Reviews/Essays

Over There: Poems from Singapore and Australia Edited by John Kinsella and Alvin Pang, Ethos Books (2008) / 324 pages / SGD 35.00   Readers looking for cross-literary collaboration between Singapore and Australia will find Over There: Poems from Singapore and Australia, a valuable addition to their poetry library. How do we name and represent […]

Look Who’s Morphing by Tom Cho Giramondo ISBN 978 192088 2549 www.giramondopublishing.com 181 pages   reviewed by CYRIL WONG Reading all of Tom Cho’s stories in a single sitting proved to be an exhilarating experience that left me reconsidering past and broken familial relationships, the politics of identity-formations, as well as the insecurities and uncontrollable desires that […]

The Kingsbury Tales By Ouyang Yu Brandl and Schlesinger ISBN 978-1-876040-82-6 books@brandl.com.au Reviewed by CYRIL WONG   In The Kingsbury Tales, Ouyang Yu has decided that he has written a novel, instead of just a collection of poems. Although there is no overarching, dramatic narrative beyond the physical and emotional transitions the poet makes between Australia, […]

A Shrine to Lata Mangeshkar By Kerry Leves Puncher & Wattmann ISBN 0-9752405-4-4 Glebe, 2008 Order Copies from http://www.puncherandwattmann.com Reviewed by KRISTIN HANNAFORD   Sometimes you have a book that travels with you.  A collection of poems which has secreted itself into a handbag or suitcase, a book you grab and keep chancing upon like […]

Touch By Meena Kandasamy Peacock Books Mumbai ISBN: 81-88811-87-4 Reviewed by JAYDEEP SARANGI   Dalit literatures in India are subversive, or structurally alternative to the models prescribed by traditional Hindu aesthetics precisely because they are literatures of sociological oppression and economical exploitation. Dalit literatures are essentially a shock to tradition and sense. They are an assault to the anthropomorphic […]

Language For A New Century   Edited by Tina Chang, Nathalie Handal, Ravi Shankar   ISBN 978-0-393-33238-4 2008 WW Norton   reviewed by MICHELLE CAHILL     Language For a New Century, published last year by Norton, is a collection of poetry from Asia, and the Middle East. The book is a poetic odyssey, an […]

A Cool and Shaded Heart Noel Rowe (Vagabond Press, ISBN 97805511307, $25)                                  Reviewed by MARGARET BRADSTOCK   Just under a year since Noel Rowe’s untimely death, Vagabond Press have graced us with a volume of his collected poems, selected by editor Michael Brennan. The collection does not include Rowe’s first book, Wings and Fire, […]

Fragile Context By Kristin Hannaford Post Pressed ISBN 9781921214189. 324/50 Macquarie St, Teneriffe, Qld, 4005 order from postpressed@gmail.com   Reviewed by ANGELA MEYER Poetry can exist between boundaries of communication. It can have an awareness of itself in the uniqueness of its form, unlike a blanket of prose which acts to unfold a narrative. Kristin Hannaford’s poems also thematically blur […]

Dilip Chitre is and Indian poet, artist and filmaker. He has published thirty books, five of which have been translated into German. He has won several prizes and awards.                      I have been drawing, sketching, and painting since my early childhood when I also started playing with words. My father collected books […]

Man Wolf Man by L. K. Holt  John Leonard Press, Elwood, 2007 ISBN: 9780977578771 78 pp. pb. AUD23.95   Reviewed by KIM CHENG BOEY                  Lyric poetry has the power to slow time down to intense, expanded moments of seeing and feeling. Its measured breaths connect language and silence, music and poetry, the visible […]

Young Rain                                                           New Poems by Kevin Hart Giramondo, 2008 (85 pages) ISBN: 9781920882457     Reviewed by CYRIL WONG               Kevin Hart’s poems are full of darkness and light, oscillating gracefully between meditations on death, the limits of selfhood, sex and the erotics of longing and memory. And although they are composed in a style […]

The Circus by Ken Bolton Wakefield Press 2010 ISBN: 9781862546899 REVIEWED BY RAE DEE JONES   For thirty years Ken Bolton has shown tenacious dedication to his chosen art. Apart from producing a series of volumes of poetry of unusual consistency, he also edited the magazine Magic Sam. When I read this recent volume after browsing through some of […]

New and Rediscovered by Vicki Viidikas Transit Lounge May 2010 ISBN: 9780980571769 REVIEWED BY MARTIN EDMOND   That Incorrigible Weapon: Vicki Viidikas, New and Rediscovered   A few years ago a friend who lives in Queensland asked me if I would mind having a look around the second hand bookshops in Sydney for the only one of Vicki […]

Aria translations by Sudeep Sen   Yeti Books, Kerala, 2009, 152 pages, Price Rs.399/599 (pb/hb) Mulfran Press, Wales, 2010, 152 pages, Price £11.95/14.95 (pb/hb)  Reviewed by NABINA DAS   That Sudeep Sen’s strikingly diverse book of translated poetry is titled ARIA, brings to mind the significance of the music analogy. Just as the different movements in […]

Phantom Limb by David Musgrave John Leonard Press 2010 ISBN 9780980526998 Reviewed by KYLIE ROSE   There are a whole host of haunting pains that torment us for reasons we do not understand and that arrive from we know not where—pains without return address. —Norman Doidge It’s a Friday night; my daughter and I are taking turns […]

A Slant of Light by Paul Kane Whitmore Press Reviewed by Michelle Cahill   Paul Kane’s collection of Australian poems, A Slant of Light concerns itself with motion and matter, the visible spectrums. In this slim, modest volume, poems from Work Life,  and the earlier Drowned Lands, as well as new poems are luminously arranged […]

Iran: My Grandfather  by Ali Alizadeh  Transit Lounge, 2010 ISBN 9780980571745 Reviewed by ANGELA MEYER       Iran’s fascinating, in parts beautiful and in parts horrific history is worthy of account: the contextual conflict; religion versus progress; and all the complex in-betweens. So many good intentions, misinterpretations, capitulations, and fluctuations has this country endured. Its […]

Ghostmasters  by Mani Rao Chameleon Press, 2010 ISBN 9789881862310 Reviewed by AMOS TOH     Mani Rao has donned many hats – TV executive, visiting fellow, scholar, critic and performer – but she is perhaps most at home as a poet. Tellingly, her poetry has spanned over more than a decade, leaving a “ghostly trail of […]

  When I’m trapping on the Foggy, / fifteen miles off Catherine Hill Bay, / the world is good” (“Trapping on the Foggy”, lines 1-3) writes Anthony Lawrence in his faux-simplistic manner. In his earlier collections, Lawrence often explores traditionally masculine activities, carried out by men in the company of men, like the drinking and […]

Net Needle by Robert Adamson Black Inc ISBN 9781863957311 Reviewed by FIONA SCOTNEY In many ways the collection Net Needle is a logical continuation of Adamson’s recurring themes of love, loss, birds and the Hawkesbury region. It is very Adamson. It has the traits readers have perhaps come to expect and admire from his last […]