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Jennifer Maiden

Jennifer Maiden

Jennifer Maiden's eighteenth poetry collection, Liquid Nitrogen, won the overall 2014 Victorian Prize for Literature, and was shortlisted for the International Griffin Poetry Prize and the Australian Prime Minister's Awards.

Jennifer Maiden reviews 'and dug my fingers in the sand' by Brook Emery

October 2000, no. 225 01 October 2000
From Masefield to Beaver, the anapaestic metre of a double unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one is often used in poems about the sea. It reproduces the rhythm of waves and also suggests a reflective but eager mood. Brook Emery’s strongly crafted collection is often based in anapaestic metre (‘a pelican, flying a loose ellipse / … sets his head / and great hooked wings lift him into ... (read more)

Jennifer Maiden reviews 'Around Here' by Cath Kenneally

April 2000, no. 219 01 April 2000
Ken Bolton recommends this: ‘What is most valuable in these poems, and what is rare, is Keneally’s avoidance of metaphor and of the conventionally poetic in favour of intelligence and educated plain-speak that, of course, isn’t so plain, so unitary ...’ This well-meant blurb could create some problems, as the volume is actually as metaphoric and conventionally poetic as most modern collect ... (read more)

Jennifer Maiden reviews 'Live from the Battlefield: From Vietnam to Baghdad, 35 Years in the World's War Zone' by Peter Arnett

April 1994, no. 159 01 April 1994
The celebrated journalist Peter Arnett’s new autobiography Live from the Battlefield partly solves one mystery for me. For the last eighteen months, whenever I discussed Arnett and his forthcoming memoirs with my husband (who was trying to research Arnett’s relationship with news network CNN after the Gulf War), I found myself constantly and inexplicably analysing Thackeray’s Vanity Fair and ... (read more)

'Death by Persona' by Jennifer Maiden

May 1999, no. 210 01 May 1999
During that torrid season when I was trying to place my forever unplaced and ultra-controversial novel Complicity (now called The Blood Judge, with good reason) one well-known and basically sane Fiction Editor comforted me. ‘You see, we don’t just publish a book, we have to market a personality.’ He later became even more famous for trying to market a white author (whom he had never met) as ... (read more)

Jennifer Maiden reviews 'Infinite City: 100 Sonnetinas' by Alex Skovron and 'Aerial Photography' by Joanne Burns

July 1999, no. 212 01 July 1999
Despite the differences in style, careful logic seems to me to be the prevalent characteristic of both these accomplished poetry collections. Hard-won logic, too. In each, we are made aware often of the processes of achieving intellectual and emotional assessment and balance. As the titles indicate, poem after poem vividly accumulates details to settle on a succinct but more distanced and distanci ... (read more)

'Clare and Kiribati', a new poem by Jennifer Maiden

April 2021, no. 430 23 March 2021
On Clare’s Skype the beach mixed every coral colour: the sheen,saw George, transforming their soft bedroom in her mother’sMt Druitt house to a Micronesian dusk. But this South TarawaBeach was much too empty. They had waited for the Afghani man,Farjaad, now for hours, but the boat that Clare had hiredfor her old friend Aunty to smuggle him from Nauru was off air.She said, ‘Maybe the Americans ... (read more)

'White Cyclamen', a new poem by Jennifer Maiden

June–July 2014, no. 362 01 June 2014
Nothing is whiter, like clouds with the sun inside them. Nothing is smoother, like clouds and the moon beside them. But they aren’t pure either. There is lily-green underside them. This is the start of an ASIO poem. Borges said living under dictators made him expert at metaphors. But lyricism is direct, adores the physical, the real. When young, one knew to recognise a worker for an intelligence ... (read more)
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