Reviews
Understated parables: Mark Mahemoff reviews ‘Solace, Selected Poems 1978-2017’ by Graham Henderson
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.
Philip Davison: Three Poems
Philip Davison has published nine novels, including The Book-Thief’s Heartbeat (Co-Op), McKenzie’s Friend (Cape), The Long Suit(Cape), Eureka Dunes (Liberties Press), and Quiet City (Liberties Press). He writes radio drama. His stage play, The Invisible Mending Company, was performed at the Abbey Theatre. He has co-wrote Learning Gravity (BBC Storyville), a documentary film on poet and undertaker, Thomas Lynch. He is a member of Aosdána.
Dense, lyrical and poetic: Helen Hagemann reviews Against Certain Capture by Miriam Wei Wei Lo
I once had the privilege of hearing Miriam Wei Wei Lo read her poetry at the State Library of Western Australia and also on the ABC’s Poetica. That seemed so long ago. In fact it was 2004 when her first edition of Against Certain Capture was published by Five Islands Press, in the New Poets 10. The good news is that her book has resurfaced, it’s an identical second edition published by an imprint called the Apothecary Archive.
Justin Lowe: Five Poems
Justin Lowe is a poet, editor and occasional reviewer who lives in a house called Doug in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney where he edits poetry blog Bluepepper. His seventh collection, The Picketer, was released late last year, and his latest, Hall of Mirrors, is currently doing the rounds of publishers. He has had poems put to music by such acts as The Whitlams and The Impossibles, and has published widely around the world, most recently in Meanjin, Verity La, Blue Nib (Ireland) The Cortland Review (USA).
Vale Tim Thorne – Poet and activist.
Rochford Street Review was saddened to learn of the death of poet Tim Thorne on the 16 September in Launceston. Tim was one of Australia’s leading poets, a lifelong socialist activist, a former President of TAP into a Better Tasmania (formerly Tasmanians Against a Pulp Mill) and a former President of the SEARCH Foundation.
Transfusions Of Truth and A Far Cry: Devika Brendon Reviews Anne Casey’s ‘The Light We Cannot See’.
My review of this dazzling book has been delayed by my father’s recent death. But the greatest tribute I can give to Anne Casey is to say that reviewing her work has been one of my greatest consolations in the past several weeks. I find myself rereading the poems in this collection several times a day, like a devout person telling their prayer beads.
Sam Morley: Two Poems
Sam Morley is a poet whose work has been published by a number of journals including Cordite, Red Room Poetry, Hunter Writer’s Centre, Portside Review, Canberra Times, Bluebottle Journal, Overland, and Antipodes and has appeared on noted shortlists including the ACU Poetry Prize. He lives in Melbourne.
Placing dynamite under the whole system: Ciarán O’Rourke launches ‘Thrills & Difficulties: Being a Marxist Poet in 21st Century Ireland’
It’s a delight to be able to join in the celebrations of Kevin Higgins’s stylish, urgent, and hell-raising new pamphlet tonight: in my experience, there’s nothing quite like it in the world of Irish poetry and literary criticism. If I were to distill down to a single element what I love, and what I believe is so necessary and unique, about Kevin’s work, it’s the wild and delicious ease (to be found in abundance in this pamphlet) in skewering the pieties of both the political and literary establishments:
Rochford Street Review 