Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

Felicity Plunkett

Books of the Year 2023

by Kerryn Goldsworthy et al.
December 2023, no. 460

What the authors of these three wildly different books share is a gift for creating through language a kind of intimacy of presence, as though they were in the room with you. Emily Wilson’s much-awaited translation of The Iliad (W.W. Norton & Company) is a gorgeous, hefty hardback with substantial authorial commentary that manages to be both scholarly and engaging. The poem is translated into effortless-looking blank verse that reads like music. The Running Grave (Sphere) by Robert Galbraith (aka J.K. Rowling), the seventh novel in the Cormoran Strike crime series and one of the best so far, features Rowling’s gift for the creation of memorable characters and a cracking plot about a toxic religious cult. Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional (Allen & Unwin, reviewed in this issue of ABR) lingers in the reader’s mind, with the haunting grammar of its title, the restrained artistry of its structure, and the elusive way that it explores modes of memory, grief, and regret.

... (read more)

Transformation is one thing. Conversion is another. With its Latin roots con (with or together) and vertere (to turn or bend), conversion is haunted by a sense of coercion, the imposition of one will over another. In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, conversion comes in the form of Clarissa Dalloway’s daughter’s evangelistic tutor, Doris Kilman, the violence of colonialism, and brutish attempts by psychologist Sir William Bradshaw to instil ‘a sense of proportion’ into his vulnerable patients. Sir William gets what he wants. He ‘shuts people up’ under the auspices of ‘the twin goddesses of conversion and proportion’. Converting, for Woolf, means ‘to override opposition’. 

... (read more)

Felicity Plunkett is a poet and critic. Her books are A Kinder Sea, Seastrands, Vanishing Point, and the anthology Thirty Australian Poets (as editor). Her recent essays are ‘Plath Traps’ for the Sydney Review of Books and ‘Strange Territory: Poems as “gifts to the attentive”’ for Australian Book Review. She was an ABR Fellow in 2015 and 2019.

... (read more)

Spore or Seed by Caitlin Maling & Increments of the Everyday by Rose Lucas

by
July 2023, no. 455

Sharon Olds, author of twelve poetry collections including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Stag’s Leap, has said that when she wrote about motherhood forty years ago, she was advised by editors (‘very snooty, very put-me-down’) to try Ladies Home Journal. For Olds, now celebrated as a bold poet of the body, there is some Schadenfreude in the anecdote, like Bob Dylan’s in ‘Talkin’ New York’ as he recounts his arrival in New York, ‘blowin’ my lungs out for a dollar a day’, only to be told ‘You sound like a hillbilly / We want folksingers here.’ 

... (read more)

My Trade Is Mystery by Carl Philips & The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse edited by Kaveh Akbar

by
May 2023, no. 453

A six-year-old in Canada memorises a poem written by Li Bai in the eighth century. She recites its twenty syllables perfectly in the Mandarin she studies at Saturday Chinese school, but beyond a mechanical conversion into English, makes little sense of it. Murmuring the poem’s words then holding her breath as though waiting, her mother tries to help.

... (read more)

Iris by Fiona Kelly McGregor

by
December 2022, no. 449

The accordion, or squeezebox, takes its name from the German Akkordeon, meaning a ‘musical chorus’ or ‘chorus of sounds’. This box-shaped aerophonic instrument makes music when keys on its sides are pressed, one side mostly melody, the other chords. Squeezing the instrument and playing with both hands, the musician dexterously produces polyphonous music.

... (read more)

Again, death rolled towards / my daughter and me. Again / its grim, slow prowl and sudden / bulk. Again, human misery / veered from its lane.

... (read more)

American poet Tracy K. Smith was the twenty-second Poet Laureate of the United States, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her 2011 volume Life on Mars. Such Color is a collection of her best poems from her wide-ranging career, before culminating in a selection of newly published poems. In Felicity Plunkett’s review, she considers the breadth of Smith’s oeuvre and the undercurrent of water throughout, writing: ‘Smith’s image of creative marine energy recalls Sylvia Plath’s image of words’ “indefatigable hooftaps”, echoing as they carry meaning outwards. In Plath’s case, as in Smith’s, one direction is seawards.’

... (read more)

‘The wave always returns’, writes Marina Tsvetaeva. And it ‘always returns as a different wave’. Such Color reveals such a relentless renewal of lyricism as a signature of Tracy K. Smith’s poetry. A selected edition promises to highlight images and ideas across the American poet’s work. For Smith, one constant is the movement of water. In ‘Minister of Saudade’, from her second collection, Duende (2007), the speaker asks: ‘What kind of game is the sea?’ After a pause at the stanza break, an incantatory reply comes: ‘Lap and drag. Crag and gleam. / The continual work of wave / And tide.’ Ceaseless making, flux, and patterning are also a poem’s work. Smith’s image of creative marine energy recalls Sylvia Plath’s image of words’ ‘indefatigable hooftaps’, echoing as they carry meaning outwards. In Plath’s case, as in Smith’s, one direction is seawards.

... (read more)

‘I just want you to feel free, I said in anger disguised as compassion, compassion disguised as anger.’ These are Maggie Nelson’s words to her partner, artist Harry Dodge, as the two negotiate the shapes of love, family, and gender. These include Harry’s gender fluidity (‘I’m not on my way anywhere, Harry sometimes tells inquirers’), children, and marriage, which they ‘kill ... (unforgivable). Or reinforce ... (unforgivable)’ when they rush to wed ahead of the Proposition 8 legislation that, for a time, eliminated same-sex marriage in California.

... (read more)
Page 1 of 5