Reviews/Essays

The Best Australian Poems Edited by Robert Adamson Black Inc. 2009 ISBN 9781863954525 Reviewed by CAMERON LOWE  http://www.blackincbooks.com/books/best-australian-poems-2009     The first thing to say about this anthology is that it is full of birds. Currawongs, crows, egrets, magpies, cockatoos, finches, owls—the list could go on. This is hardly surprising given Robert Adamson’s preoccupations with […]

Possession by Anna Kerdijk Nicholson Five Islands Press, 2010 ISBN 978 0 7340 4111 1 http://www.fiveislandspress.com/newbooks.html Reviewed by MARGARET BRADSTOCK     Following on from her poetic achievements of The Bundanon Cantos (FIP, 2003), and co-editorship of the journal Five Bells from 2000-2003, comes Anna Kerdijk Nicholson’s immaculately presented collection, Possession.   There are as many […]

 Dark Bright Doors                                                                             by Jill Jones Wakefield Press ISBN 9781862548817 Reviewed by  KERI GLASTONBURY      The titles of Jill Jones’ most recent full-length collections, Broken/Open (Salt Publishing, 2005) and her latest, Dark Bright Doors (Wakefield Press, 2010), have the contrariness of koans. There is something deliberately ‘puzzlingly poetic’ about them, and as in Jones’ […]

  When I’m trapping on the Foggy, / fifteen miles off Catherine Hill Bay, / the world is good” (“Trapping on the Foggy”, lines 1-3) writes Anthony Lawrence in his faux-simplistic manner. In his earlier collections, Lawrence often explores traditionally masculine activities, carried out by men in the company of men, like the drinking and […]

Water the Moon by Fiona Sze-Lorrain Marick Press 2009 ISBN 9781934851128  Reviewed by KIM CHENG BOEY   In his essay “Transnational Poetics,” Jahan Ramazani argues that mononational narratives of modern and contemporary poetry are inadequate in view of the cross-cultural mobility and rampant border-crossing-and-straddling that many poets of “transnational affiliations and identities” perform. Convincingly, Ramazani […]

Symptoms of Homesickness by Nathanael O’Reilly Picaro Press, 2010 ISBN 9781920957896 Reviewed by EA GLEESON   With dedications to Conlon and Quigley and geographical cues such as Yambuk, The Lady Bay Hotel and The Moyne, the nomenclature of Symptoms of Homesickness orientates us towards the Irish Australian Diaspora and particularly as it is lived out […]

Dog Boy by Eva Hornung Text Publishing, 2009 ISBN 9781921520099 Reviewed by KATHARINE GILLETT     What is it that makes us human? In Dog Boy, Eva Hornung examines the instinct to nurture and protect, not as an inherently human trait, but as one belonging to the invisibly marked territory of a pack of stray […]

The English Class  by Ouyang Yu Transit Lounge, 2010 ISBN 9780980571783 Reviewed by SALLY FITZPATRICK                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     Having resisted colonial forays for millennia, China is ironically westernizing itself, a cultural revolution with arguably as much impact as that of the Great Proletarian Revolution.  Even the poorest Chinese peasant, willing to dismiss the intense beauty embodied […]

Ghostmasters  by Mani Rao Chameleon Press, 2010 ISBN 9789881862310 Reviewed by AMOS TOH     Mani Rao has donned many hats – TV executive, visiting fellow, scholar, critic and performer – but she is perhaps most at home as a poet. Tellingly, her poetry has spanned over more than a decade, leaving a “ghostly trail of […]

Iran: My Grandfather  by Ali Alizadeh Transit Lounge, 2010 ISBN 9780980571745 Reviewed by ANGELA MEYER   Iran’s fascinating, in parts beautiful and in parts horrific history is worthy of account: the contextual conflict; religion versus progress; and all the complex in-betweens. So many good intentions, misinterpretations, capitulations, and fluctuations has this country endured. Its citizens have […]

A Slant of Light by Paul Kane Whitmore Press Reviewed by Michelle Cahill   Paul Kane’s collection of Australian poems, A Slant of Light concerns itself with motion and matter, the visible spectrums. In this slim, modest volume, poems from Work Life,  and the earlier Drowned Lands, as well as new poems are luminously arranged […]

Phantom Limb by David Musgrave John Leonard Press 2010 ISBN 9780980526998 Reviewed by KYLIE ROSE   There are a whole host of haunting pains that torment us for reasons we do not understand and that arrive from we know not where—pains without return address. —Norman Doidge It’s a Friday night; my daughter and I are taking turns […]

Aria translations by Sudeep Sen   Yeti Books, Kerala, 2009, 152 pages, Price Rs.399/599 (pb/hb) Mulfran Press, Wales, 2010, 152 pages, Price £11.95/14.95 (pb/hb)  Reviewed by NABINA DAS   That Sudeep Sen’s strikingly diverse book of translated poetry is titled ARIA, brings to mind the significance of the music analogy. Just as the different movements in […]

New and Rediscovered by Vicki Viidikas Transit Lounge May 2010 ISBN: 9780980571769 Reviewed by MARTIN EDMOND   That Incorrigible Weapon: Vicki Viidikas, New and Rediscovered A few years ago a friend who lives in Queensland asked me if I would mind having a look around the second-hand bookshops in Sydney for the only one of […]

Porch Music by Cameron Lowe Whitmore Press December 2010 ISBN 978 0 9757762 7 8   REVIEWED BY ANNA RYAN-PUNCH   Cameron Lowe’s first book of poetry, Porch Music, showcases his ability to deftly navigate both the natural and the surreal in this striking collection.   The book is divided into two sections. The first, Balloon Days, is […]

The Circus by Ken Bolton Wakefield Press 2010 ISBN: 9781862546899 REVIEWED BY RAE DEE JONES   For thirty years Ken Bolton has shown tenacious dedication to his chosen art. Apart from producing a series of volumes of poetry of unusual consistency, he also edited the magazine Magic Sam. When I read this recent volume after browsing through some of […]

The Domestic Sublime by Chris Wallace-Crabbe River Road Press Audio CD Nov 2009 REVIEWED BY ANDREW CARRUTHERS George Orwell’s defense of broadcasted poetry in his essay “Poetry and the Microphone” (1945) was, amongst the efforts of Marinetti and Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh (founders of Zaum), one of the more impassioned cases for shifting the balance from printed to oral […]

   Among the regulars by Andy Jackson Papertiger March 2010 ISBN 9780980769500 REVIEWED BY DEBBIE LIM     An online piece by the Academy of American Poets suggests that poems about the body ‘are often poems of celebration and awe, poems that delight in the body’s mysteries, its “dream of flesh”’.1   In Andy Jackson’s ‘Among the Regulars’ […]

Net Needle by Robert Adamson Black Inc ISBN 9781863957311 Reviewed by FIONA SCOTNEY In many ways the collection Net Needle is a logical continuation of Adamson’s recurring themes of love, loss, birds and the Hawkesbury region. It is very Adamson. It has the traits readers have perhaps come to expect and admire from his last […]