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Diane Fahey

Acanthus by Claire Potter & Glass Flowers by Diane Fahey

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June 2022, no. 443
Sarah Day reviews 'Acanthus' by Claire Potter and 'Glass Flowers' by Diane Fahey

Virginia Woolf, in her seminal essay on modern fiction (1919), might have been describing Claire Potter’s method in her fabulous and highly original new collection: Acanthus.  These poems seem to break apart consciousness before it becomes encoded, crystalised, as syntax. As a consequence, they have an uncanny and richly compelling ability to lead you away from the dimension in which you think you have entered the poem, in its opening lines, into something entirely different by the time you have reached the end. Somewhere between the beginning and the end something can be depended on to have shifted – mood, pace, imaginative compass bearing, subject plane.

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Fragments by Antigone Kefala & A House by the River by Diane Fahey

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June-July 2017, no. 392
Gig Ryan reviews 'Fragments' by Antigone Kefala and 'A House by the River' by Diane Fahey

Antigone Kefala’s Fragments, her fifth book of poems and first since Absence: New and selected poems (1992), is often menaced by the past, like her first collection, The Alien (1973). Here too are some subtly demolishing portraits, as well as buoyant poems such as ‘Metro Cellist’ and the slightly brooding ‘Summer at Derveni’: ‘ ...

The Wing Collection: New and Selected Poems by Diane Fahey

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December 2011–January 2012, no. 337
Rose Lucas reviews 'The Wing Collection: New and Selected Poems' by Diane Fahey

Over nearly thirty years and ten books, Diane Fahey has made a significant contribution to Australian poetry. The Wing Collection, from Puncher & Wattmann, showcases a wonderful array of her work. This generous collection offers a rich journey through Fahey’s key images and the recurring preoccupations that ...

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2010 ABR Poetry Prize shortlist

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April 2010, no 320

Taken as Required

by Ynes Sanz

An age ago, ill-matched,
ignorant but willing,
we set the rules.
‘Step by Step’, we said. ‘No Bullshit.’
Today, thinking of something else
I stumbled across the grey metal bracelet
you looped over that stick of a wrist
where your thin blood stained the skin
to resemble an antique map or a bad tattoo
(like the one they inked on for that photo shoot in the ’50s).

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Tigers on the Silk Road by Katherine Gallagher

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October 2001, no. 235
Diane Fahey reviews 'Tigers on the Silk Road' by Katherine Gallagher

Tigers and ‘the Silk Road to Istanbul’ feature in Part I of ‘1969’, the opening poem in this volume, which traces a hopeful setting forth into the undiscovered spaces of Asia and Europe. It is playfully exotic even while the homeward pull of a relationship envelops perception like a cloudscape:

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