Jal Nicholl



Review Short: Philip Salom’s Between Yes and No

Philip Salom is a poet and novelist who has, like several others of his generation, made a career straddling academia and a kind of award-and fellowship-winning literary writing (see the long list on his personal website) that has enabled him to retire in his late fifties to write full time.

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You Could Talk

about how the horse trough must feel with its green algae and orange rivets having come in at the tail-end of several thousand years of horse travel and most of it in another hemisphere where but yesterday lancashire cotton replaced …

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Jal Nicholl Reviews Ouyang Yu

In his often quoted poem ‘An identity CV’, Ouyang Yu describes himself as Australian for the last couple of years, Chinese for the first 43; unashamed of either’. National educational priorities notwithstanding, I have not found the time to learn Chinese. Inevitably though, the ideal reader of this bilingual volume would know a little more of that language than nihao. However, I immediately offer an observation that if this book is not strictly intended for English monoglots, it will have to make do with a considerably smaller readership than the average volume of contemporary poetry.

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I Look You in the Eidos

Honey, we have our natures and there’s a time to speak a time to be silent also a weekend and a week Your sister used to have a thing for Irishmen you said but in the end it was a …

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The European Manner of Crossing Legs

The money spider crosses a hand. You shut the door and open up the secret drawer, so hefty and loud your knees pop. We're beginning our descent into barbarism: sorry, it's conclusive since the windows filled with milk and the …

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