Rachael Mead



Review Short: Rachael Mead’s The Flaw in the Pattern and Philip Nielsen’s Wildlife of Berlin

Holding each of these books is a pleasure. Their two-tone covers have different but complementary botanical design motifs while the master design elements of the UWAP Poetry series, pushing on 23 titles, of which they are part gives them a uniform appearance.

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Pete Hay Reviews Rachael Mead and Amanda Joy

The chapbook is the ideal public presentation of poetry for the times in which we live. It is even more portable than the conventionally slim collection; its humbler production values permit poets to get their work ‘out there’, thereby meeting the democratic criterion of accessibility for both poet and reader, and it is conducive to the rigours of thematic focus that a small body of work encourages. Long may it flourish.

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Rachael Mead Reviews Stuart Cooke

Cooke has long been uneasy with the label of ecopoet, as he mentioned in a 2014 interview for Peril Magazine. While his previous collection, Edge Music (2011), focused on writing from the geographical and historical edges of landscapes, Opera pushes beyond an attempt to speak ecologically.

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What lies broken

after Dorianne Laux This shard of Pangea’s shattered plate. Long nights by the inkling of day. Our front door’s rusted bell. Tonic with the spike of gin. Promises, innocence, childhood faith. That mirror, my bright luck splintered to slivers. The …

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Review Short: Rachael Mead’s The Sixth Creek

Rachael Mead is part of a fine group of contemporary Australian poets writing about nature in nuanced and resonant ways. She brings her own slant to the genre with her first collection, The Sixth Creek, while doffing her hat to celebrated writers like Mary Oliver, Thoreau, and Judith Wright.

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The Waterfall

Summer flays the valley, the skinless blue of a sky with no air, only distance, a vacuum in sharp focus. Birds ignorant of the physics of flight hang in the rawness, waiting for gravity to notice. Sounds are magnified; their …

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IWD: Murder, She Wrote

Three lines from The Seventh section of Finola Moorhead’s A Handwritten Modern Classic, first published in 1977 and re-issued March 2013 by Spinifex Press, close out a varied discussion by the author on the political nature of death, that Socrates’ death ‘was political’ (as underlined in the handwritten original), that Socrates was not a writer and that writers ‘need teachers like Socrates’. In the same section she argues that artists often use ‘Another’s pain … for the success of expression’. ‘Art as comfort’, Moorhead follows on, ‘ — strange concept. / Such assumptions aren’t questioned often enough.’

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What Will We Inherit?

The galah and the goldfinch. These trees but not the grasses. Instinct. Guilt. History, with its lashing tail. Obligation, passed into my hand like a stone. My grandfather’s bible. Your mother’s pearls. The rounded rocks lying quiet in the creek. …

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