A Journal of Australian & International Cultural Reviews, News and Criticism.
Tim Loveday is a poet, writer, educator and baby academic. His work explores class, masculinity, online radicalisation, rurality and climate collapse. He won the 2022 & 2024 Dorothy Porter Poetry Awards and the 2023 Venie Holmgren Environmental Poetry Award, came runner-up in the 2024 Cloncurry Poetry Prize and was a finalist in the 2023 David Harold Tribe Poetry Prize, the 2024 Griffith Review Emerging Voices Prize and the 2024 Montreal International Poetry Prize.
We met because of poems; I submitted three to The Burning Bush, a journal Kevin was starting with Mike Begnal, at the very start of 1999. Our love affair was bookended by January verse.
Since its founding in 1986 by Ron Pretty, Five Islands Press has been a lighthouse for poets and readers sailing in the variable waters of Australian poetry.
Mark Roberts (co-editor of Rochford Street Review) and 5 Islands Press invite you to the Sydney Launch of ‘The Office of Literary Endeavours’ To be launched by Les Wicks with Angela Stretch as your MC
on Sunday 25 May 2025, 3:00 pm – 4:30 pm, Benledi House, 186 Glebe Point Rd, Glebe NSW 2037, Australia
Multi Award winning poet and photographer, John Bennett has teamed up with well-known musician and sound engineer John Laidler to produce a story of hope and beauty, celebrating endangered wetlands reclaimed after years of industrial pollution.
While many of his paintings are impressionistic of nature, his poems – particularly in his latest book Filmworks – are more impressionistic of movies. (It’s almost like a juxtaposition of the still life and the motion picture. The point being, his approach to Impressionism is as far-reaching as possible.) And, like his paintings, Purcell’s poems are more or less characterized by a select number of essential details which convey a sense of urgency in both feelings and sensations.
Like all truly satisfying works of art, Al is in possession of an auteur vision. He’s managed to pull all the disparate and quirky aspects of his reading and dreaming life (dreams are very important in this book) – he’s managed to pull all that into a persuasive whole, into poems that are small journeys, atmospheres or theatres through which a reader can roam.
Luke Morgan is a poet from Galway, Ireland. His third collection Blood Atlas is new from Arlen House in 2025. He is the recipient of the 29th Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award.
John Jenkins is a widely travelled writer living on Melbourne’s semi-rural fringe, near the Yarra Valley. His most recent books are Poems Far and Wide, Puncher and Wattmann, 2019; a collection of self-illustrated nonsense poems, Busybird Publishing, 2021; A Double Act, poems co-written with Ken Bolton, Puncher and Wattmann, 2022; The Sky Inside Us, Ginninderra Press, 2022.
Rochford Street Review 