Reviews/Essays

Possession by Anna Kerdijk Nicholson Five Islands Press, 2010 ISBN 978 0 7340 4111 1 http://www.fiveislandspress.com/newbooks.html Reviewed by MARGARET BRADSTOCK     Following on from her poetic achievements of The Bundanon Cantos (FIP, 2003), and co-editorship of the journal Five Bells from 2000-2003, comes Anna Kerdijk Nicholson’s immaculately presented collection, Possession.   There are as many […]

Water the Moon by Fiona Sze-Lorrain Marick Press 2009 ISBN 9781934851128  Reviewed by KIM CHENG BOEY   In his essay “Transnational Poetics,” Jahan Ramazani argues that mononational narratives of modern and contemporary poetry are inadequate in view of the cross-cultural mobility and rampant border-crossing-and-straddling that many poets of “transnational affiliations and identities” perform. Convincingly, Ramazani […]

 Dark Bright Doors                                                                             by Jill Jones Wakefield Press ISBN 9781862548817 Reviewed by  KERI GLASTONBURY      The titles of Jill Jones’ most recent full-length collections, Broken/Open (Salt Publishing, 2005) and her latest, Dark Bright Doors (Wakefield Press, 2010), have the contrariness of koans. There is something deliberately ‘puzzlingly poetic’ about them, and as in Jones’ […]

Symptoms of Homesickness by Nathanael O’Reilly Picaro Press, 2010 ISBN 9781920957896 Reviewed by EA GLEESON   With dedications to Conlon and Quigley and geographical cues such as Yambuk, The Lady Bay Hotel and The Moyne, the nomenclature of Symptoms of Homesickness orientates us towards the Irish Australian Diaspora and particularly as it is lived out […]

Dog Boy by Eva Hornung Text Publishing, 2009 ISBN 9781921520099 Reviewed by KATHARINE GILLETT     What is it that makes us human? In Dog Boy, Eva Hornung examines the instinct to nurture and protect, not as an inherently human trait, but as one belonging to the invisibly marked territory of a pack of stray […]

The English Class  by Ouyang Yu Transit Lounge, 2010 ISBN 9780980571783 Reviewed by SALLY FITZPATRICK                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         Having resisted colonial forays for millennia, China is ironically westernizing itself, a cultural revolution with arguably as much impact as that of the Great Proletarian Revolution.  Even the poorest Chinese peasant, willing to dismiss the intense […]

Feather Man   by Rhyll McMaster   Brandl & Schlesinger, 2007   ISBN: 9781876040833   Reviewed by DEBBIE LIM What repels can often also compel. In Feather Man, author Rhyll McMaster seems to know this as she draws us into the life of Sooky – a girl who is sexually abused by her neighbour in 1950s […]

Porch Music by Cameron Lowe Whitmore Press December 2010 ISBN 978 0 9757762 7 8   REVIEWED BY ANNA RYAN-PUNCH   Cameron Lowe’s first book of poetry, Porch Music, showcases his ability to deftly navigate both the natural and the surreal in this striking collection.   The book is divided into two sections. The first, Balloon Days, is […]

        Among the regulars by Andy Jackson Papertiger March 2010 ISBN 9780980769500 REVIEWED BY DEBBIE LIM          An online piece by the Academy of American Poets suggests that poems about the body ‘are often poems of celebration and awe, poems that delight in the body’s mysteries, its "dream of flesh"’.1   In Andy […]

The Domestic Sublime by Chris Wallace-Crabbe River Road Press Audio CD Nov 2009 REVIEWED BY ANDREW CARRUTHERS         George Orwell’s defense of broadcasted poetry in his essay “Poetry and the Microphone” (1945) was, amongst the efforts of Marinetti and Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh (founders of Zaum), one of the more impassioned cases for shifting the balance […]

Ilumina, edited by Judith Beveridge and Roberta Lowing REVIEWED BY MICHELLE CAHILL   Ilumina Poetry UnLimited Press ISBN 9780646476100 Sydney 2007 Order copies by email: pulppoetry@gmail.com                          Ilumina  is one of this year’s surprising packages. Published by the vanguard Poetry Unlimited Press under the loving patronage of Roberta Lowing, and edited by Judith Beveridge, it features work […]

Two Responses on the Poetry of Thanh Thao by Michelle Cahill and Boey Kim Cheng   Humility in the Work of Thanh Thao by Michelle Cahill   When Boey Kim Cheng and I first read the poems of Thanh Thao we were immediately struck by their quiet tone, their gentle transformations of personal and public suffering, […]

Yuxtas (Back and Forth)by Mario Licón Cabrera Launch Speech by PETER BOYLE 7 December Sydney 2007 Cervantes Publishing ISBN 9780949274205 email:info@cervantespublishing.com   Peter Boyle lives in Sydney. His most recent books are  Museum of Space (UQP) and Reading Borges (Picador)    I want to start by thanking Mario Licón for inviting me to speak at the […]

by Associate Professor Paul Sharrad University Of Wollongong Paul Sharrad is Associate Professor in English Literatures at the University of Wollongong where he teaches postcolonial writing and theory. He has published on people such as Salman Rushdie, Peter Carey, Christopher Koch, Anita Desai, Wilson Harris,Raja Rao and Albert Wendt. His book on Indian fiction in […]

  On The Apocrypha Of William O’Shaunessy MICHELLE CAHILL in conversation with PETER BOYLE   MC: What were the inspirations for your work The Apocrypha Of William O’Shaunessy ? PB: Many and varied. It is a long work – about 400 pages with a wide variety of material. I began it in 2004. Museum of Space […]

  Eucalypt: A Tanka journal, Issue 3, 2007 Beverley George (Ed.) PO Box 37 Pearl Beach 2256 ISSN 1833-8186 RRP: $30 for two issues p.a Reviewed by MARGARET BRADSTOCK          I was impressed by the inaugural issue of Eucalypt, appearing in 2006 and positively reviewed by Jan Dean in Five Bells (vol.14, no.2, […]

Writing The Pacific Jen Webb and Kavita Nandan (eds)   IPS, 2007 ISBN 9789823660165  Reviewed by MARTIN EDMOND       The title of this anthology, Writing the Pacific, immediately called to mind an extraordinary story James Hamilton-Paterson tells in his long essay Sea Burial. It is about the mid 19th century shipwreck of Italian writer/philosopher […]

On John Mateer’s Southern Barbarians (Zero Press, Johannesburg, 2007)  (Originally published in Kris Hemensley’s blog, available at http://collectedworks-poetryideas.blogspot.com  November 2008)   Reviewed by KRIS HEMENSLEY Such presence exists in John Mateer’s Southern Barbarians (Zero Press, Johannesburg, 2007), bolstered by plenty of first person, and maybe that’s the reason it’s so pleasurable to read – first […]

Once Poemas, Septiembre 1973 By Juan Garrido Salgado Translated by Stuart Cooke Picaro Press ISBN 978-1-920957-39-1 Warners Bay, 2007 Order Copies from www.picaropress.com Reviewed by HEATHER TAYLOR JOHNSON       Once Poemas, Septiembre 1973 (Eleven Poems, September 1973) reads like a narrative of collected single poems. Though not a verse novel, it tells the […]

Ana Blandiana was born Otilia-Valeria Coman on 25th March 1942 in Timiºoara, Romania and adopted her pen name at seventeen with the publication of her first poem. After marrying editor Romulus Rusan in 1960 she attended the faculty of philology in Cluj-Napoca.                                                                                                       Ana Blandiana I first heard of the poet Ana Blandiana as a […]