Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%
Bell Shakespeare - Coriolanus banner

Poetry

After Naptime by Chris Edwards

by •
April 2015, no. 370
Des Cowley reviews 'After Naptime' by Chris Edwards

Chris Edwards is an enigmatic presence in Australian poetry. Part of a generation of poets who came of age in the 1970s, he co-edited the short-lived Beyond Poetry (1974–76) but then abandoned publication for many years. With the onset of a new millennium, he unexpectedly re-emerged, publishing a series of chapbooks that culminated in his first full-length ...

Embracing the Razor by John Upton

by •
April 2015, no. 370
Geoff Page reviews 'Embracing The Razor' by John Upton

Writers who move in mid-career from one literary genre to another often encounter resistance. Some turfs are well guarded. They can also misapprehend the new form they are planning to join. John Upton, who for almost thirty years has been a successful playwright and screenwriter, has made the difficult move seamlessly in this first collection of poems.

...

Drones and Phantoms by Jennifer Maiden

by •
April 2015, no. 370
Toby Fitch reviews 'Drones and Phantoms' by Jennifer Maiden

Jennifer Maiden’s eighteenth book of poetry bears yet another title punning on war (remember Tactics, The Problem of Evil, The Occupying Forces, The Border Loss, Acoustic Shadow, Friendly Fire). Her umbrella themes – politics, power, evil, the public and private selves, war, and the role of art – are back. The title is ...

Axis, Book 1: ‘Areal’ by by a.j. carruthers

by •
March 2015, no. 369
Des Cowley reviews 'Axis, Book 1' by a.j. carruthers

With Axis, his first full-length publication, a.j. carruthers explicitly aligns himself with the lineage of the long poem. It is a bold move, if we consider that the major exponents of the form, from Ezra Pound to Anne Waldman, had invariably produced significant bodies of work prior to embarking on their poetic marathons. But ambition is fundamental to the long poem, and Axis, comprising thirty-one extended sequences and billed as ‘Book the first’, certainly outstrips Pound’s inaugural efforts – a mere sixteen Cantos issued in 1925 – by a country mile.

... (read more)

Collected Poems by by Mark Strand

by •
March 2015, no. 369
Paul Kane reviews 'Collected Poems' by Mark Strand

It is tempting to say that when Mark Strand died last November American poetry lost one of its most distinctive voices. But it isn’t quite true. First, Strand had already retired from poetry several years earlier (before Philip Roth and Alice Munro caused a stir by doing so from fiction). Strand returned to his first career as an artist (a very talented one, according to his teachers at Yale’s Art and Architecture School), constructing a series of collages that were shown in galleries in New York. Second, Strand’s voice is of course very much present in the poems he leaves behind, collected in this handsome edition, which came out a month before he died. Though it is a voice of loss, it is not lost to us.

... (read more)

The Selected Poetry of Pier Paolo Pasolini: A Bilingual Edition by edited and translated by Stephen Sartarelli

by •
March 2015, no. 369
Annamaria Pagliaro reviews 'The Selected Poetry of Pier Paolo Pasolini' edited and translated by Stephen Sartarelli

‘The singularity and importance of [Pier Paolo Pasolini’s] artistry lies largely in the protean, multimedial quality of his vision,’ Stephen Sartarelli rightly reminds us in this bilingual edition of Pasolini’s poetry. Nonetheless, to an Anglophone world Pasolini (1922–75) is best known as the rebellious and audacious director of such films as The Gospe ...

Dylan Thomas: A literary life by William Christie

by •
March 2015, no. 369
Chris Wallace-Crabbe reviews 'Dylan Thomas' by William Christie

The legendary Dylan has now been dead for a century and his fumy glitter has probably faded a little. But then, how far do any poets these days really have glamour to show for themselves, no matter how hard they drink? Very few, in the Anglophone world at least: there’s nobody around like Wales’s roaring boy.

... (read more)

Sack by John Kinsella

by •
March 2015, no. 369
David McCooey reviews 'Sack' by John Kinsella

The eponymous poem in John Kinsella’s latest book recounts a group of teenagers witnessing a sack being flung from a speeding car. The sack, they discover, is filled with tortured kittens. This shocking poem of human cruelty begins a collection concerned with Kinsella’s great themes: the degradation of the environment, human violence (particularly towards animals), and the potential for language – especially poetry – to represent, and intervene in, those things. Despite the extraordinary variety and output of Kinsella’s career so far, his works (poetry, novels, translations, plays, short stories, autobiographies, works of criticism) share a single, ambitious project: to imagine a relationship between political action and literary speech.

... (read more)

The Best Australian Poems 2014 edited by Geoff Page

by •
January-February 2015, no. 368
Jennifer Strauss reviews 'The Best Australian Poems 2014' edited by Geoff Page

‘Lending printed eloquence to a poem’ comes from ‘Alas’, Chris Wallace-Crabbe’s elegiac tribute to Seamus Heaney. There is eloquence aplenty in this fine collection of more than a hundred and twenty poems edited by poet Geoff Page, someone who understands that eloquence speaks in many tones and in various formal structures. This variety is generously represented here, even if, as a result of Page’s allegiance to ‘a broad church’ of Australian poetry and his wish to represent its full range of tendencies in a way that will speak to a congregation of ‘average reader[s]’, the collection treads lightly in the realm of experimental or avant-garde poetry.

... (read more)

Poetry Notebook 2006–2014 by Clive James

by •
January-February 2015, no. 368
Geordie Williamson reviews 'Poetry Notebook 2006–2014' by Clive James

Poetry ‘cannot be an ark to help us survive the flood’, wrote Zbigniew Herbert in 1948: ‘It has to be our daily bread, an article of primary need.’ Nothing could be more truly said of Clive James’s approach to poetry. His latest assemblage of essays, reviews, and miscellanea, collected over the years that straddle his diagnosis of leukemia, feel necessary as oxygen. There is a quiet restlessness too: a sense of sorting papers into some final order.

... (read more)
Page 31 of 91
Peter Rose Editorial Cadetship
Monash University - June