A Journal of Australian & International Cultural Reviews, News and Criticism.
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.
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
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.
And to Ecstasy satisfies a standard I have for good poetry, which may not be unique to me. This is that it should encourage, and sustain, re-reading. I don’t tend to come to novels with the expectation that they hold my interest so well – word by word, and line by line – that I need to re-read every one. But I want poetry to resist my initial attempts at grasping it
With poetry of cinematic quality, the poet tells the story of Rebecca Lieberman who was only fourteen with not much life experience or schooling, but she had strength of character and a skill, she knew how to read the fortune in tea leaves. A skill that helped her to survive.
It is a sad, but very special honour to be launching this beautiful Flying Islands book: Jill McKeowen’s posthumously published first collection of poetry, Sunday Morning, Here.
There is something about the name a poet chooses to title their collection that will either attract or repel a reader. Most poets nowadays opt for a short and catchy title, something that doesn’t give away too much.Something that proclaims eruditon and an understanding of the zeitgeist. Not to do so is risky, if one wnats to court favour and aplomb. Mick Corrigan goes against the current grain by choosing The Love Poetry of Judas Iscariot as title for his debut.
Cooke wants us to shake us loose from our tired habits of perception, I think, because this is a crucial step towards responding to the challenges of our climate crisis. We have to rethink, and ultimately dissolve, the Man-Nature dichotomy and the implicit sublimation of Nature that shapes every aspect of our interaction with it. And we have to rethink this relationship that is at the very centre of our understanding of being if we are to fashion any kind of meaningful response, or risk losing every speck of brilliance, of imagination, of love and care and growth that has been part of the human experience. That’s not to say these poems are dark and dour, rather they compel urgency by depicting the stakes.
Rochford Street Review 