A Journal of Australian & International Cultural Reviews, News and Criticism.
I met Anne Elvey quite a few yonks ago at a soup and haiku night Myron Lysenko hosted when he was living in Brunswick, before he did the tree change thing and relocated to Woodend. I had taken my knitting in case it was boring, but then Anne arrived and sat on the couch next to me
With both passion and precision, her poems explore the rift between justice and the law within the often-veiled domestic environment as well as in the courtroom and other more public spaces, in the past and also, urgently, in the present.
I really enjoyed the way in which the chronological order of the collection reflects the evolution of Angela’s thinking and her response to the moral issues she’s been confronted with when she was a practising lawyer.
One of the great gifts of these poems is Lucas’ expertise in making the familiar (such as a zoom meeting, a walk on the beach, seeing whales, a father’s belongings, an exploration of ‘the mind’s cabinet’ with a therapist) take on new clarity, a more generous one.
I am happy to announce the triumphant arrival of Cathy Altmann’s third book of poetry. Triumphant because despite the public and personal exhaustion of COVID, with its insistence on longevity, Cathy birthed, gathered and salvaged thirty-nine poems, turning them into a collection of attentive and intuitive distillations for our times.
In this new book of poetry Mark deepens and extends his range with a particular focus on ekphrasis, which in very rough terms means using one form of art or literature to describe or respond to what is seen in a different form of art or literature.
I was not prepared for the humour and humanity of these poems. Their sheer excellence.
The Light Café is a book in four sections, each headed by a stunning Dickinson quote, and one of the sections is a rain sequence, while elsewhere in the book are cloud sequences together with marvellous imagery of atmospheric effects – all of this rendered, along with the sky, the moon and the sun and the movements of air, with transformative close attention.
The collection was such a knockout that I could hardly believe anyone in Australia could respond to personal catastrophe with such artistic intelligence, fortitude, and grace that this book reveals.
Rochford Street Review 