A Journal of Australian & International Cultural Reviews, News and Criticism.
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.
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:
Some months ago, between COVID lock-downs in NSW, we set up Rochford Cottage Bookshop. Our original intention was to concentrate on local markets, particularly arts and crafts markets, to create a ‘pop-up’ poetry and small press bookshop and then to move on to readings and writing events. We managed to squeeze in a few markets before the big lock-down and now, of course, we don’t know when we will able to return. The bookshop currently is currently on-line only and consists of a combination of new and second hand titles.
Claire Gaskin has been writing and publishing her poetry for over three decades.She has authored five books of poetry: A Snail in the Ear of the Buddha, a bud (shortlisted for the John Bray SA Festival Award for Literature in 2008), Paperweight, Eurydice Speaks and Ismene’s Survivable Resistance. Claire’s poetry has been anthologised, studied at universities and has been the subject of an Melbourne University Honours thesis.
There is no tranquillity in Claire Gaskin’s fourth poetry collection, Ismene’s Survivable Resistance. Though Gaskin draws on Sophocles’ plot and constellation of characters, this is not a tragedy. The tragedy has already occurred. As in Eurydice Speaks, Gaskin assumes the voice of the voiceless in a contemporary setting. Here Ismene is a poet grappling with her traumatic past. The reader of her poems is in the position of witness.
Abigail Chabitnoy is an American poet of Germanic and Alutiiq heritage, and How to Dress a Fish is her first collection of poetry. The book is the outcome of Chabitnoy’s project to find out what she could about her great-grandfather, Michael, a Native Alaskan purportedly orphaned as a boy, and taken from his family to Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania in 1909.
These 22 one-line poems by Melbourne poet Amanda Anastasi were commissioned by the Monash Climate Change Communication Research Hub. While some of the poems document the 2019-2020 Australian bushfire crisis, others are futuristic climate visions.
Indrani Perera is a Melbourne poet, creator of The Poets’ Express e-mail newsletter, founder of The Pocketry Almanack print journal and host of the poetry podcast Pocketry Presents. She is the author of Promote Your Poetry and the poetry collections Defenestration and Pas De Deux published by Ginninderra Press. Her poetry has appeared in Cordite, More Than Melnanin, Not Very Quiet, Teesta Review (India) and The Crow and been anthologised by Geelong Writers Inc, Ginninderra Press and WA Poets Inc.
