A Journal of Australian & International Cultural Reviews, News and Criticism.
In Incandescence, Susan has crafted a collection that arises from the everyday, while expanding into the universal. These themes of parenting, caregiving, surviving a pandemic, holding a marriage together, walking through grief, and making space for joy, even amid exhaustion, mean that her poems glow with warmth and insight, even when they explore moments of deep difficulty.
A Dodds poem may be as likely to be set in a classroom as on a farm paddock as on a film screen. It may take the form of couplets, stepped stanzas, a concrete poem, a list or even an erasure.
Many of Michael Quinn’s poem deal with the personal and collective trauma in the Irish psyche.
Firstly, one has to marvel at the vast, unquenchable curiosity that runs through Ron’s work. There is a global shortage of this invaluable human trait. You find it everywhere in this book from communal bathrooms in Japan to the nature of the human soul.
This beautiful collection is both a joy to read and a challenge. Each poem stands as part of a carefully curated section. The sections combine to form a collection which demands to be read as a whole,
Jennifer Mackenzie’s work is often ekphrastic, inspired by, or growing out from, another work of art. She doesn’t describe that work of origin, as if outside of it, but becomes thoroughly embedded, moving between direct quotation and poetic re-imagining.
The Nightmare Sequence is a profound and deeply moving act of truth-telling created by poet Omar Sakr and artist Safdar Ahmed. It is bravely published by University of Queensland Press, in an almost unprecedented period of censorship in Australia’s artistic and literary scene.
Parallax is not an easy read, and demands re-reading, which is perhaps its intention. Morgan explores and upends common dichotomies which, to the reader, are inherently familiar: chaos/ order, sanity/i nsanity, religion/science and freedom/ captivity.
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
Rochford Street Review 