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Melissa Ashley

Melissa Ashley reviews 'Sweeping the Light Back into the Mirror' by Nathan Shepherdson

November 2006, no. 286 01 November 2006
Recipient of the 2005 Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize, Nathan Shepherdson’s surrealist, free-verse début, Sweeping the Light Back into the Mirror, is to be commended for its emotional bravery and its originality. At the collection’s Queensland launch, Shepherdson described what he had hoped to achieve in writing an extended elegy to his mother, Noela Mary Shepherdson. The poems were to be seen a ... (read more)

Melissa Ashley reviews 'The Apparition at Large' by K.F. Pearson

February 2007, no. 288 01 February 2007
The Apparition at Large is Black Pepper’s managing director K.F. Pearson’s second outing as the commentating enigma, most recently encountered in The Apparition’s Daybook (1995). Opening poems map the identity’s regular ‘haunts’ – the bars and cafés of inner-Melbourne – via evocative sketches of daily life’s unexpected sensuality: ‘A colour can completely drench our consciousn ... (read more)

Melissa Ashley reviews 'Folly & Grief' by Jennifer Harrison

October 2006, no. 285 01 October 2006
Folly & Grief, Melbourne poet Jennifer Harrison’s third collection, reads on one level as a playful enquiry into the centuries-long association of folly with innovative live performance. Lizard men abseil down gallery walls; an extreme body artist creates a living sculpture of bees; a ventriloquist’s dummy stirs to life; New Age travellers toss firesticks, knives and chainsaws high into th ... (read more)