Reviews

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There is something about the name a poet chooses to title their collection that will either attract or repel a reader. Most poets nowadays opt for a short and catchy title, something that doesn’t give away too much.Something that proclaims eruditon and an understanding of the zeitgeist. Not to do so is risky, if one wnats to court favour and aplomb. Mick Corrigan goes against the current grain by choosing The Love Poetry of Judas Iscariot as title for his debut.

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Linda Adair is a (re)emerging artist (having stopped art making as worklife and family took up her time) and is a poet, writer and a publisher of Rochford Press, and co-editor of the online Rochford Street Review. Her debut poetry collection The Unintended Consequences of the Shattering was published in 2020 by Melbourne Poets Union and her work has been the anthologised in the following collections: To End All Wars, Messages from The Embers, Poetry for the Planet, Pure Slush Volume 25 and the Volume on Work. She has been published in various online and print journals, both in Australia and internationally. She has read her poems at festivals, conferences and venues around the country and has been a featured poet in Cuplet, Newcastle, Live Poets at Don Banks, and will be reading in Poetry at the Pub in Newcastle in late October.

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Cooke wants us to shake us loose from our tired habits of perception, I think, because this is a crucial step towards responding to the challenges of our climate crisis. We have to rethink, and ultimately dissolve, the Man-Nature dichotomy and the implicit sublimation of Nature that shapes every aspect of our interaction with it. And we have to rethink this relationship that is at the very centre of our understanding of being if we are to fashion any kind of meaningful response, or risk losing every speck of brilliance, of imagination, of love and care and growth that has been part of the human experience. That’s not to say these poems are dark and dour, rather they compel urgency by depicting the stakes.

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I am sure, when Les started writing, that he didn’t really know what he would end up producing. Well now he has written it: a further contribution to the ongoing album of Sydney, a keen-eyed portrait gallery, a record of travels far and wide – and with the whole lot framed by questions we haven’t resolved yet, and almost certainly won’t, but which it’s essential to keep on asking.

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As this book is dedicated to John Foulcher’s brother, Ian, nothing can be underestimated about the tinge of grief as each poem flutters in and out of a sense of religious faith and that’s faith’s challenges. The moon landing, the paintings of Crewdson, and physical love, the body is paramount as our capsule and here it is presented in its ragged faults and its skin passion.

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In Ecstatic, the personal and the political are intertwined in the most profound of senses. In this book, it is the political world we must live in, love in, make love in, grow old in, die in. It is in this world that we lose hope, over and over, only for hope to painfully re-emerge and insist we fight and dream again.

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Alex Skovron is the author of seven collections of poetry, a prose novella, The Poet (2005), and a book of short stories, The Man who Took to his Bed (2017). His volume of new and selected poems, Towards the Equator (2014), was shortlisted in the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. His work has been translated into a number of languages, and he has co-authored book-length translations of two Czech poets: Jiří Orten and Vladimír Holan. His most recent book of poetry is Letters from the Periphery (2021). He is currently working on a new collection of short fiction in prose.

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