A Journal of Australian & International Cultural Reviews, News and Criticism.
In reading Lisa Collyer’s poetry collection, Gold Digger, I was struck by how she writes poems that are battle-line hardy, staunchly feminist, with a working-class sensibility and a gendered understanding of both out-of-home work and the domestic sphere
Otopos by Dominique Hecq was launched in the UK by y Anne Caldwell as part of the Speed dating launch at the Ekphrasis Symposium organised by Oz Hardwick and Cassandra Atherton at Leeds Trinity University, UK on July 6.
The title taps us all at those points during the pandemic and in life where, after losing the world as we know it, we walked through all that is gone.
Te Pūrere translates approximately into the English language as ‘getaway’ or ‘exodus’ and is an especially appropriate title for this anthology of New Zealand poets who continue to reside or have recently lived overseas as expatriates for lengthy periods. Their rationales are many and varied – ranging from employment, through relationships, to life-choice decisions to remain overseas
The recently published chapbook, Each Night I Count my Children: Poems from Gaza, is one example of how poetry has survived in the rubble of Gaza and, indeed, how it has become an essential part of the struggle to keep Palestinian society and culture alive.
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.