A Journal of Australian & International Cultural Reviews, News and Criticism.
Spirit Level: the balance between two worlds, two lives, between memory and the lived past. In this, her third collection of poetry, Marcelle Freiman continues to explore, in greater depth, themes arising from her earlier books, White Lines (Vertical) and Monkey’s Wedding.
This is penetrating yet humble poetry. Poems that fall off the tongue as gratifying as water. Some written in ways that remind me of curved, cascading terraced hillsides. Taking me to places of serenity by honouring our daily encounters found within ceilings and walls, fences and yards, streets and parks, skin and bone.
Leaf is Elvey’s sixth full length poetry collection and takes seriously John Charles Ryan’s provocation ‘how might we imagine plants?’, for it is this work of empathic imagining, and decentring of the human, that will offer us any chance of a future in the current age of species collapse and climate catastrophe.
Looking In is a well-written book, Leibowitz has a very original voice, he moves from harsh words to tender ones, from the serious to the banal, from skepticism to certitude.
It’s been amazing to work with Yannis on the poetry in this book and on the reciprocal translations we’ve done. It not only connected me back to the teaching work that I loved but also to Greek culture that I’ve only ever had a toe in, always standing on the outside looking in. I think our work has also connected Yannis a bit more with Australian culture and literature, with writing and writers that he was previously not connected with.
Whether these poems refer to historical events, social issues, the difficulty in negotiating the demands of everyday life, loneliness and isolation, selfhood in adverse social conditions, death and beauty, or even poetry itself, they seem to emanate from the same center: a distinct outlook in life and a distinct way of looking at reality.
pressed specimens is a unique collection. Costello has taken images of dried, pressed plant specimens from the collection of the Medicinal Plant Herbarium at Southern Cross University (Lismore Campus) as inspiration for a series of prose poems.
In the writing, poems swirl, hiccup, rove, lose beginnings, endings, words morph to new words, and sometimes the whole thing is shelved. But eventually, if a poem wants to land, it lands. A poem is finished, they say, when it could only be your poem and these poems with their ampersands could only be Chris’s.
No poet appears out of context, in fact, most poets write in response to or against the many poets who have come before them, as well as the poets that they may share a connection with in contemporary. Johnson’s poetry is no different, in the sense that her eco-poetics and position as a writer keenly aware of the power and fragility of the natural world is borne out of her close reading of other poets and writers.
Rochford Street Review 