Australian Poetry

Wolf Notes by Judith Beveridge

March 2004, no. 259

Admirer’s of Judith Beveridge’s distinctive talent have had a long wait between collections (it’s eight years since Accidental Grace), although she has been published consistently in anthologies and journals, and poems from the central sequence of this collection, ‘Between the Palace and the Bodhi Tree’, won the 2003 Josephine Ulrick National Poetry Prize. Patience is rewarded: this is a collection of impressive poetic maturity.

... (read more)

The Sleep of a Learning Man by Anthony Lawrence

by Peter Pierce •

March 2004, no. 259

Peter Pierce reviews 'The Sleep of a Learning Man' by Anthony Lawrence

The Sleep of a Learning Man is the sixth verse collection from the gifted and exacting Anthony Lawrence. He has also written a novel. The epigraph to this book gives some hint as to where the poet stands, and where he intends to go. It is from Antonio Porcia: ‘I am chained to the earth to pay for the freedom of my eyes.’ But looking is only one means to find his way, a dilemma that a number of the forty-two poems gathered here confronts.

... (read more)

The Metal Detectors

by Jaya Savige •

December 2003–January 2004, no. 257

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.

To the north of the island, near the old artillery battery
we played hide and seek as kids in acres of bladey-grass.
Where the war epic motion picture was shot recently
no one was allowed within a thousand metres.

... (read more)

The Best Australian Poems 2003 edited by Peter Craven & The Best Australian Poetry 2003 edited by Martin Duwell

by David McCooey •

December 2003–January 2004, no. 257

David McCooey reviews ‘The Best Australian Poems 2003’ edited by Peter Craven and ‘The Best Australian Poetry 2003’ edited by Martin Duwell

Writing this on the first Tuesday in November, I am struck by how different contemporary Australian poetry is from the Melbourne Cup. There is no money in poetry, of course, and in horse racing everyone, even the horses, are much better dressed. What’s more, despite complaints to the contrary, the returns are usually better when it comes to reading poetry than spending your days at the TAB. Martin Duwell’s The Best Australian Poetry 2003 and Peter Craven’s The Best Australian Poems 2003 are dead certs, compared to the boundless unreliability of horses.

... (read more)

For Yette in a Red T-Shirt, Running

by Jennifer Strauss •

November 2003, no. 256

A day spent scratching civilisation’s sores –

Amnesty calls for Urgent Action;

a ministerial mouth, mean as a steel trap

closes another deluded seeker of asylum

behind barbed wire; civil liberties

are spooked by terror; girl children

trafficked to sexual servitude –

and I’m spent too. Not even that trusty spur,

the great-grandmother of my children

dead in another camp, another winter, another story,

can prick this chilled indifference to bleed –

although my mind’s rubbed raw, my heart

is dry as yesterday’s crusts.

... (read more)

On La Cienega

by John Tranter •

November 2003, no. 256

By the filling station on La Cienega a burger joint

somehow survives. This Sunday morning

a pink Thunderbird sags at the kerb,

and an old Studebaker, paint flaking.

... (read more)

The Indigo Book of Modern Australian Sonnets edited by Geoff Page

by Richard King •

November 2003, no. 256

This book, says Geoff Page in his introduction, should ‘cheer up those who are prone to lament the passing of “form” from contemporary poetry’. Speaking as one who does employ the f-word now and again, I’m very glad to hear it, though I catch the note of sardonicism and think that Page rather misses the point when he writes, again a little satirically, that some ‘may complain that fourteen lines “do not a sonnet always make”‘. I, for one, am more likely to complain that a poem of roughly sonnet proportions ‘does not a decent poem make’; the sonnet (I’d say) is a means, not an end. Apart from the obvious cases of ‘straitjacketing’, of forcing a form upon such content as may be naturally resistant to it, there is the fact that too smooth a rehashing of forms is one of the things – just think of Kipling – that announces a poet as irretrievably minor. Take the Shakespearean sonnet, for example: in poets of only moderate skill, its closing couplet will tend to betray a cluck of self-congratulation.

... (read more)

Shadows

by Peter Steele •

September 2003, no. 254

Bowed from the supermarket, a week’s rations

jumbling the plastic, I saw in shadow

my dead father. He crept the pavement, burdened

as I am not by a lost country.

... (read more)

In ‘the Ukraine’

by J.S. Harry •

June–July 2003, no. 252

He meets a man with an icicle voice

who says it is ‘Mind’s disease’

to act impulsively; this man elevates

‘Reason’ to a pedestal, where he worships

at a cold, stony chiselled face, from afar

(& sometimes Peter sees him go up close, to peer,

at something old, cold, & slushy, underneath it –

which, he tells Peter, is a high I.Q.-ed

pickled brain, in a jar).

... (read more)

Lost in the Foreground by Stephen Edgar

by Judith Beveridge •

May 2003, no. 251

Judith Beveridge reviews 'Lost in the Foreground' by Stephen Edgar

Stephen Edgar’s fifth volume, Lost in the Foreground, is a book of marvels, both technically and in the elegant, magisterial reach of its content. He is wonderfully inventive, and his complex rhyme schemes and forms are achieved with such precision and finesse that one can only conjecture as to how long each piece must have taken to become so lovingly and artfully realised.

... (read more)