Accessibility Tools

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

Poetry

Kirli Saunders (OAM) is a proud Gunai Woman and multi-award-winning writer, artist, singer-songwriter, and consultant. Kirli creates to connect, to make change. She was awarded an Order of Australia Medal for her contribution to the arts in 2022. Kirli is the author of eight books, including Bindi (2020), Returning (2023), Afloat (2024), and Eclipse (2025). Her theatre show Yandha Djanbay will tour in 2026.

... (read more)

Eclipse by Kirli Saunders & Mettle by Anne-Marie Te Whiu

by
July 2025, no. 477

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.

... (read more)
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.
... (read more)

Fiction by Antigone Kefala & Poetry by Antigone Kefala

by
July 2025, no. 477

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.

... (read more)

When I think of Bach, I recall powdered wigs, a dim, gilded hall, limelight burning on a stage, rouged cheeks, finely turned men’s calves in stockings. I am in the audience, I am in a box seat, I am holding a fan, but really, I am nowhere at all.

... (read more)

The selected work of a long-lived poet presents the reviewer with so much to consume. A long life and career give a poet plenty of time to make their way through different styles and themes and, perhaps most importantly, to witness moments in history and shifts in culture. In this case, we have a career spanning fifty-something years and a life that ended in 2021.

... (read more)

The Drop Off by David Stavanger

by
June 2025, no. 476

David Stavanger’s third collection of poetry, The Drop Off, disintegrates binaries and social expectations with post-structuralist fervour, occupying and exploring the liminal space of broken families, neo-liberal cultures, mental health and, of course, language. Stavanger’s poetry is both pithy and undercutting, anathematic and loving, political and personal – and often, as is the case with such duplicitous poetry, these themes express themselves simultaneously, almost co-dependently.

... (read more)

For almost fifty years, Alan Wearne has been one of Australia’s pre-eminent users of dramatic monologue. Since The Nightmarkets (1986), he has also become one of our most persistent and accomplished writers of verse novels. It is a form which to many seems paradoxical (how can something be two contradictory things at once?), and yet it is undeniably capable of producing fast-moving and powerful narratives which remain vividly present in the mind.

... (read more)

Red maya birds that are not
maya birds, but sparrows and munias.
Words for the kind of rain that will leave us
without power for days, then the kind that sprinkles on

... (read more)

After I cut your hair, running
the clippers back and forth
until the tiles are littered with tufts
like grey lint swept from the drum

... (read more)