Jaya Savige

Jaya Savige’s most recent collection is Change Machine (UQP 2020). He is Assistant Professor of English and Head of Creative Writing at New College of the Humanities, Northeastern University, and Poetry Editor for The Australian. His previous collections include Latecomers, which won the New South Wales Premier's Prize for Poetry, and Surface to Air, shortlisted for The Age Poetry Book of the Year and the West Australian Premier’s Prize. He read for a PhD on James Joyce at the University of Cambridge as a Gates Scholar, and has held Australia Council residencies at the B.R. Whiting Library, Rome, and the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris.

Jaya Savige reviews ‘Someone Else’s Country’ by Peter Docker

November 2005, no. 276 • 01 November 2005

With the Harbour as the backdrop … the Festival of Dreaming seems well named. Looking out across the water, it is easy to dream away, the lights, the roads, the buildings, to picture the odd cooking fire, to smell that fish cooking. Written in hotel rooms while working as a professional actor in various indigenous film, television and theatre productions, Peter Docker’s Someone Else’s C ... (read more)

‘The Metal Detectors’ by Jaya Savige

December 2003–January 2004, no. 257 • 01 December 2003

He sang of old coins buried beneath the dunes, to the north of the island, near the old artillery battery. For forty years he rowed for mullet north, and south, where the war epic motion picture was shot recently. ... (read more)

Jaya Savige reviews 'Phosphorescence' by Graeme Mile, 'Peeling Apples' by Tessa Morris-Suzuki and 'James Stinks (and so does Chuck)' by Nick Riemer

May 2006, no. 281 • 01 May 2006

The title of Nick Riemer’s first volume of poems is taken from a piece of graffiti in a Sydney church, and the poems therein are aptly replete with a peripatetic, contemporary metaphysical wit. The volume as a whole has a sharp, cultivated air of philosophical enquiry, tending to nihilism, and is shot through with the poet’s continuous testing of the limits of language. The opening poem, ‘T ... (read more)

'Bach to the Fuchsia', a new poem by Jaya Savige

June–July 2020, no. 422 • 26 May 2020

In thrall to thresholds, drawn to every brink, at three weeks oldan infant’s eye adores the frames of things, the joinery that holdseach smudge in place, and individuates. It feasts on edges, architraves and jambs, the skirting boardsof portals, vistas, stairs – the sinew ... (read more)

Jaya Savige reviews 'The Goldfinches of Baghdad' by Robert Adamson

September 2006, no. 284 • 01 September 2006

Critics often comment on the ‘shape’ a poem makes – not the concrete form of the words on the page, but the poem’s conceptual trajectory, the statement, development and resolution (or lack thereof) of its central theme. What is most striking about Robert Adamson’s first collection of poems published in North America, The Goldfinches of Baghdad, however, is the shape the collection makes ... (read more)

Jaya Savige reviews 'Macquarie PEN anthology of Aboriginal literature' edited by Anita Heiss and Peter Minter

May 2008, no. 301 • 01 May 2008

If ever there was a national question, it is this ... We were good enough to fight as Anzacs. We earned equality then. Why do you deny it to us now? ... We ask you to be proud of the Australian Aboriginal, and to take his hand in friendship … At worst, we are no more dirty, lazy, stupid, criminal, or immoral than yourselves … After 150 years, we ask you to review the situation and give us a ... (read more)