A Journal of Australian & International Cultural Reviews, News and Criticism.
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.
What might it have been like to visit the Braes Hotel, to peer across to the great poet, George Mackay Brown, seated at the window, ale in hand, and then to his lips, looking out to all of Stromness and to the sea?
Practitioners of meditation are like poets in a few ways. The meditator spends long periods of time studying the contents of their attention, becoming familiar with the patterns of sensation, feeling, and thought that make up the experience of being human. Through this study, the practitioner builds an anatomy of experience, and learns something of the world they inhabit — a kind of sense making.
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.
Rochford Street Review was saddened to learn of the death of John Tranter on Friday 21 April.
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.