Ania Walwicz, Palace of Culture
Review by Rose Lucas in the Australian Book Review
(excerpt)
Reading the poetry of Ania Walwicz is a little like being drawn into a trance: the density of the prose-like lines; the disorientation of the lack of punctuation; the repetition of certain words, phrases, alliterations. It is not a poetry that can be read in short bursts.
Each poem is a commitment to a vision, to a mind-space explicitly shaped by the intensity and demand of Walwicz’s language. Having burst into Australian poetry with her ‘Polish accented’ voice more than thirty years ago, troubling the dominant Anglocentric view of Australian culture, Walwicz’s poetic still works to startle a reader from her comfort zone and to disrupt her expectations about what poetry is and can be.
In this collection, the poems cluster loosely around the interiority of the deep mind, in particular around the often disturbing and hypnotic logic of dreams: ‘i am told in a dream that a fast train that a fast rain is going to come on my way and on my way i am told that every day every day…’, or ‘what you see now i dream about what I dream I have a dream now what i see’.
Sometimes this world is threatening and claustrophobic…
Rose Lucas, ABR, November 2014
Read the review in The Australian Book Review