Australian Poetry
Melissa Ashley reviews 'The Apparition at Large' by K.F. Pearson
The Apparition at Large is Black Pepper’s managing director K.F. Pearson’s second outing as the commentating enigma, most recently encountered in The Apparition’s Daybook (1995). Opening poems map the identity’s regular ‘haunts’ – the bars and cafés of inner-Melbourne – via evocative sketches of daily life’s unexpected sensuality: ‘A colour can completely drench our consciousness.’ Transient comforts and pleasures, while lingered upon, are undercut by the apparition’s humiliating invisibility and insubstantiality.
... (read more)There are not many ways, I imagine, in which Vivian Smith puts one in mind of Walt Whitman, but one which occurs to me is that Smith’s successive volumes, at least since Tide Country (1982), have been, like Leaves of Grass (1855), a work in progress, in which previous poems reappear, sometimes in modified form, and new work is added, so that the whole corpus is re-presented in different ways over time. Along the Line is the latest, and welcome, incarnation of Smith’s oeuvre.
... (read more)John Jenkins reviews 'Nebuchadnezzar' by Shelton Lea and 'Poetileptic' by Mal McKimmie
Nebuchadnezzar is Shelton Lea’s ninth and last book. Sadly, this colourful poet, a well-loved stalwart on the Melbourne reading circuit, died of cancer in May 2006, shortly after its publication.
The book begins by surveying a ‘land of fences and diatribes’ (‘1988’). It describes the inhabitants of Koori streets: ‘old men with no tomorrows / who rock on broken chairs / and stare at a bitumen sea’ (‘fitzroy’). Lea was an advocate for Aboriginal causes, and his poems often celebrate marginalised people who must summon the desire to survive. This burden of grit grounds life in harsh experience, before a remarkable lift-off.s a sort of coda, and satisfyingly resonates to the final page, in this assured début collection.
... (read more)Admirer’s of Judith Beveridge’s distinctive talent have had a long wait between collections (it’s eight years since Accidental Grace), although she has been published consistently in anthologies and journals, and poems from the central sequence of this collection, ‘Between the Palace and the Bodhi Tree’, won the 2003 Josephine Ulrick National Poetry Prize. Patience is rewarded: this is a collection of impressive poetic maturity.
... (read more)Peter Pierce reviews 'The Sleep of a Learning Man' by Anthony Lawrence
The Sleep of a Learning Man is the sixth verse collection from the gifted and exacting Anthony Lawrence. He has also written a novel. The epigraph to this book gives some hint as to where the poet stands, and where he intends to go. It is from Antonio Porcia: ‘I am chained to the earth to pay for the freedom of my eyes.’ But looking is only one means to find his way, a dilemma that a number of the forty-two poems gathered here confronts.
... (read more)Judith Beveridge reviews 'Lost in the Foreground' by Stephen Edgar
Stephen Edgar’s fifth volume, Lost in the Foreground, is a book of marvels, both technically and in the elegant, magisterial reach of its content. He is wonderfully inventive, and his complex rhyme schemes and forms are achieved with such precision and finesse that one can only conjecture as to how long each piece must have taken to become so lovingly and artfully realised.
... (read more)Poems are like mangroves. They lodge and grow in the mind, becoming part of us, just as these plants take root in estuarine silt. Even on the page, there is sometimes a resemblance. As its title suggests, Laurie Duggan’s first volume since New and Selected Poems (1996) is substantially a product of his recent move to Brisbane, containing a large section of poems coloured by references to the city’s subtropical conditions. However, Mangroves also brings together varied material that dates from 1988 to 1994, some of which – notably the ‘Blue Hills’ sequences – has been published elsewhere.
... (read more)Paul Kane reviews ‘The Poetry of Les Murray’ edited by Laurie Hergenhan and Bruce Clunies Ross, ‘Les Murray’ by Steven Matthews, and ‘Poems the Size of Photographs’ by Les Murray
You might expect a book of eighty-eight new poems by Les Murray to be sizeable (most of his recent single volumes run to about sixty poems each). But Poems the Size of Photographs is literally a small book, composed of short poems (‘though some are longer’, says the back cover) ...
... (read more)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:
... (read more)In the August 2001 issue of Meanjin, M.T.C. Cronin writes of poetry: ‘The poems are not as useful as ribs but like them do protect life and when removed from the body grow certain murmurings of the mind.’ No matter how chaotic or runic her prose pronouncements, Cronin’s poems are quirky and original at best, diffuse and repetitive at worst.
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