Accessibility Tools

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

Michael Farrell

Michael Farrell

Michael Farrell won the 2012 Peter Porter Poetry Prize. Recent books include Family Trees and I Love Poetry (both published by Giramondo), the scholarly Writing Australian Unsettlement: Modes of Poetic Invention 1796–1945 (Palgrave Macmillan), and, as editor, Ashbery Mode (TinFish), an Australian tribute to John Ashbery. Born in Bombala, NSW, in 1965, Michael has lived in Melbourne since 1990.

Michael Farrell reviews 'Like to the Lark' by Stuart Barnes

November 2023, no. 459 27 October 2023
A book review is a review of a book. This sounds obvious enough but can put the reviewer in a position they would not wish to be in as a more casual reader: that of not just reading a book’s poems, but also feeling a need to attend to the rest of the book – that is, the book’s paratexts. Like to the Lark, the follow-up to Stuart Barnes’s Glasshouses (2016), includes one hundred pages of p ... (read more)

'say ...' a poem by Michael Farrell

May 2009, no. 311 01 May 2009
the gardens dyed silver. finally he was less keen like an eaten bird, it wasnt my thing the path diverged off course to a camp. you were willing to grow a pomegranate inside. here they were gods people with their quiet domestics, the redheads were nicer however. the pram, was full with a baby, ‘dreaming’ of white museums. & white art. ... (read more)

Michael Farrell reviews 'The Circus' by Ken Bolton

May 2010, no. 321 01 May 2010
Mid-career reinvention is an exciting thing. Ken Bolton’s poem ‘Outdoor Pig-Keeping, 1954 & My Other Books on Farming Pigs’, in Black Inc.’s The Best Australian Poems 2009, was the most surprising poem in the book. Where were the friends, artists and cafés? Where were the small ironies? A larger irony was at work. Bolton’s new book, The Circus, is something else again: a wry, s ... (read more)

Michael Farrell reviews 'Crab & Winkle: East Kent & Elsewhere, 2006–2007' by Laurie Duggan

November 2009, no. 316 01 November 2009
In the ‘March’ section of his new collection, Laurie Duggan writes, ‘(but I am the neighbours) // (I am, perhaps, Neighbours)’. The couplet points to several things: being an Australian in England; Duggan’s persona of observant neighbour; the banality and plurality (‘neighbours’) of Duggan’s perspective. The plurality is one of many levels: Duggan’s neighbourly approach is applie ... (read more)

Michael Farrell reviews 'Near Believing: Selected monologues and narratives 1967–2021' by Alan Wearne

November 2022, no. 448 25 October 2022
The near-religious title of Alan Wearne’s new selection of poems, Near Believing, gives an impression of bathos and deprecation, while nevertheless undermining structures of belief, as represented in the book; at times this belief is explicitly Christian, but can also be seen more generally as belief in others, or in the suburban way of life. It is, then, while modest-seeming, highly ambitious ... (read more)

Michael Farrell reviews 'Near Believing: Selected monologues and narratives 1967–2021' by Alan Wearne

Online Exclusives 29 September 2022
The near-religious title of Alan Wearne’s new selection of poems, Near Believing, gives an impression of bathos and deprecation, while nevertheless undermining structures of belief, as represented in the book; at times this belief is explicitly Christian, but can also be seen more generally as belief in others, or in the suburban way of life. It is, then, while modest-seeming, highly ambitious ... (read more)

‘“Is You Is …” V “Passionfruit”’, a poem by Michael Farrell

December 2021, no. 438 24 November 2021
We bring the horses back to their own fields because we likeTo see them among purple hay as if they signify black seedsA hoof can break any kind of feeling along a dramatic stretchThe gate is where I go to then proclaim my woes to his streetAnd ask him pointed questions like I’m in the Roman SenateImagine me among the morning glory wretched ’n’ botheredBut I should listen to my cornflake box ... (read more)

Michael Farrell reviews 'Shorter Lives' by John A. Scott

August 2020, no. 423 27 July 2020
John A. Scott’s Shorter Lives is written at an intersection between experimental fiction, biography, and poetry. It inherits aspects of earlier works, such as preoccupations with sex and France. As the title indicates, it narrates mini-biographies of famous writers – Arthur Rimbaud, Virginia Stephen (Woolf), André Breton, and Mina Loy – and one painter – Pablo Picasso – with interludes ... (read more)
Page 1 of 3