Poetry

With issues 101 and 102 (Renewing Dialects: New Poetry from England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales), Poetry Australia has entered upon the estate of the sage organ. The two issues account fairly representatively for PA’s traditional function – to provide opportunity, a periodic review of contemporary poetic activity, and a reliable voice. Herbert Jaffa leads off 101 with ‘Poetry Australia at One Hundred: An Impression and Appreciation’, a tribute to PA as source material and as a place of opportunity for the newish and oldish poet; and Elizabeth Perkins closes the show with a review essay of its special issues since 1968 (up to, but not including, 102). This essay cogently reminds poets and readers of a basic requirement: that poets keep ‘good faith towards the language they use’. An editor could do worse than start with such a requirement. Both 101 and 102 are clearly open to the possibilities of ‘new’ languages, and alternatives to the sort of ‘I’ catalogue of micromoments that so often puts new readers off. Shifting of the ‘I’ shuffles up some interesting versions of tone.

Grief, depression, and trauma do terrible things to the human body and spirit. The brain rebels callously against its vessel, leaving the wounded mind to wallow in the deepest pits of despair, perpetually refreshing pain and obsessively seeking out the recesses of scarred memories.

The poems of Bathypelagia by Debbie Lim and Re:Vision by Isi Unikowski are poems of cartography; they map the unknown and probe the world with human curiosity, tracing meaning onto elusive places, feelings, and encounters, solidifying these through the writing process. Both collections conspire to understand the world as they construct their realities one line at a time, the poems themselves moving – in the former’s case, vertically from the deep sea, and, in the latter’s case, through the casting of light, the revealing of landscapes.

What is immediately striking about Kirli Saunders’s Eclipse and Anne-Marie Te Whiu’s Mettle is that although both collections have much in common it is the differences that engage the reader. Saunders is a Gurnai woman and Te Whiu an Australian of Māori heritage: both poets write with an assurance and freedom founded on their respective heritages and the political struggles of an earlier generation of First Nations writers. In consequence, the poetry in both collections is precise and individual in its consideration and depiction of contemporary First Nation lives and subjectivities.

Peter Rose, the editor, for just under a quarter of a century, of these pages, has put down his scissors and pot of glue to turn seventy (in June) and step back into civilian life. Coincidentally or not, he has also just put out another book of poems, Attention, Please!, his first since The Subject of Feeling in 2015. The new title – a softened imperative – speaks aptly and cannily for the contents.

For a long time, Antigone Kefala was thought of as a migrant writer. This lens confined discussion of her work to the territory of biography and witness and obscured the migratory poetics of the writing itself. In her spare, bristling poems and candid journals, and across her non-fictional prose and fiction, Kefala’s restive work hinges on precision and vision.