Poems
‘Comfort (Hansel to Gretel in the Darkness)’ a poem by Kate Middleton
Come – no grazed knee, no tears, no –
no fear of darkness in the singing wood.
Hear the threnody written on the wind:
a lament not for lostness, no, but for the slow
path homewards, the pebbles which guide us:
... (read more)The time’s come round again, blind pomegranates shine
In their dark bins like tawny Tuscan wine.
... (read more)for Craig Sherborne
‘Grief wrongs us so.’
Douglas Dunn
To the sea we bear our fathers in state –
or what they’ve done to them: the square conversions.
Surf mild as receding tides,
we slump in dunes with our burdens,
... (read more)The kookaburra begets the sacred kingfisher
who begets the rainbow bee-eater
who begets the firetailed finch
who begets the forty-spotted pardalote
who begets the damsel fly
who begets the jewelled beetle
who begets a pentangle of reflected light
that falls on a colony of dust mites
... (read more)(from Peter Henry Lepus in ‘Iraq, 2003’)
Are all Arabs Muslims? Peter Henry asks.
Nobody answers him.
She’s got dark hair that stops
just above her shoulders. Turns up at the ends.
She’s very slim, Max says.
He’s talking to Hamid
about Weasel Smith’s girlfriend,
whom he is hoping to meet
somewhere south of Baghdad.
... (read more)Oliver Dennis reviews 'Totem: Totem poem plus 40 love poems' by Luke Davies
Luke Davies is best known as the author of Candy (1997), a novel about love and heroin addiction. His poetry, meanwhile, has attracted attention for its characteristic interest in how we relate to an unknowable universe; it is also unusual in that it draws on a more-than-everyday understanding of theoretical physics. In this latest volume, which comes in two parts – a long meditative poem followed by forty short lyrics, both celebrating love – an awareness of the vast reaches of space remains, although its expression is now less factual and has acquired a new subtlety.
... (read more)Oliver Dennis reviews ‘In the Year of Our Lord Slaughter’s Children’ by Philip Hammial ‘Home Town Burial’ by Martin R. Johnson and ‘Loneliness’ by Maurice Strandgard
Here are three volumes that offer differing responses to a world characterised by injustice, brutality and personal hardship. Far and away the most distinctive (and demanding) of these is Philip Hammial’s sixteenth collection, In the Year of Our Lord Slaughter’s Children.
... (read more)Lisa Gorton reviews ‘The Mother Workshops and Other Poems’ by Jeri Kroll and ‘Shadows at the Gate’ by Robyn Rowland
Robyn Rowland and Jeri Kroll write what you might call anecdotal poetry: simple, intimate and direct. Kroll, for instance, writes about her dogs, doing her taxes and sleeping in, with the sketchy, conversational tone of someone thinking out loud: ‘Does age smell? The older the dog grows, / the more he smells like a labrador, / though he’s a border collie and blue heeler.’
... (read more)Brian Edwards reviews ‘Other Gravities’ by Kevin Gillam and ‘A Tasmanian Paradise Lost’ by Graeme Hetherington
In the first part of his new collection, Graeme Hetherington returns to the cultural territory he presented, differently registered, in In the Shadow of Van Diemen’s Land (1999). This is the west coast of Tasmania, reconstructed this time, in ‘West Coast Garden of Eden’, as the provocative place of his childhood, an Eden after the Fall in which innocence has long before succumbed to temptation. The twenty-seven parts of ‘For Boyd’ present Boyd as the narrator’s schoolmate, a son of working-class parents who has Paul Newman looks, a careless disregard for all forms of authority, an impressive and precocious sexual appetite, and a rebel’s capacity for mischief.
... (read more)