Thankless
REVIEWS “Grace Heyer was a joint winner of the 2018 David Harold Tribe Poetry Award… more of a cosmopolitan, than metropolitan poet, with her…
A Coach Heading Towards the Provinces
Born in dire poverty but writing poetry all his life, even when he ran a successful business, Xifeng Yedu is one of the Chinese oral poets who doesn’t belong but must write his kind of oral poetry that mixes politics with sex and transcends them, with a fine sense of the Chinese language, in a post-China and Covid-19 environ, in which he is trying to eke out a poetic existence in what is already a Chinese Melbourne.
Off Limits
Off Limits features toads and torched pubs, and the hidden lives of foxes. The title poem suggests spaces that are barred, out of bounds. By extension, the collection probes underground mindscapes and the buried lives of others. Lifts manhole covers, shines a spotlight on the ways the human heart enacts rebellion. ‘Tunnel rats’ skateboarding in Sydney’s drains. Cavers making erotic forays into the forbidden White Bay Power Station. Developers eying off iconic buildings. These poems capture the desperation of commuters trapped on motorways, of long-distance lovers navigating desire between hot chilli sauce and Arizona landscapes. This is the territory of space travel and robots, the wonders of biomimicry and the transcending of our limitations to learn from animals. Wryly ironic about humanity’s dream of reinventing itself on other planets, the poet resists the trashing of the one we inhabit. This is poetry of passionate engagement, clear-eyed and firmly earthed.
The Tide Will Take It
This collection of poems is both celebration and elegy, paying homage to everyday beauty and documenting and protesting its degradation and neglect. The poems move along distinct threads: poems of ocean and river; those that draw insight from or give voice to birds and animals; and others that tell or retell the experiences of real and mythical women. Activist though they are, the poems in this collection avoid the didactic, preferring the intricacies of attempting to understand, redress and find a way to live with loss and environmental change. They inhabit many forms and voices: news reports; bird song; other poets; even the tide itself, and speak to us with tenderness, urgency and optimism.
Book of Mother
Book of Mother is an exploration of mother/son relationship and of language and consciousness (as these are entered and left). This book is an intimate encounter with dementia as lived experience. Words are an important way into the world and when we begin to lose them we find ourselves with fewer tools and fewer familiar signs to go by. Phrases lost and tip-of-the-tongue half-forgettings – loose threads like these belong to the everyday business of knowing who we are. They are also the nuts and bolts of Kit Kelen’s poetry.
Spirit Level
Geologists and archaeologists use spirit level tools to locate elusive horizontal levels in ground or rock. Similarly, the poems in Spirit Level search for the tenuous points of balance between memory and lived terrain – between past and present lives, between grief and moments of enlightenment. Conscious of the constructed and fragmentary nature of remembering, this poetry forges connecting threads between how we live in the now, and how we create meaning from past histories and experience.
Glass Flowers
In Glass Flowers, Diane Fahey explores many kinds of space – the enclosed spaces of rooms, art galleries, hospital wards, prehistoric caves, the airy, flowing spaces of gardens, and the sky’s infinite life. Her intense engagement with the natural world moves in new directions, ‘as we approach the summer years’. While some poems convey the freedom of the present moment – imaged by the long glide of a kelp gull, ‘a yielding, shaping gesture’ – others invoke the uncanny, as in ‘Unearthly’ where clouds at sunset, photographed from a space station, send out into space ‘thousand-mile shadows / cutting through that cold radiance, / probing the void.’ Fahey also directs her gaze at various kinds of creativity – in particular, paintings that explore the inner life of rooms, and self-portraits built from ‘coils and surges of / colour incarnate’.
It Seems that I’m Depressed
Man Chen, whose original name is Zhou Minjun, was born in Songjiang, Shanghai, in 1966. Currently a member of Shanghai Writers Association and head…
Inheritance
A survivor’s exploration of diaspora, refuge, and power, Inheritance is at times a celebration, at times a lamentation – an examination of ecology, migration, climate and wonder in the human, and more-than-human, historic, present, familial and sacred worlds. Incantatory and elegiac, fable and devotional, these poems are witnesses to displacement and survival.
Nellie Le Beau is the winner of the 2020 Puncher & Wattmann Prize for a First Book of Poetry. A Wheeler Centre Fellow, her poetry has been shortlisted for the Val Vallis Award and the Fair Australia Prize. Her writing has been translated into Arabic, French, and Spanish.
Save As
In A. Frances Johnson’s Save As, poetries of disfigurement braid tropes of ruin: land and country, self and community. Shunning earnestness and sanctimony, this…
