A Journal of Australian & International Cultural Reviews, News and Criticism.
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.
Detective fiction is hardly a traditional subject for poetry, yet there is clearly a perennial fascination with crime and crime solving. The Detective’s Chair exploits the conceit that the 32 detectives presented here do most of their reflecting, cogitating, puzzling, meditating and nutting-out in the embrace of a favourite chair.
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.
If I could sit here and just read every poem in this anthology to you, I would. The work in these pages is brilliant, heartbreaking, nourishing, tender, wise, funny, philosophical and they explore vast worlds
Never heavy, Rose Lucas’s voice is measured, paced – on the page and in the ear – with the rhythms of heartbeat or walking. The ‘murk’ of human obsessions and cruelty are suggested subtly, but in such a way that her poetics affirms a kind of grace. Despite its sometime pious or religious overtones, in Lucas’s poetry ‘grace’ itself is a word that the poet risks effectively.