Australian Poetry

Mangroves by Laurie Duggan

April 2003, no. 250

Poems are like mangroves. They lodge and grow in the mind, becoming part of us, just as these plants take root in estuarine silt. Even on the page, there is sometimes a resemblance. As its title suggests, Laurie Duggan’s first volume since New and Selected Poems (1996) is substantially a product of his recent move to Brisbane, containing a large section of poems coloured by references to the city’s subtropical conditions. However, Mangroves also brings together varied material that dates from 1988 to 1994, some of which – notably the ‘Blue Hills’ sequences – has been published elsewhere.

... (read more)

Ideological Moments

by Peter Porter •

September 2002, no. 244

The history of emancipation.

Overtaken, riding uphill.

... (read more)

Paul Kane reviews ‘The Poetry of Les Murray’ edited by Laurie Hergenhan and Bruce Clunies Ross, ‘Les Murray’ by Steven Matthews, and ‘Poems the Size of Photographs’ by Les Murray

by Paul Kane •

May 2002, no. 241

You might expect a book of eighty-eight new poems by Les Murray to be sizeable (most of his recent single volumes run to about sixty poems each). But Poems the Size of Photographs is literally a small book, composed of short poems (‘though some are longer’, says the back cover) ...

... (read more)

Bluebottles

by Dorothy Porter •

April 2002, no. 240

In living there is always
the terror
of being stung

... (read more)

What They Gave Him

by Chris Edwards •

April 2002, no. 240

It may seem somewhat odd that I, a racketeer and gangster, was suspected of making Cuba a safe place for the National Bank. But having made such an impression with my reports, prophecies and ancillary publications that the Federal Government, aided by a sycophantic mass, had declared me likely to generate flippers, I can see why I might have been a plausible suspect – the crime, after all, was committed by sea.

... (read more)

Voices

by Judith Bishop •

March 2002, no. 239

The skywriter fallen,

a slick of lightning foraged in the stars

for his remains.

... (read more)

New Poets Series 8 by

by Richard King •

November 2001, no. 236

and you think of
the statements you have lost,
all the things unlearnt,
the words you no longer say.
It has all been one long giving away.

(David Kirkby, ‘Water’)

The six books in Series 8 of the Five Islands Press New Poets Program come highly recommended, if only by the blurbs on their own back covers. These blurbs border on the hysterical. Cate Kennedy has ‘her heart in her eyes’, while Sheridan Linnell has written a book ‘which grows great lines like buttercups’. Michael Sharkey admires Lesley Fowler’s precision but, since he goes on to say that her poems ‘conscript experience in both hemispheres’, one assumes that precision is not his suit. Even Bruce Dawe gets carried away, assuring us that, whilst David Kirkby’s poetry may look effortless, ‘its mechanisms are merely hidden’. Hidden, that is, to all except Bruce Dawe.

... (read more)

Tigers on the Silk Road by Katherine Gallagher

by Diane Fahey •

October 2001, no. 235

Diane Fahey reviews 'Tigers on the Silk Road' by Katherine Gallagher

Tigers and ‘the Silk Road to Istanbul’ feature in Part I of ‘1969’, the opening poem in this volume, which traces a hopeful setting forth into the undiscovered spaces of Asia and Europe. It is playfully exotic even while the homeward pull of a relationship envelops perception like a cloudscape:

... (read more)

Bestseller by M.T.C. Cronin

by Gig Ryan •

October 2001, no. 235

In the August 2001 issue of Meanjin, M.T.C. Cronin writes of poetry: ‘The poems are not as useful as ribs but like them do protect life and when removed from the body grow certain murmurings of the mind.’ No matter how chaotic or runic her prose pronouncements, Cronin’s poems are quirky and original at best, diffuse and repetitive at worst.

... (read more)

By and Large by Chris Wallace-Crabbe

by Martin Duwell •

September 2001, no. 234

Martin Duwell reviews 'By and Large' by Chris Wallace-Crabbe

Chris Wallace-Crabbe’s new book, By and Large, is, despite its hundred pages, a thinner book than most of his recent volumes. The familiar features are there: a baroque and intense intellectual ambit combined with playfulness; a deep love of the sharp ‘thinginess’ of the world combined with a love of the expressiveness of the words we use to contain it; and, last but far from least, enjoyable phrasemaking. It is just that, in By and Large, the reader’s pleasure seems more attenuated.

... (read more)