Reviews/Essays

Gap by Rebecca Jessen UQP ISBN 9780702253201 Reviewed by LINDA WESTE   For many readers, the contemporary verse novel offers a startling reading experience; so directly, so succinctly, so urgently does the form communicate—that it compels a single-sitting reading, and is no less memorable for it. Rebecca Jessen’s Gap is one such verse novel; with […]

A Vicious Example by Michael Aiken Grande Parade Poets Reviewed by ALI JANE SMITH       I’ve been visiting Sydney all my life. Doing city things; museums, art galleries, parks, department stores and shops that specialise in the necessary obscurities you can now order online. There are places in Sydney that have been transformed beyond […]

Fixing the Broken Nightingale Richard Allen Flying Island Books (2013) Reviewed by MICHELE SEMINARA Fixing the Broken Nightingale, Richard Janes Allen’s tenth poetry collection, is a small treasure of a book – one you might pop into your bag and dip into at idle moments for bursts of inspiration, contemplation or solace. Indeed, the physical […]

Madame Mephisto by A.M. Bakalar Stork Press ISBN 978-0-9571326-0-3 Reviewed by PAUL GIFFARD-FORET If the artist is a trickster, then Polish British writer A. M. Bakalar’s debut novel Madame Mephisto (2012) shows great mastery – albeit never in an entirely gratuitous or wanton way. A.M. Bakalar belongs to a generation of writers that have embraced the […]

The Promise By Tony Birch University of Queensland Press, 2014 ISBN: 978 0 7022 4999 0 Reviewed by MARGOT McGOVERN     A father mourning his dead son spends solitary afternoons ‘raking fallen leaves and weeding the garden … on [his] knees, sifting through the rose beds with [his] bare hands’. A widower cannot rest in […]

The Secret Maker of the World by Abbas El-Zein University of Queensland Press, 2014 ISBN: 9780701150071 Reviewed by TESSA LUNNEY   How strange, my love. In Baghdad, death and murder fall from the sky, always faceless, known only by the trail of destruction they leave behind. In Dilwa, death and murder have a name and place […]

Foreign Soil Maxine Beneba Clarke Hachette Australia Sydney, NSW, 2014 ISBN 978-0-73363242-6 Reviewed by HEATHER TAYLOR JOHNSON Sometimes we read prose – a novel, perhaps, or a short story – and we think I bet this writer is a poet, too, and then we turn to the page that tells us of the author’s past […]

The Last Candles of the Night by Ian Bedford Lacunar Publishing ISBN: 9781922198129 Reviewed by SUBHASH JAIRETH   The Last Candles of the Night opens with two epigraphs. The first in Persian: two lines of a verse by Ali Sher Nava’i of Heart. The second comes from an Urdu poem by Zaheer Kashmiri, which has […]

Transactions of Belonging by Jaya Padmanabhan Leadstart Publishing ISBN-13: 978-9383562275 Reviewed by JESSICA FALEIRO   The word ‘belonging’ evokes a strong feeling of connection to place, person, thing or feeling.  In her debut collection of short stories, Jaya Padmanabhan explores these facets of belonging to whom, to what and to where, by making us wonder […]

Stone Postcard by Paul Magee ISBN 9780980852394 John Leonard Press Reviewed by BONNY CASSIDY   A short poem, “Swimming in Minus”, lies at the centre of Paul Magee’s Stone Postcard. Positioned here, it makes a statement about the collection; the kind of poem that a more predictable writer might have placed at the book’s opening: […]

Lens Flare By Benedict Andrews Pitt Street Poetry ISBN 978-1-922080-34-9   Peony By Eileen Chong Pitt Street Poetry. ISBN 978-1-922080-28-8 Reviewed by GEOFF PAGE   It is often difficult when writers change from one literary genre to another. Reviewers — and writers in the encroached-upon form — are quick to “guard their own turf”. Benedict Andrews, […]

Weekend’s end by Tim Wright bulky news press Reviewed by CHRIS BROWN   Late last year I received in the mail a copy of Tim Wright’s poetry chapbook, Weekend’s end. I’d been in occasional correspondence with Wright for a few years and but for this, might never have seen (or reviewed) the book, which was […]

The End of the World Maria Takolander Giramondo ISBN 9781922146519 Reviewed by JACINTA LE PLASTRIER     In native American and other cultural traditions, the raven has a powerful symbology. It is considered a messenger who carries information between worlds, is of the earth but also capable of bridging to other realms. It can also […]

The Petrov Poems by Lesley Lebkowicz Pitt Street Poetry, 2013 ISBN 9781922080141 Reviewed by LINDA WESTE Lesley Lebkowicz’s The Petrov Poems is a verse novel that keeps its offerings close to its chest: at eighty pages the volume is slim and unassuming, its cover inconspicuous. While this reserve accords with its theme of espionage, nevertheless its […]

Circle Work by Cameron Lowe Puncher and Wattmann ISBN: 9781922186232   Reviewed by VANESSA PAGE   Cameron Lowe’s Circle Work is a graceful collection of poems, with no trace of the masculine, high octane themes that you might expect from a book bearing this title. Instead, the reader is drawn into Lowe’s strange and beautiful […]

Maps, Cargo by Bella Li Vagabond Press, 2013         The Tulip Beds by A. J. Carruthers Vagabond Press, 2013 Reviewed by TAMRYN BENNETT   As Rare Object #94 and #92 respectively, Bella Li’s Maps, Cargo and A. J Carruthers’ The Tulip Beds are set to become even more recherché as Vagabond rounds-out […]

Naming the Ruins by Dinah Romah Vagabond Reviewed and launched by MERLINDA BOBIS     What do you do with loss? Or with the violated body? Or the devastated dream? What do you with ruins? You name them. You story them. You incant them into ‘oracles of love.’ This is what Naming the Ruins and […]

Sea of Heartbeak (Unexpected Resilience) by Les Wicks Puncher & Wattman Poetry ISBN: 9781922186348 Reviewed by JOHN UPTON     Before you open Les Wick’s latest collection he’s already playing with your eye and your mind: the title is a joke and an admonition: it’s “Sea of Heartbeak”, not “Heartbreak”. A sentimental cliché becomes a warning […]

Sputnik’s Cousin by Kent MacCarter Transit Lounge ISBN: 9781921924675 Reviewed by DAN DISNEY   If you are looking for narrative sensibilities or lyric sense-making in a narrow sense, then Sputnik’s Cousin is not for you. About as far out as its Russian satellite namesake once was, this is a book of astronomically strange experiments delivered […]

Onkalo by Bernice Chauly (Math Paper Press, 2013) Reviewed by JENNIFER MACKENZIE ‘Say it loud, say it silent’ (Socks) Bernice Chauly’s Onkalo begins with an extraordinary quotation in the preface from Michael Madison, director of Into Eternity, a documentary on Onkalo, a nuclear fuel repository being built on the coast of Finland: You are now […]