The heights of timelessness: Morgan Yasbincek launches ‘The Grand Reopening’ by Toby Davidson
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.
Puncher & Wattmann
A bee-bop kind of musicality: Mike Ladd reviews ‘Metropole’ by Ken Bolton
When I compare Ken Bolton’s back catalogue to his latest work Metropole, I’m struck by the remarkable consistency of his style. In the inner southern suburb of Adelaide where he now lives, Ken Bolton is still writing almost the same poem he was over forty years ago, and that is not a criticism but a compliment.
A slow reassembling of pieces: Adrienne Eberhard launches ‘Afterlife’ by Kathryn Lomer
The title, Afterlife, works in two ways. The first is as a literal afterlife, the kind many different cultures believe in, the life after death that is a kind of immortality. A number of poems in this collection explore this concept and our human need for reassurance that there will be a life after death.
Tight, decisive, purposeful and deliberate: Emilie Zoey Baker launches ‘Tight Bindings’ by Sarah Temporal
Over the years, I have watched Sarah write, perform, slam and create beautiful work. I have watched her win multiple awards, and I have watched as she helped pave the way for many young people to do the same. I’m so proud of all she has done and achieved. And now she has this beautiful collection of poems to add to her growing list of achievements.
A significant voice in Australian poetry: Louise Wakeling on Margaret Bradstock’s new poetry collection ‘Alchemy of the Sun’
Margaret is a significant voice in Australian poetry, one who has been widely published in journals and anthologies. Some of her recent poems have been used as libretti in Luke Styles’ contemporary music, and performed in both Sydney and Paris.
Observations of everything: Marcelle Freiman launches Margaret Bradstock’s ‘Alchemy of the Sun’
The overall impact of reading Bradstock’s deft, mature work is of a poetic finesse and clarity in poems engaging with the overriding importance of time – as different manifestations of time – and of place and exploration.
A sense of arrival: Claire Gaskin reviews ‘Coming to nothing’ by Morgan Yasbincek
As Audrey Lorde writes, ‘Poetry is not a Luxury’, for Morgan Yasbincek poetry is a tool for survival of living agency and a means of deep enquiry into the foundational.
The Heart of the Human Quest for Enlightenment: Judith Beveridge launches ‘The Diwan of Nawid’ by Mal McKimmie
What I really love about Nawid’s poems is the way in which he follows his ‘own heart’s language’ – to use a phrase by Jane Hirshfield. Perhaps one of the dangers of writing poetry which explores the spiritual quest is to fall back on the old cliches, but Mal is such a skilful poet that he finds unique metaphors and analogies to articulate Nawid’s feelings and thinking.
Grace and dexterity: Les Wicks Launches Ellen Shelley’s ‘Out of the Blocks’
There’s a certain relentless quality to this book, a refusal to stand still. “To falter becomes a fissure for the grime”. This is both an engine driving us through this uneasy though forgiven world alongside a promise that the explorations evident in this book are not the end of the story, just the beginning.
Rochford Street Review 