Diane Fahey



The Black Cockatoos

On photographs by Leila Jeffreys As if, surely, they recognise her joy in them, wear it welcomingly on their own gaze, they create, with her, a mutual stillness. Then her finger moves. Some carry stories, cryptically hidden but present, of …

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Review Short: Diane Fahey’s November Journal and Carmen Leigh Keates’s Meteorites

The most recent work by Diane Fahey, November Journal, and Carmen Leigh Keates’ first collection, Meteorites, represent two offerings of quiet intensity controlled and mediated by distinct voices and their respective energies.

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Glass Flowers

1 Alchemical vessels imbued with rumours of colour – a pearly acorn-brown, tinctures of amber, buff-white: the Trickster, light, mixing it up, sheathing each sculpted bloom in the glow of other objects; even the innermost whorl, the nectary, endowed with …

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Luck

My mother threw pinches of spilt salt over her left shoulder, would toss water that had boiled eggs onto the garden; crossed knives were swiftly uncrossed on the table. For good luck: her youngest brother’s signet ring, its horseshoe worn …

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Review Short: Diane Fahey’s The Stone Garden: Poems from Clare

A note on the copyright page of The Stone Garden reads: ‘The Stone Garden is written in tanka, the five-line Japanese lyric form, the first and third of its lines having five syllables, the others, seven.’ The book keeps to this syllabic form throughout with two five line poems to a page. These poems from Clare unfold in six sections and Fahey’s craft is evident in the way she can break registers of imagery with engaging shifts and turns.

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from: Zoo Birds

Mute swans form pictograms from unknown languages; write with mango beaks on lakes; move at will from one kind of perfection to another. Meditation Icons of the art of now, of being nowhere but here, they practise pure stillness, freedom …

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Andy Jackson Reviews Carl Rickard and Diane Fahey

Carl Rickard's Lost Places and Diane Fahey's Sea Wall and River Light are distinctly Australian, both in their themes and as products. They indicate something about how writers living in Australia see their place in the world, and how they try to make themselves heard.

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Spring News

An elephant seal came to lie along banked kelp, its eyes wet with the sea's gleam and all the brighter for being set in that grey body – one long, lounging muscle stroked by the tide. This side, a stretch …

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Cormorants at Solstice

Shades of the goose, the penguin? But that conduit of snow-striped black, the lithe fluidity on shore, are yours. Twin peaks, gothic against humdrum waves, loom as feathers dry. Body shapes – comic, ingenious or statuesque – suggest an alphabet …

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