Reviews/Essays

Radiance by Andy Kissane Puncher & Wattmann, 2014 ISBN: 9781922186522 Reviewed by ANNA KERDIJIK NICHOLSON   Radiance is Andy Kissane’s fourth collection of poetry. In my view this collection is a subtle change from, but consistent with, his previous books of poetry (1). Kissane may be setting out his thesis in the poem ‘Summer’, in which he […]

New and Selected Poems by Chris Wallace-Crabbe Carcanet, 2013 ISBN 978-1906188-07-8 Reviewed by CASSANDRA ATHERTON   On the eve of his eightieth birthday, it seems appropriate that Chris Wallace-Crabbe’s New and Selected Poems offers readers an insight into his rich oeuvre and the opportunity to remedy, at least on a small scale, what Michael Sharkey (2007) […]

1953 by Geoff Page UQP ISBN  9780702249525 Reviewed by LINDA WESTE ‘Innovative’: the characteristic imputed to a recent prize-winning verse novel [1] that left prose novel competitors on the short list, prompts one to ask: what determines innovation in a form whose conventions are not widely understood? Geoff Page’s 1953 is a notable exemplar of […]

The Pillow Book by Jee Leong Koh Math Paper Press, 2012 ISBN: 978-981-07-3078-9 Reviewed by TIFFANY TSAO In taking its title and opening epigraph from one of the first masterpieces of the zuihitsu tradition—the pillow book written by Sei Shōnagon in the tenth century—Koh’s own pillow book seems to invite close comparison. However, as the […]

Ephemeral Waters  by Kate Middleton Giramondo, 2013 ISBN 978-1-922146-48-9 Reviewed by JO LANGDON   ‘Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find obsessive’, begins Joan Didion in ‘Holy Water’, an essay from the author’s 1979 collection The White Album. It was this essay […]

  Indigo Morning: Selected Poems By Rachael Munro Grand Parade Poets, 2013 ISBN: 9780987129130 Reviewed by GEOFF PAGE   Rachael Munro’s second book, Indigo Morning: Selected Poems, is intriguing on at least two levels, the autobiographical and the aesthetic. Her first book, Dragonshadow, was published in 1989. Although this new collection is highly personal in […]

Barnacle Rock By Margaret Bradstock Puncher and Wattmann, 2013 ISBN (paperback) 9781922186126 (e-book) 9781922186133 Reviewed by JOHN UPTON    ‘You will go back through the quiet bush’, says the eponymous poem in this collection, ‘past Aboriginal middens / rainbow lorikeets nesting / in tree knolls / to the uninhabited beach’ (Barnacle Rock). And during this […]

An Elegant Young Man by Luke Carman Giramondo, 2013 ISBN 978-1922146-45-8 Reviewed by ELIZABETH BRYER Luke Carman’s An Elegant Young Man, a formally innovative bildungsroman, is composed of eight story cycles set in Sydney’s multicultural western suburbs. The shortest of the cycles are the most experimental; these alternate with longer, more structurally conventional ones. The […]

The Double By Maria Takolander Text, 2013 ISBN: 9781922079763 Reviewed by PRITHVI VARATHARAJAN   We are fascinated, as a culture, with doubles and doppelgängers. This fascination is evident in our collective cultural consciousness: in our art. Think of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, in which the protagonist stays forever youthful, and able to […]

Moving Among Strangers: Randolph Stow & My Family by Gabrielle Carey UQP ISBN 978 0 7022 4992 1 Reviewed by MARTIN EDMOND     The quest memoir, poorly defined as a genre, is an ancient form with roots, most likely, in pre-literate times. Briefly, it is a narrative, told usually in the first person, of […]

The Question of Red by Laksmi Pamuntjak Gramedia Pustaka, 2013 Reviewed by JENNIFER MACKENZIE   From where she was standing, on the backyard of the hospital, the only objects she could make out were the parts chosen by the dying light. Idlehorse carts, bamboo bushes deep in sleep, an abandoned pile of buckets. She walked […]

Backyard Lemon Wendy Fleming Melbourne Poets Union Series ISBN 978-0-9925020-0-3 Reviewed/Launched by KEVIN BROPHY   The first thing we might say is that the backyard lemon tree is an iconic fixture in Melbourne’s northern suburbs, as heraldic as the Hills Hoist clothes line is for the rest of Australia’s backyards. The lemon is a humble […]

Bluewren Cantos By Mark Tredinnick Pitt St Poetry ISBN 978-1-922080-32-5 Reviewed by ANNE ELVEY When Bluewren Cantos opens ‘With Emily in the Garden’, the reader hears a beguiling voice. In shorter lines than is often the case with his work, Mark Tredinnick weaves the tropes of attentiveness to the other, mortality and finitude, together with […]

Turn By Wendy Chin-Tanner Sibling Rivalry Press, 2014 Reviewed by CYRIL WONG   Wendy Chin-Tanner’s poems in her debut full-length collection, Turn, returns with part-nostalgia and part-anguish to her Chinese-American childhood in New York City, while contrasting these memories with her current life. The ambivalences of the past and the future react against each other […]

Intimate Letters: Selected Poems of Chen Li translated by Chang Fen-ling Bookman, Taipei ISBN 9575866967 REVIEWED BY JANET CHARMAN   In November 2009 I was fortunate to be part of a group from around the Pacific Rim, attending the annual International Writers’ Workshop at Hong Kong Baptist University. Over the month of November each year, this programme […]

The Swan Book by Alexis Wright Giramondo, 2013 ISBN 978-1922146-41-0 Reviewed by MICHELLE CAHILL   The hallmark of a great writer is the capacity to renew and reinvent their creative vision which Alexis Wright achieves with startling virtuosity, sureness, wit and political astuteness in The Swan Book. This is an eclectic fiction, mythopoetic, a meta-narrative […]

Too Afraid to Cry by Ali Cobby Eckermann Ilura Press Reviewed by SOPHIA BARNES     Ali Cobby Eckermann’s elegant, confident and distinctive memoir is a slim volume for all that it contains. If a reader has the leisure to read it all in one sitting (as I did) the impact of its interwoven vignettes, […]

When My Brother was an Aztec By Natalie Diaz Copper Canyon Press ISBN 9781556593833 Reviewed by AIMEE A. NORTON   Natalie Diaz’s debut collection is a book about appetites.  It contains raw, narrative poems that pivot on her brother’s meth addiction.  Lyric surrealism is interspersed throughout and serves both as a welcome reprieve from the […]

 Toyo By Lily Chan Black Inc ISBN: 9781863955737 Reviewed by PAUL GIFFARD-FORET   In the Folds of Making: A Review of Toyo by Lily Chan   Upon a close reading of Melbourne-based, Japanese-Australian author Lily Chan’s debut novel and memoir Toyo, a word cannot fail to strike our attention, returning like a litany throughout. It […]

Transactions By Ali Alizadeh University of Queensland Press ISBN 9780702249785 Reviewed by ELIZABETH BRYER     Ali Alizadeh’s Transactions is a panoramic cycle of vignettes that depict characters in a globalised world on the margins of Western and, most particularly, capitalist society. A vast array of characters jostle within its pages: assassins, prostitutes, poets, protesters […]