Reviews/Essays

Parang by Omar Musa Blast! Publishing, 2013 ISBN: 978-0-646-59463-7 Reviewed by ANGELA STRETCH     It takes time to have a heart, to suffer, to feel the weight of things. The heart is alive precisely through its capacity for fellow-feeling. Like the posthumous soul in Malaysian thought, memory disperses as if it is no longer […]

Boom by Liam Ferney Grande Parade Poets ISBN 978-0-9871291-4-7 Reviewed by MELINDA BUFTON     Liam Ferney’s Boom (Grand Parade Poets, 2013) is a much-anticipated collection of tightly-knit poetry, threaded with the things he has seen and the spaces he’s occupied, cast with a sardonic glance and the flick of a metaphoric burnt-down cigarette. It […]

My Funeral Gondola by Fiona Sze-Lorrain Mãnoa Books / El Léon Literary Arts, 2013 ISBN: 978-0983391982 Reviewed by TIFFANY TSAO       Where does life reside? Where does the spirit live? Where is the substance of the self? In Fiona Sze-Lorrain’s second poetry collection, My Funeral Gondola, ponderous wonderings become lighter than air, flying […]

The Book of Ethel by Jordie Albiston Puncher and Wattmann ISBN: 9781922186263 Reviewed by DAN DISNEY     Jordie Albiston’s new book is the formal equivalent of an exclamation mark. These first-person narrative poems call from the ether of memory/invention, and in The Book of Ethel Albiston ventriloquizes her maternal great-grandmother’s voice to recount Ethel’s […]

Hotel Hyperion By Lisa Gorton Giramondo, May 2013, 50pp ISBN 9781922146274   In her second collection of poems, Hotel Hyperion, Lisa Gorton shows us how memory is “a place less like place than like memory itself” (“Dreams and Artefacts”): a surface, which we may see through but not penetrate. These poems are concerned with the […]

Clear Brightness by Kim Cheng Boey Puncher & Wattmann, 2012 ISBN 978 1 92145 094 5 Reviewed by CHRISTOPHER POLLNITZ     It was Coleridge who prescribed for Wordsworth what seems a superhuman task, that the poet who wishes to be considered original must “create the taste by which he is to be enjoyed” — […]

Eldershaw by Stephen Edgar Black Pepper Press, 2012 ISBN 9781876044787 Reviewed by LINDA WESTE     Publishers are not usually champions of narrative verse: it is not sufficient that writers of poetic narratives have literary history on their side. None would deny the pre-eminence of literary antecedent: the verse narratives that arose in each period — […]

Anguli Ma: A Gothic Tale by Chi Vu Giramondo ISBN 9781920882877 Reviewed by HOA PHAM     The Melbourne based writer Chi Vu is known for her plays “The Story of Soil” and “A Psychic Guide to Vietnam”. The text for “A Psychic Guide” was included in the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature and […]

The Seaglass Spiral by Alan Gould Finlay Lloyd ISBN: 9780977567751 Reviewed by GEOFF PAGE Let me begin, atypically for an Australian reviewer, with a declaration of interest. I have been a friend and colleague of Alan Gould from well before before he published his first book, Icelandic Solitaries, in 1978. I have read all his […]

Joyful Strains Edited by Kent MacCarter and Alison Lemer Affirm Press, 2013 ISBN 9780987308535 Reviewed by SOPHIA BARNES     Joyful Strains is introduced to us by Arnold Zable as a testament to the spirit of the PEN International project, bringing together a vibrant and engaging, by turns moving and hilarious, collection of stories. These […]

konkretion by Marion May Campbell University of Western Australia Publishing ISBN 9781742584911 Reviewed by CATHERINE COLE     Campbell’s novella, konkretion, follows an elderly ex-communist, Monique Piquet, through Paris, as she meets up with a former student who has published a book about German political activists, Ulrike Meinhof and Gudrun Ensslin, who were former and […]

Autoethnographic by Michael Brennan Giramondo, 2012 ISBN 9781920882891 Reviewed by TAMRYN BENNETT   ‘The world was already the world and we were looking for ourselves’ ~ Michael Brennan It is possible to comb Michael Brennan’s most recent collection for clues connecting it to the triptych the author alluded to in notes on Unanimous Night. Or […]

Straws, Sticks, Bricks by Cyril Wong Math Paper Press Reviewed by AMOS TOH     I first discovered Cyril Wong’s poetry at the same time I was introduced to his music, during the launch of his fifth collection of poems, Like A Seed With Its Singular Purpose, in 2006. Perched on a table in the […]

Collusion by Brook Emery John Leonard Press ISBN 9780980852363  Reviewed by SUSAN FEALY   Collusion by Brook Emery explores Daniel Delfoe’s question ‘is it better to be here or there?’ while imparting the experience of being consequent to living inside the question. We enter a deeply reflective, largely solitary world where uncertainty and complexity are […]

  Thick and Thin Lines by Phyllis Perlstone Puncher and Wattmann Poetry, 2012 ISBN 9781921450532 Reviewed by STEPHEN EDGAR     Some years ago I remember watching a television documentary about the English artist Ben Nicholson. At one point, speaking about a particular series of paintings in which Nicholson had arranged some carpentry tools in […]

Radar  by Nathan Curnow and Kevin Brophy Walleah Press, 2012 ISBN 9781877010187 Reviewed by DAN DISNEY   This shared book between two poets from different generations is a fascinating collection of segues, ellipses, and strange unities. The binaries are obvious: two poets (at different stages of their careers) populate separate halves of the book with their […]

The Sunlit Zone Lisa Jacobson 5 Islands Press, Melbourne, AUS 2012 ISBN 9780734047465 Pb 165pp Reviewed by LINDA WESTE In each verse novel, the unique relationship of poetic and narrative elements leads to a dynamic duality of design. Lisa Jacobson’s verse novel, The Sunlit Zone, illustrates how productive this interplay of narrative and poetic elements can […]

Fairweather’s Raft by Dael Allison Walleah Press, 2012 ISBN: 978-1-877010-21-7 Reviewed by GILLIAN TELFORD On the cover of Fairweather’s Raft a toy-like sailing vessel is adrift on a glassy ocean, its sail reflected as a shadow beneath the surface – and beneath the surface is where the reader is led by Dael Allison in this […]

Snowline by Jo Langdon Whitmore Press Poetry, 2012 ISBN 978 0 9757762 9 2 Reviewed by CHARLES MANIS Snowline, the debut chapbook by Jo Langdon, is both elegant and powerful. The lyric poems in this volume operate primarily in couplets and tercets, and out of the white space come teeth and airplanes and fragments of […]

Looking for Bullin Bullin by Brenda Saunders Hybrid Publishers, 2012 ISBN 1921665904 Reviewed by MARGARET BRADSTOCK     Embracing her Aboriginality has given Brenda Saunders both a focus and a purpose in her recent poetry collection, Looking for Bullin Bullin. Writing over the last decade, Saunders has, as she herself says, “a lot to say […]