- 115: SPACE
with A Sometimes
114: NO THEME 13
with J Toledo & C Tse
113: INVISIBLE WALLS
with A Walker & D Disney
112: TREAT
with T Dearborn
111: BABY
with S Deo & L Ferney
110: POP!
with Z Frost & B Jessen
109: NO THEME 12
with C Maling & N Rhook
108: DEDICATION
with L Patterson & L Garcia-Dolnik
107: LIMINAL
with B Li
106: OPEN
with C Lowe & J Langdon
105: NO THEME 11
with E Grills & E Stewart
104: KIN
with E Shiosaki
103: AMBLE
with E Gomez and S Gory
102: GAME
with R Green and J Maxwell
101: NO THEME 10
with J Kinsella and J Leanne
100: BROWNFACE
with W S Dunn
99: SINGAPORE
with J Ip and A Pang
97 & 98: PROPAGANDA
with M Breeze and S Groth
96: NO THEME IX
with M Gill and J Thayil
95: EARTH
with M Takolander
94: BAYT
with Z Hashem Beck
93: PEACH
with L Van, G Mouratidis, L Toong
92: NO THEME VIII
with C Gaskin
91: MONSTER
with N Curnow
90: AFRICAN DIASPORA
with S Umar
89: DOMESTIC
with N Harkin
88: TRANSQUEER
with S Barnes and Q Eades
87: DIFFICULT
with O Schwartz & H Isemonger
86: NO THEME VII
with L Gorton
85: PHILIPPINES
with Mookie L and S Lua
84: SUBURBIA
with L Brown and N O'Reilly
83: MATHEMATICS
with F Hile
82: LAND
with J Stuart and J Gibian
81: NEW CARIBBEAN
with V Lucien
80: NO THEME VI
with J Beveridge
57.1: EKPHRASTIC
with C Atherton and P Hetherington
57: CONFESSION
with K Glastonbury
56: EXPLODE
with D Disney
55.1: DALIT / INDIGENOUS
with 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
Maria Takolander
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
EARTH Editorial
Why ‘Earth’? Because we are of it, because we are destroying it, because there is nowhere else. Because to think about anything else right now feels like dissociation. The theme of this special issue isn’t radical. It’s not political. It’s …
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged Maria Takolander
Submission to Cordite 94: EARTH
Why EARTH? Because we are of it, because we are destroying it, because there is nowhere else.
Posted in GUNCOTTON
Tagged Kent MacCarter, Maria Takolander
Waking in the Blue
Addressed to Robert Lowell The night attendant at the service station, garishly lit when I had thought the world extinguished, pumps $10 of fuel into our tank. My plastic moneybox looks childish in the car’s backseat, but the silver coins …
Posted in 89: DOMESTIC
Tagged Maria Takolander
‘Geelong checks its modernist warranty’
In 1890, an American aeronaut named Millie Viola departs the Geelong showgrounds in a hot air balloon, in order to give an assembled crowd of onlookers a parachute jump display.
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged Anthony Lynch, Cameron Lowe, Corey Wakeling, Dick Diver, Jo Langdon, John Bechervaise, Maria Takolander, Millie Viola
Re-visiting Chernobyl
1. Liquidation1 The earth has always been so accommodating, enfolding all kinds of calamities: the meteoric end of dinosaurs, the Neanderthals and other botched experiments, the debris of bronze and iron ages, modern battlegrounds . . . And there is …
Posted in 86: NO THEME VII
Tagged Maria Takolander
Review Short: Chapbooks from Simon Armitage and Philip Gross
Poetry has a peculiar provenance in the public sphere. To describe the situation with egregious simplicity, some allege that poetry should speak to and for the people, while others assert that poetry should be avant-garde, testing the conventions of language and enacting nothing less than a transformation of society.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Maria Takolander, Philip Gross, Simon Armitage
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
Nox
A poem addressed to Anne Carson My husband is wheeled from emergency to theatre along a hallway carpeted with silence. Escorted to a waiting room, almost fin de siècle Victorian, I survey medical books encased by glass and blighted like …
Posted in 75: FUTURE MACHINES
Tagged Maria Takolander
Introduction to Autumn Royal’s She Woke & Rose
Cover design by Zoë Sadokierski She Woke & Rose introduces us to a poet, Autumn Royal, who is unafraid to spark light in the darkest of places. The poems in this impressive debut collection illuminate the uneasy space of the …
Posted in INTRODUCTIONS
Tagged Autumn Royal, Kent MacCarter, Maria Takolander, Zoë Sadokierski
Review Short: Judith Beveridge’s Hook and Eye
Last year I heard Judith Beveridge interviewed by Bronwyn Lea at the 2014 Queensland Poetry Festival. Aside from being left with the enduring impression that Lea should have her own TV show, I was also struck by a number of Beveridge’s revelations regarding her praxis. Beveridge confessed, for instance, that she does not like listening to music. Nevertheless, she described the process of writing poetry in a way that resonated with the classical foundations of lyric verse in music. Beveridge revealed that she begins writing by mobilising rhythm, rhyme, feeling and alliteration to bring forth the words and images of her poetry. She begins, in other words, from an embodied experience of language – as the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes it in The Phenomenology of Language – that is essential to us all.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Bronwyn Lea, Judith Beveridge, Maria Takolander, Paul Kane
Prithvi Varatharajan Interviews Maria Takolander
Takolander’s work often dwells on the self, the body, and history, each of which she de-familiarises in her poetry, making it seem strange, or revealing the strangeness that was there all along.
Posted in INTERVIEWS
Tagged Maria Takolander, Prithvi Varatharajan
Martin Langford Reviews Maria Takolander
Maria Takolander has grouped the poems in this, her second collection, to isolate three slightly different impulses in her work. Because the central section is comprised of poems whose point of view underlies those of sections one and three, I shall deal with it first. All of its poems explore the dark and unforgiving nature of the world.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Maria Takolander, Martin Langford
Maria Takolander Reviews Bronwyn Lea
It is a tribute to the quality and readability of Bronwyn Lea’s poetry that a selection of her work forms the second volume in the new George Braziller series (edited by Paul Kane), which aims to introduce contemporary Australian poets to American readers. True to lyric poetry, Lea’s poems are musical in their composition, and they can be intimate in their subject matter. However, Lea’s work is never just about crafting agreeable verse, and it is never just about her personal experience.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Bronwyn Lea, Maria Takolander
Review Short: Tracy Ryan’s Unearthed
Tracy Ryan’s seventh full-length collection of poems, Unearthed, comprises of an extraordinary series of elegies and elegiac poems. The elegiac mode here is both intimate and epic in scale. These poems commemorate the most private moments shared with lost lovers – those times ‘relished and wasted’ (12), ‘snug’ in ‘coffin-dark’ beds (32) – as well as the ways in which our inhabited environments – mountains, the plant and animal worlds, even glimpses of the moon – are ghosted by the dead.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Maria Takolander, Tracy Ryan
The Twilight Zone
Maple Street, Smalltown, Ohio. Sunday afternoon, a regular sitting room, an urgent news broadcast. Doom. And then nothing. Electricity lingers briefly, like a soul, until there is only the grey bulge of the screen and its putrid reflection. A man …
Posted in 50: JACKPOT!
Tagged Maria Takolander
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.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Ali Alizadeh, Claire Potter, Maria Takolander
Dogs in Space
Somewhere in Patagonia, an old man carries an axe, and a kitten blows like tumbleweed down a street otherwise empty. The closed storefronts are vacant as dreams, and the traffic lights like absence before the raw wind. It is barely …
Posted in 40: CREATIVE COMMONS
Tagged Maria Takolander
