A Journal of Australian & International Cultural Reviews, News and Criticism.
The collection, Some Days the Bird, is the result of Anne and Heather’s pandemic collaboration across the globe. Anne and Heather wrote poems to each other weekly during 2021, the second year of the pandemic, to and from opposite hemispheres and seasons. When I say wrote, I mean handwritten, posted, by snail mail.
While thematically very consistent with her previous collections, I think the poetry in Riptide is bolder and asks more questions of the reader. Amanda has something of a magpie-mind. Interested in and inquisitive about everything, she seeks to better understand every aspect of our world, no matter how small, and our pivotal role in it
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.
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.
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.
Rochford Street Review 