Jennifer Harrison

Jennifer Harrison reviews 'languish' by Marion May Campbell and 'And to Ecstasy' by Marjon Mossammaparast

August 2022, no. 445 • 28 July 2022

The title of Marion May Campbell’s third poetry collection, languish, conjures ideas of laziness, daydream, failure to make progress, ennui, lack of enthusiasm, anhedonia. Campbell’s poetry is concerned with the excitement of language, but also its debasement. Several reviewers have commented on the work’s intertextuality (Campbell often employs compositional strategies such as parody, allus ... (read more)

'Mandelbrot Set', a poem by Jennifer Harrison

August 2022, no. 445 • 26 July 2022

i ~ dots of colour     points on a complex          number plane where the x horizontal axisrepresents the ‘real’ part number              and the vertical y gives us unseenspace      the imaginary i      x=iy          and i2 =-1& ... (read more)

Jennifer Harrison reviews 'In the Room with the She Wolf' by Jelena Dinić and 'Beneath the Tree Line' by Jane Gibian

April 2022, no. 441 • 23 March 2022

In an impressive first collection, the South Australian poet Jelena Dinić incorporates her Serbian heritage and memories of war-affected Yugoslavia into an Australian migration narrative of clear-sighted beauty. William Carlos Williams wrote in the introduction to Kora In Hell: Improvisations (1920): ‘Thus a poem is tough … solely from that attenuated power which draws perhaps many broken thi ... (read more)

Jennifer Harrison reviews 'Whirlwind Duststorm' by John Hawke

September 2021, no. 435 • 19 August 2021

In the epigraph to this collection, a quote from Jean-Paul Sartre on Edmund Husserl suggests that we are entering a poetic that challenges the possibility of conscious knowledge; consciousness is itself a maelstrom that extrudes the intruder and has ‘no inside’. What follows is both a refutation and embracement of this assertion in chatoyant language that is as thoughtful and melodic as it is ... (read more)

'Explorer', a new poem by Jennifer Harrison

May 2021, no. 431 • 26 April 2021

after Eavan Boland’s ‘New Territory’   The world closed in, but it was fortunatethere was her own interior to explore:the prayer books a captain might have readon long voyages, now small with gossamer pagesof tiny print, so interesting, myths really,of rise and fall, pride, hedonism and fate,the farmer who could not turn water into wineno matter how hard he tried. And then there weree ... (read more)

'Galleria' a poem by Jennifer Harrison

April 2001, no. 229 • 01 April 2001

I’ve been trying to place lovein the exhibit for inspectionbut there are fees to be perfected. ... (read more)

Miles Ahead

ABR Arts • 15 June 2016

'If you are going to tell a story, come with some attitude, man' Miles Dewey Davis III (26 May 1926 – 28 September 1991) After a ten-year gestation, actor Don Cheadle (Hotel Rwanda [2004], Crash [2004]) has realised his dream to produce a film on the legendary jazz musician Miles Davis. Cheadle who directs, co-writes, and plays the central role eschews the usual linear narrative in Miles Ahead ... (read more)

Jennifer Harrison reviews 'Ecstacies and Elegies: Poems' by Paul Carter

August 2014, no. 363 • 01 August 2014

It may seem strange to begin a review of Paul Carter’s extraordinary poetry collection by quoting the words of another writer, but these lines of Boris Pasternak’s – taken from his essay in The Poet’s Work (1989), a collection of writings by twentieth-century poets on their art – seem particularly pertinent: By its inborn faculty of hearing, poetry seeks out the melody of nature amid ... (read more)

Jennifer Harrison reviews 'Outcrop: Radical Australian poetry of land' edited by Jeremy Balius and Corey Wakeling

March 2014, no. 359 • 28 February 2014

Radical histories often balance political ideas and actions on a see-saw of progressive liberal ideology on the one hand, and a thumbs-down rejection of the ‘old guard’ on the other – a challenge to perceived obsolete, lazy, or contaminated ways of seeing, doing, or being. When I encountered the word ‘radical’ in the title of Outcrop, its rich political history of associations hovered ab ... (read more)