Felicity Plunkett

Felicity Plunkett is a poet and critic. Her latest work, A Kinder Sea, is published by UQP. Her first collection of poetry Vanishing Point (UQP, 2009) won the Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Prize and was shortlisted for several other awards. She has a chapbook Seastrands (2011) in Vagabond Press’ Rare Objects series. Felicity was Poetry Editor for University of Queensland Press and edited Thirty Australian Poets (UQP, 2011). She has a PhD from the University of Sydney and her reviews and essays have been widely published in The Australian, Sydney Morning Herald, Australian Book Review, Sydney Review of Books etc. Her essay ‘Sound Bridge’, a portrait of Indigenous Australian musician Dr G. Yunupingu, was first published in Australian Book Review and anthologised in Best Australian Essays 2015 (Black Inc, ed. Geordie Williamson).

Felicity Plunkett reviews 'Iris' by Fiona Kelly McGregor

December 2022, no. 449 • 25 November 2022

The accordion, or squeezebox, takes its name from the German Akkordeon, meaning a ‘musical chorus’ or ‘chorus of sounds’. This box-shaped aerophonic instrument makes music when keys on its sides are pressed, one side mostly melody, the other chords. Squeezing the instrument and playing with both hands, the musician dexterously produces polyphonous music. Iris Webber, the protagonist of Fi ... (read more)

'On Dover Street', a new poem by Felicity Plunkett

November 2022, no. 448 • 25 October 2022

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Felicity Plunkett reviews 'Such Color: New and selected poems' by Tracy K. Smith

January–February 2022, no. 439 • 22 December 2021

‘The wave always returns’, writes Marina Tsvetaeva. And it ‘always returns as a different wave’. Such Color reveals such a relentless renewal of lyricism as a signature of Tracy K. Smith’s poetry. A selected edition promises to highlight images and ideas across the American poet’s work. For Smith, one constant is the movement of water. In ‘Minister of Saudade’, from her second ... (read more)

Felicity Plunkett reviews 'On Freedom: Four songs of care and constraint' by Maggie Nelson

October 2021, no. 436 • 22 September 2021

‘I just want you to feel free, I said in anger disguised as compassion, compassion disguised as anger.’ These are Maggie Nelson’s words to her partner, artist Harry Dodge, as the two negotiate the shapes of love, family, and gender. These include Harry’s gender fluidity (‘I’m not on my way anywhere, Harry sometimes tells inquirers’), children, and marriage, which they ‘kill ... (un ... (read more)

Felicity Plunkett reviews 'Summer' by Ali Smith

October 2020, no. 425 • 14 September 2020

I could begin with a lark stitched into a letter. It’s 2020 and ‘all manner of virulent things’ are simmering. Sixteen-year-old Sacha writes to Hero, a detained refugee. She wants to send ‘an open horizon’. Unsure what to say to someone suffering injustice, she writes about swifts: how far they travel, how they feed – and even sleep – on the wing. The way their presence announces the ... (read more)

Felicity Plunkett reviews 'The Salt Madonna' by Catherine Noske

March 2020, no. 419 • 24 February 2020

From the mainland, the fictional Chesil Island appears to float on the horizon. Perched above its bay, a statue of the Virgin Mary spreads its arms, its robes ‘faded and splintered by salt’. This icon of the miraculous and maternal, crafted from trees and symbolic of the invasion and settlement of Indigenous land, is imposing and worn, revered and neglected. The sometimes-narrator of Catherin ... (read more)

Felicity Plunkett reviews 'The Weekend' by Charlotte Wood

November 2019, no. 416 • 23 October 2019

‘What kind of game is the sea?’ asks the speaker of Tracy K. Smith’s poem ‘Minister of Saudade’. ‘Lap and drag’, comes the response, ‘Crag and gleam / That continual work of wave / And tide’. It is not until the end of The Weekend that the sea’s majestic game is brought into focus, and then the natural world rises, a riposte, to eclipse human trivia. Before this, Charlotte Woo ... (read more)

‘A mutinous and ferocious grace: Nick Cave and trauma’s aftermath' by Felicity Plunkett

June–July 2019, no. 412 • 23 May 2019

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds perform at Open’er Festival on 4 July 2018 in Gdynia, Poland (Ewa Burdynska-Michnam, East News sp. z o.o. Alamy Stock Photo) It begins with a projected haze of ocean horizon. In this blurry liminal space, silence is misted with anticipation, like the moment before an echo comes back empty, right across the sea. Then a close-up of multi-instrumentalist Warren Ellis ... (read more)

Felicity Plunkett reviews 'Dangerous Ideas about Mothers' edited by Camilla Nelson and Rachel Robertson

December 2018, no. 407 • 26 November 2018

An essay at the heart of this collection, ‘Against Motherhood Memoirs’ by Maria Tumarkin, is not as insistent as its title suggests. Tumarkin, interested in ‘fissures and de-fusion’, troubles the awkward spots in her analysis. While reading Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015) – which places ‘motherhood and queerness side by side’ with autotheory and what Nelson calls ‘post-shame ... (read more)

Felicity Plunkett reviews 'On J.M. Coetzee' by Ceridwen Dovey

November 2018, no. 406 • 15 October 2018

‘We think back through our mothers,’ writes Virginia Woolf (twice) in A Room of One’s Own. At first, she seems to be suggesting that women artists can only derive inspiration from women who precede them: ‘It is useless to go to the great men writers for help … the weight, the pace, the stride of a man’s mind are too unlike her own.’ But Woolf’s bravura rhetorical essay (she calls ... (read more)