Poetry
As a result of the public works of Puncher & Wattmann, it has been established yet again that a book of poetry can andshould combine meaning and design in a shock of pleasure. Toby Fitch’s first full-length collection, especially the central title poem, does this in spades. Orpheus returns to ...
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Randolph Stow, who died in 2010 aged seventy-four, must now be considered part of the Australian canon, whether that concept is conceived broadly or as a smaller cluster of Leavisian peaks. This status derives from his eight novels, which include the Miles Franklin Award-winner To the Islands (1958), the celebrated children’s book Midnite: The Story o ...
In July 2007, at the age of thirty-one, Aidan Coleman suffered a stroke as a result of a brain tumour. Asymmetry is a book in two parts. The first details the poet’s survival after this near-death experience, his struggle to regain full use of his body and to speak and write again. The second part is a group of love poems for his wife, Leana ...
... (read more)Peter Kenneally
Snowline
by Jo Langdon
Whitmore Press, $19.95 pb, 31 pp, 9780975776292
A childhood in Australia, safe and dry, but somehow incomplete: then time overseas defining the self against a different sky; finally, the return home, perhaps to start a ...
Jay Daniel Thompson
fourW twenty-two
edited by David Gilbey
fourWpress, $25 pb, 174 pp, 9780958675987
f ourW twenty-two is an initiative of the Booranga Writers’ Centre in Wagga Wagga. This current edition features short stories and ...
This volume contains all the poems that Rosemary Dobson wants to preserve. They represent a substantial portion of her output, which seems right for a poet who began with a degree of quiet confidence and poise that belied her youth. From the earliest, published when she was in her twenties ...
... (read more)It is 2050 in Melbourne. The seas have risen, full of accidental genetic mixtures and cloned versions of extinct favourites, while the land is dried out and life is a tense combination of techno-affluence, terror, and normality ...
... (read more)Brutal looking
Kate Middleton
Naked Clay: Drawing from Lucian Freud
by Barry Hill
Shearsman Books, $25 pb, 160 pp, 9781848611780
With his new volume of poetry, Barry Hill has set himself the challenge of writing a book focused on the visual art of t ...
Paul Hetherington reviews 'Another Fine Morning in Paradise' by Michael Sharkey
The variety of Australian poetry is attested to by books such as Another Fine Morning in Paradise. Neither entirely fish nor fowl, it is by turns satirical, watchful, effusive, and lyrical. Its central preoccupation is with a sharp-eyed scrutiny of what might be called the-idea-of-a-better-life ...
... (read more)The cover of Kristin Henry’s verse novel All the Way Home shows a man at the wheel of a car, looking ahead at an endless dirt road. There is even a YouTube trailer for the book on the publisher’s website, with more driving. But in Henry’s book, as in all the best road movies, nobody ever seems to get anywhere.
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