Paul Hetherington



Contemporary Chinese Poetry in Translation: The Homings and Departures Project

Image by Wang Yin Homings & Departures is a poetry translation project of the China Australia Writing Centre (CAWC) at Curtin and Fudan Universities, and the International Poetry Studies Institute (IPSI) at the University of Canberra. As worldwide borders close …

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5 Translated Yosuke Tanaka Poems

Image courtesy of The High Window. For a Person Suffering from Air-Conditioning Syndrome Because Japan is located at the edge of Asia you can enjoy great soup noodles there Let’s start with that as an introduction When you enter a …

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Review Short: Shastra Deo’s The Agonist

Shastra Deo’s first volume of poetry, The Agonist contains many poems about corporeal life, and about the separation of bodies, problematising the connections between body and thought. The poems often turn the inside out, as it were, opening up a poetic anatomy of internal organs and interior life.

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West Coast, Ireland

We follow high grass and dipping fields where a horizon is painted lead white and dark strokes lather the ocean. You speak of memory, but it doesn’t hold. Granite and limestone patch the landscape like obduracy and words are grabbed …

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Alice Allan Reviews Watching the World: Impressions of Canberra

What is it about Canberra that invites so many definitions? Comparing where we live with where we don’t is an Australian fixation, but there’s a specific energy to the way that people with a connection to Canberra go about this – they will start deriding or defending the place minutes after you’re introduced.

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EKPHRASTIC Editorial: Poetry that Sees

In ancient Greece ekphrasis was understood more broadly than in the contemporary world, indicating a complex genealogy for this term that encompasses so much fine poetry as well as many other forms of writing.

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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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In Those Rooms

                                              In those   rooms   we   thought we   knew  the   way  things were.                                            An ordered disposition of light through shutters, bright spills on the floor.                                            A painting framed like a question across a wall.                                       You pointed to it, saying “it’s made of cut-up canvas”. Twenty fragments …

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Alexis Late Reviews Paul Hetherington

Artistically, burnt umber is an earthy shade intensified by heat. It is a colour synonymous with this country – familiar to anyone who has trekked through Western Australia, from where Paul Hetherington originally hails. In this collection, it is also a metaphor for memory, which, through the heat of feelings in the present, attains an intensity that overwhelms the original events.

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Submission to Cordite 56.1: EKPHRASTIC

Poetry for Cordite 56.1: EKPHRASTIC is guest-edited by Paul Hetherington and Cassandra Atherton. NOTE: due to the nature of what we’re seeking, we’re going to be accepting submissions to this special issue for a considerable amount of time; submissions close …

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Review Short: Luke Fischer’s The Poet as Phenomenologist: Rilke and the New Poems

Rilke’s poetry is known for its brilliance and individuality and, to an extent, for its variability. His early work is largely of a neo-Romantic and religious temper, suffused with generalisations and subjective gestures that frequently strain after significance. Nevertheless, he produced some important early poetry, most notably in his three-volume Book of Hours. In these works, ways of seeing, perceiving and understanding the world are already critical questions for him. However, had these poems been all he left to posterity, he would not now be a household name.

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What Was Left

A towel and bathing cap remained, and a tattered copy of a novel: The Red Room. They belonged to 13-year-old Lena, his Swiss pen pal, who stayed for five weeks during a ferocious summer. Nearly every day his parents took …

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Paul Hetherington Reviews The turnrow Anthology of Contemporary Australian Poetry

John Kinsella is an Australian poet with a high profile and a long record of achievement, including winning the 2013 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry. He is also an assiduous anthologiser. Most notably, he edited The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry (2008), one of the more successful of recent attempts to establish an indicative canon of Australian poetry (although this was not, perhaps, Kinsella’s avowed intention with that book).

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