Poetry
Jennifer Maiden’s first books, Tactics (1974) and The Problem of Evil (1975), introduced a fantastically complex and enquiring poetry, with strangely fragmentary assemblages of character wrought from conflict. Both books were partly inspired by television’s gory nightly footage of the Vietnam War ...
... (read more)A few pages into this collection we read the line: ‘all of it is lies’. ‘It’ signals the irritation that motivates much of Pam Brown’s writing in click here for what we do. Memory, in these poems, is a problem. Brown’s is very much a poetry of movement: she desires to stay light and mobile, not to be detained by memory ...
... (read more)Dennis Haskell reviews 'Hard Horizons' by Geoff Page and 'The Left Hand Mirror' by Ron Pretty
I have no idea if Pitt Street Poetry is located in Pitt Street, in the centre of Sydney’s CBD, but it has certainly made itself central to poetry publishing in Australia. Its list includes such fine poets as Eileen Chong, John Foulcher, Jean Kent, and Anthony Lawrence; that reputation will be added to by these books from Geoff Page ...
... (read more)There is a shimmering, ludic intelligence to this collection of poems, Philip Mead’s first since 1984. The word ‘comeback’ is apt, with its grace note of gladness for renewed possibilities. Opening any new work, the anticipation is acute: will I be changed by reading this, and if so, how? What might I think, feel, or recognise ...
... (read more)David Dick reviews 'Archipelago' by Adam Aitken and 'Present' by Elizabeth Allen
Both Adam Aitken’s Archipelago and Elizabeth Allen’s Present examine the establishment and mutability of identity in the worlds of objects, histories, literature, and media in which they place their speakers. Of course, the exploration of identity is a common theme of poetry, particularly as it pertains to how the material of language ...
... (read more)Benjamin Ivry reviews 'Our Life Grows' by Ryszard Krynicki, translated by Alissa Valles
This poem, cited in its entirety, is ‘My Poor Son’ by the Polish writer Ryszard Krynicki, who will be seventy-five years old in June 2018. Likely the finest poet in the generation after Zbigniew Herbert, the dazzling philosopher of modern Polish verse who died twenty years ago, Krynicki was born in a Nazi slave labor camp ...
... (read more)David McCooey reviews 'Who Reads Poetry: 50 views from Poetry Magazine' edited by Fred Sasaki and Don Share
So, who reads poetry? American military cadets, that’s who. And medical specialists. Also, songwriters, journalists, and philosophers. And don’t forget (ex-) poets, priests, and politicians (to quote Sting). But let’s get back to those military cadets. What does poetry do for them? Who Reads Poetry gives us a number of ...
... (read more)Joan Fleming reviews 'Domestic Interior' by Fiona Wright and 'The Tiny Museums' by Carolyn Abbs
The classic lyric preoccupation with interiority, and how internal life touches and changes the outside world, finds expression in two recent collections of poetry: Fiona Wright’s ...
... (read more)Judith Bishop’s Interval appears just over a decade since the publication of her first book, also using a one-word title, Event (Salt, 2007). This gap seems far too long. Certainly, there have been two chapbooks in the intervening years – Alice Missing in Wonderland and Other Poems (2008), in the Wagtail series ...
... (read more)David McCooey reviews 'Renga: 100 poems' by John Kinsella and Paul Kane
Poets aren’t generally known for being great collaborators. Wordsworth and Coleridge’s 'Lyrical Ballads' (1798) is a rare example of a co-authored canonical work of poetry. 'Renga: 100 poems', by John Kinsella and Paul Kane, has some similarities to 'Lyrical Ballads'. Like those of its ...
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