Holocene Pointbreaks
Written amid the COVID lockdowns of 2020, Holocene Pointbreaks embraces the geographical restriction during that period to create a triptych of local meanderings; an…
The Oblong Plot
Moving nimbly between the granular and the broad view, The Oblong Plot, Chris Andrews’ third collection, takes in paint splotches on a sawhorse and…
Tight Bindings
With unflinching honesty and lyrical precision, Tight Bindings grapples with embodied experiences and moments of transition. Birth, death, sex, illness, desire, and motherhood are all…
Anatomy of Voice
What is a voice?
In this book-length poem, (which starts in a manner reminiscent of Beckett’s Company), the isness of voice is its central preoccupation: it is considered from as many different aspects as there are parts to this multiform poem. Highly exploratory, with words sometimes rising from or inspired by selected Renaissance wood-cut engravings, Anatomy of Voice is divided into four Partitions – across which are lyricised the shiftings of the question ‘what is a voice’, and the poem’s speculative and evocative answers. The book is simultaneously warmly personal and scholarly, intimate and learned, a felt meditation created as a tribute to the late Bill Maidment, a teacher whose influence on the author (as it was for many) was life-changing.
DAVID MUSGRAVE
Infantilisms
Infantilisms concerns the work of serious culture, which for the philosopher Charles Fourier (the presiding spirit here) is deathly. Infantilism, by contrast, is the work of the passions (work as passion, which is true poesis): Fourier’s “little hordes.” Blake had a similar idea of “infantile” joyousness in doing & making, in revolt against the Iron-Clad Laws. Infantilisms is a poetic refusal of all such Laws & their dour, sarcastic, humourless notaries. At its heart lie feelings of tenderness. A writer can only be a fool according to the exigencies of the epoch they’re bequeathed, but only a child can write poetry. Everywhere the work of mourning has turned to so much schadenfreude: what good’s Literature that can bring only flowers to its own funeral? Do not draw comfort from watching the little children play — join their wild dance!
Axolotl Waltz
In axolotl waltz, Nathan Shepherdson steers a rusty trolley with its wobbly wheel as he haunts the aisles in the Supermarket of Casual Koans (SOCK). What he can’t find, he invents, or at other times puts items back he bought months ago, on their same shelf, unopened. Shepherdson is perhaps an outlier in Australian Poetry – grows his own punctuation, turns water into accidental wit, stares at the seeds of random ideas with a synthetic light in his eyes. Yet he understands that shadows are the perfect fabric for a new suit or old clothes. It seems the shooting stars he’s looking for have blown their headlights.
I’ve Been Called Away
An uncompromising avant-gardist when young, Chester wrote brilliant poetry and strongly influenced younger friends he mentored. The names of some of them – Robert Hughes and Clive James – are familiar to Australian readers. But not Chester. Chester is the first Australian poet to write poetry in the jokey, colloquial style of what is known as the New York school – poets such as John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Koch, who threw phrases at the page like an action painting, and treated meanings as objects to toy with and abandon. Ten years younger than the founding members of the New York school, Chester was writing poems like theirs at about the same time – starting in the second half of the 1950s. He is unlikely to have read their work. He was uniquely original.
Alchemy of the Sun
Alchemy of the Sun is a book about journeys. Sent to “open up the country”, ignorant of Aboriginal strategies for coping with the terrain and climate, many of the desert explorers failed, some dying in the attempt. Today’s battle is with man-made climate change and its aftereffects, an ongoing fecklessness that has disturbed the delicate balance of elements and environment. These poems seek to challenge the mindset of “conquering” the land, and offer instead the opportunity of mediation with the forces that shape the planet and our lives.
High Spirits
“Paul Mitchell has a deep love of the human condition and celebrates it with warm, witty, wise and wonderful words. He peers deeply into the
cosmic comedy and weaves poetry of humour and compassion from all its colours.” – Michael McGirr
Sanctuaries
Diane Fahey builds on an already rich body of poetry about birds with this fresh tribute to their exquisite intelligence, grace and splendour as they exist in the wild, and in our immediate sensory world. Vividly, she evokes the lives and contemporary plight of penguins, flamingos and myriad other birds. Sanctuaries offers a composite portrait of the suffering and the resilience, the giftedness in song and, in evolutionary terms, the self-fashioned beauty of birds.
