- 114: NO THEME 13with J Toledo & C Tse 113: INVISIBLE WALLSwith A Walker & D Disney 112: TREATwith T Dearborn 111: BABYwith S Deo & L Ferney 110: POP!with Z Frost & B Jessen 109: NO THEME 12with C Maling & N Rhook 108: DEDICATIONwith L Patterson & L Garcia-Dolnik 107: LIMINALwith B Li 106: OPENwith C Lowe & J Langdon 105: NO THEME 11with E Grills & E Stewart 104: KINwith E Shiosaki 103: AMBLEwith E Gomez and S Gory 102: GAMEwith R Green and J Maxwell 101: NO THEME 10with J Kinsella and J Leanne 100: BROWNFACE with W S Dunn 99: SINGAPOREwith J Ip and A Pang 97 & 98: PROPAGANDAwith M Breeze and S Groth 96: NO THEME IXwith M Gill and J Thayil 95: EARTHwith M Takolander 94: BAYTwith Z Hashem Beck 93: PEACHwith L Van, G Mouratidis, L Toong 92: NO THEME VIIIwith C Gaskin 91: MONSTERwith N Curnow 90: AFRICAN DIASPORAwith S Umar 89: DOMESTICwith N Harkin 88: TRANSQUEERwith S Barnes and Q Eades 87: DIFFICULTwith O Schwartz & H Isemonger 86: NO THEME VIIwith L Gorton 85: PHILIPPINESwith Mookie L and S Lua 84: SUBURBIAwith L Brown and N O'Reilly 83: MATHEMATICSwith F Hile 82: LANDwith J Stuart and J Gibian 81: NEW CARIBBEANwith V Lucien 80: NO THEME VIwith J Beveridge 57.1: EKPHRASTICwith C Atherton and P Hetherington 57: CONFESSIONwith K Glastonbury 56: EXPLODE with D Disney 55.1: DALIT / INDIGENOUSwith 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
Matthew Hall
20 Poets, a Free Anthology from Cordite Books
The geographic barriers that can, at times, hinder Australian literature are no longer relevant, and poetry communities around the world must be enlightened by the commanding, demanding and exciting trajectory of contemporary Australian poetics.
Posted in GUNCOTTON
Tagged Alan Loney, Anne Elvey, Autumn Royal, Bonny Cassidy, Broede Carmody, Chris Mann, Claire Nashar, derek motion, Javant Biarujia, Jeanine Leane, Jen Crawford, John Hawke, Kent MacCarter, Kris Hemensley, Matthew Hall, mez breeze, Natalie Harkin, Omar Sakr, Rachael Briggs, Ross Gibson, Tanya Thaweeskulchai, Tony Birch, Zoë Sadokierski
Introduction to Matthew Hall’s False Fruits
Fruit is the apogee of the pastoral. It’s what the work, the waiting, the ritual and the thanks are for. But the making of fruit is costly and even the ‘natural’ cycle of things will be managed so some factors are privileged over others. In this cycle of post-lyrical poems, Hall questions the form and circumstances of these factors. What are they?
Posted in INTRODUCTIONS
Tagged Alissa Dinallo, John Kinsella, Lily Mae Martin, Matthew Hall
Written Land: A Lionel Fogarty Chapbook
For Lionel Fogarty, the divide between what is said and what goes unsaid, between Indigenous life and non-Indigenous assertions, exemplifies this pressure, poetically and politically.
Posted in CHAPBOOKS
Tagged Lionel Fogarty, Matthew Hall
Simon Eales Reviews On Violence in the Work of J.H. Prynne
Violence and poetics are the key poles in Canadian-Australian critic and poet Matthew Hall’s new scholarly release. Hall charts how the British late-modernist poet, Prynne, responds to violent events of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries – from the Holocaust, through apartheid, Chernobyl, and Australian colonialism, to Abu Ghraib. These affective sites of violence are linguistic, too: chapter two takes its subject as the ‘the sociolinguistic war’ which takes place under ‘the strain of economic factions and the reach of the multinational resource sector’.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged J.H. Prynne, Matthew Hall, Simon Eales
Matthew Hall Reviews Writing Australian Unsettlement
In his essay on Charles Olson, ‘Open Field Poetics and the Politics of Movement’, David Herd bridges the geopolitical gulf between Hannah Arendt’s conception of ‘statelessness’ and Giorgio Agamben’s ongoing inquiry into the state of exception, biopolitics and nationhood. Herd contends that:
… [f]or complex and evolving reasons, the modern political state has become, by the early part of the Twentieth Century, synonymous with the idea of nation. The consequence of this was that citizenship came to be identified with national affiliation. Simply put, to fall outside of one national jurisdiction was to fall outside of all jurisdictions.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Jong Ah Sing, Matthew Hall, michael farrell, Ned Kelly, Philip Mead
How Poems Work: Nora Gould’s ‘While he waited for the school bus’
‘While he waited for the school bus’ is just one example of the extraordinary work that defines Nora Gould’s new book. Steadfastly observant, carefully detailed and with the capacity to twin trauma and beauty, Gould’s debut collection represents some of …
Posted in GUNCOTTON
Tagged Matthew Hall, Nora Gould
Arc 75: The Arc-Cordite Poetry Special Issue
Cover art by Ian Friend My plumbing? Not exactly. But, well, after 14 months in the planning, making, mulling, and editing, it’s finally here: Arc Poetry Magazine 75: The Arc-Cordite Poetry Special Issue. Shane Rhodes and I (Kent MacCarter) co-wrote …
Posted in GUNCOTTON
Tagged Chris Johnson, Jenny Haysom, Kent MacCarter, Kevin Matthews, Matthew Hall, Monty Reid, Robyn Jeffrey, Serge Duguay, Shane Rhodes, Zenobia Frost
Terrance Houle and Adrian Stimson: Performative Gestures from the Canadian Prairies
Italo Calvino argued that writing was a combinatorial exercise and that, for him, reading represented ‘a way of exercising the potentialities contained in the system of signs’. I would like to keep this declarative at the forefront of our investigation into the work of Terrance Houle, neither with a confirmative bias not leaning towards negating the statement of Calvino, but thinking through his statement in our analysis of a few of Houle’s images.
Posted in ARTWORKS, ESSAYS
Tagged Adrian Stimson, Italo Calvino, Matthew Hall, Terrance Houle
Hayland: An Intertext: Writing Lycidas through The Western Producer
Yet once more, in commodity crops, again in aster yellows, with merits in stacked resistance, I scramble for feed coverage and demand the forward position. It is important to reduce shattering before late crop reports filter in. Bitter constraint is …
Posted in 59: GONDWANALAND
Tagged Matthew Hall
Prints in the New Snow: Notes on ‘Es Lebe der König’, J.H. Prynne’s Elegy to Paul Celan
In 1966 Prynne emphasised the necessity for poetry to ‘emphatically reclaim the power of knowledge for each and any of us in our common answerability as the creatures of language.’[1. Keston Sutherland, “Hilarious Absolute Daybreak,” Glossator: Theory and Practice of the Commentary, 2 (2010): 115-148, 117.] The ekphrastic, proprioceptive and dedicatory analysis that Prynne demanded of his readers through Kitchen Poems and The White Stone reaches a point of crescendo with Brass in 1971.
Posted in ESSAYS, SCHOLARLY
Tagged Alexander Pope, J.H. Prynne, Matthew Hall, Paul Celan
X About X: An Interview with Shane Rhodes
Queensland Poetry Festival is thrilled to welcome award-winning Canadian poet Shane Rhodes as the 2013 Arts Queensland Poet in Residence. Since the residency program began in 2005, Queenslanders have had the pleasure of hosting an international poet for three months each year, bringing their ideas and creative energy to inform, influence, and engage fellow poets.
Posted in INTERVIEWS
Tagged Matthew Hall, Sarah Gory, Shane Rhodes
Review Short: Matthew Hall’s Hyaline
How does one review a book of poems that has no table of contents and no page numbers? More to the point, perhaps, is how does one read such a book? What do those absences signify? Individual poems have titles, yet they seem to move on, almost glide on, from what preceded them, and into what follows. “Artifice’, the book’s first poem in the section ‘Harm’s Light’ in fact has each section beginning with the last line or two of the preceding section, pausing, but resuming , then handing on to its successor.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Andrew Taylor, Matthew Hall
Comings, Goings and GUNCOTTON
There is only one appropriate way to begin my first news post as Managing Editor of Cordite – that being to extend, then extend further, then possibly dislocating my e-arm in extending further still, a massive thank you (for all …
Posted in GUNCOTTON
Tagged Adrian Wiggins, Ali Alizadeh, David Prater, editors, Emilie Zoey Baker, Emily Stewart, GUNCOTTON, Kent MacCarter, Matthew Hall
An Introduction to the Work of Glen Phillips
I initially approached Glen Phillips in the hopes that he would contribute to Cordite Poetry Review’s Children of Malley II edition, whimsically playing off the Malley / Mallee imagery. As Glen’s poetry, criticism and almost entire oeuvre deals with the landscape of Western Australia I thought what better assonant reference could we have for this, our second Malley edition.
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged Glen Phillips, Matthew Hall
Matthew Hall Interviews Peter Larkin
This interview was began on a midday walk along the Coventry and Warwick borders in England’s temperate May and was concluded over the course of these past months. My own visit to Warwick was a delight, though suffering from the travails of long distant travel and foreign flu bugs, it was a long awaited and much anticipated trip.
Posted in INTERVIEWS
Tagged Matthew Hall, Peter Larkin
Introducing Peter Larkin
To my delight, and profound confusion, one morning there was a message in my inbox from Peter Larkin. Peter contacted me after reading my poem ‘a continuous plain’, which was published in Cordite’s Pastoral issue, edited by Stuart Cooke, and which quotes a line of his: ‘true scarcity of no trespass.’
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged ecopoetics, Matthew Hall, Peter Larkin
Matthew Hall Reviews John Watson
Erasure Traces is an experimental work, in terms of linguistic innovation, textual depth and in the application of theoretical constructs to the formulation of poetry. I feel that there is a great amount of depth to the work which may be overlooked at a preliminary read and so I undertake this review to underscore the possibilities and potentialities that I see as dominant substrates in Watson's work.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged John Watson, Matthew Hall
J.H. Prynne and the Late-Modern Epic
The poetry of J.H. Prynne has recently come to the attention of an international set of poets and literary theorists. This attention has coincided with the release of his updated collected work, Poems, and, coincidently, with Prynne's retirement from a teaching position at the University of Cambridge and as a librarian at Gonville and Caius College. The attention that the rerelease of Poems has incited is due partially to a growing awareness of contemporary British Poetry, and marks the first time that Prynne's poetry has been made widely available outside of the small press publications of Cambridge.
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged epic, J.H. Prynne, Matthew Hall, pastoral
Matthew Hall Reviews Les Wicks
In Les Wicks' The Ambrosiacs visual and tonal senses, shown through a series of relentless escapes and endscapes, create a striking depiction of the poet's perceptions and observations. The fundamental basis of Wicks' collection, and the manner in which the reader is encouraged to approach them, is as an elegy: a series of memories and dedications aiming for the preservation of the instant, even if the instants are acknowledged as fleeting.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Les Wicks, Matthew Hall
‘a continuous plain …’
a continuous plain interrupted so; ligatures extending from birthplace. 'true scarcity of no trespass;' the questions of function can now be delayed. where homesteader and exile drink of the same cup; it is the dialect of language which qualifies. an …
Posted in 33: PASTORAL
Tagged Matthew Hall
Polyvalent
meditated by praise at variance a magnificent structure vessels of cartography by hunger's voices as store house projections that divisionless resonant direction fields tessellated expression replete escapes mnemonic paths contrarily lyrical a grafting which does not supervene on irresolute divisions …
Posted in 33: PASTORAL
Tagged Matthew Hall
Pastoral Variations (Two Fragments)
the prairies wear the veil of corporeal frontiers like skin-grafts a map whose land marks the grain edge of formidable rivers, the mark of trade routes discernable only by sight or song dissected by barbed wire of varying tensions, sung …
Posted in 33: PASTORAL
Tagged Matthew Hall
