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David Gilbey

David Gilbey is Adjunct Senior Lecturer in English at Charles Sturt University in Wagga Wagga, President of Booranga Writers' Centre and Hon Secretary of ASAL.

David Gilbey reviews 'Museum of Space' by Peter Boyle

August 2004, no. 263 01 August 2004
‘His poems, now more and more exclusively in prose, have become taut and aphoristic, for he seeks patiently to release energy potential in language, and to make of poetry an instrument of revelation, indeed a close ally of philosophy.’ These words, by R.T. Cardinal in The Penguin Companion to European Literature (1969), in fact gloss the poetry of René Char. They could be taken as an apt des ... (read more)

David Gilbey reviews ‘Poems 1980-2008’ by Jan Owen

September 2008, no. 304 01 September 2008
Poems 1980–2008 selects from Jan Owen’s first five collections and adds eighty pages of new poems. This is an accomplished, playful, intelligent collection which confirms Owen’s status in the front ranks of Australian poets (why is there so little criticism or commentary on her work?). It is full of angels, goddesses, older men, iconic art, imagined sex, strange fruit, flowers, trees, birds, ... (read more)

David Gilbey reviews 'New and Selected Poems 1945-1993' by David Rowbotham

April 1994, no. 159 01 April 1994
... Be tough And dream. It's your only chance. Imagination precedes fact. Born in Toowoomba in 1924 and serving in the RAAF in the Second World War, David Rowbotham has produced nine books of poems, four of prose (stories, novel, monograph), worked collaboratively on an autobiography while employed at the Brisbane Courier Mail for thirty­two years, partly as the arts editor and partly as ... (read more)

David Gilbey reviews 'The Paradoxes of Water: Selected and new poems 1970–2005' by Rod Moran

October 2005, no. 275 01 October 2005
One of the things Rod Moran is good at is an oxymoronic tenacity – a kind of deliberate insouciance, a restrained violence – due to his embrace of metaphor. His best poems articulate disturbing comparisons and create surreal hybrids. You can see this in some of the early poems from High Rise Sniper (1970–80) selected for this new collection, such as ‘Chemical Worker’: ‘this pure acid, ... (read more)

David Gilbey reviews 'Glassmaker' by Shane McCauley, 'Geology' by Kevin Murray and 'Catch of the Day' by Max Richards

May 2006, no. 281 01 May 2006
Okay, I’ll take up Kevin Murray’s challenge in his poem ‘Freelance’ – that the reviewer is ‘a rogue knight / circling other men’s dragons’, though, like Max Richards, I reject Walter Benjamin’s Romantic formulation of criticism as a ‘fulfilment / of the artwork’. Each of these dragons has some fine points; all are modest in their own ways and illustrate Shane McCauley’s glo ... (read more)

David Gilbey reviews 'What the Painter Saw in Our Faces' by Peter Boyle and 'The June Fireworks' by Adrian Caesar

November 2001, no. 236 01 November 2001
These two new collections are obverses in contemporary Australian poetry and show the opposing, but often interlocked, tensions between modernism and postmodernism. The poems in both books concern themselves with art’s capacity to create or suggest other worlds. Both use painting and the visual arts in dramatically different ways as metaphors and motifs. Both collections fragment and project the ... (read more)

David Gilbey reviews 'The Passion Paintings: Poems 1983–2006' by Aileen Kelly

April 2007, no. 290 01 April 2007
On a recent plane trip from Wagga to Sydney, I was talking to an engineer who uses X-ray technology to examine the deep structure of aircraft after stress, to assess airworthiness. Complicated, fascinating, with considerable and direct bearing on passenger safety. By way of exchange, I read him parts of Aileen Kelly’s ‘Simple’, an impressive poem that, in three stanzas, X-rays the history of ... (read more)

David Gilbey reviews 'Christina Stead' by Jennifer Gribble, 'Janet Frame: Subversive fictions' by Gina Mercer, and 'The Ironic Eye: The poetry and prose of Peter Goldsworthy' by Andrew Riemer

August 1994, no. 163 01 August 1994
I am enmeshed in criticism. Criticism defines and speaks me. I criticise, therefore I have a job. But criticism is a tricky business. It’s partial, changes from one time/place/person to another (as Jennifer Gribble acknowledges). I’m not an expert on Janet Frame or Christina Stead (although I’ve included books by each on courses in the past) and my awareness of Peter Goldsworthy’s oeuvre ... (read more)

David Gilbey reviews 'Masculinities and Identities' by David Buchbinder

October 1994, no. 165 01 October 1994
Running hot on the national Austlit Discussion Group email waves recently was the question of speaking position and voice for men in contemporary critical discourse. What had occasioned the discussion was ASAL’s annual conference in Canberra, part of which had been a very successful morning at the Australian War Memorial focussing on writing and war (e.g. Alan Gould and Don Charlwood). On the c ... (read more)
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