews David McCooey and Cameron Lowe
Though relatively young, Geelong-based Whitmore Press’ poetry series already boasts strong collections by Barry Hill, Paul Kane and Maria Takolander, amongst others. With Graphic by David McCooey and Porch Music by Cameron Lowe, Whitmore’s winning streak continues. Both books brim with inventive, surprising and thought-provoking new poetry.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Amelia Walker, Cameron Lowe, David McCooey
David McCooey Reviews Craig Sherborne
As illustrated by his extraordinary memoir, Hoi Polloi (2005), Craig Sherborne has many strengths as a writer. He has immense tonal control (and can range from the tragic to the farcical in a breath); he has an extraordinary ear for the language and hypocrisy of class; he is one of our great contemporary satirists; and he has a genius for the telling anecdote and detail.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Craig Sherborne, David McCooey
