Book Reviews
FRESH
Monday, August 23rd, 2010
The Raw Nerve by Richard Hillman
Puncher & Wattmann, 2009
Richard Hillman’s new book has a compelling red cover. A giant black semi-colon portrays a synapse letting through the electrical signal of the poet and book to its readers. A brilliant design, but one hard to live up to. The poems in The Raw Nerve are, for the most part, of ordinary domestic life; a kind of poetry no easier than any other to realise. The trap that Hillman falls into occasionally is presenting, for example, the subject of parenting, rather than using that subject sufficiently to make a poem.
(more…)
The Unhaunting by Andrew Taylor
Salt Publishing, 2009
The Unhaunting is Andrew Taylor’s seventeenth book of poetry and comprises work written between 2003 and 2008. The collection is divided into five parts. The first, ‘The Importance of Waiting’, acts as a tidy introduction to the book’s themes of mortality, elusive truths and the environment, both as interior and exterior. Taylor begins with a vivid portrait of Perth’s suburban landscape where quiet concern spills over into the everyday. Poems become touched by apparition and by the possible threat of cancer returning to the poet after a period in remission. Even the landscape seems predisposed to such ambiguity and to its own threat of extinction. Death, dying and ghosts from the past actively haunt the pages of this book. These ghosts are not necessarily always human, often they materialise as concern, emotion and memory. They linger in a bold light and do not fade easily.
Continue reading →
The West: Australian Poems 1989-2009 by John Mateer
Fremantle Press, 2010
Since the publication of his startling first collection Burning Swans in 1989, John Mateer has established himself as one of the key Australian poets who, for the absence of a better term, can be broadly labelled post-Generation of ’68. What my clumsy terminology seeks to indicate is that Mateer (alongside other younger poets such as those appearing in the seminal 2000 anthology Calyx) follows in the general direction of earlier innovators while making crucial, although not necessarily generational, departures. The West, a substantial selection of Mateer’s Australian-published poetry of the last two decades (he has also published poetry in Portugal, Japan and his native South Africa, among other places), presents potent instances of his unique, unsettling poetics. Continue reading →
Going Down Swinging No. 29: The Unguarded Word edited by Lisa Greenaway and Klare Lanson
Going Down Swinging Inc., 2009
This was my first full dip into the reputable journal Going Down Swinging and so I started with the index. It is not often that you find entries of such intriguing fragments as ‘shoot a harpoon into its golden centre' or ‘the dark play of your wet eyes'. The entries that drew me in the most were ‘terrorism, blah blah' and ‘would sever the possum's head'. I played a fun game of fill in the blanks before tackling the serious issue of reviewing this delightful package of a journal.
Continue reading →
Over There: Poems from Singapore and Australia edited by John Kinsella and Alvin Pang
Ethos Books, 2008
Over There: Poems from Singapore and Australia is ambitious. This anthology reads as a sample of more to come, rather than a clear achievement of the sizable task that it sets out in its introduction. Over There is not, as the title might initially suggest, a collection of travel poems, nor is it a comparison of different postcolonial reflections arising from Singapore and Australia. It does contain infrequent travel writing poems, as well as comparative or postcolonial works, but these do not in any way dominate the anthology. What initially appears to characterise Over There is not a distinctly international or culturally comparative flavour, but rather the absence of these tropes. Over There is focused on illustrating the range of experiences – cultural, linguistic, political, just to name a few – rather than drawing forced conclusions about the similarities between Singapore and Australia.
Continue reading →
Marriage for Beginners by Catherine Bateson
John Leonard Press, 2009
Marriage for Beginners is Catherine Bateson's fifth collection of poetry. As the title suggests, marriage, or more precisely the breakdown of the poet's first marriage, is a key component of this work. Bateson has structured the volume in three sections. Although the connections are not so obvious in the beginning, it soon becomes clear that these three individual parts unfold like a three act drama filled with an array of characters and conflict.
Continue reading →
Views of the Hudson: A New York Book of Psalms by Angela Gardner
Shearsman Books, 2009
Angela Gardner's first collection of poetry, Parts of Speech, won the Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize for an unpublished manuscript in 2006 and was subsequently published a year later by University of Queensland Press. Views of the Hudson: A New York Book of Psalms is her second collection, although Gardner has published several books as a visual artist who also incorporates poetry with printmaking. Views from the Hudson was written during a visit to New York in 2008 as part of a Churchill Fellowship that aimed to investigate collaborations of poetry and printmaking for emerging practitioners.
Continue reading →
