Cassandra Atherton

Cassandra Atherton is a poet and scholar. She is Professor of Writing and Literature at Deakin University. She was a Harvard Visiting Fellow in English and a Visiting Scholar in Comparative Culture at Sophia University, Tokyo. She is writing a book of prose poetry on the atomic bomb with funding from an Australia Council grant.

Cassandra Atherton reviews 'Island 132' edited by Rachel Edwards and Matthew Lamb

July–August 2013, no. 353 • 27 June 2013

The Kantian epigraph to this issue of Island points to an exploration of the island as ‘the land of truth’, with the ocean around it as ‘the native home of illusion’. In this way, the translation of experience, both real and imagined, is navigated in clever and topical ways. The emphasis on ‘island’ as a micro-metonym for Tasmania demonstrates that while there are changes afoot at Isla ... (read more)

Cassandra Atherton reviews 'Antipodes: A Global Journal of Australian/New Zealand Literature, Vol. 26, No. 2' edited by Nicholas Birns

June 2013, no. 352 • 27 May 2013

A polyphony of voices in Antipodes offers readers a textured view of literature from Australia and New Zealand. Contributors to this biannual journal are Australianists from all over the world. This globalisation is perhaps best evidenced by the inclusion of critics from Portugal, Slovenia, Lebanon, and Austria, writing incisively about Gail Jones, Indigenous poetry, Australian Lebanese writers, a ... (read more)

Cassandra Atherton reviews 'Hotel Hyperion' by Lisa Gorton

May 2013, no. 351 • 27 April 2013

The camera ottica in the epigraph to Hotel Hyperion alludes to Lisa Gorton’s artful play with shifting perspectives in this luminescent collection of poetry. The reader is invited to put her eye to the lines of poetry as if to a Galilean telescope or ‘perspective tube’. By looking at the poems through the peephole as an optic chamber, the reader brings the larger concerns of time and space i ... (read more)

Cassandra Atherton reviews 'Australian Poetry Journal, Volume 2, Issue 2' edited by Bronwyn Lea

April 2013, no. 350 • 26 March 2013

Australian Poetry Journal, the flagship publication of Australian Poetry, contains a veritable who’s who of Australian poets. However, this doesn’t mean that the journal is part of the poetry gangland to which some other contemporary Australian journals belong. This is a testament to editor, Bronwyn Lea, who must disappoint many poets – possibly even poet friends or acquaintances – in orde ... (read more)

Cassandra Atherton reviews 'The Best Australian Stories 2012' edited by Sonya Hartnett

February 2013, no. 348 • 29 January 2013

Sonya Hartnett’s début as editor of The Best Australian Stories is marked by a series of fictions about dysfunctional families, eccentrics, and misfits. The homeless, lonely, disenfranchised, intellectually disabled, sick, afflicted, even the dead, are featured alongside the privileged, rich, and famous in a macabre mardi gras. Readers familiar with Hartnett’s writing will recognise many of h ... (read more)

Cassandra Atherton reviews 'The Conversation' by David Brooks

November 2012, no. 346 • 26 October 2012

The epigraph from Plato’s Phaedrus cleverly introduces the Socratic dialogue on which David Brooks’s new novel turns. This makes for a brilliant foray into the contradictions at the heart of the truths that both characters are seeking in The Conversation. This question-and-answer exchange is presented as a kind of Scheherazadian dégustation of narratives, where the novel endures for as long a ... (read more)

Cassandra Atherton reviews 'Ormond Papers Volume XXVIII, 2011' edited by Pera Wells

May 2012, no. 341 • 24 April 2012

Ormond Papers showcases the academic work of Ormond undergraduates and the wider college community. This volume loosely explores issues of identity and space, opening with the Ormond-centric ‘Our Academic Home’, on the refurbishment of the Academic Centre. Robert Leach’s interview with Colin Barnes, the gardener, is a highlight, despite some ill-conceived questions (‘You’ve been here a w ... (read more)

Cassandra Atherton reviews 'The Keeper of Fish' by Alan Fish (edited by Philip Salom) and 'Keeping Carter' by M.A. Carter (edited by Philip Salom)

May 2012, no. 341 • 20 April 2012

In his Keepers trilogy, Philip Salom is an Eliotian Fisher King, exploring the fissuring of identity in a triple play of plurality. The first book, Keepers (2010), was written by Salom, but authorship of The Keeper of Fish and Keeping Carter is attributed to Alan Fish and M.A. Carter,respectively. In his role as editor for these two poets, Salom becomes their gatekeeper or, as he states, their ‘ ... (read more)