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Australian Poetry

‘Dark satanic mills won the day’, S.K. Kelen tells us in one of his strongest poems, ‘Slouching’. ‘Cold modernity followed, a brooding European / monochrome hinted at worlds passing (the good old days).’ What many critics take to be William Blake’s damning of the Industrial Revolution – ‘And was Jerusalem builded here, / Among these dark Satanic Mills?’ (from ‘And did those feet in ancient time’, c.1804) – could easily have served as an epigraph for Kelen’s Island Earth. The industrial age, its intrusion upon great swathes of the ‘emerald world’, has been variously and often compellingly dissected by Kelen throughout his poetic career, which spans more than three decades and is represented in this New and Selected. Also scrutinised is industrialism’s accomplice and enabler: the increasingly global economy that, for Kelen, has made a hostile takeover of human activity at almost every level.

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I

Rooms so familiar
they complete themselves in me –
this darkened hall where the glass cases,

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John Leonard’s anthology of young Australian poets, showcasing the work of an exclusive septet, comes hot on the heels of Felicity Plunkett’s more accommodating Thirty Australian Poets (reviewed by Fiona Wright in the December 2011–January 2012 issue of ABR). Young Poets: An Australian Anthology ...

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The Welfare of My Enemy is an unusual experiment in narrative poetry. Taking as its theme ‘the disappeared’, it is a set of narratives, a kind of anthology that imaginatively documents the myriad ways in which (and the different reasons for which) people go ‘off the radar’ and end up as missing persons ...

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Vishvarūpa by Michelle Cahill

by
April 2012, no. 340

Vishvarūpa, Michelle Cahill’s second collection, is a convocation of untouchables and deities – unbelieving, irreverent, and sardonic – each a proxy for an aspect of the poet’s (post-colonial) self; each a stand-in, even, for a moment in every human life.

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'Oscillations', a new poem by Toby Fitch.

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1

The far margin of wintering wetlands,
mist before sunrise. Outside my window
a rock parrot is perched on its fence-post.

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Taking note might prompt some things:
look! Even a colon finds correlation
with the eyes of Hoji’s frog, and the king’s.

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Outside by David McCooey

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March 2012, no. 339

Philip Larkin at thirty-one asked ‘Where can we live but days?’ It shouldn’t take half a lifetime to learn that we have night and day, yet learning how to live with this arrangement, and that this is the arrangement, is something we keep adapting to all our lives. While not a dichotomy, night and day help form the dichotomous nature of our thinking, and inform especially the method of describing and explaining everything that we call poetry. David McCooey has taken this elementary fact as first principle in creating poetry that is by turns accepting and acerbic, buoyant and bothered, carefree and careful. Outside is divided into two studied sections, one coloured by day, the second by night.

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The answer could only be yes. Or,
(as James would have it) it was a question,
the way she turned back to him
seemed to say, that deserved

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