Libby Hart



Agatha

Most paintings portray you as a placid woman bearing a salver, as if you were offering cupcakes, rather than the two breasts that were sheared from your body. If there is anguish, it’s half-hearted. If there is blood, it’s a …

Posted in 91: MONSTER | Tagged

Postscript

I placed my hand against heart to quench the spark. Yet once I let you kiss me with the kisses of your mouth. I drank each word you wrote on my tongue. I swigged until I was fire. Wick and …

Posted in 79: EKPHRASTIC | Tagged

Review Short: Robert Adamson’s Net Needle

Net Needle begins with the thoughtful interlacing of seven poems. The first poem, ‘Listening to Cuckoos’, highlights the bird’s ‘two unchanging notes’ during the start of spring. Then, ‘Summer’, with its ‘pallid cuckoo call’ through the poet’s garden threads into ‘Garden Poem’ and how sunlight spans the course of a day until ‘patches of moonlight’ travel into the next poem, ‘Dorothy Wordsworth’. Here, we find the Romantic poet’s sister ruminating near a window where the moon moves ‘across the star-decked dark’.

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Libby Hart Reviews Kate Newmann, Robyn Rowland and Jessica Traynor

Labels are funny things. A lot of the time they can feel unnecessary – especially to an individual being labelled – but there are instances where such an exercise can prove useful. Writing about the Ireland is a good example of this. On one level we must consider Ireland as one entity, but we must also acknowledge that modern Ireland is not made of one but two territories. This statement shouldn’t be interpreted as overly simplistic. The complexities surrounding the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland extend beyond politics and are deeply ingrained in the language and identity of people from both sides of the border.

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Review Short: Libby Hart’s Wild

Poetry might be whispering these days, but only fools fail to hear it. The whisper might be the tough sibilance of protest, it might be the swirl of nostalgia for what will soon be lost and irretrievable, it might be the resilient, gnomish murmur that tells of what cannot be suppressed, and cannot either ever be quite directly expressed. And so, Huginn and Muninn open Libby Hart’s new collection of poetry.

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Elegy

When you died there was death in every room. I had to place my grieving in a box. Three years round I found myself weeping in a darkened cinema as I listened to George Harrison sing, Here Comes the Sun. …

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Libby Hart Reviews Kate Middleton

For her second poetry collection Ephemeral waters, award-winning poet Kate Middleton followed the course of the Colorado River. The Colorado’s 2,330km journey begins in Rocky Mountain National Park.

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Review Short: Danijela Kambaskovic’s Internal monologues: (a romance)

Internal monologues: (a romance) is Danijela Kambaskovic’s first poetry collection in English. Her two previous collections, Atlantis and Journey, were written in Serbian. Each monologue is voiced with relative simplicity, but don’t underestimate Kambaskovic. She uses English most vibrantly, which sets her apart from the native speaker. Her choice of words and ‘word play’ seems entirely alive and vibrant, as if she was approaching English in new and exciting ways.

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INTERLOCUTOR Editorial

Before you do anything else today, I want you to stop and listen. I want you to close your eyes and listen to your surroundings. What is it that you can hear? Birdsong? Is it the sound of passing cars? The wind whispering?

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Libby Hart Reviews Kate Fagan

First Light is Kate Fagan’s long-awaited second full-length collection. It was published in March 2012, almost ten years to the day after her successful debut, A Long Moment, was released. Ten years is a mere blip in time for planet Earth, but what does it mean to a poet and her history? Ten years can bring a well of experience and an abundance of living – of living the poet’s life and the musician’s career, and of the academic’s savoir vivre. Labels such as lover, wife and new mother are also pertinent to this slow burning collection.

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Submissions for INTERLOCUTOR Now Open!

Beginning with this issue of Cordite, we will accept up to four poems per submission. This includes text, sound, image, video and other digital forms of poetry. INTERLOCUTOR will include features, interviews, updates and more from just about every angle …

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Heather Taylor-Johnson Reviews Libby Hart

This Floating World is Libby Hart’s long-awaited follow-up to her 2006 Anne Elder Award-winning Fresh News from the Arctic. Like Arctic, the collection is heavily dependent on both the natural world and the nature of humans in relation to that world. I am making an educated guess that the book is a product of Hart’s residency at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in County Monaghan, Ireland, as the structure of the second and major part is a songline of the area.

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Libby Hart Reviews Rosanna Licari

An Absence of Saints is one of those poetry collections you pick up and immediately sense all the effort and dedication that has gone into making it, the reader easily recognising those long hours that have since stretched into years where the poet shaped and reshaped poems to then be brought thoughtfully together into a manuscript of common themes.

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Libby Hart Reviews Andrew Taylor

The Unhaunting is Andrew Taylor’s seventeenth book of poetry and comprises work written between 2003 and 2008. The collection is divided into five parts. The first, ‘The Importance of Waiting’, acts as a tidy introduction to the book’s themes of mortality, elusive truths and the environment, both as interior and exterior. Taylor begins with a vivid portrait of Perth’s suburban landscape where quiet concern spills over into the everyday.

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Libby Hart Reviews Catherine Bateson

Marriage for Beginners is Catherine Bateson's fifth collection of poetry. As the title suggests, marriage, or more precisely the breakdown of the poet's first marriage, is a key component of this work. Bateson has structured the volume in three sections. Although the connections are not so obvious in the beginning, it soon becomes clear that these three individual parts unfold like a three act drama filled with an array of characters and conflict.

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Libby Hart Reviews Angela Gardner

Angela Gardner's first collection of poetry, Parts of Speech, won the Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize for an unpublished manuscript in 2006 and was subsequently published a year later by University of Queensland Press. Views of the Hudson: A New York Book of Psalms is her second collection, although Gardner has published several books as a visual artist who also incorporates poetry with printmaking.

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These curtains, how they fluttered like wings.

These curtains, how they fluttered like wings. The singer, however, was no ugly eagle or aeroplane egg, the camera zoomed in of its own accord It’s like a postcard holiday home. Not present. Misrepresented. Waving hello – or the silent …

Posted in 38: POST-EPIC | Tagged

Libby Hart Reviews Dorothy Porter

The Bee Hut is Dorothy Porter's posthumous volume of poetry and her seventh collection to date, although her agent has indicated there are more books to come. Most poems assembled here were written in the last five years of her life and the final poem, ‘View from 417' was written only two weeks before her death from complications associated with breast cancer.

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from ‘This Floating World’

These curtains, how they fluttered like wings.

Posted in 37: EPIC | Tagged

Libby Hart Reviews Judith Beveridge

Throughout Judith Beveridge's career we have seen her take an element from one volume of poetry and expand on it in her next book. Take for example her first collection, The Domesticity of Giraffes (1987) where she wrote of 'Hannibal on the Alps'. This theme was then redeveloped to become 'Hannibal Speaks to his Elephants' in Accidental Grace (1996).

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