A Journal of Australian & International Cultural Reviews, News and Criticism.
When you read these books you’ll see that the work is supported by a network of women sharing their work – the Saturday Writing Sisters – and also women critiquing and editing each other’s work.
This idea of returning forms one of the central tropes of Feldspar in both a figurative and literal sense. Many of these poems revisit scenes of the past, of the casual rituals of life down on the farm.
If I had to sum up Carl Walsh’s Tarp Green Light in one word it would be mindful. The work focuses inward, quietly observant, converting memory into the present moment through deep and sustained observation.
If you pick this up, you won’t want to put it down until you have finished reading it. That’s what happened to me when Suniti sent it as a manuscript. The first sentence in chapter 1 is: ‘I’ve fallen in love with the woman next door.’
Some books I’m not sure if I consume them or they consume me. Chinese fish has an amazing hypnotic clarity. Page turning, subterranean transitions keep moving me forward, they flow with no catch of air to breathe, a woman’s way book.
The Art world and the literary scene don’t interact in any culturally productive way, yet any writer would admit to feeding off visual art and any visual artist would say the same of literature. Since Tipping is both writer and visual artist, he must be very well-nourished.
These poems operate in media res, where the writer addresses the reader and engages us in the midst of a flow of ideas and feelings which have begun prior to our arrival, a continuous discourse with that world.
Gazebo Books 2023.
Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon writes poetry from and about the female body.
Her opening collection, First Blood was a gritty exploration of girlhood that challenged cultural expectations of ideal femininity. Her second collection If There is a Butterfly continues to centre female bodily experience, taking pregnancy, birth, and motherhood into her orbit.
Rochford Street Review 