Reviews/Essays

The Hazards by Sarah Holland-Batt UQP ISBN 978-0-7022-5359-1 Reviewed by TIFFANY TSAO   The first poem of Sarah Holland-Batt’s The Hazards provides a fitting opening for a collection so beautiful, so cold, and so much about the coldness of beauty. The eponymous jellyfish speaker of the poem ‘Medusa’ is unapologetically cerebral—‘a brain trailing its nettles’, […]

Unclaimed Terrain by Ajay Navaria Translated by Laura Brueck Giramondo ISBN: 9781922146892 Reviewed by MEETA CHATTERJEE-PADMANABHAN Unclaimed Terrain by Ajay Navaria translated by Laura Brueck, and published in Australia by Giramondo cannot be described complacently as a ‘good read’. That is not what it set out to be. The stories are provocative and unsettling. There is […]

Wild by Libby Hart Pitt Street Poetry ISBN 9781922080387 (paperback) Reviewed by HEATHER TAYLOR-JOHNSON To say that Libby Hart’s third book of poetry, Wild, was a highly anticipated one is to take into account that her first book, Fresh News from the Artic, won the Anne Elder Award and was shortlisted for the Mary Gilmore […]

Haifa Fragments by Khulud Khamis Spinifex Press ISBN 9781742199009 Reviewed by SELMA DABBAGH The protagonist of Khulud Khamis’s first novel, Haifa Fragments, Maisoon, is a jewellery designer and her story resembles an assemblage on a jeweller’s worktop; a thickly strung necklace that tailors off without a clasp, several loose, coloured stones lying around and about it – […]

Yimbama by Ken Canning Vagabond Press ISBN 978-1-922181-43-5 Reviewed by BRENDA SAUNDERS The poetry in this collection covers the full range of social and cultural conditions facing Aboriginal people today. Burraga Gutya writes of imprisonment, mental illness, domestic violence, dislocation and the injustice due to racism or ignorance. On the back cover notes to this […]

The Boy from Aleppo who Painted the War by Sumia Sukkar Eyewear Publishing ISBN: 9781908998460 Reviewed by TESSA LUNNEY The main character’s name looks grey, which mean I won’t like him. Gustave Aschenbach is a very dark name; he must be bad. I don’t want to finish the book in case it upsets me. Thinking […]

Kin by Anne Elvey 5Islands Press ISBN 978-0-7340-4897-4 Reviewed by DIMITRA HARVEY Val Plumwood wrote, “the ecological crisis requires from us a new kind of culture”. She was of course referring to the set of human/nature dualisms that underpin the contemporary West, and which “promote human distance from, control of and ruthlessness towards the sphere […]

Home After Dark by Kavita Nandan USP Press. Fiji ISBN 9789820109216 Reviewed by SUMEDHA IYER Early in Kavita Nandan’s Home After Dark, the protagonist Kamini meets V.S. Naipaul and tells him that A House for Mr. Biswas is her favourite book. He asks her where she is from; when she says she is Fijian, he simply […]

The Life of Houses by Lisa Gorton Giramondo ISBN 9781922146809 Reviewed by ALEXANDRA MCLEAVY The Life of Houses opens with one of the central characters, Anna, awaiting her lover’s arrival in a hotel dining room. The setting is ornate, the hour early and the space as yet unpopulated. “It had become the part of her evenings […]

Stories of Sydney Ed by Michael Mohammed Ahmad Seizure ISBN 978-1-921134-26-5 Reviewed by REBECCA ALLEN Soaring white-tiled sails curve up into the cloudless sky. Below, foamy tails of boats criss-cross that famous stretch of liquid blue. Waves glitter in the summer sun. A post-card city. Sydney shows off the same made-up face in thousands of […]

Drones and Phantoms by Jennifer Maiden Giramondo ISBN 978-1-9221-46-72-4 Reviewed by MELINDA BUFTON Jennifer Maiden’s Drones and Phantoms is her 19th poetry collection, the most recent in a list of titles published with marked regularity since the early 1970s. Her work is frequently noted to contain recurring themes that circle violence and war, her bio […]

The Blind Man With The Lamp by Tasos Leivaditis (trans. N N Trakakis) Denise Harvey ISBN 978-960-7120-32-8 Reviewed by ANDY JACKSON Ever since its emergence, the prose poem has been a uniquely potent embodiment of paradox. While a poem, arguably, could be defined as the literary form which declares itself to be “not prose”, a […]

Captives by Angela Meyer ISBN 978-0-9875401-2-6 Inkerman & Blunt Publishers  Reviewed by EUGEN BACON The photographs, when they come out, look just like Victorian-era death portraits, only my subjects are still alive. (15) Noir graphics on the front cover of Captives foreshadow light and shade, life and death. A reader might approach this book of […]

Almost Sincerely by Zoe-Norton Lodge ISBN:978-1-922146-85-4 Giramondo Reviewed by JESSICA YU I grew up in a quiet and oftentimes dingy suburb in the outer north-west of Melbourne called Gladstone Park. Whenever someone asks me where I grew up or moved away from, I’m surprised if they have heard of it. What strikes me most is […]

The Told World by Angela Gardner Shearsman ISBN 978-1-84861-371-3 Reviewed by ROBERT WOOD Le Serment des Horaces, a large neoclassical oil painting by the French artist Jacques-Louis David painted in 1784, depicts three Roman brothers saluting their father. The father holds their swords out for them so they can then go on to patriotically kill the three brothers […]

The Poets’ Stairwell by Alan Gould Black Pepper ISBN: 9781876044800 Reviewed by GEOFF PAGE First, a disclosure. I have known the poets Kevin Hart and Alan Gould, the “real life” protagonists of this autobiographical novel, for more than forty years. While this must inevitably intensify the pleasure I take in the work, it should not […]

sweetened in coals by Phillip Hall Ginninderra Press ISBN 9781740278584 Reviewed by JANETTE DADD   Jacques Raubaud, at the Sydney Writer’s Festival of 2014 made the observation that poems differ from novels in that if they do not stir a memory then the poem will not be successful. The poet has precious time to invite the reader, to […]

On Manannan’s Isle by Usha Kishore Isle of Man, UK. ISBN: 978-1-304-14507-9 (PB) REVIEWED by Sutapa Chaudhuri   On Manannan’s Isle is Usha Kishore’s debut collection of poetry. The fifty-six poems included in this collection are multicultural in nature and present a ‘chiaroscuro world’ (‘A Spoonful of Indian Sky’). Intertextual and multilayered, these poems build […]

Death Fugue by Sheng Keyi translated by Shelly Bryant Giramondo ISBN 978-1-922146-62-5 Reviewed by JENNIFER MACKENZIE He calls out more sweetly play death death is a master from Germany he calls out more darkly now stroke your strings then as smoke you will rise into air then a grave you will have in the clouds there […]

The Two Rivers of Granada Descend from the Snow To the Wheat/Los Dos Rios de Granada Bajan de la Nieve al Trigo. by Juan Garrido Salgado Reviewed by JANET GALBRAITH On opening the envelope that contains Juan Garrido Salgado’s latest offering of poetry: The Two Rivers of Granada Descend from the Snow To the Wheat/Los […]