David Mason

David Mason reviews 'The Language in My Tongue: An anthology of Australian and New Zealand poetry' edited by Cassandra Atherton and Paul Hetherington

August 2022, no. 445 • 28 July 2022

There’s an old Irish saying: ‘If you want praise, die. If you want blame, marry.’ I could add from personal experience, ‘If you really want blame, edit a poetry anthology.’ While poetry is relatively popular, it often seems that more people write it than read it. As a result, poets can be desperate for affirmation and recognition, managing their careers more jealously than investment ban ... (read more)

David Mason reviews 'The Jaguar' by Sarah Holland-Batt

June 2022, no. 443 • 25 May 2022

I first encountered Sarah Holland-Batt’s poem ‘The Gift’ in The New Yorker. It begins, ‘In the garden my father sits in his wheelchair / garlanded by summer hibiscus / like a saint in a seventeenth-century cartouche’ – an unremarkable opening, I thought, to a poem of personal anecdote, a genre too ubiquitous among our contemporaries. Rereading the poem in the context of her third colle ... (read more)

David Mason reviews 'Into the Rip: How the Australian way of risk made my family stronger, happier … and less American' by Damien Cave

November 2021, no. 437 • 25 October 2021

In 2016, New York Times correspondent Damien Cave moved his young family to Sydney to establish a foreign bureau for the newspaper. As he writes in his new book, Into the Rip, the experience has been transformational, teaching him among other things that ‘None of us is trapped within the nation we come from or the values we picked up along the way’. Despite political and economic alliances, Au ... (read more)

David Mason reviews 'How to Read a Poem: Seven steps' by Thomas H. Ford

January–February 2022, no. 439 • 28 September 2021

In my thirty years as an academic, the greatest joy and puzzlement I had was in teaching poetry. I agree with T.S. Eliot that ‘genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood’. Our best teaching often involves what we do not fully understand. The scholar D.S. Carne-Ross once argued that, upon hearing poetry spoken in an unfamiliar language, you can tell it is poetry, the language of poe ... (read more)

'Quantum of Light', a poem by David Mason

July 2021, no. 433 • 23 June 2021

Dusk when the people in the treesstand out against the dark – but it isn’t dark, only a deep gradationof the light – the people in the trees,crone-like olives, have been gathering all day,ravelling, unravelling their hair, their knotted fingers,tableaux of maenads, harvesting. Even on the other side,the over-underside of the globe, even here it is not dark but onlya deep gradation of t ... (read more)

David Mason reviews 'African American Poetry: 250 years of struggle and song' edited by Kevin Young

May 2021, no. 431 • 27 April 2021

The Library of America has published massive anthologies of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American poetry that include work from multiple racial and ethnic backgrounds, so why now another large book devoted exclusively to African Americans? Because it needs to be said and said again just how profoundly American this poetry is, how it enriches culture and should not be ignored among the more co ... (read more)

David Mason reviews 'Dearly' by Margaret Atwood

March 2021, no. 429 • 03 February 2021

Margaret Atwood began as a poet and transformed herself into a factory, producing work of great energy and range. Since her first collection, Double Persephone, appeared in 1961, she has published more than sixty books of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. She is a librettist, a maker of eBooks, graphic novels, and television scripts, and, with the serialisations of The Handmaid’s Tale and Alias ... (read more)