Reviews/Essays

Rawshock by Toby Fitch Puncher and Wattmann, 2012 ISBN 9781921450617 Reviewed by FIONA HILE     Luminosities The few lines of biography on the back cover of Toby Fitch’s first full-length collection of poems, Rawshock, remind us that he was ‘born in London and raised in Sydney’ whilst a recommendation gleaned from the launch speech […]

The Recluse By Evelyn Juers Giramondo Shorts, 2012     The Recluse opens with a brief, evocative description of student life in a share house in Queen Street, Newtown, Sydney in the early 1970s; wherein we learn that the author sometimes skips classes and goes down to read in Camperdown Cemetery. One of her favourite […]

Alien Shores Ed. Sharon Rundle, Meenakshi Bharat Brass Monkey Press ISBN 9780980863932 219 pages, RRP $24.95 Reviewed by SUNIL BADAMI   Exile is a powerful undercurrent in the Indian imagination. One of its defining myths, the Ramayana, tells the story of a noble prince banished from his home and spending much of his exile rescuing […]

The Walls of Delhi by Uday Prakash translated by Jason Grunebaum UWA Publishing ISBN 9781742583921 Reviewed by PAUL GIFFARD-FORET     Global India and the Dialectic of the Ornament / Excrement: “Light on exoticism, heavy on reality” and “India for Indians, not India for/in the West”. It is in those terms that Uday Prakash was […]

The Darkest Little Room  By Patrick Holland  Transit Lounge Publishing, 2012  ISBN: 978-1-921924-24-8  Reviewed by JEN CRAIG     Patrick Holland’s second novel The Darkest Little Room is a pursuit, as its title suggests, of terminal, secretive spaces. Joseph, or Joe, is a 33-year-old Australian journalist living in Saigon. On the side he employs Minh […]

Rimbaud in Java by Jamie James Editions Didier Millet Singapore , 2011 Reviewed by JENNIFER MACKENZIE   Of the biographies of poets, it is that of Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) which continues to perplex and confound. Why is it that someone so gifted should abandon poetry at the age of twenty-one for the life of a […]

Southern Sun, Aegean Light: Poetry by Second-Generation Greek-Australians Edited by N. N. Trakakis   Arcadia: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2011, 317p ISBN 9781921875120 Reviewed by VRASIDIS KARALIS  Almost twenty five years after the last anthology of Greek Australian Poetry, Nick Trakakis’ recent publication comes to cover a considerable gap in the bibliography and at the same […]

Collected by Rosemary Dobson UQP, 2012 ISBN 978 0 7022 3911 3 Reviewed by GEOFF PAGE     Reading Rosemary Dobson’s Collected in those few short (and now poignant) weeks between its delayed appearance and her death at 92, I was particularly struck by how little these poems, beginning in the mid-1940s, have aged. Most […]

Night Train by Anthony Lynch Clouds of Magellan ISBN: 9780980712087 Reviewed by TINA GIANNOUKOS   Despite their disparate appearance in journals over several years, and anthologised in Best Australian Poems, the poems in Night Train give the impression of a well-conceived, pre-determined collection. Night Train is not a capricious collection of dissimilar poems sutured together […]

Letters to My Lover from a Small Mountain Town by Heather Taylor Johnson ISBN 9781921869662 Interactive Press Reviewed by NATHANAEL O’REILLY    While searching online for new collections of Australian poetry in 2008, I came across Heather Taylor Johnson’s debut collection, Exit Wounds (Picaro Press, 2007). As an Australian residing in the United States, I […]

 The Red Sea  by Stephen Edgar Baskerville Publishing  ISBN 978-1-880909-78-2 Reviewed by JAL NICHOLL   What a peculiar thing the meditative lyric is. How different in spirit from Basho’s instruction to poets: “Go to the pine if you want to learn about the pine, or to the bamboo if you want to learn about the […]

All Just by David Herd Carcanet Press ISBN 9781847771636 Reviewed by ANN VICKERY   All Just (2012) is David Herd’s second collection published by Carcanet Press (the first being Mandelson! Mandelson! A Memoir (2005)). The epigraph by Giorgio Agamben foregrounds the volume’s key theme which is to explore what it means to be political in […]

Domestic Archaeology by Kelly Pilgrim-Byrne Grand Parade Poets, 2012 ISBN Reviewed by BRONWN LANG This is Kelly Pilgrim-Byrne’s second publication.  Her first, People from Bones, was co-authored with Bron Bateman and the new collection, Domestic Archaeology, “has been ten years in the making and aims to take you on the journey of infertility and out […]

Grit Salute by Keri Glastonbury Papertiger Media ISBN 978-0-9807695-2-4 Reviewed by MELINDA BUFTON   More than any collection I’ve read recently, Keri Glastonbury’s work takes us along for her travels – we are the notebook in her back pocket, and accordingly, she wants us to remember a few things with her.  And what an excellent […]

The Brokenness Sonnets I–III & Other Poems by Mal McKimmie 5 Islands Press, 2011 ISBN: 978-0-7340-4425-9 Reviewed by TOBY DAVIDSON When Mal McKimmie’s debut collection Poetileptic was released in late 2005, I attended the launch at Carlton theatre where I had just seen Oscar Wilde’s Salome. A small, high-quality audience of esteemed poets, editors and […]

 Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry since 1965  by Timothy Yu Stanford University Press, 2009     Gwee. Your book Race and the Avant-Garde, published in 2009, gives voice to the racial complications in the poetic avant-garde of America since the 1960s. You strongly suggest that its various formations have never been defined by […]

There is a painful edge to the word race. Sometimes I cannot help thinking of it as a wound, something that cannot be cleft apart from my femaleness. And yet there, at the same time, when I step back a little, there is always the sense that race is an illusion, something made up. Otherwise […]

On Search and Recognition: Adopted Korean Diaspora and Poetry   Unlike the stranger returning home to discover his childhood village disappeared, the poet enters Korea as a social ghost resisting erasures that stripped him of family, geography, history, language, and memory and sent him overseas for adoption to one of 15 western receiving nations. One […]

Kundiman is a literary organization dedicated to the creation, cultivation and promotion of Asian American poetry.  Founded in 2002 by two poets, Sarah Gambito and Joseph O. Legaspi, Kundiman supports the artistic and professional development of emerging Asian American poets, and aims to preserve and promote the cultural legacy of the Asian American diaspora.  It […]

Pier Alice James Books 2011 by Janine Oshiro ISBN: 9781882295883 Reviewed by WENDI M LEE Janine Oshiro’s first poetry collection, Pier, is a haunting masterpiece tinged with fantasy and the shifting landscapes of nature, decay, and creation. Oshiro writes of family histories: a deceased mother and ailing father, growing up in Hawaii and living on […]