A Journal of Australian & International Cultural Reviews, News and Criticism.
Mark Mahemoff’s poetry has been published in one Chapbook, a CD selection, and six full-length volumes. The latest, which was launched at The Newcastle Writer’s Festival, is Beautiful Flames (Flying Islands 2024). Mark works full-time as a psychotherapist.
Devotional is a difficult collection to read. It is dark and pessimistic. But many lines glint with beauty.
Mark Mahemoff is an Australian poet, critic, and psychotherapist. His next book, Beautiful Flames (Flying Islands Press), will be published later this year.
As it says on the back of his latest book, Our Ways on Earth, “His key aims as a poet remain—to write as clearly as possible and to make his next poem different from the last.”
The tile of his new book Heard-Hoard, derived from the phrase “word-hoard” which appears in the poem ‘North’ in a book of the same name by Seamus Heaney (North, Faber and Faber, 1975) is perfectly coined. It positions Riley as a recorder and hoarder of words but also of stories, place and sounds.
It his hard not to respect someone who has had the courage to devote themselves full-time to writing in Australia given the hand to mouth existence that this kind of life often ensures. And judging by much of Henderson’s poetry, his life has not been an easy one. Indeed, it appears to have been a constant search for a light at the end of the tunnel.
Rochford Street Review 