Poetry
Lines in the sand
David McCooey
Activist Poetics: Anarchy in the Avon Valley
by John Kinsella, edited by Niall Lucy
Liverpool University Press (Inbooks), $170 hb, 224 pp, 9781846314698
This book of essays by the vegan-anarchist-pacifist poet John K ...
Enclave of images
Gig Ryan
Surface to Air
by Jaya Savige
University of Queensland Press, $24.95 pb, 96 pp, 9780702239137
Jaya Savige’s first book, latecomers (2005), was an impressive début and won the New South Wales Kenneth Slessor Aw ...
Gravitas and levitas
Philip Harvey
A Local Habitation: Poems and Homilies
by Peter Steele, edited by Sean Burke
Newman College, $39.95 hb, 168 pp, 9780734041708
Once in a seminar long ago, I heard Peter Steele quote one of Winston Churchill’s more ...
Julian Croft reviews 'Fresh Linen' by Gary Catalano, 'The Hooded Lamp' by Roland Robinson, and 'At Valentines' by Ken Taylor
These three volumes, reprints of books published in the 1970s and 1980s, appear in the Art Box Series by Picaro Press. Reasonably priced, they will give contemporary readers a sense of the seedbed of Australian poetry a few decades ago. These volumes do just that. It would be hard to imagine a ...
... (read more)Reserve and pity almost meet in Andrew Marvell
Lisa Gorton
Andrew Marvell: the Chameleon
by Nigel Smith
Yale University Press (Inbooks), $55.95 hb, 416 pp, 9780300112214
In 1629, Charles I of England sent Daniel Nys to Europe to buy art. Along with ...
William Christie reviews 'The Cambridge Companion to the Sonnet' edited by A.D. Cousins and Peter Howarth
It is a measure of the stature of William Wordsworth among his younger contemporaries that he would find himself subject to innumerable challenges over the early years of the nineteenth century. What upset the second generation of Romantic poets – Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and, to some extent ...
... (read more)Mark Tredinnick’s much-anticipated first collection of poetry, Fire Diary, is an examination of place and how to respond to it. The title provides a clue to the form of the book; many poems chart the daily exigencies of living within nature. More importantly, the collection explores the moods and aspirations of the self ...
... (read more)Scatter
Rose Lucas
amphora
by joanne burns
Giramondo, $24.95 pb, 136 pp, 9781920882631
joanne burns has long been a force in Australian poetry. amphora, her thirteenth collection, builds on that legacy wit ...
'Hautes Fenêtres: Thoughts on the place of translation in recent Australian poetry' by Simon West
In a 1995 interview for the Paris Review, Ted Hughes was asked if the 1960s boom in translated poetry, particularly with series such as the Penguin Modern European Poets, had influenced poetry written in England. ‘Has it modified the British tradition!’ he replied. ‘Everything is now completely open, every approach, with infinite possibilities. Obviou ...
Babushka doll
William Heyward
New Impressions of Africa: Nouvelles Impressions d’Afrique
by Raymond Roussel (translated by Mark Ford)
Princeton University Press (Footprint Books), $47.95 hb, 253 pp, 9780691144597
Like all of his earlier books, Ra ...