David McCooey

'God' a poem by David McCooey

December 2002-January 2003, no. 247 • 01 December 2002

God, the lonely father,shuffles through thecorridors of heaven,haunted by angels –memories of desire,the source of nostalgia. ... (read more)

David McCooey reviews 'Fast, Loose Beginnings: A memoir of intoxications' by John Kinsella

October 2006, no. 285 • 01 October 2006

John Kinsella’s new memoir, Fast, Loose Beginnings, may have been published by the august publishing house of Melbourne University Publishing, but it is nevertheless a garage-band of a book. It is, as its title signals, both fast and loose. Its rhythms aren’t always graceful, and its timbres aren’t always smooth. You can almost hear the hum of the amplifiers. The poet Jaya Savige, in his rev ... (read more)

David McCooey reviews 'Enfolded in the Wings of a Great Darkness' by Peter Boyle, 'The Lowlands of Moyne' by Brendan Ryan, and 'Carte Blanche' by Thom Sullivan

April 2020, no. 420 • 20 March 2020

Enfolded in the Wings of a Great Darkness by Peter Boyle Vagabond Press, $25 pb, 82 pp Peter Boyle’s Enfolded in the Wings of a Great Darkness is a book-length elegiac poem dedicated to his partner, the anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose (1946–2018). Unlike other works lamenting the illness and loss of a spouse, Boyle’s collection largely avoids representing the day-to-day demands of suf ... (read more)

David McCooey reviews 'The Song Remains the Same: 800 years of love songs, laments and lullabies' by Andrew Ford and Anni Heino

March 2020, no. 419 • 24 February 2020

In 1973, aged six, I heard the song ‘Rock On’ by David Essex. I was obsessed by its sound. While I couldn’t have put it into words, I half understood that the song was made sonically exciting not just through its inventive arrangement (a song about rock and roll with no guitars!) but also its production techniques, especially the use of reverb and delay to ‘stage’ the vocal and instrumen ... (read more)

David McCooey reviews 'The Lovemakers: Book two: Money and nothing' by Alan Wearne

May 2004, no. 261 • 01 May 2004

Alan Wearne’s The Lovemakers is a book about overdoing it. Its characters have unwise love affairs, dream foolish dreams, drink too much, engage in criminal activity, amass (and lose) vast wealth, and talk incessantly (usually about themselves). Wearne’s characters usually deal with obsession and with the places you get to in life if you overdo things. Few characters in this second part of Wea ... (read more)

David McCooey reviews 'The Australian Popular Songbook' by Alan Wearne

June 2008, no. 302 • 01 June 2008

Having spent two decades or more writing massive verse novels – The Nightmarkets (1986) and The Lovemakers (2001, 2004) – it may seem that Alan Wearne, with his latest book of poetry, The Australian Popular Songbook, has finally returned to smaller forms and, as suggested by the title, a more lyrical idiom. But, as always with Wearne’s work, things aren’t that simple. The smaller forms wer ... (read more)

David McCooey reviews 'Empirical' by Lisa Gorton

October 2019, no. 415 • 25 September 2019

In her latest collection of poems, Empirical, Lisa Gorton demonstrates – definitively and elegantly – how large, apparently simple creative decisions (employing catalogues or lists; quoting from the archive; engaging in ekphrasis or description) can produce compelling and complex poetic forms. Empirical shows continuities with Gorton’s two earlier collections, especially with regard to a re ... (read more)

David McCooey reviews 'Hoi Polloi' by Craig Sherborne

September 2005, no. 274 • 01 September 2005

A laughing man, according to Flaubert, is stronger than a suffering one. But as Craig Sherborne’s extraordinary new memoir of childhood and youth shows, the distinction isn’t that simple. There is much to laugh at in Hoi Polloi, but this is also a book suffused with pain and suffering. Sherborne is both a powerful satirist and a poet of vulnerability. The poems by Sherborne included in The Bes ... (read more)

David McCooey reviews 'The Twelfth of Never: A memoir' by Louis Nowra

April 2000, no. 219 • 01 April 2000

Louis Nowra was born in 1950 and is – as he presents himself in this memoir – that very mid­-century thing, an outsider. An outsider in terms of class, mental constitution, and sexuality (for a time), Nowra suffers a worse, and originary, alienation from his mother. Being born on the fifth anniversary of his mother’s shooting of her father, Nowra’s existence is caught between dysfuncti ... (read more)

David McCooey reviews 'A Passing Bell: Ghazals for Tina' by Paul Kane

December 2018, no. 407 • 26 November 2018

Rarely does one come across a book that is both intensely ‘literary’ – stylised, sophisticated, deeply engaged with its antecedents – and achingly moving, so viscerally raw that it takes one’s breath away. A Passing Bell: Ghazals for Tina – an elegy-sequence for Tina Kane, to whom Paul Kane was married for thirty-six years – is such a work. Kane’s use of the ghazal is an inspired ... (read more)