Martin Langford



Music Becomes Memory: What Listening to Music Does to the Poetic Voice

When I think about the music that’s closest to me, that’s an inextricable part of my identity in how unwaveringly I have carried it through time.

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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.

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Autumn Royal Reviews Martin Langford and Dan Disney

Matters of identity in relation to land are a major concern for poets writing in Australia. In the introduction to The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry (2009) John Kinsella points out that since its earliest forms Australian poetry expresses ‘a sense of urgency about communicating the uniqueness and significance of the Australian landscape, and the relationship between individuals and community and country/place’.

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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.

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A History of Australian Silences

I The first was a cross-hatch of bodily lightning – a nerve-net of increase-sites danger-sites food-in-its-season. The first silence shook out its leg and sang low in the drone. There were no gaps between it and story. The first silence …

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What Audience? Which Festival?

Having recently worked as director of the Australian Poetry Festival (Burning Lines, April 2001), Martin Langford offers his contribution to the continuing discussion about how to present poetry to the public.

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