Reviews/Essays

I’m Not Racist But…. by Tim Soutphommasane New South Books ISBN  9781742234274 Reviewed by JARNI BLAKKARLY Discussion about race and racism has been forcing its confrontational self into Australia’s mainstream public sphere quite a bit lately. It has been so visible and tangible that it’s becoming increasingly difficult for those who would rather not discuss it […]

Inside My Mother by Ali Cobby Eckermann Giramondo ISBN 9781922146885 Reviewed by GEOFF PAGE   Since the appearance of her popular first collection, Little Bit Long Time, in 2009, Aboriginal poet, Ali Cobby Eckermann, has produced five more books including a couple of verse novels, the second of which, Ruby Moonlight, won the NSW Premier’s […]

Small Acts of Disappearance by Fiona Wright Giramondo ISBN 978-1-922146-93-9 Reviewed by EMMA ROSE SMITH ‘I just saw Fiona Wright,’ says my friend over the phone. ‘At least, I thought it was her.’ A statement that wouldn’t be out of place at a poetry event or around the streets of the inner-west of Sydney. But my […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]