Hunter Publishers

One of the many life-challenging things that poetry can do is to prise open unexpected spaces and take us somewhere entirely unanticipated, whether it be in terms of how we live, how we understand the world, or how we link the fabric of textual utterance with that of our lived experience. These two new poetry collections set about this labour of disruption in very different ways, demonstrating some of the pathways available between poet and reader.

The reader of Stasis Shuffle is immediately confronted with the collection’s naming convention. Titles of poems and sections are parenthesised, for example, ‘(best before)’, ‘(weevils)’, ‘(& then). More than simple stylisation, this convention suggests that every poem is a fragment, a meander through consciousness. The first poem, ‘(best before)’, begins ‘liberated / from the drudgery / of usefulness’, a quote from Walter Benjamin. From there, Stasis Shuffle wanders flâneur-style through language, politics, and many different kinds of plant life. The central arc of Stasis Shuffle, however, is its self-consciousness about subjectivity and process. ‘(best before)’ asks ‘is your slowly accreting poem / morphing into a larger cloud yet’? As the collection unfolds, poems begin to comment on themselves and the writing process.

Personal Weather is Peter Bakowski’s seventh collection, yet he remains impossible to categorise. His is a distant relative of Ken Bolton’s conversational style, while also a close cousin to central European poetry. His poems can be three-page narratives or urbanised haiku. Above all, Bakowski is a poet of wonder – wonder at the contradictions and complexity of life as it passes him by. He is also very personal, both in his use of the autobiographical ‘I’ and in his idiosyncratic takes on more objective material.

Ronnie Scott, who started The Lifted Brow in Brisbane in 2007 at the age of twenty, has now curated this Best of collection from the magazine’s first five years. It’s an eclectic mixtape of contributions from internationals such as David Foster Wallace, Heidi Julavits, and Tao Lin, local writers Christos Tsiolkas and Frank Moorhouse, and a roll-call of the young and/or hip, including Romy Ash, Tom Cho, Anna Krien, and Alice Pung, many of whom were but talented emerging writers when their work first featured in the magazine.