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Felicity Plunkett

Felicity Plunkett

Felicity Plunkett is a poet and critic. Her latest work, A Kinder Sea, is published by UQP. Her first collection of poetry Vanishing Point (UQP, 2009) won the Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Prize and was shortlisted for several other awards. She has a chapbook Seastrands (2011) in Vagabond Press’ Rare Objects series. Felicity was Poetry Editor for University of Queensland Press and edited Thirty Australian Poets (UQP, 2011). She has a PhD from the University of Sydney and her reviews and essays have been widely published in The Australian, Sydney Morning Herald, Australian Book Review, Sydney Review of Books etc. Her essay ‘Sound Bridge’, a portrait of Indigenous Australian musician Dr G. Yunupingu, was first published in Australian Book Review and anthologised in Best Australian Essays 2015 (Black Inc, ed. Geordie Williamson).

Felicity Plunkett reviews 'The Weekend' by Charlotte Wood

November 2019, no. 416 23 October 2019
‘What kind of game is the sea?’ asks the speaker of Tracy K. Smith’s poem ‘Minister of Saudade’. ‘Lap and drag’, comes the response, ‘Crag and gleam / That continual work of wave / And tide’. It is not until the end of The Weekend that the sea’s majestic game is brought into focus, and then the natural world rises, a riposte, to eclipse human trivia. Before this, Charlotte Woo ... (read more)

‘A mutinous and ferocious grace: Nick Cave and trauma’s aftermath' by Felicity Plunkett

June–July 2019, no. 412 23 May 2019
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds perform at Open’er Festival on 4 July 2018 in Gdynia, Poland (Ewa Burdynska-Michnam, East News sp. z o.o. Alamy Stock Photo) It begins with a projected haze of ocean horizon. In this blurry liminal space, silence is misted with anticipation, like the moment before an echo comes back empty, right across the sea. Then a close-up of multi-instrumentalist Warren Ellis ... (read more)

Felicity Plunkett reviews 'Dangerous Ideas about Mothers' edited by Camilla Nelson and Rachel Robertson

December 2018, no. 407 26 November 2018
An essay at the heart of this collection, ‘Against Motherhood Memoirs’ by Maria Tumarkin, is not as insistent as its title suggests. Tumarkin, interested in ‘fissures and de-fusion’, troubles the awkward spots in her analysis. While reading Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015) – which places ‘motherhood and queerness side by side’ with autotheory and what Nelson calls ‘post-shame ... (read more)

Felicity Plunkett reviews 'On J.M. Coetzee' by Ceridwen Dovey

November 2018, no. 406 15 October 2018
‘We think back through our mothers,’ writes Virginia Woolf (twice) in A Room of One’s Own. At first, she seems to be suggesting that women artists can only derive inspiration from women who precede them: ‘It is useless to go to the great men writers for help … the weight, the pace, the stride of a man’s mind are too unlike her own.’ But Woolf’s bravura rhetorical essay (she calls ... (read more)

Felicity Plunkett reviews 'No Friend But the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison' by Behrouz Boochani

October 2018, no. 405 27 August 2018
Behrouz Boochani describes being smashed into the sea by the boulder-like weight of an overpacked, splintering boat transporting asylum seekers from Indonesia to Australia. The wreck’s ‘slashed carcass’ gashes the flailing survivors and the bodies of those who have died, and Boochani settles under a wave, finding refuge ‘by imagining myself elsewhere’. Finding the strength to surface, he ... (read more)

Felicity Plunkett reviews 'The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume 1: 1940-1956' edited by Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil

April 2018, no. 400 26 March 2018
‘A letter always seemed to me like immortality because it is the mind alone without corporeal friend,’ wrote Emily Dickinson. Yet part of the lure of letters – and life writing generally – is a sense of the corporeal, the promise of discovering the writer herself. As Jacqueline Rose suggests, writing about biography and Sylvia Plath in the London Review of Books, it is tempting to imagine ... (read more)

Felicity Plunkett reviews 'Demi-Gods' by Eliza Robertson

December 2017, no. 397 24 November 2017
In the preface to Demi-Gods, a boy burns moths with a magnifying glass. A girl – the novel’s narrator, Willa – watches ‘khaki wings’ that seem to be ‘folded from rice paper’. She imagines ‘ten moths circling a candle to form a lantern’, cries later, but does not stop Patrick. The wings ignite ‘like dog-eared pages in a book’. Like dog-eared pages, Willa’s memories are fold ... (read more)

State Editor's Introduction by Felicity Plunkett | States of Poetry QLD - Series Two

States of Poetry Queensland - Series Two 16 October 2017
In his luminous paean to poetry, modestly titled How to Read a Poem, Edward Hirsch writes that ‘poetry is made of metaphor’. This lucid statement is beautiful enough, but as a poet, Hirsch continues, making music, elaborating, forever taking the idea onwards, upwards and outwards, with poetry’s relentless energy: ‘It is a collision,’ he writes, ‘a collusion, a compression of two unlike ... (read more)

Reading Australia: 'by the river' by Steven Herrick

Reading Australia 02 November 2016
Buy this bookby the river evokes the textures of a small Australian town in 1962 through lean episodic poems that drift along gently until moments of intensity break their banks. Through a leisurely accumulation of detail – houses on stilts, fruit bats, a blotchy carpet of mango pulp, wisteria, cricket, bags of lollies – the town comes into focus, along with the lives of its people, especially ... (read more)

Felicity Plunkett reviews 'The Memory Artist' by Katherine Brabon

August 2016, no. 383 21 July 2016
For Pasha Ivanov, memory is 'a warped wound, with a welt or bruise that had arrived inexplicably late'. As the son of political dissidents in Moscow during Brezhnev's rule, his childhood memories wend between impressions of his mother leaning over the typewriter, her back's incline 'like a mountain, severe and strong', and the activists who gather in their small flat copying banned poems and artic ... (read more)
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